You beat off inside them. What you did in your skull was your own business; there was no way they could possibly know what was going on in there nor could they care—because the sensibility alone was inviolate—but what your skull permitted you to do you did and only results counted. Perhaps it was this way; perhaps it had always been that way and I had never understood, all those years of history, all those years of frantic scuttling on the periphery all wasted, wasted, because at last I understood the meaning of it all: it didn’t matter as long as you had the results. All that they wanted were results; the rest of it was your business. They didn’t care. They didn’t care. They had their own problems; they had their own skulls. No one could ever know what went on inside them and it didn’t matter.
I saw it all.
I was a night-creature, a stifled bird circling darkly at an immense height over the prairies; I was a scuttling rodent traversing the fields; I was a prowling mammal seeking his mate over far distances: I was all of these and others as well as her arms bit and tore at the back of my neck and I felt myself sliding through the ring, through the center, to the core. In that explosion of mystery I found the dark center, reaching toward it, distended at enormous length (her breasts and nipples batting against me) reaching toward a final discovery which would be as placid and immutable as the face of the moon (my tongue fell from her breasts, my face squeezed into her shoulder), a revelation beyond insight that would justify all of it (unh, unh, unh, somebody went) and would blow me free at last from my accursed history (uh, uh) into a cavern of final knowledge where all things would be glimpsed (uh) and ordered, touched and seen and I was reaching, reaching, moving toward that final dark target, that center and there was a pulsing (uh, ah) and a long, whimpering slide ending with a convulsion and thrashing and bucking and moaning we moved twitching on the grass and that was the way it finished, the last drops beaten off and out, the last inch of conjoinment made, and then as it subsided to a whickering and pointless decline I felt the most convulsive shock of all, a shock which drew me out along all the fibers of my being, dividing and imploding me, causing all the fragments to jar out scattering and I kicked and thrashed again in something close to pain and screamed into her cheek as she fought and fought and finally threw me off her.
I lay on the grass panting.
“You silly bastard,” Marie-Jean said to me, “you silly, silly bastard, you went into the fence.”
I turned on my stomach and inspected the grass as the shuddering went through in little rivulets and ripples, pinning me to the good, green earth of home, the tested earth of pain and knowledge.
“Can’t you ever watch what you’re doing?” she said.
“Don’t you even know what you’re doing?” she said.
“I must interject a comment at this time,” I said, putting aside my pen and leaning toward D’Arcy. “I hope you’ll forgive me but obviously I’m not in a position to interrupt a recollection here; that recollection is obviously complete. It seems to me that this first sexual contact of yours was not as masturbatory as you may feel but did, indeed, in most ways resemble the initial contact of most males. After all,” and finally it was a relief and pleasure to express myself uninterrupted at some length; D’Arcy was fascinating, the most fascinating and provocative man in the whole sexual history of the world but sometimes he did have a tendency to monopolize the focus entirely; even beyond a biographee’s license, “after all,” I repeated, “this is a strongly masturbatory culture as you yourself pointed out earlier, and the sheer transition from masturbation to copulation, then, can be rather a difficult one. Granted all of this, granted the masturbation-orientation of your early pubescence and middle-adolescence, in short, we can only say that you functioned commendably under the circumstances. I see no reason at all for the overlay of guilt which seems to accompany these reminiscences, this particular incident. The important thing is that you did well by her.
“The important thing is that you did well by her,” I said again, leaning forward to make the point more emphatically, “as far as she was concerned you performed as a male in a masculine way and toward the accustomed end. The business of touching the electrified fence at the conclusion, as a matter of fact, might be interpreted as sheer metaphor rather than disgrace; you had found an objective-correlative, I am trying to say, for the feelings and sensations which had passed through you prior to that electrification. Now, if I might go on even further to say that her comment was by no means a deprecation but only that kind of whimsical comment which women, the best of women, the most experienced of women, tend to make after the act of intercourse, well then we should see that there is absolutely no reason for you to place capsulization upon this rather than upon the place where it really should be, which was the satisfactory and apparently mutual orgasm which you incited. So I think that we can thus put the incident in its proper place. Don’t you?”
