“Yes” (with this one word Sorger finally accepted as an obligation what for so long he had only mused about). At times Lauffer had really been his friend, and recently he had been one with the woman in their true, screaming, and clutching bodiesâbut what presumption in him, the “Stranger” (the name of an emetic fungus), to importune these two with the claims of a “friend” or “lover.”
Sorger did not foresee that these two would come together, he saw their union before him in the present: the perfect couple, the consummate student of earth forms and the divine beast.
No one asked why he was laughingâthey knew. And the next moment placed Sorger, who mechanically went on playing, in the midst of a prehistoric event that was just taking place. In the river there was a narrow, gently sloping island with a small, rounded hollow in the middle, where the conifers, which were sparse and stunted everywhere else, grew dark and dense. This hollow had probably resulted from an underground cavern, into which Sorgerâwhile his fellow players, who at that very moment were on a level with his eyes, rose to the upper edge of his field of visionâsank all at once, as slowly as in a dream. Already moss was growing in the pit and dark bears rose up between the trees.
As though in triumph, Sorger went out into the open. He moved in the glow of the windows; outside, there was no other light, not even the dot of a star. At first he saw the two of them sitting at the table; then the
bushes merged with the receding bright rectangle, as though the panes had been smeared with dirt. “Please forget me.” He saw so little ahead of himânow and then, a lighter-colored stone silhouetteâthat he had to feel his way with his feet and elbows. Not even a splashing; only a soft scraping from time to time.
Then nothing more stood out from the darkness; at last, no more images. A short while before, all distinct surfaces, regardless of color (wasn't there such a thing as a wedding color?), had reminded him of dead people, as though he were staring at those who had died there. Then he saw the river flowing in the darkness: thick anthracite against thinner black; and these forms, as a painter he admired had said, were now his “performers”; able to “perform” in his place because they were unabashed, free of his embarrassment.
Once all recognized techniques had been applied to the description of a phenomenon, Sorger's science called for one additional, ultimate technique, which he called “comprehensive vision”; here, in the face of the black-on-black Arctic night, such comprehensive vision was achieved, though it had not been planned and the requisite composure was lacking; a different sort of calm took hold of him (he literally experienced center and depth) and at the same time reached out beyond him; it warmed the palms of his hands (and his gently spreading fingers), arched the balls of his feet, made him conscious of his teeth, and transformed the whole of him into a body which became a radically extroverted organ of all the senses. Seeing himself in strips of darkness, he was overpowered by the calm of a savageâwhich could be expressed only in the one word “beautiful.”
Not merely turning his head, but nimbly twisting his shoulders and hips on their axis, he recognized in the
darkness that his life would inevitably become dangerous. He did not see the dangers; he had an intimation of them; he could not go looking for them, they were necessity itself; he had an intimation of necessary solitude and continued remoteness; and all these intimations crowding in on him, but forming no clear prophecy, added up to a feeling of adventure, as if he had just gone away from all his dear ones with no possibility of return; and, his head whirling with the intoxication of being forever alone, he rejoiced out loud: “No one knows where I am. No one knows where I am!” (For a moment the moon appeared, and he hissed at it.)
And then he heard a whimpering beside him in the darkness, as of an abandoned child. Or was it the breathing of some large animal?
But it was only a human, standing beyond reach but fairly near him, clearing his throat to show no harm was intended. And between these two, who could not see each other, the following words were said: “Hi, stranger. How are you feeling this evening?” Sorger: “Fine, thank you. How are you?” The speaker: “Short autumn. Run out of fuel.” Sorger: “Isn't there a woodpile down by the river?” The speaker: “Good river. Fine summer. Long winter. Could you spare a quarter, mister?” (A hand, warm like Sorger's own, took the coin.) The speaker: “God bless you, man. Green northern lights, yellow around the edges. Where you from?” Sorger: “Europe.” The speaker: “I'm going to tell you something. Never look at the snow too long. It can make you blind. That's what happened to me. Want me to tell you something else?” Sorger: “No, thank you.” “You're welcome, friend. Don't eat too much fish. Enjoy the rest of your stay here. Take care. Have a good time. Pleasant trip. Touch home soon.”
