47

greatly rewarded. After my amusing dinner and a good film which, when we came out, proved to have lasted much longer than usual, on our return in my friends' car the lightening hand of pain unexpectedly grabbed my internal organs and, twisting them in a grim convulsion, wrung out of them as from a dish-rag a deathly inner perspiration-- as if one were about to retch a nothingness poisoned with anguish. I was in for it, this being the preliminary to invasion by the tenacious rodent which would not cease from me for days.

It was one o'clock and Insel might have waited since half past eleven. He had. When my friends in some concern dropped me at the Dome I could see him sitting outside.

Insel seemed unconscious of having waited for me for an hour and a half. After all it was ridiculous stopping to apologize to one who lived in that other time and space. My reflection immediately complicated, "When was he here? When was he there? Was he in a wavering way existing in both dimensions at once?" The distant arist went about his simple social life with sufficient consecutiveness, save for long delays excused with mysterious illness and misplaced sleep, he visited any one who would have him on the right day.

During my absence he had changed.

I had never seen him like this before-- human-- actually gay! As I tried to explain why I must go home, Insel, in laughing over something he wanted to tell me, laid a fluttering hand on my shoulder-- the torture of my body ceased.

It was not only an interruption of pain. I was regalvanized. Straightening from top to toe, I inhaled a limpid air-- the neon tubes carressed my eyes.

-48-

I looked at Insel amazed. In what unheard of parasitism had I drawn
this vitality out of a creature half disintegrated?

Evidently he was in good form. The sparks he seemed to emit in turn
gave off smaller ones; an added superficial illumination induced by a few
drinks, having much the same effect as the perspective confusion of traffic
lights among electric signs.

Out of all this an intimate twinkle approached me. "Promise to sit
here with me till seven o'clock tomorrow evening," Insel entreated.

"Naturally," I acquiesced.

There is no field of fantasy so rich as the financial promoting of
failures. Weaving in and out of our conversation was a shuttle of money-
making devices for Insel's relief, the most practical being to star him in
a horror film. It is a poor horror which has to grime its face-- the only
face on the films that has true horror in it is Jouvets-- and that only an
inkling-- and so discreet.

Insel said he had been offered such a role. But again he had not been
able, or wishful, to pursue anything that carried him into the future-- a
future that ebbed from him as from others the past. He would look forward
with one eagerly-- always at a certain point he reverted-- turned his blind
back on the forward direction-- .

He said, "I have worn myself out tramping the city on fruitless quests--
to show my good will."

Now I had found another profession for him-- magnetic healer. Suddenly
I foresaw the fear my physician would inspire nullifying his therapeutic value,
and I did not suggest it to Insel.

In his unusual liveliness, words, like roomy cupboards, dipped into the

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reservoir of excited honey and flapping their open doors spilled it all over
the place as they passed.

"Unglaublich," said Insel. "With you alone am I able to express myself.
You tell me exactly what I am thinking. No one else has understood what we
understand.

"You have such marvelous ideas-- "

"But Insel," I protested conscientiously, "I have touched on my ideas so
lightly-- If I knew your language well enough to convey the subtlest shades
of meaning-- ."

We decided to get a first-class dictionary. Henceforth **nothing** was to
be lost!

Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savour lay in its impress
of endlessness has left me an ineradicable visual definition of Insel with
his whittled exterior jerking in tics of joy a pate too loosely attached and
almost worn down to the skull-- and myself expansive in some secondary glow
from that icy conflagration strewing grey ashes over his face as it burnt
itself out. Always at an instinctive interval of shoulder from shoulder,
as two aloft on the same telegraph wire exchange a titter of godforsaken
sparrows.

As night drew out-- it got draughtier and draughtier-- we removed, as
if receding into a lair, from the terrace to further and further inside the
cafe from the open to the enclosed-- each time ordering a new 'consummation'
from a different waiter-- till we reached an inaereate core of the establish-
ment. Here we inexplicably came upon that friend whose hypothetic non-exis-
tence insured Insel's vaunted isolation. One after another the same Germanic

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wag would shuffle up to our table, each time wearing a different face.

One-- projected that declamatory arm which in a certain condition present at the time falls with a forgetful plop before completing an indication. "Who is Insel," it challenged, "to monopolize this perfectly fascinating woman?"

Another-- equally appreciative until he discovered the hair in the shadow of my hat to be undeniably white-- apologized with a shudder, "I won't say it doesn't look all right on you-- but I can't bear the sight. It reminds me that I am old." He looked less old than Insel-- He was one of the many unfortunates who have had nothing to give off' but the bubbles of adolescence, whereas Insel's rattling pelvis was trotting the leather seat in the sitting leaps of an exuberant child.

"They are so surprised," he chortled repeatedly, "They are accustomed to seeing me _all alone_-- ."

I ordered supper-- got cigarettes at the counter and dumped them on our table on my way downstairs to buy some rouge (probably on a cue my subconscious had taken from my critic.) When I returned it looked as if the empty space in our quiet corner had come alive, the leather padding had broken out in a parasitic formation, a double starfish whose radial extremities projected and retracted rapidly at dynamic angles.