After a pause during which D’Arcy made no comment, I said, “After all, you must not be so self-deprecatory. There is really no reason for it. Don’t you think that what I have said makes a good deal of sense?”
And when he still said nothing, I put the question to him in the strongest possible terms. “Of course, I might be entirely wrong about this,” I said. “Tell me what you think of it.”
But there were to be no more answers that evening, no more recapitulations, no more discussions. For, his fine-boned head sinking slowly upon his chest, his chest moving nearer and nearer in slump to his knees, my friend, my dear friend D’Arcy, my testament, my vindication, my pursuit, had fallen into the rosiest and most gentle of slumbers. His head bobbed unevenly in his clasped hands.
I stole from him as silently as possible, not wishing to embarrass him with the knowledge that he had not listened to what I had been saying, and I found a nest of my own.
SEVEN
Today I had a long discussion with one of the doctors in this institution. It occurred within the sacristy of his office, within easy earshot, I suppose, of guards and attendants, and I have no doubt that every word I spoke was recorded to be discussed at the administrative level sometime later. But it was an extremely fruitful discussion nevertheless and bears upon the present project. I find it very difficult to function under these circumstances. I wish there were a little less persecution hereabouts, to say nothing of the dim shouts which infest the corridors at the oddest hours.
He started out—a thin, pale, almost desiccated young man who wore the faint mantle of obsession with that casual grace which only the truly accustomed can bear—by asking me how I felt about the institution in general, and my ambitions in particular. “It’s only a matter of time,” he said, rather vaguely, “until this comes to a head, you know. We need as much information as possible preparatory to making our final decision.”
“Final decision for what?” I asked reasonably enough, lighting a cigarette with a magnificent gesture and throwing the match with a ping into the ashtray with a graceful generosity of motion which fully encapsulated my contempt for the institution, its occupants and this particular, most unpleasant, personage. “That is the question I’d like answered at the present time.”
“Well, you know,” he said rather vaguely. “Decision to do this, decision to do that. Disposition I guess is a better word. Are you getting along more satisfactorily with your roommates these days?”
“I have no relationship with my roommates. I have no desire to pretend that I do. The question you should ask, assuming that any question is in order here, is how I am getting along with myself.”
“Well, then, how are you getting along with yourself?”
“Splendidly,” I said, a bit stiffly. “I have never been more conscious of my interior depths, never have I functioned more in accordance with my secret because most basic needs. I have reached that moment of blending, you see, in which ambition can be almost instantly translated into accomplishment; this being the major function of the human psyche, I would say.”
“Ambition and accomplishment. In what way?” He took one of my cigarettes absently and began to toy with it, looking, perhaps, for traces of some drug which would render explicable my buoyancy. After a moment or two of shredding, he took one of my matches and tried to duplicate my own lighting-gesture, failed miserably, and with a subsiding puff of embarrassment settled back into his chair. I could not resist the juvenile impulse to giggle; a lapse of dignity which is always permissible during moments of cosmic amusement.
“You remind me of my friend D’Arcy,” I said.
“Oh? How and in what way?”
“You have the same gestures. The same flick of wrist, the same intensity. Also, the same imitativeness. This is not to mean that D’Arcy was a slavish follower; it only means that he found some of my gestures wholly admirable and tried to emulate them.”
He ignored this promising line of speculation which would have led to a discussion of that peculiar role-reversal which seemed to come over us in the last days (why did D’Arcy find himself subsumed by the personality of his biographer?) and said instead in a most pedestrian fashion, “this D’Arcy. We’ve been hearing a lot about him recently and I note from a careful study of your case record,” and he patted a large, grey folder on his desk, an irregularly shaped oblong from which protruded in violent, contradictory disarray greasy papers with the suggestion of typing on them; it was depressing to think that all that they thought they knew of me might be within those confines, “that the name of D’Arcy is quite prominent. Perhaps you’d like to tell me a little more about him.”
“Not particularly,” I said. “D’Arcy, after all, is not confined here. I am. Under the circumstances—to make him a tenant by proxy, I am trying to say—it would be irrelevant at best, destructive at worst to concentrate upon him unduly.”
