I hold her close in my arms. She is trembling and looking at me and pressing herself against me and I hold her, we hold each other—two strangers who know nothing of one another and cling to one another because each mistakes the other for someone else: strangers who nevertheless derive a fleeting comfort from this misunderstanding which is a double and triple and endless misunderstanding and yet is the only thing that, like a rainbow, holds out the deceptive appearance of a bridge where no bridge can ever be, a reflection between two mirrors thrown onward into even more distant emptiness. “Why don’t you love me?” Isabelle murmurs.
“I love you. Everything in me loves you.”
“Not enough. The others are still here. If it were enough, you would kill them.”
I hold her in my arms and look over her head into the park where now shadows like amethyst waves are running up the fields and roads. Everything in me is clear and sharp, but at the same time I feel as though I were standing on a narrow platform high above a murmurous deep. “You wouldn’t be able to stand it if I lived outside you,” Isabelle whispers.
I don’t know what to reply. Something always moves in me when she says things like that—as though there were a deeper wisdom in them than I can recognize—as though they came from beyond the phenomenal world, from the place where there are no names. “Do you feel how cold it’s getting?” she asks on my shoulder. “Each night everything dies. The heart too. They saw it to pieces.”
“Nothing dies, Isabelle. Ever.”
“Everything does! The stone face—it cracks into pieces. In the morning it is there again. Oh, it is no face! How we lie with out poor faces! You lie too—”
“Yes—” I say. “But I don’t want to.”
“You must tear away the face until there is nothing there. Only smooth skin, nothing else! But then it will still be there. It grows back. If everything stood still, one would have no pain. Why do they want to saw me away from everything? Why do they want me back? I’m not going to betray anything!”
“What could you betray?”
“The thing that blooms. It is full of mud. It comes out of the ducts.”
She trembles again and presses herself against me. “They have stuck my eyes shut. With glue, and then they have run needles through them. But still I cannot look away.”
“Away from what?”
She pushes me off. “They have sent you too! I will betray nothing! You are a spy. They have bought you! If I told you, they would kill me.”
“I’m not a spy. And why should they kill you if you tell me? It would be much easier for them to do it before. If I know, they will have to kill me too. There would be one more who knew.”
This penetrates. She looks at me again, considering. I keep so quiet that I hardly breathe. I feel that we are standing in front of a door behind which there may be freedom. What Wernicke calls freedom. A return from the maze, to normal streets, houses, and relationships. I don’t know whether this will really be better, but I can’t speculate about that while I have this tormented creature before me. “If you explain it to me, they will leave you in peace,” I say. “And if they don’t leave you in peace, I’ll get help. From the police, the newspapers. They will become afraid and then you won’t need to be.”
She presses her hands together. “It’s not just that,” she manages to say finally.
“What is it then?”
In a second her face becomes hard and closed. The torment and indecision are washed away. Her mouth grows small and thin and the chin protrudes. Now there is something about her of the grim, puritanical, evil old maid. “Drop that!” she says. Her voice, too, has changed.
“All right, we’ll drop it. I don’t need to know.”
I wait. Her eyes glitter in the last light like wet slates. All the gray of the evening seems concentrated in them; she looks at me in a superior and mocking way. “You’d like that very much, wouldn’t you? Well, you have failed, you spy!”
For no reason I become furious, although I know that she is sick and that these transitions of consciousness come like lightning. “Go to hell,” I say angrily. “What does all that matter to me!”
I see her face changing again; but I go out quickly, full of an incomprehensible tumult.
“And?” Wernicke asks.
“That’s all. Why did you send me in to see her? It accomplished nothing. I’m no good as a nurse. You see for yourself—just when I should have spoken carefully to her, I shouted at her and ran away.”
“It was better than you think.” Wernicke gets a bottle and two glasses out from behind his books and pours drinks. “Cognac,” he says. “There’s just one thing I’d like to know—how she senses that her mother is here again.”
“Her mother is here?”
Wernicke nods. “Since day before yesterday. She hasn’t seen her. She couldn’t have, even from her window.”
“Why not?”
“She’d have to hang out too far and have eyes like a telescope.” Wernicke inspects the color of his cognac. “But sometimes patients of that sort do sense these things. Or perhaps she just guessed. I have been pushing her in that direction.”
“Why?” I say. “Now she’s sicker than I have ever seen her.”
“No,” Wernicke replies.
I put down my glass and glance at the thick books on his shelves. “She’s so miserable it makes your stomach turn.”
“Miserable, yes; but not sicker.”
“You ought to have left her in peace—the way she was during the summer. She was happy. Now—it’s horrible.”
“Yes, it’s horrible,” Wernicke says. “It’s almost as though what she imagines were really happening.”
“It’s as though she were in a torture chamber.”
Wernicke nods. “People outside always think torture chambers don’t exist any more. They exist all right. Here. Each one has his own in his skull.”
“Not just here.”
“Not just here,” Wernicke agrees with alacrity, taking a swallow of cognac. “But there are many of them here. Do you want to be convinced? Put on a white coat. It’s almost time for my evening rounds.”
“No,” I say. “I remember the last time.”
“That was the war; it keeps right on raging here. Do you want to see more of the wards?”
“No. I remember very well.”
“Not all. You only saw some of them.”
“It was enough.”
I recall those creatures, standing in cramped postures in the corner, motionless for weeks at a time, or continually running against the walls, clambering over beds, or groaning and shrieking, white-eyed, in strait jackets. The inaudible thunders of chaos beat down on them, and pre-existence, worm, claw, scale, writhing, footless, and slimy, the creeping things before thought, the carion existences, reach upward from below to seize their bowels and testicles and spines, to draw them down into the gray confusion of the beginning, back to scaly bodies and eyeless retchings—apd, shrieking like panic-stricken monkeys, they seek refuge on the last bare branches of the brain, chattering, hypnotized by the ever-rising coils, in the final horrible dread, not of the brain, worse, the cells’ dread of destruction, the scream above all screams, the fear of fears, the death fear, not of the individual, but of the veins, the blood, the subconscious entelechy that silently control liver, glands, the pulse of the blood, and the fire at the base of the skull.
“All right,” Wernicke says. “Then drink your cognac, give up your excursions into the unconscious and praise life.”
“Why? Because everything in it is so wonderfully ranged? Because one eats the other and then himself?”