I WAS READY TO LEAVE FOR SAINT-CLOUD WITH my little valise when there came a soft knocking on the door I was about to open, a knocking irreal as the fall of dusk. Insel had turned up again. He collapsed before me like a stricken gull having received some unavowable hurt in the unknown wastes where he belonged. The storm must have completely disintegrated his exceptional electrification.
“Um Gottes Willen,” he panted almost inaudibly. “I cannot eat, I cannot sleep, and now my heart is ceasing to beat.”
It was remarkable he should succeed in speaking—his body no longer showed much sign of life. He might be using this body—with its interwoven identity of the living remains of a dead man and the dead remains of a man once alive—as a medium, from a distance to which his fluctuant spirit had been temporarily released.
His face having lost its bruised appearance was set in the tidy waxen consistency that makes corpses look like sudden dolls.
I might be entertaining a ghost, so light a labor I found it to draw him through the glass doors into the studio. As I dropped him onto an enormous couch, my everyday self broadcast a panic.
“Mrs. Jones, her daughter having sailed for New York, is discovered alone in her flat with a dead tramp.”
Briefly I thought of blowing the thing out of the window. The seeming imminence of his death allowed for no other means of getting rid of him. But this was no solution. He would be found—sprawled in the courtyard.
Then it came to me that in spite of my willful descent into a forbidden psychology, I still had sufficient power to put him to rest. “Insel,” I inquired, “can you hear me?” Then—very slowly—very distinctly, “You are going to sleep—sleep till the blue moon.”
There surged out of Insel a whisper of horror, “But my heart isn’t beating,” he protested.
“That is only a neurotic illusion,” I consoled him, believing I lied.
He lay on the couch and did not die. I began to arrange for a possible revival. “Is there anything you can drink that isn’t alcoholic?” I asked him quietly.
After a while he murmured, “Pfeffermintztee.”
“Try to be alive when I come back,” I urged him in all sincerity.
“Where are you going?” he wanted to know, his voice a hoarse agony.
“To buy pfeffermintztee.”
“No—no—you’re not to leave me—ever.”
With a strange grip of a limp vice his fingers clung to my wrist. I had to sit down beside him. Now he was staring as if bewitched, at the parquet of the floor.
“The peppermint won’t grow out of the floor,” I advised.
“It will,” said Insel. “You’re to stay here.”
And I found myself staring together with him.
It was no peppermint growing out of the planes of polished oak. Only the creeping organic development of a microscopic undergrowth such as carpeted chaos in his work, almost as closely cramped as the creamy convolutions of a brain. Foliage of mildew it spread—and spread.
“An infusion of that fungus would be bad for you,” I persuaded him, taking his fingers carefully apart, lifting their tentacular pulp from my wrist.
Escaping I rushed to the shop at the corner and back again. As Insel was still living, I made him his tea.
“And you will be able to sleep,” he reproached me, oblivious of his drowsiness as he fell asleep.
I could watch over my invalid through a pane of glass incompletely covered by a curtain on the door at the far end of the studio.
A dense oppression stole through the flat all packed up in its iron shutters. Insel, who had no longer been able to bear a light, lay pallid and obscure in a faint reflection from a lantern in the hall, his slumber the extinction of a dim volcano. Lax as a larva, a glow worm “gone out,” his head bared of its phosphorescent halo, seemed swollen in a meaningless hydrocephalus. As if, while conscious, electric emissions had diminished his cranial volume.
Around him the atmosphere was stale as an alcohol preserving a foetal monster he resembled in repose.
Insel was unpleasant bereft of his radiance.
His body had dwindled in distilling an immaterial essence to such concentration it was appreciable to the senses. One was aware of an effulgence, which, if it waxed and waned during his waking hours, had now altogether vanished. His body swept and garnished like the house in the Bible—devilishly invaded—was no longer human as it lay before me in the form of Insel.
There unshining and supine he seemed abandoned of all quality except the opaque. The gray inflated opacity of his unseeing head, which, should one lift it from the pillow, must surely loll on his shoulder—the head of an idiot.
The flat seemed emptier for his being there, until I found that further off it was filled to a weird expansion with emanations drifting away from Insel asleep. They crowded the air, minute horizontal icicles, with a tingling of frozen fire. In the room at the end of the corridor their force of vitalized nothingness was pushing back the walls. Why should Insel, less ponderable than other men, impart perceptible properties to the Air? Was he leaking out of himself, residuum of that ominous honey he stored behind his eyes into which it was his constant, his distraught concern to withdraw?
