Insel (12 page)

With that acrobatic facility he had for immeasurable leaps from despair to cajolery—he readjusted himself to the station buffet—as if to get down to some business.

HIS EYES NOW PACIFIED IN A STEADY HUMAN mesmerism smiled cosily into mine.

“An was denken Sie?
” he asked in coquettish anticipation. “What are you thinking of?” Again I had that creepy impression of ultimate tension, of a cerebral elastic taut for the snap.

“—of you,” wheezed the battered record turning on his brain to my sudden visualization of Insel as a gray tomcat having a fit in a cloud of ashes and lunar spangles.

I could not tell him, no thought coincided between one on the verge of dwelling among the levels he laid bare to me and one who remained outside.

Still he went on smiling a little vaingloriously.
“An was denken Sie?”
he asked again, of God knows what girl, in God knows what decade, and all the same of me.

In my veritable séances with Insel, the clock alone retrieved me from nonentity—thrusting its real face into mine as reminder of the temporal.

Thus I saw how three whole hours went by while Insel asked me what I was thinking of. They passed off in a puff as though, for a change, he had contracted time into intensity.

All the whimsical nonsense ever conceived rotated on his eyeballs which seemed to convey “while I pretend to search for some secret in you the less danger is there of your being inquisitive as to mine.”

With every question his eyes grew greater, thrust out longer spears, unctuous in the aromatic ooze from his brain.

“What are you thinking of?” urged Insel, and the softer fell his voice, the more inflexible he knit himself together—the more terrifically to disintegrate on some signal he invoked.

So I sat with as soothing and expressionless a smile as I could concoct and answered occasionally, “I am thinking of June 18th, 1931, or of nine o’clock on Tuesday of the week before last. —What are you thinking of?” His eyes converging on me, a yellow glow fused to a single planetary dilation rapped on the sun gong.
“—An was denken Sie?”
Insel, discouraged, petrified his face before me—with a determination beyond all human power, in the “last expression” that death imposes on pain. Incredibly exact, rivalling even any original I had seen.

“I should have preferred,” he said with his voice of dead lovers crying through the earth, “to be fit for you to look at.” Then he deliberately set himself on fire.

In exact description—he did not consistently appear to the naked eye, as a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparison to the morning murk sifting through the glassed environment. As a thread in the general mass, he retained his depth of tone. But as if his astounding vibratory flux required a more delicate instrument than the eye for registration. Some infrared or there invisible ray he gave off, was immediately transferred on one’s neural current to some
dark room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its brilliancy. So one saw him as a gray man and an electrified organism at one and the same time—

—it was only the candle spluttering … preliminary to the most beautiful spectacle I have ever “seen.”

Shaken with an unearthly anxiety, this creature of so divine a degradation, set upon himself with his queer hands and began to pull off his face.

For those whose flesh is their rags, it is not pitiable to undress.

As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonization upon the table, his cheeks torn down, in bits upon the marble—one rift ran the whole length of his imperfect insulation, and for a moment exposed the “man-of-light.”

He sat there inside him taking no notice at all, made of the first jelly quivering under the sun and some final unimaginable form of aereal substance, in the same eternal conviction as the Greek fragment—

Once at dark in the Maine woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables.

At last Insel’s eyes dying of hallucination, stared suddenly into the filtered day. Horrified almost to blindness he complained, “
Es ist zu hell
.” He sounded as if deliberately quoting “it is too light”— That did not matter after all the ways he had been “happening.”

“So you’re starving, are you?” I mocked, exasperated with his total inability to estimate himself. “The greatest actor alive.”

As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of
yards ahead. He was pirouetting perplexedly around himself when I caught up with him and we got into a cab.

In that small space he behaved like a fish on the end of a line, like a kite in the air entangled in its own tail—carrying about with him, in his awful unrest, my hand to which he clung—his own had clamped so fast to it, he could hardly get it off—when I dropped him at his door.

