Insel Read online

  I did not find it extraordinary that my condition as an undiminishable steak should make me feel almost sublime, or that the man intensely leaning towards me should pray to it.

  There was another element in his unbelievable magnetism of recoil. His air of friability warning off contact lest he crumble. Not only was he preposterously emaciated, but even as his gravity seemed lightened, his body—what was left of it—seemed less ponderable than it should have been. Insel was made of extremely diaphanous stuff. Between the shrunken contour of his present volume his original “serial mold” was filled in with some intangible aural matter remaining in place despite his anatomical shrinkage. An aura that enveloped him with an extra external sensibility.

  To investigate, I tapped him lightly on the arm in drawing his attention—and actually in a tenuous way I did feel my hand pass through “something.” The surface of his cloth sleeve, like a stiff sieve, was letting that something through. The effect on Insel was unforeseeable—jerking his face over his shoulder, he twitched away from my fingers with the acid sneer of a wounded feline. This might be merely a reflex of physical repulsion to myself, so later I repeated the gesture, but as if my hand in its first contact had got coated with the psychic exudence it would seem there was no longer any hurt in it. He was calm under my touch.

  8

  THE REVERSE OF HIS ALOOFNESS WAS A HOLLOW invitation to my intrusion. Urged to cross the frontier of his individuality, I got in the way of that faintly electric current he emitted. His magnetic pull steadily on the increase, the repulsion proportionately defined, threw me into a vibrational quandary, until as if it were imperative for me to make a connection with the emissive agency of my accidental clairvoyance, with a supernormal acumen he inspired, I located the one point of contact: the temple. Straightway I found myself possessed of an ability to form a “mental double” (for no portion of my palpable substantiality was in any way involved), a mental double of my own temple.

  This was one manifestation of how in Insel’s vicinity pieces of bodies would seem to break off as astral fractions and on occasion hang, visually suspended in the air. Quite apparently to my subconscious the bit of my skull encaving the fragile area flew off me, crashed onto his and stuck there.

  On the spur of this subvoluntary cohesion to the telepathic center—I definitely penetrated (into) his mediumistic world where illusory experience which had so far escaped as scarcely whispered pictures took on a fair degree of resemblance to three-dimensional concretion: the sculpture of hallucination succeeding to the visionary film.

  Insel straightened as a water level, his petrified eyes drilling the image of his coma into the ultimate ceiling, broke into a right angle of prostration and ascension.

  Out of a torso of white ash arose iron rags as puffs of curling smoke, blocks of shadow crushed together in the outline of a giant. Dense as the dark, high as a tower, the almost imperceptible radiance of a will-o’-the-wisp shining from it—I crouched alongside encumbered with an enormous shell white as plaster which, having but partly taken shape, trailed to an end in a sail of mist.

  And all the while Insel kept up his mixture of Beggar’s Opera and oratorio, showing a tragi-comic duality in his confidences. A coxcomb in purgatory, he enlivened a suppliant self-abasement with pranks he was proud to have played on a short-sighted mistress. Vast tracks of his barren universe were fixed in her monocle.

  Our discussions of his tribulations had the light hilarity of conversation between clowns. Our shoulders almost touching, we seemed to have come within risible distance of each other. As if our imbecilic mirth were due to an assurance that suffering loses weight when tossed to and fro.

  Intermittently his intriguing anxieties ceased to be actual. In his cerebral commotion, Trouble, attaining an inflation at which it burst, had no further existence except in the fragments constituting his exhortations for help which, at that, were his means of entertaining one.

  Albert Londres tells of a lunatic who periodically would drop whatever he was doing to go up to the wall and say peculiar prayers to it. So Insel had two or three intimate anecdotes he had to “get off.” He told them whenever I met him with an earnestness that, like a gentle gimlet, bored into my mind. The culminative point of his corporeal life had been his threat to shoot a girl who left him for a lesbian, and of his psychic life, his magnetic rays drawing some other girl out of bed on to her balcony whenever he passed below at night.

