Grimscribe (19 page)

"Apparently Mr. Catch has left us," said the doctor, noticing that I remained under the spell of what I had just seen. Taking advantage of the moment, he tried to lend a certain focus or coloration to this experience. "You must understand," he continued, "that the integrity of material forms is only a prejudice, at most a point of view. This is not to mention the substance of those forms, which is an even more dubious state of affairs. That the so-called anatomy of a human being might burst forth as a fantastic insect should be no cause for consternation. I know that it may seem that in the past I've attempted to actually bolster your prejudices about a clockwork world of sunrise schedules and lunar routines. But this insistence has only had a paradoxical effect, just like certain drugs that in some people induce a reaction quite the opposite of the norm. All of my assurances have made you more confirmed in your suspicions that things are not bolted down, so to speak. And no more is that thing which we call the mind. We can both learn a great deal from Mr. Catch. Of course, I still recognize that there remain some unfortunate aspects to his case - there was only so much I could do for him - but nonetheless I think that he has gained rare and invaluable knowledge, the consequences notwithstanding. 

"His research had taken him into areas where, how should I say, where the shapes and levels of phenomena, the multiple planes of natural existence, revealed their ability to establish new relationships with one another ... to become interconnected, as it were, in ways that were never apparent. At some point everything became a blur for him, a sort of pandemonium of forces, a phantasmagoria of possibilities which he eagerly engaged. We can have no idea of the tastes and temptations that may emerge or develop in the course of such work. . . a curious hedonism that could not be controlled. Oh, the vagaries of omnipotence, breeder of indulgence. Well, Mr. Catch retreated in panic from his own powers, yet he could not put the pieces back as they had been: unheard of habits and responses had already ingrained themselves into his system, seemingly forever. The worst sort of slavery, no doubt, but how persuasively he spoke of the euphorias he had known, the infinitely diverse sensations beyond all common understanding. It was just this understanding that I required in order to free him of a life that, in its own fashion, had become as abysmal and problematic as your own except he is at the opposite pole. Some middle ground must be established, some balance. How well I understand that now! This is why I have brought you two together. This is the only reason, however it may seem to you." 

"It seems to me," I replied, "that Mr. Catch is no longer available. " 

Dr. Dublanc emitted the shadow of a laugh. "Oh, he's still in the house. You can be sure of that. Let's take a look upstairs." 

He was, in fact, not far at all. Stepping into that hallway of closed doors at the top of the cellar stairs, we saw that one of those doors was now partially open and the room beyond it was faintly aglow. Without announcing us, Dr. Dublanc slowly pushed back the door until we could both see what had happened inside. 

It was a small unfurnished room with a bare wooden floor upon which a candle had been fixed with its own drippings. The candlelight shone dimly on the full face of Mr. Catch, who seemed to have collapsed in a back corner of the room, lying somewhat askew. He was sweating, though it was cold in the room, and his eyes were half-closed in a kind of languorous exhaustion. But something was wrong with his mouth: it seemed to be muddied and enlarged, sloppily painted into a clown's oversized grin. On the floor beside him were, to all appearances, the freshly ravaged remains of one of those creatures in the film. 

"You made me wait too long!" he suddenly shouted, opening his eyes fully and straightening himself up for a moment before his posture crumbled once again. He then repeated this outburst: "You couldn't help me and now you make me wait too long." 

"It was in order to help you that I came here," the doctor said to him, yet all the time fixing his eyes on the mutilated carcass on the floor. When he saw that I had observed his greedy stare he regained himself. "I'm trying to help both of you the only way you can be helped. Show him, Mr. Catch, show him how you breed those amazing individuals." 

Mr. Catch groped in his pants pocket, pulled out a large handkerchief, and wiped off his mouth. He was smiling a little idiotically, as if intoxicated, and worked himself to his feet. His body now seemed even more swollen and bulbous than before, really not quite human in its proportions. After replacing his handkerchief in one pocket, he reached down into the other, feeling around for some moments. "It's so simple," he explained in a voice that had become placid. And it was with a kind of giddy pride that he finally said, "Oh, here they are," and held out his open hand toward me. In the thick pad of his palm I could see two tiny objects that were shaped like eggs. 

