‘Living waste matter.’
‘I delighted in the thought of it. My favorite pastime was to push through a crowd, touching and groping the bare arms of unescorted women. The sight of my own grime on their pale wrists and hands was just as satisfying a thing as I could think of.’
‘I don’t suppose you were very popular.’
‘I was a popular point of discussion. Socially, though? No, I was not well thought of. But then I rarely stayed in one place long enough to become more than an alleyway myth. Mania or no, I was not a fool, and I knew enough that I should strike and move on at once, before any violence came against me. I would steal a horse and head for the next town, only to start my contamination campaign all over again. My days were ordure and ugliness and the blackest kind of sin, and I was only half living, just barely hanging on, waiting and hoping, I think, for death. And then one morning I woke up and found myself in a most curious place, and would you care to guess where that was? Don’t say jail.’
‘I was going to say it.’
‘Let me just tell you then. I awoke with the king mother of all whiskey headaches on a cot in militia barracks. I was washed and my beard had been shaved clean. My hair had been cut back and I wore a soldier’s uniform. The reveille was screaming in my ears, and I thought I would die, literally, of fright and confusion. Then a bright-faced soldier came by and gripped me by the arm. “Wake up, Hermann!” he said. “You miss roll call one more time you’ll wind up in the stockade!” ’
‘What in the world had happened?’
‘That was precisely what I wanted to know. But put yourself in my position. How would you find the answer to this?’
‘I suppose I would ask someone.’
Warm affected a serious posture and voice: ‘Pardon me, my good man, but would you mind telling me how it is I came to join the militia? It is only a slight detail, but I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.’
‘It would be an awkward way to start a conversation,’ I admitted. ‘But what else was there to do? You could not simply go along with it.’
‘But that is exactly what I did do. Fell right in line, as a matter of fact. You must understand, Eli, that I was disconcerted in the extreme. As a drunkard, I was used to losing an hour or two here and there, or even an entire evening. But how much time had passed for me to join the militia and establish relationships with the other soldiers, all of whom appeared to know me well? How could I not recall so drastic a change? I decided to keep my head down and go with the crowd until I could figure things out.’
‘And did you ever?’
‘It was all the doing of the bright-faced soldier, named Jeremiah. Every once in a while, out of boredom, he liked to go into town and find the very lowest sort of alcohol-muddled scallywag. He would fill him with drink, extract personal information, and then, once the man was totally incapacitated, drag him back to the barracks, outfit him in a military uniform, and put him to bed. This is what happened to me.’
‘Were you very angry when you understood you’d been tricked?’
‘Not particularly, because by the time I found out, I was glad to be there. Life in the militia brought about many positive changes in my life. I was forced to bathe regularly, which I did not like at the start, but I endured, and this return to the habits of cleanliness successfully killed my bedeviling excrement obsession. I was fed, and the cots were comfortable, the barracks warm enough, and there was usually at least a little something to drink at night. We played cards, sang songs. A sturdy group of men, those soldiers. A bunch of orphans, really, alone in the world, passing time together, with nothing much to do. In this manner, six or seven uneventful months rolled by, and I was beginning to wonder how I might get out of there when I had the good fortune to befriend a lieutenant colonel named Briggs. If I had not come to know him, then you and I would not presently be sitting about, waiting for the river’s riches.’
‘What happened?’
‘I will tell you. I was passing by his quarters one evening when I noticed his door, which usually was not only closed but bolted shut, was now ajar. Like many of the other soldiers, I had developed a curiosity about him, because while your typical officer was very much the taskmaster and bellower, Briggs was shy and retiring, a slight, gray-haired man with a faraway gaze, forever locked in the privacy of his room doing God only knew what. Mysteries are scarce in the militia; I found I could not help but investigate. I opened the door and peered in. Tell me then, Eli, what do you think I saw?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Take a stab.’
‘I really don’t know, Hermann.’
‘Not much for guessing, eh? All right, I’ll just say it. I saw our man Briggs, standing alone, deep in thought, and he was wearing a crisp cotton smock. On the table before him were burners and beakers and all manner of laboratory paraphernalia. Scattered around his room were numberless bulky, heady tomes.’
‘He was a chemist?’
‘A hobby chemist, and not a very keen one, I came to learn. But the sight of his effects took hold of me. Without hardly knowing what I was doing I entered fully into his quarters and stood before the equipment, staring over it as if hypnotized. By this time Briggs had noticed my gawking person; he blushed and cursed me, damning my impertinence and ordering me from the room. I begged his pardon but he would not hear me, and he pushed me out the door. That night I found I could not sleep. The nearness to the books and equipment reawakened my hunger for study and learning; it came over me like a fever, and at last I rose from my cot and wrote Briggs a letter by candlelight, explaining about my past and my father’s, and essentially demanding that he take me on as his assistant. I slid the missive under his door and he called for me the next morning. He was wary, but once he understood my seriousness and the depth of my knowledge we struck a bargain, which was that I would assist him in his experiments, and as payment for this he would allow me access to his effects and books, and I should be allowed a certain amount of time to work on my own in his room. I gladly quit my usual nights of cards and bourbon and dirty stories and set up what was, at least for militia barracks, a fairly ambitious laboratory. Guided then, by my own sense of intuition, and also by the books Briggs happened to have in his library, I was led to the realm of Light.’
Warm paused to pour himself a cup of coffee. He offered me a cup and I declined. He took a small drink and returned to his story.
‘The years that had passed me by since I last studied, how many had they been? And all that time I did little else but abuse and mistreat myself. I had had no sustenance to speak of, neither physical nor mental, and as I sat and cracked a book that very first evening I was visited by a concern that my brain might not recognize words the way it had in the past. The brain is a muscle, after all, and I would have to retrain it, wouldn’t you think? Eh? Well, I had a nice surprise then, which was that my mind, unbeknownst to me, had all the while been improving itself of its own accord, waiting for the day I might dust it off and use it again. Now that day had arrived and my brain, as though worried I might only shelf it once more, attacked every page of every book with a magnificent strength and vitality. It was all I could do to keep up, but thankfully I did, and received my reward some months later when the idea for the gold-finding formula came to me, or should I say hit me, for it was just as though I were knocked on the chest with a heavy stone—I actually fell back in my chair. Poor Briggs didn’t know what was wrong with me. At first I couldn’t speak. Then I jumped for the ink and paper and would not be moved for an hour.’
‘What did he think of the idea?’