  As a prayer, repeated over and over, becoming autohypnotic, attains to faith in each retelling, these stories grew vaster, lasted longer, reached farther into a kind of absolute of confidence. As if with incantations he must summon up his past because some unimaginable impediment withheld the present and the future from him. His mind besieged the barred outlet of today-into-tomorrow in an effort to break it down and gather fresh material, but on finding itself impotent revoked to memory, dilating his souvenirs until for him the story of the universe was blotted out by the gigantism of his meager individual experience.

  Externally his aspect was vague as, internally, the rudimentary ideas stored in his cerebral cells. His person withdrawing in approaching, his eyes appeared to start their staring in advance of the brows that encaved them. Between his “expression” preceding his face and his speech which so often sounded as if issuing from a distance behind him, his person melted from view. In him everything seemed inverted. His voice in its drilling intensity getting softer, louder, would go up higher, lower.

  My casual ability to partake of his moods evoked my own anxiety of the past which joining in his terror of the aerial omen made it doubly real. The nomistic warning which recurred to my mind, “He who looks back returns to the maze,” I disobeyed; so intense was my intuitional curiosity as to the leak in Insel’s magnetic coherence. I felt that giving in to a dislocation of my identity, which is usually perilous or demoralizing, must in this exceptional case, be finally vindicated by a revelation of what supremely lovely essence was being conveyed to me by this human wreck. In the light of this my certitude his corporeal mendicancy appeared fictitious. So surely it was an exquisite nucleus that in his somewhat comatose exaltation he struggled to save. On the instant I accepted this salvation as equally my affair. Memory in euthanasia will come to life when fed on the same sort of stuff as that which formed it—.

  Insel, the animate cadaver, stretched with the pliancy of decay from the last war into the next—while walls of solid murder with soldiers for bricks came marching in on a living aspiration—to enclose it—waste it—it must not happen again.

  “Vielleicht verkaufen,” I could hear Insel muttering as I made this decision, obsessed by an impersonal responsibility. He was toting up imaginary accounts in payment of his passage to America.

  “Promise to be my guide and companion?” he implored earnestly while staring straight before him as if it did not matter where I was.

  “How tedious,” my everyday self recoiled, the lovely essence evaporating, for whenever Insel turned his profile he sort of extinguished. It was only when both his eyes were fixed upon me I entered his Edenic region of unreasoning bliss to sway among immaterial algae.

  In profile, as if he cut himself in half and in halving should leave himself evil, he became so alien, so very elfin, he induced aversion. The notch at the spring of the nose was further back than the drop of the upper lip. These angles of his pasty face were over-acute and out of plumb. A kink near the ear suggested the wire-hung jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy. In profile, this nitwit infused with the secret ghost, seemed to have been carved for a joke out of moldy wood.

  “Immer—immer spazieren—eternally taking a walk,” he insisted, once more aware of my presence; his voice dwindled to a pathos so unearthly it could only converse with the unconscious. His eyes, for dusk had fallen, were phosphorescent as approaching fireflies.

  As Insel consecrated our spontaneous comradeship with his tom-tom reiterations of how he delighted to talk to me, and I, nonplussed, would hazily inquire, “What about?
” I kept on naming him to myself.

  “Die nackte Seele,” and again, “Die nackte Seele.”

  It seemed quite fortuitous that sitting beside him I should feel I was up against “the naked soul.” Practically anything might substitute in my consciousness for a man, who, however long I looked at him I could never entirely “put together.”

  We had been sitting outside the Lutetia for six hours.

  “Now,” laughed Insel, “Man Ray should pass again.”

  “To conclude, we have no use for time.”

  “That is not what I mean—”

  “You mean that eternity spins round and round?”

  We arose. But our legs become paralyzed from sitting so long on the hard little chairs, we barely saved ourselves from toppling over and staggered across the pavement. Suddenly the Metro opened at my feet. In the midst of a sentence I dropped from sight as if impelled to conform with Insel’s concepts by flickering out. One seldom took leave of him; (walking along with him one would unexpectedly drift sideways into a cab) as Insel, in an electric sputter, softly mumbled “schade.”