In his soaring, flagging excitations he might have spent a spiritual capital and going broke, be raising exhaustive loans on the steadily decreasing collateral of his vitality, until an ultimate bonfire in those eerie eyes should be extinguished in some unimaginable bankruptcy.
In him the intangible and tangible components of a human being had come apart. As if in some ruthless extraction of Supreme Good from a fallible pulp, the vibrancy interpenetrating normal muscular fiber had been indrawn from his physical structure to condense in a point of flame. When some mysterious fuel failed him, Insel remained—a mess of profane dross.
I thought of his pictures, those queerly luminous almost materializing projections. Curious creatures moving in levitation—frequently cerebral abortions of cats.
Any student of ancient occultism would recognize them for elementals. Imbecilic, vampiric—here and there an obsessive absence of a mouth implied an inconceivable constipation. A conspicuous liver, so personal he might have served as his own fluoroscope, clear as a pale coral was painted as only the Masters painted. He had no need to portray. His pictures grew, out of him, seeding through the inter-atomic spaces in his digital substance to urge tenacious roots into a plane surface.
I wondered in what psychic succession these monsters issued from a man, who himself when unlit or cut into profile, became so hauntingly animal, even insectile. Who, when asleep, being the makings of his own bestiary, was vilely void as an incubus—wondered why millenary monsters of a disreputable metaphysic should re-arise intact in a modern subconscious.
Insel slept for twenty hours. With one interruption. When I went in to see how he was I woke him up.
Through the slits in the shutters the outdoor lights laid narrow blades along the floor, above Insel’s feet on the whitewashed wall they crossed and cast a double shadow of a hanging fern. Otherwise the room was a mausoleum.
Again I could have sworn I beheld the dead. Silence had hardened upon him in a stony armor, too heavy for the fluttering of breath.
I listened till the sound of his rigidity grew so shrill I was forced to make it mute. Terrified, I took hold of the door and crashed it to.
Insel—who after all must, of his nature, float quite lightly on the surface of a coma—easily lifted his lids.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” I gasped. “It was necessary to make a noise to know you are not dead.”
With none of the daze of sudden rousing he excused me gently. And slept anew.
Those depths through which others plunge into sleep for him stretched shallow as moisture on a mirror.
In the morning I went out, off into the sunlight, shopping. Leaving far behind me that darkened room, and whatever it contained.
My major purchase was kilos of bright red beef.
When he awoke I fed him chunks from a great frying pan. Insel sat up and swallowed them with fairly bestial satisfaction.
“Why,” I asked to make conversation, “do you always want ‘Fleisch ohne Knochen’?”
I had taken it for granted he ordered boneless meat to avoid waste. But Insel began peering about shockingly as if suspicious of being overheard.
“When I am alone,” he explained, in an unexpectedly vacuous voice, “I do not eat like this—I have to drag bones into a corner—to gnaw.”
I felt curious to know how—without teeth—. But Insel beginning to shine again put off the animal, to become the clown of an angel.
Through the row of glass doors the ornaments in the hall looked like fish under water as a celadon tide of pale lamplight sluiced into the studio. From the shutters on either side, entangled reflections flickered into the halo that was now re-forming round Insel’s face.
Stark on the sommier he floated up from the floor of a pool with the wavering fungus he had sown there clinging to his cover.
He told me he had found the secret of perpetual motion if only he had the money to buy the stuff. To me it seemed he had rather discovered a slow time that must result in eternity.
I told him I had for some while been conceiving a ballet.
“It is the story of a maiden seeing her life in a crystal— It would look exactly as it does here, everything translucent.” I waved to Insel— “Yet as in the days when there were maidens they had no ‘life,’ what she sees is her future spouse sowing his ‘wild oats.’
“All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijinsky—yet once I came across one who possessed a dual equipoise which threw him into a huddle with himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up to the moon around him, whichever way he turned— But I should have to do maquettes—animated maquettes of the choreography—and I can’t make anything grow out of the floor,” I said deferentially.
“Of course he makes love to everything. A cocotte’s eye. The woman in the litmus petticoat forecasting the weather. A rainbow,” I continued, seeing Insel entranced. “The Queen of Fairyland— Mermaids and Medusae.” Envy was stealing into Insel.
“I dance divinely,” he said and I could see him crossing a ballroom floor propelled as if on invisible casters, as truly initiate acolytes, in reception and remittance of the Holy Book before the high altar.
