William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Otto was having trouble keeping the leg wrapped. — You ought to get rid of that sling, Ed Feasley said. — It's just a gag anyway, isn't it? Here, give me the leg, and he left with it partially wrapped in the bit of blue cloth under his arm.

The car roared south in the dawn's early light. — We have to do something with it, said Feasley, nodding back at the fragmentary passenger in the back seat. — We ought to give it to somebody. Somebody who needs it.

— There's a girl I'd like to give it to, Otto said. — I'd like to give it to Edna Mims, God damn it, in a box, a nice long white flower box from Max Schling.

— That's it! said the driver. — She's the girl you used to go around with in college? She's a good lay. We've got to get the box now.

The sudden light of Madison Square showed day approaching rapidly, though the sky was not yet colored with dawn; but with this clearing sky above, and the knock he had got on the head, sobriety and trepidation descended upon Otto. — We'd better not, he said.

— No, come on, it's a fat idea.

They thundered into Washington Square. Otto tried desperately to think of an alternative, something safer, someone defenseless. Then he said, — Stanley.

— Stanley?

— We'll tell him it's a relic. He's a Catholic, and he must want a relic. We'll give him the Pope's left leg.

— He won't believe it.

— He'll believe it.

— I wouldn't believe it, even if I was Catholic.

— He's a Catholic. He'll believe it. How does he know what the Pope's leg looks like?

— How does anybody know, except the Pope?

— Except the Pope. There's more than one pope.

— The rest are dead.

— All right, they're dead. This is from a dead one.

— Well then he can't have been dead very long.

— Look, we don't have to tell him it's a pope's leg. Stanley lives in a basement apartment. All we have to do is break the lock on the grating, we can do that some way, and slip it into bed with him. He'll wake up and think it's the Pope.

— The Pope in bed with him?

— But then he'll find that there's no one attached to it. Then he'll know.

— What'll he know?

— Why then he'll know that the Pope is dead.

The car turned toward Sixth Avenue.

At four in the morning, the nurse told Stanley that his mother was sleeping well, that he had better go home and get some rest, they would get in touch with him immediately if anything happened. Mother lay in one of those bed machines which can be cranked and warped in any direction, to accommodate whatever vagary of accident or human ill. But even now, though the black beads lay quiet in her fingers, she was not asleep. Not at all. After a reassuring look at her teeth in the glass she had closed her eyes and pretended sleep, so that they would go away, mortally tired she was of all of their quietened voices in hope that she would live, their faces drawn in dolefulness trusting that she would not die when that, in unequivocal reason, was all she wanted.

For one thing, she was certain that somewhere along the way they had left a pair of scissors inside her. For another, they had played music to her when they made the amputation (this was called therapy), and she could not get the tune out of her head. When she thought of her missing limb, she remembered the tune; then as her weary unmusical mind dragged her helpless through that tune, she remembered the leg, which would at this point begin to itch. When she inclined to scratch it, it was not there. And as she bent her body, the scissors would shift. Then the tune would commence again. Could she wait? while one after another of her parts was carried away, in a bottle, in a glass, on a tray. What shabby presentation would she make, when she appeared at her final Destination? Her thumb twitched on the crucifix, and a lonely movement of the sheet toward the end of the bed betrayed her wakefulness, where her foot tapped against a metal rung. No one noticed it. Stanley went home.

He let himself into his room, bolted the door and fixed the chain, and lay down on his back, fully dressed, staring at the crack in the ceiling above. At first, he had only measured that crack once a week, but in these last few months he measured it every evening, and since the beginning of December, two ways: along its broken length, and the straight distance from the corner of the room to the end of the crack. In twenty months it had lengthened one and five-eighths inches. How long could it go on? before that ceiling, with the sudden impatience of inanimate things, would yawn open over him, and fall with the astonished introduction of the lives above into his own. Who could live in a city like this without terror of abrupt entombment: buildings one hundred stories high, built in a day, were obviously going to topple long before, say, the cathedral at Fenestrula, centuries in building, and standing centuries since. A picture of that cathedral hung on the wall across the room, and when he lay down it was either to stare at the ceiling, or, on his side, at that print, the figure which seemed to be gathered toward heaven in the spired bulk of the cathedral. Fenestrula! If ever he should get to Italy, it was in that cathedral that he wanted to play the organ; a lonely ambition, solitary epiphany. Meanwhile he carried concealed a small hammer and chisel, escape tools, and tried to avoid travel underground.

On the ceiling grew the graph of Stanley's existence, his central concern: Expendability.

Everything wore out. What was more, he lived in a land where everything was calculated to wear out, made from design to substance with only its wearing out and replacement in view, and that replacement to be replaced. As a paper weight, on the pile of lined music composition paper tattered by erasure, lay a ceramic fragment from the Roman colony at Leptis Magna in North Africa. was slightly conical, a triangular shape, dull, unglazed, and thumb prints were almost discernible in the scalloped edge: valueless as objet d'art, it had what might be credited as tactile value, and little else, except that it had been made to last. And Stanley, eating in the neighborhood with pressed metal cutlery, drinking from paper cups and plastic cups, often sat silent at table for minutes, weighing the dishonest weight of a plastic salt shaker, considering Leptis Magna, still standing on the Libyan shore of the middle sea. Phonograph needles? razor blades? thrown away entire, when their edges and points were worn. Automobile batteries? someone had told him that batteries in European cars lasted for years, but here companies owned those long-life patents, and guarded them while they sold batteries to replace those they had sold a year before. But there was more to it than gross tyranny of business enterprise; and advertising, whose open chancres gaped everywhere, only a symptom of the great disease, this plague of newness, this febrile, finally paretic seizure dictated by a beadledom of time monitored by clocks, observatories, signals on the radio, the recorded voice of a woman (dead or alive) who dissected the latest minute on the telephone when you dialed NERVOUS.

Stanley looked at his wrist watch. He was almost never seen in any but frayed and soiled clothing, but he owned others. In the closet at his head, which was locked, were three suits, two almost new and the third never worn. There were two pairs of shoes, brown and black, which he took out and dusted every week. He had two hundred new razor blades, and a porous stone on which he could get old ones almost sharp, which accounted for his half-shaven look. (Some day he hoped to own a Rolls razor; but he understood their sales were discouraged here by American razor blade manufacturers.)

Those were the outward signs. But like every legitimate terror, this obsession with expendability ran through every instant of his body's life. Stanley had haircuts infrequently, and even then only a trim. He did not wash often. People must suspect this. What did they think? But better, perhaps: let them think what they would. Every abrasive contact with the wash cloth and caustic soap must wear down the body a little. But here came another enigma: if washing wore things out, what of clothes? He always wore a shirt just one more day, not only making it last but keeping his supply of clean ones (and some never worn) ready. But when, eventually, the one he wore went to the laundry, wasn't it necessary to use the most harsh soaps and treatment to get it clean? Therefore wasn't it wearing out faster?