I WAS READY TO LEAVE FOR SAINT-CLOUD WITH my little valise when there came a soft knocking on the door I was about to open, a knocking irreal as the fall of dusk. Insel had turned up again. He collapsed before me like a stricken gull having received some unavowable hurt in the unknown wastes where he belonged. The storm must have completely disintegrated his exceptional electrification.

“Um Gottes Willen
,” he panted almost inaudibly. “I cannot eat, I cannot sleep, and now my heart is ceasing to beat.”

It was remarkable he should succeed in speaking—his body no longer showed much sign of life. He might be using this body—with its interwoven identity of the living remains of a dead man and the dead remains of a man once alive—as a medium, from a distance to which his fluctuant spirit had been temporarily released.

His face having lost its bruised appearance was set in the tidy waxen consistency that makes corpses look like sudden dolls.

I might be entertaining a ghost, so light a labor I found it to draw him through the glass doors into the studio. As I dropped him onto an enormous couch, my everyday self broadcast a panic.

“Mrs. Jones, her daughter having sailed for New York, is discovered alone in her flat with a dead tramp.”

Briefly I thought of
blowing
the thing out of the window. The seeming imminence of his death allowed for no other means of getting rid of him. But this was no solution. He would be found—sprawled in the courtyard.

Then it came to me that in spite of my willful descent into a forbidden psychology, I still had sufficient power to put him to rest. “Insel,” I inquired, “can you hear me?” Then—very slowly—very distinctly, “You are going to sleep—sleep till the blue moon.”

There surged out of Insel a whisper of horror, “But my heart isn’t beating,” he protested.

“That is only a neurotic illusion,” I consoled him, believing I lied.

He lay on the couch and did not die. I began to arrange for a possible revival. “Is there anything you can drink that isn’t alcoholic?” I asked him quietly.

After a while he murmured,
“Pfeffermintztee.”

“Try to be alive when I come back,” I urged him in all sincerity.

“Where are you going?” he wanted to know, his voice a hoarse agony.

“To buy
pfeffermintztee
.”

“No—no—you’re not to leave me—
ever
.”

With a strange grip of a limp vice his fingers clung to my wrist. I had to sit down beside him. Now he was staring as if bewitched, at the parquet of the floor.

“The peppermint won’t grow out of the floor,” I advised.

“It will,” said Insel. “You’re to stay here.”

And I found myself staring together with him.

It was no peppermint growing out of the planes of polished oak. Only the creeping organic development of a microscopic undergrowth such as carpeted chaos in his work,
almost as closely cramped as the creamy convolutions of a brain. Foliage of mildew it spread—and spread.

“An infusion of that fungus would be bad for you,” I persuaded him, taking his fingers carefully apart, lifting their tentacular pulp from my wrist.

Escaping I rushed to the shop at the corner and back again. As Insel was still living, I made him his tea.

“And you will be able to sleep,” he reproached me, oblivious of his drowsiness as he fell asleep.

I could watch over my invalid through a pane of glass incompletely covered by a curtain on the door at the far end of the studio.

A dense oppression stole through the flat all packed up in its iron shutters. Insel, who had no longer been able to bear a light, lay pallid and obscure in a faint reflection from a lantern in the hall, his slumber the extinction of a dim volcano. Lax as a larva, a glow worm “gone out,” his head bared of its phosphorescent halo, seemed swollen in a meaningless hydrocephalus. As if, while conscious, electric emissions had diminished his cranial volume.

Around him the atmosphere was stale as an alcohol preserving a foetal monster he resembled in repose.

Insel was unpleasant bereft of his radiance.

His body had dwindled in distilling an immaterial essence to such concentration it was appreciable to the senses. One was aware of an effulgence, which, if it waxed and waned during his waking hours, had now altogether vanished. His body swept and garnished like the house in the Bible—devilishly invaded—was no longer human as it lay before me in the form of Insel.

There unshining and supine he seemed abandoned of all quality except the opaque. The gray inflated opacity of
his unseeing head, which, should one lift it from the pillow, must surely loll on his shoulder—the head of an idiot.

