King Coffin

XII What It Is to Be a Stranger

If the whole apartment house had seemed hostile, on his return to it in the evening, and uglier and more prisonlike than ever after his telephone talk with Jones from the pay station in the hall (in the shadow of the elevator), it now seemed, in the soundless turmoil of time, nothing but an enormous and elaborate trap. Lying down for the twentieth time, fully dressed, on the dark bed in the dark room, he stared through the little square of window: not for any sight of the clouded and hurrying sky, but for a sharper vision of Hampden Hall. In mid-air, it was if he could reverse himself, return from halfway across the street (or from the roof of Widener Library) to see his own building from outside; as if in fact he were a bird, looking in through his own window, looking cynically downward at the dark figure on the bed which was himself. Seen thus, under the hurrying heavens, the building was simply nothing but a monster: it stood upright and unapologetic, in the midst of the mad universe, a queer hard brickwork organism with hot metal arteries and tingling nerves of copper, breathing the night air through huge vent holes on a flat roof of tar and gravel. Inside it were the human lice on which it nourished itself — it had gathered them together for the night. Among these of course was himself, lying there with his hands beneath his head; now staring out past the roof of the A.D. Club to meet the gaze of his projected spirit, which hung there like an angel in modern dress, now returning for a scrutiny of the little Buddha on its shelf. It was a prison, a trap; but it was more than that, worse than that — the whole building had seemed somehow sinister as he approached it; and after the telephone talk with Jones it had begun to seem definitely evil. The impulse to take flight had been sharp enough, he had wanted to hurry out again at once, to go anywhere, to drive a car madly into the country, even perhaps simply to go to town and get drunk. But disgust had inhibited this impulse, disgust and something else — a fear, a suspicion, an uneasy edge of self-doubt. Not fear, no — disgust, disgust, disgust, this queer new horror which, rising periodically in the back of his mind, almost on the back of his tongue, made him want to close his eyes lest he should see the world in the very act of changing its shape. And all this was not because of the telephone talk with little Jones, of course not, not at all — at most the telephone talk was a part of it, it had certainly not changed anything. No, what was sickening was the way in which all the details of his plans, his scheme, were now at every point working so well together but in a sense not quite his own: as if his own speech came back to him, from a mouthpiece, translated into an unfamiliar language. There was an ugly sort of distortion in it, everything was meanly and sneeringly caricatured, as by concave and convex mirrors; it was like the strange drawling and snarling sounds which quite ordinary and pleasant words or voices can become in a dream. With a desire to escape this he had thought of going to town, or even of simply taking a long walk, but at once to realize that the thing was inescapable. Much better had been the impulse to put it all down, to make the last entries in his journal of the adventure, add the last date to the column of dates on the map, and even to attempt to codify these impressions as if for the novel. Almost immediately, he had found himself trying to outline a queer sort of essay, a philosophic essay, but not quite philosophic either, perhaps psychological was what he meant, but of course without in the least being able to get at the thing: he had written intermittently for hours, now and again going out to walk from end to end of the long dimly lighted corridor, pausing at the one end to look down toward the river, and at the other to watch a late car or two speeding urgently along Massachusetts Avenue. All night, the world had seemed full of clocks — the grandfather clock in the professor’s apartment sent its soft tyang through the walls, Memorial Hall and Saint Paul’s dutifully and sadly echoed each other, the dreary wooden steeple of the Unitarian Church added its deeper note; but even with these to mark the passage of his feet along the corridor, the expensive shoes placed swiftly one in front of the other, the heels slightly scuffed and dragging, his eyes intent on the slight swerve with which the right foot as if carelessly placed itself, even with these the sense of time had not been so much marked as diffuse. He had got up only to sit down again, had flung himself on the bed only again to rise and begin walking, or had paced the crooked corridor only once more to sit down and try to write. It might be four o’clock, it might be five. Above Beck Hall, the sky had begun to brighten. There was a little patter of rain, a little grazing of rain, on the window. It was as if it had touched his skin, it stung him to a sudden but perhaps false alertness, he jumped up and went back to the table, looked sharply at the map, sat down.

