The doctor put a strangely tentative hand on DeSoto’s shoulder, turned it into a sweeping gesture which glided from chest to waist to calf and ended with the two of them facing one another in attitudes of mutual bewilderment; clowns locked in puzzled confrontation. “I think we’ve had enough,” the doctor said. “There’s little point in continuing this.”
“But I haven’t made my position clear,” I said. “There are certain elements which certainly must be justified including that of sleeping arrangements; if I am only given a chance—”
“He can go on for several hours,” the doctor said. “Once unchanneled, there is no end to it. I tell you this from experience.”
“Well,” my familiar said, shaking his fine-tooled head, looking at me with an expression into which the first edge of equivocation had passed, “perhaps we should terminate this interview now. Next time—”
“But I wanted to discuss this matter of women as well as the diary and the plans I have for my estate—”
“Later,” the doctor said. “We can do all this later.”
“Well then,” I said, “how about tomorrow? We can sit down again tomorrow and discuss the sheer mechanics of my release.”
“That would be at the discretion of the staff,” DeSoto said. “Of course if they were willing—”
I felt my reasonableness, that strange mood which had come over me during this interview, subside; it went away so rapidly that it was with a feeling of violence that I confronted the aspect of being drained; all parts of me running out, all conscience, all connection, all possibility. I fondled the table in an enormous embrace trying to recover my aplomb, then stood shakily, facing them. It was evident that I was at some kind of an emotional crisis because the phrases and rhetoric, instead of coming easily from me, much as if they had been pre-arranged and I was only giving meek and humble voice to them, seemed to have an odder, thick consistency, much as if they were being made on the spot and manufactured for causes more obscure than those for which I generally competed. I fastened upon DeSoto, seized him so to speak in the glare of that emptiness and said, “You can’t do this to me. I cannot take it anymore. I have been here for days and days, possibly weeks, entirely cut off from an apprehension of history; entirely severed from the promise of outcome and I tell you now that I can no longer bear this cheat; I have not circumscribed the awful facts of D’Arcy’s life and my own so that I could be systematized to extinction. I tell you now that there are drastic undercurrents here; drastic intimations, I tell you that I will not be humored anymore or reduced to a kind of functional implosion of all possibility due to your devices; rather I must seize, seize, I must transcend all of this, I must renounce utterly with the one hand and yet grasp utterly with the other; I must find reason or failing that a kind of apocalypse but there will be no more of this. I demand my rights, gentlemen! I demand that you desist! I demand my most immediate release, a pardon, a sheet of paper stating that I have done no wrong! I demand this standing on my record and on yours and I can promise you the most dire consequences if this is not immediately accomplished!”
Even from the depths of the sudden emotional distress which came over me—a distress which caused my eyes to peer suddenly through that bridge of water and retrospection which is, perhaps, all they can know of feeling—I could see that this speech had impressed DeSoto strongly if not the doctor. He looked at me, stricken with that kind of communion which will affect even the most officious of men when he realizes that what has come before him dwells other than in abstraction, and he raised his hand as if he were to say something.
But it was the doctor who spoke first. “Oh you poor bastard,” he said, “you poor, poor bastard. You poor bastard.”
I wheeled upon him desperately for explication, my own hand raised as if to guide the doom-ridden lightning toward him. But he only said again, “You poor bastard; this is just terrible. Terrible, terrible.”
DeSoto turned upon him. “I don’t really think there’s any need for this,” he said. “The patient wants release; he has just delivered a very affecting statement to that effect and you—”
“But you don’t understand either!” the doctor said wildly, his eyes glinting from one to the other of us, a fine, high madness in them and beyond that a streak of woe which would have caused me, in other circumstances, to reach out my hands to touch him. “I thought they explained to you! I thought you read the records! Surely you could not have come in here not knowing!”
“I really dislike this,” DeSoto said. “I am an examiner, a judicious, state-appointed examiner; I make my rounds, do my job, collect my benefits and try to think of the future as little as it thinks of me. If I am put into wild inextricable situations, they cannot be my doing; causation is beyond a man of simple talents like myself. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The doctor backed against the wall, his palms touching it, his wild, flickering stare unabated and as I looked into it, then, I saw what he was trying to say; given rhetoric and substance by desperation his message pierced out at me unevenly from his ragged face and hit me with a dull impact, somewhere between orgasm and the pain of withdrawal. I couldn’t take it; I felt my breath drawn unevenly into my lungs; felt the churned pulsing as my heart tried to make sense of it, felt my knees cave and went into the seat. The folly, the desperation came over me then and if I had had the strength I would have whipped my prick from my pants and ejaculated for sheer horror.
“Every time the same thing,” the doctor was saying, “the same thing, the same confessions, the same pretensions, the same demands. No change; no change, perfectly contained fugue, perfectly contained I’m telling you; circular in its essence and unbreakable because we can’t touch it, we simply can’t touch it and yet reasonable, reasonable—”
“What the hell is it?” DeSoto shouted, grappling the doctor finally by his damp lapels and half spinning him toward me, toward the center of the room, the pressure he exerted causing DeSoto himself to fall back and half crumple into the wall, then unfold in a gesture of reception as he waited to hear from force what silence could not have given him.
