Great Circle: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  —What the hell.

  —Where else, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Central Kendal Park, through the subway in the dark. But this was later, much later. And now Alan is dead, and all the others are dead, everybody I loved is dead, whenever I pick up a newspaper somebody is dead. Anyway, Elsa’s skull will have detachable teeth. What a rush there must be on the escalator to hell. Among the lost people. Per me si va nella città dolente. Have your tickets ready, with your passport, please—have your tickets ready, with your passport, please. Brattle Street is, as you might say, one of the main arteries of hell. Cambridge is a flourishing suburb. What swarms of hypocrites there be mounting the slopes of Calvary.

  —Why Calvary again.

  —Ah, but my dear chap, I’ve changed it this time. That’s my cunning. You thought you’d caught me, didn’t you. Why, here’s some Rhine wine, some echt love-lady milk, as I live and breathe.

  —I wouldn’t begin mixing drinks, if I were you.

  —But you aren’t me, Bill. Quod erat demonstrandum. Why not hang yourself on the wall like a bat beside that rusty harpoon. Upside down, like Dracula on the turret. Jesus! What a turn that gave me, in Paris, on Christmas Eve! It was snowing, too, just like tonight. Snowbroth.… Oh, sorry, damn that ash stand anyway. Why do you have it. It’s ugly.

  —Why don’t you sit down.

  —I will. There’s nothing I like better. Whoooof. My God, that went fast. But I saw it going, just the same.

  —What.

  —I think it was the nasturtium quid.

  —What did it look like.

  —Excuse me. I’m not really drunk, Bill. I’m not as much of a fool as you think. I can see pretty straight. I am thinking clearly, too. Very clearly. I see you distinctly, there, you with your three eyes, and an extra one in your ear. Oh, I know what you have them for, it’s all right, I understand it perfectly, every man to his taste, as the farmer said when he kissed the pig. There’s the pig again. But this death business. This dying business. These coffins. These funeral parlors. These greasy undertakers, and the ribbons on doors. Do you know what, Bill? We’re dying piecemeal. Every time some one you know dies, you die too, a little piece of you. Now a fingernail, now an eyelash. A hair today, a corpuscle tomorrow. Slowly, slowly. The liver, then the lights. And the worst of it is that what’s dead isn’t buried: it rots in you. There’s Alan, dead in my side. Elsa, dead in my prostate gland. Uncle David, dead in my right hand. My father, dead in my memory of geometry, turned to a putrid phosphorescent rhomboid. I’m a walking graveyard, a meditative dance of death. So are you. A bone orchard. Why if I were to investigate you, Bill—good God, how I widen my eyes at the mere thought! I’d probably know why you’re an amateur analyst. I’d know why you’re afraid to speak out. Why you sit there and wait for your poor fool of a patient to do the speaking for you. Who died on you, Bill? Who lies dead on your heart? Oh, Jesus. I feel sick. But that eye in your ear. What’s that, synesthesia? Dislocation? Per auram wollen sie? Und das hat mit ihrem singen. Per auram. I suppose it was your little sister, who died when you were twelve. I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have said that. Perhaps it was only a cat. But this death business—aren’t you really dead, Bill? And if not, why not? I’m dead. Any further death for me would be merely, as it were, a publication. No essential addition. Just take the bones out, Felix, and spread them on the grass. Burn them, and spread them on the grass. I feel sick.

  —I don’t wonder. Why don’t you try the Roman feather.

  —Don’t be simple-minded, you idiot. I don’t feel sick in any sense so God-damned easy.

  —No?

  —No.

  —Then where’s your mother.

  —Ah, ha! The cloven hoof. I knew I’d get you down to that at last.

  —Down to what.

  —The mother.

  —Speak for yourself, Andy. I’m only trying to help you.