Sorger heard the speakerâwhether Indian or white, man or woman, he couldn't be sureâmoving off in the darkness, and sure of the way, sure of his direction and his body, he ran back to the village and the gabled house. The other two were standing at the window but didn't turn their heads in his direction, as though they hadn't even noticed his absence, or as if he had already been so forgotten that he would have to breathe at them. Over the Indian woman's shoulder, two glassy fox eyes stared at him.
No more talk; for a last time the smooth woman drew him to her with both her hands, pushed him away with a little laugh, and grazed him with a look of astonishment in which her whole face seemed to expand, though no part of it moved; but Sorger had thrown his arms around his friend, who had taken his place beside her in the goodbye line; and in the end gone dutifully (“the mail plane and all that”) to bed in the next room, which was suddenly (but not for very long) freezing cold.
In his sleep, Sorger kept waiting for someone who didn't come. Once he woke up and saw the cat crouching in the corner of the room. “Monumental little beast.” Quietly addressing the cat, he coaxed it to him. It came and laid its head on his knees. The cat wanted to live: and Sorger wanted to be forgotten by his best friends and perish. Unthinkingly he addressed the cat as “child,” loved it (his arms grew strong with love), and named his loved one with its color: “Black-and-white.”
In a dream, Sorger's brain became a map of the world, and when he woke up, he was a mound of earth with a lot of stones in it. In the gray of dawn, Lauffer was lying in the supposedly empty room, a malignant grimace with closed eyes. Hauling his suitcase, Sorger passed the absently
staring cat, which now gave no sign of knowing him. He left many possessions in the house. “Let's get out of here!”
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At sunrise in the mail plane (he was sitting in back with some Indians who had already dozed off) Sorger saw the yellow foliage of a lone birch smiling out of the endless virgin pine forest, thought of the Indian woman (“There's a sweet woman down there”), and sat up straight with directionless curiosity, which soon changed to a feeling of hunger, not for anything tangible, but for whatever might be coming. Without images, he anticipated “the future.” In the midst of his imageless fantasy, he saw the pilot turn around and read from his lips the words: “We have to turn back.”
The reason for turning back was the first snowstorm of the winter on the high plateau beyond the southern mountain ranges, where the larger settlement (formerly a gold-mining center), where one could change to a jet, was situated. Even as the pilot was looping back, the landscape changed its face. A round swampy lake became a hypnotic stare; meandering little rivers took on so dense a covering of aquatic plants that a sparkling of water could be seen only here and there, and the long gullies on the hillsides, long, straight stripes etched into the rubble by the spring thaw, curved in all directions. The plane would not be able to leave again until the following morning.
After landing, Sorger stood motionless at the edge of the little airstrip. There he and his suitcase loomed as in a fun-house mirror, with short fat legs and a great long neck. He hadn't been gone very long, just time enough for a short plane ride, but the whole village seemed to have turned into “premises” closed to the public. Sitting
down on his suitcase, he turned “village” and laughed at himself, Sorger. Never had he come home to such unreality. How was he to avoid being seen? He stood up, started walking, and, shrugging his shoulders, changed direction. Play was no longer possible: the phony colors of the empty housefronts, the disenchanted water of the phony riverâand through this utterly threadbare world, with an affectation of hail-fellow-well-met-ness, zigzagged not a face but the grin of a simpleminded dupe.
Not knowing where to go, he became dangerousânot as an aggressor, but as a potential victim.
A man of no particular age was walking ahead of the irresolute Sorger on the narrow path; moving as slowly as Sorger, he was not deep in thought, but neither was he looking at anything, and as a result the slowness of his walk gradually took on an air of viciousness. He didn't look around, but from time to time showed a bit of eyeless profile, as dogs sometimes do in running past. At length he stepped to one side, pulled a tire chain out of his pocket, and, clutching the heavy thing in his fist, came straight at “me!”
