Free Adventures In Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher

unprecedented possibility of earning so enormous a sum of
money in a simple sideshow, he was determined to follow the performer’s slightest
movement with the greatest of attention, the better to imitate him and win the
prize.
    After several moments of anxious silence the performer went up to
the edge of the stage and said in a hoarse voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, the trick
is to exhale the smoke of a cigarette through the neck.” He lit a cigarette, took
his hand down from his collar, where it had been until then, and released a fine
stream of bluish smoke through an orifice in an artificial larynx, clearly the
result of an operation. The man in the front row was taken aback: he blushed to the
ears and, returning to his former seat, mumbled, loud enough for people to hear, “Of
course if you’ve got a gadget like that, it’s no trick at all.”
    Unfazed, the performer responded from the stage. “What do you mean? Just do as I
did.” Perhaps he really would have given a prize to a fellow sufferer. In booths
like these, pale, withered old men swallowed soap and stones, young girls contorted
their bodies, anemic, hollow-cheeked children left off chewing corn kernels to mount
the stage and dance to the jangle of the bells on folk costumes—and all to earn
their keep.
    After the midday meal, when the sun burned like blazes, a feeling of utter desolation
came over the fairgrounds: little wooden ponies standing inert, their bulging eyes
and copper manes exuding the dire melancholy of a petrified life, the hot odor of
food wafting over from the booths, and a lone hurdy-gurdy in the distance doggedly
churning out its asthmatic waltz, an occasional fluty metallic tone gushing out of
the chaos like a thin, lofty
jet d’eau
from a fountain.
    I spent many happy hours outside the photographers’ booths, contemplating strangers,
alone or in groups, standing motionless and smiling against gray landscapes of
waterfalls and far-off mountains. The common backdrop made them all look like
members of a single family who had gathered at a picturesque spot to have their
pictures taken. Once I found my own picture outside such a booth. The sudden
encounter with myself forced into a static pose at one edge of the fair depressed me
no end. Before ending up in our town, it had surely made the rounds of places
unknown to me. For a moment I had the feeling of existing only in the
photograph.
    I experienced this sort of mental shift often and in the most varied circumstances.
It would sneak up on me and make an abrupt turnabout in my inner state. I would,
say, happen upon an accident and stand about gawking for a time like the rest of the
spectators when all at once my perspective would change—it was like a game I used
to play: I would make out a strange animal in the paint on my wall and then one day
I was unable to find it, its place having been taken by a statue or a woman or a
landscape composed of the same decorative elements—and although everything about
the accident remained the same, I suddenly saw the people and objects around me from
the point of view of the victim, as if I were the one lying there, viewing the whole
thing up from below and out from the center and feeling the blood pouring down my
body.
    And just as at the cinema—without any effort on my part, as a mere corollary to the
fact that I was watching a film—I would imagine myself intimately involved in the
action on the screen, so when outside a photographer’s booth I would see myself
instead of the person in the print staring down at me. I would suddenly find my own
life, the life of the person standing in flesh and blood outside the display case,
indifferent and insignificant, just as the living person inside the display case
regarded the travels of his photographic self from town to unknown town as absurd.
And just as my picture traveled from place to place contemplating new vistas through
the dirty, dust-laden glass, so I myself went from one place to the