The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —Now I shouldn’t repeat this, but I heard . . .

  —Do you know . . .

  —I heard . . .

  —Do you know what I thought, as I remembered, after that illness that lasted so long, the Lord didn’t spare him. As I remembered . . .

  —But I was certain . . .

  —Well it’s true, the past plays tricks when all we have to depend upon is mortal memory.

  —Wait! Don’t you smell something?

  —I did in there, I smelled something burning.

  —The terrible sweet smell of something burning.

  Their words rose on bursts of wind, were fouled in the buttressed eddies, and sunk by metallic cries of nails being wrenched from wood inside, where they went themselves a moment later, for it had suddenly begun to snow.

  The wind was still gentle enough, and the snow fell lightly; but through it, on the highway, gripping the steering wheel over which he could just see, a young man whose expression did something to redeem the otherwise vapid character of his face peered ahead between knuckles gone white with purpose, as he sped to answer the summons. His only sounds were bleating attempts to control his cold, now in its second, and most watery, day. The storm, as he would call it later, and as, later, it did indeed become, had blown up just as he left the town some ten miles off; and as though it had arisen as a challenge and a dare to his duty, he sped into the white flakes, making of their mild falling a threat worthy of his goal.

  He did in fact almost come to grief as he entered the town, where the arrow pointing to left warned of the imminent curve to the right. From time to time he had taken one hand from the wheel, to draw across his nose, which is just what he was doing at that moment, and for uncountable terrifying instants he wove between the Civil War monument and the Depot Tavern, as though choosing which to demolish, an experience which the most worthy of goals could scarcely redeem, and explains why he had to be helped from his car upon arrival at the church.

  Things had been set to rights as far as was possible, the pulpit replaced, the damaged pews straightened out, and the windows un-boarded, largely through the efforts of the burly man and his buddies. He stood now to the back of the unsteady gasping congregation, looking quite indignantly about him, and above, from an eye already greatly swollen and discolored. There were others as severely marked, better than a half-dozen of them, and he turned to one now, whose shirt hung in tatters under his torn jacket, to mutter, —We got him there all right, the doc gave him a sedative, put him right out like a light. Then he turned respectfully to the fore, waiting for the conscript in the pulpit to begin.

  The young minister started twice, but the sounds he made could barely be heard above, or distinguished from, the gasps and chirps in the congregation. And the reason for this ferment was that they were, one by one, turning their eyes above them. Although little light came in through the lozenge-shaped panes even now, uncovered, because of the sudden change in the weather, and the electric lights were, like the organ, found to have been put out of order, it was still quite easy to see the figures of stars, planets, the moon in various phases, and a resplendent sun, among other lavish celestial bodies, painted broadcast over the inside of the roof.

  Gradually the sound from the pulpit disentangled itself from those rising before it, climbing earnestly from one line to the next of what turned out to be part of the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. After that reassuring narrative, the place was quiet but for the sounds of his own sincere pleading, as he went on to Saint John, and that vernal episode involving Lazarus, which he seemed to think might not come amiss. Apparently he was right. They seemed more grateful for resurrection than they had needful of the stable birth; and as his own voice broke and mounted between gasps, and his eyes watered in what, from almost anywhere in that light, appeared an overpowering emotion of belief, many lips on the upturned faces joined his importunate plea, —I am the Resurrection, and the Life . . .

  It was a simple service. He hoped by now to do little more than read a psalm, solicit a hymn, a cappella, and during that exercise recover enough voice himself to get through benediction; but he had hardly launched Psalm Number 89, —Till I thy foes thy footstool make . . . when there was a resounding crash which, though apparently some distance off, in the direction of the railway station, lost none of its impact on this convalescent throng. With great presence of mind, he called for Rock of Ages, and with equal fortitude led two stanzas of it himself, so that the benediction, when it came, was accepted as a minute of silent prayer by all but a few who could see his lips, and every bit of his face, straining over it, until, with the lowering of his unsteady hand, it was all over, and no one there ever saw him again.

  He left that town the way he had come, though more slowly, and more slowly still as he approached the built-up end of the curve which had almost saved him from the experience he had just been through, in the same manner that someone else, a complete stranger as the barbarian license tag showed, had just been delivered from the cares of this world to the chimera of the next. The Depot Tavern was ablaze; and the car radio, which was well inside with the whole front end of it, was playing the rondo from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, to the silent passenger, and the twelve-point buck, knocked slightly askew up there as though he had cocked his head, listening, and in spite of the red Christmas tree light dangling at the end of his nose, watching with a dusty eyeball and an air of imperturbable serenity.

  The real storm came, shrouding Mount Lamentation and then obliterating it altogether. The wind blew with a peculiarly terrible quality, broke here and there in the town a few windows, vindictive, viciously fingered where there was anything to destroy. It swept over the empty carriage barn, and cracked a blotched pane of that window tucked high on the house where Janet had been found, blue and rough-faced, weeping, and slavering —never never never never never . . . see him . . . more . . . , which some coarse unimaginative mind later publicly interpreted as a reference to a figure he’d known only as the sexton, found then in answer to the whine of a dog from behind a locked door, in bed, clutching a piece of paper, as the coroner, displacing the top button of the underwear for a token touch of his stethoscope against that empty chest, said he had probably lain for a day or two.

