Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

— Laugh.

— I’m laughing. I can’t think of it without laughing. Ha, ha, ha.

— That’s the funniest sounding laugh I ever heard, if you’ll excuse my saying so.

— Step up, ladies and gents, and listen to the laughing embryo. He laughs through his primordial gills, like a lizard. He applauds himself with tiny dorsal fins, and his eyes, now shut with tears, are when opened much too large and all-seeing. He sees bang to the end of the world. The grave has no secrets from him, the tomb no horrors; when he is born tomorrow he will have a bone in his mouth, and this he will present on his birthday to his loving mother, who is none other than our old friend the worm. All his days he will walk attended by an orchestra of Elizabethan worms. The death-watch beetle will precede him in his march to the frontiers of consciousness; and arrived there on the final morning, it is he himself who, by thumbing his nose at God, will give the signal for the trump of doom. Which, in the circumstances, will be a great disappointment.

— You bet it will.

— Old Mary is a brick. You never met old Mary, did you. You ought to meet her — a grand old dame. Getting too fat, you know, and past middle age, too, but she’s a good sport. And it’s a liberal education to spend a night with her. What she doesn’t know about this town you could write on a two-cent stamp. She knows the college inside out — you’d be surprised, Bill, you’d be really surprised. More than one member of the faculty has wept on Mary’s ample scented bosom, and told her the secrets of Cambridge. Good God, did you ever go to Sanders Theater, to a Thursday night symphony, and see the wives of the professors? Of course you have. It’s a joke. If it weren’t for Mary and a few others, those poor fellows would be dead, that’s what. Why, they aren’t female at all. They’re a kind of lichen. Have you ever talked with one at a dinner party, or a Brattle Street tea? Of course you have. Oh, God, they’re so refined and intelligent — what a lot they think they know — and their estimable husbands have to sneak off to old Mary just to be reminded that they’re alive. What a joke, what a joke. Mary knows the names of their children, and how old they are, and where they go to school, and when they have measles, and when they die, or are born, and what Professor X’s bank balance is, and the fact that poor old Y is going to be fobbed off with an associate professorship instead of a full professorship — why she knows as much as old Terry used to know, and that’s saying a lot. And straight as a die, too. She never lets you down. I told her all about Bertha.

— What did she say.

— Just what you say, only better.

— For example.

— Forget it, she said — forget it, kid. You aren’t exactly an angel yourself, are you, to be expecting miracles of yuman nature. She always call it yuman nature. She always calls me kid, too — I suppose because she remembers me when I was twenty-one or two.

— What else did she say.

— Is this the inquisition? Or judgment day? And are you God?

— I am God the Father.

— Then Mary is the Virgin Queen. She said — what did she say. She told me not to be a fool. She gave me some damned good whisky, and massaged my head, and showed me photographs of her one and only love, some time in the last century, and told me not to be a fool. We discussed the ethics of suicide, lying in bed with a pomeranian. She complained of the streetcars in Massachusetts Avenue — they kept her awake at night. She wished she still had her apartment in Day Street — she got fired out of that because one of her visiting girls got drunk too often and was noisy. She was sentimental about the apartment in Day Street, for she had lived there twelve years. Old Foxy Smith — do you remember Foxy Smith, the gentle old dodo who used to teach us history — was one of her regular visitors for years. He used to come there straight from a faculty meeting, wearing rubbers. Can you imagine it, Bill. What an old saint and prig we used to think he was. And Mary was very fond of him, took care of him, sewed on his buttons, darned his socks, gave him advice about his health, knew he was dying of cancer long before any one else did: he told her about it more than a year before he died. When he died, she went to the service in Appleton Chapel, and saw his wife for the first time. Strange, isn’t it? She knew him better than his own wife did. She sent some flowers anonymously, too. My God. Foxy used to talk about suicide with her. He thought of killing himself before his cancer got too bad. She persuaded him not to. When I asked her why, she said, well, she thought we ought to live out our lives as God intended. If death by cancer was indicated, we must die of cancer. To my suggestion that death by suicide might be indicated, she replied with a stubborn no, no, no, no — slapping my hand each time. She appealed to the pomeranian for support, his name is Yale, but Yale was discreetly silent. Now that’s a queer and beautiful business, Bill — I’m having another drink, and one of these crackers. She gave the old fellow what little joy he had. Just the same, his wife wouldn’t have been very grateful, would she, although I don’t doubt she thought she loved him — perhaps she did love him.

— You amuse me. That shoe seems to fit you.

— Not at all.

— Sure it does. Look at it.

— I’m looking. But I never did think the sexes were reversible in this regard. A woman can share a man, but a man can’t share a woman. And that’s all there is to it.

— Oh, for the love of mud.

— Thank you, I’m not very fond of mud.

— Anyway, I’m glad to see you’re calming down.

— Don’t fool yourself.

— Oh, yes, you are.

— Are you trying to annoy me? Don’t bully me. When I want to be calm, I’ll be calm. I’m not calm. I’m quiet, but I’m not calm. I’m so full of hate you could poison New York with me. Is it hate? No, it isn’t hate. Yes, it is, too. I wouldn’t at all mind killing Bertha and Tom. If mere feelings could kill them, they’d be dead. The damned incestuous—

— That’s the keynote, all right.

— What is.

— Incest. Don’t you see what you’re doing?

— Your conversational manners are very insinuating.

— Don’t you?

— Well, tell me, don’t badger me, tell me.

— In every one of your love affairs, you’ve tried to make your sweetheart your mother. That’s why they’ve all been unsuccessful. Why do you want to do it? — that’s the question. It won’t work. That’s why sooner or later you reject or abandon them all, or they abandon you — they have to. You force them to. Bertha is no exception.

— You make me sick. Do you mean to say I’ve abandoned Bertha? Don’t be a fool. Or don’t try to be a fool.

— I don’t mean you left in the sense of moving from Cambridge to Reno — that’s immaterial. Abandonment needn’t be geographical.

— God, that’s funny. Abandonment needn’t be geographical! You’ll be the death of me. Was Casanova geographically abandoned?

— You may not have left her board — but you left her bed. Or so you told me.

— You’re damned unpleasant. Let’s talk about something else.

— You mean the subject is unpleasant. I thought you wanted to talk it out.

— What a hell of a lot of books you have, Bill. How did you ever pick them all up. Aren’t the Japanese a wonderful little people? And the ants too. I once thought what a good satire on man could be written with the ant as the subject. You see? Everything would reduce itself to terms of ant. In short, one would reduce everything to the anthropocentric — pretty good, that. Naturally, from the ant’s point of view, all the characteristics of the ant would be considered virtues. The highest praise of an ant would be that he was, as you would expect, antly. Statues, of heroic size, would be erected to the great ant heroes — warriors, builders, or what not — inscribed with phrases like, “He was the antliest ant of all time.” … And of course there would be an anthropomorphic god.