The Lost Weekend

by Charles Jackson

  A man in a grey suit, grey shirt, with grey hair and grey hands, wearing grey shoes, grey tie, grey glasses—A grey man stood on the platform at the far end of the hall. He had already begun to speak over the restless considerable murmuring of the crowd. He had been speaking, it seemed, before anyone arrived; and there was the feeling, even the certainty, that he would go on speaking long after the last of them had fled to carry out the fearful business which was the burden of his speech. He stood alone in the center of the bunting-draped platform and spoke to the world in deadly monotone deadly clear, like an oracle, the import of whose message is so momentous that he does not stoop to color it by the slightest inflexion or emphasis or shade of emotion: the dreadful intelligence will strike home without his lending it anything but the minimum of lip-service. His talk was punctuated now and again by the muffled crash of a collapsing chair or the shifting of feet or coughing or clearing of throats or the slamming of a door behind one last impossible tardy breathless student, but it did not matter. What he said was heard and felt by all, felt like an electric charge, though none understood.

  A silence like infinity dropped finally over the hall, broken only by the fateful monotone. Don strained to hear what held his fellows hypnotized; and as he began to understand, the meaning of all he heard vanished away in the very moment of understanding. It was like a foreign language whose vocabulary he had learned in childhood along with his own native tongue, and forgotten. How rapt he could have listened if, like the others, he had not understood at all! He knew why his attention wandered, why he was unable to follow what he once knew so well, why the gist eluded him precisely because it reached his grasp. For the voice came over the crowd chanting a psycho-analytical lingo that was so familiar to him he could no longer register the sense of the words—the way you can say “Put,” “Put,” “Put,” “Put,” “Put,” “Put,” “Put,” or “Take,” “Take,” “Take,” “Take,” “Take” over and over till you lose all track of their meaning. So it was now. He heard the complicated once-fascinating polysyllables pour forth from the emotionless speaker (emotionless because no emotion was needed, words took the place of everything) and tried to get back to that state of innocence where these same words had once opened up to him a new world (hardly brave, but such people in it!). He wanted to get back only so that he might belong with the listening throng in more than this crushingly physical way. It was no use. The German derivations, the Latin borrowings, the Freudian locutions, the images torn by the roots from Greek drama and mythology—all the fashionable skimble-skamble from Vienna made no sense to him any more; so that he sat alien and bewildered in the close-packed crowd, who alone of them all would have comprehended and acknowledged the last obscure point of the harangue but for the melancholy fact that he had trod that ground too well, too eagerly and hopefully—far too many times—like the squirrel in the cage.

  It was the foolish psychiatrist. Foolish? Now it was plain as all that daylight, plainer than the dream was real. The man was neither wise nor foolish, rational or irrational, alive or dead—and was he indeed man? It was useless to name him, say of him this or that, call him anything. He was, simply. Nothing more. Oh but nothing less! Oh there was no denying that he was! As Don sought him through the dust-filled air, he knew that he would last, remain, be, stand static there for ever and for ever, long after words like foolish or any signs or sounds of communication whatever had passed into the language of antiquity. Incredible that such suspended and everlasting being had been achieved; still less could one credit this triumph, this absolute, in anonymity: for Don knew him as only the interrogator is known to the interrogated, the confessor to the catechized, the questioner whose questions reveal far more than they seek. And knowing him, knowing he himself was likewise known, Don yet knew—suddenly—that he could edge himself up from between the pressing elbows and shoulders of his neighbors, push to the end of the row, pick his way down the aisle over the thrust-out pant-legs, mount the platform and confront him face to face; and be not known. The man would never have seen him before in his life.

