She was not out for a while. She remained in the bathroom for the better part of an hour while I gloomily inspected my fingernails, read through some of the text of the magazines—the photographs had no appeal for me other than at times of self-abuse, and since I had flagellated myself twice that morning before arising they fell upon blank eyes—and wondered if I was finding out something about girls that I hadn’t known previously. I hoped dimly, somehow, that I wasn’t: it would be a terrible thing to believe that they all behaved in a manner like this. After a long time, Rona came through the hall, making flat, thumping noises, and into the door, tossing the magazines onto the bed. She picked up her large, brown handbag which had been lying in a corner, fumbled with its latch until it opened, and ran a comb listlessly through her hair.
“Filth,” she said.
“What? What’s that? What are you talking about, anyway?”
“The whole lot of you are poisoned, diseased filth. I’m going to go downstairs and get my mother and make her go home. I don’t want to ever see you again.”
Oh, the flame that burst within me as I heard this! But confusion was there as well. Always this duality of emotion. It is historic. “Why?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
She motioned toward the magazines. “If after looking those things over, if after you having them in your room in your bed and showing them to a houseguest, if after all of this you don’t know why I want to go home ... well, I just can’t talk to you. I can’t.”
“They’re just magazines. What about them?”
“The women. The positions. Is that all you men really think about? Is that all you have on your minds? I feel sorry for all of you. I didn’t even know this kind of thing existed.”
“It isn’t that it exists,” I said. “They just show them that way. I don’t know whether it exists or not. What are you so excited about? What does it matter? They’re not asking you to pose for those pictures, are they? I didn’t force you to look at those magazines, did I? I wasn’t the one locked up in the bathroom with them for such a long time, was I? Listen, Rona, where are you going? Now, don’t be like that. What are you taking those with you for? Come back, Rona, stop that. Come back, now!”
But she had already left the room, two of the magazines clutched under her arm, handbag aswing. I swear to you, I had no idea what she had in mind. It occurred to me that she was going back to the bathroom again or had decided, in an explosion of sanitary impulse, to toss the magazines into the incinerator instead, but it was only as the mumble of voices, rising and rising, cut dully through the tapestry of my room and into my horrified ears that I realized what she had had in mind; she had gone downstairs, into the nest of adults, magazines in hand, and had betrayed me. She was showing the magazines to all of them. She was showing the magazines, most specifically, to Bernice.
Betrayal, was, of course, the least thing in my mind. One can only be betrayed in possession of guilt and as I have already pointed out, the magazines had no significance to me whatsoever; they were the private adjunct of an obsessive act and no more; thoroughly arcane I believed. But as the voices rose and rose, as I heard heavy sounds on the stairs, as I heard shaking, shaking moving through the eaves, the walls, the corridors of being, the first perception came upon me then, the first suggestion of ominousness. Rona had been far more concerned with the magazines than ever I had been. I was still at the skulking, animaline level in my sexual experimentation. But the girl, the girl; the girl as I was trying to say, the girl—
The door opened. Standing in classic position, caught by the dusklight, almost transfigured in that picturization, Bernice stood before me raising the largest, loosest, grandest admonitory finger that I had ever seen.
We were lying at our ease draped on our separate couches then, D’Arcy and I, wineglasses forgotten and casually empty by our sides, only the uneven ticking of the many clocks in his apartment—D’Arcy was a modest collector of antique timepieces—breaking the dark silence that followed. For a while, at that point in his recollections, I thought that D’Arcy had fallen asleep but as I turned slowly to verify this it became apparent that he hadn’t; his eyes on me huge and stricken, his mouth trembling slightly, he had instead reached a point of absolute block. Tentatively I reached out a forefinger and touched him on the wrist. He trembled.
“That must have been terrible,” I said. “The traumatic effect and so on.” Someone plugged in an electric drill several floors below us and a whining, shrieking knife of sound moved slowly up toward us, passing on its way to the heavens, filtered by the beating of the clocks. “Was this the same girl—this Rona—that you said you copulated with under the disheveled tree in the province of—”
He shook his head restlessly, energetically. “No,” he said. “Not at all. That only happened much later. That was a long time after. No, I never saw her again. After that night. It was the province of Q—where the tree was, a delightful place.” His head drooped. “No, this all happened in the city. I never had much luck in the city.”
“Do you want to continue?” I said. “The hour is late; I can tell that on your clocks, valuable and rare timepieces all. We can take this up another time. The truest instinct of the biographer is his patience, his talent for propitiousness.”
“Oh, I guess so,” he said, “but it means that I haven’t gotten to the point of all this, the initial point I made at the beginning. It speaks very little for my sense of organization, of compaction.”
“But my dear friend,” I reminded him, “it was you who said just a few moments ago that chronology was a function of meaning not the other way around. So you can stop wherever you want and begin afresh the next time.”
“That is true,” he said with a sigh, “that is absolutely true. In fact, now as you look at it that way—” and I waited for him to say more but after a long pause it became evident that he had nothing left to say, that the pounding of his breath had become regularized, that D’Arcy, in fact was asleep. His marvelous powers had so dwindled, his attunement had become so blunted that there was, for him, literally no longer a barrier between consciousness and annihilation. So I left him that way, stealing deeper into the caverns of my own recollection, moving more warmly toward the core of my own mystery as all around me the sound of D’Arcy’s muffled gasps and cries filled the room, and so the first of our nights, the most meaningful of our nights, the night of our joining was over. In the forest of dreams that I entered I too saw Bernice and she was even more horrifying than D’Arcy had said, one blunt finger shaken to the heavens in a gesture vigorous enough to displace the bowels of sensibility and I understood everything, I understood almost everything; I felt the room close around me tighter and it must have been for a long, long time, then, that I too slept.
