I COULD NOT MAKE OUT WHY THIS FANTASTICALLY beautiful creature should have both hands round my throat, when Insel, shrunken to a nerve, his eyes fixed as blinded granite, sat at that distance with his fists so tightly clenched. Fingers of automatic pressure rapped their tonnage of abstract force on my jugular—the blood on my brain surged in a noisy confusion— “You are going to give in—obsessed by my beauty—having no hope—endlessly resigned—”
All the air wheezed in my exploding ears as a last breath, “—suffering—suffering—suffering—choked by a robot!” This was not all that suffocated me—myriads upon myriads of distraught women were being strangled in my esophagus.
I had known exhaustive desperation but no such desperation as this—with its power of a universal conception—of limitless application: being impersonal made it the more overwhelming.
“You—are—going—to—give—in.”
“To whom?” I wondered—my eyes closing. “To Insel? Or this incredibly lovely monster made of dead flesh.”
“Thou art fair my beloved, thou—,” rose from a subconscious abyss.
Not wholly convinced I wrenched my eyelids apart—my cerebral current, flowing an infinitessimal fraction of a second faster than the normal, registered Insel. I caught him at it. Swift as the leaves of the shutter on a camera when a snapshot is taken, there came together upon his concentric face a distinct enlargement of Colossus’ photograph that always stood on the sitting room mantlepiece at the other end of the flat.
Simultaneously it came back to me how Insel, on his first visit, had taken that photo between his hands to stare at it inordinately as if for reproduction, for a long time, and at length bringing it nearer to his eyes.
“Such beauty as this,” he said, “could scarcely happen more than once in a hundred years.” He himself put it at two thousand, I had laughingly observed.
“Stop it,” I commanded, letting fly a fearful kick at Insel’s brittle shin. As if he were anaesthetized, the kick seemed not to hurt him—he received it with the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness.
“The pet! The lamb!— it does television, too,” I told myself delightedly.
“Insel,” I laughed, enthusiastic over him once more.
“Seien wir uns wieder gut—I give you the key—dinner—My man Godfrey—the loan on your picture—you go to the Balkans—you are the living confirmation of my favorite theories.”
As for Insel, he emerged from his “raptness” babbling of Colossus—Colossus as he had himself foretold me having taken on an immortality as an evergrowing myth. Insel claimed him as a kindred spirit with ideas identical with his own.
“How entirely he would have accepted me— my art—We would have been as one—”
I argued at length against this sudden conviction. “Do you know,” I asked, “who, for the so-called precursor of surrealism, was the supreme painter?— Rubens—” Only then did Insel’s illusions miserably dissolve.