Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

In the meantime, the auditorium had filled up again, I don’t know how. The members of the audience sprawled comfortably in their seats; there wasn’t a piehole not gnawing a thick twist packed into the corner of the mouth. Before me, in neat rows, hordes of eyes snooped over my head. No! It’s a single eye: the eye of a fly. I see myself in it, multiplied, but is it actually me? It looks like me, I’m that I, yet somehow topsy-turvy. It’s my worry, it’s my regret, I’m buffeted by a “now or never,” and my teeth are chattering, but the answer I get from the fly’s eye is a tidy mosaic of unfamiliar gentlemen (for the most part me, topsy-turvy), and it convinces me it’s my mistake, that there is no worry, no regret, no caritas, nothing but the curiosity to see multiplied to the point of inhumanity, to see what this almost redemptive profile of Fuld’s would give us were we to see it from the front. This curiosity grows and grows, it’s already too great, I can’t handle it, I see it, it’s sprung forth from me like a finger puppet from a magician’s box, it has the eye of a fly. It sways on a wavering nudge, it sways forward, back. It has the knavish smile of a scoundrel who’s nicked the wire beneath the acrobat and is delightedly awaiting the consequences; the short, splayed paws of a welcoming little devil from limbo, along with his wicked joviality. He knows he’s bewitched me. He knows, and he’s smiling. He sways more and more, he smiles less and less. And having reached full tilt, he has stretched his arms out like a happy little jester getting into a tangle with a gendarme; the smiling was done; in the fly’s eye, now so near, a tidy mosaic of unfamiliar gentlemen paralyzed by a curiosity that has no name. The nasty biceps of outrageous weightlifters sprouted behind the short paws: curiosity, as burly as a drunken stock-boy, jolted me. Something twanged, crunched, and creaked beneath my feet; I fell on something; for a moment it put up a rough resistance, but all of a sudden it went slack and yielded disgustingly; something awkwardly jagged was left in my arms. The blackamoor vanished; Mutig, livid with furious regret, stood back and carefully examined his lacerated hands; in my arms — Giggles. Facing me head on, however, and, as always, in the posture of a sadistic examining magistrate— Fuld. Fuld? No; something hideous; an expansive, sweet-toothed grimace, like that of someone inexpressibly good trying to polish off everything but his smile, someone as though barely a shadow, who, having realized the pointlessness in due course, has fled, covering his face and bidding me toward this empty disharmony.

“Are you nuts? Who gave you the right?” I tore the rubber puppet away from him and hurled it far, far away.

Fuld dropped his head to the table; a trio of sobs, then silence; tears rolled like peas from Mutig’s eyes; they left an emptiness, and a grief whose way had been barred till now took up residence in that emptiness; hesitantly at first, but soon in an impatient stampede, like a startled herd. In long processions. Giggles’s arms slid from my neck; she snapped and hung down across my own; the glass shards beneath her feet were a fine dust. I dragged myself and Giggles over to Fuld and stuck my free arm under his belt. I hauled them toward the exit, making hard progress. I had to get by Mutig. He feigned an empty gesture of forestalling me.

“You think it’s fun being a god, when all you are is human?”

“A god? All you are is inhuman.”

“You think it’s so easy being human when you’re somebody’s god?”

They hung across my arms; their heads were swinging; they swept the floor with their arms. They were heavy. A café’s Sunday din pecked into the spacious room. And Mutig — and why isn’t he helping me? — was now pulling himself back together, leading us with the ceremonious step of a host. He opened the door for me and stepped aside.

“In spite of everything, thank you,” he said. “But do take care of them, Mr. Successor.”

I put them down at the curb and went to look for a car. The street had gone dark in the meantime. Presently I saw quite distinctly that I was here today for the first time. I didn’t know the place; and not a street sign to be found — that got my goat! The whole time there’s that traffic, as if it were being sucked out just past its source: but now it sounded like nothing more than a weir off in the distance. — I had barely gone a few steps when I spotted a hansom cab moving toward the place where Fuld and Giggles were lying. I recognized it at once as the cab that had brought me here, and I thought this natural— secure, perhaps, in the knowledge that I hadn’t even looked at the driver earlier. The driver smiled; the one before (but how would I know?) also had that smile of the consecrated. But consecrated in what? I jumped onto the footboard, like lobby boys do in the rain when they’re trying to stop a car for their clientele. (I envy them that jump, for they do it as if out of privilege — the privilege of youth, and I, now making the jump myself, am a little embarrassed at having presumed something to which I no longer have a right.)

“It’s as if I’d foreseen it,” said the driver.

“Foreseen what?”

“Sir,” he said, “I’m not saying that I’ve foreseen anything, but that ‘it’s as if I’d foreseen it.’ A sentence where ‘it’ has a conventional function, which is to say none at all, and where all the emphasis is placed on the condition ‘as if I had.’ I don’t know whether you, too, have objectless premonitions. That is, premonitions that we recognize only after the object they were premonitions of has been fulfilled.”

“Naturally,” I said, intending sarcasm, but maybe coming off as just angry.

“Your ‘naturally’ attests to your suspicion. I’m not to blame if, through your own fault, circumstances rouse your suspicion that I’m pointing indiscreetly to your personal affairs. A driver is discreet by his very vocation. Unless I’m asked, I never take any notice of a person’s affairs. I strive solely for so-called ‘general thoughts.’ Take, for example, my ‘as if I’d foreseen it’; all I’d wanted to say was that the aspect assumed by premonitions once the event has come to pass is perhaps not from retroactive suggestion so much as like a lamp behind a banner. That banner is the objectless premonition, and the event itself is the light that shines through that fulfillment — only then do we see that it really was within. The event within the premonition, that is. — So it’s to Rue d’Astorg, is it?”

A question so unexpected that it took a moment before I placed it, and I called out in surprise, “What, do you know this man?” (It happened that Fuld lived on Rue d’Astorg.)

The driver shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m the driver, after all, who chauffeurs gentlemen who’ve been through the wringer. Each of us has his destiny. There are people who float along from start to finish like advertising balloons: future angels have fallen for them, and they happily take them under their wing, so very far, where man is forbidden to go; there they are passed to the next angelic shift. — On the other hand, there are the people who spend their whole lives shambling out of pits. There isn’t a man damned to hell who hasn’t run into those oafs on the way down — it’s like the only reason they were created was so that beggars would feel better, and to guide the way for marked beings. — As I’ve said, gentlemen who’ve been put through the wringer are set aside for me; gentlemen who’ve been put through the wringer are no different than timid gumshoes. They hold out against evil for much the same reason people bury a pheasant: to get it all wormy. And once the evil’s teeming with worms, they have to leave it anyway, for it turns their stomach. Their hunger is eternal. Those are the most dangerous people of all — like people who haven’t eaten their fill.”