Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Pickle her as a voucher specimen! Invultuate a waxen image of Beelzebub and with it plug up her jakeshole! Send her an immortelle and develop the obvious meaning! Force her to absterge herself with a swatch of her own hair! Inject her with black mamba distillates until she assumes the nature of a snake! Whip her with the winter branch of a whiffletree! Throw her into a stewpool to fatten up your caribes! Grill steaks out of her baby’s feet!

“Shower her with burbolts! Set her impossible tasks, like sorting out an infinite mixture of millet and barley! Make her suck on a musket-barrel, fire it, and send her to hell with her clothes on! Truss her, rub salt on the soles of her feet, let goats lick it off, and watch her die from laughter! Glue a sinapism on her mouth after a hearty meal of drastics and peristalts! Press her between two wheels of gritstone and breccia! Make her peer into the boiler of a steaming locomotive, then nudge her! Stitch her into a sack and wing her into the Bosphorus! Douche her with slacked lime, borax, and alkaline flux!

“Pisk her! Smout her! Minge her! Whinge her! Drop her into a revolving water-screw! Decartilage her completely and make her tap-dance! Reverse her eyes, then place her lover’s picture in front of her, and watch her leap for it the wrong way! Sit her in a tub filled to the brim with Dutch Mordant! Swipe open her mouthends with a billhook! Cut a spot in her breast and place a window before her heart as an aquarium for stinging butterfly cods! Sigmoidoscope her with a harpoon, heated white!

“Drop balls of rattlesnakes down her chimney! Sew her ears to her inner thighs and, staring into her anus, let her beslubber her face! Incinerate her alive at 2000° F. and dust a brothel floor in Tirana with her cremains! Scald the bottom of her feet with a candle until the fat drops down to fan the flame! Fill your library with books fashioned with skin provided by her first child! Decapitate her, mesh her mouth, and make her head into a radio!

“Pour hot clay into her vagina and make little ceramic witches of her! Drive a yataghan into her brainbox! Drill holes into each of her teeth, wire them, and drag her over miles of naming bitumen! Paint her skin with belladonna, morphia, drachms of King’s Yellow, thring-sene and cause dermal asphyxia! Assault her with Japanese moon-chucks! Deploy an envoûtement and hex her! Pour ice-water into her ear and set massive fans to work! Force her at gunpoint to geek the head off a puffer-fish! Gut her facial cords, temple to jawbone, and watch the character of her face collapse — and, as in all cases of disfigurement, keep mirrors around her!

“Vapulate her! Wherret her! Sneg her! Bash her on the panbone! Thwitch out her innards! Strip off portions of her skin, paint them, and then use them for tiny kites! Abacinate her by placing a red-hot basin near her eyes! Take her first-born infant by the ankle and flog her with it until both are dead! Carve an Eskimo tupelak with her face on it and blaspheme it, scomfitting it with whispers, obscenities, and dark curses! Throw her into a huge thirlpool! Break a needle in her finger and watch her die of lockjaw!

“Estrapade her with jerking ropes! Stuff her every orifice with grain, strap her down, and let her be pecked alive by 117 marabout storks, the ugliest birds on earth! Cut her heart into a thousand gammons! Drop raccoons full of diphtheria viruses down her chimney! Pry off her fingernails with metal turkas ! Draw off quarts of her blood to use for ink to correct the first drafts of your next book! Stuff her ears with her lobes! Lower her alive into a sarcophagus made of limestone quarried at Asas! Exile her to the island of Pandataria! Send her wandering into the fogs of Exmoor! Beat her to death with mop-sticks! Seal her into a room with mygales, bushmasters, and coral snakes and amplify her screams! Hoise her! Souse her! Bounce her! Trounce her! Punch her! Stunch her in the umbo! Pull out her throatball!”

THERE WAS AN END to it only when Darconville, suffering more than tongue could tell or heart could hold in silence — a ridiculous figure, a failure, a fool — packed that night to leave Cambridge with complete disagreeable detachment of soul from every earthly sentiment, possession, hope, and desire, for having no proper defense against the anguish of human relationships anymore he simply turned away from them, spontaneously writing his feelings in a brief note that became a minute, then a short confession, and finally an explanation of fuller statement he could finish only to the point when it was thrown, despairingly, after a heap of consequential letters, photos, and papers into the suitcase he banged shut.

The demeanor of the d’Arconvilles in direst straits had long been the demeanor of men who had no doubt regarding their own integrity; it applied no longer. He couldn’t care again; neither explore; nor feel; and succumbing to whatever doom was now his with no more sense of responsibility than of that meted out to him by a destiny he took to be nothing more than the terrible intensification of chance, he accepted what he thought about no more.

Goaded by insult, heaped by lies, despoiled by injustice, tried beyond his strength, beyond all patience, he left his rooms for the last time and mounted the stairs to receive both a final malediction and the means to carry it out. He reached the top floor of Adams House. As prearranged, someone was waiting for him, someone at the far end of the dark corridor, coming no closer but standing back out of the feeble light, and then the moment, almost interminable in apprehension, was upon him. He hugged his shadow to him like a warm fear. Darconville stood for the final time before Dr. Crucifer. (Of the third he felt in this company? It was a matter God alone understood, if His mercy allowed Him to think about it.)

A sudden and desperate impulse at that moment, a longing to love somebody, anybody, anything not imbued with wickedness overcame Darconville. He stopped. He shook his head. He moved a few steps backwards. There wasn’t yet a word spoken.

“ He who will not when he may ,” Crucifer then whispered from the shadows, the voice respirating low in its unsleeping malevolence, “ when he will he shall have nay .”

“Are you talking about me — or G-God?” asked Darconville, his voice pleading as inconfidently he went further forward. But it was too late.

The glare of Crucifer’s boiled eyes in their unnatural flush and the severe fat line of his mouth determined to mirror what they themselves wouldn’t reflect on, and Darconville saw himself in the corruption: two negatives made an affirmative. They never shook hands. There were no goodbyes. A shadow merely handed him a pistol. And Darconville turned and was gone.

The singlemindedness of love? It can pursue a single aim with a concentration of energy, with a fullness and pertinacity of unwavering will near matchless in power. The wheel of feeling, however, makes an unerring revolution, and, lo, there is hatred. For Darconville, wasted by illness and discredited by disaster, the infection was upon him; his face was like no human face and nearly unrecognizable. Life at its highest and best, such as he himself once enjoyed, offered the possibility of its alternative which as it replaces the other none can escape. Curbed by no limitations, he made no pretensions anymore to the discovery of new and striking facts; out of savage pain, then, out of reckless mockery and loss and long weeks of self-abandonment was wrought a new resolve — and so like the black princes of the Renaissance who would step not a foot in the streets until they had buckled on a sword or sharp dagger by their sides, Darconville set off alone, bought his butcher’s ticket at the airport, and began his journey to the underworld where no darkness, however close, could either save or shelter one from that fate in which victim and executioner would alike be instruments. He felt for the pistol: Tartars gave as gifts to the tortured the canes with which they’d been flogged. It would be like the algebra of love, what he was now about to do, suddenness in passion fit to matters of eternal consequence, with one lover firing and another lover dying — shot, unexpectedly, straight through the heart.