His father’s letter—

It lay on the floor between his feet, the phrases of it looked up at him like round eyes — he had flung it there to forget it, flung it down in anger and hatred, but now it watched him. The phrases had of course stuck in his mind, only because they had so sickened him with anger and disgust — the typewritten phrases of a typical businessman’s smoothness and complacency. I do not presume to advise — as you are doutbless aware — far be it from me — I can only report that the writer of this anonymous letter says — tired of your irresponsible behavior — dragging my name into the police courts — not enough that you were a continual worry to your mother — and so on and so on.

Somebody had written to him, obviously — probably Sandbach. And Gerta must have given him the address.

And they were threatening police action?

He looked down at it, pushed it farther under the table with his toe. The hard, firm, coarse signature, written with large open letters and a heavy pen, lay there like some ugly relic of his own past, something hateful and obscene, something to be destroyed. The angry energy of hypocrisy—

To find this waiting for him in the letter box, with its menacing special delivery stamp, had undoubtedly made its contribution to his increasing sense of evil and ugliness, it had at once occurred to him — so right was his intuition — that it might be better to destroy it unread; but also it had occurred to him that it might actually contain something in the way of news. It was as if, even through the unopened envelope, he had been able to feel a threat, the encroachment of something: perhaps, however, only because the arrival of a letter from his father was in itself so unusual. He had waited, called up Jones first — keeping the letter in his pocket — and it was odd now to consider the intimate and by no means accidental connection between the two things. So intimate, in fact, that had he read the letter first he might not have telephoned to Jones at all. At any rate, it would have been necessary to consider it, to consider whether in the light of this threat the immediate project had not better be abandoned, the meeting with Jones postponed; perhaps even to consider the substitution of some one else for Jones, since it was now possible that Toppan knew who Jones was. The letter lay in his pocket speaking of this, while he himself spoke with Jones; just as later, in his room, the conversation with Jones spoke softly and disconcertingly through the curt phrases of the letter. It was peculiarly right that the two things should thus have coincided in time — but it was also peculiarly unpleasant.

He teased a cigarette from the opened packet on the red table, lit it, walked to the window. The smoke drifted backwards over his shoulder in a wide flat band of gray, undulated a little towards the floor, then softly dispersed in an upward vagueness towards the ceiling by the bathroom door. He watched it, saw the last pale thread of smoke lick neatly over the top of the door, and suddenly remembered that long ago he had meant to make a study of drafts in this fashion. “The flight of cigarette smoke is only a draft made manifest.” He said this aloud, as he crossed the room to open the door to the corridor, he said it with amusement, and then added:

— There goes the professor’s clock.

The clock had struck the half hour. Standing just outside the corridor door he blew upward a long soft plume of smoke, blew it towards the top of the doorjamb, but not forcibly: with the effect, therefore, of merely releasing, for observation, a trial balloon of smoke, a willing cloud. After a barely perceptible pause, the smoke billowed downward very slightly and then swooped in a long wide dispersed wave upward into the room. Keeping quite still, lest his own movement create any artificial current of air, he repeated the action: again the smoke swirled neatly, after a moment’s hesitation, into the quiet room — obviously the air in the corridor was warmer than the air inside. This being the case, the current near the floor must, of course, flow the other way. Stooping close to the linoleum floor he exhaled a soft cloud before him. It wavered, broke, and came loosely backward across and round his face. Exactly as one would expect.

