Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

It was surely some kind of signal, after which he saw his confessors differently from how he had been seeing them just a second earlier. As if they’d passed from the realm of phantasmagoria into the realm of the real. Closer to the real, but not yet entirely there. For the whole time it still seemed natural to him, both that they were listening to him with so convincing an appearance of people who aren’t listening, and that, though he was within arm’s reach, they were addressing him as though from beyond so many mountains, not actually seeing him and not caring about his responses. He was drowning in incongruities, he knew it, but nothing in him opposed them: that’s how he caught on that he was dreaming, or that he was in regions bordering on dream. He saw that they were taking his words in, but he saw just as well that there was no more of these words than there would be of a stone falling straight into an abyss. — He saw that they were speaking to him, but he saw just as well that the words they were saying to him, and which they were aware of, were sinking into their oblivion. But at the same time they were also banished words, words already prepared long ago. Merely an opening! Now he had finally provided one himself. — He saw the judge and the onlookers and their frayed condolence, for it was a condolence for a misfortune they were all secure from. And he knew that the originator of their superiority, which they find so flattering, which they don’t brag about, but which they delight in, was him, and knowing himself to be that delight’s unwitting creator he adopted a kind of frightened tenderness toward it, even though he knew that the bliss he had arranged for them was the high point of their jealous certainty that they had a reason to hold him in contempt.

A tenderness more than majestic, a tenderness aloft, but endeavoring to move him in vain. If he submitted to it, it was only as though upward toward the trap door onstage, carrying him up with a gliding lift without him realizing that he was ascending. And while he was emerging, dazed but sensible, the world around him turned so grimacingly, and was annealed with a rainbow oscillating so quickly that now it looked out, now it squinted, just as if some hand had grabbed it and let it go by turns, and all the sense of the world, it seemed, dashed from the matter of “I’m putting it out” to the matter of “I’m firing it up.”

To him it seemed he had gotten up, with the one qualification that it was not him so much as his companions, in whom he now, for the first time, recognized foreigners, in no way foreign to him. He said that this was a subtle and fundamental difference, and he exhaled, deeply relieved. They were looking at him, calmly and blankly, and he, seeing this, leaped across the flexible permutation to the gossipy certainty, calmly and blankly, that he was the one looking at them; and now, in his jaws, he also felt the unpainful cramp of a person who, with immeasurable amazement or pain, has been left swallowing his saliva with mouth agape. But that gesture was without doubt merely a mimetic gesture, for he was neither amazed, nor suffering. So much had slipped between him and them, one thing after another, uncrossable spaces, thick and see-through sliding panels shifting along precisely tested grooves. He recognized that he was getting, if not farther and farther away from his companions, then ever more somewhere that was more and more “elsewhere” from where they dwelled, even though they hadn’t lost sight of him. When quite close to the revolving doors — he noticed that this was quite close to the revolving doors — he suddenly fell into a rotation so powerful that he retained only as much consciousness as would fit into his abruptly cut-off knowledge that he had been seized by the swiftly swirling vortex, wherein he lost consciousness. All he still heard, as though behind manifold, unevenly-woven curtains of sound, was: “You’ll get out of there somehow; carted off with the dead, no way. .,” and he awoke with a sober awareness that he was coming around from a rather brief, yet weighty, swoon. He passed through a door leading from one street to another, but the fact that the door leading from street to street was actually an extraordinary door struck him only when it had shut, hermetically sealing the street from which he had arrived from the street where he now found himself. There was a quiet so deep that, as though on an absolute scale, it was the sole means by which to measure how very demanding the racket had been on the street he had come from, of which he was still aware without actually remembering it yet. The quiet that had spilled everywhere rose from the earlier racket with contours as sharp as the drawings that, as you keep scribbling, will arise from coated “magic papers.” — It was a long, monotonous, ceremoniously uninhabited, yet affably, if restrainedly, inviting street with ideal academic perspective, like in a simplistic urban design. Not that it was abandoned, but the passers-by — you could tell — were conscious of their own purely decorative nature. It was a commercial street, shop after shop, one like the next; but you could tell that all those shops were merely a guise of a certain shop that, it so happened, didn’t differ from them, having more or less the appearance of a first among equals; it was quite far away. The entire street was somehow contrived, the specified shop as well, which seemed, however, the slightest bit less calculated, further testifying to the fact that this had to do with a shade that has a deeper cause. In the meantime, however, that shop’s chosenness was in no way manifest except in that it sufficed to look at it (and it was impossible not to) for the thought that one might not head toward it to become absurd. Thus he headed toward it, fastidiously keeping to the sidewalk, which, despite the fact that there were people walking behind him, had the unerring quality of a sidewalk officially as yet “uncommissioned.” When he arrived there, he encountered one of those decorative figures, several of whom, as in any perspectival plan, were scattered along the street. But the one in front of the shop was at the same time more calculated and more significant than the others, and the reality that the figurine was Tiemen was so natural — no, what am I saying — it seemed so inevitable that in speaking of its naturalness I’m not doing this naturalness justice.

Tiemen had the look of a person at an appointed meeting, and our walker the look of a person who, upon arriving at the appointed meeting-place, has found the one whose absence would have surprised him, if not discomfited him. Tiemen took him by the sleeve and led him to the display.

“Till now, I have never robbed a jeweler’s,” he said, “but your first time is worthy of something special. Don’t worry, it’ll go smoothly. You see the beautiful platinum bracelet with rubies? Your mission, as you know, is to steal that bracelet, that one there, and nothing else. That’s what we agreed. If you fail. . But you know that everything depends on your not failing.”

As he was saying this, Tiemen was pointing out a bracelet wrapped around a wax arm on a plush green pillow, where it was obviously boasting. He would have gladly nodded, and not only with his head, but with words as well, that it went without saying, but he couldn’t, for again there was that unpainful cramp in his jaw, which made him salivate such that it wasn’t enough to swallow, not being able to swallow.

All of a sudden, he sensed that Tiemen, behind his back, was surreptitiously slipping into his hand something that stood out for the striking disproportion of its weight (it was very heavy) to its dimensions, which were minute. And this disproportion taught him, without his needing to look, that it was a wooden club lined with lead.