It was clear that something strange and bad had happened to me. My malaise, spontaneous as a sneeze, had been generated full-blown, complete, with no symptom less intense than any other. After a week it became apparent that whatever had struck me had done so with a peculiarly adaptive kind of cunning, with an almost biological sense of justice. By keeping careful track of what was happening to me I soon noticed that no two symptoms ever occurred simultaneously. It was as if what had been true of my life was true now of my chemistry — that not even my body was capable of doing two things at once. As the cough subsided the pain grew. As the pain subsided something else took its place and kept it only until some other threat presented itself. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
There was something else. Besides this waxing and waning; this sweeping of my body’s circuits by progressive symptoms — a kind of vulgar, physical absurdity, almost like one of those garish movie marquees which operate according to some fixed mechanical cycle, one light popping on only after another has blinked off — there was a weird inconsequentialness to these tokens. The unproductive cough, the pain in the left side, too low to be connected with my heart, on the wrong side for appendicitis, bespoke a kind of triviality that belied the cruel realness of their presence. The other symptoms (I had accepted from the beginning that these were symptoms, that not even disease could present itself without a mask) seemed just as far-fetched, almost comic. For several days I seemed to be possessed in turn by all the basic drives. During one period I was always hungry, and no matter what or how much I ate I failed to satisfy myself. The hunger was as intense as the pain in my side had been — what one imagines starving men feel. In the next phase I was constantly cold; I had to get my winter sweaters and overcoat from our apartment and went out dressed as I might be in the depth of a cold winter, despite the unseasonable April heat. After that I felt an almost overwhelming sexuality. I brought magazines to my room on Fifty-eighth Street and pored lasciviously over the pictures of the girls, as susceptible as a pubescent boy to the silly accompanying text. Almost any casual contact with a woman — a clerk in a store, a girl beside me on a bus — was enough to set me off. Once, after staying up late writing my letters, I went to an all-night cafeteria for some coffee at about three A.M. A charwoman, middle- aged and fat, was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor beside my table, and it was all I could do to stop myself from climbing on top of her.
Endlessly symptom followed symptom. My urine seemed thick. I was conscious of a hypersensitivity of my hair ends; it was torture to put a comb to my head. My hands fell asleep; my skin burned; my gums swelled. My heart tumbled heavily in my chest, like one casket loose in the hold of a ship.
My sleep during all this had never been so profound, yet I was as tired during the day as an insomniac. I awoke each morning to some new outrage, sudden, unanticipated, yet somehow already familiar, sadly certain and permanent as a doom. I might have been a city held in patient siege by wily, dangerous enemies. One morning I realized, with the queer rush of relief familiar to one who has at last learned some unpleasant rumor about himself, that I was going to die. I knew this. I was, simply, going to die. That’s what it would come to. I was incurable.
Much as I had thought of death I had given almost no thought at all to ill health. Now I perceived that death was a consequence of something that happened to your body, and this obvious truth struck me with a force that I would not have imagined. I understood that what I had thought of as oblivion, annihilation, was rooted in a bedrock of matter — that, as was now being demonstrated to me, a thousand things could go wrong, a million; that there were no guarantees that life would or needed or even wanted to go on; that whatever chemical experience meant when we said life was as consequential and in effect as accidental as the arrangement of fallen leaves on a lawn; that anything could happen; that one thin tissue bruised in a trip on the stairs could pollute others; that fatality was a chain reaction, death some ubiquitous thing on springs inside us, neither waiting nor ready to pounce, but set to go off at the merest untoward, uncircumspect jostle. I saw my body as something volatile as a bomb. Hypochondria was deep wisdom and ludicrous folly; there was nothing that we could do.
Thinking this — seeing myself not as someone who would one day die, but as one who was already dying, who even as he lived broke down whatever odds there were in his favor, who against his will recklessly used up his single provision, his small store of time — I began to feel a tremendous, almost heroic power. In the streets I sensed a strange, previously unknown force within me, as if I were in possession of some dread, terrible secret, which, were I to disclose it, would permanently affect the lives of others. Living, I was simply one among others; dying, I was above them, imprudent and colossal as some lame-duck hero. Although in one sense The Club had never seemed so important, it was irrelevant compared to this new thing. I saw again, but in a fresh, totally unexpected way, that I had not been prepared to die, that I had only been prepared to dread and hate death. While this was unchanged — while, indeed, I saw my death as the greatest of tragedies — my new reaction was neither tragic nor sad. Instead, I felt a weird giddiness, a strange lightness of heart and mind. I did not want to die, but the sense of rude power I experienced when I knew that I was dying was the most stimulating thing that had ever happened to me.
It was in this mood and to test this power that I began my series of death experiments.
Fully clothed I lay down on my bed. Placing my arms full length, unnaturally stiff, beside me, I arranged myself as in a coffin and closed my eyes. I tried to put all thought out of my mind, but the effort of keeping my body rigid produced a constant strain on my consciousness. It was unsatisfactory, and after a few minutes I gave it up; shockingly, whatever else it was, death was not uncomfortable.
I got on a Broadway bus. As inconspicuously as possible I slumped in my seat. I closed my eyes; I took small, imperceptible sips of breath; I stiffened; I allowed my body to pitch, as volitionlessly as a stone, with the momentum of the bus. In a few minutes someone sat down beside me. The rustle of a newspaper indicated that my seat mate was as yet unaware of me. Once the bus stopped abruptly and I fell stiffly against my companion; then we turned a corner and I was buffeted away from him, against the window. My feet shot out in compensation and I could feel our shoes touching. I could no longer hear the rustling of the newspaper, and I knew that whoever sat next to me was studying me. I could feel the power of my corpse slowly collecting, accumulating. The temptation to open my eyes was almost irresistible. Gradually the soft, random chatter of those around me began to subside. The silence pulled out behind me like a rug unrolling. Soon the only sound was the bus itself and the noises of traffic. Now I felt the full weight of everyone’s curiosity, the contagious, rubbery-necked swoosh of their attention, their startled, disturbed dread. They were like creatures arrested by some unaccustomed noise in a forest. I felt my death ooze out to them; I felt their almost adrenal response. It was as if some powerful taboo had been violated. I ached to stare back at them.
When the bus swung around another corner I collapsed ruthlessly against the person next to me. He gasped and recoiled as if struck by something profoundly unclean.
Someone rushed up. “Is he all right?” a voice said.
“I don’t know. I can’t tell,” said the man next to me, shoved now into a kind of action. He leaned forward and shook me cautiously.