The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

GEHENNA

How easily—reflected Smith, or Jones, or Robinson, or whatever his name happened to be—our little world can go to pieces! And incidentally, of course, the great world; for the great world is only ourselves writ large, is at best nothing but a projection of our own thought, and of our own order or disorder in thought. It was a moment’s presumption that led a genius to write that genius and madness are near allied; proximity to madness is not a privilege of genius alone; it is the privilege and natural necessity of every consciousness, from the highest to the lowest; Smith and Robinson are as precariously hung in the void as Shakspeare himself. Do we not know that even the animals go mad? Have we not been informed that an ant, afflicted with a tumor of the brain, will walk in circles, bite his neighbors, and in every sense behave abnormally? His internal order, or habit, has been changed—and, ipso facto, the external order has been destroyed. By that little speck of accidental matter, unforeseeable, gods (perhaps) have been deposed, stars dislodged from their orbits, moons turned into alarm clocks. The fair page of the world, thus re-set, becomes a brilliant but meaningless jumble of typographical errors.

And thus—thought Smith, or Jones, or Robinson—it is with me. At this very moment some little atom may have taken, in some tiny crossroad of my brain, the wrong turning. Some infinitesimal dead leaf may have lodged itself, in my thought’s stream, against some infinitesimal twig; and the consequences may prove incalculable. On that dead leaf of matter or feeling or thought will depend the whole course of my life. In an instant it will be as if I had stepped through this bright cobweb of appearance on which I walk with such apparent security, and plunged into a chaos of my own; for that chaos will be as intimately and recognizably my own, with its Smith-like disorder, as the present world is my own, with its Smith-like order. Here will be all the appurtenances of my life, every like and dislike, every longing or revulsion, from the smallest to the greatest; all the umbrellas—so to speak—of my life, all the canceled postage stamps and burnt matches, the clipped fingernails, love letters, calendars, and sunrises; but all of them interchanged and become (by change) endowed with demonic power. At a step, I shall have fallen into a profound and perhaps termless Gehenna which will be everywhere nothing but Smith. Only to the name of Smith will the umbrella-winged demons of this chaos answer.

It is now—thought Smith, or Jones, or Robinson—past midnight, and this apartment house, with all its curious occupants, is asleep. The janitor has locked the outer door; the row of mother-of-pearl electric buttons (one for each occupant) is inert, for lack of inquiring fingers to complete their respective circuits; the brass letter-boxes yawn darkly for the absent postman; the elevator has settled down for the night on the fourth floor, to which it was brought by a late-comer at twelve-forty-three. Even the water in the innumerable pipes has gone to sleep, become stale and torpid. And here, in my room, I pace to and fro, thinking how easily I could change all this. Perhaps I would achieve this gradually, and step by step, just as I pace to and fro across the four rugs from Persia which cover the floor; item by item I would tear down the majestic fiction which is at present myself and the world, and item by item build up another. Exactly as one can stare at a word until it becomes meaningless, I can begin to stare at the world. What in heaven’s name are these rugs? What in heaven’s name are these walls, this floor, the books on my mantelpiece, the three worn wooden chairs, the pencils in a row on my red table? Arrangements of atoms? If so, then they are all perpetually in motion; the whole appearance is in reality a chaotic flux, a whirlwind of opposing forces; they and I are in one preposterous stream together, borne helplessly to an unknown destiny. I am myself perhaps only a momentary sparkle on the swift surface of this preposterous stream. My awareness is only an accident; and moreover my awareness is less truly myself than this stream which supports me, and out of which my sparkle of consciousness has for a moment been cast up. And how easy—once more—to slip back into the flux itself, into that deeper current, that primordial chaos, which is really I! My own Gehenna, now as always, awaits me there within, with all its horrors and all its magnificence.

Pausing at the window and looking forth at the row of snow-laden roofs opposite, above which hang the stars, I light one cigarette from another, and wave away the smoke with my hand. Let me also, with a mental gesture of waving (and what is thought but a gesture?), wave away this apartment house. At the mere notion, it has already begun to lose something of its reality. Was the North Star hung at the world’s masthead only in order that on a certain day in a certain year an ugly wallpaper should be glued to the walls of this room? Is evolution only an evolution from the sublime to the ridiculous? This curious structure of bricks and wood, with its guts of lead and its nerves of copper, with its horizontal tiers of little caves, its stairs, its elevator, and the metal heart which sends warmth everywhere through metal arteries—why should it be as it is? Instantly, it becomes a horror. And its occupants, these other Smiths and Robinsons, lying asleep in dark little holes, with their hands hanging over the bed’s edge, their eyes shut and their mouths open; so solemnly divesting themselves of their detachable skins, winding their watches, brushing their teeth, turning the handglass this way and that to see if their hair be thinner or the circles under their eyes be larger; these too become a horror. And how shameful that I have permitted them to cooperate with me in the erection of this fantastic fiction, how shameful that I should have submitted to this group-assumption of so much that cannot be assumed! Do these monsters dream, with their eyes shut and their mouths open, of the North Star hung aloft at our masthead; do they dare to reach out, with heroically destructive hand, toward that sparkle of consciousness, with intent to destroy? Do they ever for a moment think of looking down, through their own eyes in the handglass, to the glorious Gehenna which we are?

