The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (93 page)

—Where’d you hear that?

—I studied medicine, Anselm said, mumbling as he did usually when admitting to something favorable about himself; and as immediately embarrassed at so having drawn their attention, tore from his magazine “P
ILES
! Amazingly fast palliative relief . . . No mess or sticky fingers! . . . It’s Better, Faster, Easier to use! . . .” Beneath that: “G
OD
Wants You . . . Poor health? Money troubles? . . . A remarkable New Way of Prayer that is helping thousands to glorious New Happiness and Joys . . .” —Here Stanley, take your choice. It’s all one anyhow, he said, rolling the cover closed on
Can Freaks Make Love?

—You know, the trouble with you, you’re all mothers’ sons, Max said to them. Stanley stopped stirring his coffee and looked up, Anselm turned on him, Hannah had turned away. —You and Anselm and Charles, Max smiled agreeably to Stanley. —And Otto? he added, looking at Otto who said,

—As a matter of fact, I just finished dinner with my father a little while ago.

—Otto’s part of a series of an original that never existed, Max said as though he had not heard.

—What do you mean, you . . .

—That’s what you told me yourself yesterday, didn’t you? Max drew him on.

—But no, Otto rubbed his hand over his eyes. —The series didn’t exist but the original existed. The original did. It had to. He sat there looking glazed-eyed for a moment, then turned to Stanley. —I just had dinner with my father, he said, as though remembering back over a great distance, or attempting to separate a distant image from one which had recently supplanted it. —For the first time, he added.

—Did you like him? Stanley asked uncertainly.

—It’s a funny feeling. It was strange, sort of . . . I feel like I’d lost something, like . . . I feel like nobody sort of . . . Staring straight ahead of him, he rubbed his forehead, and his wrist, descending, paused to press against his ribs, where no identity interrupted his contagion with himself. —I don’t know, he mumbled, licking his naked lip, and went on in a low tone to Stanley, —Look, if you had a friend, somebody you haven’t seen for a long time and he . . . someone else takes his place, but he still . . . I don’t know. Never mind.

—You’re drunk, Anselm offered.

—That’s funny, Otto persisted without looking up at Max. —To say the original never existed! Look, he went on to Stanley, —Suppose you knew somebody who used to be a friend and who . . . and you found out he was, well like Mister Feddle, putting names on things that weren’t his, I mean . . .

—You know who I envy? Anselm broke in on them impatiently. —I envy Christ, he had a disease named after him. Hahaha, hey Stanley?

Stanley pretended not to hear. He looked up from his cold coffee and said to Otto, —But if Mister Feddle saw a copy of a play by Ibsen, if he loves
The Wild Duck
and wishes he had written it, he wants to be Ibsen for just that moment, and dedicate his play to someone who’s been kind to him, is that lying? It isn’t as bad as people doing work they have no respect for at all. Everybody has
that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of . . . recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn’t be sinful to want to have created beauty?

—Why don’t you go home and read Saint Anselm before you talk like this? said Anselm sitting forward, opening his eyes which he had closed as though attempting sleep here. —“The picture, before it is made is contained in the artificer’s art itself,” he said. “And any such thing, existing in the art of an artificer, is nothing but a part of his understanding itself.”

—Saint Anselm. Dig him, said the haggard face bobbing over the back of the booth. —What are you trying to prove?

—I’m proving the existence of God, God damn you. Saint Augustine says a man who is going to make a box has it first in his art. The box he makes isn’t life, but the one that exists in his art is life. “For the artificer’s soul lives, in which all these things are, before they are produced.”

—Where’s God? In the box?

—You dumb son of a bitch . . .

—What’s your favorite song, Anselm?

—
Nola
. Now screw, will you.

—I wish I had written
The Wild Duck
, Stanley said.

—I’m high, man.

—On what?

—On tea. We been balling all night. Have you got any? Hey Saint Anselm, have you got any charge? The haggard face hung over the back of the booth like a separate floating entity, rolling the eyes toward Max, to say, —He’s in training. To be a saint.

—I notice he doesn’t eat meat, is that the reason Anselm? Max asked. —So that your body won’t . . .

—What God damn business is it of yours?

—Save the bones for Henry Jones . . . gurgled the haggard face.

