“Are you sure,” I asked, point-blank, “that your hashish isn’t a huge hoax?”
“A huge hoax?” Chaylas riposted, slowly, in a bizarre nasal tone. “A huge hoax?” And he began to laugh—soft, dry, jerky laughter. He deposited his long pipe on the table in order to laugh more comfortably, and more wholeheartedly, his head thrown back behind the cushions of his divan. He was literally writhing with laughter. “A hoax! Hashish a hoax! I’m sure of it! A huge hoax! Fernand, old chap, you’ll be the death of me!”
I found this overly familiar hilarity incongruous and disproportionate. I was offended. I let him see it.
“You’re laughing? My supposition isn’t so stupid, though—since I don’t feel anything.”
“You don’t feel anything? That’s true, my poor friend! You can’t, any more—but you shall see, you shall see!”
That sort-of-apology softened me up. I didn’t want to upset him. My question might, indeed, have seemed absurd to him. And I smiled myself.
I resumed my observations. The walls retreated, as if the room had visibly expanded. My torpor increased. It seemed that a subtle emanation was rising up from the carpet, soon bathing me up neck-deep: an emanation from which only my head emerged, in which I was about to be drowned—and I experienced a bizarre sensation of inhabiting a foreign body, of never having noticed how alien my body was.
I examined Chaylas’ head. I had never looked at him either! The brass-bound edge of the table was presently adjacent to a shelf unit whose upper part was filled with books. In the glass-fronted lower part, amid the scattered knick-knacks, that strange Chaylas was a radiantly beaming Japanese mask! He made me laugh: an inconvenient dry and jerky laugh, then an outburst of broad laughter; and an absurd exclamation sprang from my lips: “An ape! My dear Albert, you have the head of an ape!”
The head formed a grotesque grimace of hilarity, the eyes squinting, the mouth twisted.
“An ape! Yes, Fernand, an ape! You too! You’ve got one too, haven’t you?”
Indeed, I had. Everything—my own words, Chaylas’ head, that Japanese showcase, the entire room, including the caricaturish hands of the clock, had taken on an irresistibly clownish appearance. I stood up, and stood on the divan in order to take a panoramic view of things, and I improvised a burlesque performance of a particularly humorous character.
The jokes were flowing through me with such abundance that I had no time to develop them. I could only mark their passage by quintessential allusions—but Chaylas half-understood, even seeming to divine with an extraordinary perspicacity what I was about to say, and replying to my gibes before I had enunciated them with sparkling, and no less elliptical, pleasantries.
For those ten minutes, we held the most extravagant synod of laughter that it is possible to imagine.
Little by little, the topic was exhausted. The last volleys faded away. I sat down again.
“It’s nothing,” Chaylas affirmed. “It’s starting.”
And I realized—it was a parenthetical thought—that we were now fully under the influence of hashish.
How does one describe the inexpressible? That room seemed to me to be isolated in space, 100,000 leagues from the Earth; we had transmigrated to another planet; my body harbored an exceedingly agile and subtle soul; and brief flashes of consciousness were the only memory of my previous self…
An exquisite and disturbing prodigy, to have transgressed the fastidious bounds of my individuality, to have rejected the old envelope of quotidian appearances, to see things with new senses, and perhaps—who knows?—in depth, in their essential aspect!
Yes, breaking through the membrane of reality, here is the fullness of hashish. No hallucination, to tell the truth. My ideas, prompt and jerky, pass by sequentially, unrolling cinematographically, as voluble as the mechanism of a watch whose escapement has just broken…
At the same time, deep inside me, in the utmost depths, an indiscernible thought, as enigmatic as a beam of light rising from a mine-shaft, rises gradually towards consciousness.
Chaylas was smiling. What was he dreaming? Why, as he looked at me that smile of complicity? Why was I, too, smiling with a secret disquiet?
We look at one another, motionless.
He would have liked to speak too, but he dared not, any more than I did. That is so embarrassing to day, so dubious still! Which of us would give voice to the idea, the suspicion of which was oppressing me, setting a chill in my heart?
