Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

He rinsed himself off, reached for his bathrobe, and said calmly, “I pretended to be the most impudent man alive, but actually it was only uncertainty. That’s when you pick an ideology like choosing a tie off the rack—whichever seems most colorful and expensive. I was the most defenseless nobody, and above us all, like the brightest of stars, shined a certain critic of the older generation. He wrote like Hafiz praising the locomotive. He was the nineteenth century incarnate. He couldn’t breathe in our atmosphere, he could see no one of greatness. He had not yet noticed us, the young. Individually, we didn’t matter; if there were ten of us, he’d say good morning. He was a curious type, doctor, a born writer. He had talent, an apt metaphor for every occasion, and humor—and he was completely merciless. For one good metaphor, he was willing to annihilate a book and its author. And did he do it honestly? Don’t be naive.” Sekułowski combed his wet hair with great attention. “Today I’m absolutely sure that he believed in nothing. Why should he? He was like a beautiful watch missing one tiny screw, a writer with no counterweight. He wasn’t foolish enough to become the Polish Conrad, but there was no remedy for that.”

He put on his shirt.

“At the time, I had lost God. I don’t mean I stopped believing—I lost Him the way some men lose women, for no reason and with no hope of recovery. I suffered, because I needed an oracle. Well, it wouldn’t have taken much for that critic to finish me off. But he did believe in one thing. Himself. He oozed that belief the way some women ooze sex. Besides which, he was so famous that he was always right. He read a couple of poems that I sent him, and passed judgment. We were about as much alike as the sun and a shovel”—he laughed, knotting his tie—“and I was a dirty shovel. He talked in terms of first causes, fumbled around, and finally explained to me why my poems were worthless. He hesitated for a while, but in the end he let me go on writing. He let me, do you understand?” Sekułowski made an ugly face. “Well, it’s an old story. But when I think that today his name is meaningless to the young, I’m delighted. It’s revenge and I didn’t even have to lift a finger. It was prepared by life itself. It ripened slowly like a fruit—I know of nothing sweeter,” said the poet with great satisfaction, tying the silver belt of his camel smoking jacket.

“Can his contemporaries ever judge a man of genius? Is the van Gogh story fated to be repeated forever?”

“How should I know? Come into the room; it’s so humid in here, you could suffocate.”

“I think that more than one lunatic is an undiscovered genius. Just missing a counterweight, as you put it. Like Morek, for instance.” Stefan told him about the idiot mathematician.

Sekułowski cut him off angrily: “Morek is as much a genius as your Pajączkowski, but without such a good job.”

“Be that as it may, Pajączkowski has a doctorate in psychiatry… his work on manic-depression,” said Stefan, upset.

“Sure. Most academics are exactly like that mathematician. Maybe they don’t drool, but they can’t see anything outside their own fields. I knew a lichenologist once. You might not know what that is,” he added unexpectedly.

“I do,” retorted Stefan, who in fact did not.

“A lichenologist is a specialist in mosses,” Sekułowski explained. “This tow-headed scarecrow knew enough Latin to classify, enough physiology to write articles, and enough politics to carry on a conversation with the janitor. But if the discussion turned to fungus, he was lost. This world is crawling with idiot mathematicians. If they cultivate their poor skills in a socially useful direction, they’re tolerated. Literature is full of writers who are read by washerwomen but worry over their style with an eye to a posthumous edition of their letters. And what about doctors?”

Stefan tried to steer clear of the sensitive issue of medical practice, hoping to draw some more interesting formulations out of Sekułowski, but all he got was an invitation to kiss his ass. He went upstairs angry. All he knows is how to insult me, he thought.

Stefan decided to eavesdrop at his own door. The corridor was dark and empty as he approached on tiptoe. Silence. A rustling—her dress? The sheets? Then a sound like the plunger being pulled from a syringe. A slap. Then total silence, broken by sobbing. Yes, somebody was definitely crying. Nosilewska? He could not imagine that. He tapped the door lightly, and when no one answered, he knocked once and entered.

All the lights were out except the small lamp on the nightstand, which filled the room with a pale-lemon glow that reflected off the mirror to the wall and the bed. The bottle of orange vodka was half-empty: a good sign. The bed looked like a tornado had hit it, but where was Nosilewska? Staszek was lying there alone, in his clothes, his face buried in the pillow. He was crying.

“Staszek, what happened? Where is she?” asked Stefan, rushing to the bed.

Staszek only groaned more loudly.

“Tell me. Come on, what happened?”

Staszek raised his wet, red, snotty face; the emblem of dispair.

“If you… If I can… If you have…”

“Come on, tell me,”

“I won’t. If you feel any friendship for me at all, you’ll never ask me about it.”

“But what happened?” Stefan demanded, curiosity overcoming discretion.

“I feel miserable,” moaned Staszek.

Then suddenly he shouted: “I won’t tell you! Don’t talk to me!” And he ran out, holding the pillow to his chest.

“Give me back my pillow, you maniac!” Stefan shouted after him, but Staszek’s footsteps were already thumping down the stairs.

Stefan sat in the armchair, looked around, even lifted the covers and smelled the sheets, but he found out nothing. He was so curious that he wanted to go see Nosilewska, but he restrained himself. Maybe Staszek would calm down by morning. Maybe she would give something away, he thought, but he knew there was little chance of that.

It was late September. Heaps of manure were turning black like great molehills in the plowed fields. The aspen near Stefan’s window was diseased: dark spots covered its prematurely yellowing leaves. He sat motionless, watching the horizon sharp as a knife. He would sink into a torpor for hours on end, his eyes fixed on the sky, following the patterns of motes dancing in the empty light of the window.

Nosilewska asked him to write a report on a new patient. He agreed eagerly—anything to fill the time.

The patient was one of those slender androgynous girls who padded their busts with lace pillows to transfix men. But the whole beauty of this eighteen-year-old schizophrenic lay in her dark, quick gaze. Her hands fluttered near her face like small doves, lighting on her cheek or under her chin. Once she stopped looking at you, the spell was broken.

The obligation of calling on her became a pleasure for Stefan. The more he fought it, the more he liked her. After a tragic, unfortunate love affair (he was unable to find out exactly what had happened), she yearned to escape from the evil world that had hurt her, to escape into the mirror. She longed to live in her own reflection.

She approached Stefan willingly, knowing that he carried a small nickel mirror. He let her look.

“It’s so… so marvelous there,” she whispered, ceaselessly adjusting her eyelashes, her wavy hair. She could not take her eyes off the gleaming surface.

She reminded Stefan of a couple of other women he knew, the wives of friends in the city. They could sit in front of the mirror all day long, arranging their faces into every possible smile, investigating the sparkle of their eyes, peering at every freckle, every line, smoothing here and pushing there, like alchemists waiting for gold to precipitate in the alembic. The most obvious kind of abnormal obsession, and he had never thought of it before. Birdbrains, of course, but it was a mistake to assume that all neurasthenics were intelligent.