  This was the more shattering because Don now seemed to sense that the burden of the talk was himself, the speaker spoke of him, the name named was Birnam. He listened then so passionately, with such anxiety and intent, that he began to fear he would give himself away: that his very act of listening would soon call the attention of the entire hall to the fact that he was here, sitting in their very midst, giving ear. Without moving his head by so much as a hair, he allowed his eyes to glance about from side to side, and was reassured. They were all listening, like himself; never would his presence become known to them while they continued to listen in such thrall; he could relax, if he wanted to, but for the fact that his shoulders were held up in the vise of his adjacent fellows; he could faint, and not slip down. But he did not feel like relaxing, he was far from faint. Curiosity burned in him, though not for what the speaker was saying (even if he had forgotten the sense, he anticipated every line and could have prompted the speaker himself): he was on fire to know what the others were getting from that unending foreign harangue, they who could not have forgotten the vocabulary because they had never known it. Whatever it was, it was enough. They did not need to understand; they felt. How they felt it! How they took that incomprehensible tirade and translated it into outrage, as yet still dumb. What kept it dumb so long? Why did they not even murmur their revolt? Were they going to be shocked into an eternity of silence, stricken to inaction, unstrung by the enormity of what the speaker was saying, hypnotized and mute forever?

  No, they were not.

  Heads turned. He saw them throughout the hall, beginning to turn this way and that. Students faced one another (many of them having to lean back to do so), who ordinarily would have averted their gaze, dropped their glances, refused to acknowledge one another eye to eye, cowed by the dark meanings they felt sure were lurking somewhere behind those alien dark words. There was no cowing here; these were not sidelong glances. They dared to look each other in the eye—indeed, did so to confirm suspicions. The fellows on either side of Don turned to him, staring; he stared back, first at one, then the other, and tried to match with his own worked-up stare the look of anger that blazed from under their frowning brows. The boy on his right nodded, a short sharp nod. Don did not know what was meant, but he nodded too. Then he noticed that others were nodding in front of him, and up and down his own row. At the same time, a murmur began somewhere (was it outdoors?), a murmur like humming, like a wordless song crooned at a distance. The murmuring grew, till finally he heard that it came from the two on each side of him, and those beside them, and their neighbors, and theirs, and so throughout the hall. The man on the platform talked on, and the murmurings formed a kind of piquant accompaniment to the solo of unending words. It was the first sign of revolt, as yet unrealized; for the murmuring continued to remain nothing but a medley of murmurs, sustained in a prolonged legato, as a new note asserted itself: an odd soft clack-clack-clacking that caused him to glance up into the dust-filled air whence it came.

  A plane moved over the crowd, not twenty feet up: a frail silly ramshackle airplane, something less than a crate; a contraption of canvas and lath held together by paste and tacks, with a large shiny clacking propeller lazily revolving like the two-bladed fans on the ceilings of old restaurants—an aëroplane; just such a flimsy fake as he himself had ridden in at Coney Island and Riverview, Playland and Revere, Tivoli, Brighton, and the Prater; a counterfeit flying-machine suspended by long cables from a turning swing, and swung gradually out wider and wider into the air over the heads of the gawping holiday-makers as the swing swung faster and faster, giving you the illusion of flying, though flying in a boat. The craft overhead was not suspended by cables, it moved under its own illusory power, on its own rickety all-but-transparent wings (he could see the clots of glue at the seams, the ribs could be heard to creak and give) as it rode the air serene, slow, unpredictable, like a drifting canoe. It floated low over the crowd as
if in search; and now and again, capriciously, it would veer off to one side, the way a water-insect, streaking along the surface of a pond, will suddenly turn and dart off in the opposite direction. But the plane did not streak or dart, it meandered, it took its time, it seemed to know whom it was seeking and whom it would find, and it found him.

  No other head turned upward beside and besides his own. No one else seemed to have noticed the gently-riding flying-machine or to have heard the propeller’s clacking blade. How they would have looked, had they known! In the body of the ship sat three women, resting comfortably with their forearms on the edge of the cockpit or their bare arms dangling over. They were of no age, neither young nor old; they had long hair of an indeterminate color, flowing down about their ample shoulders; they sat together in pleasant, most amiable, most harmonious concourse; and they were naked. Now and again they turned to glance at one another in silent understanding; and often they smiled.