But it was not DeSoto to whom the doctor spoke. “You poor bastard,” he said to me, then, “you’ve been here for seventeen and a half years.”
TEN
“There remains very little more to say,” D’Arcy said slowly, examining his glass. “And I, most particularly, am delighted that this is the case.” He tossed the glass, with a little of the wine still glistening, to the floor where it bounced and then spread its putrid contents over the rug. All the emotion seemed to have gone out of him under last night’s explosion and out of me as well for I only sat idly in an approximation of the scribe’s posture, fondling my pen and putting it occasionally into a large gap in my teeth where it tasted vaguely like rubber.
“But the whole biography,” I said, “the whole sweep of it; we have barely understood you past your 18th or 19th year and yet you say that you have arrived near completion. I fail to understand this.” Under my reasonable dialogue was an urgent clown’s voice counseling me to smash D’Arcy, to leave my chair and render him senseless on the rug next to his wine glass but I was tired, tired, the action was as irrelevant as unperformed. And the end was near; for whatever reason the biographer’s journey was almost done. So I said, “Of course you must have your reasons.”
“Of course I have reasons, you oaf,” he said, but there was no malice in the word, only a vague kind of endearment. “This is a seminal biography; we are talking of the seminal, the basic influences which went into the composition of the whole man. Once he has been set on his course, unalterable, there is merely a gentle flowering of possibility. No, almost everything which happened between the incident I am about to describe to you and the present time is as predictable as it was delightful; the influences being locked into place guided it as smoothly as you can send your pen through curled sheets of white paper. After this, there is little more to explain; you will know why I am what I am and you may go back to the dismal hatching-place of your rooms and try to make an art out of it.”
“If I want to,” I said. “Frankly, I have been thinking more and more of going to the sea at the completion of these dialogues; finding a white, enclosed bungalow somewhere where I can rattle around in two or three rooms performing meaningless tasks, consoling absent but soft local women while the waters slowly but necessarily overtake me, bringing me back, bringing me back. I have thought of this more and more often; the harsh perpendicular made by sand and sun in the early morning, the lone beach wanderer caught in the middle of this geometry, the whisper of fishes in the warm wet sands below. This strikes me as a more useful course; I may be getting out of town shortly.”
“That would be your choice,” D’Arcy said. “I have been thinking oddly not of water as a place of retirement but of fire; a slow, broken schooner journeying from this city through the mists of the equator itself, the sun turning slightly at midday to slam the boat against the heated plane of glass that is the sea, the slow, parched suffering of the equatorial voyage; the scent of the hard, flat pine boards of the deck as I drag myself suffering in search of some vegetables to conquer my scurvy. Of course this is all a matter of individual choice. What we have concluded is that the present situation lacks leverage.”
He poured a small serving of wine into his carefully cupped palm and drank it that way, considering me. “I want to tell you now of the motel and the splendor, the reaching and the drawing, and the apocalyptic moment which happened somewhere between the wiring and the horror under the sheets; I want to tell you all of this and be done. We never should have started this.” He gurgled up the last of the wine, rubbed his palms absently against one another and settled back into his seat, gesturing at the same time that I could have some wine as well, if I wished.
“No,” I said, “there has been entirely too much drinking here over the last few days.”
“And other things as well,” D’Arcy said almost agreeably, and searching with increasing eagerness for his cigarettes, he then began:
I returned home that summer (D’Arcy said without pause, finally grasping his cigarettes with a sigh) in that state of slow, glazed apprehension which can only afflict those who have seen too much combat or too much copulation; my loins drained, drained, my perceptions hardly equal to what had happened to me, that summer of pause eagerly awaited as a means of necessarily and finally integrating the two. Even the prospect of two more full years at the school, commencing that fall, could not disengage me from the feeling, as I came home that summer, that I had already bypassed the possibility of transition; short-circuited myself into a kind of final disaster. Surrounded by trunks bulging with fresh copies of magazines I had purchased at the railroad terminal, holding two fresh copies of The Magazine itself on my lap I passed that journey in a slow orgy of pinching and rubbing, my compliant prick trying to remind me with its idiot’s sense that there were, perhaps, better times ahead.