It was Insel all cluttered up with his 'private life'. Draped with the bodies of two negresses, spiked with their limbs. They seemed, out of ambush, to have fallen upon him from over the back of the high seat. The waiter had laid a startling oblong of white cloth which knocked the milling muddle of polished black arms and faces round Insel's pallor into a factitious distance, although he and his mates were actually attached to my supper table.

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57

The group being occupied it was difficult to know how to greet them.
I swept an inclusive smile of welcome across them as I sat down and the waiter brought the food.

As I watched this virtually prohibited conjunction with a race whose
ostracism 'debunks' humanity's ostensible belief in its soul, I scarcely
heard the scandalous din they were making; these negresses, with their fingers
of twig, were tearing at some object-- my scarlet packet of 'High-life'!--
rapidly becoming invisible under Insel's touch-- he clung to it with such
constrictive tenacity, he might have been squeezing an atom.

"Maquereau!" "Saland!" shrieked the dark ladies to stress their pandemonium accounting of benefits bestowed.

"Insel," I addressed him authoritatively, not dreaming 'pimp' and 'skunk'
were almost the only French words familiar to the poor dear, "If you could
understand what they are calling you-- you'd let go!"

Once more fallen sideways off himself like his own dead leaf in one of
those unexpected carvings into profile; a zig-zag profile of a jumping jack
cut out of paper from an exercise book; shrunken to a strip of introvert con-
centration blind as a nerve among the women's volume, clenching his gums in a
fearful sort of constipated fervor, as if hammering on an anvil, Insel thumped
his closest negress with an immature fist. Every thump drove in my impression--
as this black and white flesh glanced off one another-- of their being totally
unwed-- that Insel, whom I often called 'ameise' who was even now like an 'ant',
occupied with his problem of a load in another dimension, could never have
worked on those polished bodies than with the microscopic function of a termite--
unseeing, unknowing of all save an imperative to adhere-- to never let go.
He clung to my cigarettes conscious of nothing but his comic 'tic'.

-52-

There were onlookers peering under the brass rail topping the back-to-back upholstery-- three heads left over from the crowded hours. One, the sharp mask of a Jew worn to a rudder with centuries of steering through hostile masses, lowered its pale eyelashes on the neighbors' insurrection as if closing a shop.

I paid the waiter, bought some more cigarettes, jumped into a taxi, undressed and went to bed, all with the delicious composure Insel instilled-- not questioning the continuity of this 'elevation of the pure in heart' even while he in whom it originated was being slapped by inexpensive harlots on their way home from work.

I was falling into blissful sleep when a hopeless S.O.S. vibrated on the air-- an S.O.S. that sounded like a sobbing 'sterben'. I started up in horror of my selfishness. What could I have been thinking of to leave that delicate soul to his longing for suicide on the contemptible grounds that I was sick of the racket he had been causing.

What would he do, on emerging from a dimension where a packet of ten cigarettes encompassed a universe, to find that I, his very means of expression, had deserted him. With an aereal ease I must have 'caught' from Insel, I threw on my clothes and more or less floating into the street together with the presage of dawn, the hoses of the street cleaners slushing my ankles, hounded by my ever growing obsession that Insel held a treasure to be saved at all costs. Damp and heroic I arrived at the Dome. The piebald mix-up had disappeared.

"What happened to that skeleton I had with me an hour ago?" I asked the major domo. "He got into a tangle with some negresses-- Was he all right?"

-53-

"-- one who has greatly suffered," I was astounded to hear myself telling the man-- like a nice old maid with illusions-- in precisely the sombre tones of Insel's 'patroness drive'. Equally astounded, he shrugged his shoulders.

"You'll find him in one of the little bars round here-- he won't be far, madame."

I knew better. I had my own vision of him-- it was the rustiness of that nail that haunted me. Or woul I reach his attic only after an ebony vampier had sucked the last drop of blood from his corrupted carcass.

Nevertheless, on my swift passage I caught sidelong sight of Insel standing disproportionately at the end of a row of little men before a 'zinc', his head, appearing enormous, shone with a muted gleam.

Without stopping I raised my hand. Insel, although he had his back to me, rushed into the street-- he seemed to be continuing to run around.

In his gesture I could see a conclusion of distressful searching in which he had circled during my absence-- beating his breast. "Warum, warum, ist diese Frau davon gegangen?-- Why did this woman go away? I have not ceased to ask myself." Insel complained again and again in miserable bewilderment. "You went away-- Why did you go away!"

"Only to fetch something I left at the other cafe."

Tenderly confidential he bent his neck-- a gnarl in a stricken tree-- I was about to learn what urgent anxiety had drawn me out of bed.

"There was a waiter," he whispered hoarsely into my hat, "who wouldn't let me out of the Dome until I had paid for two cafe fines." (They had forgotten to include them when I paid for the supper.) "It isn't that I want you to pay me back," he protested with his so distinguished courtesy-- ."

