John Hawkes - Death, Sleep & the Traveler

But how was Ursula so quick to recognize that the woman I became in my dream was my mother? And how unfortunate that Ursula could not have been always so perceptive and so humane.

“Allert,” Peter was saying, “do you remember our conversation about a course of treatment I finally persuaded my staff to abolish at Acres Wild some years ago?”

I smiled my heavy meaningless smile. I tapped my temple, I tried to reconstruct some faded conversation about psychiatric treatment, though why should I care, I thought, what was it to me? I leaned down, tugged at my fallen brightly colored sock, nodded my head. My study was white, attractive, well ordered but oddly filled with the overpowering stench of schnapps, though only one small glass gleamed within easy reach of my swollen and slowly drumming fingers. I struck a match and slowly puffed on my cigar. I was well aware that Peter was watching my eyes closely. I recollected with utter clarity that he had remarked repeatedly that my eyes were much too small to be trusted. In my study we were alone and facing each other in twin chairs.

“Yes,” I said, exhaling, using my hands to cross one knee upon the other, “yes, I believe I do remember something of the sort. For you it was quite a victory, was it not?”

“Yes, my friend, it was a victory. Even your brightest young clinician can be fixated on the old barbaric ways. And yet recently I’ve been thinking that perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps that treatment should not have been abolished.”

“But it was dangerous. If I remember, you said it was dangerous.”

His blue eyes were watching mine. One of his knees was crossed upon the other, as was mine, and his long dark fingers were prayerfully joined at the tips. His leathery face was a mask of expressionless concentration and dead nerves, his angular elegance was a mockery of my own shapeless size. It was obvious that Peter would never know the sensation of fine blue veins treading the whiteness of a fat arm. I waited, puffing the cigar, thinking of a bay horse harnessed to a gleaming carriage behind a white chateau and recognizing the familiar seriousness, even condescension, of Peter’s talk. Once again he was trapping me, I knew, in one of his dramatic pauses.

“Yes, Allert,” he said at last, “you’re right. The treatment was dangerous.”

He paused. I could resist no longer the little glass of schnapps. I found myself imagining some hostile patient who, in a mad stroke of understanding, snatches from the pocket of Peter’s long white coat a cheap paperbound work of fiction concerning a pair of young nurses who set about using their sexuality as a cure for maniacs. Another dangerous treatment, I told myself.

“The problem with that archaic cure,” he said at last, as if lecturing some of his students in the warm light of my study, “was that by subjecting the patient to deeper and deeper states of coma we brought him increasingly close to death’s door. The patient descended within himself and, while we, the worried staff, hovered at his side, always waiting to administer the antidote or undertake the rescue mission, so to speak, the patient was traveling inside himself and in a kind of sexual agony was sinking into the depths of psychic darkness, drowning in the sea of the self, submerging into the long slow chaos of the dreamer on the edge of extinction. The closer such a patient came to death the greater his cure. The whiter and wetter he became in his grave of rubber sheets, my friend, and the deeper his breathing, the slower his pulse, the more he felt himself consumed as in liquid lead, the greater the agony with which he approached oblivion, then the greater and more profound and more joyous his recovery, his rebirth. The cure, when it occurred, was remarkable. The only trouble was the possibility of the patient’s death. On the other hand, coma and myth are inseparable. True myth can only be experienced in the coma. Perhaps such an experience is worth the necessary risk of death.”

He stopped, paused, frowned. His dark elongated face assumed an expression of grief and profundity. But I knew that he was not yet done, that there was something further he wished to say, which caused my own breath to grow more shallow. So I myself said nothing, but, well-intended and helpless as always, merely glanced at him with my usual openness as if to beckon him on to his conclusion, his familiar bitterness. I found myself wishing for gray light and falling snow.

“Allert,” he said then, as the sweat came out on the back of my neck, “has it ever occurred to you that your life is a coma? That you live your entire life in a coma? Sometimes I cannot help but think that you never entirely emerge from your flickering cave. You must know things the rest of us can never know, except by inference. But I do not envy you the darkness and suffering of your coma, my friend. I hope you do not die in it.”

Silence. More silence. He was through at last. And I raised my hand, I took three puffs on the cigar, I raised my head, the glass of schnapps was empty, the room was warm. Peter was standing, preparing to stroll out of my study in search of Ursula. If pity could kill, as Ursula was fond of saying, I would have died in his glance.

“I am fond of you,” I said. “Ursula and I are both fond of you. But there are certain days when I do not enjoy your company.”

As he passed me he allowed his hand to rest for a moment on my slumping shoulders.

“What do you think of my theory,” Peter was saying, “that past a certain age it becomes quite impossible to make new friends? The avenue of the unexpected friend is simply obliterated. No enjoyment of sudden recognition, no new faces, no prolonged sharing of secret confidences never heard before, no thrill of a new voice in the open air. None of this for those of us who are beyond a certain age. We simply live as best we can with the old friends we have already made, until there is one offense too many or some silly eruption of sexual conflict, or one of us dies and thus even the old friends disappear. It is a desolate situation, my friend. Quite desolate.”

“But, Peter,” I said, laughing and in slow motion thrusting my hand through the clear pane of glass toward the falling snow of my childhood, “at least our mistresses tend to retain their allure, their interest. Is it not so?”

But I myself have never had a mistress, of course. Only my eager young girls and friendly women. Only a wife.

“What do you think of my theory,” Peter was saying, “that a man remains a virgin until he commits murder? The destruction of unwanted purity depends not on sexual experience but only on the commission of what is generally called the most heinous of crimes. What do you think?”

My rash is now an unremovable undergarment that covers and contains my belly and buttocks and genitalia in a wet palpable flush of color like a tincture of blood in warm water. Thus it has spread. But this flush, this color, is thicker than skin. It is a growth that has totally enveloped the mid-portion of my body and, in the process, has lost its pebbled texture that once brought to my mind the flesh of the pink-lipped strawberry. Now it is smooth, velvety, thick and, throughout most of the day, glistening and moist with its own secretion. I have never known such a rash and could not have imagined any skin condition capable of so much change and such determined growth. It is as if I am girdled day and night with the velvet, as it is called, that covers the antlers of those northern horned creatures (elk and so forth) in the period immediately preceding the season of sexual aggression and mating. But the sight is not entirely unattractive. And my rash does not itch. Of course the question is whether or not it will continue to expand its dominion until it covers my entire body, or whether it will be contented merely to have consumed the bulging erogenous center of my physical life.