Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Stefan, who disliked Rygier, smiled and asked, “What do you have against Doctor Rygier?”

“Well, just… I won’t do it again. If you’re on duty, doctor, not a peep.”

“I’m not on duty. I just happened to be passing by,” Stefan said. But that sounded a little too informal, so he corrected himself: “Come on, no more fooling around. Doctor Rygier or me, it’s all the same. Otherwise they’ll send you right to electroshock.”

Paścikowiak sat on the bed, covering the hole in the sheet, and showed his narrow teeth in a silly smile. The records said he was subnormal, but his cleverness did not fit into any diagnostic pigeonhole.

On his way out, Stefan glanced into the next ward. An idiot, a longtime hospital resident, lay murmuring on the nearest bed, covered with a blanket. A few patients were sitting nearby, and one was walking around his bed.

Stefan went in.

“What’s going on?” he asked the man who was murmuring. A beggar’s face with a red beard, yellowish eyes, and a toothless mouth peeked out from under the blanket. “All right, how much is a hundred and thirteen thousand two hundred and five times twenty-eight thousand six hundred and thirty?”

This was an act of kindness: now the crouched figure murmured in a different tone, fervently, almost prayerfully. A moment later he jabbered, “…illion… forty-one million… ifty-nine thousand… dred and fifty.”

Stefan did not have to check. He knew that the man could multiply and divide six-digit numbers in seconds. When he first arrived at the asylum, Stefan had asked the patient how he did it. The reply was an irate mutter. Once, tempted by Stefan’s offer of a piece of chocolate, the idiot promised to tell his secret. Stammering and drooling on the chocolate, he said, “I’ve got… drawers in my head. Click, click. Thousands here, millions here, click click. Snap. And there it is.”

“There what is?” asked Stefan, disappointed.

Now the mathematician lowered the blanket, and his face beamed. He was big. “Pump me up!” he lisped.

That meant that he wanted to be given two large numbers.

“Well…” Stefan scrupulously counted out the thousands and told him to multiply. The idiot drooled, whispered, hiccuped, and gave the answer. Stefan stood at the foot of the bed, thinking.

The idiot was silent for a moment, then pleaded again, “Pump me up!”

Stefan recited another pair of numbers. Was this what the idiot mathematician needed to be reassured of his own worth? There were times when Stefan felt a sudden fear, as if he should fall to his knees and beg everyone to forgive him for being so normal, for sometimes feeling self-satisfied, for forgetting about them.

He had nowhere to go. In the end he went to see Sekułowski.

The poet was shaving. Noticing a volume of Bernanos on the table, Stefan started to say something about Christian ethics, but Sekułowski did not give him a chance. Standing at the mirror, his face lathered, he shook the shaving brush several times, sending suds flying across the room.

“Doctor, it makes no sense. The church, that old terrorist organization, has been acquiring souls for two thousand years now, and what has come of it? Salvation for some, symptoms for others.”

Sekułowski was more interested in the problem of genius. Stefan supposed that he thought of it “from the inside,” regarding himself as a genius.

“Well, then take van Gogh or Pascal. It’s an old story. On the other hand, you garbagemen of the soul know nothing about us.”

(Aha! thought Stefan.)

“I remember, from the days of my apprenticeship, a few interesting, pure forms nourished by various literary circles. There was this young writer. Things came easy to him. He had his picture in the papers, interviews, translations, reprints. I was green with envy. I could savor hatred the way the Buddha savored nothingness. Once we ran into each other when both of us were drunk. All his inhibitions were gone. He broke down crying, told me that he envied me my elitism and my high standards. That I had been so protective of what I wrote. That my solitude was so productive and proud. The next day we weren’t talking to each other anymore. Soon after, he published an essay on my poems: ‘An Abortion Signifying Nothing.’ A masterpiece of applied sadism. If you want to listen, please come into the bathroom because I’m going to take a shower.”

Lately Sekułowski had been admitting Stefan to his evening ablutions, perhaps as a new way of humiliating him.

He climbed naked into the shower and went on talking. “When I started, I had doubts when my friends praised me. When they didn’t, I thought: Aha! And when they started giving out advice—that I was in a rut, a blind alley, that I was burning myself out—then I knew I was on the right track.”

He ran a washcloth over his hairy backside.

“There were a couple of old men back then. The first was supposed to be an epic poet—he had never published a single epic, but that was his reputation. They believed in him, but I didn’t. He collected mottoes like butterflies. Said he needed them for his ‘life’s work.’ He had been writing this life’s work since his youth, constantly correcting it and comparing it to Flaubert’s manuscripts. Forever making changes and never getting it right. He would put down three words a week. When he died, somebody lent me his manuscript for a couple of days. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: fluff. Nothing that would last, no effort, no desire. Never trust blowhards—you have to have talent. Don’t tell me about Flaubert’s endlessly worked-over manuscripts, because I’ve seen Wilde’s work. That’s right, Oscar. Did you know that he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in two weeks?”

He stuck his head under the shower and blew his nose thunderously.

“The other one was famous in partibus infidelium. A member of the PEN Club. He read the Upanishads in the original and could write as fluently in French as in Polish. Even the critics respected him. He feared me alone, and hated me because I knew his limits. I could sense them like a hollow bottom in everything he wrote. He would get off to a great start, establish the situation, inject life into the characters, and the action would roll along, until he got to the point where he had to rise above the level of merely putting things down on paper, to step beyond stupidity. But he couldn’t do it. That was as far as he could go. Nobody else could hear the false note, so he thought of himself like that naked emperor in Hans Christian Andersen. Do you understand? For me, someone else’s writing is like a weight on the floor. All I have to do is walk up to it and decide whether I can pick it up or not. In other words, could I do better or not?”

“And could you?”

Sekułowski scratched his soapy back luxuriantly.

“Almost always. Every so often, when the waves receded, I’d read what I’d written—with some admiration. It’s mostly a question of style. The difference in generations comes down to this: once they used to write, ‘the dawn smelled of roses.’ Then a new wave comes, and for a while they write, ‘the morning smelled of piss.’ But the device is the same. That’s not reform. That’s not innovation.”

He barked like a seal under the hot stream of water.

“All writing has to have a skeleton, like a woman, but not one you can feel. Also like a woman. Wait a second—I just remembered a great story. Yesterday, Doctor Rygier lent me a couple of old literary journals. What a riot! That pack of critics uttering each word convinced that history was speaking through their mouths, when at best it was yesterday’s vodka. Ouch!” His hair had gotten tangled.

He rubbed his belly and went on, “I have a particularly painful memory from that period, on which fate has poured balm. I’ll leave names out of it. May he rest peacefully in his grave, upon which I relieve myself,” Sekułowski said with a vulgar laugh that may have had something to do with his own nakedness.