Ex Occidente Press

[MadsPLP]

Another small press has started, releasing books which may be of interest to members of this forum.

Ex Occidente Press

They have released books by Mark Valentine (editor of the journal Wormwood, and the author of two volumes about the decadent occuly detective The Connoiseur (and by some named the true heir of Machen)), Ray Russell (from my favourite publisher, Tartarus Press) - forthcoming is also a volume of new stories by Reggie Oliver, as well as a new collection by the brilliant Quentin S. Crisp, John Gale, Steve Duffy, and Joel Lane! Here is a list of other forthcoming titles:

Quote

The Light of the World and Other Stories by Peter Bell The Rakes of the Old Courtyard by Matheiu Caragiale Dangerous Invitations by William Charlton The Burning Calendar of Jerusalem Unicornus by Father Mihail Avramescu The Old Knowledge by Rosalie Parker The Lighted Burrow - Sanatorium Journal by Max Blecher Disagreeable Tales by Léon Bloy Sacred Flowers: The Odd Tales of Nigromontanus by Ernst Jünger Faces of Ice by Joel Lane Tenebrous Tales by Christopher Barker The Sonnet of Fire and Other Stories by Marcel Brion The Incendiary Traveler by Gellu Naum The Black Cupboard and Other Tales by Claude Seignolle

About the press:

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About Ex Occidente Press Ex Occidente Press is an independent publishing house from that doubtful place that was once called "la Porte de l'Orient" by travellers, seers and esoterists, generals and freemasons, poets and spies, prostitutes and rakes, salon artists and theologians, but which is known nowadays under the name of Bucharest. Ex Occidente Press specialises in rara et nova fiction of the supernatural, the odd and the weird, the strange and the decadent, the fantastic and the obscure, the very holy and the luxuriously heretical. Ex Occidente Press places equal emphasis on introducing both new works from contemporary writers and works from an earlier age of European literature that has been neglected in the English-speaking world. For questions, orders and general information, please write to exoccidente@gmail.com

All in all, I think the prospects of Ex Occidente Press looks very promising indeed.

[yellowish haze]

Thank you for sharing this, MadsPLP. I have heard about Ex Occidente Press some time ago when titles by Mark Valentine were announced (I think their site looked different back then), but I don't remember seeing the list of forthcoming books. Sounds fantastic. I'm especially looking forward to collections by Reggie Oliver and Joel Lane.

[The New Nonsense]

This is terrific news. I'd heard news of Ex Occidente Press a month or two ago with the announcement of Ray Russell's book . However, I could not find any further information about the publisher. I'm glad you were able to dig up some more info. Currently there are only a few publishers who print Decadent works, such as Tartarus Press and Dedalus Books. Having another added to their ranks should help tremendously. Besides printing the works of new authors, I look forward to see which older and long out of print titles they plan to make available.

I'm curious to see the quality of their books. If they're anything like Tartarus Press' books, I'll be very happy indeed.

---

[Nigromontanus]

The Master in Cafe Morphine, The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller, The City of the Strange Fear, Virtue in Danger. A few of my most-delayed titles. I know some friends who have pre-ordered a David Tibet book fifteen years ago, others who are still waiting for their copies of a complete Urmuz edition, pre-ordered thirteen years ago.

In order to break this tedious, malign pattern I have decided to team up with an aesthete extraordinaire. The German bookseller and publisher Jonas Ploeger. Jonas runs his bookstore Antiquariat Buecherwelten - buecherwelten.com - since 10 years and just founded his imprint Zagava Books. We believe that our joined forces will secure a new perspective and safe distribution through Germany's reliable postal services. The first book to appear under the Ex Occidente Press & Zagava Books label will be Virtue in Danger by Reggie Oliver. Most probably the box / slipcase (made of wood and glass) for The Last Thinkers volumes will also be released together with Jonas. I am trying to keep up with Jonas's clear suggestions and proposals for Virtue in Danger. What was initially advertised as a "regular" Ex Occidente Press book has now transformed into a full high-end edition, fully illustrated, to be released in a very special format, with a myriad of extras and surprises. The release date for Virtue in Danger is early 2013, February-March. To say I am excited about this vita nova for the press would be an understatement. More details will follow soon.