  (Downstairs, in the defaced study, the coroner even got to his knees on the floor beside the carcass flung there at full length, to note and comment on the single fatal wound in the bull’s neck, inflicted while it lived, as one could see from the round and gaping nature instead of its being drawn in a slit, as such a wound would have been otherwise.)

  And the darkness came in like a substance driven on the wind which filled every crevice with it, and still did not relent where it failed in destruction, wailing round corners and shrill in the timbers erected awry but steady there at the foot of the hill. As for that platform, it would take three men as many days to dismantle it; but, although a number of curious things were to turn up around the place within the next few months, no one ever came upon anything that might have been a balloon.

  A number of curious things turned up during the first few months of the new minister’s tenancy, though that barely lasted the spring. He did “dig right in” (that was one of his expressions) to try to make the place “cheery” (another) and even “cozy” ( . . .), choosing, first off, a bright upstairs room for his study, where it was not until one day when he lay on his back on the floor exercising with dumbbells (that was one of the things he did) that he discovered the wall to be papered with roses, and all of them upside down. Heretofore the pattern had not disturbed him, for he’d never tried to make anything of it; but now! . . . He was on his feet immediately, and had that taken care of, repapered, that is, with something (as he said) of a more masculine character, a repetitious series of what for him represented fox hunting, not unlike the paper he had used in a darker downstairs room, after its floor had been sanded to remove the stains, and its walls and ceiling scraped of the brilliant colors with which the
y had been heavily painted, that and a half-dozen repairs to the walls where they looked to have been kicked in.

  From a small room at the end of the upstairs hall, he’d had removed a printing press, its jumble of type, and a bundle of printed matter of which he could not make head or tail; not that he needed the room for anything, but he saw no reason to have a printing press in it at the foot of the narrow bed. From a chest of drawers in another room, he had a quantity of empty bottles removed. Not that he needed the drawers. He took down some paintings, whose subject matter was neither cheery nor cozy, and stored them along with a damaged statue, whose presence was certainly neither of those things, in a closet where he had come upon a jumble of books and some pieces of dark wood each mounting a small broken mirror in the end, which he took to be the remains of a curious picture frame, though he did not consider trying to have it restored.

  At one point he opened a small closet and found in it oatmeal tins, nothing but empty square oatmeal tins stacked from floor to ceiling.

  Then there were the books. Dumped in another closet he found such titles as Malay Magic and Libellus de Terrificationibus Nocturnisque Tumultibus in a cascading disarray, and forced the door closed on them again immediately. From a dim room presided over by a needlepoint NO CROSS NO CROWN (which he gave to the Use-Me Ladies) he rescued a few sober titles for his own shelves, where Baxter’s Everlasting Rest and Fisher’s Catechism lent an air of permanence, stacked against Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Andrew Jackson Davis’s Penetralia was of course relegated as a curio, for “Dick” (as this young man encouraged people to call him, since his Christian name was Richard), had no interest in seeing the interior of objects. That, along with Buffon’s Natural History, which actually sprang open in his hand when he took it down, and he found himself staring at a hand-tinted picture of an ape.

  There were even books in the room where he’d found the drawers full of bottles. He kept two volumes, Tissandier’s Histoire des ballons, not that he was interested in balloons, or could have read them if he were, but they were bound in green, and matched the motif of the new wallpaper. As for the others, two volumes of Lew Wallace, and Jules Verne’s Tour of the Moon, Round the World in Eighty Days, and Five Weeks in a Balloon, those he gave to the American Legion, with whom he was co-operating in the great nation-wide Spiritual Crusade which they were sponsoring.

  In the community, “Dick” also sang (he had a very agreeable “white tenor”), and conducted the Boy Scout troop.

  There were, among the local mothers of fourteen-year-old boys, a few who felt they understood “Dick” very well, and cherished him accordingly; there were on the other hand a few elders who did not understand him at all, even to one sturdy old man who complained at the new minister’s pronunciation. —Don’t like the way he says Gawd . . . said that gray eminence, with the petulance of a man defending someone in his immediate family, and he never entered the church on his own feet again.

  The ladies of the Use-Me Society found “Dick” a very agreeable listener; and he soon had some idea of how matters had gone before him, how the church (where he took one look and said, —Gee, we’d better dig right in . . .) came to demand such extensive refurbishing, and so forth. —And don’t you know . . . said one of the ladies (who already referred to him as “Our ‘Dick’ ”), speaking of the late sexton, —I once heard him say, It’s only we that have no care for dying who never manage it . . . And from other things she, and her companions, said from time to time, their relief at having been delivered from the prospect of burial by those hands was evident, as though he might have laid them in askew, to hamper that mighty leap when the Trumpet sounded. “Dick” heard of the demented girl who had lived up there, since taken to a state institution where she should have gone in the first place (for her own good) but for the Reverend’s charity (which often extended too far), that she had rewritten the Bible and was in the act of printing it herself when “everything came to a head.” Even the reliable details of her rumored cure of the sexton’s paralysis were brought from these rotting-rooms and aired quite solemnly: the old man had got both legs into one leg of his pajamas one night on going to bed, cried out, —A stroke! . . . or —Paraplegia! . . . or some such, and she had come down the hall to the rescue. Though where they had gained this intelligence, or that she never left the house because she feared falling through the cracks in the sidewalk, they did not disclose.

