The painless buoyancy lasted well into the night when, as I sat calmly at work in my hotel bedroom, I unexpectedly disintegrated. My body, which had hitherto made upon itself the impression of a compact mass, springing a multiplicity of rifts, changed to a fractional covering I can only compare to the spines of a porcupine; or rather vibrant streamers on which my density in plastic undulation was being carried away — perhaps into infinity. A greater dynamism than my own rushed in to fill the interstices. Looking down at myself I could see my sensation. The life-force blasting me apart instead of holding me together. It set up a harrowing excitement in my brain. An atomic despair — so awful— my confines broke down. I lost contour. Once more I found myself in the “impossible situation” in which one cannot remain — from which there is no issue.
I cognized this situation as Insel’s. A maddening with desire for a thing I did not know — a thing that, while being the agent of his — my — dematerialization alone could bring him together again. A desire of which one was “dead” and yet still alive — radial starfish underpattern of his life, it had communicated itself to me. I was being impelled to the pitiable serial choreography of Insel when in the closed cab he had chased himself along the incalculable itinerary of his dissolution.
In a darting anguish consciousness in pulverization peered from the ends of incontrollable antennae for something unattainable.
I had more space than had Insel in his cab, yet the in-slanting facade of my room under the eaves with the red glow of its wall paper got “in my way.” Having no idea of what was happening to me, I seemed to have also unsuspected reserves of will power. I put up a pretty good fight against this incredible dematerialization — it took me hours to weave myself together — but at last, exhausted yet once more intact, I fell upon my bed and slept.
Next morning my face looked “destroyed” like Insel’s.
Although I was all of a piece, my very bones were weak. I had to walk carefully. I found out why, when climbing slowly up the hill to the station to buy a newspaper, I was cleft in half. Like the witch’s cat when cut apart running in opposite directions, suddenly my left leg began to dance off on its own. Thoroughly frightened at this bisectional automatism, I somehow hopped to the fence on my right and clung to it in an absurd discouragement.
The day after that I thought I was normal. Walking serenely at my habitual pace, I went to a shop in the village before keeping an appointment for lunch.
Without association (as usual) the idea of Insel rose in my mind. Quite different to thinking about someone. I was overcome with that imbecilic self-satisfied laughter, that Parnassian guffaw. It had nothing to do with any humor known to the intellect; being a sort of blank camouflage for all intellection. With me it was always filtered with a faint derision. But even this derision I took for granted. Brought to a halt under the full force of my mental hilarity, I felt constrained to continue to share if — with what? — with whom? To do so I turned sideways. Whenever this idea of Insel occurred I could not go straight ahead — I had to turn to it — as when I had tried to sum him up on the Boulevard.
My feet remembered that lightness, that skimming of the pavement — I was engrossed in a merriment beyond existence. When this merriment ceased, I found myself in a part of the country I had never seen before.
I had kept track of the time to avoid being late— as that gust of laughter caught me it had been twenty to one. I walked into an open yard where a man was washing a car. He informed me it was twenty to one and that it would take me half an hour to get back to the place where by all the laws of possibility I should still have been. He allowed me to telephone my friends, to begin lunch without me, that I had got lost — at the other end of the wire it was twenty to one.
All this was comparable to an incident that occurred when I made friends with a little girl whose intelligence was like a jewel in a case too tightly closed. A backward child, one of those partial imbeciles, who, not being “all there,” showing only half their human nature, are either angelic or diabolic. Probably their own halves are all they respond to in other people, for Fifi, when she said “Bonjour” with a smile of benediction, would discover, “Madame, you are as sweet as a rose.”— “Monsieur, you are bright as gold.” Her being subnormal lent an elfin prestige to her slow serenity among her associates, offspring of peasants and small tradesmen, who attended the informal court she held in the parlor behind her parents’ shop.
Rigid as bygone queens in her orthopedic corset, she accepted the offering of every conceivable kind of toy duck from her wondering courtiers, with a lunar giggle that never precisely applied to anything. Her passion, her concretion of sublimity, took the form of a duck. “God is playing hide-and-seek,” she would announce, “so the Virgin Mary has married a duck and they live in the top story of the Riviera.” And once when I found her watching some live water fowl by a pond in a farmyard— “Why do you love the duck?” I asked her. “Il dort dans son dos,” she perfectly replied.
A fearful future opened before her if she could never keep shop, and the medical specialists consulted on her behalf promised she would become like average children should they graft a bit of the bone in her leg as a wedge into her spine, thus rectifying her crookedness and relieving the pain. But this operation, successful they said in many other cases, failed with this half-wit angel, who, incidentally, had predicted the year of her own death.
So Fifi died most uncomfortably, lying very much like a trussed duck, only on her tummy — her leg being bent up behind her for the grafting and bound to her back — screaming in a nursing home until she had no more breath.
Only once, in talking to this little girl, had I seen her unhappy. An unhappiness intense as it was brief. A drip of anguished words revealing how she received as an awful animosity her mother’s solicitous efforts to get her to “make sense.”
While undressing to go to bed that night, as if a flash of sympathetic insight “put me in her place,” I suddenly found myself imprisoned in Fifi’s mind.
Strangely enough, it was analagous to my sensation of utter helplessness when dislocating my cervical vertebra, I had found myself without any instrument with which to contact the universe.
But now I was at the mercy of an imperfect instrument. The antennae of the contact with the world in some way crippled for their function seemed — like the umbilical cord in abnormal birth — to be wound round my brain in a fearful constriction, implacable as iron barriers.
My brain, like a bird in ceaseless hurt, beat its wings for the conscious liberation against a cage — or rather, a sort of immature sieve, which would spring a hole intermittently; here and there letting a glimpse of phenomena through — phenomena fitful and unrelated.
Caught in a horror of active impotence, I struggled in terror — unlike Fifi, I could get out.
This gratuitous experience was as nothing to that of disintegration when, on the contrary, one became aware of forces inherent to phenomena, which, being beyond the range of registration by the normal instrument — the conscious organism as it exists in our present stage of evolution — resulted in a super-sensibility so acute it shattered itself to splinters.
The intuitional self is incapable of surprise, but my everyday self was amazed. I felt that for dabbling in the profane mysteries I had got more than was coming to me.
Less than anything on earth did I require a face destroyed as Insel’s; for some while I should walk with misgivings—.