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I always had to order the same drinks for myself as for Insel, or he would not have taken anything-- but I made him drink my fine. It would, I felt, have superfluous results were I to even sip alcohol in the company of this weirdly intoxicating creature. At the same time in accordance with my mission as a life-saver, I begged him to take cafe au lait-- which roused a pitious opposition.

As if wound up he went on beating a mea culpa on his absent breast.

I caught him by the arm.

Instantaneously he displaced to a distance. I was left with my own arm articulated at a right angle, holding in my hand a few inches of grey bone. It had come away with a bit of his sleeve, acutely decorated with the jagged edge of torn black cloth. At the same time, Insel laying his hand on my shoulder, the rag and the bone did a 'fade out'.

"Promise me to stay here," he whispered, "while I go to the bar. These people would not like it if I did not pay."

Insel, who seemed to remember our pact, wanted to go back to the Dome. But I refused.

"It's time for you to sleep," I commanded. That persistent teeter in my mind which was always tipping Insel up in a stiff horizontal straight line, his immovable eyes glued to infinity, was laying him out in state on no bed under an awesome canopy of poverty.

"No," I decided, "I shall put you back in your box-- my pet clochard is going to lie in a row-- under a bridge."

-56-

We wandered off in search of the Seine-- It was dawn.

Perhaps this show-case hung outside a librarie was a prison and we,
therefore, suspecting an isolation, dissolved its wire caging with the
crafty focus of sight to set the content free.

We saw the primeval steam (whose last wisp straying endlessly had
wreathed itself round Insel's brain) condense to stone in a frayed torso.

In the darkness it was blind. As the sky broke open, its outline entered
the morning gently with the eyes of an animal. As daylight warmed the lids
widened to the vision of a pagan.

In conception vast enough to absorb the centuries it survived, now in
defiance of time to surpass it-- the eternal Thing was looking at us with the
fullness of the future. All we had ever understood that was less than itself
peeled like spoiled armour.

What enormous forboding, Insel, in his simplicity, I, in my complexity,
recognized in its ideal expression, I cannot say. It was a recognition of
something known which, in spite of life we would know again. Insel, without
speaking, turned to me staring at the re-impression of an impression on a
book spread out for the passer-by we had both, I could see, in identical
silence found one significance in an early Greek fragment-- I do not remember
which.

I have heard that some philosophers assume reality to be absent without
an audience. In empty streets the sun had a terrible excessive existence
for ourselves alone. We walked together, yet repeatedly, as if having veered

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57

in an arc it took no time to describe, Insel would be coming towards me from
far away.

"Go back!" he cried in gaunt derangement, "if it disgusts you to look
at me." Shining uselessly, as an electric bulb 'left on' by day, his face, unshaven,
was partially clouded.

We came to a Raoul Dufy in a dealer's window; his charming 'crook's tech-
nique' disintegrated my meticulous companion. I feared that, the shock reinforc-
ing his perpetual cerebral fit, he was about to throw a physical one. Instead
he became covered with verdigris.

We had to relapse at another cafe. Insel disappeared for quite a while.

"Have you been sick?" I asked solicitously. He was looking less green.

"Dufy," he explained.

I put down the money for the coffee and a twenty-five centime piece rolled
to the ground.

"Would you pick that up?" I begged. Insel began pulling himself together
but did nothing about it, so I picked it up myself.

"Oh, dear," he wailed forlornly. "I thought you pointed to me. For God's
sake throw it down again-- or I shall never forgive myself," he pled and pled--

Nothing would induce me to. I foresaw him distinctly diminishing through
the hole in the center of that tiny disc and I had to get him to the Seine.

At length we arrived at the gleaming water bearing so lightly its lazy
barges with their drag of dancing diamonds. Whatever had been an 'under-the-
bridge- was all boxed in and the sun had crawled so far into the sky it was
needless to look for another.

After that we seemed to be wandering in an aimless delight round and round
the Orangerie. Insel's boots were hurting. His pain was impersonal; it might

-58-

have been following him, snapping at his legs.

With some effort, having breakfasted all night, we conceived the idea
of going to 'lunch'. Insel, who was on the point of allowing the air to lift
him from the railed-in terrace of the Tuilleries and set him down in the Rue
de la Paix, appraised by normal standards, although it was just this 'beauty
of horror' I was sure should be worth such a lot of money to him, looked really
terrifying. His being unshaven became a smoke screen. Always his self illu-
mination cast its own shadow. In shining he dragged an individual darkness
into the world. I felt sure that as the thoroughfares refilled we would run
less risk of being arrested for disturbing the public peace on the left bank.

"My friend we are not dressed for going into town," I insisted, heading
him off in another direction.

"Why," asked Insel in bewildered politeness, "you look as lovely as you
always do?"

With a bizarre instinct for scenic effect the hazard presiding our sense-
less excursion drove us into the Gare d'Orleans.