But suppose—as I pace to and fro on the Kerman rugs, and glance now at one picture on the wall and now at another—suppose that instead of a step-by-step approach to destruction I were to plunge into it all at once, like Empedocles into Ætna. Could I not, simply by an effort of will, go mad? Could I not, like a watchmaker, in a moment’s exasperation, thrust a violent scissor-blade into the heart of the delicate mechanism? Not, of course, by anything so simple as a mere physical action; but rather, by an action of the mind on itself. Presumably, this would have to be an act of forgetting. I would have to forget who and what I am, why I am here, what this room is, these pictures, this floor on which I pace—why the room is square rather than spherical, why I am myself shaped as I am—and with these things, also, all sense of unity and continuity. Would this not be possible? Suppose, as I now begin to prepare myself for bed and sleep, I were to concentrate with particular ferocity of imagination on some one detail. For example, I have now shut myself in my bathroom, and as I brush my teeth I notice, reflected in the mirror, the knob of the door behind me. It is a brass knob, perfectly commonplace. On the top surface of it, a little to one side, the electric light is reflected as a small bead of brightness. Below it is the dark keyhole, and to one side of it the glass towel-rack on which hang two soiled towels. All these things seem suddenly absurd; but it is the doorknob on which I choose to exercise my imagination, for I already begin to foresee that it is in a foreordained sense the key to the whole situation. I stare at the knob, narrowing my eyes, at the same time aware of my own reflection in the mirror, and of something in my expression which is already a curious mixture of insanity and fright. I have stopped brushing my teeth; I stare at the knob with my toothbrush in air; an extraordinary thrill of horror goes coldly and slowly up my spine and seems to burst, like a tiny cold little rocket, somewhere at the base of my skull. For what I have now realized, acutely and profoundly, and with a mystic terror which is complete almost to the point of irremediable madness, is that this odd round little object of brass is my only remaining means of egress, not only from this room, but from this idea which is at present myself. I have come to the brink of chaos. Another slightest step, and I am lost. If I continue to stare for another five seconds at the knob, further narrowing my eyes (and ipso facto narrowing my consciousness), I shall cease to know what the knob is for, and will at once, finding myself trapped, go mad with a kind of animal madness. I will dash myself against the walls, scream, fall exhausted; and falling, fall forever out of time and space into my own Gehenna.

Instead, I drop my gaze. I finish brushing my teeth. Not that I am really afraid to pursue the hallucination (if hallucination it truly is) but that I have a cunning notion of putting myself still further to the test. What I have now foreseen is that fearful moment when, before opening the door, I shall reach up my hand and extinguish the light. Again the cold little rocket bursts slowly in my skull, scattering its little seeds of death; the void whistles beneath me; I am absolutely alone in a world of which the only tenable principle is horror. I take a last look at myself in the mirror, calmly, detachedly, without any trace either of pity or amusement. There I am: with the scar on my forehead, the rusty gnarled eyebrows, the fine red spider-veining in my cheeks, and my two hands resting on the marble edge of the basin. Is my name Smith? But how preposterous. What on earth is a Smith? Would the Pole Star know me? Would the Pleiades take off their hats to me, or a jury of molecules pronounce me a unit? In short, would the universe admit that it had produced me, or assume the slightest responsibility for me?

No, the question is no sooner asked than laughed at. It is obvious enough that these Smiths are an accident, a freak, an absurdity, a mere bad dream. Billions of years ago, in some minor interstellar clash, or some streamlike catalysis of unimaginable vapors, purposeless and terrible, there occurred a momentary conception of these funny little Smiths; the principle which created me is already dead; I am merely the posthumous life of that concept. In reality, I was dead before I was born. Belatedly, I see myself in the mirror, recognize my fatuity, have just time to laugh at myself, and am gone.

And so, I turn out the light. I am in pitch darkness. Not a single thing is visible. And suddenly, with an extraordinary sense of power and wisdom, I reach out an automatic and precisely directed hand, touch and turn the knob, and am released. Escaping one approach to Gehenna, I move at once unhesitatingly toward another; for now I stretch myself in bed, once again boldly extinguish a light, close my eyes, and begin to sink through slow turmoils of sound and sense to a dream. In this dream, I am standing before a small glass aquarium, square, of the sort in which goldfish are kept. I observe without surprise that there is water in one half of it but not in the other. And in spite of the fact that there is no partition, this water holds itself upright in its own half of the tank, leaving the other half empty. More curious than this, however, is the marine organism which lies at the bottom of the water. It looks, at first glance, like a loaf of bread. But when I lean down to examine it closely, I see that it is alive, that it is sentient, and that it is trying to move. One end of it lies very close to that point at which the water ends and the air begins; and now I realize that the poor thing is trying, and trying desperately, to get into the air. Moreover, I see that this advancing surface is as if sliced off and raw; it is horribly sensitive; and suddenly, appalled, I realize that the whole thing is simply—consciousness. It is trying to escape from the medium out of which it was created. If only it could manage this—! But I know that it never will; it has already reached, with its agonized sentience, as far as it can; it stretches itself forward, with minute and pathetic convulsions, but in vain; and suddenly I am so horrified at the notion of a consciousness which is pure suffering, that I wake up.… The clocks are striking two.