  As for the Reverend himself, it was generally admitted that his efforts and accomplishment, especially in those two final days of his dominion, had been prodigious, and, for one man, incredible; as it was generally agreed that he had, in his lifetime, suffered severe trials, and in sharing the magnanimous aggregate of their own troubled pasts, they were able to concur in granting him the right to a prolonged, confined, rest, in a private institution, where what remained of his own funds after the cost of repairs to certain community property, and his neighbor’s bull, had been deducted, would suffice to maintain him until he was delivered (or summoned: there were two distinct opinions on this) by the Lord; and where “Dick,” being of an earnest, responsible nature, decided to visit him.

  And he did manage to emerge with the consolation that the familiar figure whom their community of kindness had enthralled showed no signs of breaking out to return and violate them with signs of appreciation, and appeared, if not grateful, distantly resigned to what, in the compound agreement of their own, they were pleased to call the Lord’s will.

  Happymount had been built originally as a natural history museum, by a philanthropist who felt that such things should be located in the country. When, eventually, it became evident that people were unwilling to make this excursion simply to see stuffed animals and stuffed Indians, it was suggested that they might come out to see human specimens, especially if they were relatives. The lighting inside was very bad. Beyond an iron palisade which separated it from the cares of the world, Happymount rose on a sea of green lawns tended by lonely lunatics: what could be more restful and rewarding than following the lawnmower up and down the green swathes day after day, and by the time one reached the laundry it was time to start at the front gate again.

  The grassless winter proved a problem.

  —Then you are the son? The doctor stared brightly through gold-rimmed glasses. He had proved, when he stood behind his desk a moment before, to be a good head shorter than “Dick,” who was himself barely average height.

  —The what? I? . . .

  —Miss Inch, the doctor called, and a nurse appeared in the door. —The son . . . the son . . .

  —It’s a beautiful day, doctor.

  —Ward G . . .

  —Wait a minute . . . wait a minute . . .

  It is true, the grassless winter proved a problem for everyone. Once outside in the sunshine, the nurse said, —You must not mind Mister Farisy. We have put him to sharing quarters with Mister Farisy.

  Mr. Farisy’s dossier at Happymount was a slim one: it detailed little of his successful years as an eminent anatomist, did not, in fact, even mention the process he said he had perfected for curing hams while still on the pig. It commenced in volume only at the point where (according to his own testimony) he had been appointed by the Congregation of the Sacred Rites, at the Vatican, to investigate early methods of crucifixion: were nails driven through the hands? or the wrists? As a scientist, Mr. Farisy had always relied on empirical methods, and found no reason to abandon them now: twenty arms were delivered to his laboratory. He nailed each right hand, and each left wrist, to the wall, and attached mobile weights driven by a system of bellows which he’d removed from a player piano, to simulate the rising and falling motions of the breathing human being. Then he set the thing in motion: weights rose and fell; wood creaked; flesh tore; bones split; and something snapped in Mr. Farisy’s head. Next day he called for two dozen arms, then a gross, and silence followed: he said he had been brought to Happymount soon after he’d been discovered swinging hand-over-hand in the
trapeze of intricate and grand proportions he’d fashioned in his laboratory. (But then, he also said he was descended from Attila the Hun.)

  —Humm . . . ho . . . did Barabbas go free? Listen, I had a dream last night, a most ghastly nightmare. Do you want to hear it?

  —No.

  —I was on a mountaintop beside a little shed. I don’t know how I could tell I was on a mountaintop, because I couldn’t see the mountain. I couldn’t even see other mountains. It was just because I knew I was on a mountaintop, so there! Ahhp . . . don’t interrupt or I won’t tell you any more. Maybe it was the light. The quality of light is different on a mountaintop, you’ll see, thin, rarefied, the quintessence of purification.

  —Be quiet. Go to sleep.

  —The shed was an old board building. Weatherbeaten. Well, why shouldn’t it be weatherbeaten, on a mountaintop like that, so there. The sun . . .

  —Hmmnph . . .

  —Yes the sun was behind me, covering me with its quintessential light, so there. I had him under the arms, with his back up against the shed but he was much bigger than I was, so much bigger I could hardly lift him. I decided the only way to do it was to nail one hand to one board and the other to a board higher up, then take the first nail out and put it in two boards higher, and then the same with the other hand, left hand, right hand, left hand right hand left hand . . .

  —Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

  —Right up the wall. And why that’s exactly what I was doing when I saw the hands were tearing to pieces. He was too big. I couldn’t keep it up or the hands would be all torn to pieces by the time I got him up there. Oh, oh, oh, oh, it was terrible, and terrible, and discouraging from a scientific point of view, the way the nail just tore it apart, left hand, right hand . . . maybe I should have used smaller nails? That’s the way I left him, with his trouser-cuffs dragging in the dirt.

  —Stop it.