In the almost gelatinous gloom of the great hall the enclosure before the
Buffet Restaurant, its boundaries set by stifled shrubs, offered a stage for
Insel to unroll his increase existence to the fitting applause of a dead echo,
the countless scurry of departed feet.

This station, as he entered it, became the anteroom of dissolution, where
the only constructions left of a real world were avalanches of newspapers,
and even these alined in a dusty perspective like ghosts of overgrown toys.

The place seemed deserted. There was no one to see Insel lay out hocus-
pocus negresses on the table in apologetic sacrifice.

"They were all wrong," he brooded, as if he were a puritan with an ailing

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59

conscience, "I was going in the wrong direction!-- I renounce," he sobbed hurling off the negresses, who, bashed against the dingy windows of the Gare, melted and dripped like black tears into limbo down a morbid adit leading to underground platforms-- there to mingle with the inquietude of departure to be borne away on a hearse of the living throbbing along an iron rail which must be a solidified sweep of the Styx.

"The only thing wrong with those negresses was your beating one of them up!"

Insel denied this vehemently, and reproached me. I had, he said, inflamed their rebellion by smiling at them. That was no way to handle negresses.

"What? You can sleep with them, but I can't smile at them. How do you work that out?"

This muddled Insel, the theme of whose half conscious theatricals must either be that his beefsteak shared jealous passions with less conclusively slaughtered meat or that prostitutes lay far beyond a patroness's permissions.

"Colored people are not--," he began, looking very Simon Legree.

"But Insel in your relationship she is entitled--"

"I only slept with her three times--"

"If she had slept with you half a time I consider she has the right to everything you possess."

Insel, who had a fanciful ingenuity in extricating himself from any situation he felt to be awkward without very well understanding why, instructed me, "You know nothing of the etiquette of my underworld-- its laws. The rights of such women extend only to the level of the table top."

"It's like this-- I am sitting at the Dome-- she comes along--"

"She dropped on you," I corrected-- It was fun teasing him. Like tickling

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a dazed gnome with a spider's silk.

Ignoring my interruption, he continued, "She may take anything under the table-- she can grab a thousand francs from my pocket-- it is hers. But to lift anything off the table-- ausgeschlossen!-- impermissable!"

So exactly the logic on behalf of woman in the normal world that I squeaked, "You haven't got a thousand francs in your pocket."

What matter if we were trivial. We must find some excuse for our unending hazy laughter. Speech was an afterthought to that humorous peace as it fused with our incomparable exaltation. It was ridiculous to find ourselves, alone, in well being so wide there was room for innumerable populations.

Insel harped back to not having beaten the negress.

"Well," I temporized, relenting, "you thumped her-- You did like this," clinching every nerve in my body I tried to imitate that excruciation which in him took the place of a sense of touch-- But my fingers closed on an absence-- incipience of all volume, Insel's volume. "Didn't you know?"

All he could remember was her stealing my cigarettes.

"Stealing," I exclaimed, "the waiter told me they support you-- ."

"Everybody," Insel reflected drearily, "thinks I am such an awful 'Maquereau.' I only had three meals with them."

"You don't have to exonerate yourself," I said dryly, overcome with compassion. "It's quite a feat-- being a pimp and starving to death." Then laughing, "Whoever heard of a maquereau without any money!" It made such a gorgeous sound when they were shouting-- almost macrusallo. Like crucified mackerel-- "

"They stole my sheets," Insel interrupted sternly, "my six white sheets."

"Six sheets against three meals or three embraces! Whichever way you put

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it your honor is clear," I consoled him, "All the same, I shall not call you
clochard any more, but macrusallo."

Insel's luminous duality peculiar to this one night seemed to be forming
a more domestic hallucination, an elfin attempt at flirtation, miraculously coy,
which played all to itself against the greater glow and measure of his basic
disarray-- a tacit assumption of our having mutually renounced an inferior world
in spite of his repulsiveness being, as he wailed, greater than I could bear.

I had once, to get a simple opinion, asked my dressmaker to take a look
at him.

"Well, do you think he's mad," I asked her.

"He looks so funny," she giggled, "He looks 'in love'."

She was right, he had the air of being amorous of anything or everything
in general which left him so rapt and gentle, or, taking an 'inner' view, his
astral Venus flowed in his veins. This was shy when he met a woman, Mme.
Feirlein or any other, he had an approach of continent rape, as if he were
persuading her bemused, "See! It must be the more lovely for being already
consummate."

For a moment I wondered if his unstaid mind had reconceived in some un-
guessable aspect I assumed for him, its eerie durable passion in general-- for
myself. But apart from the likelihood of his having no idea as to whom he
alternately bewailed and beamed upon, I remembered the only emotion I aroused
in creative men was an impulse of 'knock-out' (that any intuited opposition of
the future stirs in the subconscious) which of course was _impossible_ with this
delicate soul swimming so docilely along his astral stream under the thunder
and lightenings of his distraction like a confiding duck as I scattered crumbs.

