Shafts from his eyes became so penetrating I could feel myself dissolve to a transparent target, they pierced me, and, travelling to the further side, stared through my back on their return to his irises.
He seemed to collect electricity from the air (in the afternoon there was a violent storm). This crackling electricity flashed so nearby without attaining to me. It was as if I were almost leaning up against a lightning conductor. I remembered his girl’s watch was still in my handbag — it lay beside me — a kind of self-focus in his magnetic field.
He had always something about him of a lithe tree struck by its own lightning.
These magnetic tides would rise and ebb as we sat in felicity around an enormous plat anglais, which I could not touch for my absorption in Insel and of which, as Insel ate of it, the rosy meats seemed to drop uselessly into void. And all the while Insel spasmodically kept up his bum’s charade pleading for variable salvations. With his floppy pathos he implored me to take pity on him, to take him in — I would see how I would work with Insel keeping house for me with that precision he exercised in his own dimension — to put him in a nursing home and surround him with angelic choirs of pretty nurses “only to look at,” he exclaimed — persuasive or timorous.
I had seen the actor Moisse by the light of a little candle remember some human tie in a prison cell; the humble flame drawing him into itself spread his reminiscent spirit over the callous walls to warm them. Such a candle was burning behind Insel’s eyes as if he were his own narrow room. Yet the lines of its rays shining to infinite remoteness — a state of consciousness closing out the world — laid their ethereal carpets along the ceaseless levels of annihilation.
No rock, no root, no accident of Nature varied a virgin plain that had conceived no landscape, and I saw Insel reduced to the proportion he would have in the eye of a God — setting out — unaccompanied, unorientated, for here where nothing existed, no sound, no sun, reigned an unimaginable atmosphere he longed to breathe. I could see this, because he was seeing this, as still hanging back, he writhed to its lure. Although I promised solicitously to send him to a nursing home, we knew I could not come to his aid—. He had never told me where he was. His torment tantalized pity.
With that acrobatic facility he had for immeasurable leaps from despair to cajolery — he readjusted himself to the station buffet — as if to get down to some business.
12
HIS EYES NOW PACIFIED IN A STEADY HUMAN mesmerism smiled cosily into mine.
“An was denken Sie?” he asked in coquettish anticipation. “What are you thinking of?” Again I had that creepy impression of ultimate tension, of a cerebral elastic taut for the snap.
“—of you,” wheezed the battered record turning on his brain to my sudden visualization of Insel as a gray tomcat having a fit in a cloud of ashes and lunar spangles.
I could not tell him, no thought coincided between one on the verge of dwelling among the levels he laid bare to me and one who remained outside.
Still he went on smiling a little vaingloriously. “An was denken Sie?” he asked again, of God knows what girl, in God knows what decade, and all the same of me.
In my veritable séances with Insel, the clock alone retrieved me from nonentity — thrusting its real face into mine as reminder of the temporal.
Thus I saw how three whole hours went by while Insel asked me what I was thinking of. They passed off in a puff as though, for a change, he had contracted time into intensity.
All the whimsical nonsense ever conceived rotated on his eyeballs which seemed to convey “while I pretend to search for some secret in you the less danger is there of your being inquisitive as to mine.”
With every question his eyes grew greater, thrust out longer spears, unctuous in the aromatic ooze from his brain.
“What are you thinking of?” urged Insel, and the softer fell his voice, the more inflexible he knit himself together — the more terrifically to disintegrate on some signal he invoked.
So I sat with as soothing and expressionless a smile as I could concoct and answered occasionally, “I am thinking of June 18th, 1931, or of nine o’clock on Tuesday of the week before last. — What are you thinking of?” His eyes converging on me, a yellow glow fused to a single planetary dilation rapped on the sun gong. “—An was denken Sie?” Insel, discouraged, petrified his face before me — with a determination beyond all human power, in the “last expression” that death imposes on pain. Incredibly exact, rivalling even any original I had seen.
“I should have preferred,” he said with his voice of dead lovers crying through the earth, “to be fit for you to look at.” Then he deliberately set himself on fire.
In exact description — he did not consistently appear to the naked eye, as a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparison to the morning murk sifting through the glassed environment. As a thread in the general mass, he retained his depth of tone. But as if his astounding vibratory flux required a more delicate instrument than the eye for registration. Some infrared or there invisible ray he gave off, was immediately transferred on one’s neural current to some dark room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its brilliancy. So one saw him as a gray man and an electrified organism at one and the same time—
— it was only the candle spluttering … preliminary to the most beautiful spectacle I have ever “seen.”
Shaken with an unearthly anxiety, this creature of so divine a degradation, set upon himself with his queer hands and began to pull off his face.
For those whose flesh is their rags, it is not pitiable to undress.
As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonization upon the table, his cheeks torn down, in bits upon the marble — one rift ran the whole length of his imperfect insulation, and for a moment exposed the “man-of-light.”
He sat there inside him taking no notice at all, made of the first jelly quivering under the sun and some final unimaginable form of aereal substance, in the same eternal conviction as the Greek fragment—
Once at dark in the Maine woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables.
At last Insel’s eyes dying of hallucination, stared suddenly into the filtered day. Horrified almost to blindness he complained, “Es ist zu hell.” He sounded as if deliberately quoting “it is too light”— That did not matter after all the ways he had been “happening.”
“So you’re starving, are you?” I mocked, exasperated with his total inability to estimate himself. “The greatest actor alive.”
As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of yards ahead. He was pirouetting perplexedly around himself when I caught up with him and we got into a cab.
In that small space he behaved like a fish on the end of a line, like a kite in the air entangled in its own tail — carrying about with him, in his awful unrest, my hand to which he clung — his own had clamped so fast to it, he could hardly get it off — when I dropped him at his door.
13
I WAS READY TO LEAVE FOR SAINT-CLOUD WITH my little valise when there came a soft knocking on the door I was about to open, a knocking irreal as the fall of dusk. Insel had turned up again. He collapsed before me like a stricken gull having received some unavowable hurt in the unknown wastes where he belonged. The storm must have completely disintegrated his exceptional electrification.