  —Yes yes yes yes. So you are. Good old Bill. Top hole. But this death business. This dying, this piecemeal dying. This death that creeps in from the extremities, slowly, slowly—and up from the unconscious, too, darkly—these dreams of death, corruption, rot—it’s all been said, I know, I’m tiresome. But it’s real, just the same. To lie in massed corruption, and to stink. To walk through cold corruption, and to speak. To think through foul abstractions, and to live. You know what I mean. I hate you, but I’ll tell you. Shall I tell you? Yes, I’ll tell you. You don’t deserve it. You understand nothing, you have no perceptions, you’re a fool, a well-meaning fool, a failure, but I’ll tell you. What is it gives you such a power over the subtle, Bill? Your pseudonymous calm? No doubt. Your rare combination of muscle and breadth of brow. Brawn and brains. But the brains, not so hot. Not so hot. Why, with your stupidity and my brains, Bill, we’d rock the world. Let me see—I was going to tell you something. What was it. Oh, yes, it was my dream last night. This will be easy for you, and I make you a present of it, gratis. How did it begin? I was asleep with Bertha, that was it—and she woke me. She said we must go upstairs. So I got up and followed her upstairs, taking my pillow with me. It seemed to be a strange house, and yet somehow familiar. At the top of the stairs we went into a dark bedroom, and there, in a wide double bed, with a single bed beyond, were my mother and father. My father was in the single bed, and Bertha walked around to it. Meanwhile, I myself—tee-hee—crept softly into the wide bed with my mother, who was asleep. Isn’t this a beauty? Could consciousness go further in deliberate self-torture? I lay on my side, facing my sleeping mother, drew up my knees, and by accident touched her flank with one of my hands. I felt very small, my head and hands were small, my hair was close-cropped and thick (you see how young I was)—and also, suddenly, I was filled with horror. I got up hastily, and spoke to Bertha, who was somewhere in the dark. Told her I was going. She answered from the dark: “Do you call this a MARRIAGE?” I ran out into the hall, and darted down the stairs, which were dark, and there I discovered a strange thing—the stairs were strewn with the family silver—forks and knives and spoons were scattered all up and down, some of them still sliding slowly and heavily, as if only just launched downard by the burglar, who, I assumed, must be still in the house—a nameless ghost-like horror came over me, and I woke up. I woke up. Sweating.

  —Jupiter and Semele.

  —I don’t get you, but we needn’t go into it. Every man to his own interpretation, all of them correct. Oedipus complex, castration complex, anything you like.

  —What about that silver.

  —My family silver, that’s all.

  —You recognized it.

  —You bet. Acanthus pattern and everything.

  —I suppose you have it?

  —Of course I have it. It came down to me from my mother!… Hot dog.

  —Pretty good. I don’t seem to know much about your mother. You’ve never spoken much about her, have you.

  —Why should I.

  —How did she die.

  —She was drowned.

  —How old were you.

  —Twelve. Anything else? I’d got all my second teeth. I knew how to read and write. My favorite book was Jackanapes. After that, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. As you might expect.

  —You said it, Andy! You’re helpless. None so blind as those who see and doubt it. You know all this, but you won’t let it do you any good. Isn’t that it? Think it over.

  —Oh, for God’s sake, Bill.

  —Anything you like. That’s a swell dream.

  —Isn’t it, though? By God, yes. I knew you’d like it. But wait till I tell you the one about the bones.

  —Why not go into this one a little more, first.

  —Oh, no, what’s the use. It’s all as plain as a codpiece.

  —It is to me. I’m not so sure it is to you.

  —Take my word for it. I know what you mean—don’t be stupid! Sure, I’ll have a cracker and a drink. Why, hello, Michel, old fellow! Are you still there? My God, if I could only sculp—is that the word?—I’d twist the whole damn
ed college yard into a single group of agonized gods that would send the northstar west. What a chance, what a chance. I’d squeeze Appleton Chapel with one squeeze into such a shape of hypocrisy and cold slow sweat as even Cambridge would recognize … Take it from me, kid, take it from me.

  —So you’re resisting again, eh.

  —Why not. I believe in resistance. Why acquiesce.

  —There’s a lot to be said for acquiescence, Andy—and you know it. Don’t you.