  So now I descended the stairway—Insel leaned over it in his disgraceful grace, “When shall I see you again?” he implored, clutching his concave breast. An awesome lunar reflection lit up his face from within.

  9

  ON ONE OF MY VISITS TO TOWN INSEL DID NOT turn up, but when I left home to dine with friends I met him drifting round the corner with the wild concern of having too lately thrown off an unguessable inertia.

  He greeted me with the relief of an object which, having fallen apart, should chance upon its other half again. His discomforting friable surface had slightly embodied; he even—I felt, but was not sure—took my arm: a brittle elbowing into the prelude of some danse macabre.

  With a kind of epileptic cajolery he beseeched me to break my appointment. Finding this ghostly courtesy agreeable as any other, I decided to give him half an hour. I would drive to my friends instead of walking. So down we sat to suffuse another stray cafe with the ineffable haze of his contagion.

  Insel, leaning back against his chair in a tall recline of felicity, groped in his pocket and took out something I could not see for he held it like a conjuror. Signing for me to hold out my hand he placed his over it as a cupola showering so discreet a sensitiveness my hand responded as a plot of invisible grasses grazed by an imperceptible breath.

  “The girl,” he whispered, and the grasses parted under a couple of atomies cupped in my palm; Insel and his girl embracing—or were they Adam and Eve? “The girl gave me this,” he said, puckering his face in helpless incomprehension. “And it won’t go.”

  I looked at what he had dropped in my hand—a sordid silver watch on a worn leather strap.

  “Will you take it to be mended?” he wooed me. “You can speak French.”

  As soon as I was seated beside him I had reached the extremity of optimism. The landscape of a spattered hoarding across the street was too lovely to look at. I had to lower my eyelids. Insel already had lowered his on a face falling lower and lower into the excavation of his breast.

  He started up, elated to impart what he had found there. Evidently a death warrant.

  “I am to die,” he rejoiced. “And will you weep one little tear for me?” he asked flirtatiously.

  “Yum, yum,” I jibed, intent on the beauty of the silver rivers he had loosened in the veins of the ugly marble table top. “Does ums want to be pitied?— you’ve struck a hunk of granite.”

  “You won’t weep?” he implored from a gust of sad laughter.

  “Not a drop.”

  Insel tried again. “Sterben,” he sighed in the voice of a weary archangel, an incommemorable voice burying the endlessness of death in two syllables. I was disturbed—if he should peter out on that annihilating refrain I would never know what was so weirdly, so wonderfully the matter with this exquisite scarecrow.

  “Insel,” I shook him gently, “you’re much more likely to make people weep by remaining alive.”

  But Insel, passionately in love with Death, raved in a soft, a sublime sibilance, “Sterben—man muss—man—mu—uss.” This fair decease in which he infinitely delighted, vaster and more dimly distant than the lesser deaths of his usual aberrations, sailed with Insel on its wings to heights of a stratospheric purity.

  At once the hoarding became abominable, the marble of the table the color of nausea, the whole of the world depressing, and Insel, a dilapidated suicide, hung aloft from a terrifyingly rusty nail together with all his unpainted pictures—. This was a recollection of the somber ambition which stirred him whensoever he became aware of his real life. It looked pretty bad—real life—so carelessly repaired by hand—that obscene, that relentless hoarding. Insel, his eyes closed upon it, induced by Death the absolute decoy, examined an integral vision lining the degeneracy of his brain.

  His dirge still hummed on the air—.

  Life without world, how starkly lovely, stripped of despair. The soul, inhabiting the body of an ethic, ascended to the sapphire in the attic. Here was no need for salvage. If he preferred to attain perfection, I would let Insel loose to die as he pleased. But my unconscious, with an inkling of what perfection was like after sharing to some degree in his increate Eden, squirmed with envy.

  If Insel committed suicide—I could share in that, too. My envy at once supplanted by a flowering peace—filling with fragrance—space. Through a break in the cool white blot of its branches—I perceived the cafe clock. On that uncompromising dial all things converged to normal. I was a tout for a friend’s art gallery, feeding a cagey genius in the hope of production. Insel’s melodious ravings, an irritating whine— It was ten to eight.