The same thing would probably be true of the doors to the bedroom and the kitchenette?…

The bedroom worked beautifully — the draft was sharper, more dramatic, the smoke was as if violently seized, hurled headlong down invisible rapids. But the kitchenette, presumably because its window was shut, or simply because it was out of the path of the main currents, was a disappointment: the movement of the smoke, whether at floor or ceiling, was scarcely perceptible, sluggish, equivocal. In fact, it would go exactly where propelled. He blew cloud after cloud into the little boxlike room, it hung swaying and gently convolving over the table, over the white enameled refrigerator, over the gas stove, almost motionless, passive. It was like a backwater of a river: it was stagnant; and looking at it he became abruptly aware of the profound nocturnal silence. It was that moment between night and morning when the traffic is stillest, the brief interval between the end of the night life and the beginning of the day — the hour when life is at its ebb. In hospitals, people were now in the act of dying. And in Reservoir Street, at this instant—

He turned quickly away, walked to the corridor and closed the door. Returning, he stared out at the palely brightening clouds, heard again that grazing patter of the drizzle on the pane, saw the little chain of fine bright beads which had been lightly etched there. But the rain could make no difference — it neither added to nor subtracted from the wide appearance and nature of things. The structure beneath it was exactly the same, — undiminished, loyal, unsentimental: what one had made, or what one was making, was still the same, kept its hard and clear identity. And the whole face of the world, if one now dared to see it thus, was one enormous growing “thing”—a vast and dreadful or beautiful flower: a flower which, if beautiful, was also terrible: as if the universe might be simply a single outrageous pond-lily whose roots were murderous. Yes, it was exactly that. The blood drawn up by that profound taproot made possible the thrust and loveliness of the blind enormous flower: the perfect synthesis of good and evil. And if this was so, if life was in essence really like this, why then was it possible to feel any compunctions? Unless, of course, one simply failed outright in one’s attempt to identify oneself at all points with life: failed, at it were, to stretch oneself co-terminally with the four points of the cross, and to become, oneself, cruciform.…

The idea was not new, he had thought of it in fact at the very beginning, though not perhaps in quite such terms or so neatly. The structure of evil had been manifest and omnipresent, the evil in himself he had always quite recognized, or had at all events wanted to recognize: it needed no justification, was natural and right, and the whole action had in the end revolved quite properly around his decision to face the real shape of the world and to shape his own deed accordingly. But it seemed to him that he had never actually seen the vision, the tree-shaped vision, the lily-shaped vision, so clearly and perfectly as now. It was something of this that he had tried to put down in his rapid notes, the orderly sheets of which lay on the table beneath the map — but to look at them now was only to realize that vision is one thing, action or speech another. He said aloud, tearing the paper with deliberate hands:

— Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics. Few are the mystics! I must have a drink, and I must go slow.

But he made no move toward the kitchenette, where the whisky stood on the shelf, he stood still, aware that he was looking at nothing, he thought for a moment that perhaps the best thing would be to write, quite suddenly and quite simply—as if for the renewal of a lost contact with a swiftly sinking world — to Gerta. My dear Gerta, if it is not now, not already, too late — if now with the impediment in my speech removed—

Impossible.

It was not the conversation on the telephone with Jones which had done this — how could it be? It was not even clear that the conversation with Jones had anything to do with it. The logic of that, the logic of the consequences of that, was flawless: there had been no mistake: the whole thing now stood, from beginning to end, as perfect as a theorem in algebra. Jones, Karl Jones, would meet him on Friday, they would drive together to Concord — to meet the mythical partner and discuss the mythical advertising campaign — Jones had assented to the plan almost with alacrity — and with this was concluded the final pure curve of the idea. The ultimate cutting-off had thus been accomplished, the separation from humanity; the individual had asserted himself, stood alone in the full horror of a light which permitted no moral shadows: or none, at any rate, save those created by his own will and for his own purpose. The stranger had been identified — hadn’t he? — as Jones, and as such could thus be destroyed: the strangeness in Jones had been recognized, with its terror and its pure desirability; it had been observed carefully and inimically as the thing-that-wants-to-be-killed; it could be killed. There is no compromise with the object, no placid or reasoned acceptance of it. It is seen, understood, and destroyed. The vision is pure.

Yes!

