William Gaddis - The Recognitions

She was sixty-three. It was not, in her case, a ripe age, but quite the other way, a systematic reduction of unfertile years and thoughts, disapprobation, generally a life bounded by terms of negation, satisfied with its resistance to any temptation which might have borne fruit. Better to marry than to burn, but she had not been forced to that pusillanimous choice: gnarled, she stepped from one virginity to another without hesitation. Here, three centuries after Dort, her face wore a firm look of Election, as though she knew where she was going, had visited there many times before. She seemed in a hurry to be gone from that body, as any vain soul well might have been, the still fingers faded under the framed flush of NO CROSS NO CROWN. Surrounded by closed books, with Buffon's Natural History on the floor, they found that body in her chair where she had left it when she fled, unequivocally abandoned, as though not even the last trumpet could summon her to take it up again. Her last words were, I believe I put it in the top bureau drawer. They looked there afterward, but found only the white round shell box with a hole in its top, into which she had used to put dead hair when she combed it out.

Wyatt was twelve, and deeply impressed by tne funeral sermon his father spoke over that anonymous box where Aunt May, in a lavender gown she had never before worn, lay with the lid closed, a stipulation as importunate as that of the Blessed Umiliana (another devotee of quicklime) having her socks put on, with her last breath, so that the crowd could not venerate her nude feet.

— "O man, consider thyself! Here thou standest in the earnest perpetual strife of good and evil," Reverend Gwyon thundered the lines of William Law down upon the gray faces (whose owners, years later when he was locked up, defenseless, recalled it as the last truly Christian sermon he had ever read). — "All nature is continually at work to bring forth the great redemption; the whole creation is travailing in pain and laborious working to be delivered from the vanity of time; and wilt thou be asleep? Everything thou hearest or seest says nothing, shows nothing to thee but what either eternal light or eternal darkness has brought forth; for as day and night divide the whole of our time, so heaven and hell divide all our thoughts, words, and actions. Stir which way thou wilt, do or design what thou wilt, thou must be an agent with the one or the other. Thou canst not stand still, because thou livest in the perpetual workings of temporal and eternal nature; if thou workest not with the good, the evil that is in nature carries thee along with it. Thou hast the height and depth of eternity in thee and therefore, be doing what thou wilt, either in the closet, the field, the shop or the church, thou art sowing that which grows and must be reaped in eternity."

Three years later, that partisan Deity whose most recent attention to the family had been Aunt May's rescue from mortality, acted in Wyatt's direction (though, as the boy and his father independently suspected, perhaps it was a different God altogether). Wyatt was taken with a fever which burned him down to seventy-nine pounds. In this refined state he was exhibited to medical students in the amphitheater of a highly endowed hospital. They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Physicians, technicians, and internes X-rayed the boy from every possible angle, injected his arms with a new disease they believed they could cure, took blood by the bottleful from one arm to investigate, and poured the blood of six other people into the other. They collected about his bed and pounded him, tapped his chest, thrust with furious hands for his liver, pumped his stomach with a lead-weighted tube, kneaded his groin, palped his spleen, and recorded the defiant beats of his heart with electric machinery.

He was embarrassed by the flocks of fingers exploring for cancer, or something as satisfactory, and mortified when photographed in despoiled nudity by a handsome nurse. The hands of these young women were the first ever to reach him with the succor of indifferent love; and two he would never forget, though he never saw her to whom they belonged. He lay in an operating room staring at the lamp above him, reading the circle of words in its center, Carl Zeiss, Jena, Carl Zeiss Jena Carl Zeiss. while a surgeon's insistently clumsy fingers dug in an incision under his arm for a node which slipped from their grasp. The hands of the nurse at his head wiped his face with a damp cloth, and when he fainted were there with aromatic spirits to revive him: so the woman's hands kept him, and the man's eventually caught the node, took it out, sewed up that hole and descended to make another in the leg where they paused on the surface to slice off a piece of mottled skin, then entered to probe and remove a fragment of muscle. A zealous young interne, Doctor Fell, ran a needle into his backbone and tapped that precious fluid. Week after week, he continued to provide an outlet for this conspiracy of unconscionable talents and insatiable curiosity.