The release date for Dehiscence (D.P. Watt), The Last Gold of the Decayed Stars (Colin Insole), Oriflammes (Thomas Stromsholt) and Bricked-Up Windows (Vona) is 10-13 January, 2013. January is a good month. Both Secret Europe and The Peacock Escritoire were released in January, which makes this month rather special for not obvious reasons.

Finally, a kind diversion. The most favourites of Occidental's favourites in 2012.

Books
An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori
Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Josef Sudek: The Legacy of a Deeper Vision by Maia-Mari Sutnik
In the Search of the Essence of Place by Petr Kral
Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red by Lydia Davis
The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller
A Life in Letters by Joseph Roth
Traveler of the Century by Andres Neuman
Ten Poems from Hafez by Jila Peacock
A Little Hungarian Pornography by Peter Esterhazy
My Berlin is a Monologue by Nora Iuga
Waiting for the Dog to Sleep by Jerzy Ficowski
The Celestial Bibendum by Nicolas de Crecy
Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal
Les Derniers Jours de Stefan Zweig by Guillaume Sorel
Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk
Her Not All Her by Elfriede Jelinek
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper
Best European Fiction 2013 edited by Aleksandar Hemon

The discovery of the year: Sylph Editions. Truly outstanding little books released by a wonderful independent press in London. No other small press like Sylph Editions.

Music
Feasting with Panthers by Marc Almond & Michael Cashmore
Love This Giant by David Byrne and St. Vincent
The Seer by Swans
Kadavar by Kadavar
Hell Money by Rome
Dar de Duh by Dordeduh
A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits by Maarten van der Vleuten
The Laughing Stalk by Wovenhand
Opus Eponymous by Ghost
Like Water by Pedro Negresco & Luiza Zan
Step Inside by Troubled Horse
"Jhonn," Uttered Babylon by Myrninerest
Bacovia Overdrive by Robin and the Backstabbers
Catholic by Gavin Friday

Regards!
Dan

[Draugen]

Thats exciting news Dan. I have purchased form Jonas before, he is a pleasure to deal with and genuinely cares about books. Hopefully this will take some of the stress of distribution away and allow you to publish more fantastic books!

[ToALonelyPeace]

Regarding Wound of Wounds: An Ovation to Emil Cioran, I once asked if there's copy available and there are still some left for 120 euro. I am intrigued because there is a Justin Isis tribute but money is tight right now so I'll see if I can buy it next year.

[Nigromontanus]

Check the cloth boards for a book I have designed and published a few years ago. GOLEM OF BUCHAREST, by Andrew Condous. That should answer all your questions. I hope!

A free PDF of WOUND OF WOUNDS is available to anyone interested in reading it. Actually, free PDFs are available for almost all (but not all) of the books I have published.

[Jeff Matthews]

Respectfully, having googled, I may be ignorant of the symbolism involved, but I don't see how those boards address the original accusation concerning Cordeanu.
I am also told you edited and published a magazine called 'letters to nuovo europae' (sp?) which was dedicated largely to supporting far right artists.

[Justin Isis]

Quote Originally Posted by ToALonelyPeace

Regarding Wound of Wounds: An Ovation to Emil Cioran, I once asked if there's copy available and there are still some left for 120 euro. I am intrigued because there is a Justin Isis tribute but money is tight right now so I'll see if I can buy it next year.

The PDFs are available free as Dan has said. Anyway I will just post it in here for convenience...consider this an advertisement for the book...

The Aristocracy of Weak Nerves

From the outside, there is nothing at all lurid or even Romantic about the Zoo: its facade suggests a nondescript university facility, perhaps a kind of research station. But it would be a mistake to imagine the building as anonymously bureaucratic or in any way forbidding. The large entranceway, with its tasteful iron gate spread wide during business hours, suggests easy access; and having passed through this gate, the visitor is able to take in the general arrangement of the Zoo, which is exceedingly simple and linear. The exhibits are housed in cages whose layout forms a rough rectangle, which encloses an open central area where it is possible to rest and take refreshment at the sparsely-furnished cafe (where, after all, a touch of humor has crept in; there is no food and only two drinks available: water and strong black coffee. Smoking, of course, is permitted).