  They smiled at Don. Nothing in this or any world could have been more charming, more gratifying or rewarding, than their collective smile. It was not the smile of mirth, though certainly it was good-humored; it was a smile which said that everything they saw, or heard, or knew, everything that was, they approved. They approved of Don sitting there, looking up at them; the murmurs, the turning heads, the anger, the sunlight, the foreign voice—all was right and good and exact; all was in order. And under the indescribable sympathy of that approving smile, he could not but approve likewise.

  Again he tried to understand the speaker, tried to disassociate the sense from the incredible terminology he once knew so well. Oh, he understood! But how much better did the others understand who did not comprehend at all; who would have reviled the sense even more than they reviled the words; who had only contempt and blind hatred for knowledge such as this; who despised the speaker as they despised the spoken of, because, in their home-bred hearts, they knew and knew rightly that the cold alien passion of the intellect, the passion of detachment which surveys everything and is moved by nothing, lies with the instincts of death.

  Belongs with death. Very well, then!—The murmurs increased. They were not murmurs now, they were threat and protest. They grew in volume, gradual and imperceptible, swelling in a vast long-mounting crescendo—still low; not loud—all but lulling to the senses. Hardly fearful, almost weary, he sat waiting for the riot to break. His eyes sought the plane. He located it in a far corner of the hall, turning, coming back, dipping now and again to avoid the trapeze-wound rafters. It shone bright gold as it passed through the vertical blocks of sunlight that stood in the dusty air. Now it was overhead, a little to one side, hovering; and again the women smiled.

  He looked up at the women—his heart looked up. He had need of that smile now, and took avidly of it. The women glanced at each other as they saw his distress; their exchange was warm, most friendly; concerned, yet unworried; and when they turned to look down at him again, one of them bent further, bowing in assent, in almost affectionate salute. She leaned against the edge, and her blue-white breast drooped over the side, lolling like a water-filled toy-balloon. Did she then, for a moment only, seem to waver between a rueful shake of the head, and a smile? If so, it was a great deal less than a moment, for now she was smiling as before; and strange little chills of apprehension went down his spine. He knew it was almost time; and he tried to smile back to show that he knew, and accepted.

  The murmurs had long since passed into muttering, the muttering was now a great roar. A wind seemed to blow through the hall; the building reverberated, the windows shook, he felt the floor beneath his feet vibrate with the noise. One partly-dangling trapeze jounced on its rope; a basketball-board at the end of the hall flapped back and forth like a punkah; the plane itself rippled and dipped overhead, its flimsy wings squeaking above the din; and the women—smiling, unalarmed—steadied themselves with their hands on each other’s shoulders. Out of the bedlam a single word established itself, a word cried out by one, then many, and he glanced quickly at the women to see if that was right, too. It was; he knew without looking, knew without their reassuring almost-maternal smile. It was right that the name “Birnam!” should now be chanted by all that angry youth. Short sharp crashing noises, like baskets bursting, punctuated the general tumult as the flimsy chairs broke up. And all the while, on the platform, it was terrible to see the grey man, whom no one could hear now, going on and on with his interminable dark monotonous lecture, as before a somnolent classroom.

  One student rose up, and they all perforce rose up also. Don himself was pulled to his feet by the rising shoulders and hips of his locked neighbors. More chairs gave way; the crash of their collapse rattled like volleys of ancient musket-fire. There were groans of release and relief, even from Don himself (yes, that he could share in), and the thousand throats took up the cry in their single atavistic purpose: “Get Birnam! Get Birnam get Birnam! Get birnam get-birnam getbirnam!” Once more he glanced at the women bobbing above, their white arms holding the sides of the weaving plane. They were moving away now, but the smile reached him still—cool, detached, yet affectionate, accepting and denying him at once.

  The building caved in. There seemed to have been a deafening explosion. Had their pent-up massed emotion burst the walls apart, blown them down? Where was the alien speaker, where were the women now? There was a heap of flat ruin, and the crowd was on the campus, in the open air. They stood hesitant, dazed. But only for a second. Once outdoors, in the full sunlight, the obscurantism of the dream vanished, and all was suddenly clear as if they followed a planned design.