Reverend Gwyon took all this in a dim view. As his son lay dying of a disease about which the doctors obviously knew nothing, injecting him with another plague simply because they had it on familiar terms could only be the achievement of a highly calculated level of insanity. Wyatt's arms swelled at each point of injection. The doctors nodded, in conclave, indicating that science had foreseen, even planned, this distraction. From among them came Doctor Fell with a scalpel in his hand and a gleam in his eye seldom permitted at large in civilized society, a gleam which the Reverend recalled having seen in the eye of a Plains Indian medicine man, whose patient regarded it respectfully as part of the professional equipment assembled to kill him. With the bravura of a young buck in an initiation ceremony, he slashed the arms open at each point of infection. Dr. Fell did a good job. They drained for two months.

Winter thawed into sodden spring, cruel April and depraved May reared and fell behind, and the doctors realized that this subject was nearing exhaustion, might, in fact, betray them by escaping to the dissection table. A few among them bravely submitted, in the interests of science, new experiments and removals; but during Wyatt's prolonged residence many comparatively healthy people had been admitted to the hospital, and were waiting in understandable impatience to make their own vital contributions to the march of science. With serious regret, the doctors drew their sport to a close, by agreeing on a name for it: erythema grave. After this crowning accomplishment they completed the ritual by shaking hands, exchanging words of professional magic, mutual congratulation and reciprocal respect, and sent the boy home to die.

In the parsonage, Wyatt lay perspiring freely in his sheets. At one moment his muscles and the joints of his body were so filled with pain that he would deliberate for minutes before moving a limb, or turning over. At other times he was feverishly awake, and the books stacked round him could not hold his exhausted attention. Their titles ran from Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta to A Coptic Treatise Contained in the Codex Brucianus, the Rosarium Philosophorum, two books of Dante's Divine Comedy, Wyer's De Prœstigiif, Dœmonum, Llorente's Inquisition d'Espagne, the pages of these and all the rest littered in the margins with notations in Reverend Gwyon's hand. Gwyon had brought them up, one by one, meaning them to serve for conversation, which he found difficult; but once arrived in the sickroom he would stand passing the book nervously fr.om one hand to the other until asked about it. He would look down, as though surprised to find it in his hands, a moment later be talking about it with a fervor which gradually became agitation, until he left off altogether and handed it over, as shy at the idea of trying to press on his son things which so interested him, as he was excited at the possibility of sharing them with him. Then he might simply stand, trying to keep one hand still in the other behind him, while he stared at the floor, in the acute embarrassment of this intimacy which the sickness had created between them. On the other hand, Wyatt read as much as he could, to prepare for these conversations which gave his father such pleasure, to break the silences whose strain showed so readily in that flushed face, and the short exhalations tainted with the sweet freshness of caraway. Sometimes Gwyon simply turned and rushed out of the room, with as much restraint as he could manage until he reached the door, as he did one day when he espied a stained familiar pamphlet among his son's papers on the floor. — Where did this come from! he demanded snatching it up open on a picture of a wreathed papal monogram tied at the foot with an anchor. — I found it, in the rubbish, on the rubbish heap, Wyatt faltered, — the kitchen midden years ago, behind the carriage barn. He stared at the covetous look on his father's face. — I didn't know. — And you've kept it, yes, all this time, kept it for me? Gwyon brought out without looking up from it, turning the spotted pages. — Did you read it? — Just, the Italian was difficult, I didn't know all the words, but the pictures. that? that monogram, with the anchor? — Yes, Gwyon murmured catching it under his thumb, — Clement's monogram, he was martyred, yes here, gettato a mare con un'ancora. they tied an anchor to his neck and threw him into the Black Sea.