He, too, sees himself askew. He sees himself as a conjurer spinning an endless paper ribbon with signs of Morse code from his maw. The marks are voluminously concrete, and these concrete signs create a chain, and that chain represents an occurrence. It is an occurrence: that which has occurred— somewhere, somehow, to someone. This occurrence concerns him unintentionally, yet he is well aware that between the two of them there is a close relation, he’d happily pronounce it, now it seems to him that the quality of that relation is that of the words “I am responsible for everything that happens,” but when he has these words already on the tip of his tongue he realizes that that’s not quite it.
He pulls the sort of paper ribbon with its signs from his throat, but by now they’re not written down so much as signs just now being written, the writing from Belshazzar’s feast: written in bluish light like that which torments mercury lamps, and each mark was visibly impressed into a cartoon figure as well, but with a different light.
He hears himself talking, he’s speaking the bluish words, and around each the tremulous and sparkling contour of a word of confession: in sum, a kind of moving electric advertisement trotting from darkness, where it lights up, into darkness, where it goes out.
He’s looking at the current of confessional words which he hears, and he finds it strange that those who pronounce them are also looking at them, and also as though at foreign words; they’re reading with the distracted interest of loiterers on the boulevard:
“A pronounced case of deficient will. .” — “Passive tolerance of injury as an indication of subconscious criminal inclinations. .” — The inscription, “The surest guarantee of moral depravity is approving of one’s own ill treatment, it applies to everyone, present company excepted,” flew by faster than the inscription that had preceded — somehow with a provocative shyness — but now we have the luminous question: “Who folds his hand when he has mostly trumps?” into the encouragement of which there spurted “A cheat in dire straits,” and it drained away. “Or else a super-lucid Polycrates” passed with ironizing sluggishness, which courted the exhortation: “All of you who are suffering for a crime not committed, bring about justice by redeeming the crime after the fact. .”
Here, however, the jotting’s trotting was suddenly cut off, and with so sheer a suddenness that everyone, people and things, and even the trot itself, seized and chopped, shut down before an as-yet mysterious cause, almost irrevocably. For it had come right up to the slope leading toward the unsightly catastrophe, along which the town’s ramparts crashed toward the little river, clinging to the bulwarks tailored to those two sycamore promenades, toward one of which, the smaller, he maintained an almost human amity. Where had this safety-memory come from? Safety, since it propped up his crashing presence of mind: he tugged at the reins, he tugged them with a strength he hadn’t expected of himself, and which revived the pride within him. The café’s “happy hour,” which had reared so dangerously, settled back down and trotted as before.
“And why not?”—he heard himself—“and why not? He was beautiful.”
It was a response (it half-rose), it was his response to some “no way! come on, no way!” which, having first taken fright, threatened some quiet sentence that he had interposed immediately before. The sentence died away in his memory; all that remained of it was the recollection that he had been saying it with his head lowered, as if he were reading from the light mahogany table where they were sitting.
And again those rushing aural figures with contours of tremulous light, except perhaps the slightest bit fainter, more personal, no longer sententious messages to EVERYONE, now just inquisitional questions to HIM:
“Didn’t it occur to you that that event was the complement of the mishap at Benedictine Mill?” — “Since when do you have this magical attraction for wretches and lowlifes?” — “Maybe you exude caritas? Maybe it’s predestination?” — “Then again, the dead do fear the living, and they’re all over you.” — “Like biting flies on rotten meat.” — “Why don’t you defend yourself against them?” — “Either you can, or you can’t.” — “The living can’t not defend themselves — in your place, I’d have been afraid!”
After the word “afraid,” the emboldened spiral intervened, and the trot, straightforward till now, broke into a whirl. And it was a smooth transition, through the sudden rotation of two quite disagreeable movements. The temporal divide between the two was a hair’s breadth, and that hair sounded briefly, as though with the echo of something overheard somewhere and sometime before: “But see who’s here? And why the long face?”