  The fraternity house was located at the far north-east corner of the campus—they all knew that. That’s where Birnam was! That’s where they would get him! No words were exchanged, no one took leadership. With a herd understanding, they all moved off at a trot. Without a cry now, without so much as a mutter, they started across the campus; and he ran with them.

  The ground shook as from continuous nearby blasting. He knew that while he ran with the crowd, stayed with them, was one of them, his presence would go undiscovered. But what of that moment when they should reach the fraternity house and fail to find him? Would they not then turn about and discover him there in their very midst? What could save him from their anger then?—their double anger for having cheated them of finding him where they had sought him first. He did not think that far ahead, he merely ran on.

  Was this the end at last?—the pattern completed? Or was some unfathomable providence saving him for a still juster destruction? It was like all the unreal times he had come so near it—seeking it, as he had always been seeking it, unrealizingly—and been always unrealizingly spared.… Like the time when he came- to on the hard iron catwalk high over the railroad tracks at Basle (awoke in the blue steaming night and saw the murky yards beneath flecked with tiny piercing lights of ruby and emerald and topaz shining through the steam, and the trains sliding in from all over Europe or panting there below as they bided the hour that marked the time-change between Switzerland and France); that time he had climbed to the wet slippery vibrating rail of the Conte di Savoia plunging westward in the middle of the night and dared his Norwegian Anna to prevent his leap to the boiling wake of the ship (she had walked away, amused, and he had been left standing there, doing what he would have been unable to do sober and by daylight, till the gale—which might have done otherwise—filled his camel’s-hair coat and threw him ignominously to the rolling deck again); or the nightmare-time at five in the morning, with a tireless barfly Irish friend—the two of them all that remained after a gala night at the Suvretta, they and a drowsy fixed-smiling barmaid who awaited their further pleasure—the way, then, he had exploded a gas-filled balloon with his cigarette and ignited the twisted crêpe-paper streamers strung from floor to ceiling: touched off the whole room with a sudden hellish roar till the place was all one instant flame—which immediately, miraculously, went out (sparing not only him, that time, but the several hundred sleepers as well who slep
t in the rooms above).…

  Was this, then, the end, this lynching now (for so the dream pointed from the start)? No, it was only the beginning, the first of all those freakish nightmare-times, the foundation of the pattern, laid in dream as in fact, to be repeated endlessly till the one ultimate just end or new beginning.…

  He was not scared for himself (he had never been, ever). He was only frightened because a dreadful thing was about to happen to them all, of which he, the victim, would be the least to suffer. It was horrible that it had to happen but there was no help for it, no other way out for any of them. He ran on blindly, his heart thumping with an intolerable pity. His one fear was that he might stumble and fall and be trampled underfoot, finding his death in a way that he knew was not right, in a way that was against the will of the crowd, a death accidental and anonymous, contrary to the whole intention of the dream as it had shown itself from the beginning. But if the other were intended and inevitable, why fear falling? He would not fall, and he didn’t. He ran on, propelled along at a deadly jog-trot by the single purpose of the mob.

  The great buildings of the campus were lost in the clouds of dust that went up from the thousands of running feet. The Liberal Arts and Fine Arts colleges, the Hall of Languages, the Library—dimly he was aware that the crowd flowed past them somewhere in the dust-yellow gloom. They became more and more obscured and were left behind. Above the dull thunder of trampling, he heard the bell in the chapel ringing, the alarum-bell.

  Then, a little ahead—still a hundred feet off, perhaps—he began to notice there was some small island that the crowd flowed around. The stream separated at that point and closed again beyond it, and ran again on. A tree, a post? But it was an object moving. Something or someone fought there, going against the crowd, cutting through it—toward him? Over the bent backs and bobbing heads, through the spiraling dust, passing maddeningly in and out of view as the crowd wove around it, he saw the young agonized face, the battling arms, the threshing shoulders, the grinding clenched white-shining teeth of his younger brother.