To investigate, I tapped him lightly on the arm in drawing his attention — and actually in a tenuous way I did feel my hand pass through “something.” The surface of his cloth sleeve, like a stiff sieve, was letting that something through. The effect on Insel was unforeseeable — jerking his face over his shoulder, he twitched away from my fingers with the acid sneer of a wounded feline. This might be merely a reflex of physical repulsion to myself, so later I repeated the gesture, but as if my hand in its first contact had got coated with the psychic exudence it would seem there was no longer any hurt in it. He was calm under my touch.
8
THE REVERSE OF HIS ALOOFNESS WAS A HOLLOW invitation to my intrusion. Urged to cross the frontier of his individuality, I got in the way of that faintly electric current he emitted. His magnetic pull steadily on the increase, the repulsion proportionately defined, threw me into a vibrational quandary, until as if it were imperative for me to make a connection with the emissive agency of my accidental clairvoyance, with a supernormal acumen he inspired, I located the one point of contact: the temple. Straightway I found myself possessed of an ability to form a “mental double” (for no portion of my palpable substantiality was in any way involved), a mental double of my own temple.
This was one manifestation of how in Insel’s vicinity pieces of bodies would seem to break off as astral fractions and on occasion hang, visually suspended in the air. Quite apparently to my subconscious the bit of my skull encaving the fragile area flew off me, crashed onto his and stuck there.
On the spur of this subvoluntary cohesion to the telepathic center — I definitely penetrated (into) his mediumistic world where illusory experience which had so far escaped as scarcely whispered pictures took on a fair degree of resemblance to three-dimensional concretion: the sculpture of hallucination succeeding to the visionary film.
Insel straightened as a water level, his petrified eyes drilling the image of his coma into the ultimate ceiling, broke into a right angle of prostration and ascension.
Out of a torso of white ash arose iron rags as puffs of curling smoke, blocks of shadow crushed together in the outline of a giant. Dense as the dark, high as a tower, the almost imperceptible radiance of a will-o’-the-wisp shining from it — I crouched alongside encumbered with an enormous shell white as plaster which, having but partly taken shape, trailed to an end in a sail of mist.
And all the while Insel kept up his mixture of Beggar’s Opera and oratorio, showing a tragi-comic duality in his confidences. A coxcomb in purgatory, he enlivened a suppliant self-abasement with pranks he was proud to have played on a short-sighted mistress. Vast tracks of his barren universe were fixed in her monocle.
Our discussions of his tribulations had the light hilarity of conversation between clowns. Our shoulders almost touching, we seemed to have come within risible distance of each other. As if our imbecilic mirth were due to an assurance that suffering loses weight when tossed to and fro.
Intermittently his intriguing anxieties ceased to be actual. In his cerebral commotion, Trouble, attaining an inflation at which it burst, had no further existence except in the fragments constituting his exhortations for help which, at that, were his means of entertaining one.
Albert Londres tells of a lunatic who periodically would drop whatever he was doing to go up to the wall and say peculiar prayers to it. So Insel had two or three intimate anecdotes he had to “get off.” He told them whenever I met him with an earnestness that, like a gentle gimlet, bored into my mind. The culminative point of his corporeal life had been his threat to shoot a girl who left him for a lesbian, and of his psychic life, his magnetic rays drawing some other girl out of bed on to her balcony whenever he passed below at night.
As a prayer, repeated over and over, becoming autohypnotic, attains to faith in each retelling, these stories grew vaster, lasted longer, reached farther into a kind of absolute of confidence. As if with incantations he must summon up his past because some unimaginable impediment withheld the present and the future from him. His mind besieged the barred outlet of today-into-tomorrow in an effort to break it down and gather fresh material, but on finding itself impotent revoked to memory, dilating his souvenirs until for him the story of the universe was blotted out by the gigantism of his meager individual experience.
Externally his aspect was vague as, internally, the rudimentary ideas stored in his cerebral cells. His person withdrawing in approaching, his eyes appeared to start their staring in advance of the brows that encaved them. Between his “expression” preceding his face and his speech which so often sounded as if issuing from a distance behind him, his person melted from view. In him everything seemed inverted. His voice in its drilling intensity getting softer, louder, would go up higher, lower.
My casual ability to partake of his moods evoked my own anxiety of the past which joining in his terror of the aerial omen made it doubly real. The nomistic warning which recurred to my mind, “He who looks back returns to the maze,” I disobeyed; so intense was my intuitional curiosity as to the leak in Insel’s magnetic coherence. I felt that giving in to a dislocation of my identity, which is usually perilous or demoralizing, must in this exceptional case, be finally vindicated by a revelation of what supremely lovely essence was being conveyed to me by this human wreck. In the light of this my certitude his corporeal mendicancy appeared fictitious. So surely it was an exquisite nucleus that in his somewhat comatose exaltation he struggled to save. On the instant I accepted this salvation as equally my affair. Memory in euthanasia will come to life when fed on the same sort of stuff as that which formed it—.
Insel, the animate cadaver, stretched with the pliancy of decay from the last war into the next — while walls of solid murder with soldiers for bricks came marching in on a living aspiration — to enclose it — waste it — it must not happen again.
“Vielleicht verkaufen,” I could hear Insel muttering as I made this decision, obsessed by an impersonal responsibility. He was toting up imaginary accounts in payment of his passage to America.
“Promise to be my guide and companion?” he implored earnestly while staring straight before him as if it did not matter where I was.
“How tedious,” my everyday self recoiled, the lovely essence evaporating, for whenever Insel turned his profile he sort of extinguished. It was only when both his eyes were fixed upon me I entered his Edenic region of unreasoning bliss to sway among immaterial algae.
In profile, as if he cut himself in half and in halving should leave himself evil, he became so alien, so very elfin, he induced aversion. The notch at the spring of the nose was further back than the drop of the upper lip. These angles of his pasty face were over-acute and out of plumb. A kink near the ear suggested the wire-hung jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy. In profile, this nitwit infused with the secret ghost, seemed to have been carved for a joke out of moldy wood.
“Immer — immer spazieren—eternally taking a walk,” he insisted, once more aware of my presence; his voice dwindled to a pathos so unearthly it could only converse with the unconscious. His eyes, for dusk had fallen, were phosphorescent as approaching fireflies.