Insel (19 page)

His emaciation no longer of flesh had become an exteriorized act of the flesh in which the last ooze of the spermatic juices might have been, in some fearful enervation, spent. Instead of being suffused with that liquidity of relief following upon embrace, his eyes, in some ultimate heat, were boiled to the creamy, soiled putrescence of stale oysters in a stew.

I did not reflect that this enormity of sensuous filth was probably as unreal as his nervous aromatics distilled from his astral collusions with a goddess. It was a mental impossibility to associate these opposite phenomena. Had I recalled the earlier iridescent Insel, it could only have been as a figment of
my
insanity.

An alarming presentiment occurred to me. “Insel,” I gasped, “you’ve blown that thousand francs.”

“What are you?” he sneered venomously, “an inquisitor?”

“He has notions as to how white women should be handled, too,” I laughed to myself as I hurried down the corridor to the dressmaker.

I was determined to take conventional leave of a guest who would be gone when I returned to Paris. It would put me to great pains, I supposed, breaking through animosity so unaccountable it left nothing intact but surprise. Still, it was pretty bad if I could not prevent the “epidemic quarrel with me” from spreading to even this lunatic whose essential void I had found so soothing.

After my fitting I invited him to come down to the cafe, intent on buttering him up, on bluffing him into forgetfulness of having allowed me to discover his awful alter
ego (in cases of the sane, this alter ego seldom got to work until out of my sight), curious to see if we could part on good terms.

As we stood face to face with nothing in common, the last people on earth likely to become acquainted, I saw him force back his loathing, to accept. Our mutual distaste was noxious on the palate. We each had a pressing engagement for dinner.

I remembered Geronimo taunting me that I was “no psychologist.” “You just walk into a man’s brain, seat yourself comfortably in an armchair to take a look around—afterwards, you write down all you have found there,” he had said. Then what the hell in Insel had I “walked into”? His complaint was true. Nobody saw in him what I saw in him. A kind of consciousness unconscious of its own potency. Even now he was disgusting to the point of revelation.

Insel had also the idea of bluffing a conformative wind-up to our illusory alliance. Resorting to his earlier priggish decency, once we were in the back of the cafe, he hung his head, apparently poisoning it with spurious shame, and mumbled:—

“The bad thing about me is that every now and then I come to a blind alley in my life—where somebody has to help me.”

“Now look here, Insel,” I persuaded him with stimulant hypocrisy, “if it were not for that basic something in you—no help would be forthcoming. That which is valuable one does not
help
, one responds to a cosmic imperative.”

He began to look as if he had been overdoing the shame.

“There was some mention,” I added offhandedly authoritative, “of you busting a thousand francs. You seemed on the defensive. But
why?
The artist requires
color
in his
life.” This fallacious insight melted Insel’s imitation shame, disclosing the very really wounded face of a child who has long been sulking for being misjudged.

“You told me,” he burst out unhappily, writhing with reproach, “that I put lots of money in the bank.”

So that was it. Insel, with his organic magnifications, had become a foul lout, because he was feeling—cross.

“I didn’t,” I fibbed, striking the suitable note. “I said you hid it under the carpet.” Neither of us had a carpet—we immediately floated off as if on the magical mat of Baghdad, talking on—.

I could feel any word I was saying fit into Insel’s brain appeasing as a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

At once—it was growing late—he clamored for me to stay with him; for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize duration—forever.

Probably I was the collaborative audience to his finest act, the giving off of that calm equation that always reduced me to a hushed respect. He grew in power in his silent “role” in ratio to my reaction. The ultimate self, august in certainty, put forth a soporific bloom that covered his damaged face.

Only now I remarked that on the emergence of this ultimate self in its intangible armor of nobility depended that prolongation of time I so often experienced in the company of Insel, for at present there was no aquarium diffusion, none of that virtually giggling attainment to Nirvana. No x-ray excursion nor any fractionation. His medium-ship concentrated in a sole manifestation. This interference with time.

I could not make out whether the cause was a shift in
the relative tempos of a cosmic and microcosmic “pulsation,” whether
my
instant—the instant of a reductive perceiver—passed through some preponderant magnifier and enlarged, or whether a concept (become gnarled in one’s brain through restriction to the brain’s capacity) unwinding at leisure, was drawing my perception—infinitely soothed—along with it. For again this novel aspect of time seemed, like light, to arrive in rays focusing on the brain at a minimum akin to images on retinas; and the further one projected one’s being to meet it, the
broader
one found it to be. Anyway, it was useless trying to analyze it. This alone was certain. It was absolutely engrossing to the mind, although nothing brief enough for us to cognize
happened
in this longer time, which occurred commensurately with the bit of lingering I was wedging in for Insel between contiguous hours in defiance of occupational time.

Rarely, at intervals of aeons, Insel and I would look up at each other in an utter yet somehow communicative impersonality, the final relationship of distinct similars confronting the same phenomenon.

INTIMATELY CONFIDENTIAL ONCE MORE, INSEL was trying to disentangle before me
the thousand directions
. He had shown them to me previously, in answer to my asking him why he did not work although I had left him materials in my studio.

“So often at dusk I come here to stare at that white canvas,” he had told me dreamingly. “I see all the worlds I could paint upon it. But
um Himmels Willen
! Which one? I can create everything. Then what thing? A thousand directions are open to me, to take whichever I decide—I cannot decide.”

I had long ago worn down in contemplation of that multiplicity of direction. How
far
my mind had traveled; never to come to the
beginning
of any route. Surely, for Insel it should have been different—starting with the spectral spermatozoa that seeped from his brain through his gardening hands.

The glare in Capoulards Cafe grew dim. Insel’s brain floated up from his head, unraveled, projected its convolutions. They straightened in endless lines across a limitless canvas, a map of imminent direction. On the whole of space were only a few signboards on which grew hands, alive and beckoning.