At the same time a worn down record of old-fashioned inflection clattered

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out of Insel's head;

"In spite of all-- "

A lesson? A suggestion? A refrain to be taken up?

Instantly I knew this to be a touch-word on which some spring must snap,
some wheel fly wild. That, as I watched, something horrible, in anguish, was
>wanting to happen<-- a dangerous inertia waiting to be acted upon by some external
irritant.

Our lake of peace was draining as Insel gathered himself together for
some voluntary magnetic onslaught "in spite of all" had swollen on the air--

Shafts from his eyes became so penetrating I could feel myself dissolve
to a transparent target, they pierced me, and, travelling to the further side,
stared through my back on their return to his irises.

He seemed to collect electricity from the air (in the afternoon there was
a violent storm). This crackling electricity flashed so near by without attain-
ing to me. It was as if I were almost leaning up against a lightening conductor.
I remembered his girl's watch was still in my hand bag-- it lay beside me-- a
kind of self-focus in his magnetic field.

He had always something about him of a lithe tree struck by its own lightening.

These magnetic tides would rise and ebb as we sat in felicity around an
enormous plat anglais, which I could not touch for my absorption in Insel and
of which, as Insel ate of it, the rosy meats seemed to drop uselessly into void.
And all the while Insel spasmodically kept up his bum's charade pleading for
variable salvations. With his floppy pathos he implored me to take pity on
him, to take him in, -(I would see how I would work with Insel keeping house
for me with that precision he exercised in his own dimension!)- to put him in a

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nursing home and surround him with angelic choirs of pretty nurses "only to
look at," he exclaimed-- persuasive or timorous.

I had seen the actor Moisse by the light of a little candle remember some
human tie in a prison cell; the humble flame drawing him into itself spread his
reminiscent spirit over the callous walls to warm them. Such a candle was burn-
ing behind Insel's eyes as if he were his own narrow room. Yet the lines of its
rays shining to infinite remoteness-- A state of consciousness closing out the
world-- lay their ethereal carpets along the ceaseless levels of annihilation.

No rock, no root, no accident of Nature varied a virgin plain that had
conceived no landscape, and I saw Insel reduced to the proportion he would have
in the eye of a God-- setting out-- unaccompanied, unorientated, for here where
nothing existed, no sound, no sun, reigned an unimaginable atmosphere he longed
to breathe. I could see this, because he was seeing this, as still hanging back,
he writhed to its lure. Although I promised solicitously to send him to a nursing
home, we knew I could not come to his aid--. He had never told me *where he was*.
His torment tantalized pity.

With that acrobatic facility he had for immeasurable leaps from despair
to cajolery-- he readjusted himself to the station buffet-- as if to get down
to some business.

His eyes now pacified in a steady human mesmerism smiled cosily into mine.

"An wass denken sie?" he asked in coquettish anticipation "What are you thinking of?" -- Again I had that creepy impression of ultimate tension, of a cerebral elastic taut for the snap.

-64

"-- of you", wheezed the battered record turning on his brain to my sudden visualization of Insel as a grey tom-cat having a fit in a cloud of ashes and lunar spangles.

I could not tell him, no thought coincided between one on the verge of dwelling among the levels he laid bare to me and one who remained outside.

Still he went on smiling a little vaingloriously. "An wass denken sie?" he asked again, of God knows what girl, in God knows what decade, and all the same of me.

In my veritable seances with Insel, the clock alone retrieved me from nonentity-- thrusting its real face into mine as reminder of the temporal.

Thus I saw how three whole hours went by while Insel asked me what I was thinking of. They passed off in a puff as though, for a change, he had contracted time into intensity.

All the whimsical nonsense ever conceived rotated on his eyeballs which seemed to convey 'while I pretend to search for some secret in you the less danger is there of your being inquisitive as to mine'.

With every question his eyes grew greater, thrust out longer spears, unctious in the aromatic ooze from his brain.

"What are you thinking of?" urged Insel, and the softer fell his voice, the more inflexible he knit himself together-- the more terrifically to disintegrate on some signal he invoked.

So I sat with as soothing and expressionless a smile as I could concoct and answered occasionally, "I am thinking of June 18th, 1931, or of 9 o'clock on Tuesday of the week before last... "What are you thinking of?" His eyes converging on me, a yellow glow fused to a single planetary dilation rapped on the sun gong. " -- An wass denken sie?" Insel, discouraged, petrified his face before

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me-- with a determination beyond all human power, in the 'last expression'
that death imposes on pain. Incredibly exact, rivalling even any original I
had seen.

"I should have preferred" he said with his voice of dead lovers crying
through the earth, "to be fit for you to look at." Then he deliberately set
himself on fire.

In exact description-- he did not consistently appear to the naked eye, as
a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparison to the morning murk sifting through
the glassed environment. As a thread in the general mass, he retained his depth
of tone. But as if his astounding vibratory flux required a more delicate
instrument than the eye for registration. Some infra-red or there invisible ray
he gave off, was immediately transferred on one's neural current to some dark
room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its brilliancy. So one
saw him as a grey man and an electrified organism at one and the same time--

--it was only the candle spluttering... preliminary to the most beautiful
spectacle I have ever 'seen'.