“Always at the crucial moment the youth is intercepted. There comes floating in between him and the object of his concupiscence, a—” I stopped, as Insel, seemingly relieved by the frustration of a rival, closed his eyes, and waited till he came to. “Over and again I drop the idea in despair. Over and over again I find a solution so simple it constantly slips my mind. I have only to make some little people about five inches high and tell them what to dance.” Insel nodded comprehendingly. “Yet whenever I get to work I come upon some fundamental obstacle. It takes me hours,” I complained to Insel, “to remember it cannot be done. It is as if at the back of that memory stands another memory of having had the power to create whatever I pleased.”
Insel’s eyes enlarged in a ruminative stare. The stealthy oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer need of larynxes to converse. Insel thought at me. More precisely— vaguely conceived before me.
“To make things grow,” he conveyed on his silence, “you would have to begin with the invisible dynamo of growth; it has the dimension of naught and the Power of Nature. As a rule it will only grow if planted in a woman— But my brain is a more exquisite manure. In that time in which I exist alone, I recover the Oceanic grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multiple as sand.”
Then the silence of Insel took on voice once more—A voice which as if returning from diffusion among the mists—might be coming from “anywhere,” resumed his ever recurrent cries of horror on behalf of women who could no longer love him.
“For God’s sake,” I implored, for Insel returned to his “normal” state, I followed suit— “stop agonizing— Go to sleep— To negresses every white man looks—white.”
“It’s the teeth,” he groaned— “Die Mädchen—”
At least you’d have more chance with the girls if you got Bebelle to clean your suit—
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, overcome by my inherent conviction of personal blame for anyone not being able to get anything they want—. And in Insel it seemed his need was for something so sublime that over all his aspirations hovered crowns of glory—Mädchen—something entirely outside my zone of attraction, in his regret for them, took on enchanting attributes—even those in a mountain village who ate such quantities of garlic it breathed from the pores of their skin—so much so that Insel, with the heartiest will in the world, had found it impossible to “hug them close enough.”
“You’d better get into that couch and leave your suit in the hall—when I come home I’ll throw it into a bath of gasoline.”
Insel was horrified. “I don’t want anybody to see the dirt in that suit—let alone you—I’ve worn it for five years.”
“All I shall see is the gasoline go dark—it would seem just as dark if I were cleaning something that had only been worn six months.”
But Insel was actually writhing in a bitter determination to protect his own.
“Are you afraid,” I asked, in a sudden concern for his “rays,” “that it would interfere with your Strahlen?—I’m not going to wash it. You can’t short-circuit.”
On the contrary—I anticipated him distinctly renewed in an intenser radiance—
“Please,” I begged—enraptured as a nun seeking permission to lay fresh lilies before a shrine. “Ich bitte Sie.”
He was obdurate—it would seem, in shame. It did not occur to me that in cleaning him up one would be cutting a slice from his “beggar’s capital.”
“It’s not distinguished to be ashamed—”
Insel, in a way, gave in—.
“You try it,” he warned me. “Before your eyes the suit will turn white.”
“It won’t, or if it does, I’ll turn it black again.”
“You may clean it forever,” he intoned ominously— “the while it grows whiter—and whiter.”
“Mädchen,” I reminded him for bait— “or at least,” as for an instant Insel’s ravaged features showed through his ennobling aura— “better negresses.”
Insel was pacified. But he did not go to sleep. He evaporated.
I recognized a vapor whose drifting suspension of invisible myriads he copied so passionately with the overfine point of his pencil.
When it cleared off it had left him again an effigy straightened as the level of water.
The world of the Lutetia had materialized. An infiltration of half-light softly bursting the dark, a thin cascade, the ferns dripping into a green gloom. Here, where dawn and noon and midnight were all so dim and Insel lay sensitive to clarity as a creature of the deep sea; the closely shuttered studio with its row of glass doors was a real replica of the irreal “aquarium.”
Because I found the place somewhat chilly when sunless—I had thrown a great white blanket over my thin dress. This was due to no obsession for Insel’s white miracles. Simply, everything being put away in naphthalene, this had returned from the cleaners and the femme de ménage had not yet locked it up.
Fairly inflexible—it curved around me loosely, encaving me—its stiff corner trailing off like a sail.
I sat on the edge of the couch at the feet of that rigid flotsam—in a huge white shell.
Again I received a strictly lateral invitation to wholly exist in a region imposing a supine inhabitance. A region whose architecture, being parallel to Paradise, is only visible to a horizontal gaze. Should one stand up to it, it must disappear.
