William Gaddis - The Recognitions

In the living room, he turned away from Camilla's picture, where he had stopped, and took John H. down from the wall across. That portrait he put in a broom closet, muttering that the ancestor had probably got just what he deserved. All this time it seemed that Gwyon was putting off a decision which had already been made. He even stopped to cover a large mirror with a tablecloth. Finally he walked out to the back veranda of the house, and down onto the lawn.

Perhaps it was prospect of the white moon's rising which had upset Heracles. The sleighbells sounded furiously, and then stopped, leaving an urgent silence. Gwyon was perspiring freely as he paced toward the arbor and back, in spite of the cool night air mounting around him. Then he stopped for a full minute to look toward the shadowed hulk of Mount Lamentation.

When he went in at the carriage-barn doors, Heracles stood still, quivering his long arms slightly, and then came up to his full height, waving a piece of bread. Gwyon took the leash from the wall, fastened it to the animal's neck and together they walked up the lawn toward the house.

Afterwards Wyatt could not distinguish reality in these days, and the nights of the weeks just past. Deliria embraced in his memory, and refused to discriminate themselves from one another, from what had happened, and what might have happened. Memories of pain were lost between waking and sleep, and but for the merciless stabbing in his feet that night, no longer identified themselves with definite parts of his body. Prolonged hours of wakefulness, when all he sought was sleep, might turn out to have been sleep when he waked: but most insupportable was the sensational affair which went something like this: consciousness, it seemed, was a succession of separate particles, being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady unconscious flow of life, of time itself, and in fainting, the particles of consciousness simply stopped, and the rest flowed on, until they were restored: but this was the stoppage, the entire disappearance of that deeper flow which left the particles of consciousness suspended, piling up, ready any instant to shatter with nothing to support them. Still, at such times everything was in order, of shape and color to mass and distance, of minutes accomplishing hours by accumulation just as the clock itself stayed on the table where it was if only because it had been accumulating there for so long: that was the reassurance of weight. But had a voice, even his own, quoted, — "With regard to Saint Joseph of Copertino Rapture was accompanied by Levitation"? The grating cry of Janet rang in his ears still: had he chased her down the brick wall of someone's garden, where she turned on him transformed into a black man, and escaped? Had his father come in with Heracles, shaken him in his bed and pounded the walls saying words he could not understand, and turned to drive the animal out before him and down the stairs? And then a faint cry from the carriage barn below: had he leapt from his bed toward the pale casement of the window, forgetting that he had been so long off his feet that they were useless, their function totally forgotten, so that he fell screaming at the pain in them? For he woke on the floor with his father beside him, holding him up by the shoulders, his father whom he did not recognize, wild-eyed in that dim light. Then he broke open sobbing at the memory of the pain which had just torn up through his body. — In my feet, he cried, — it was like nails being driven up through my feet, as he was laid back on the bed blood-spotted at the shoulders, by this shaking man who could hardly walk from the room.

A few days later, Wyatt began to recover. He regained the weight of his body by meticulous ounces. That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.

The Town Carpenter came to call, and stood looking round the room at the wallpaper. The convalescent's bed had been moved to the sewing room, since its windows faced east and south and those of his own smaller room to north and west, away from the sun. Her sewing cabinet, with its long drawer still full of a thousand buttons, stood to one side of a window, and over it a shelf with a few books she had never opened since leaving school. There was nothing else of Camilla in the room, though here it was she had come at the moment of death, seeking something. — What was it? he whispered sometimes, looking up and around as though he expected her again, though her presence had always been one silent and expectant, often even while she was in the room it had seemed empty.

Camilla had chosen the wallpaper. It was pink, with beaded bands of light blue running to the ceiling and rows of roses between them. Her father had papered the room, and behaved very professionally about it though his pleasure showed through at the privilege of doing it for them: showed through so well that he had got the paper on upside down. And only now, as he lay on his back and followed its lines up the wall, did Wyatt realize that the roses were roses, not the pink dogs' faces with green hats he had taken them for as a child, and never questioned since. When she stepped into the room that first time, Camilla could not see what had gone wrong. Then she did; but there stood her father with a smile of pride beside her, and she threw her arms over his crooked shoulders and thanked him, and never told him. It was the way things had of working out for her from the start.

— It looks fine, it still looks fine, the Town Carpenter said now, backing into a chair stacked with paintings and sketches and knocking the whole thing over, which immediately put him at his ease by giving him something to do. He admired each piece separately as he picked them up. — The detail! The detail! he said over and over, of these souvenirs of Wyatt's illness by now become permanent fixtures in his life. Of these fragments of intricate work most were copies. Only those which were copies were finished. The original works left off at that moment where the pattern is conceived but not executed, the forms known to the author but their place daunted, still unfound in the dignity of the design.

— Look! said the Town Carpenter, waving a book from the floor. — Balloons!. Then he added, — Damn them, the French. Someone's written it in the French language. He stood turning the pages, muttering, — They do that to confuse people, of course. The French covet a truth when they come upon it, you know. He stayed an hour or so, talking himself most of the time, a proclivity he'd developed since he started to become hard of hearing and people tired of the effort of talking to him. Now, he gave a rough precis of the Odyssey (Gwyon had sent him off one day with Chapman's translation), and as though the voyage had suddenly grown too short, had just introduced Odysseus to Prester John at Ogygia, when Janet came in with Wyatt's supper. The Town Carpenter behaved with all the courtly grumbling of a shy hero, retiring before her, waving from the door to the boy on the bed'and calling out, as though across a chasm, — And they've made me the sexton at the church, you know. The Reverend your father made me the sexton, over their dead bodies if you follow me. And he escaped with both volumes of Tissandier's Histoire des ballons.

Thus the bells ringing in the morning hours were usually right on time; but after eleven in the morning they commenced to fall off a bit, for it was a good fifteen-minute walk from the Depot Tavern to the church.

Waking in this room of roses upside-down was a new experience, the dawn red from the roses of Eden (as one of those books at his bedside had it from the Talmud), after the days' ends in his own room red from the fires of Hell. Here, after the throbbing flow of the night was broken by the first particles of light in the sky, he often pulled a blanket from the bed and crept to the window, to sit there unmoving for the full time it took until the sun itself rose, the unmeasured hours of darkness slowly shattered, rendered into a succession of particles passing separately, even as the landscape separated into tangible identities each appraising itself in a static withdrawal until everything stood out separate from the silent appraisals around it.