He’s said “All right?” and I’ve replied “Yes, fine”—to gain time, obviously. He gets up, inspects the walls, goes to lie down on another divan on the other side of the fire, facing me…that’s normal. No, there’s no mystery there.
Another heavy silence. Again that ambiguous and constrained smile. More and more embarrassed, that ominous smile. For the secret, the terrible secret, will get out; it seethes in our brains like vapor under pressure; it expands around us, saturating the room with an atmosphere more revelatory than explicit speech. The mystery reveals itself, communicates itself without anyone having said a word. He knows too! We both know! And yet—for it is necessary at all costs that the other does not know that the other knows—we each persist in smiling, smiling with a fixed and cataleptic grimace.
And I remember. Intermittently, I recollect the series of my previous meetings with Caylas. I analyze successively his somber character, his bouts of pessimism, his perverse taste for flirting with death. One day, he mixed with his opium pills a pill of the same appearance containing a lethal dose of strychnine, and, inviting me to imitate him, swallowed one selected at random. He was mad when, having put a live cartridge in his revolver, he made me spin the magazine blindly, then cried: “Three!” Three times, with the barrel of the gun in his mouth, he pressed the trigger, without releasing the bullet—which came fourth. And that other day when he said to me, with a strange expression, as he pointed to his mistress: “If she pleases you…”
I had my eyes open, though, and when these images vanished—as a face reflected in an unsilvered glass melts into things placed behind it as they become clearer—I see Chaylas in front of me, on the divan on the other side of the fire, studying me curiously.
We were young then—it was two years ago! The poison’s premature old age had not yet injected such scorn for life into our veins—but me, me! I am not so detached, am I?
“Evidently.”
He has replied, aloud, to my psychic interrogation. It’s clear. He knows. He is penetrating my thoughts as I am penetrating his! Our thoughts, absolutely synchronous, are progressing as one, within two brains.
Absolutely synchronous?
I see by the character of his smile, in which I read our ideas, that the coincidence is not complete. There is, here and there, a temporal displacement in the transmission.
But he must know whether it is really true, whether this prodigy of telepathy, by a mysterious effect of the drug, effectively links our cerebral cells, whether our psychic dynamisms have really entered into communication, whether the thought is circulating between us as if between vessels linked by a U-tube.
Is it true? And I say: “Oh—that would be wonderful!”
“Wonderful, yes, isn’t it?” replies Chaylas, whose gaze never leaves me. “You too?”
No more doubt.
As motionless as a statue, I do not manifest my emotion. And this is how our occult duality proceeds within me, alternating my own thoughts with others, of a somber and haggard character, which I do not recognize, undoubtedly furnished by Chaylas. An influx of comic sadness and mortal disgust—the flagrant uselessness of our life—strange ideas that I adopt, that I have to adopt, as Chaylas, by virtue of the reciprocal flow, has to admit my thoughts into him.
Independent asides slip into the interstices of this psychic conversation: parcels of myself, protected from the contagion, reflecting in flashes on the horror of the phenomenon. An ultra-determinist, accustomed by other poisons to see my lucid consciousness as nothing but an inactive witness o
f fatal energies that take control of my pseudo-will, I rebel, this time, against finding myself under the direct influence of another human brain, subject to another’s ideas—even with the assured revenge of the same empire over him.
And from time to time, assuming the materiality of speech, the expected replies formulate themselves at their precise moment. This is what confirms the sorcery; he replies to my mental question.
“Oh, that’s right!”
“No doubt.”
But I’m deceitful, at present; taking refuge in a strictly personal islet of lucidity set apart from the currents and eddies of our duplicate thought, I entrench myself there, to test whether we are indissolubly linked.
Sometimes, I have the upper hand; I feel my thought running into him, like a river into the sea; sometimes, it is his that flows back into me, irresistible, as the tide fills an estuary.