The flat seemed emptier for his being there, until I found that further off it was filled to a weird expansion with emanations drifting away from Insel asleep. They crowded the air, minute horizontal icicles, with a tingling of frozen fire. In the room at the end of the corridor their force of vitalized nothingness was pushing back the walls. Why should Insel, less ponderable than other men, impart perceptible properties to the Air? Was he leaking out of himself, residuum of that ominous honey he stored behind his eyes into which it was his constant, his distraught concern to withdraw?

In his soaring, flagging excitations he might have spent a spiritual capital and going broke, be raising exhaustive loans on the steadily decreasing collateral of his vitality, until an ultimate bonfire in those eerie eyes should be extinguished in some unimaginable bankruptcy.

In him the intangible and tangible components of a human being had come apart. As if in some ruthless extraction of Supreme Good from a fallible pulp, the vibrancy interpenetrating normal muscular fiber had been indrawn from his physical structure to condense in a point of flame. When some mysterious fuel failed him, Insel remained—a mess of profane dross.

I thought of his pictures, those queerly luminous almost materializing projections. Curious creatures moving in levitation—frequently cerebral abortions of cats.

Any student of ancient occultism would recognize them for elementals. Imbecilic, vampiric—here and there an obsessive absence of a mouth implied an inconceivable constipation. A conspicuous liver, so personal he might
have served as his own fluoroscope, clear as a pale coral was painted as only the Masters painted. He had no need to portray. His pictures grew, out of him, seeding through the inter-atomic spaces in his digital substance to urge tenacious roots into a plane surface.

I wondered in what psychic succession these monsters issued from a man, who himself when unlit or cut into profile, became so hauntingly animal, even insectile. Who, when asleep, being the makings of his own bestiary, was vilely void as an incubus—wondered why millenary monsters of a disreputable metaphysic should re-arise intact in a modern subconscious.

Insel slept for twenty hours. With one interruption. When I went in to see how he was I woke him up.

Through the slits in the shutters the outdoor lights laid narrow blades along the floor, above Insel’s feet on the whitewashed wall they crossed and cast a double shadow of a hanging fern. Otherwise the room was a mausoleum.

Again I could have sworn I beheld the dead. Silence had hardened upon him in a stony armor, too heavy for the fluttering of breath.

I listened till the sound of his rigidity grew so shrill I was forced to make it mute. Terrified, I took hold of the door and crashed it to.

Insel—who after all must, of his nature, float quite lightly on the surface of a coma—easily lifted his lids.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” I gasped. “It was necessary to make a noise to know you are not dead.”

With none of the daze of sudden rousing he excused me gently. And slept anew.

Those depths through which others plunge into sleep for him stretched shallow as moisture on a mirror.

In the morning I went out, off into the sunlight, shopping. Leaving far behind me that darkened room, and whatever it contained.

My major purchase was kilos of bright red beef.

When he awoke I fed him chunks from a great frying pan. Insel sat up and swallowed them with fairly bestial satisfaction.

“Why,” I asked to make conversation, “do you always want
‘Fleisch ohne Knochen’?
”

I had taken it for granted he ordered boneless meat to avoid waste. But Insel began peering about shockingly as if suspicious of being overheard.

“When I am alone,” he explained, in an unexpectedly vacuous voice, “I do not eat like this—I have to drag
bones
into a corner—to gnaw.”

I felt curious to know how—without teeth—. But Insel beginning to shine again put off the animal, to become the clown of an angel.

Through the row of glass doors the ornaments in the hall looked like fish under water as a celadon tide of pale lamplight sluiced into the studio. From the shutters on either side, entangled reflections flickered into the halo that was now re-forming round Insel’s face.

Stark on the
sommier
he floated up from the floor of a pool with the wavering fungus he had sown there clinging to his cover.

He told me he had found the secret of perpetual motion if only he had the money to buy the stuff. To me it seemed he had rather discovered a slow time that must result in eternity.