Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

And so? So?

He was seized by a weakness so blustery that he reeled. He raised his hands: it didn’t prevent his tumbling into the mirror; it only softened it. He and that other one, their foreheads were now almost touching. The unpleasantness of the face he beheld came on so brutally that he was already repudiating himself, without the least regret, firmly, like a sworn enemy, humbled at last — when here, as if they were spilled flowers, the carpet of words spread out before him: “blessed are they who endure wrongs.”

And all at once, as though he had been meekly begging for it, he started to feel happy. His appearance started to appeal to him with an appeal so unconceited it was as if it were others who appealed to him. He lifted himself up; it didn’t matter that he doubted whether his legs would already bear him again, and when, feeling strong, he saw himself standing without support he nearly came to doubt it. It was a strength better than the bodily kind. In particular, it was the kind of strength that commanded him inexorably to turn his face to the window. He had never before complied so willingly, and so he collided with the light, with morning, with Sunday. He collided with them literally as with corporeal beings that had heard of his plight and set forth in a double-time march to vouch for him. He went to meet them, slowly, gratefully, in no way meekly, as one meets an ally merely fulfilling his honorable duty. He leaned out the window; they were standing below, looking up. He saw Sunday morning. It didn’t coax, it didn’t persuade; with a sweeping, ever so simple gesture, it established that he had to assume his place, and that it was his by right and no worse than the rest. The meadow glistened like an army of lancers; they clambered all the way up to the horizon, where they scaled the rampart of a spreading stand of trees. From the treetops they roused the village, harassing it with arrows whose trajectories seemed more real than the winged point flying that way, and the village’s primary concern was to send word to the day that it’s awake, that it’s not afraid. It was sending that word through vertical and twisting columns of smoke from dry timber, and if it was still visible, it was wavering impatiently so as to get up there already, somewhere where it would dissipate, that is, coalesce with everything else, there where everything just happens.

He finished getting dressed, he went out. Walking past the mirror he spotted himself once more — but this time involuntarily. He passed by; but after two or three steps he was stumped: he had to recoil again, and again he stood before the mirrored dresser, in profile. He stood there, strikingly alone, as alone as if he were looking upon himself without what he thought with, without what he perceived with, deprived of them both, as though he had abandoned them in the place he was recoiling from. But he was not spiritless. Something within him was presenting itself; something for which he was merely a place, for its origin lay at a great distance. He was not spiritless; he was , even though he neither thought nor perceived, and was like a drawer, still immaculately tidy a moment ago, suddenly thrown into. . not yet disorder, but the now as if as-yet undaring threat of disorder. In that brief moment, that other time when he had been standing before the mirror, he had made little more of his eyesight than the image of his temples going gray and a short revolt against the unwelcome furrow that had intruded between his nostrils and the corner of his mouth, to which he had never paid any attention. But still, he’d started to miss the trustworthy protrusion of his zygomatic bone: it had apparently been eaten up by that tumefaction that had also infected his face and double chin. In short: he hadn’t recognized himself. No: it wasn’t like that. He’d recognized himself, but with a distaste he hadn’t experienced before. He was seized by a terrible fear, but he mustered all his forces and stifled it. (Really: he wrung its neck, and with a madness, with a hideousness no different from how he had once wrung the neck of a chicken.) — Yes, he raised his head, splashed himself, straightened his tie, and eyed himself, hissing, “What have you done to yourself?” and stepped out. It was a specious stepping-out, which he compensated for with a jerk of the shoulders and a painfully slow turn: now he was standing there, facing the mirror, and looking himself straight in the eyes, as if this were a matter of how to hinder them in their accelerated blinking; he said, having shaken his head mistrustfully: “Such hatred!”—and left.

The yard — he already knew this — opens out from a spiral staircase, just when one had gone halfway down. He knew this step, and he was descending, scraping against the wall, and the more slowly he did so, the closer he got to the step. He stopped right when the first outline of the outdoors appeared; and, with it, legs. He spotted six legs; they were legs lying in ambush. Sure, it’s funny to talk about feet lying in ambush, but what do you want, they were feet lying in ambush. They jumped the gun like it was no big deal, hardly three steps from the door that went out to the yard, but that didn’t help them: you could see them stand up deliberately, because they knew that until he got to where he was going he had to go close by. He ordered himself to go not only close around them, but as close as possible (at the phrase “as close as possible” he clenched his teeth), and to size up the people to whom those feet belonged — for he didn’t have the slightest doubt as to whom they belonged — to challenge them without haste, in the proper order, one after another. And he ordered himself under pain, not only that he must face up to them, but in doing so hurl an insult in their faces. But here his directive — the disorder that threatened the tidied drawer — had started to make a move, was already flipped: it wasn’t a matter of going around them, sizing them up, and hurling an insult in their faces, but rather of not being able to go around them and not being able to size them up without having hurled an insult at them. But because they were standing in such a way that he must go around, the insult he would hurl at them didn’t bow to his will. He must hurl it at them, not because he wishes it, but rather because he must wish it.

He stood on the threshold. He looked around. The innkeeper and the Steels were standing with their backs to him. And he made an unexpected discovery: he was wrong; his calculation was off; in no way was it essential that he pass close by. With a bit of caution it was possible to get out to the yard before they even noticed him. But before he could even delight in this discovery, the innkeeper turned around, and the Steels’ heads followed this gesture. Had they spotted him? The apodosis of “. . and over here was the servants’ quarters, which we turned into guestrooms” knew nothing of him. Yet he was still sure that just as he was standing on the threshold of the house, he was also standing at that apodosis’s doorstep. He, insulted, unavenged, stepped inside this clause without so much as leaving a ripple. He entered like a shadow. The insulted, the unavenged didn’t exist.

“. . And over here was the servants’ quarters, which we turned into guestrooms.”

The innkeeper punctuated it with a pithy period. A period as if prearranged. A period/assembly point for an excursion to big fun, a period/rest stop.

“I am a gentleman!” — The outspread hands. — “Just take a look at him!” — “You shitass!” — “Yes, but do you have any proof?”

Before him who must pass by, must hurl his insult, there stood three illuminati, who knew that he must but can’t manage. They were standing majestically, with dignity and aware of a triumph so perfect that it set aside the rather burdensome responsibility.