Let’s go! Stronger! No? But who is in command of our psychic couple—you or me? Reply! Reply out loud, I demand it!
He says nothing. He is still looking at me. But an internal voice cries: Me! Who thought that? Him or me?
And I strive with all my might: Ah! for this, I employ free will! I stand up, bracing myself with all my strength, in order to vanquish that antagonistic will. Interlocked like wrestlers in the ideal space that separates us, seemingly indifferent witnesses, our wills engaging in a duel with wild moves. Somersaults of triumph go through me. His shoulders are about to touch! And I press down, oh, I press down! But my hold is broken without his having acknowledged defeat, and I must defend myself in my turn, terribly.
It’s a duel to the death. To the death, because the oscillatory, intoxicated, whirling-dervish double thought is vertiginously interlocked in a spiral of alternate litanies descending towards suicide.
He wants to kill himself—he’s mad: I should certainly have realized that—and that old obsession will be realized today. He is thinking, I know, about the weapons hanging on the wall behind him—those loaded revolvers that he sees, as I see them, without looking at them…ho! Isn’t it me who has just suggested it to him? Did he really think it?—And then you’ll kill me (for he has the proselytism of suicide, he wants me to deliver myself from life, in spite of myself), you’ll kill me, and then yourself; we’ll kill on another, with revolvers over there. Oh, don’t come any closer! I forbid it! See, I’m staying still (to maintain him in his place too, for if I try to forestall him, he’ll perceive my intention immediately, and I can’t—very quiet, this, very quiet!—kill him before he can do the same to me). Enough, I forbid it! Let’s think of something else for a moment, so that I can get some respite in our hand-to-hand combat, to gather strength, to tame your impulses; so that I have the time to vanquish you; let’s go on to something else, let’s go on! (But I don’t find anything, and in the void of my suggestion, it’s his mortal thought that will hold sway, filling me too….) Listen, I remember… (No, not that! I don’t want to! I’ve said nothing! A shadow! A shadow over that!) …that your mistress… (Am I mad, then, to tell him about that? Me, I don’t want to. Me? Who’s me?) That day we… (No! Nothing! Nothing! Ah, Victory! Nothing.) Listen. I’ll tell you…
And our black gazes, our pupils enormous sound one another out. Our faces are terrible, oracular.
“Come on! Come on! Let’s go! Yes, these are our synchronous thoughts. Let’s go! A mysterious communal force, overwhelming, our Destiny, springs forth from the duplicate utmost depths of our being. Come on! We’re going to die!
Traitor! You lied! It’s your insanity that you want to pass off as our Destiny. Me, I want to live! I will live. My strength is coming back. I will! I will!—Victory! I’ve taken command of the couple. (For a brief instant, perhaps? No matter, it’s enough.) Stay there—I order you to stay there! Twenty seconds! Twenty seconds! I want you to stay, madman!
Ah! I’ve leapt up! I was able to leap up!—ahead of him—to open the door, close it from the outside, lock it, and run away, free, run away into the darkness, to my home, to shut myself in too, to lock the door…
The connection between us is broken. A few fragments of his thought are still floating around me. Vanquished, he tried to turn the drama into a joke, to excuse himself prosaically…
After an hour on watch, revolver in hand, I sensed that he was going to sleep.
Saved! I had reconquered my individuality, my precious individuality, submissive only to the play of eternal forces, and not to an unbearable conjunction with another human brain!
I dared to go to sleep.
When I woke up from a slumber swarming with horrid dreams, the memory of the adventure disturbed me again. I had recovered my normal consciousness and my full lucidity, but, in contrast to the aftermath of the phantasmagorias of ether, I was unable to see the telepathy of the previous evening as a simple illusion. The drug’s effect had ceased; I was reasoning with my everyday brain—that brain which systematically denies the possibility of supernatural force—and yet I did not believe that those stranger phenomena were purely subjective in nature.
Even if they were only an illusion due to the hashish, had they not drawn from the depths of my organism, revealed and given birth to the consciousness of a crazy inclination—latent until then—to suicide?
