A card came from Carl, postmarked St. Louis. He said that he had left the coast for good, was in St. Louis, but gave no address.
Later I discovered that his departure, and the break-up of the band, was coincidental with the death, under mysterious circumstances, of the singer named Joey. Joey was a good sailor, had managed boats all his life—but he took a small catboat out when the storm warnings were up, headed the thing into the rain and wind . . . and, according to the Coast Guard, deliberately capsized her, turning downwind, and then coming about, so that she jibed. His body—what was left of it—was never found . . .
Why Carl came to St. Louis, in particular, I didn’t know . . . although I found out later. I also found that he was not alone: he had brought Concha with him . . .
There followed a succession of weird illnesses, disconnected physical manifestations, and, as with the epilepsy, he took the trouble to report to me: random cards, postmarked St. Louis, giving the strict details, and no address.
He reported the appearance of a succession of shapes and markings in odd areas of his body—stars, crosses, and various abstractions, like microscopic cell life . . . One after another, or in groups, they appeared, and vanished . . .
(MOBY-DICK: “. . . the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and recrossed with numberless straight marks in thick array.”
“By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.”
These shapes and forms finally resolved into a set of mammary rudiments—a mere suggestion of nipples, appearing in lines from the crotch to the true breasts, to the armpits. They remained for some time, and then disappeared.
Later, during the summer—with the intense heat beating up from river, brick, and asphalt, as it can only in St. Louis—he reported what appeared to be Elephantiasis of the Scrotum—the scrotum swollen and hanging to his knees, the penis enveloped, with only an invagination to indicate its presence. Whether he treated this condition, or allowed it to pursue its course, in any case, he eventually recovered.
Over a considerable period of time, he lost several teeth. Nothing seemed to happen to them, they didn’t decay or cause pain—they simply fell out. And, in every empty socket—after an extended delay—he grew a replacement; so that, by the time the process ended, he had, to a large extent, a third set of teeth.
At one time, he developed an abdominal swelling, so marked and painful it could not be ignored. For this, he went to the hospital, and underwent surgery. The result was the removal of a teratoma, or dermoid cyst—containing bits of skin, hair, nails, teeth, and tongue, fully developed. The only explanation was the predatory conquest by Carl, at some very early prenatal stage, of an unfortunate, competitive twin. The lesser organism, attacked and overcome, had nevertheless managed to place random cells within the folds and envelopes of the conquering embryo; and these, now fully developed, had waited until Carl’s full growth to present themselves.
Recovering from the operation, he became involved in a drunken brawl. The trouble started in a tavern, spread to the sidewalk, and eventually to the whole block, and Carl, resisting the police, turned on an officer and attacked him. I never discovered the nature of the attack, but it put the officer in the hospital and Carl in jail.
Locked in solitary, in a cell remote from the others, Carl remained out of control, raving and screaming long after he was sober.
Then he suddenly became quiet. He began chatting with the guards, and, through them, sent messages to the other officers. In a short time, he was in a front office, having an interview . . . and a little after that, he was on the street, a free man, all charges dropped. He had simply conned his way out . . .
Once when I asked him about this, he laughed, put his arm on my shoulder, and quoted Melville, with appropriate flourish: “. . . men are jailors all; jailors of themselves.”
. . . and added, matter-of-factly: “I liberated myself . . .”
For a while, Carl seemed to desert Concha, or at least two-time her. He took up with his final companion, a creature named Bonnie—fat, blowsy, alcoholic . . . she would sit in a rumpled bed, drunk, dirty, her stringy hair falling down, and quote Wordsworth and Keats . . . sneezing and weeping violently, lamenting that she suffered from “Rose Fever”: unconsoled when Carl told her that Hart Crane, American poet, was similarly allergic . . .
Carl once bragged to me, confidentially, that he had accomplished intercourse with Bonnie twelve times during thirty hours . . .
Whatever else he did was mysterious . . . but the law was on his heels again—his position in St. Louis became untenable. Expecting to hear of his arrest, I was surprised to hear, instead, that he had committed himself to a private institution. It was a shrewd gesture: the police gradually lost interest in him, and yet, the commitment having been his own act, he was free to leave whenever the heat was off.
I tried very hard to locate him, but could find no trace—as usual, he had left no address. For many months, I knew nothing of him, and I began to feel that he was passing, or had already passed, into institutional oblivion.