The cages are all large and spacious, fitted with iron bars. This, the Impresario assured us, was not intended as a concession to any kind of camp or kitsch aesthetic, but merely as a clear instantiation of the Zoo’s nature, one that would make it instantly understandable without any need for explanatory material or sensationalist signposting. A more “modern” facility, the Impresario explained—one with less spartan furnishings—would have been viewed by the exhibits as an attempt to somehow obfuscate the Zoo’s nature, which in turn would have cast the entire affair into bad taste. So: simple iron bars on spacious cages, and all of them unlocked, the exhibits being free to leave at any time.

It is really a simple arrangement, and no doubt contributes to the Zoo’s appeal, as there is nothing to distract from the exhibits themselves. The Impresario—I must refer to him by this title, which he chose himself over the more obvious Zookeeper, Warden or even Administrator, all of which would have been more accurate, but which he did not feel fully expressed his role—classified them by their relative energy levels instead of their stated philosophical positions. Although I quickly grasped the logic of this system during my period of employment, it perhaps requires some explanation, particularly when the metabolism and mindset of a particular exhibit would seem to be at odds. Some of the more vehemently misanthropic specimens, including one—a Dutchman who claimed that all of existence was a single, hellish and infinitely sustained thought in the mind of a malevolent God who was both everywhere and nowhere—were talkative and even forceful, commanding; sometimes even cheerful, if almost always in a rather brittle sense. These Argumentatives were exhibited in the northwest quadrant of the Zoo, regardless of the extremity of their views, which the Impresario considered less important than their willingness to engage visitors in debate, or, more commonly, to simply lecture at or even hector them. The selling point of the Argumentatives, then, was that they would "become talky”—and as the northwest quadrant was closest to the main entrance, they were in most cases the first exhibits that visitors would encounter. As they followed the path of the Zoo’s perimeter through the northeast and southeast quadrants, the energy levels of the exhibits decreased, reaching their lowest point in the southwest quadrant, which housed the Depressives. These consisted of exhibits with views as diverse as those of the Argumentatives, but who all for the most part remained silent and bedridden. The extreme Depressives (referred to as Catatonics) rarely moved, and some had even been outfitted with drip feeds and catheters despite remaining conscious; watching them was entrancing, meditative. When they rolled onto their sides and faced the visitors, their expressions seemed dead, lost inside themselves.

It might be thought that this progression would deflate the tension of a visit rather than build it to any sort of satisfying pitch or climax, which is in a sense correct, but suited the experience the Impresario wanted. Having encountered the Argumentatives, most visitors would by now already be in an agitated or at least preoccupied state, so that the sight of so many men—and they were almost all men, the female exhibits being a comparative rarity—lying on their sides would invite either quiet reflection or else spur the visitors to take the lead in interacting with the Depressives. All who paid entrance to the Zoo were free to call out to the exhibits or otherwise engage them in conversation or debate, which, emboldened by the intellectual provocations of the Argumentatives, they often did throughout the rest of their tour, even with Depressives or Catatonics who were not inclined to respond. This complete freedom naturally resulted in visitors who chose to simply take out their daily frustrations or other repressed grievances on the exhibits, arguing with the Argumentatives and deriding the Depressives as useless parasites, slugs of society, weaklings, damnable heretics, or whatever other epithets they preferred. This always struck me as somewhat of a dubious pleasure at best, but it contributed to the Zoo’s revenue. Most of the exhibits were thoroughly inured to the abuse and would pay it no mind, although some of them—almost always Argumentatives—tirelessly responded in kind, resulting in some memorable shouting matches. Other visitors, of an empathetic, charitable or merely perverse disposition, would struggle to get the exhibits “back on their feet” with suggestions of a changed medication regimen, religion, positive thinking, and all manner of other cures and palliatives. For the most part this was a futile exercise, although the Zoo occasionally did lose exhibits to these “missionaries,” as the Impresario called them. On more than one occasion an exhibit checked himself out only to return weeks or months later, chastened by his stay in the outside world. The Impresario accepted these prodigals with perfect magnanimity.