Shaken with an unearthly anxiety, this creature of so divine a degredation,
set upon himself with his queer hands and began to pull off his face.

For those whose flesh is their rags, it is not pitiable to undress.

As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonization upon the
table, his cheeks torn down, in bits upon the marble-- one rift ran the whole
length of his imperfect insulation, and for a moment exposed the 'man-of-light'.

He sat there inside him taking no notice at all, made of the first jelly
quivering under the sun and some final unimaginable form of aereal substance,
in the same eternal conviction as the Greek fragment--

Once at dark in the Maine woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The

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scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables.

At last Insel's eyes dying of hallucination, stared suddenly into the fil-
tered day. Horrified almost to blindness he complained, "Ess ist zu Hell." He
sounded as if deliberately quoting 'it is too light'-- That did not matter after
all the ways he had been 'happening'.

"So you're starving, are you?" I mocked, exasperated with his total in-
ability to estimate himself. "The greatest actor alive."

As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of yards ahead. He was
pirouetting perplexedly around himself when I caught up with him and we got into
a cab.

In that small space he behaved like a fish on the end of a line, like a
kite in the air entangled in its own tail-- carrying about with him, in his
awful unrest, my hand to which he clung-- His own had clamped so fast to it, he
could hardly get it off-- when I dropped him at his door.

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I was ready to leave for St. Cloud with my little valise when there came
a soft knocking on the door I was about to open, a knocking irreal as the
fall of dusk. Insel had turned up again. He collapsed before me like a
stricken gull having received some unavowable hurt in the unknown wastes where
he belonged. The storm must have completely disintegrated his exceptional
electrification.

"Um Gottes' Willen" he panted almost inaudibly. "I cannot eat, I cannot
sleep, and now my heart is ceasing to beat."

It was remarkable he should succeed in speaking-his body no longer showed
much sign of life. He might be using this body-- with its interwoven identity
of the living remains of a dead man and the dead remains of a man once alive--
as a medium, from a distance to which he fluctuant spirit had been temporarily
released.

His face having lost its bruised appearance was set in the tidy waxen
consistency that makes corpses look like sudden dolls.

I might be entertaining a ghost so light a labour I found it to draw him
through the glass doors into the studio. As I dropped him onto an enormous
couch, my everyday self broadcast a panic.

"Mrs. Jones, her daughter having sailed for New York, is discovered alone
in her flat with a dead tramp."

Briefly I thought of blowing the thing out of the window. The seeming
imminence of his death allowed for no other means of getting rid of him. But
this was no solution. He would be found-- sprawled in the court-yard.

Then it came to me that in spite of my willful descent into a forbidden

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psychology, I still had sufficient power to put him to rest. "Insel" I inquired,
"can you hear me?" Then - very slowly - very distinctly, "You are going to
sleep-- sleep till the blue moon."

There surged out of Insel a whisper of horror, "But my heart isn't beating"
he protested.

"That is only a neurotic illusion" I consoled him believing I lied.

He lay on the couch and did not die. I began to arrange for a possible
revival. "Is there anything you can drink that isn't alcoholic?" I asked him
gently.

After a while he murmured, "Pfeffermint tee."

"Try to be alive when I come back," I urged him in all sincerity.

"Where are you going?" he wanted to know, his voice a hoarse agony.

"To buy pfeffermint tee."

"No - no - you're not to leave me - ever."

With a strange grip of a limp vice his fingers clung to my wrist. I had to sit down beside him. Now he was staring as if bewitched, at the parquet of the floor.

"The peppermint won't grow out of the floor," I advised.

"It will," said Insel, "You're to stay here."

And I found myself staring together with him.

It was no peppermint growing out of the planes of polished oak. Only the creeping organic development of a microscopic undergrowth such as carpeted chaos in his work, almost as closely cramped as the creamy convolutions of a brain.

Foliage of mildew it spread-- and spread.

"An infusion of that fungus would be bad for you," I persuaded him, taking his fingers carefully apart, lifting their tentacular pulp from my wrist.

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Escaping I rushed to the shop at the corner and back again. As Insel
was still living, I made him his tea.

"And you will be able to sleep," he reproached me, oblivious of his
drowsiness as he fell asleep.

I could watch over my invalid through a pane of glass incompletely
covered by a curtain on the door at the far end of the studio.

A dense oppression stole through the flat all packed up in its iron shutters.
Insel, who had no longer been able to bear a light, lay pallid and obscure in a
faint reflection from a lantern in the hall, his slumber the extinction of a
dim volcano. Lax as a larva, a glow worm 'gone out', his head bared of its
phosphorescent halo, seemed swollen in a meaningless hydrocephalus. As if,
while conscious electric emissions had diminished his cranial volume.

Around him the atmosphere was stale as an alcohol preserving a foetal
monster he resembled in repose.

