Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The days passed. Morning brought emptiness, ink flooded the sky beyond the window, and night crept in again, earlier and earlier now, the cold winds outside crying and sobbing like a child in a chimney and blowing out the faraway lights of Boston one by one. Visitors were still prohibited him. Late one night, however, Darconville was awakened when the door of his room, gradually opening, sent a diagonal fan of light across the bed. He sat up quickly and clicked on the lamp. There stood Lampblack of all people — alone — gesturing nervously with a handful of mail he dropped on the bed just before he rushed out. The largest piece, postmarked New York, was an official-looking manila envelope. Darconville slit it open, and an angry blush suddenly filled his head as with a sinking heart he saw what he held in his hands — a photograph of a blond fellow in a naval uniform, the subject’s rank and identification below. It was Gilbert van der Slang, himself.

Swiftly, Darconville took up a pencil nearby, crossed out the name with a petulance that broke the lead in midstroke, and shut off the light. The weighty darkness bore in on him in a sudden synathroismus, crowding a million terrible particulars upon him and paralyzing him head to foot, and though he opened his mouth to gasp he was prevented from either calling or crying out under the action of the crippling inexplicable force pressing him to death. He lay motionless in the dark, with tears rippling down his cheeks, waiting for the rest of his life to show him what it would be. Then he could suddenly breathe. Then the darkness began to dissolve. Then he could again discern necessary shapes out of unnecessary shadows. And then he knew that the detective to solve a crime must become an accessory to it. He turned on the light again.

And he picked up the photograph.

GILBERT VAN DER SLANG, Ensign (USNR) — it would be a graduation photo — stands at attention in the full dress of regimental commander in the boy navy: white gloves, a sash at the waist, the shoddy-for-broadcloth jacket with its ventral rows of brass-buttons. The subject is stiff as a stork — poker-backed, eyes front, arse tight as a trapdrum — but the martial stance, nevertheless, fails to supply the proper pointing, not for want of high-seriousness certainly — the little chin juts out niet zander arbljt —but for the uniform, impressive indeed were it not the type that conventionally attracts ice-cream vendors, doormen, and South American officials. It’s the pose of a smugly pretentious deluxe: the Count of Trumpet on maneuvers from the stage of sugarplum opera! The picture, were it hung in a museum, would be entitled, “Are You Proud, Mother?”

The student medals and sigla are very nice, but it’s the kind of military respectability with which vulgarity is always on speaking terms, for the white ducks, foreshortened like a clumperton’s, are in painful collaboration with those black government-issue shoes — the sort that never seem to be fellows — and the sleeves mooch down too far over the hands. Alongside the left leg, facing oddly inward and suggesting a slight effeminacy, hangs a toy sword with which by optimistic transfer he doubtless seeks to counteract that impression.

It’s a sallow face, plain as the way to market, one of those drawn yellow lamplit complexions best exemplified in the work of minor Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The small blunket-colored eyes, cold as a boomslang’s, are looking straight, if unseeingly, toward Cape Disappointment where those who graduate from service academies are of course doomed, for want of imagination, to spend the rest of their lives. He has a bifid chin and the sharp grypanian nose of a logical positivist. The lank hair characteristic of him has always been considered indicative of pusillanimity, enough so to advance by way of suggestion a distinct androgen deficiency — or even possible impotence.

There is a humorless and hard-natured line to the mouth, Protestant in cast, shaped to the possibility of generating inauspiciously vexatious abuse like sending common seamen for non-existent tools (still deemed wit at sea) or ordering a battue of porpoises as a holiday diversion on some dull cruise to the Leeward Islands or the Hawaiian chain of Kukeke Eleele. It would be a high immature voice, slick with alloquia and sea-bop and nautical drunts in the quasi-linguistic bluff of logbook narrative about jackstays ‘n’ jumper struts ‘n’ jibbin’ the kibber. The head is capitalupine, the hands thin and spidery, deft at small tasks. There is a sapped but inflexible tonality to the general appearance of this brisk little fart, the lack of repose conveyed especially in the adolescent legs, elongating the outline, which run out of the effortfully dovetailed imposture of uniform and down to feet long as kippers — the body actually taking on the appearance of having issued from the feet themselves ! He is, in fact, quite short.

This is a figure of fun — a cross-grained, long-waisted clockcase of opposability with the generic temperament of a satrap and a talent for extrapolating cues from postures with indefatigable readiness. He loves bandmusic, probably ran cross-country ( les Pays-Bas, certain !), and would have had the best “cargo project” at the Academy — the kind of officious little pickstraw who’d go into a complete shitfit if anyone in his presence ever failed to refer, for instance, to a ship as a boat. He’s a dog to procedure. There is in that bast and Nankeen-yellow mask a sunken and repugnant mood of refusal — spitefully incloistered— showing a person in whom secrecy would erroneously be taken for reserve and for whom everything drops into categories made familiar only by his indifference, as a makeweight to a scale adjusts a gain. An underbutler squats in an esquire: he finds meaningful what he can verify by counting on his fingers, discerning no limit between achievement and ambition, and thus is beauty duly converted by that transubstantiating process of the functionist, once again, to use. There are, however, more wheels and counterpoises in this engine than are easily imagined. His thoughts are executed only to matters of dogged purpose, his emotions but to formulate accumulations — and Either piggybacks Or, the while, for the acquisition of both. Here is Ambidexter, for good or for the time being, whichever comes first.

We discern a sharp composite picture of a prattboy so null in effect — his mind an abode of anything — that in nothing isn’t something to which he wouldn’t promise all he seemed for everything he lacked. And if a girl? Occasion is his cupid. He is what is his shadow: it is and it is not; he’d strut and fleer and fumble with his hat with untaught fists and with a smile that aches to shield his mouth as glasses would his eyes proceed to peep love ditties in her neck and seek to mirror lies — until such time when promises reflect what’s far too malcon-formed for sight to see he’d turn and gaze inward with the lost half of his double face, and then would turpitude purvey to malice in a flash! It is a photograph of utter vacancy. Vain, pale, fragmentary, silly, indeed almost nothing — wait! — O my God, but what about those ears ?

His ears are absolutely monstrositous! No, it’s not simply that they stand noticeably away from the head — lobeless, horizontal, shaped like eraserwheels! — they actually shoot out of the haircut like those xanthodermic warballs made of Hoggland clay with which van Tromp and his sullen brabantois sought to obliterate the English and establish the legitimacy of that cheesemongering, guilder-grubbing, tulip-sniffing, drainage-scheming Gomorrah of the North where people live below sea-level, exact payment from guests, and sport footwear made of trees! His ears?