THREE
More remains to be said about the circumstances under which this memoir is written before I can proceed.
I resent the attitudes of the staff in this institution more than I can possibly communicate. Their manner is not only insulting, it is heinous; so self-delimiting as to raise the most serious questions of free choice. The regularization of existence can in itself be tolerated; I am a man who, having existed within the framework of one institution or another through the while of my life finds, perhaps, his only freedom within the routinization and bureaucratization which the institution imposes by necessity. But there is a line to be drawn between regularization and abuse and I believe that they have passed it here, moved into another territory altogether. This makes my work infinitely more difficult, of course. Creative expression under the best of circumstances is an agony; under the series of humiliations with which I have been recently forced to deal it is almost impossible.
Yesterday evening, my two roommates having left the premises to engage in some woodburning on the rear lawn—they permit this under strict supervision and every night half of the recreation area is set cheerfully ablaze to be resuscitated the next morning with new devices—I was sitting alone in these rooms, fingering my beard idly and wondering if I should continue another chapter of these revelations or retire early to be the more refreshed on the following day. (The following day would be today, just to keep my records straight.) The question of chess was out of the question, inasmuch as my partner had suffered a nervous relapse and had been placed in custodial care for an indefinite period and, the chess board possibly being haunted, no one had chosen to supplant him. The library was a gesture on the rim of possibility but it is small, oppressive, ill-stocked and presided over by one of the queen-bitches of recent history, a large, sweating lady who is interested only in enlisting those few devils who drift in upon a private and rather horrid formation of impulse. So I was on the verge of retiring for the night—having resolved to double my output on the succeeding day as penance—when one of the attendants here, a squat, menacing nameless man who wears dark glasses even under the thinnest moon entered without knocking and stood before me, his arms folded, a hypodermic needle (I could tell) cunningly concealed in a cavernous palm. He beamed at me ingratiatingly.
“How are you doing?” he asked with a shrug which he thought would conceal all purpose, a heavy deference assumed with cunning. But I could see the left palm slowly travelling toward me, describing a small, malicious arc. Nevertheless I did not cringe; it is not within me to display emotion. This is the secret of living whether within or without institutions.
“Perfectly well, my good man,” I said, crossing one knee casually over the other and contriving to retreat a few subtle inches from him, the meantime putting a hand behind me to grasp a book I could throw at him in extremis. “I am at the moment, however, thinking of going to bed.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I am very tired. The slow pace of the days here commands their own enervation; in the midst of inactivity comes that perception of doom which guides us to the womb of sleep.” I was deliberately oversimplifying so that there was no way in which he could miss my message, its substance being an urgent desire for his speedy removal.
“Perhaps a little shot would help,” he said with a horrid grin. “A relaxant. I brought something in for you right here.”
“I am in no need of palliatives. I feel perfectly well and can move into sleep without assistance of any sort.”
“Well then,” he said, sitting on the bed next to me and putting the offending hand out of sight, gesturing vigorously with the other, “failing that, some conversation. Would you care to talk a little about it before you go to bed?”
“Talk about what?”
“The way you’re feeling, the way things seem to be treating you, your objects, goals and ambitions. That kind of thing.” The needle twinkled from his reappearing palm. “Of course you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. There’s no compulsion here.”
I could see the consequences of a swift jab dealt by that shy hand, the shocking vault into unconsciousness, the slow murmuring and passage of forms above me just as had happened—well, when had it happened? Anything was preferable to this, at the same time I did not honestly want to converse. “Well,” I said, “perhaps we could talk a little if you wish. Not that I have too much to say and I am extremement fatigue.”
“You find your life here oppressive?”
“Not particularly. There is a sufficient internal freedom to countermand external restraints. Of course my roommates are something else again. Yes, they are a problem.”
“You dislike your roommates?”
He was a short, squat man—this entire institution seems to be populated by short squat men; I am one of the few lean, towering persons in the place—and as he made this last statement, framed almost as a proposal, as an item brought up for reconsideration, he leaned close toward me in a horrid assumption of familiarity, the needle still gleaming wisely in his palm. His gaze turned toward one of the blank windows, pursuing the form of a large, brown, sullen tree almost out of sight and my own gaze swung along with his, caught in the topmost branch where a single trapped bird sat heavily on a limb and dropped pellets to the ground below. As I was considering all of this—the bird was no stranger, he appeared to be part of the package which included the tree—I felt the grim, inevitable prick of the needle, as well-known and assumed as the moment of entrance itself; that cold slam dragging me back to the oldest intimation of all and I must have toppled, in my abandonment, from the bed to the floor where I sat cross-legged on my haunches confronting the assassin for several moments. He put the needle back into his pocket with an expression close to pleasure and looked at me reasonably.
“You might as well stand,” he said. “It doesn’t work that fast. Believe me, I know these chemical compounds.”
Oddly enough, the betrayal had not foamed me into rage; if anything, this confirmation of worst possibilities had left me almost completely at ease: the institution can only become oppressive through resistance and it was resistance which I was not bound to feel. I wanted to touch the attendant in the face, then, croon simple songs to him, whisper old messages and pledges; assure him that I bore him no grudge at all for what he had done to me; that there was rich, rich precedent for all of this. But this kind of demonstration has always been repugnant to me, even at moments of necessity. I stumbled to my feet and went near the window, snatched at it and tried to haul it up to take large gasps of air.
“They’re locked,” the attendant said. He now seemed perfectly at ease, immersed in a resignation which only a few moments ago had been my own. How little it takes to accomplish this shift of roles; only a little authority and there you are. The fallacy is to see roles, functions, relationships as lasting when they are merely the casual outcome of certain organic twitches. Ha, ha, ha!
