Richard Weiner: The Game for Real

And I entered chambers that whispered to me that nothing is also something. I was willingly convinced. Then it was as though their immeasurability gradually diminished. Slowly, slowly I came back to myself. I was somewhere that resembled my bedroom, at first nearly, then almost, and finally enough that it set the mind aglow. It was actually that a revolution had gone down here, and that it was hiding what it really wanted. — The whole time there was this great silence, though no longer hermetic; the sound of beingness carried in, as if from a far-off passage. More and more distinct. — And then, as if my millstone had been suddenly removed: I turned my head. I determined that yes, I was in my bedroom. It was different from before, but it was still my bedroom. — A bitter relief rippled through me. I started getting undressed.

I started getting undressed. The day, already departing for tomorrow, returned hastily and somewhat reluctantly, as it does daily, somewhat like a chastened child on his way to bed, who in the confusion forgets that he has to say goodnight. He’s returned, the helpless little cripple, and he’s sobbing into his elbow, “Look what you’ve done to me!” What a wretch! Day after day, the same story: I hear out his grievances, but absently; I argue with him, but without interest; I promise that I’ll do right by him tomorrow, but my mind is elsewhere; I warn him to cut it out, but I warn without passion. Because that’s pretty much it, my mind is elsewhere: on the harbor that awaits me. But where you enter, it seems to me, you don’t sail out from again, so I’m making sure I keep to the buoys that lead the way: straight ahead, sleep. A line of buoys leads me there, they’re quietly swaying on a very black, very languorous surface. The pilot plows through the water, which doesn’t so much as splash. As if he were slithering over it. This pilot is silence. — Today, however, he doesn’t quite want to be. In what silence there is, something is whispering. I listen in, attentive, unriled. It’s nearby — those two over there. The kind of whispering before sleep, the whisper of considerate guests who are afraid of disturbing you. You can hear them removing their clothes: the absent punctuation to their whispering. Not long ago I would offer my hospitality to friends, to couples. We’d spend an evening at the theater. Upon returning we would converse for a short time longer, then I would leave them and go get undressed. Like today. Then, too, one could hear the call of things that had been put off: affable dots, accent marks, and semicolons set my guests’ whispering to music — a whispering in no way mysterious, a whispering that told all. It was having a cozy time in the silent womb of my apartment, in the spacious silence. Here and there a distinct word slipped through the slightly open door, as if to assure me that I had a share even in that which I did not discern. Those words spun out like a rosary, dense at first, then less and less frequent. After which nothing but whispers and the chatty punctuation of things. — I pay close, but cool, attention. Yes, it’s entirely like the other day, after the theater. The friendly idyll before sleep. — What am I saying, like back then? What a fool I am! It is the other day after the theater. Next door are my recent guests. That is, today is not so long ago, what with not so long ago having been today. We came back from the theater. We had a bit of conversation. That before retiring we might hit upon something. That we might find some pretext for falling asleep beneath a baldachin of laughter: we’ll chat — chat like tossing a ball, any which way — so, then, what might we chat about? About the waiter, who got a bit tongue-tied; or how we laughed ourselves silly at the usherette who offered us the programs, displaying them like they were tablets of law; at our gesture of refusal she’d shrugged her shoulders as if regretting that we did not want to submit to the law, and worried that we might thus be risking our salvation. We solemnly vow that tomorrow we will go to such-and-such a place, and we go to sleep bursting with laughter, because we have unwittingly revealed to each other that we don’t think it matters. –

Yes, but it was precisely out of this cheerful laughter that my fear prolapsed. It alerted me that they were cowering here somewhere. It alerted through the sweaty shirt sticking to my back. It was a strange fear: I didn’t have it, but I was aware of it. As if it had appeared to me. I knew that it and I were face-to-face, so close I couldn’t see it. So close it wasn’t there to see. A peculiar fear. Unexcited, reflective, and imploring. Imploring me to shelter it within myself, to take it in. It looked so unhappy, it looked particularly unhappy. One evening — I was quite young at the time — an older man had stopped me on the street, and he said to me: “Take me with you.” I looked at him, one would say, as befit the circumstances, well, with revulsion. He broke into tears: “Take me with you, no one wants to take me with him.” I wasn’t afraid, for I clearly saw that he was suffocating on the tenderness with which everyone was thrusting him away. I was certain that he wouldn’t harm me, that he had nothing to harm me with. . I wasn’t afraid, I say, and yet I was seized by horror, and I know precisely where it had come from: it was the horror of being infected with misfortune. With his misfortune, for this man was unhappy the way others fall ill. I took to my heels, but he came after me, quietly calling, “Don’t be afraid, you big ninny, don’t be afraid of being unhappy.” But I fled, I fled, for unfortunates like these pose a greater threat to us than Jack the Ripper. In like manner was the unsightly and piteous fear that was confronting and courting me here not my own fear, it was beyond me, without my having actually beheld it; and yet I knew it was here, and I feared it as I would someone with an infectious disease: i.e., its horror.

I remembered that I had been scared in the very same manner already once today, it was just as I was inspecting the dining room and it occurred to me that I was not particularly astonished at the stranger behind the door, and that it wasn’t okay for me not to be astonished. I recoiled at my not feeling horror. Who knows, maybe that’s just the sort of horror that makes us sweat whenever, out of nowhere, we’ve run into ourselves, as I did today when I ran into my apartment; who knows, maybe there is constantly residing within us this sort of unexpected eternal visitation, from which we recoil only when it occurs to us that it’s like we’d been looking the other way all this time. Only we seldom run into ourselves: we rattle the keys, we cough, we drag our feet across the floor, we do what we might so that the thief will make it out the window in the meantime. There’s no merit in being robbed; the merit is in putting up with the sight of the burglar — putting up with him as if he were an old acquaintance.

At last, silence. Utter. It bumped up against one of those sort-of-fleeting rustles that jacks make when raked together, and then it spilled away, silent as a swamp. I identified it immediately, that rustle — it was her amber necklace tossed onto the marble mantelpiece. It, that rustle, was the threshold of voicelessness, but at the same time it was the wake-up call of her presence. It was like the click in a stereopticon just before the photographs are replaced; the “view” replaced by a “view” just as smoothly, fluidly, and with the same almost violent suppleness as with a “peep box,” and no matter that none of the preceding images had announced this one, no matter that there was no precedent for this one among those past, no matter that it had clicked in as if sent down, here it was like something that could not be — it was here as the sole thing that was, indisputably, and upon which one had to gaze: the imagined “fine acquaintances with whom I had returned from the theater” had withdrawn and been replaced by the image of “these two, so strangely familiar.” And the transcendent, unfortunate, solicitous horror, which I (without actually feeling it) caught wind of by feeling my shirt sweaty against my back, was absorbed by the picture called “these two, so strangely familiar,” and faded markedly. — It might have seemed that the phrase “as a graveyard” should follow “silent,” so deep was the silence that followed. But no. Rather, it resembled the silence that washes through an apartment wherein a harmonious family is at its ease. I was pierced with so powerful a sense of intimacy (with those two) that it formed a sweet knot in my throat. A muted light still shone in the living room. From that I judged that those two were not yet asleep; I got a cheery taste for playing host; I went out to them to see whether they needed anything.