“Of course,” I was saying, “I don’t know where you are—wherever it is is very far away. And I am just as far away. I have existed before my time.”

“How true,” said Insel.

“Whatever I have found out belongs to a future generation.”

“How true,” said Insel again, devoutly.

“And by the bye,” I commented, “the sentiment of one generation is the neurosis of the next. All that stuff you have of ‘suffering for love’ is the most awful slush.”

“I know—I know,” he agreed with fervor.

—Indefinable lines of cerebral nerve marked on the map of inertia, unrealizable journeys. Along one route,
die Irma
dissolved to a puddle of serum, to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficult; that volatile fungoid lichen outcrept one as one picked one’s way, grew tall until one must turn back.

My former trust in the ripening of Insel’s work had had its foundation in that very “parting of the ways” he told me he had come to, where he turned assured toward something eternally immune to his host of elementals.

It had taken so short a time for this parting of the ways to subdivide into the thousand directions. Yet even now he was rich in postponement. While that commonplace back of a woman watching for signs on his painted firmament turned in anonymous patience to this chart of unarrival.

The curtain of the sky came down and she was not there— “If the painting no longer ‘goes,’ ” Insel surprisingly was ruminating, “I shall do as you do. Write. What a profession. One carries one’s studio about with one. A sheet of paper—”

Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the
blank of orientation faded—the thousand directions withdrew, leaving us at a destination.

Nothingness.

It was not black as night nor white as day, nor gray as death—only a nonexistent irritation as to what
purposed inconsequence
had led us into the illusion of ever having come into being.

The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were
still there
— Two unmatched arrows sprung from its meaningless center—were surrounded by a numeral halo—I
had
to leave Insel, it was ten to eight.

“HOW GOES THE BOOK,” HE ASKED WITH HIS FORMER appreciative intimacy as we passed out of the cafe. I was feeling exceptionally “good” about my work just then, vainly imagining I had criticized my last incompletion.

“It is going wonderfully,” and with a flash of that exhibitionism of the spirit succeeding to inordinate periods spent with no means of communication—I threw out my hands—elatedly believing I had reached the stage prescribed by Colossus for creation, when all that one has collected rolls out with the facility of the song of a bird.

“Sehen Sie
, Insel,” I explained, “
Man muss reif sein
—One must be ripe.”

I felt Insel crack as if he had been
shot
alert.

“Can she possibly mean it,” I could
“hear”
him ask himself as he wheeled towards me, noticing me for the
first
time; and then convinced, as I stood a little exalted on the corner of the street, decide, “Here is a woman with whom there is absolutely
nothing
to be done.”

I must have had my hands outspread, for Insel dropped like a soft moth into my open palm— On his face was a smile unlike all the fluctuant smiles of hallucinated angels I had watched there. It was a normal smile. Yet in the old abnormal voice of whispering emotion, laying his dried
branch across my shoulder, he choked, “
Ich komme nach Hause
.”

He was “coming home.”

Across his gentle brow floated the will-o’-the-wisp trailing a pair of boiled oysters in its wake,
Mädchen
, like missiles that have not gone off, he scattered abroad.

“But Insel,” I reminded him, “you have an appointment for dinner.”

Insel gaped at me.

The illocal foci of his pupils exploding incredulously, darted in all the directions of the radial underpattern of his life. It took some moments to sort these simultaneous impressions. When I had done so, I longed to get even with Insel, to say “I have absorbed all your
Strahlen. Now
what are you going to do?”

I said nothing of the kind. Because firstly it was not true, and secondly, it might inspire in him a worse obsession; for one thing one feared as above all else menacing Insel was some climax in which his depredatory radioactivity must inevitably give out.

So all I said was “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” smiled Insel, his bittersweet stare both dazed and stoic, “
Danke für alles
—Thanks for everything.”

I

In the organic continuity of family life, one is under the earth caught among bare roots of imperceptible plants whose flowers lean out smiling toward the solar stimulation of a heterogeneous society.

II

Women particularly—lose their lovely faces in private—so much so that it is only in the occasional hazard of a party one may gauge the effect of creatures, one has actually in some remote biological process given birth to.

III

Alda who, in a crowd, caused me to blink as at the too near approach of a brilliant star—

IV

totally extinguished on her filial visits. Her face almost blotched with a fundamental erosion my essence produced in her—developed a kind of set jowl. As she sat down before me she would clutch that soft white fist. I watched it grow rosy as it squeezed out the inadvertible tide of my futility.

“Aaron,” she announced, “doesn’t see why he should give you that hundred dollars”—and with that heinous crow I seemed to call up from the depths of so many of my intimates—
“Your book!”
she sneered, “It’s an excuse ___ to get money out of us!”

V

“You’re no good—never have been any good—” This blank truth struck me with the finality of unconsciousness. It was from very far away in time & space I heard her aggravation hollow out a course for my second childhood.

“You
wanted
the business—we gave you the business—You wanted an apartment—we gave you the apartment and you sell it for nothing & come over here!”

“But Aaron told me to sell it at that price — — —”

VI

I expostulated.

“Pooh—he was drunk,” Alda retorted in a streak of decision.

It is the reverse of enlightenment to see oneself ‘in reality’. Of the image & likeness that forms our inexpressible Being—in the metamorphosis of passing through other brains—all that appears to our companions is a chimney sweep.

VII

As she drew to a close, taunting me with my “painting _ _ _ that idleness where other artists prepared a whole exhibition in two months,” Fact dilated for me. Alda’s recriminations were identical with mine of myself. Incipient in my mother’s womb their transcription effacing time in me they
now reverberated from the lipsticked mouth of a child I loved.

VIIA