But what if at just that moment I were to begin to feel again, what if — no, no, that way there are things I do not wish to be confronted with. Let me die numbly, insensate, yet thinking still, if that were possible.
I feel — I feel! — by what must be a quaking of the floorboards Benny Grace approach the bed. Now in a show of hushed and reverent solicitude he stoops over me and peers into my face, and I am as a boy again pretending to be fast asleep as my suspicious mother bends over me in the light of a school-day morning. You see how Benny’s coming has already reduced me to this childishness, these dreams and maundering fears dragged from out of the depths? Now, perhaps sensing how unsettled I am by his warmly breathing presence leaning over me like this, he snickers softly.
Should I open my eyes? Should I open my eyes.
“He hasn’t changed,” he says over his shoulder to Petra at the window, where she remains, no doubt nervous of approaching too close to me, fearful of what she will have to look upon. I do not blame her: a catheter, for instance, even if only the suggestion of it, is not a pretty object for a daughter to have to contemplate, given what it is, and where it is placed. “Still the black hair,” Benny says, “the noble profile.” Again he gives his snuffly laugh. “The original Adam.” This last he addresses as if to me, intimately, in a murmur; he must know I can hear him, or at least must suspect it. He turns aside and begins to pace, those hobbled feet of his making a goatish clatter on the wooden floor. “Yes, years,” he says, from a little way off now, to Petra, continuing evidently an earlier train. “The things I could tell you! The stories!”
I would laugh if I were capable of it. I am in a sort of panic of amazement — Benny Grace here, at Arden, with his stories! And I flat out and speechless while he stands upright — Benny, of all people. I cannot credit it. I must have been wrong in what I said, or rather in what I thought, a minute ago; I must not have been expecting him, for if I had been, why would I be so surprised that he has come? But after all it was inevitable he would make an appearance at the end. Benny Grace, my shadow, my double, my incorrigible daemon. Yes, I would laugh.
I have never been any good in dealing with people. I dare say I am not alone in this sad predicament, but I feel acutely my incompetence in the matter of other folk. You know how it is. Say you are walking down a not particularly crowded street. You spy, at quite a long way off still, out of the corner of your eye, out of the corner of your watchfulness, as it were, a stranger who, you can see, has in his turn become aware of you as you approach him. Even at that distance you both begin to make little adjustments, covert little feints and swerves, so as to avoid eventual collision, all the while pretending to be perfectly oblivious of each other. As often as not all your efforts of evasion fail, precisely because you have been making them, I imagine, and in the end one of you is compelled to sidestep clumsily to allow the other to plunge past with a snarling smile. This is the way it is in general, with me, wherever I am, with whomever I happen to be. I am always, always on guard against coming smack up against one of my own kind. And when I am forced to enter on that agitated, long-distance dance of avoidance the broadest pavement becomes a tangled track, and I am as in an unsubdued jungle where the little apes howl and the birds of night scream and scatter. I do not doubt it could be otherwise. There is no reason not to stride forward smiling and clasp the approaching stranger manfully to one’s breast in fellowship and affection. If I remember rightly it was the poet Goethe — entirely forgotten now but in his day there were those who would have ranked him above the sublime Kleist! — who urged that we should greet each other not as monsieur, sir, mein Herr, but as my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de misères! Or was it Schopenhauer? Not to be able any longer to look anything up — ah! Well, no matter, you get the drift. For my part I would be happy to take this good advice provided I am allowed to send my greetings by semaphore.
I did not see Benny Grace coming, that was the trouble. It was in the far north that I first encountered him — or that he first encountered me, more like — which strikes me as odd, since I think of him as so much a creature of the south. An auditorium, a long, white room abuzz with people, and I in the front row, in a reserved seat, and a woman beside me agitatedly shuffling the text of a talk she was about to give, an ordeal the prospect of which terrified her, although she had undergone it many times before. Her name was Inge, or Ilsa, I wish I could remember which. Let me see: I shall settle for Inge. To open the colloquium there had been a reception — noise, laughter, champagne glasses of sticky white alcoholic syrup — and later on there would be dinner followed by decorous tangoing. One side of the room was a wall of glass looking out on a green slope dotted sparsely with spindly white birches. Were there deer? My memory insists on deer, peacefully at graze among the trees, fastidious long-legged creatures with beige-and-brown coats and stumpy tails that twitched comically. Weak northern sunlight, a delicate lacquering of bleached gold. It was midsummer then, too, the days endless up there in those latitudes. There had been rain, and there would be more, and the grass sparkled, as if with malice. I was aware of Benny first as a pair of hoof-like feet and two fat thighs clad in rusty black, inserting themselves with much squeezing and puffing into the place to my left. Then the globular head and moist, moon face, the smile, the wreathed dome — he was balding even then — and those whorled ears daintily pointed at their tips.
I cannot remember which city it was we were in, or which country, even. We had arrived that day, Inge and I, from elsewhere. Bellicose Sweden, I remember, was on the warpath again, mired in yet another expansionary struggle with her encircling neighbours, and travel throughout the region was hazardous and liable to delays, and I feared being stranded there, chafingly, in Somewhereborg or Somethingsund. Inge was a Swedish Finn, or Finnish Swede, I do not think I ever discovered which, for certain. Ash-blonde, tiny, very slim, child-sized, really, but an earnest savant famous in her field, which was, I recall, gauge theory — gauge was all the rage, at the time. I can see her still, little Inge, her tremulous hands and skinny legs and turned-in toes, can still smell her scrubbed skin and cigarette breath. She was forty and looked twenty, except first thing in the morning and late at night. Dorothy was not long dead and I was adrift in a daze of sorrow and remorse and would have clung to any spar in those dark, immense and turbulent waters. A sense of strangeness, of being generally estranged, comes over one in circumstances such as I was in, I am sure those who have suffered a similarly violent and sudden loss will know what I mean. Everything I did or saw, every surroundings I wandered woozily into, struck me as bizarre, wholly outlandish, and like an idiot child I had to be pulled along by the hand from one baffling spectacle to the next.