—Anselm, preaching leftovers of the bleak ruin of Judaism, Max commenced with sententious ease, —a watered-down humanism . . .

—Cause Henry don’t eat no meat. Hey Anselm, I got something for you.

—What are you supposed to know about religion? Anselm turned on Max.

—As Frazer says, Max explained indulgently, —the whole history of religion is a continuous attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find sound theory for absurd practices . . .

—And what does Saint Augustine mean when he talks about the Devil perverting the truth and imitating the sacraments?

—This sacrament will go the way of all the rest of them, Max smiled. —It won’t be long before they’re sacrificing Christ to God as God’s immortal enemy.

—Hey Anselm, listen to this, Daddy-o noster. Daddy-o, up in thy way-out pad. You are the coolest, and we dig you like too much . . .

—The god killed, eaten, and resurrected, is the oldest fixture in religion, Max went on suavely. —Finally sacrificed in the form of some sacred animal which is the embodiment of the god. Finally everyone forgets, and the only sense they can make out of the sacrament is that they must be sacrificing the animal to the god because that particular animal is the god’s crucial enemy, responsible for the god’s death . . .

—Crucial! . . . Anselm spat out.

—Thy joint be right, the squares be swung . . . the haggard face continued, reading from a scrap of paper.

—And what does Justin Martyr mean, when he says “the evil spirits practice mimicry”? Anselm demanded. —Crucial! . . .

—Help us to score for some scoff today, and don’t jump us salty if we come on like a drag, cause like we don’t put down other cats when
they
goof . . . the haggard face went on in the silence straining between Anselm and Max. —For thine is the horse, the hash, and the junk . . .

—God damn you! give me that God-damned thing! Anselm burst out, swinging round and tearing the paper from the loose fingers; and the haggard face dropped out of sight, to bob up once more with, —Cause face it . . . and disappear again, as Anselm tore the shred of paper into smaller and smaller bits.

—Look Anselm, Max said coming up to him, —why don’t you be reasonable? You’ll end up like Charles, this pose of yours . . .

—Like Charles! And you, what . . . be reasonable! Anselm got to his feet. —This pose! this . . . Gott-trunkener Mensch, yes, you . . . be reasonable! That’s what they called Spinoza, your prince of rationalists, damn him, you know what they offered Spinoza to conform? A thousand florins. “Conform outwardly” they told him, but what did he do, he changed his name from Baruch to Benedictus. The prince of rationalists!

Max had taken a step back, and another, smiling as though embarrassed for Anselm, as Anselm came on. —And what did they do, they damned him, the lens-maker Spinoza. They excommunicated him, right into the darkness of reason. The Schammatha, they damned him in the name that contains forty-two letters, they damned him in the name of the Lord of Hosts, and the Tetragrammaton, in the name of the Globes, and the Wheels, and the Mysterious Beasts . . .

Max was backing toward the door, toward the man in the checked suit who said, —To tell the truth I wouldn’t dare go in there, they’re all nuts. —I’m freezing to death, said his companion.

—In the name of Prince Michael and the Ministering Angels, Metateron, Achthariel Jah, the Seraphim, the Ofanim . . . Anselm went on shrilly as Max backed out into the night. —The trumpets dropped, they reversed the candles, Amen, there’s the Schammatha, damned right into the darkness of Reason . . . and he stood quivering in the empty doorway for a minute, indifferent to the eyes turned on him. Then he spat in the street and came back to the table where Otto had just stood preparing to leave. —Here, take this, Anselm said to him, holding out his magazine. —There’s a special article in it,
Can Freaks Make Love?
with illustrations, a “rare photo of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, with two of their natural children . . .” He slumped in his chair again, and after a moment started to whistle, rasping through his teeth.

—What is that? what you’re whistling, it’s Bach isn’t it?

He looked up at Stanley, and after a moment, —Yes, he admitted, —the seventy-eighth cantata. His elbow rested on
The Moan of the Tiber
.

—An aria? Stanley asked to his empty face.

—“We hasten with feeble but diligent footsteps” . . . a duet, Anselm said vaguely, watching Stanley stir the cold coffee, with a lifeless chill in his eyes. —Sung by women, by women’s voices . . .