  —Oh, have it your own way. You want every one to be a yes-man. A pitiful dirty little yea-sayer. No ironies, no doubts. Everything for the best. God is good, the snail’s on the heart. And all that kind of honeycomb tripe. If you feel sick, why, yes, that’s good, that is, and all the swarm of sick lights in the brain that go with it, now to port and now to starboard. I see them now. Maggots. What the hell. Put your head down. No, I’ll open the window.… Thanks.… That’s better.… How they drift, Bill, how they drift, did you ever notice? In little slow streams, and then hot swarms, and then little slow streams again and then all swooping upward like a lost meal. Woops, my dear. I’ll put my lunch out into Massachusetts Avenue, shall I? A nice warm waffle for some nocturnal policeman to study. If he were really intelligent, he’d know what I’d been thinking, wouldn’t he.

  —Go on, try the feather.

  —Get the hell out of here.

  —Just as you like.

  —Of course it is. This is just what I like. A cold band of air on my pituitary body. That intersteller current of the soul. Birdwings, too, and the albatross, and the arctic sponge of nescience.… This is free association.

  —So I see.

  —See something else for a change. Go fry yourself.

  —Go kill yourself. Jump out, why don’t you.

  —I would for a nickel.

  —Here’s the nickel.

  —Let me see it. Why it’s actually a nickel.

  —Why not cut out the melodrama for a change and settle down to a little hard thinking?

  —You mean hard drinking, Bill. I’ve thought too much.

  —You’ve behaved like a spanked child.

  —Well, why not, that’s what I am.

  —You needn’t be. And you needn’t think only of yourself.

  —So you’re going to preach again.

  —I’m just telling you the truth.

  —Keep the truth for yourself. What I want is darkness. I want to sleep. I want the sea and the moon. Above all, the sea. Did you ever think of it. Did it ever really terrify you and delight you. You know, at midnight, under a brown wild moon, with a warm south wind, and a surf running. So that the surf is all of sinister curled bronze, and the sound fills the whole damned night, and the beach looks like a parchment on which nothing has been written. Nothing. Wide silver. Smooth. I know just where it is, too. North of the Gurnett. Not far from Clark’s Island. The seals are on it, and I rowed there in the dark. I had a tin can to bail with. Did you ever row a dory, Bill. I had one, it was named Doris, and a little four-pronged anchor, which I buried in the beach. I love the feeling of a sea-soaked rope, a salt-water painter. And the slow sluggish slushy grind of the flat bottom as it slides up the sand and pebbles and swings to one side.… What was I saying.

  —You were talking about your childhood.

  —So I was.

  —It made me homesick.

  —You don’t mean to say you had a childhood, Bill.

  —You’d be astonished.

  —Why have you never mentioned it.

  —Why should I.

  —Well, anyway, it’s still snowing, isn’t it.

  —I note the interrogative touch, and congratulate you.

  —Yes.… Mum’s the word.… This snow on the wrist feels good. Try it.

  —Do you remember——

  —What.

  —No.

  —Christ. I see disasters, and I bring them back. The whole world fills with fecal madness. I am a—I am here, in Cambridge, Mass. You offered me a nickel to jump out of the window. I didn’t jump, because you showed me up. So I’m quite properly ashamed. Evidently I don’t want to die, which is what you wanted to prove, isn’t it? If I want to live; what do I want to live for. What. Rhetorical question. For hot dogs and western sandwiches. The feel of walking, which is a matter of always keeping the left foot going. The sound of the clock. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the fellow who lives with his left eye on the almighty clock. It’s all a matter of keeping the hand going. Har har.

  —The right hand.

  —Voi credete che si muove, ma non è vero.

  —From Venice as far as Belmont.

  —Farther, if you like. I’ll ask no questions, and I’ll tell no lies.

  —For God’s sake, Andy, settle down. This gets us nowhere.

  —Don’t I know it?

  —Well, it’s late.

  —Where? Lateness is relative.

  —For one thing, it’s late in Shepard Hall. I mean, to be brutally frank, it’s late for Bertha.

  —Too damned late, if you ask me! But I’m sorry, Bill. You know how it is. How can I say it. I can’t. There’s all this—there’s all that. The heres, the theres, the unders, the overs. The pasts, the futures. The dirty stockings, and the dirty sinks. Peeled potatoes. Beds, here and there. One after another. The clipped fingernails on the floor. Coffee grounds, Brattle Hall dances, lemon peels, the Dramatic Club, muddy galoshes in the front hall, and bills from the cleaner. Just ordinary human dirt and effluvia, you know. One night after another. Sweat under the arms, gouts of pink toothpaste clotted on the toothbrush that hangs on the wall. The little crinkled hairs left in the bathtub, too—so telltale. Intimacy! Why the hell do we want it?… Don’t tell me.

