Conrad Aiken: King Coffin

He stepped into the dark bedroom, approached the dressing-table mirror and without turning on the light leaned on his hands towards the obscure image which he saw coming forward to meet him there. For a second, the face that looked out at him was not his own face, but the face of Jones. It looked at him merrily, impertinently — exactly as if it were going to wink. It was only a trick of the light — it was because the light was behind him — the sharp illusion was gone as soon as it had come — but the effect was nonetheless extraordinary. The face was his own, of course, he leaned again towards it on trembling hands, feeling weak and shaken, and as he examined his eyes, his mouth, his cheeks, the wide and pallid forehead, it seemed to him that his face had somehow changed . It seemed, in fact, in some subtle and dreadful way, to have lost its meaning. There was no character in it, no significance — it had become a more featureless area: a kind of mask: something seen from outside …

Had Jones done this?…

It was as if Jones, in that moment of vision, had said something, or been about to say something: as if, in thus interposing himself, he had somehow managed to make some preposterous sort of statement or claim. He had been about to say “I am no stranger than you are”; or perhaps “Aren’t you really a stranger yourself? Have you thought of that?”; or else, simply, “Now you know what it is to be a stranger.”

The words seemed actually to hang in the air; and it was with a feeling of automatically echoing them that he said aloud:

— Now you know what it is to be a stranger. Now you know! Jasper Ammen.

And certainly, now, he was looking at himself from an immense distance, and with a detachment which amounted really to cruelty and enmity. Or was it fear? Or was it amusement? One could say calmly, now, that the face was absurd, one could say that it was just an arrangement of lines and planes and colors, that it was obscene, that it was ugly. It was as surprising and as mean, as vital and objectionable, as definitely something to be suspected and distrusted and perhaps destroyed, as some queer marine creature which one might find on overturning a wet rock by the sea. It was conscious and watchful, its eyes looked out of the pool of the mirror with a hard animal defensive sharpness, clearly it was dangerous and alert. It might have to be killed. If one were to put out a hand or a stick and touch it—

But the thought was unbearable, he flung himself on the bed and said:

— I must try to sleep. I must try to get a few hours sleep.

He closed his eyes, and immediately the conversation with Jones on the telephone began to repeat itself. Not tomorrow, no. I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse me. I can’t talk to you now, you see everything is upset, we’ve had an accident, my wife has just had a stillborn baby, and tomorrow is impossible as the funeral is in the morning at Mount Auburn. Yes, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry.… Perhaps Friday. Yes, Friday would be all right.… The dreadful shameless gentleness of the voice, the soft accent of concern, in which nevertheless there was no self-pity: the naked raw glibness of the confession on the telephone, the awkward glibness — the ordinary humble unavoidableness of the calm voice having to say such things on the telephone— You’ll have to excuse me now —as if he merely had an engagement for lunch, or had to go to the toilet. It had seemed so entirely simple, so almost meaningless, this series of tragic and placid statements, there in the corner of the marble-floored hall, beside the wrought-iron grill of the elevator; as if they might have been discussing the weather, or the prospects for the baseball season: except, of course, for the careful gentleness of Jones’s voice, the rather unsophisticated and surprised gentleness, calculated for the occasion. Not quite calculated, either — for what had been really disconcerting was the natural sound of the sorrow in the voice, as if Jones, taken off guard, didn’t know how to conceal his suffering. And thus, the whole scene had come to him over the telephone — the smell of ether in the garden, the revolving clotheshorse lifting its spiny arms in the lamplight, the empty ash can waiting at the curb, the doctor’s car, the shabby cellar, the coal-bins, the swiftly moving shadows on the ceiling of the upper bedroom, and then that moment when the shadows had suddenly ceased to move, and finally the woman’s cry, so queer, so quavering, so soft—

Christ!

He opened his eyes quickly and blindly, as if to do so would stop the whirl of impressions and phrases — it was if he were drunk, or sick, and sought any sight of the world, any fragmentary and lurching vision of a wall or ceiling, to check the wild swoop of his vertigo. And now the daybreak was square and bright in the little window, as sharp and immediate as the tiny jeweled picture in the finder of a camera, each moving cloud separate and round and distinct and with a color forever its own, never to be repeated, immortal. It was as good as a cinema, as comforting as the sight of moving water, he lay and watched the irregular regularity of the cloud-procession, listened to the faint intermittent claw-grazing of the little rain, tried to fix his attention there, to avert his attention by averting his face. And for a while it was in fact as if he had managed to fall asleep with his eyes wide open. He felt like a cat, with the cunning of a cat, allowed his mind to be lulled by the activity of his eyes, permitted all the motion of his consciousness to concentrate there on the surface, in those two points of sight. His hands were still, his body was still, his feet were softly pressed against the footboard of the bed, he breathed as lightly as possible. It was the process of becoming a cloud, or of becoming nothing but a consciousness of cloud: even the sounds came to him only indistinctly and tangentially: he refused to admit them: the bell-sounds, the car-sounds, the slamming of a door, the milkman hurrying along the hall, clinking his bottles, the first morning hum of the elevator, summoned down to the second floor by Jack, the janitor — aware of these, he also dismissed them, allowing himself to become simply a recipient of light. It was all like a world of glass, translucent, brittle, precarious, but infinitely precious. It was like having an enormous pain, which even to breathe was to invite: as long as one held one’s breath, it vanished. When one breathed again, one tried it cautiously, round the edges and corners, one sent down to begin with the tiniest little tentacle of air, a silver thread of exploration—

But it was no use. It was all no use. As soon as one did try to breathe, that preposterous and incredible mountain of sensation was there again, the unbelievable shape once more had to be believed. As in a nightmare the figure of the old woman seen in the street reappears vaguely again in the distance at the quayside, or on the ship, perhaps altered and unrecognizable, and later is heard mounting the stairs behind one, with a sort of scrambling and sinister haste, coughing and sneezing as she comes, and to one’s gaze over the banisters lifts at last the face of which the horror, hitherto not admitted or confessed, is freely and lethally given, so to his consciousness, through all its elaborate structure of dispersal, came the beginnings and misremembered fragments of that conversation with Jones. It could not have happened, and yet it had happened: that he should have leaned there at the public telephone in the hall by the elevator, with Jack standing at the front door to take his last nocturnal look at the weather, holding a dust-cloth in his hand, and that instead of an unruffled arrangement of the final plan should have occured this sudden plunge into the murkiest and ugliest and most painful of unsolicited intimacies—