I turned abruptly to the doctor. "The pills you gave me."

"It was the only thing that could be done for you. I've tried so hard to help you both." 

"I had a suspicion," said Mr. Catch, now reviving himself from his stupefaction. "I should never have brought you into this. Don't you realize that it's difficult enough without involving your own patients. The derelicts are one thing, but this is quite another. Well, my suitcases are packed. It's your operation now, doctor. Let me by, time to go." 

Mr. Catch maneuvered himself from the room, and a few moments later the sound of a door being slammed echoed throughout the house. The doctor kept close watch on me, waiting for some reaction, I suppose. Yet he was also listening very intently to certain sounds emanating from the rooms around us. The noise of restless skittering was everywhere. 

"You understand, don't you?" asked the doctor. "Mr. Catch isn't the only one who has waited too long ... far too long. I thought by now the pills would have had their effect." 

I went into my pocket and removed the two little eggs which I had failed to swallow earlier. "I can't claim that I ever had much faith in your methods," I said. Then I tossed the pills at Dr. Dublanc who, speechless, caught them. "You won't mind if I return home by myself." 

Indeed, he was relieved to see me go. As I traced my way back through the house I heard him running about and opening door after door, saying, "There you are, you beauties. There you are." 

Although the doctor himself was now hopeless, I think that in some manner he had effected a cure in my case, however ephemeral it may have been, for during those first few moments on that hazy morning, when the taxi edged out of the alley and passed through that neighborhood of gnawed houses, I felt myself attain the middle ground Dr. Dublanc spoke of-the balancing point between an anxious flight from the abyss and the temptation to plunge into it. There was a great sense of escape, as if I could exist serenely outside the grotesque ultimatums of creation, an entranced spectator casting a cJinical gaze at the chaotic tumult both around and within him. 

But the feeling soon evaporated. "Could you go a little faster?" I said to the driver when it began to seem to me that we were making no progress in leaving that district behind: things again appeared to be changing, ready to burst forth from their sagging cocoons and take on uncertain forms. Even the pale morning sun seemed to be wavering from its proper proportions. 

At the end of the ride, I was content to pay the extraordinary fare and return to my bed. The following day I started looking for a new doctor.

Instructor Carniero was holding class once again.

I discovered this fact on my return from a movie theater. 

It was late and I thought, "Why not take a short cut across the grounds of the school?" How much trouble this alternate route would save me was not precisely clear. Nevertheless, I suddenly felt that if I left the street I was walking along, which was lighted well enough, and proceeded across the grounds of the school, which were vast and dark, I would truly be taking a short cut. Besides, the night was actually quite cold, and when I looked down the front of my overcoat I saw that the single remaining button holding it together had become loose and possibly would not last much longer. So a short cut, taken on a very cold night, appeared entirely in order. In fact, any other course of action seemed unthinkable to me. 

I entered the school grounds as if they were only a great park located in the midst of surrounding streets. The trees were set close and from the edge of the grounds I could not see the school hidden within them.
Look up here
, I almost heard someone say to me. I did look and saw that the branches overhead were without leaves; through their intertwining mesh the sky was fully visible. How bright and dark it was at the same time.
Bright
with a high, full moon shining among the spreading clouds, and
dark
with the shadows mingling within those clouds a slowly flowing mass of mottled shapes, a kind of unclean outpouring from the black sewers of space. 

I noticed that in one place these clouds were leaking down into the trees, trickling in a narrow rivulet across the wall of the night. But it was really smoke, dense and dirty, rising up to the sky. A short distance ahead, and well into the thickly wooded grounds of the school, I saw the spastic flames of a small fire among the trees. By the smell, I guessed that someone was burning refuse. Then I could see the misshapen metal drum spewing smoke, and the figures standing behind the firelight became visible to me, as I was to them. 

