It was Wisconsin, thought Charles, not Michigan. Milwaukee. Noting that he had neither initiated the thought nor welcomed it, and did not approve of its appearance in his mind once it had endured sufficiently to make a kind of stamp, a mere nitpicking correction in the middle of what was clearly the cry of a rent heart, he wondered if one’s thoughts were ever truly one’s own. If not, who’s were they? What were they? And of what possible use to him when one fine day a thought might not just be tracer fire of action passed and action to come, but somehow truly matter?
“I of course,” continued Alexander’s letter, “asked him why he said ‘if I make it to Minnesota,’ and he said he was not feeling well. We had only one lamp burning in the little room so it was hard to see his face. He spoke of the Spring Park disaster and I couldn’t see his face. He sounded as if that burden was lying very heavily on him — and of course you know that he never felt a burden to be heavy. Never. But I couldn’t see his face. The lamplight was so weak and flickering that the shadows played tricks with me. He was uncharacteristically cold as well, all wrapped up in his chair with a blanket. He began to go on and uncharacteristically on about how guilty and wretched he felt about his ‘profligacy’ during the hey-day of the Poodle Dog. He laughed loudly and bitterly about how he had thought that a man of power actually deserved that kind of pleasure, that kind of relief. After a while, a long while, he seemed to have emptied himself out. He sounded calm, maybe resigned to something he didn’t like, but calm, empty in a good way. I said I would go get some fresh air. I wanted a very big drink, which I had, and went for a walk to the park. When I came back he was still sitting in his chair in the darkness but I could smell the gun smoke. I don’t understand how it could have happened, in that place at that time. I left him very much himself, if exhausted, and returned to. nothing. He was gone. It doesn’t seem real. His absence doesn’t seem real. The world doesn’t seem real without him. I disbelieve the world that doesn’t have him in it. Even if I accept the facts — even if I hear Father saying what he always said and which I had no trouble ‘believing’ or using as a creed — I don’t believe it, I don’t profess it. I don’t know how I could ever have been so deluded as that.”
Charles paused over the breakdown of the grammar and noted too the breakdown of the handwriting: it had become sloppier but pressed deeper into the paper, and strokes that should have been graceful were jagged. He could feel his own hand cramping. There were smears and spills of ink now too, on this last page. He thought helplessly of something Strindberg had written, probably in his Paris diary, or his chemistry notes, or Inferno, or the Occult Diary.? Hands burned by chemicals, wounds into which was spilled salt, or rather coke dust. “He testified this solemn truth, by frenzy desolated, Nor man nor nature satisfies whom only God created.” That was not Strindberg, was it? No, that was somebody else. Who had nothing to do with Strindberg? Probably not. The blackened and cracked hands, burned and deformed, crusted over as if by a process of smelting with black dead blood. they will never be clean, my apparatus is insufficient, I need money! Oh, Father, I wanted to introduce you to Strindberg. I wanted you to put him next to Teddy so I could say, here is a man who lived a strenuous life that wasn’t handed to him on a silver platter, and here is a man who grieved what was lost, who saw that it could not be replaced, who believed in your God but who saw that life was an illusion.
I have neither a cool head nor clean hands, Father. I wish you could forgive me. I never saw the need.
“I sometimes find myself thinking he had to have been murdered,” Alexander continued. “But the terrible truth is that an old Stoic would certainly think twice but not shy away from taking the matter in his own hands. Clean hands. Cool head. The end.”
Charles secured a bottle of morphine pills without much trouble, and when he and Vera had taken a dose, he told her about his father’s suicide. She said nothing, and they remained silent for several hours, thinking, in a deep, ceaselessly absorbing twilight that never changed, of the peace that passed all understanding: death.
Mastering an urge toward immediate and pointless violence, or not so much mastering it as feeling it ebb back whence it had flowed, Charles watched an old couple approach Vera and Daisy.
“Daisy!” the man shouted. “Daisy! Over here!” the woman shouted.
Charles watched the three embrace, three small plain people holding each other by the shoulders, patting each other’s backs, and thought he saw in it a dignity of purpose he wanted for himself. Daisy seemed to know where she was going and what she was doing and why she was doing it, and it was fascinating to watch. It was the simplest or rather most ordinary of acts, but she was committed and persuasive and pulling it off so well he was sure she must have some sense of how porous her molecular structure was with all the other structures around her. Her act would seem to be false or superficial otherwise — accepted of course, as all such acts were, but accepted with that yawning indifference that marked all mediocre acting. He was quite sure he lacked — now that the change had come — this dignity — despite a hope, a wish to believe, to tell, and to act the story that he was becoming a good man — that everything beguiling and forceful in his character was there now only to hide that lack, and he found his face hot with embarrassment.
There was something in her gaze; in his own — admitting that he perceived it from the other side of consciousness — nothing, just a lot of darting back and forth, reconnaissance of the audience and deep studies of the sky. And with that thought he looked up, saw that Daisy and her friends had gone, that the background of the picture had darkened perceptibly, as if it were a very old oil painting, but that the colors had become somehow richer for it. He wondered how much longer he would be able, be allowed, to play the fool — and recognized instantly what most identified him as a fooclass="underline" this belief that he could choose a role, that he could pick and choose as it were amongst the great parts of history. Almost a year now had gone by and yet it seemed that a fraction of a second, the flash of a thought, could undo it all, could unwind the clock, could make these people milling about this train station in the middle of nowhere disappear in a cloud of smoke. He had been pretending to be someone else, but he didn’t know whom. I have not been convincing. I have been an object of derision. My duplicity has been effortless and yet I am very tired. I am too tired to sleep. Every room I enter becomes not merely a stage — that would be unremarkable — but the same stage I just tried to exit, which is impossible.