“My name is DeSoto,” the legal person said with one eyebrow faintly raised. “I am here in answer to your requests which, I understand, were frantic and constantly repeated; I am here only to show you that this is not an institution of retention so much as it is one of crystallization.”
“That’s it,” the doctor said. “You caught it, you really caught it.” He moaned with satisfaction. “That’s exactly the way he talks.”
“The way who talks?” DeSoto asked.
“This one.”
“I certainly do not,” I said. “My speech is littered with archaicisms on occasion but it is neither convoluted nor that agonizing jangle of semi-imported words which my roommates substitute for communication. I am delighted, however, to finally have someone before me.”
“That’s my job,” DeSoto said. “Now, the question is, what do you want? What brings you here? I’m an extremely busy man and there are many people here to service, you know; this feeling that all elements here are peculiarly molded either for or against you is one of those obsessions of which you’re going to have to rid yourself before we can be expected to be entirely sensible here. So why not tell me—”
“That’s no way to get at him,” the doctor said. “He can convolute with the best of them. You have to be direct, direct.”
“What the hell do you want?” DeSoto asked blandly, and put his other fist carefully on the table, from which fist extruded a gleam of chromium which I took to be a prosthesis. “Level with me.”
“Many things,” I said. “In the first place, I know on direct evidence that at least one and probably both of my roommates are not confined here but are staff members whose sole function is to spy on me and to report my movements and convulsions to their seniors—”
“The usual systematization,” the doctor said. “You know what that represents.”
“Never mind,” DeSoto said. “He’s asked for a hearing, we can grant him that at least. Why are they reporting your movements? Why are they spying on you? What’s the particular interest in your movements anyway? I’m a responsible official, you can tell me this in complete confidence.”
“It’s not necessary,” I said, frankly enough, charmed by the refreshing honesty of his manner; at last a sensible, if not a cooperative man’s attention had been granted me. “That would be a question only the institution can answer. I can only say that there seems to be a most particular interest in my functioning and my idiosyncratic behavior; almost as if an elaborate biography of me were being planned which biography would require such minutiae. Nothing I do here is that interesting except for the writing, of course, but there’s no way of getting hold of that because I keep it in a very private place. Otherwise, it’s just a question of lavatory habits and sleeping and that kind of nonsense. I don’t pretend to understand it.”
“Comes and goes,” the doctor said. “Like I was telling you, they come and go. Sometimes they’re here and sometimes they’re there. It’s a cyclical kind of thing. Now, in a case of this sort the cycle—”
“Biography?” DeSoto said, not without interest. “Why would someone want to write a biography of you, particularly here?”
“The biographer’s instinct is a sheer twitch,” I told him, reasonably enough. “I have it myself; I can’t pretend to explain to you its origins or its purposes. It is founded in the obsession to be subsumed completely in the life and thinking of another person; a kind of supercession of the will, a denial of self for the better, richer alternative. It hits most people at one stage or another in their lives; perhaps in a state of acute depression when they want to flee the hated and therefore hateful self. It is entirely possible that one of my roommates or someone higher in the institution—”
“But why you?” DeSoto repeated again, quietly. “That’s the question on the table, so to speak. What is so exceptional about you? Not that you aren’t exceptional of course; every person is exceptional and not only to himself, but in the present case—”
I folded my arms rather grandly against myself and raised my beard to him. “I don’t have to answer that,” I said. “That wouldn’t be within my province. You would be obligated to. That is why I called this conference. I think that it is time to terminate my residence here. In short, I want to be discharged; I want to walk in the park again, I want to see women—”
“But listen,” the doctor murmured, apparently only for DeSoto, “we go through this periodically, I’m telling you—”
“I’m telling you that I am conducting this discussion as provided by law,” DeSoto said, and turned back to me. “You say you want to see women, do you?”
“Among other things. As I would want to glimpse all aspects of the normal, civilized, transitory existence, I would certainly want to see women. There are other things of course.”
“But this biography you say you’re writing. The one about your friend D’Arcy. What would happen to that if you left here? You’d probably abandon it.”
“You told him,” I said to the doctor. “You told him all about that.”