"Class has resumed," one of them called out. "He's come back after all." 

I knew these were others from the school, but their faces would not hold steady in the flickering light of the fire that warmed them. They seemed to be smudged by the smoke, greased by the odorous garbage burning in that dark metal drum, its outer surface almost glowing from the heat and flaking off in places. 

"Look there," said another member of the group, pointing deeper into the school grounds. The massive outline of a building occupied the distance, a few of its windows sending a dim light through the trees. From the roof of the building a number of smokestacks stood out against the pale sky. 

A wind rose up, droning loudly around us and breathing a noisy life into the fire in the decaying metal drum. I tried to shout above the confusion of sounds. "Was there an assignment?" I cried out. When I repeated the question, they only seemed to shrug. I left them hunched around the fire, assuming they would be along. The wind died and I could hear someone say the word "maniac," which was not spoken, I realized, either to me or about me. 

Instructor Carniero, in his person, was rather vague to my mind. I had not been in the class very long before some disease a terribly serious affliction, one of my classmates hinted-had caused his absence. So what remained, for me, was no more than the image of a slender gentleman in a dark suit, a gentleman with a darkish complexion and a voice thick with a foreign accent. "He's a Portuguese," one of the other students told me. "But he's lived almost everywhere." And I recalled a particular refrain spoken by that soft and heavy voice. "Look up here," he would say, usually singling out one of us who had not been attending to those diagrams he was incessantly creating on the blackboard. A few " members of the class never needed to be called to attention in this manner, a certain small group who had been longtime students of the instructor and without distraction scrutinized the unceasing series of diagrams he would design upon the blackboard and then erase, only to construct again, with slight variation, a moment later. 

Although I cannot claim that these often complex diagrams were not directly related to our studies, there were always extraneous elements within them which I never bothered to transcribe into my own notes for the class. They were a strange array of abstract symbols, frequently geometric figures altered in some way: various polygons with asymetrical sides, trapezoids whose sides did not meet, semicircles with double or triple slashes across them, and many other examples of a deformed or corrupted scientific notation. These signs appeared to be primitive in essence, more relevant to magic than mathematics. The instructor marked them in an extremely rapid hand upon the blackboard, as if they were the words of his natural language. In most cases they formed a border around the perimeter of a strictly technical diagram, enclosing it and sometimes, it seemed, transforming its sense. Once a student actually questioned him regarding this apparently superfluous embellishment of the diagrams. Why did Instructor Carniero subject us to these bewildering symbols? "Because," he answered, "a true instructor must share everything." 

As I proceeded across the grounds of the school, I felt certain changes had occurred since I was last there. The trees looked different somehow, even in the faint moonlight which shone through their bare branches. They had become so much thinner than I remembered, emaciated and twisted like broken bones that had never healed properly. Their bark seemed to be peeling away in soft layers, because it was not only fallen leaves I trudged through on my way to the school building, but also something like dark rags, strips of decomposed material. Even the clouds upon which the moon cast its glow were thin or rotted, unravelled by some process of degeneration in the highest atmosphere of the school grounds. There was also a scent of corruption, an enchanting fragrance really-like the mu1chy rot of autumn or early spring-that I thought was emerging from the earth as I disturbed the strange debris strewn over it. But I noticed that this odor became more pungent as I approached the yellowish light of the school, and strongest as I finally reached the old building itself. 

It was a four-story structure of dark scabby bricks that had been patched together in another era, a time so different that it might be imagined as belonging to an entirely alien history, one composed solely of nights well advanced, an after-hours history. How difficult it was to think of this place as if it had been constructed in the usual manner. Far easier to credit some fantastic legend that it had been erected by a consort of demons during the perpetual night of its past, and that its materials were absconded from other architectures, all of them defunct: ruined factories, crumbling prisons, abandoned orphanages, mausoleums long out of use. The school was indeed a kind of freakish growth in a dumping ground, a blossom of the cemetery or the cesspool. Here it was that Instructor Carniero, who had been everywhere, held his class.