The Otto Loser Mysteries

This is the final episode of Anton’s Bark. It begins with Otto’s reading of Chapter Fourteen of Otto in Flames. The fourteenth chapter of Anton’s novel produces the miraculous ending the writer had always been looking for, but had never been able to find. Now that the writer is lost to the mire of the Unseen, and his book as been lost to time, the real Otto discovers he is finally free. What happens next, after the fictitious Otto manages to reunite himself with his family in Vienna, is the real Otto’s ending to Otto in Flames. At the conclusion of this last episode there is nothing left but for the real Otto to recall, as poetically as he can, how Anton was finally able to escape from the cave and return to his wife, Oksana, still painting a portrait of him in their loft, on 18 February 2019. Thank you for listening.

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In an echo of the time Anton followed Urania through his own town at the beginning of the real Otto’s telling Anton’s Bark, Chapter Thirteen has the fictitious Otto following Marie down a street, on a dark night in Vienna. She has the fated money. He now suspects what her secret is, which is to say what the writer has in store for him as Marie enters a private club. A potent feedback-loop has begun to irrupt between the fictitious Otto’s life, and Anton’s experiences in the myth of Midas. The ending of Otto in Flames might ave been a foregone conclusion, yet the fictitious Otto would never have guessed at the true outcome. In the commentary that follows, we learn that as Anton never knew how his novel ended, despite his many efforts to find out, it falls to the real Otto to come up with an ending. That astonishing ending will be set out in Chapter Fourteen of Otto in Flames, next week. This episode ends with an account of what happened to Anton on returning to the cave with a puppet of the fictitious Otto in his mouth, a puppet answering to the name of Orpheus.

Ever since 1999 Otto has known that by one-minute after midnight, on 19 February, 2019, his estranged wife Marie, would be with him in his hotel room. And in Anton’s mysteriously unfolding novel that is exactly what happens. Today, the real Otto reads Chapter Twelve for us. Now that that special midnight has come and gone, there are no more prophecies he might use to guide his fictitious self. And his quest to be reunited with his family is marred by the fact that he is still in possession 30,000 euros, which he now knows Marie badly needs. There is a sense in this chapter that Anton may be aware of Otto’s repugnance at being in the hero of Otto in Flames. While preoccupied with his adventures in the Unseen there is a sense that the writer may even be enjoying his hero’s predicament in Vienna. When it comes to Otto’s turn to tell us what happens to Anton, increasingly absorbed in a medieval version of the myth of Midas, the telling is also slyly exuberant, raising the thorny question of who is taking who for a walk.

Otto’s reading of Chapter Eleven has him recounting how his fictitious self comes face to face with a ferocious dog.  His premonition, that he would be attacked by such a dog, within twenty-four hours of arriving in Vienna, comes true. What the fictitious Otto didn’t know however, is that this attack would happen in the midst of an unexpected encounter with his son, Jakob. He doesn’t lose heart. His final premonition is that he will be safely in his hotel room with Marie, by midnight that night. The episode concludes with the real Otto’s description of Anton’s continuing adventures in the Unseen, which by now have become a wild retelling of a popular Greek myth. Still chasing after the Frenchman’s shoe, Anton races down a passage, which takes him into the Dark Ages. As Otto explains, it is apparent that Anton’s mind is somewhat adrift. The writer seems to have forgotten his desire to find out what happens in Otto in Flames. He only wants to get out of the cave, and back to his wife. Yet what happens Anton will have its consequences in Chapter Twelve of the novel, where Otto’s own quest to be reunited with his family continues.

Chapter Ten embroils Otto even further into the unforeseen, during his second day in Vienna. By early evening he is ready to meet Marie again, and take her out on a date. His plan is to rescue the relationship he’d had with her, some twenty years before. He is sure that it is Marie he is about to meet in the lobby of his hotel, because his prophecy had always been that she would be with him in his hotel room by midnight that night. Anton however, would have been able to remind him that prophecies too, are open to misinterpretation. It is in fact, a surprise that awaits the fictitious Otto in the lobby. And yet, it is left to the real Otto to narrate what happens to Anton in the Unseen. But while the writer is trapped in a cave, the fictitious Otto finds himself trapped by a dog. He provides a detailed explanation concerning how all of this could have happened, but despite himself, the real Otto’s descriptions of Anton’s quest to escape from the cave, by chasing after a Frenchman’s shoe, can only have the effect of feeding back into what happens to his fictional self in Chapter Eleven.