“‘If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?’ You there, with the red hair—have you asked Mommy and Daddy about any of this? No? Now might be the time to start. In the proper spirit of love, of course. The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous...”

I can recall these words with intense clarity, including the initial quotation, which was delivered in a tone of suitably ironic pomp. It was spoken to me on my first childhood visit to the Zoo by a Romanian Argumentative with a somewhat pinched countenance and an impressive shock of greying hair. This figure, who I would personally attend to in his later years, was more of a Reflective than an Argumentative—not much of a real philosopher, although he always drew a lively crowd of visitors eager to hear his latest extemporaneous epigram. He meandered greatly and often contradicted himself, but there was something calming about his voice, despite the literal meaning of the words it often conveyed.

On that visit I detected a definite conspiratorial tone of reassurance from several of the other exhibits, and in this I was not alone; my eventual coworkers would later share their own stories of entering the Zoo for the first time and sensing the same thing. Our parents had already taken us to nursing homes, animal zoos and fairground haunted houses, and the Zoo seemed to recall all and none of them at the same time. There was a hint of the classroom about it too—some obscure and unhealthy pedagogy. Having seen so little of life, we could not really understand what the exhibits were saying, but their words carried a curious, mocking authority—all the more curious because authority of any other kind was never thought to be mocking. It was unclear to what extent our parents intended a Zoo visit to function as a kind of inoculation against the exhibits, or whether exposure to them had no deeper meaning than any other spectacular attraction. Certainly the Zoo had its elements of spectacle, to which a cautionary meaning could be ascribed, but the sense that we were witnessing in the exhibits a state of degradation to which we too might fall if not careful was mostly undercut by the intellectual brilliance of the Argumentatives, and those Depressives who, however pitiable, retained a kind of grave dignity.

Unable to forget the words of the Romanian Reflective, I later returned to the Zoo on my own. Now free to wander at my leisure without the scrutiny of my parents, I spent an entire day observing and listening to the exhibits. Most of them openly denounced procreation, civic pride, religion, hedonism, personal identity and meaning of any kind—things which young people have been taught to value, even if only in the abstract. To hear the foundations of society and even the self dismantled with such thoroughness left me with a numb feeling that was not altogether unpleasant.

As I have said, the exhibits would discourse freely with all who paid the entrance fee. Some of them argued that they were in fact free, while we visitors were the real exhibits; that is, that the Zoo was less a prison, or even a sanctuary, so much as the only existing island of liberty. This kind of reversal delighted me. As I grew older and continued to visit, I was never sure to what extent I agreed with any of the exhibits, or whether agreement was necessary or even meaningful. The Impresario did not seem to care either way, and when as a young adult I entered his office to apply for a position, I learned that philosophical stances of any kind played no role in the interview process. Apparently those who were inordinately attached to any of the exhibits’ views were not regarded as suitable candidates for employment; an attitude of neutrality or even indifference was preferred. Still, it was difficult not to become convinced by the exhibits, so that even after I received my uniform and set to work cleaning their cages and bringing them their meals, I often found myself electrified by a chance remark, certain that I was at last seeing reality accurately.

There were a number of regular occurrences. Apart from learning the habits and routines of the exhibits, we staff and attendants became familiar with the route followed by the Tobacco Creeper as it made its way around the Zoo. The Tobacco Creeper was either a misshapen homeless man, an extremely old, bent-backed woman, a mental defective of some kind, or an arcane synthesis of the three. Its facial features were indeterminate in the extreme, and those we could make out beneath its gauze mask displayed great deformity: clouded, half-closed eyes, a crushed nub-nose and hideously smooth skin, perhaps the result of long-ago burns. Apart from the mask and the rags tied around its head, it wore the hood of its ratty old jacket up, and usually concealed its eyes behind a comically large pair of sunglasses that might once have been worn by some grand old dame at a seaside resort in the distant past. Its hands were protected by cloth wrappings, and more tightly-wrapped rags covered its legs and feet.

