HIS EYES NOW PACIFIED IN A STEADY HUMAN mesmerism smiled cosily into mine.
“An was denken Sie?” he asked in coquettish anticipation. “What are you thinking of?” Again I had that creepy impression of ultimate tension, of a cerebral elastic taut for the snap.
“—of you,” wheezed the battered record turning on his brain to my sudden visualization of Insel as a gray tomcat having a fit in a cloud of ashes and lunar spangles.
I could not tell him, no thought coincided between one on the verge of dwelling among the levels he laid bare to me and one who remained outside.
Still he went on smiling a little vaingloriously. “An was denken Sie?” he asked again, of God knows what girl, in God knows what decade, and all the same of me.
In my veritable séances with Insel, the clock alone retrieved me from nonentity—thrusting its real face into mine as reminder of the temporal.
Thus I saw how three whole hours went by while Insel asked me what I was thinking of. They passed off in a puff as though, for a change, he had contracted time into intensity.
All the whimsical nonsense ever conceived rotated on his eyeballs which seemed to convey “while I pretend to search for some secret in you the less danger is there of your being inquisitive as to mine.”
With every question his eyes grew greater, thrust out longer spears, unctuous in the aromatic ooze from his brain.
“What are you thinking of?” urged Insel, and the softer fell his voice, the more inflexible he knit himself together—the more terrifically to disintegrate on some signal he invoked.
So I sat with as soothing and expressionless a smile as I could concoct and answered occasionally, “I am thinking of June 18th, 1931, or of nine o’clock on Tuesday of the week before last. —What are you thinking of?” His eyes converging on me, a yellow glow fused to a single planetary dilation rapped on the sun gong. “—An was denken Sie?” Insel, discouraged, petrified his face before me—with a determination beyond all human power, in the “last expression” that death imposes on pain. Incredibly exact, rivalling even any original I had seen.
“I should have preferred,” he said with his voice of dead lovers crying through the earth, “to be fit for you to look at.” Then he deliberately set himself on fire.
In exact description—he did not consistently appear to the naked eye, as a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparison to the morning murk sifting through the glassed environment. As a thread in the general mass, he retained his depth of tone. But as if his astounding vibratory flux required a more delicate instrument than the eye for registration. Some infrared or there invisible ray he gave off, was immediately transferred on one’s neural current to some dark room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its brilliancy. So one saw him as a gray man and an electrified organism at one and the same time—
—it was only the candle spluttering … preliminary to the most beautiful spectacle I have ever “seen.”
Shaken with an unearthly anxiety, this creature of so divine a degradation, set upon himself with his queer hands and began to pull off his face.
For those whose flesh is their rags, it is not pitiable to undress.
As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonization upon the table, his cheeks torn down, in bits upon the marble—one rift ran the whole length of his imperfect insulation, and for a moment exposed the “man-of-light.”
He sat there inside him taking no notice at all, made of the first jelly quivering under the sun and some final unimaginable form of aereal substance, in the same eternal conviction as the Greek fragment—
Once at dark in the Maine woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables.
At last Insel’s eyes dying of hallucination, stared suddenly into the filtered day. Horrified almost to blindness he complained, “Es ist zu hell.” He sounded as if deliberately quoting “it is too light”— That did not matter after all the ways he had been “happening.”
“So you’re starving, are you?” I mocked, exasperated with his total inability to estimate himself. “The greatest actor alive.”
As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of yards ahead. He was pirouetting perplexedly around himself when I caught up with him and we got into a cab.
In that small space he behaved like a fish on the end of a line, like a kite in the air entangled in its own tail—carrying about with him, in his awful unrest, my hand to which he clung—his own had clamped so fast to it, he could hardly get it off—when I dropped him at his door.