But suddenly he felt that he must close his eyes; and opening them again, he as suddenly felt, for no clear reason, that he must clap his hands sharply together before him, turn quickly, look at something else, something new—do something, go somewhere. He clapped his hands together again, walked toward the waterfall without seeing it, revolved quickly away from it, and made as he did so a gesture with his hands such as he knew (and painfully) he had never in his life made before: a queer forward thrust of the hands, stiffly parallel, the fingers tensely apart, as if he were in fact reaching for something. It lasted only a moment, his arms fell limply to his sides, limply and a little self-consciously, almost perhaps ashamedly. This wouldn’t do, this wasn’t right at all! Once more he began to feel as if he were in some subtle way being indecently hurried; like a person who in stepping on to an escalator miscalculates its speed. It was as if one were rather cruelly and undignifiedly yanked, dislocated — and with that feeling of disgust with oneself which makes one disinclined for the time being to look at oneself in a mirror. To lose control—

He stepped into the dark bedroom, approached the dressing-table mirror and without turning on the light leaned on his hands towards the obscure image which he saw coming forward to meet him there. For a second, the face that looked out at him was not his own face, but the face of Jones. It looked at him merrily, impertinently — exactly as if it were going to wink. It was only a trick of the light — it was because the light was behind him — the sharp illusion was gone as soon as it had come — but the effect was nonetheless extraordinary. The face was his own, of course, he leaned again towards it on trembling hands, feeling weak and shaken, and as he examined his eyes, his mouth, his cheeks, the wide and pallid forehead, it seemed to him that his face had somehow changed. It seemed, in fact, in some subtle and dreadful way, to have lost its meaning. There was no character in it, no significance — it had become a more featureless area: a kind of mask: something seen from outside …

Had Jones done this?…

It was as if Jones, in that moment of vision, had said something, or been about to say something: as if, in thus interposing himself, he had somehow managed to make some preposterous sort of statement or claim. He had been about to say “I am no stranger than you are”; or perhaps “Aren’t you really a stranger yourself? Have you thought of that?”; or else, simply, “Now you know what it is to be a stranger.”

The words seemed actually to hang in the air; and it was with a feeling of automatically echoing them that he said aloud:

— Now you know what it is to be a stranger. Now you know! Jasper Ammen.

And certainly, now, he was looking at himself from an immense distance, and with a detachment which amounted really to cruelty and enmity. Or was it fear? Or was it amusement? One could say calmly, now, that the face was absurd, one could say that it was just an arrangement of lines and planes and colors, that it was obscene, that it was ugly. It was as surprising and as mean, as vital and objectionable, as definitely something to be suspected and distrusted and perhaps destroyed, as some queer marine creature which one might find on overturning a wet rock by the sea. It was conscious and watchful, its eyes looked out of the pool of the mirror with a hard animal defensive sharpness, clearly it was dangerous and alert. It might have to be killed. If one were to put out a hand or a stick and touch it—

But the thought was unbearable, he flung himself on the bed and said:

— I must try to sleep. I must try to get a few hours sleep.

He closed his eyes, and immediately the conversation with Jones on the telephone began to repeat itself. Not tomorrow, no. I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse me. I can’t talk to you now, you see everything is upset, we’ve had an accident, my wife has just had a stillborn baby, and tomorrow is impossible as the funeral is in the morning at Mount Auburn. Yes, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry.… Perhaps Friday. Yes, Friday would be all right.… The dreadful shameless gentleness of the voice, the soft accent of concern, in which nevertheless there was no self-pity: the naked raw glibness of the confession on the telephone, the awkward glibness — the ordinary humble unavoidableness of the calm voice having to say such things on the telephone—You’ll have to excuse me now—as if he merely had an engagement for lunch, or had to go to the toilet. It had seemed so entirely simple, so almost meaningless, this series of tragic and placid statements, there in the corner of the marble-floored hall, beside the wrought-iron grill of the elevator; as if they might have been discussing the weather, or the prospects for the baseball season: except, of course, for the careful gentleness of Jones’s voice, the rather unsophisticated and surprised gentleness, calculated for the occasion. Not quite calculated, either — for what had been really disconcerting was the natural sound of the sorrow in the voice, as if Jones, taken off guard, didn’t know how to conceal his suffering. And thus, the whole scene had come to him over the telephone — the smell of ether in the garden, the revolving clotheshorse lifting its spiny arms in the lamplight, the empty ash can waiting at the curb, the doctor’s car, the shabby cellar, the coal-bins, the swiftly moving shadows on the ceiling of the upper bedroom, and then that moment when the shadows had suddenly ceased to move, and finally the woman’s cry, so queer, so quavering, so soft—