The Tobacco Creeper would creep from cage to cage, picking up the fallen tobacco and butts discarded by the exhibits, with which it would carefully assemble its own cigarettes. Its movements could be startling; at times it would slump over and fall forward before righting itself at the last moment and bounding ahead in a manner reminiscent of a kangaroo. Sometimes it would crawl on its belly like a soldier or a snake before suddenly standing upright and then just as suddenly slouching against a wall. Despite its appearance, it never displayed any ill will, or even a desire to communicate; perfectly mute, it wished nothing more than to collect its daily supply of stray tobacco and smoke its grubby cigarettes in silence. Over the years it had achieved the status of a beloved pet, and the exhibits would reach out from their cages to stroke its rag-swaddled head. Somewhat alarmingly, children and other young visitors seemed enamored with rather than terrified of it; perhaps in its obscurity and awkward but unflagging motion they saw something of themselves. A picture of the Creeper at the entrance assured their parents that it was an authorized element of the Zoo rather than an escaped exhibit or unwelcome indigent. It was the closest thing the Zoo had to a mascot.

Most of the exhibits agreed that life consisted of a brief interval of awareness crushed between infinitely longer slabs of nothingness. This sandwich of nihilism they nevertheless attributed numerous flavors, almost all of them unpleasant. There were sardonically hateful exhibits and tormented, hypersensitive ones whose adherents—for a number of them attracted regular visitors who recorded or scribbled down their utterances—fancied them full of compassion and pity, as well as exhibits who, despite their various medications, seemed to exist in a constant, violent contortion of unbearable anxiety. Others were dull and mild on the surface but would expound on the depth of their agony if questioned.

Some of the exhibits were occasionally mauled by hope. They went into paroxysms, or at least looked troubled and almost lovelorn. A few attempted something like productivity, briefly recording their thoughts or even beginning more ambitious treatises and disquisitions. But hope invariably faded, replaced with paralyzing despair or mere indifference. We came to anticipate these periodic upswings of mood, which followed their own generally predictable schedules, giving the impression that the mind or perhaps temperament of each exhibit was a single gear, and when taken together they formed a kind of mechanism, a groaning piece of industrial clockwork prone to eruptions of steam and unexpected noises. This negative philosophical machine was the Zoo’s totality, a strange and seemingly purposeless assemblage lumbering forward erratically, powered by a spectral flame suspended in vast inner darkness, a harsh grey light of diseased vitality that flickered briefly before extinguishing itself with no great fanfare.

If the Argumentatives and Depressives alike had their share of supporters, certain exhibits in particular drew a regular contingent of devoted visitors. The Romanian was always a popular draw, as was the Unperson, an exhibit who claimed to be no one, a functional human robot. Although he did not seem to be suffering in any sense, he belonged nowhere else and so had ended up at the Zoo. He was immensely suggestible, and there were reports that some of the staff sexually abused him, although I never witnessed this. Mostly he posed for photos with visitors who took advantage of their ability to dictate his facial expression to him. On command he would break into a smile of perfect optimism, or else assume a morose, preoccupied appearance.

“There is no one inside me,” he would say, sitting perfectly still on the bed inside his cage. “I am neither alive nor dead.”