He put his hands behind his neck and sighed, tipping his chair back at a disastrous angle and recovering only in the nick of time. The brief flare of panic before the recovery brought his face to light as I had never seen it before; it was the face of a juvenescent so swaddled in his role as no longer to be convinced of his identity and I wanted, somehow, to apprise him of this, show him that I had credentials and tools of insight at least the equal of his, but before I could say anything, he said, with a hint of asperity, “Why do you talk that way anyway? I mean it’s off the record but I really like to know.”
“Why do I talk what way? I’m not sure I understand.”
“Your rhetoric. The jumble of your sentences. I mean, why do you find it necessary to speak in the most tortuous fashion? Nobody here talks like you. It’s difficult to understand a thing you say. Frankly, you talk as if you come from the pages of a bad old novel. Why do you find it necessary to hide your tensions behind these convolutions?”
“I am entitled to the way I speak,” I said, as grandly as I could, “and you are entitled to your opinions on it but I think, frankly, that your comments are ill-meant and ill-spoken. I didn’t ask to be brought here, after all, and I didn’t ask for this interview. I’ll be very happy to go at once to my quarters if you will only say the word. I might point out, however, that the biographer, one overtaken by the biographical obligation I should say, cannot be blamed for a rhetoric which in many cases is not his. Language has the aspect of a chameleon after all.”
Having been so undercut—on the horns of his own processes, so to speak—my interrogator was left with nothing to say, nothing to pursue. He commenced therefore, to ask me some of the more conventional questions about my youth, predilections, and sexual outlook.
I responded as well as able. There is little reason for me to dissemble on these topics because, as I have been trying to impress upon these people from the first, I am not the relevant party; I am but the extension of D’Arcy who is subject to my object. To take an unnatural (or even routine) interest in my own habits and background is as sensible as it would be to investigate the fisherman who caught the fish for the more Freudian implications of his act. Indeed my very presence in these corridors is the outcome of purest accident; an explosion of coincidences and incidents so pointless as to reduce everything which followed to anticlimax. It is hardly possible to say at the present time that I have an identity in fact; most biographers do not. I therefore responded, as I say, freely and frankly, even embroidering some recollections for his greater interest. Uninterrupted except for certain cues I must have spoken upwards of an hour and three-quarters, describing juvenile impressions, juvenile repulsions, juvenile intimations, telling him the flat truth or that representation of it which seems to render the Profession content, all the time intricately disassembling into several divisions small sheets of paper which had been thoughtfully placed before me for diversion. It was not so much reaching a point of conclusion, eventually, as it was equivocation; what I had left to say seemed merely to be a reconstituent of what I had already said. So I slid down into my seat and looked at him, aware only at that moment that his face, in its whitened, flattened intensity, seemed to be floating against the background of the walls; a fish suspended in a sea of board. The second thing I noted when I tried to apprise him of this was that I literally found talking difficult; my larynx and vocal cords having been swollen to outsized proportions by my reminiscences. So I settled for clearing my throat in a noncommittal fashion, and settling again upon one of the pieces of paper, making it clear to my interrogator that it was his turn to speak; that I had nothing to say.
“That is fairly interesting,” he said finally. “Particularly the episodes of torture. I hadn’t realized that your background contained incidents of this nature. I would have thought—”
“Backgrounds contain whatever their fullest potential is toward containing,” I said, aware with a distant pleasure that I had gotten off what one of my roommates would call a mot, “and nothing else. There is no irregularity other than in the ear of the auditor.”
“But what you say happened to you; surely it must have been highly disturbing. Don’t you feel—”
“I am utterly divorced from my history,” I said, folding my hands over my belly in a parody of his own pose. “I exist merely in terms of my apprehension, my role, so to speak. I told you that everything I said would be of the most impudent irrelevance—”
“Tell me,” he said, apparently musing. “During this particular cellar incident you described: the business with the tar and the three youths, didn’t you feel—”
“I am tired,” I said. “Unless I am wrong, we have exceeded the statutory limit of these conversations by almost twice its length. I would far prefer to rest.”