Stanley gasped, lifting the spoon from the coffee cup. —What is it? he whispered, as the thing slipped back into the coffee. He raised it out again.

—Ha, ha, hahaha . . .

The alarm clock strung to Mr. Feddle’s neck went off.

—What is it? It’s a . . . he held it in the air, unable to move, staring at it.

—You can use it for a bookmark, Stanley. For when you read Malthus. Hahahahaha . . . look at what Stanley found in his coffee.

—Anselm, did you . . .

—Hahahahahahahahaha

Mr. Feddle shut the clock off with one hand, finished his beer with the other, bowed to three people, stumbling away from the hollow desperate laughter behind him, out the door where he bumped the man in the checked suit who said, —There, there he goes, out the other door, the side door.

Above emptied streets, the roseate heaving persisted; above bodies contorted with sleep, strewn among the battlements erected in this common war without end, some wrenched as though in the last
embrace, spoke with tongues, untended and unattended, extended limbs and members to come up against the thigh of another fallen, and be similarly still, or rise distended to enter the warm nest again and swim in the dark channel, committing the final assault in the anonymity of exhaustion, hearts emptied of prayer. But the blood-luster of the sky witnessed that the battle was not done, though all were slain: it shone like the sky over the Campagna where Attila’s Huns met the Romans in engagement so fierce that all were slain in deed, extreme but inconclusive, for their spirits continued the battle three nights and days over the field of unburied dead.

In the bar of a midtown hotel where the rear guard bivouacked among chrome and glass, scarred, alert, at battle stations (for there’s no discharge in the war), Otto rested his left arm openly before him, raised one eyebrow, turned his lips down at the corners, flared his nostrils, and paid with a twenty-dollar bill. He spilled his drink. —Better give me another, he said. —Irish.

—You’ve had enough, Jack.

—Will you give me another drink?

—You’ve had enough tonight. Go home and sleep it off.

—Have I had enough? May I buy you a drink, madame?

—Come on, Jack, don’t start any trouble. Leave the lady alone.

—I’m talking to her, not to you.

—Come on, fellow. Be a sport. Get the hell out of here.

The man in the checked suit came in the street door as Otto, clutching
Can Freaks Make Love?
rolled in his right hand, strode from the bar into the lobby of the hotel.

—You want to buy some pictures?

—Pictures? Otto asked, turning.

—Girls, you know?

—Just girls?

—Yeh, what’sa matter, you queer? He started to thrust back into the envelope the pictures he had half displayed, tangles of white limbs.

—Don’t I know you? Otto stared at the young man, the hat on the back of his head, the extinguished cigarette stub in the corner of his mouth. —You don’t know me, Mac, the young man said quickly. —You don’t know me. You want these or not.

—Let’s see them.

—What’s the matter, you don’t trust me? I can’t bring them out here. A buck for the pack.

—All right, here. Here. Otto handed him a one-dollar bill.

In the men’s room, he opened the envelope. A sailor banged the door, coming in, and Otto went into a booth. He stared at the first picture; and then sat down, staring at it. He turned it up, and
looked at each one, his fingers quivering against their glossy surfaces, at each one quickly, ascertaining the face, unable to contain the whole figure in his apprehension, seizing at details, the unfamiliar maple chair she sat on, curled in, the Venetian blinds, the wallpaper, the upholstery pattern on the chair, her fingernails, the lines of her knuckles, the irregular dent of her navel and the two full blots swelling toward him, detailed blemishes on the expanse of her flesh, which delineated it but could not bring it to life in any variety of pose and exposure, obstacles at which his gaze stumbled, passing over the shadowed white in a silent mania of search which led him helplessly to her face, and deserted him there, fixed by the mouth which stigmatized his hunger, fixed by the eyes which knew him, and did not move.

Aware of silence, he stared at these blemished rubrics, WARNING! ALL SO-CALLED PROPHYLACTIC TUBES . . . NOT SANITU . . . GENUINE!, on the metal door before him, conscious only now the sounds of it ceased that the sailor had been sick in a wash basin.

—Hey, come on out, you want a good browning?

He sat, paralyzed by silence, suddenly cold and in detailed motion, shivering. The metal door before him banged, and rattled on the latch. —Hey, come out of there, what are you doin in there, poundin your pork?