I have said that the exhibits were free to leave at any time, but there was one exception who was interned permanently and whose cage was locked, his personality evidently being considered so unsuitable for outside existence that the possibility of his return was not even contemplated, much less permitted. Naturally the status of this "Extreme Case" who had been judged utterly incompatible with, if not actively deleterious to society, attracted great interest. I remember my own sense of mingled trepidation and excitement upon approaching his cage for the first time. Later, when I had commenced my employment and become familiar with him, I was able to witness the effect that his reputation had on first time visitors. Most of them expected something in the manner of the more abrasive Argumentatives: a ranting lunatic advocating human genocide, or some other embodiment of explicitly criminal derangement. But the exhibit was a small and unimposing man who usually wore heavy red or brown sweaters and an old woollen hunting cap with a peaked brim; his clothes on the whole were too large for him. His features were mild, and in fact he resembled a certain avuncular children’s television host who had been popular in my youth, although I did not impart much significance to this coincidence. The exhibit took pains to always situate himself in front of his desk, seated and facing away from visitors, so that the glow of his large computer monitor haloed the back of his head. He did not complain about his condition or express any other statements of suffering, much less expound anything like a coherent philosophy. Instead, he carried out the same repetitive task on every day of every year I observed him. The large monitor could be read easily enough; at any given time the exhibit was logged into OkCupid, viewing a woman’s dating profile. Often the profile differed, although routine observation revealed that the exhibit only ever examined the same three women. The first was a thickset blonde university student, the second a frail middle-aged woman with dark hair and glasses, and the third a severe-looking teenager with a shaved head, dressed in what looked to be a man’s suit. The exhibit often stared at these profiles for hours without moving, and when he glanced away it was always to return his attention to the sheets of paper arranged on his desk. These were covered with cursive scrawls, and it was clear that the exhibit was engaged in writing out a long letter by hand. His expression as he wrote was neutral, and at certain points he would return his attention to the screen again, becoming lost in the profile before him. When the concentration of visitors outside his cage became too great and the Extreme Case sensed that they demanded some sort of show, he would finally turn to them and deliver a few words, usually nothing more than a simple, bland greeting. Once I saw a group of boys remaining in place even after the other visitors had departed in disappointment; evidently they were still expecting a horrific malediction or some sudden torrent of transgressive wisdom.

“Don’t expect too much out of life,” the exhibit told them at last. The boys listened to him solemnly, as if attending to the words of a priest. The exhibit seemed to be speaking with great insincerity.

All of the exhibits—or aristocrats, as the Impresario sometimes called them—had considered suicide, but it was generally agreed to be too late for it to make any difference. Despite this widespread resignation, the Zoo contained a Euthanasia Booth for any exhibits who decided to permanently and expeditiously escape from themselves. The booth was used very infrequently, but remained one of the Zoo’s chief attractions, as many visitors ardently wished to witness an exhibit ending their life. During my period of employment I can recall only a single instance of the Booth fulfilling its function, and this occurrence involved a professor from Frankfurt who the Zoo had exhibited for twenty years. On the day she chose to leave her cage and follow the path that led to the Booth, an alarm of sorts went off, and a funereal but rather tinkly piece of piano music was piped through the Zoo’s PA system. The combination of a rare female exhibit with a rare public death commanded the immediate attention of both visitors and staff alike, and the atmosphere of excitement could be compared to that preceding a parade at Disneyland; all those present were encouraged to stop what they were doing and attend to the upcoming suicide. Young visitors absorbed the atmosphere of solemn spectacle and immediately ceased their chatter, while older ones took out their cameras and other recording devices. As the professor passed, we received the impression of a snow leopard or some other noble creature leaping from a precipice to extinguish itself in a flash of wild glory, although from the outside the scene was nothing more than that of a middle-aged German academic, in noticeably poor physical condition, with short dull dun-colored hair, conveying herself to the Euthanasia Booth as if carrying out a particularly tedious and routine errand. Once known for the passionate rhetoric of her essays on Hölderlin, she left no note of any kind and evidently did not feel the need to explain her decision, which had been to a great extent foreshadowed by her written works of nearly half a century before. All that remained was to enter the booth, strap herself into the chair and insert the IV for her lethal injection—steps she undertook with stolid efficiency. The Romanian Reflective seemed visibly affected by her death, and I can recall him speaking to himself as I passed by his cage:

“Too late now to escape time. Too late to lament, Sofia. It is not only too late for death, but too late to lament it. What vitality remains is only the flat hum of a refrigerator, ever-present, keeping our despair cool in the surrounding fire of the self. Boxy and remote. We cannot be unplugged...”

The Romanian seemed to be mumbling, trying to marshal his thoughts into more impressive aphorisms, but it was clear that age had affected him, and he quickly trailed off.

A few resolutely suicidal exhibits disdained the Euthanasia Booth and determined to assert themselves by way of an unwitnessed and individually enacted death. On three occasions I discovered exhibits who had managed to hang themselves with bedsheets or other crude garrotes fashioned from the materials present in their cages. In these cases, the Impresario instructed us to simply call the coroner and have the corpse removed rather than sound the alarm and invite all to see, even though this would presumably have satisfied the visitors.