  —That’s the question to begin with, perhaps.

  —Or end with.… I’ll close the window. The snow seems to be coming in.

  —Thanks.

  —That’s the question to begin with. It can’t be done. Not permanently. Everything against it. So beautiful, too, so beautiful, so bloody beautiful—but is it possible? No, I don’t think it is.

  —Not for you, perhaps. Why not.

  —Why not.… The exquisite beginning, in mystery always—the subtleties of the approach—the sunrise wonder—Alpenglow on the Jungfrau—joke, Bill, joke. But when you’ve spent a night on the Jungfrau, that’s another matter, by God. A different kettle of fish, a nightmare of another color. Now don’t open your mouth with that supercilious arch—I know what you’re going to say—you’re going to quote Stekel about Don Juan and Casanova, or something like that. Oh, yes, indeed. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the juvenile don Giovanni. Why, the poor fellow’s lost his mother, he has, and that’s why he smokes and drinks. But old Mary’s as good a mother as you could want. You ought to see her in her bath. Marvelous, the aplomb with which she sponges that enormous pink and white area, and the candor of it, the absence of shame—she’s a good child of nature, and clean as a sea-cloud. Yes. Yale always barks beside the tub, and Mary scatters water at him and laughs. And the equipment of that bathroom, Bill!… What the hell am I talking about.

  —Intimacy, I believe!

  —So I was.… Intimacy.… That’s where marriages break down. That’s just where they break down. That’s why Shakespeare left home, and Michelangelo never had one, or Beethoven either. That’s why Melville tried to wring his wife’s neck. Good jumping Jehosaphat, isn’t it plain as day? Do I need to say another word? Why don’t you go to bed.

  —I’m wide awake. I may close my eyes, to rest them, but I’ll be awake, you can go on talking.… So you’ve got the horrors.

  —The horrors, yes. And don’t misunderstand me. But what the hell do I mean, I wonder. What horrors. Why the horrors. What’s wrong with it. Why can’t it last. There are the obsessions, as when one is gardening. You kill aphids, millions of them, day after day—squashing them against the rose stalks between your thumb and finger, green juices, green pulp, tiny clots, one rosebud after another, and finally
you get an obsession—at all times of the day or night you see the swarms of little green insects, feel them thickly under your fingers, you even begin dreaming about them, a foul clotting of them occurs in your dreams, you have them under your fingernails, they fall in solid green coagulations from behind your ears, they are in your hair—that’s the way it is. That’s the way it is with sex, I mean. I must have a small drink. Do you see what I mean. It’s the endless repetition of what should very seldom be repeated. Is that it? I don’t know. I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s very baffling. By god, no matter how much you love a woman, the time comes when you don’t want to sleep with her. For a while, anyway. Or at any rate one wants holidays. But how are you going to manage it. You can’t say to your wife, Darling, I’m fed up with you—I know your body too well—the toes, the knees, the flanks, the moles, the hollows under the clavicles, the median line, the asymmetrical arrangement of your breasts, the pelvis, the pink patch of eczema on your side, your perfumes and undergarments and brushes and combs, your toilet habits, every one, the faint bubble of caught breath with which you fall asleep—but just the same I love you, will always love you. If only you’ll be tactful and not too exacting about this. Don’t ask questions, darling, whatever you do. Don’t say a word. Sing cheerfully as you go about the house, greet me with the happiness of the lark when I come home, be busy, have lots of things to do, put no pressure upon me, don’t betray by so much as the flicker of an eyelash that you’re aware of the fact that I’ve abandoned you (but not geographically)—and who knows, one fine night, or one night when it’s raining cats and dogs, or snowing like this, or we’re both a little tight after a party—who knows, who knows? Everything might suddenly become beautiful and strange once more. You would be a stranger to me, and I to you; we would commit a joyful infidelity with each other; each of us would be new. Hell’s delight, that’s only the beginning of it. The fringe.