William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— What's the matter? Stanley asked him as he approached slowly.

— There was something. . Otto said, looking him in the face again, in the eyes, which were dull with the sky beyond. — Something. .

— What?. . Stanley looked at him anxiously.

— I don't know, earlier, that moment. . Otto said, looking more confused. — For a moment, a feeling that you. . that you and I… It was as though you were someone who had been. . He faltered, broke off, and looked up, recovering. — Damn it. He's gone, Max?

— Yes, he's gone, down there, Stanley pointed.

— And this damned thing, he left me this and took Collectors Quarterly, it cost a dollar.

— Do you want it back? Stanley commenced helpfully. — If I see him. .

— That painting, Otto murmured, looking down again. He rubbed his free hand over his face. — The Christ in that painting, I wanted to look at it, I wanted to look at it again, there was something. . familiar… he went on vaguely, mumbling, — and the Virgin. .

After a pause, Stanley said, — But there should be, Christ. .

— Not that, not that, Otto waved him back, and stood gripping his temples in an open hand. Then he dropped his hand and shook his head. — Never mind, he said. Looking at Stanley, he tried a strained smile. — The divine spark… he muttered, at the anxious face being weighed toward him by the uneven mustache. — And what are you going to do with it, anyhow? he brought out in sudden derision.

— But that, Stanley said, coming a step nearer him, — that is what undoes us all. He stood before Otto looking into Otto's eyes, waiting; but saw them narrow.

— I hate him, Otto said, changing again as abruptly.

— Who?

— Him. Max.

— But, why?

— Yes. . because he'll survive.

Every street she crossed, the black sky showed to her right, as though these were tunnels through to the "chilly hell" of the poet's Elegy on the Thousand Children, through to Boreas, and beyond the north wind. And so every time she stepped from the curb, going west, she tried not to look; and always had looked before she stepped up on the curb ahead.

As she came nearer the river, the pavement and the walks were wet with the light snow which had commenced since she started. She passed an empty baby carriage, and stopped, a step beyond it, to look back and make sure it was empty. Then she looked up and smiled at the woman who had been shaking a mop from the window above, and that woman only stared at her until she went on; and even then looked up, and a minute later stopped shaking the mop again, seeing her pause down the block and kneel on the wet walk to help a child with an entangled mitten-string, kneeling there, the narrow eyes of the woman in the window had it, a moment too long.

On a trestle at the far end of the street an engine smashed a coupling closed with a shattering sound which was gone immediately, leaving a wail from the river beyond suspended on the particles of silt in the air, to be exhausted slowly as they were borne to earth by the scales of snow shed from above.

Where a crate lay broken on the sidewalk she turned in at the doorway in this last block of Horatio Street. She sought the bell with no name and then, leaning against the door it came open before her finger found the bell, and his door was just inside. In front of it stood a wastebasket full: some bottles and tubes, electric-light bulbs, and that door was not tight closed.

— Asleep? she whispered, entering. And she closed the door behind her silently, a hand on the knob and her back against it, slowly, as she looked round. Then she coughed, and covered her mouth quickly, for the room was full of a bitter cluster of smells from the smoldering pile in the fireplace. In fact some of it had burned on the hearth and lay smoking spilled out on the floor, and she hurried over and kicked the burning pieces back up on the bricks seeing, as she did so, the blackened edges of photographs, details of brushwork highly enlarged.

There were torn bits of paper, torn pieces of canvas and splinters of wood, a few books, some eggshells, a small squirrel-hair brush, strewn among the bright pigmented spots on the floor. Beside the low bed, where she went and sat on the edge, was a broken glass, a box of Dutch cigars unopened, a coconut, and a leather box filled with cuff links, collar buttons, paper clips, two penknives, another knife, bladeless, and a knifeless blade, buttons, pen points, studs, a number of keys, some brass wood-screws, a single pearl earring, and prominently, two large archaically studded hoops of gold. She leant down and wiped her wet cheeks with the end of a blanket that trailed from the welter on the floor. Then she straightened, on the very edge of the bed, and turned putting a hand forth, gently. — You. . she whispered.

She sat like that a minute more, seeming not to breathe, then she whispered again, — You. . but more tartly, — if you keep your eyes closed, then where are you now without me?

The bare bulb glared on her standing up, and she said, — It is very warm in here, taking two, and three, and four steps, taking off her coat. She laid it on a high stool and looked round her again, stood singly beneath the bare bulb and casting no shadow until she turned and walked toward the only whole canvas in the room, turned face-to-wall, where her shadow fell on it and on a single plane expanded over the rough and soiled back of it. She got hold of the frame and turned it from the wall.

— Do you reproach me? she said, after a time of looking at it though their eyes did not meet, and then she extended her hand and traced its features. Then she whispered something and abruptly turned her back.

Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar, lay on the floor at her foot; and she kicked the book away. Then she walked over to where the hinged mirrors stood against another wall, turned them open and closed them again quickly.

— You. . she said again looking back to the bed, for she'd turned quickly.

There on the floor at her feet was a drawing, it was a meticulous self-portrait, and she took a step before she saw it, saw it was not a detail of brushwork that is, and leaned down to pick it up. — You, she said, — all upside-down. Then she righted it and repeated, — all upside-down.

She stood there staring somewhere between the bed and the drawing as though a hand were on her; and then turned and pulled the mirrors again. She cocked one leaf open with the toe of her right foot, holding the picture up with effort as though it were a great weight, and looked at the prompt emergences, settling her eyes on the even image, the same that she held in her hands; then raised her eyes to the second image of her own face, and let the leaf go closed with a clap, so that a part of it broke out and fell to the floor separating as soon as it sounded, to reflect the glare of the bulb in the ceiling back, in shapes of breakage, to the ceiling.

The room was filled with the odor of destruction: as though there might arise on the smoke a difference, when a storehouse of chemicals burned: here in the squat fireplace were chemicals, some of them inorganic, and the organic transmutations suffering oxidation with the immediacy of a chain reaction on the page of a chemistry text; but where, in this consummation, the law of the conservation of energy? Could brush strokes make the difference, then? Science in magnitude, biology and chemistry as triumphantly articulate as subordinates are always, offer no choice but abjure it in frantic effort to perfect a system without alternatives, the very fact of their science based on measurement; and measurement, designed to predicate finalities, refusing the truth which shelters in possibility: in the weight of the smell of the smoke there was more than the death of the body, the cellular sucking construction, hunger of tissues unconscious of any end but identical reproduction. But if strokes of creation fed the flames, strokes in whose every instant possibility had been explored for the finality which is perfection, torn apart in the attempt to free it into the delineation of that baffled enclosure of its own medium, here were brush strokes whose future had been dictated by the thwarting enclosure of the past, a past whose future was struck dying with every instant of the delineation of its everlasting life.