Insel was unpleasant bereft of his radiance.

His body had dwindled in distilling an immaterial essence to such con-
centration it was appreciable to the senses. One was aware of an effulgence,
which, if it waxed and waned during his waking hours, had now altogether vanished.
His body swept and garnished like the house in the Bible-- devilishly invaded--
was no longer human as it lay before me in the form of Insel.

There unshining and supine he seemed abandoned of all quality except the
opaque. The grey inflated opacity of his unseeing head, which, should one lift
it from the pillow, must surely loll on his shoulder-- the head of an idiot.

The flat seemed emptier for his being there, until I found that further
off it was filled to a weird expansion with emanations drifting away from Insel
asleep. They crowded the air, minute horizontal icicles, with a tingling of

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frozen fire. In the room at the end of the corridor their force of vitalized
nothingness was pushing back the walls. Why should Insel, less ponderable
than other men, impart perceptible properties to the Air? Was he leaking out
of himself, residium of that ominous honey he stored behind his eyes into which
it was his constant, his distraught concern to withdraw?

In his soaring, flagging excitations he might have spent a spiritual capital
and going broke, be raising exhaustive loans on the steadily decreasing collateral
of his vitality, until an ultimate bonfire in those eerie eyes should be extin-
guished in some unimaginable bankruptcy.

In him the intangible and tangible components of a human being had come
apart. As if in some ruthless extraction of Supreme Good from a fallible pulp
the vibrancy interpenetrating normal muscular fibre had been indrawn from his
physical structure to condense in a point of flame. When some mysterious fuel
failed him, Insel remained-- a mess of profane dross.

I thought of his pictures, those queerly luminous almost materializing
projections. Curious creatures moving in levitation-- frequently cerebral
abortions of cats.

Any student of ancient occultism would recognize them for elementals. Im-
becilic, vampiric-- here and there an obsessive absence of a mouth implied an
inconceivable constipation. A conspicuous liver, so personal he might have
served as his own flouroscope, clear as a pale coral was painted as only the
Masters painted. He had no need to portray. His pictures grew, out of him,
seeding through the inter-atomic spaces in his digital substance to urge tena-
cious roots into a plane surface.

I wondered in what psychic succession these monsters issued from a man,

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71

who himself when unlit or cut into profile, became so hauntingly animal, even insectile. Who, when asleep, being the makings of his own bestiary, was vilely void as an incubus-- wondered why millenary monsters of a disreputable meta-physic should re-arise intact in a modern subconscious.

Insel slept for twenty hours. With one interruption. When I went in to see how he was I woke him up.

Through the slits in the shutters the outdoor lights laid narrow blades along the floor, above Insel's feet on the white washed wall they crossed and cast a double shadow of a hanging fern. Otherwise the room was a mausoleum.

Again I could have sworn I beheld the dead. Silence had hardened upon him in a stony armour, too heavy for the fluttering of breath.

I listened till the sound of his rigidity grew so shrill I was forced to make it mute. Terrified, I took hold of the door and crashed it to.

Insel-- who after all must, of his nature, float quite lightly on the surface of a coma-- easily lifted his lids.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you," I gasped. "It was necessary to make a noise to know you are not dead."

With none of the daze of sudden rousing he excused me gently. And slept anew.

Those depths through which others plunge into sleep for him stretched shallow as moisture on a mirror.

In the morning I went out, off into the sunlight, shopping. Leaving far behind me that darkened room, and whatever it contained.

My major purchase was kilos of bright red beef.

When he awoke I fed him chunks from a great frying-pan. Insel sat up and swallowed them with fairly bestial satisfaction.

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"Why" I asked to make conversation, "do you always want 'Fleisch ohne
knochen'?"

I had taken it for granted he ordered boneless meat to avoid waste. But
Insel began peering about shockingly as if suspicious of being overheard.

"When I am alone," he explained, in an unexpectedly vacuous voice, "I
do not eat like this-- I have to drag bones into a corner-- to gnaw."

I felt curious to know how-- without teeth--. But Insel beginning to
shine again put off the animal, to become the clown of an angel.

Through the row of glass doors the ornaments in the hall looked like fish
under water as a celadon tide of pale lamp light sluiced into the studio.
From the shutters on either side, entangled reflections flickered into the
halo that was now re-forming round Insel's face.

Stark on the sommier he floated up from the floor of a pool with the waver-
ing fungus he had sown there clinging to his cover.

He told me he had found the secret of perpetual motion if only he had
the money to buy the stuff. To me it seemed he had rather discovered a slow
time that must result in eternity.

I told him I had for some while been conceiving a ballet.

"It is the story of a maiden seeing her life in a crystal-- It would look
exactly as it does here, everything translucent." I waved to Insel-- "Yet
as in the days when there were maidens they had no 'life', what she sees is
her future spouse sowing his 'wild oats'.