The Impresario’s precise psychology was a matter of speculation amongst we employees, although few definite conclusions were ever reached. He had apparently conceived the Zoo along with several other unorthodox business schemes while still a young man, and it had been the only one of his ideas to have resulted in much profit. He was unfailingly courteous to his workers and seemed almost apologetic to the exhibits—some of whom went so far as to curse him and his family on a regular basis. The Dutchman once referred to him as “a cockroach feasting on the excrement of our misery,” while a particularly vociferous American Argumentative, who was convinced that the human race must drive itself extinct in order to “return balance to the planet,” regularly worked himself up into a froth of venom whenever the Impresario passed, spitting in his direction and throwing small objects. The Impresario seemed more embarrassed than anything, and absorbed the imprecations with a bowed head. He disdained to play the showman, too, and rarely interacted directly with the visitors, preferring to let the exhibits speak for themselves. In matters of maintenance and general upkeep he could be fastidious, and he paid great attention to the physical condition of the exhibits, bearing as he did the cost of their health care. Most of them required medications of various kinds, and the majority were afflicted with ailments that seemed partly psychosomatic but still required regular attention. Digestive disorders were common, as were skin conditions and poor dental hygiene. Despite these trials, many of them were exceedingly long-lived and persisted well into their eighties and nineties, clinging to life even as their conditions steadily deteriorated.

After five years of employment, I still did not feel that I had exhausted the Zoo’s mysteries, but I had become familiar enough with them that my work had lost much of its glamour. The insights of the exhibits—their stripping away of social illusions, the cold honesty that had once seemed so urgent and upsetting—had been reduced to tics and truisms, philosophically unassailable but no longer carrying the force of a revelation. I had thought of leaving before, but a sentimental attachment tied me to the Zoo, and in the end it was a sudden whim that eventually caused my resignation. For a long time rumors had circulated among the visitors, describing secret exhibits or areas of the Zoo not open to the public. The content of these supposed hidden rooms varied depending on the account, but it was almost always spoken of as being too upsetting for general exhibition, either for intrinsic moral reasons or because it would somehow reflect negatively on the prejudices of the public in a way that would affect the Zoo’s continued existence. My coworkers and I naturally had access to almost every area of the grounds and had never come across such a room, but we were not immune to the rumors and still sometimes speculated on what the Impresario might be hiding. On the day in question I had wandered over to the administrative area on my lunch break to discuss the condition of a Depressive who had recently transitioned to full Catatonia. The Impresario’s office was not particularly large, but it bore the mark of his meticulous nature: clean carpet beneath, family photographs framed on the walls with an even amount of space between them. It was not unusual for him to offer the staff coffee during situations such as this, and I always accepted. Now the conversation trailed off as I faced him across his desk, our empty mugs resting in front of us, and after a moment’s deliberation, I idly mentioned the hidden room.

“It does exist,” the Impresario said, as if the matter was of no great importance. “I could show you, if you want. Would you like to see it?”

I nodded my assent, not taking him entirely seriously. He stood, returned our mugs to the sink and then led me through a door behind his desk that opened onto a long corridor. I was familiar with the layout of the building and had some idea of the dimensions of this corridor, but I had never passed through it before, much less entered any of the rooms along its length. If asked, I would have guessed them to be storage areas for Zoo records, which was how they were designated on the maps provided to the staff. The Impresario walked to the end of the corridor and stopped in front of a door, which he then unlocked and motioned for me to follow him inside.

The first thing I noticed was the room’s sole occupant: a small, naked child. This rather corpulent little boy, who looked barely old enough to read, was clearly a tenant and not a prisoner, as the room was furnished with a couch and comfortable-looking bed, and there were no restraints or any other ominous implements present. With that said, there was no television and no books, and nothing else with which the boy might occupy himself. He did not have any obvious sources of food and water either, although he had been provided with a toilet, and I watched as this naked child pissed into it with no trace of shyness, the pale golden stream sustaining itself in a clear arc before breaking into desultory dribbles. He seemed entirely unconcerned with either of us.

"Is this it?" I asked.

"Yes, this is it."