It was surely some kind of signal, after which he saw his confessors differently from how he had been seeing them just a second earlier. As if they’d passed from the realm of phantasmagoria into the realm of the real. Closer to the real, but not yet entirely there. For the whole time it still seemed natural to him, both that they were listening to him with so convincing an appearance of people who aren’t listening, and that, though he was within arm’s reach, they were addressing him as though from beyond so many mountains, not actually seeing him and not caring about his responses. He was drowning in incongruities, he knew it, but nothing in him opposed them: that’s how he caught on that he was dreaming, or that he was in regions bordering on dream. He saw that they were taking his words in, but he saw just as well that there was no more of these words than there would be of a stone falling straight into an abyss. — He saw that they were speaking to him, but he saw just as well that the words they were saying to him, and which they were aware of, were sinking into their oblivion. But at the same time they were also banished words, words already prepared long ago. Merely an opening! Now he had finally provided one himself. — He saw the judge and the onlookers and their frayed condolence, for it was a condolence for a misfortune they were all secure from. And he knew that the originator of their superiority, which they find so flattering, which they don’t brag about, but which they delight in, was him, and knowing himself to be that delight’s unwitting creator he adopted a kind of frightened tenderness toward it, even though he knew that the bliss he had arranged for them was the high point of their jealous certainty that they had a reason to hold him in contempt.
A tenderness more than majestic, a tenderness aloft, but endeavoring to move him in vain. If he submitted to it, it was only as though upward toward the trap door onstage, carrying him up with a gliding lift without him realizing that he was ascending. And while he was emerging, dazed but sensible, the world around him turned so grimacingly, and was annealed with a rainbow oscillating so quickly that now it looked out, now it squinted, just as if some hand had grabbed it and let it go by turns, and all the sense of the world, it seemed, dashed from the matter of “I’m putting it out” to the matter of “I’m firing it up.”
To him it seemed he had gotten up, with the one qualification that it was not him so much as his companions, in whom he now, for the first time, recognized foreigners, in no way foreign to him. He said that this was a subtle and fundamental difference, and he exhaled, deeply relieved. They were looking at him, calmly and blankly, and he, seeing this, leaped across the flexible permutation to the gossipy certainty, calmly and blankly, that he was the one looking at them; and now, in his jaws, he also felt the unpainful cramp of a person who, with immeasurable amazement or pain, has been left swallowing his saliva with mouth agape. But that gesture was without doubt merely a mimetic gesture, for he was neither amazed, nor suffering. So much had slipped between him and them, one thing after another, uncrossable spaces, thick and see-through sliding panels shifting along precisely tested grooves. He recognized that he was getting, if not farther and farther away from his companions, then ever more somewhere that was more and more “elsewhere” from where they dwelled, even though they hadn’t lost sight of him. When quite close to the revolving doors — he noticed that this was quite close to the revolving doors — he suddenly fell into a rotation so powerful that he retained only as much consciousness as would fit into his abruptly cut-off knowledge that he had been seized by the swiftly swirling vortex, wherein he lost consciousness. All he still heard, as though behind manifold, unevenly-woven curtains of sound, was: “You’ll get out of there somehow; carted off with the dead, no way. .,” and he awoke with a sober awareness that he was coming around from a rather brief, yet weighty, swoon. He passed through a door leading from one street to another, but the fact that the door leading from street to street was actually an extraordinary door struck him only when it had shut, hermetically sealing the street from which he had arrived from the street where he now found himself. There was a quiet so deep that, as though on an absolute scale, it was the sole means by which to measure how very demanding the racket had been on the street he had come from, of which he was still aware without actually remembering it yet. The quiet that had spilled everywhere rose from the earlier racket with contours as sharp as the drawings that, as you keep scribbling, will arise from coated “magic papers.” — It was a long, monotonous, ceremoniously uninhabited, yet affably, if restrainedly, inviting street with ideal academic perspective, like in a simplistic urban design. Not that it was abandoned, but the passers-by — you could tell — were conscious of their own purely decorative nature. It was a commercial street, shop after shop, one like the next; but you could tell that all those shops were merely a guise of a certain shop that, it so happened, didn’t differ from them, having more or less the appearance of a first among equals; it was quite far away. The entire street was somehow contrived, the specified shop as well, which seemed, however, the slightest bit less calculated, further testifying to the fact that this had to do with a shade that has a deeper cause. In the meantime, however, that shop’s chosenness was in no way manifest except in that it sufficed to look at it (and it was impossible not to) for the thought that one might not head toward it to become absurd. Thus he headed toward it, fastidiously keeping to the sidewalk, which, despite the fact that there were people walking behind him, had the unerring quality of a sidewalk officially as yet “uncommissioned.” When he arrived there, he encountered one of those decorative figures, several of whom, as in any perspectival plan, were scattered along the street. But the one in front of the shop was at the same time more calculated and more significant than the others, and the reality that the figurine was Tiemen was so natural — no, what am I saying — it seemed so inevitable that in speaking of its naturalness I’m not doing this naturalness justice.