Despite the entanglement of its erstwhile writer, now trapped deep in the cave, Otto in Flames has taken on a momentum of its own. Today, the real Otto reads Chapter Nine for us. This chapter follows the meeting he’d had with Marie at the Spitzenhof café. Since 1999, the fictional Otto has known through his prophecies more or less what would happen to him on his first day in Vienna. Despite his bitterness at being nothing more than a character in a series of Anton Matins novels, the ninth chapter of Anton’s book sees Otto ensnared in an unforeseen predicament with Marie, he can’t wriggle out of. They leave the Spitzenhof separately. But Otto’s prophecy, such as it is, tells him that he will certainly see her again, back in his hotel room, at midnight that night. The only way the real Otto can influence events now, is by narrating his version of Anton’s wild-goose chase for a shoe, thrown by a lost French cartographer, down a cave passage in the Unseen. The shoe leads the writer straight into a Greek myth, which in itself will signal the structure for Chapter Ten.

The mystery of Chapter Eight is that the writer is no longer in a condition to be able to write it. Yet despite his condition, Anton is still able to imagine it. Even as far as the real Otto is concerned, this next chapter, which he reads for us, puts him where he’d always wanted to be, sitting opposite Marie in the Spitzenhof café. To his dismay however, and because of the interferences of the godly priest, the fictional Otto finds himself in possession of a large sum of money, which he’d never predicted having. By means of his capacity to narrate, the real Otto tries to take control of Anton’s book, or at least to take control of the writer who’d been swallowed into Unseen while writing Otto in Flames. And so, a new story begins. As the real Otto sees it, Anton Matins has become a strange creature, on an urgent quest to get back out of the cave, in order to be reunited with his long lost wife, Oksana. It is with this in mind that Chapter Nine begins to flow into Anton’s potent imagination.

Today, Otto reads Chapter Seven for us. This is the last chapter Anton had been writing before he disappeared altogether. In this chapter the fictional Otto remains amorphous, somewhere in his memory. But he soon emerges, not quite into the Spitzenhof café again, but into Father Promentano’s operatic version of it. Otto’s reflections, following his reading of this chapter, centre on problems of the ‘self’. This is a conundrum, given that his own origins are to be found in a series of mystery novels. On this question, Otto explains that he has long believed himself to be an ‘automaton’, without the capacity to choose. While he was still a lawyer in England, the fictional Otto had been in a position to write a book about this. He completed the book before his fictional self was destined to return to Vienna. What the real Otto comes to realise about himself, and his written fate, no to mention Anton’s own passage through the Unseen, is that by stepping into the cave, the missing writer of Otto in Flames would go onto trigger an ‘intensification of the phenomenon of all possibilities’. This intensification includes some bizarre ways of drafting Chapter Eight.

Otto’s reading of Chapter Six features his surprise meeting with Father Promentano at the Spitzenhof café. He’d been expecting to meet Marie there. He’d had a clear premonition of that meeting. As a result, the fictional Otto can only react angrily when this doesn’t happen. We discover that the fictional Otto finds himself in conversations with the peculiar priest, a Greek god in disguise called Father Promentano, who delivers a carrot, followed by a stick. The carrot is a large sum of money, the stick is a nightmare. And so, while sitting with a deity in the Spitzenhof café, having refused divine money, the fictional Otto is plummeted to a place in his memory in 1999, when he was last with Marie before they separated, and he went to England. They were on holiday together. At one point during this holiday, the fictional Otto sees his future come alive, through a series of curious prophecies. The sixths chapter is followed by the real Otto’s brief commentary on a few sentences that will occur in Chapter Seven, as well as his account of Anton’s evermore desperate attempts to get back into the cave, in the year 1882.

This episode begins with the real Otto’s reading of Chapter Five. It is a pivotal chapter in Anton’s novel where, after waking up from a nightmare in his hotel room in Vienna, the fictional Otto arranges to meet his estranged wife, Marie, at the Spitzenhof café, only to be shocked and disappointed when he gets there. We learn that the fictional Otto has been endowed with special but difficult to interpret powers of foresight. Since 1999 he’s been able to foresee what was going to happen to him within twenty-four hours of his arrival in Vienna. Unfortunately, the details of these prophecies are sketchy. Not to be thwarted by Anton’s designs for him, in the second half of this episode, the real Otto emerges once again, in his own right, putting him in pole-position to challenge Anton’s version of what happens to him in Otto in Flames, through his telling of what happens to Anton after he disappears and tries to write an improved draft of Chapter Six.