William Gaddis - The Recognitions

And then a crash.

They looked to see Hannah getting up from the floor, and Max went to help her. Herschel stumbled and fell against a chair, where his whole body shook, heaving from its shallow depths. — I can't stand it, I can't stand it any more. She asked me who I was, and I told her and she said How do you know who that is, is it anybody at all and. Oh God, Christ, I hate hitting somebody I don't like.

On the floor before the fireplace lay the funeral spray, lifted gaily from the door of a bereaved Italian family downstairs, trampled so that its wires stood out naked. Time had been there. The garden which one had thought could not grow, had risen in rank luxuriance, like the plants on that plantation abandoned. For even bananas must be cut and hung to mature properly; left on the stalk, they swell and burst open, attract insects, develop an unpleasant taste, beyond the bounds of cultivation, beyond the plantation, in the jungle, where in the art of evil their near relatives, the orchids, blossom, not questioning the distant Greeks on how they got their name, deriving innocently from the devil's residence in man: that part which the ange's cut from the monk Helias. Otto led Esme forth, and at the stairs she drew him down.

"Why has not man a microscopic eye?" writes Alexander Pope; "For this plain reason: man is not a fly." What of Argus, equipped with one hundred eyes to watch over the king's daughter turned into a heifer by a jealous goddess; how many images of the heifer did he see? how many leaves to the bracken where she browsed? And after the death of Argus (his eyes transplanted to the peacock's tail), this wretched heifer, the metamorphosis of Io, was visited by a gadfly sent by the jealous goddess, and driven frenzied across frontiers until she reached the Nile. What did the gadfly see? And Argus, suffering the distraction of one hundred eyes: did he sit steady? or move distracted from distraction by distraction, like the housefly now dashing and retreating in frenzy against the windowpane, drawn to a new destination the instant it halted, from the shade-pull to the floor, from there to the lampshade, back to the baffling window glass. No Argus, this miserable Diptera, despite its marvelous eyes guardian of nothing; for where was the heifer? Below, perhaps. From the high ceiling the housefly careened to the molding across the room, thence to the lampshade, to a green muffler, a pair of socks on the floor, and so to the sleeping face which it attended with custodial devotion, until the blinking unmicroscopic eyes came open, and Otto lay awake.

— O God, what have I done? came borne on a girl's voice, sustained by a muted Rhadames singing before his judges from the lungs of a radio. Otto closed his eyes, not yet ready to return to this life. The fly rummaged about his cheek, remarking there the pitted damages of adolescence, an uneven surface affording foothold for claws laden with typhoid bacilli. Still, for a moment, the fly studied the caves of the nostrils leading into the crooked tanned peak of the nose. Otto threw his arm across his face. The fly rose, swirled, returned to walk across the cleft of the chin, and from that eminence sighted the convoluted marvel protruding across the way, and leaped silently to the ear.

— O God, what have I done? This was followed by a tearing sob.

Otto's hand moved quickly, to the ear; but by the time it reached there, the fly was trampling his eyebrow, its purpose of devilish torment unchanged since lo reached the Nile, where Egyptian mothers still hesitate to disturb flies settled on a sleeping child, awed by the fly god, Baal-zebub, evil and insect-breeding power of Baal, the sun himself, lover and quickener of nature.

— O God, what have I done. oouuuh. while in Egyptian background Rhadames was sealed up in the tomb, alive, where he finds Aïda waiting, sunless, and out in the sunshine metamorphosed by a pun Baal-zebub becomes Beelzeboul, the dung god, Prince of Devils.

So Otto, forced awake by three millenniums, a goddess, a princess, and a devil, swung once more at the housefly and sat up on the edge of his bed, his face anxiously distorted, listening. He waited.

— O God! What have I done! sounded through the thin wall.

He got up and lit an American cigarette.

December's thin sunlight came in at the window, hopefully revisiting this city despaired of the night before. In thousands of rooms, as many men intently removed minuscule stubble from pallid chins, with as much care for office appearance as though each worked under Saint Wulstan, whose holiness was so offended by beards that he carried a knife, and when a man so adorned knelt for his blessing the good Bisho.p of Wulster cut out a handful of it, threw it in the poor fellow's face, and told him to cut the rest off or go, quite literally, to Hell. Now they buttoned buttons for the thousandth time without question, absorbed in pragmatic interior monologues which anticipated the successes of the day to come fostered by the failures of the day before.

The city throbbed in gray effulgence, radiating motion, while silent pigeons swept the lower air, or walked grunting on the sills and cornices of the buildings, and on the sidewalks of open places. In Union Square, one of them attacked a bird of rare beauty, tropically plumed, which looked lost and unused to spreading its wings beyond the breadth of a cage.

Otto stumped about the small room, picking up his cigarette whenever it had rested for long enough to burn a brown scar on the woodwork, to liven its coal and find a fresh place to leave it. He was dressed in shorts. The linen suit was rumpled, and the morning light showed it less becomingly so than he had believed the night before. He examined a smudge on the elbow (where it had been dropped on Esme's floor), started to brush it out, and then did not. It remained, witness to what, try as he would, he could not clearly remember. Two suits and a jacket hung beside the linen, only the gray flannel carefully unpressed.

— O God! What have I du-un. huuuuh. came through the wall. — Haha. Haha. That's the way to do jt… He sank back in the chair, still staring at the wall; but only the radio voice reached him: Ladies, if you are troubled by excess hair, write for a free brochure of our method, guaranteed to remove fifteen hundred hairs in a single hour.

Then he got up and dressed slowly. Buttoning his shirt, he looked vacantly at a book and some papers on the table, which had come under the attention of the fly. He took a towel from the bed and snapped it at the fly. The fly moved to the ceiling, and several of the papers to the floor. Picking up the local Spanish newspaper (which he carried in public and appeared to read), he muttered something; then, pulling on his trousers, he looked as absently at a scrap of notepaper on which was written, Gd crs as mch fr mmnt as fr hr — wht mean? The expression on his face started to change as he read that over, scratching his head as he filled in the vowels. But whatever that expression would have been, it failed: he stood looking at his fingernails, turned in upon the palm. Then barely glancing, crumpled the notepaper as he picked it up and threw it in the basket, to turn away buttoning his trousers, and sit down to count his money.