  Nevertheless, as Insel was going to sterben—the word now sounded flatly banal—I promised to meet him at the Dôme after the cinema. “Take this,” I said. “Be sure you eat a wholesome meal,” with my usual mental ejection of the obvious man, to whom I was definitely averse.

  This unreasonable nonchalant faith in Insel’s alter ego was about to be greatly rewarded. After my amusing dinner and a good film which, when we came out, proved to have lasted much longer than usual, on our return in my friends’ car the lightning hand of pain unexpectedly grabbed my internal organs and, twisting them in a grim convulsion, wrung out of them as from a dishrag a deathly inner perspiration—as if one were about to retch a nothingness poisoned with anguish. I was in for it, this being the preliminary to invasion by the tenacious rodent which would not cease from me for days.

  It was one o’clock and Insel might have waited since half past eleven. He had. When my friends in some concern dropped me at the Dôme I could see him sitting outside.

  Insel seemed unconscious of having waited for me for an hour and a half. After all it was ridiculous stopping to apologize to one who lived in that other time and space. My reflection immediately complicated, “When was he here? When was he there? Was he in a wavering way existing in both dimensions at once?” The distant aristo went about his simple social life with sufficient consecutiveness, save for long delays excused with mysterious illness and misplaced sleep, he visited anyone who would have him on the right day.

  During my absence he had changed.

  I had never seen him like this before—human—actually gay! As I tried to explain why I must go home, Insel, in laughing over something he wanted to tell me, laid a fluttering hand on my shoulder— the torture of my body ceased.

  It was not only an interruption of pain. I was regalvanized. Straightening from top to toe, I inhaled a limpid air—the neon tubes caressed my eyes.

  I looked at Insel amazed. In what unheard of parasitism had I drawn this vitality out of a creature half-disintegrated?

  Evidently he was in good form. The sparks he seemed to emit in turn gave off smaller ones; an added superficial illumination induced by a few drinks, having much the same effect as the perspective confusion of traffic lights among electric signs.

  Out of all this an intimate
twinkle approached me. “Promise to sit here with me till seven o’clock tomorrow evening,” Insel entreated.

  “Naturally,” I acquiesced.

  There is no field of fantasy so rich as the financial promoting of failures. Weaving in and out of our conversation was a shuttle of money-making devices for Insel’s relief, the most practical being to star him in a horror film. It is a poor horror which has to grime its face—the only face on the films that has true horror in it is Jouvet’s—and that only an inkling—and so discreet.

  Insel said he had been offered such a role. But again he had not been able, or wishful, to pursue anything that carried him into the future—a future that ebbed from him as from others the past. He would look forward with one eagerly—always at a certain point he reverted—turned his blind back on the forward direction—.

  He said, “I have worn myself out tramping the city on fruitless quests—to show my good will.”

  Now I had found another profession for him— magnetic healer. Suddenly I foresaw the fear my physician would inspire nullifying his therapeutic value, and I did not suggest it to Insel.

  In his unusual liveliness, words, like roomy cupboards, dipped into the reservoir of excited honey and flapping their open doors spilled it all over the place as they passed.

  “Unglaublich,” said Insel. “With you alone am I able to express myself. You tell me exactly what I am thinking. No one else has understood what we understand.

  “You have such marvelous ideas—”

  “But Insel,” I protested conscientiously, “I have touched on my ideas so lightly— If I knew your language well enough to convey the subtlest shades of meaning—.”

  We decided to get a first-class dictionary. Henceforth nothing was to be lost!

  Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savor lay in its impress of endlessness has left me an ineradicable visual definition of Insel with his whittled exterior jerking in tics of joy a pate too loosely attached and almost worn down to the skull—and myself expansive in some secondary glow from that icy conflagration strewing gray ashes over his face as it burnt itself out. Always at an instinctive interval of shoulder from shoulder, as two aloft on the same telegraph wire exchange a titter of godforsaken sparrows.