Christ!

He opened his eyes quickly and blindly, as if to do so would stop the whirl of impressions and phrases — it was if he were drunk, or sick, and sought any sight of the world, any fragmentary and lurching vision of a wall or ceiling, to check the wild swoop of his vertigo. And now the daybreak was square and bright in the little window, as sharp and immediate as the tiny jeweled picture in the finder of a camera, each moving cloud separate and round and distinct and with a color forever its own, never to be repeated, immortal. It was as good as a cinema, as comforting as the sight of moving water, he lay and watched the irregular regularity of the cloud-procession, listened to the faint intermittent claw-grazing of the little rain, tried to fix his attention there, to avert his attention by averting his face. And for a while it was in fact as if he had managed to fall asleep with his eyes wide open. He felt like a cat, with the cunning of a cat, allowed his mind to be lulled by the activity of his eyes, permitted all the motion of his consciousness to concentrate there on the surface, in those two points of sight. His hands were still, his body was still, his feet were softly pressed against the footboard of the bed, he breathed as lightly as possible. It was the process of becoming a cloud, or of becoming nothing but a consciousness of cloud: even the sounds came to him only indistinctly and tangentially: he refused to admit them: the bell-sounds, the car-sounds, the slamming of a door, the milkman hurrying along the hall, clinking his bottles, the first morning hum of the elevator, summoned down to the second floor by Jack, the janitor — aware of these, he also dismissed them, allowing himself to become simply a recipient of light. It was all like a world of glass, translucent, brittle, precarious, but infinitely precious. It was like having an enormous pain, which even to breathe was to invite: as long as one held one’s breath, it vanished. When one breathed again, one tried it cautiously, round the edges and corners, one sent down to begin with the tiniest little tentacle of air, a silver thread of exploration—

But it was no use. It was all no use. As soon as one did try to breathe, that preposterous and incredible mountain of sensation was there again, the unbelievable shape once more had to be believed. As in a nightmare the figure of the old woman seen in the street reappears vaguely again in the distance at the quayside, or on the ship, perhaps altered and unrecognizable, and later is heard mounting the stairs behind one, with a sort of scrambling and sinister haste, coughing and sneezing as she comes, and to one’s gaze over the banisters lifts at last the face of which the horror, hitherto not admitted or confessed, is freely and lethally given, so to his consciousness, through all its elaborate structure of dispersal, came the beginnings and misremembered fragments of that conversation with Jones. It could not have happened, and yet it had happened: that he should have leaned there at the public telephone in the hall by the elevator, with Jack standing at the front door to take his last nocturnal look at the weather, holding a dust-cloth in his hand, and that instead of an unruffled arrangement of the final plan should have occured this sudden plunge into the murkiest and ugliest and most painful of unsolicited intimacies—

But why should it be painful? Why should he want both to think of it and not think of it?

You’ll have to excuse me, I can’t talk to you now, you see everything is upset, we’ve had an accident—

An accident! The word looked a mile long, he was walking slowly from end to end of it, sparrows were chirping on the window ledge above Plympton Street, he must have slept. It was a quarter to eight, and still lightly raining. There was no time to lose, for Jones would probably go to Mount Auburn early — it wasn’t the sort of thing one dawdled about. And to make the necessary inquiries, one would have to get there first.