Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

“I see you’re new here,” she whispered, looking around nervously. “Can I talk to you for five minutes? Even two?” she begged. Stefan looked at Staszek, who stood smiling slightly, playing with a neurological rubber hammer.

“Doctor, I’m completely normal!”

Stefan knew that dissimulation was a classic symptom in some forms of madness, so he thought he knew how to handle her. “We’ll talk about it during rounds.”

“We will? Really?” She seemed to cheer up. “I can see you understand me, doctor.”

Then she leaned close and whispered, “Because there’s nothing but lunatics here. Nothing ,” she added with emphasis.

He wondered why she had been so secretive. Who else did she expect to find in an asylum? But as he walked with Staszek, it suddenly struck him: she meant everybody, including the doctors! Nosilewska too? He tried to ask Staszek, as delicately as possible, whether Nosilewska was perhaps a little strange, but his friend snorted.

“Nosilewska?” Staszek launched into a heated defense: “Ridiculous! She comes from the best family.” He’s hopelessly in love with her, Stefan realized. Staszek suddenly looked different to him. He noticed the badly shaved spot on his bobbing Adam’s apple, his ugly teeth, an emerging pimple, the receding hairline where a few years ago there had been lush dark waves.

He doesn’t stand a chance, Stefan thought.

Stefan himself had no interest in her. She was beautiful, even very beautiful, with extraordinary eyes, but something about her repelled him.

As they walked, Staszek remembered Sekułowski and decided to introduce Stefan to him.

“A fantastically brilliant man,” Staszek explained, “but scatterbrained. You can have a great conversation, but don’t set him off. And watch your manners, will you? He’s very touchy.”

“I’ll be careful,” Stefan promised.

They went outside to get to the recovery wing. The skies were clearing, the wind tearing great holes in the gray, fluffy clouds. Fog wafted low over the trees.

They came across a man in a short coat pushing a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He was a Jew, powerfully built and dark-skinned, with a beard that started almost at his eyes.

“Good morning, sir,” he said to Stefan, ignoring Staszek. “Have you forgotten me, doctor? Yes, I see that you don’t remember me.”

“I’m not sure,” Stefan began as he stopped and returned the other man’s bow. Staszek stood by in obvious amusement, kicking at a weed with the tip of his shoe.

“Nagiel, Salomon Nagiel. I did your dad’s metalwork, don’t you remember?”

Something clicked in Stefan’s mind. In fact there had been a handyman with whom his father would sometimes disappear into the workshop to build a model.

“Do you know what I do here?” Nagiel continued. “I am the First Angel.”

Stefan felt foolish. Nagiel came closer and whispered earnestly, “A week from now there’s going to be a big assembly. The Lord God Himself will be there, and David, and all the Prophets and Archangels. Everyone. I have influence there, so if you need anything, doctor, just let me know, and I’ll take care of it.”

“No, I don’t need anything.”

Stefan grabbed Staszek by the arm and pulled him toward the door. The Jew stood watching, leaning on his shovel.

“Who knows what laymen think an asylum is,” Stefan was saying as they turned into a long corridor with yellow tiles. At a landing another corridor led off to the left, lighted by small, widely spaced lamps that somehow suggested a forest. They moved in and out of darkness as they walked.

“The symptoms you’ve seen so far are pretty typical. Delusions, hallucinations, motor excitement, dementia, catatonia, mania, and so on. But pay attention now.”

He stopped under a frosted-glass lamp at an ordinary door with a handle and lock.

They entered a small, airy room with a bed against the wall, a few white chairs, and a table with an orderly stack of thick books on top. Numerous sheets of paper crumpled into balls lay on the floor. A man in violet pajamas with silver stripes sat with his back to the door. When he turned around, Stefan recalled a photograph from an illustrated magazine. He was a tall man, almost handsome, but putting on weight that was obscuring his sharp, regular features. He had prominent eyebrows flecked with gray like his temples, and his eyes looked bright, lively, and strong, capable of staring relentlessly, now vacant with relaxation. They were colorless, and picked up the hues of their surroundings. They were light now. The poet’s skin, pale from his confinement indoors, seemed almost transparent; under his eyes it sagged into barely perceptible pockets.

“Allow me to introduce my colleague, Doctor Trzyniecki,” Staszek said. “He’s come to work with us for a while. An excellent participant in discussions of ideas.”

“But only as a dilettante,” said Stefan, pleased at Sekułowski’s brief, warm handshake. They sat. It might have looked strange: two men in white coats, stethoscopes and hammers sticking indiscreetly out of their pockets, and an older man in wild pajamas.

They chatted about this and that for a while, and then Sekułowski remarked, “Medicine can offer a pretty good window on infinity. Sometimes I regret not having studied it systematically.”

“You are speaking with an expert on psychopathology,” Staszek said to Stefan, who noted that his friend was more restrained and rigid than usual. He’s trying his best, Stefan thought.

Stefan said that no one had yet written a novel about medicine believably depicting the profession.

“A scribbler’s job,” the poet said, smiling politely but dismissively. “A mirror to everyday life? What does that have to do with literature? By that view, doctor—contrary to what Witkacy says—the novel would be the art form of the peeping Tom.”

“I was thinking of the whole complexity of the profession… the transformation of a person who enters the halls of the university knowing people only on the outside and… comes out a doctor.”

He knew that sounded stupid. To his unpleasant surprise, Stefan realized that he was having trouble formulating his thoughts and choosing his words, that he was confused, like a freshman in front of a professor, even though he felt no awe of Sekułowski.

“It seems to me that we have no more knowledge of our bodies than of the most distant star,” the poet said quietly.

“But we are discovering the laws that govern the body.”

“Not until the majority of biological theses have their antitheses. Scientific theory is intellectual chewing gum.”

“But allow me to ask,” Stefan replied, slightly impatient. “What did you do when you were sick?”

“I called the doctor.” Sekułowski smiled. His smile was as bright as a child’s. “But when I was eighteen years old, I realized how many morons became doctors. Since then I have had a panicky fear of illness, because how can you entrust your body to someone more stupid than yourself?”

“Sometimes that’s best. Haven’t you ever felt like confiding things you would conceal from those closest to you, to the first stranger that comes along?”

“And who, according to you, is close?”

“Well, your parents, for instance.”

“Mommy and Daddy know best?” Sekułowski asked. “Parents are supposed to be close? Why not the coelacanth? After all, your biology teaches us that they are the first link in the chain of evolution, so why shouldn’t intimacy extend to the whole family, lizards included? Do you know anyone who ever conceived a child with a warm thought to its future intellectual life?”

“Well, what about women?”

“You must be joking. The sexes deal with each other out of complicated motives, probably a consequence of some twisted protein that lacked something here and had something sticking out there, but how do we get from there to closeness? To intellectual closeness. Is your leg close to you?”