I stood on the bow of the boat for so long that had I glanced at a watch I would not have understood the object’s meaning. I no longer noticed whether the boat was still moving or whether there was anything at all behind me; the rare flashes of buoys and house lights on shore seemed to be eons away from the boat. I no longer understood that had I been in my cabin, I would simply be seeing darkness, that is, I would see nothing and not know how close nonexistence comes to people, I would not feel the announcement of death in the dying of color and loss of features; I was completely in the night, wholly open to it.
I thought that the emptiness was crying out; when the wind died down a bit, I heard singing in lullaby tones resembling the sounds of stone Aeolian harps that never reached musicality but expressed the one-dimensional dreariness of being cast in crystal; the singing came from afar, as if through a series of windows that opened and closed; with that singing, sometimes close to a howl and sometimes thinning to the sound of a flute, I felt a primordial horror, the fear of nonbeing, so ancient that the feeling did not know itself, just as an animal does not know it is an animal. Probably this was what the first human who managed to separate himself from the fact of his existence felt, thus dooming himself to know death; a knowledge still unverbalized, piercing the vertebrae that united bones, muscles, and flesh into the body.
Suddenly out of the dancing darkness came something white and motionless in the river channel, resembling a gigantic bone with four joints. Its whiteness was the noble white of marble, which gives statues their aloofness from the world; the darkness tried to blacken it but could not: the white color did not glow but it did not allow other colors to mix with it.
The white pillar rose above the waters, it came closer, and the majestic calm of its lines became clearer. Five tiers rising one above the other, like sails, and now it seemed it was a ship, a tall ship coming toward us. Amid the chaos and discord of the night, amid the darkness that blurred all borders, all lines that destroyed the horizon and mixed up heaven and earth, the white pillar redefined the separation; its hanging levels, the bottom steps of a great staircase, built the tiers of the heavens, and its soaring line set the vertical axis. The three central levels had openings like keyholes; empty niches, the promise of invisible gates ready to open above the spire, at dizzying heights.
The roar of a foggy siren from the oncoming vessel deafened me, submerged my mental dread in the immediacy of physical fright, and I learned where I was. We were sailing over an old flooded town, of which only the bell tower remained, they had forgotten to blow it up and then left it as a marker for vessels; the Aeolian harps were clots of wind that formed under the vaults of the belfry, and the black ear on shore was a communications antenna.
Deep under the ship’s keel, foundations were covered by drifting sands, and drowned leaves floated over former streets; the river was enjoying its own underwater autumn, fish hid in the silt that had settled over the summer, crawfish dug habitats in the dirt of former gardens and during the day cleaned the hulls of boats onshore.
But there were also the white pillar, the white stairs to the invisible gates on high; they existed just as objectively as the bell tower—but the white staircase appeared to me at the bottom of the hole, and when I came to I sensed that the corpse on which I had fallen had been warmed by my body; he had an axe in his hands, the axes had been given to the exiles so they could build, and I could take it out of his dead fingers.
I chopped steps in the ice; I was the first one to get out of that hole, and I sensed that the pit would close and vanish, washed away by high tides; the living and the dead had met and my warmth became their warmth.
The dinghy carried me toward the Artic Ocean. I realized I was mad, I bore the virus of knowledge that should not be passed to the living; something was still not completely understood and without that understanding the knowledge was deadly.
The river grew broader, my wound ached, my temperature rose; madness throbbed in my temples, and I remembered a long-ago meeting with madmen and Grandfather II, when I felt the same fever, the same virus, the same fear.
When I was little we went for walks in the local park; it smelled of sour pea soup; the odor of that soup, wherever you smelled it, meant that a solid fence would soon materialize, sometimes covered with barbed wire; behind it would be a cement block or brick building. That was the situation here: beyond the concrete fence stood the psychiatric hospital.
I led Grandfather II along the paths and told him what I saw; suddenly I heard the bird-like screeches of the patients— they seemed to converse in their own language, inaccessible to the doctors, a language they spoke fluently, or else they had become somehow like gulls, and I thought they might fly up, settle on branches, and grow feathers. Grandfather II shuddered; that was so unusual that it scared me. He never shuddered, as if his body were frozen, and here some memory pushed him and bent him; he tried to pretend he was stretching out of weariness, but the pretense did not help: the squawks of the mental patients—a rare sound for the human voice—had reminded him of something in the past which had remained distinct, and Grandfather II whispered, thinking that I had moved away and could not hear him, “I won’t move, I won’t!” He whispered and stood stock-still, bringing his feet together as if he were standing in a narrow radiant place of his mind.
Later, when the screaming died down, Grandfather II asked me detailed questions about how the hospital looked and even, to my surprise, whether there was a crack in the wall to see what the patients looked like. I found a crack, but the patients had been taken away; all I saw were slate awnings— we had the same kind at our kindergarten—and two orderlies taking turns pushing each other in a wheelchair: they raced along the asphalt path, avoiding piles of bricks, laughing excitedly but joylessly.
I returned to the park as an adult: I came back gathering up all my memories of Grandfather II—and I met a patient escaping from the hospital.
The man was running through the woods, running like mad, as if it were not he, but somebody else twisted and cramped in the prison of his body; a man inside a man. This prisoner was running and trying to free something within himself; the fugitive fell on the ground, rolled in the leaves, banged against trees; his screams were muffled, as if he was screaming through his stomach. But his running and his fits were devoid of intensity, the body hindered him and sometimes, victorious, the man stopped, took a few disconnected steps, then hurtled himself into clumsy flight again; a person sewn into an animal skin or sack would run that way.
The fugitive came closer and I could see his face—empty of all emotion; his face, which had slipped lower under the weight of his own skull.
The madman ran toward the river; muddy, full of tires and rusty metal, but deep in places; deep enough to drown. You could surely see the river from the hospital windows; full of rubbish, filthy, with a stench of effluvia, steaming, it did not freeze in winter, and on frosty days a toxic fog the color of dog urine hovered over it; it emanated evil, like the filthy passage between garages, there was an affirmation of self-destruction about it, like alcoholics in the final stage of the disease; no wonder the local tramps drank along its shores, the men as murky as the water. The fugitive had not completely taken leave of reason, he could tell that here was the river and he ran toward it to die.