“Of course I did. Did you think I wouldn’t? What’s the difference? You were the one who built up this biography—”
“At any rate,” DeSoto said roughly, “that would certainly injure its development, wouldn’t it? Don’t you think you’re better off in a quiet, stable, unpressurized environment like this one, where you could—”
“I’m not that interested in the biography anymore. I’ve just lost a certain kind of interest in it. It’ll get written; if I don’t do it, someday someone else will. D’Arcy is that important. But I don’t feel like being involved in him anymore; I am feeling, rather, that my own identity, long-neglected, long fallen to ashes under the mire of obsession, is ready to flower once again and I would like to find it; I would really like to find that identity. I am not saying—”
“But this D’Arcy is so uniquely important to you,” DeSoto said, leaning forward, a flicker of intensity now passing across that habeas corpus face, “do you think you should really neglect him; leave him to wither, so to speak, and besides, were your—ah, ah—your detention to cease there would be other problems; problems which you—”
“That happens to be the way I feel,” I said. “A sense of mission can be equated with purpose only so long as that purpose can be said to exist, but when it is misdirected, it is usually unrecovered.”
“Well, tell me then,” DeSoto said, “were this detention to cease, exactly what would you do? What would be the quality of your life? Surely you’ve made plans.”
“In a sense I have,” I said. “I would want to find a room, a quiet room with an overhanging balcony somewhere where the sounds of women and birds commingling in the dawn; perhaps the slapping of pond waters and the murmurs of children as well, a room where I can both glimpse and yet withdraw, see and yet be not part of what I witness; gather in the slow storm of life as I pace out my own days. The room would have a mirror and tight shades for moments when I wanted to rest and there would always be a decanter of wine, the finest wine beside my bed where I could reach for it. There would be periodicals and music and once, perhaps in a great, great while there would even be a prostitute; not an exceptional prostitute but an ordinary working woman of the commonest and therefore most lasting type. And she would come to me unhuddled in the shroud of clothing; her breasts frank before me in the casting light of noon, her nipples square and open and neither the height nor fullness of those breasts would matter as long as there was a touching, a clinging. And we could lie together, flat, stomach-to-stomach in the stillness of that room for a long time, our loins misty with their need but separate, separate and after a long time, with a beautiful and lunging spontaneity, she—this whore, I mean to say, for she would only be a whore; this is the crucial part—would open before me and I would ease in by her side, just the first inch of me touching the wet lips drawn together puckered like a young girl’s and they would part just a trifle, enough to allow me a kind of succession of connection until finally I would feel myself gripped fully in that gentle and ancient embrace and then, palm-to-palm, lips grazing one another we would move together slowly, the tube of her rolling and unrolling around me until finally with a whicker of sunlight I would emerge through the other part of her and climax. And then there would be other things to do; good wine and good books and even some writing if I care to get it done, perhaps on D’Arcy himself. I might even return to D’Arcy.”
I admit that I had bemused myself, let alone my two auditors and it seemed only after a very long time that DeSoto, rubbing his palms together, spoke slowly and in a different kind of voice to the doctor. “Remarkable,” he said.
“Simply remarkable.”
“These cases always are. The unusual reality—”
“All I can do,” DeSoto then said, “is to take it under advisement. Your request, I mean; the way you feel. I can’t say yes or no. But we’ll discuss it and inform you of our decision.”
“Discuss it with whom?”
“The staff. We’ll probably have a full staff meeting as we do every so often and discuss you and a few other things.”
“You mean my roommates,” I said. “My roommates will be part of that meeting, won’t they?”
“You roommates are fellow residents like yourself, not members of the staff, so they will not be present. Only qualified personnel will be. Isn’t that right, doctor?”
“Oh, that would be correct. In the event of such a meeting of course. There are imponderables—”
“I flatly refuse to consider their presence at any such convocation,” I said flatly, looking at DeSoto who in the last analysis I had judged to be an entirely sensible man; an external correlant, perhaps, to that fine rationality of my own which had swept over me like a cloud the first time I had glimpsed the markings on my roommate’s wrist. “They would see the man in extremis so to speak, rather than in the conservative public posture and no man has any right to be judged outside of how he appears to be. I must be quite strong about this.”
“But the question of living arrangements,” DeSoto said, “perhaps you are a shade—ah—overambitious in your tastes. It might be better—”