At home I found the situation to be relatively stabilized: with my acquired sense I soon found out that my mother was having a series of new, vagrant affairs with various uninteresting men who hovered on the edges of commerce in the city; likewise that my father, long since having abandoned himself to the possibility of these affairs if not their actual occurrence, had found interests of his own in an obscure but refreshing way which kept him away most evenings on what he termed “private business.” It was surprising how all of this was clear to me after one short year at the school; what had been abstract and removed a year ago because “adult” actions were always somehow both more and less rational than those of children was now almost translucent; my new insight—that everybody was doing it, that there was no one, anywhere, who was not doing it; that all of it came down to the contact and the coupling—rendered everything explicable and therefore somehow shameful; I had thought that adults, perhaps, functioned on impulses less bizarre than those which guided my own pale thighs and fist in the darkness. But the adjustment was made easily and I landed my bags and parcel of magazines in my own room without incident, explained to my parents that I was anticipating a contemplative summer and closed a door which, although somewhat figuratively, I intended to close for three months.
I might have made it, too. This is the important point; one which cannot be dropped from your recollections, you ass, when you get into your vile bungalow and begin to rattle around in search of that common sense and discipline which has long since deserted you. My fist was strong, my heart resilient; my perceptions cooled by the extrinsic ardors of the years, I might have managed to tie it all together and yet emerge a whole man. I had the magazines, tubelike (I had discovered how to wedge the pages into one another for an even tighter grip), I had no dearth of interesting things to jerk off to with my recollections of the year just past, I had not even guilt or guile because I had proved time and again—had I not?—that I was perfectly capable of doing it. If I preferred masturbation this was very much my business; my mother seemed to prefer a little adultery and my father a streak of perversion; it all came down, then, to the same thing in the long run. Between meals and long roaming excursions to the park; between easy sleeps and the idiocies of a “preparatory course for adults” taken in a local high school, I might have suspended out the full weight of that summer and redeemed, returned to school that fall to fuck and think in equal parts, the two sides of me ever-reconciled. But that was not to be. Such things are never meant to be. Stability is the ultimate imposture; only change exists, implosion, violence, the severing of parts; not even the masturbator has his cove. In the middle of that July I was rewarded by an unexpected and wholly peremptory visit from my little Marie-Jean.
It was the slowest and most promising of summer afternoons; my mother had gone into the center of the city for what she said would be a detailed Christmas shopping expedition which might keep her out, searching the bargain stores, until midnight; my father was performing obscure accountant’s acts at a firm so small and in such legal trouble that it did not even have a telephone. Before me in a small pouch lay my magazines, tacked upon the wall were two severed breasts, a thigh and my most precious ornament, a full, closed vagina which I had transcribed, on tracing paper, from the pages of a nudist magazine. (I would not add such magazines to the permanent collection; they struck me as peculiarly perverse, insulting because of all that denial centered by that one desperate purpose.) My prick, recharged by 6 hours of morning idleness stood at ready, my slow pounding fist beginning to describe delicate circlets around the head. At that moment the bell rang.
Facile as I could only have been made through five years of such adjustments performed with a maniac’s ease, I placed the magazines back in the pouch, removed the tackings from the wall and restored my reduced prick to my pants pleased that even this organ needed no signal from me. All of us were cooperating, all of us were in place. I went to the door and opened it, ready for any kind of engagement and found Marie-Jean looking at me, her eyes shrouded by their heavy lids, her sleeveless dress glowing orange against the colors of the dismembered sun. She had improved slightly physically in the past year; her sexuality was no longer a mere suggestion under her carefully contrived attitude but had somehow, instead, filtered into the attitude itself, causing her large breasts to press urgently against the compound of silk and memory that covered them. She looked at me without speaking, then walked into the house and almost with a possessor’s appropriation, kissed me gently on the forehead and slid down into the nearest of chairs.
“You look well,” she said. “That place has done wonders for you. I wish something or somebody had done wonders for me. I didn’t know you lived in a place like this; it’s pretty awful, here, but it’s not your fault.”
“Listen,” I said, vaguely stunned, “I don’t know what to say. I thought that—”
“Oh, the letter,” she said, almost charmingly. “That mean letter I wrote you up there. Oh, I was just envious because you had gotten away from home and were living a nice life while I was stuck at home with Daddy and his bedsprings. I wasn’t really mad at you; I kind of missed you. So since we’re in the city for some kind of a convention or something, I thought I’d drop by and say hello to you, kind of apologize for that letter. You look very well. I bet you were screwing like mad up there.”
“Not really,” I said astonished. “It’s—”
“Oh, everybody knows about that place. The miracle is, how did you get in? People wait for ten years, sometimes, to get there and when they do, they have a way of never leaving, even when their time is up. It’s a great place; very expensive though. I guess you got your share of it, huh?” Her eyes measured me, then flicked to my father’s scotch decanter on the table. “If I may—”
“Oh yes,” I said, grappling for it and handing her a glass from underneath the table, letting her construct her own. I had the fanatic’s intimation that if I would only leave her alone, give her as much to drink and hear as she wanted, she would leave in good time, and leave me to my devices. The important thing was to be obliging. “You look well yourself,” I said pointlessly.
“Not as well as you. Of course, I haven’t been fucking in and out like a big machine all year, either. I have to take it where I can get it and most of them don’t want it.” Her eyes flickered. “I bet you’ve come a long way since that day. Technically, I mean.”