And what if it were true? What if it had been true?
Should I interrogate Chaylas? But today, returned to a civilized lucidity, would he not deny those savage impulses, that wild scene in which he had conducted himself like a caveman? And what about me? Had not my own role been grotesque and odious?
So I avoided him. I had him sent away from my door—after all, he might have come to ask me why I had locked him in his room!
It was necessary, however, to bite the bullet when we bumped into one another a week later on the boulevard. He was, as always, taciturn and closed off. He did not raise the question. Devoured by one of those fatal curiosities that demand the illumination of something that should forever remain in shadow, I wanted to know.
We were silent. A slight vertigo, like an after-effect of hashish, was communicated between us despite the positive atmosphere of the boulevard.
At the precise moment when I was about to speak, I saw a hesitation on his face identical to mine: a dread that I might reveal to him the reality of the adventure—and the least allusion, by him or by me, would be irrefutable proof!
Simultaneously, we turned our eyes away. Simultaneously, we voiced the same commonplace.
Notes
1 ISBN 978-1-932983-89-0.
2 ISBN 978-1-934543-44-3.
3 Those by Robert, Lermina and Schwob.
4 Those by Ulbach, Mullem and Allais, although a case could be made out for adding Nodier to the list.
5 Those by Ulbach and Robert, although a case could be made for adding Lermina and Mas.
6 I have had to omit an untranslatable joke here; the term Restif uses for which I have substituted “evacuation” is démanger, which is the etymological opposite of manger (eating) in French but is not used as such (it is actually used to mean itching); he adds a parenthetical observation to explain that the equivalent term is used literally in the lunar language. I have used “evacuation” rather than “defecation” here because Restif subsequently uses a more direct French equivalent of the latter English word (déjection) in circumstances that hint at a similar wordplay; the English transfiguration of dejection is, of course, used quite differently.
7 This last pair—two words (bienfaisant, malfaisant) that have the same form as present participles in French, by virtue of ending in –ant, while actually being adjectives—embodies one of several untranslatable linguistic jokes in the list. Number 4 (battant, vainquant)—the only item not to feature a blatant opposition—is more complicated than it seems in translation because of the multiple meanings of battant.
8 Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) was a noted mathematician, commemorated in a formula that bears his name, who applied his art to astronomical calculations and speculations. The person named as havin
g been convinced of Lagrange’s argument as soon as he heard it is the writer Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792), with whom Restif dined twice a week from 1786 onwards, along with other guests. Restif falsely attributed the anonymously-published Les Posthumes to Cazotte—who had fallen victim to the Terror ten years before its publication—and the gesture suggests that some of the narrative’s details originated in discussions at Cazotte’s table, although the basic idea of letters from beyond the grave was allegedly furnished by Restif’s sometime patroness, Fanny de Beauharnais, while the world-view of the narrative and its extraordinary range are pure Restif.
9 Available from Black Coat Press in Frankenstein and the Hunchback of Notre-Dame (ISBN 978-1-932983-38-8) and Lord Ruthven the Vampire (ISBN 978-1-932983-10-4).
10 Nodier appears to have invented this world, having run out of readily-available synonyms for “clown.”
11 “All things that can be known.”
12 Zoroaster.
13 “If, in this instance, it is permissible to compare small things with large ones.”
14 Augustin Jal (1795-1873) published a glossary of nautical terms.
15 The English word chiurm is as esoteric as Nodier’s direct French equivalent, chiourme, but there is no ready alternative; it refers to any means of calibrating the rhythm of a crew of galley slaves. It is, alas, not obvious what contribution a crew of galley slaves could make to the propulsion of a dirigible balloon.
16 A metric league is four kilometers; the Earth’s circumference is approximately 40,000 kilometers. Given that the steamboat had already carried the travelers 1800 leagues, therefore, a balloon journey in a similar direction would have taken the travelers more than halfway around the world, probably ending up somewhere in the Pacific.
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