Just as he had no age, the man seemed to belong to no race. Bright eyes without a center. Whenever his knees threatened to crumple, he twisted his lips, but did not smile. When he (“actually”) hauled off with the chain, neither of the two had a face left; in that moment the whole world contracted and became tragicomically faceless.
“Dear brother.” The drunk brought the chain down on the suitcase, which burst open, and fell on top of it, dead to the world.
Sorger pushed the inert body away and, taking his belongings under his arm, went straight to the gabled house, which greeted him with its earthly beauty. By
then he was so furious and hated everybody so intensely that all his movements had become angular. The door was locked, and he sat down on the wooden steps in front of it. A falling leaf touched the back of his head like a paw, but the cat was inside the house, strolling about the deserted rooms, now and then making a play movement, wholly absorbed in its own reflexes, which helped it to pass the time, whereas the man on the steps outside was humiliated by his forced idleness. The boot scraper at his feetâwhich reminded him of the floorboards in a bathhouseâand the basketball lying beside it seemed to add insult to injury.
The assault had humiliated rather than hurt him; more than violence, it had been an expression of contempt for his person and belongings, as though a voice had shouted: “You and your photographs! You and your drawings! You and your scientific papers!” Only then did Sorger hit backâwith his fist in the air. There was no more Far North, only the weather, which was cold and gray, as it had always been for an idler who, in the space under the huts, saw not Lauffer's “small static earth forms” but only rusting junk; while in the meantime his work, whose secret, he had thought, was known to him alone, was being done by some anybody, effortlessly, with one among many simultaneous manipulations. For a moment, when that creature lifted his chain to strike, Sorger had been dead; now he was alive again, but the formlessness was still there; the next moment of formlessness was already pulsating in the immensity of time; as in dire pain, he felt at once minute and limitless, an intolerably heavy dot and an intolerably weightless immensity. Once again the Indian woman was the “other race,” and whatever might happen in the interim, she was sure in the end to plan his destruction. “And you, Lauffer, if you lie to
other people”âsaid Sorger, grown abusive in his formlessnessâ“it's because their company, whoever they may be, makes you miserableâbut on the other hand you don't want them to know it, because you're an amiable, kindhearted, compassionate sort, yet basically morose.”
At this point the angry orator, becoming aware of himself as a formless creature with, somewhere, too small a breathing hole, looked up and saw the surface of the water, as though it were gazing at him. This level ground was much too quiet; Sorger expected an eruption; he felt the need to see a mountain coming into being that minute, or at the very least a boulder breaking off from a cliff. He jumped up and kicked the ball against the wall of the house, so violently that, in rebounding, it whistled in his ear; then he went on playing without catching his breath until the pebbles before his eyes sparkled like flowers and he felt creepy, playing by himself.
When he stopped, he saw the rows of low clouds behind him over the water. They were pale-bright and motionless, not flat underneath as usual, but rounded. A gust of wind blew from deep within the landscape, and suddenly great snowflakes were falling, whirling darkly on the horizon like a swarm of locusts, not from all the clouds at once, but from one after another at short intervals, breaking loose from the clouds and rushing downward like a series of avalanches, until at length a brief but powerful squall descended with a dry crackling sound on the house and the man standing in front of it, while not a single flake was falling on the great fluvial plain.
Just then, under the uniformly gray sky, a dense, windless, slow snowfall set in which tickled the lips and turned the surroundings of the house into a fairyland. Radiant joy! Delicious sweat! Unable to breathe only a moment before, Sorger ran into the recaptured air; a bundle of
life, he ran several times around the house, shouting as in eternal childhood. Soon his dear colleague (visible at a distance in the flat tundra) turned up and was not a little surprised. So the hours passed in a new, sad, and formally perfect friendliness, until the next day, when Valentin Sorger, equipped with a different suitcase, flew from that nameless neck of the woods, where already the wintry dusk was taking over (but in which two pairs of eyes belonging to Lauffer and the Indian woman were clearly discernible), into the world of names. In the university town on the west coast of the continent where he had once spent a few years, there was a wide street, lined for the most part with gas stations and shopping centers, named Northern Lights Boulevard.