Somehow, unable to dissolve into mist, and thus too dense to enter a mirage, the nearest I could conform to the arid aquatic was in becoming crustacean.
Being an outsider did not interfere with my participation in the ebullient calm behind Insel’s eyelids, where cerebral rays of imprecision, lengthening across an area of perfectibility, were intercepted by resonant images audible to the eye, visible to the ear; where even ultimate distance was brought within reach, tangible as a caress.
As all this “lasted forever” it seemed incompatible that Insel should slump back into a larva. Yet there he was—extinguished again in unregenerative sleep.
I turned to go. A scatter of objects on the table attracted my attention. Among some weary sous and tiny strangulated worms—broken shoe laces—lay evidently the bone of some prehistoric fish. A white comb shrill with the accumulated phosphorus of the ages. Insel had emptied out his pockets.
I went about my cleaning. Ordering several bidons of gasoline, I poured them into an enamel tub, and suspending the suit by a wooden pincers, I dipped it in.
The sun was shining, the kitchen blazing white. Before the open windows that which seemed most substantial about Insel, like a corpse let down from a gallows, fell to its knees in the volatile fluid.
Then the ghastly thing began to turn pale. I set upon it in opposition and that white contorted outgrowth of a brain almost tangled in the whisk-brush—.
Had he really intended as much in his challenge—or did this Polar region of a mania— these maps of Himalayan anthills with their scabs of pure vegetation embossed upon the backdrop of his clothes, depend for their pictorial clarity on some accord between his cerebral vibrations and mine?
Being tired and bored, I went in to see if in exchange for some more food, I could make terms with Insel.
He appeared uneasy. Rolling his eyes like runaway wheels spoked with interrogations. His expression was such as I had never seen. Terror solidified.
“I am a prisoner here!”
It did not recur to me that his classic complaint is an echo in the corridors of asylums.
Tearing my visionary trappings of meat and such from me with his flippant accusation, Insel did not at all want to know, “When shall I see you again?”— He had never seen me before.
My everyday self shuddered— “Blackmail! Almost as awkward as dead tramps.” I reflected, but I had become so nicely attuned to Insel’s moods that my parasitic clairvoyance, of its very nature, being constrained to see eye to eye with him, immediately veered to his viewpoint, I concluded I must in a temporary aberration have kidnapped this gaunt guest whose snarl was unsociable.
“Beefsteak,” I quavered, as if enticing a surly hound.
Insel, completely jammed between infinite walls, was not having any steak.
I must dislodge his attention.
Seemingly at hazard my dilemma linked up with one of the kind of infantile anecdotes Insel always greeted with glee.
“Have you heard about the Hungarian immigrant lost in London?” I inquired as engagingly as I could. “He wanted to find his consulate and could not understand why the policeman only shrugged his shoulders when he explained he was ‘Hungry.’ ”
Strange how unerringly the unconscious picks its way. I had “found” Insel for himself again. To the Titan of Hunger—the policeman’s shoulders heaved in the shrug of all humanity ignoring Insel. This recognition shook him with the most sophisticated laughter I have ever heard in my life.
“Your suit has turned white,” I announced.
A gleam of crafty assurance stole into his transparent eyes.
“You will never ‘get out’ while your suit is white,” I threatened, “all die Mädchen are on the other side of the wall—”
“Oh,” said Insel with a conciliatory smile, “I only want them to look at.”
“Well, they won’t look at you until your suit is black; and as we’re about it you’d better let me clean your shirt.”
His shirt was of a dark gray design rather mellow. When I suggested renovation he clutched it by the open throat.
“See,” he said, lifting it with a cautious yet ostentatiously offhand gesture, “the neckband is worn ragged inside—it’s not worth it.” He was cowering in some apprehension that constricted him, that even devitalized his hand. Become as the hand of a victim of infantile paralysis, it flopped over with the edge of the stuff. He had an air of shifting—just so far—the bandage of a wound.
Not for the first time, with Insel, I received a subliminal flash of an apostate Saint Sebastian writhing with arrows—in such privacy, it would be indelicate to intrude upon it with whatever assistance.
On looking back, it seems inconsistent, that once the elation he inspired in me died down— I should have continued in my obsession of conserving something very precious with an Insel changing to an incubus, playing his silly psychic tricks on his clothes—raving of imprisonment and the gnawing of Knochen. It had left me with the solicitude one might have for a valued friend with whom one has been on some glorious drinking bout, when he shows up next day at a disadvantage in a particularly nasty hangover.
One last struggle with the suit—and it turned black again. Insel must have forgotten about it.