"All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijinsky-- yet once I came
across one who possessed a dual equipoise which threw him into a huddle with
himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up
to the moon around him, whichever way he turned-- But I should have to do

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73

maquettes-- animated maquettes of the shoreography-- and I can't make anything grow out of the floor" I said defferentially.

"Of course he makes love to everything. A cocotte's eye. The woman in the litmus petticoat forecasting the weather. A rainbow," I continued, seeing Insel entranced. "The Queen of Fairyland-- Mermaids and Medusi." Envy was stealing into Insel.

"I dance divinely" he said and I could see him crossing a ballroom floor propelled as if on invisible castors, as truly initiate acolytes, in reception and remittance of the Holy Book before the high altar.

"Always at the crucial moment the youth is intercepted. There comes floating in between him and the object of his concupiscence, a--" I stopped, as Insel seemingly relieved by the frustration of a rival, closed his eyes, and waited till he came to. "Over and again I drop the idea in despair. Over and over again I find a solution so simple it constantly slips my mind. I have only to make some little people about five inches high and tell them what to dance." Insel nodded comprehendingly. "Yet whenever I get to work I come upon some fundamental obstacle. It takes me hours," I complained to Insel, "to remember it cannot be done. It is as if at the back of that memory stands another memory of having had the power to create whatever I pleased."

Insel's eyes enlarged in a ruminative stare. The stealthy oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer need of larynxes to converse. Insel thought at me. More precisely-- vaguely conceived before me.

"To make things grow," he conveyed on his silence, "you would have to begin with the invisible dynamo of growth; it has the dimension of naught and the Power of Nature. As a rule it will only grow if planted in a woman-- But my brain is a more exquisite manure. In that time in which I exist alone, I recover

-74-

the Oceanic grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multiple as sand."

Then the silence of Insel took on voice once more-- A voice which as if returning from diffusion among the mists-- might be coming from 'anywhere', resumed his ever recurrent cries of horror on behalf of women who could no longer love him.

"For God's sake," I implored, for Insel returned to his 'normal' state, I followed suit-- "Stop agonizing-- Go to sleep-- To negresses every white man looks-- white."

"It's the teeth," he groaned-- "Die Mädchen--"

At least you'd have more chance with the girls if you got Bebelle to clean your suit--

"I'll tell you what--," I said, overcome by my inherent conviction of personal blame for <u>anyone</u> not being able to get <u>anything</u> they want--. And in Insel it seemed his need was for something so sublime that over all his aspirations hovered crowns of glory-- Mädchen-- something entirely outside my zone of attraction, in his regret for them, took on enchanting attributes-- even those in a mountain village who ate such quantities of garlic it breathed from the pores of their skin-- so much so that Insel, with the heartiest will in the world, had found it impossible to 'hug them close enough'.

"You'd better get <u>into</u> that couch and leave your suit in the hall-- When I come home I'll throw it into a bath of gasoline."

Insel was horrified. "I don't want anybody to see the dirt in that suit-- let alone you-- I've worn it for five years."

"All I shall see is the gasoline go dark-- it would seem just as dark if I were cleaning something that had only been worn six months."

But Insel was actually writhing in a bitter determination to protect his

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own.

"Are you afraid," I asked, in a sudden concern for his 'rays', "that it
would interfere with your 'strahlen'?-- I'm not going to wash it. You can't
short-circuit."

On the contrary-- I anticipated him distinctly renewed in an intenser
radiance--

"Please," I begged-- enraptured as a nun seeking permission to lay fresh
lilies before a shrine. "Ich bitte sie."

He was obdurate-- it would seem, in shame. It did not occur to me that
in cleaning him up one would be cutting a slice from his 'beggar's capital'.

"It's not distinguished to be ashamed--"

Insel, in a way, gave in--

"You try it," he warned me. "Before your eyes the suit will turn white."

"It won't, or if it does, I'll turn it black again."

"You may clean it forever," he intoned ominously-- "the while it grows
whiter-- and whiter."

"Mädchens", I reminded him for bait-- "or at least," as for an instant
Insel's ravaged features showed through his ennobling aura-- "better Negresses."

Insel was pacified. But he did not go to sleep. He evaporated.

I recognized a vapour whose drifting suspension of invisible myriads he
copied so passionately with the over-fine point of his pencil.

When it cleared off it had left him again an effigy straightened as the
level of water.

The world of the Lutetia had materialized. An infiltration of half-light
softly bursting the dark, a thin cascade, the ferns dripping into a green gloom.
Here, where dawn and noon and midnight were all so dim and Insel lay sensitive

-76-

to clarity as a creature of the deep sea; the closely shuttered studio with its
row of glass doors was a real replica of the irreal 'aquarium'.

Because I found the place somewhat chilly when sunless-- I had thrown
a great white blanket over my thin dress. This was due to no obsession for
Insel's white miracles. Simply, everything being put away in napthaline, this
had returned from the cleaners and the femme de menage had not yet locked it
up.

Fairly inflexible-- it curved around me loosely, encasing me-- its stiff
corner trailing off like a sail.

I sat on the edge of the couch at the feet of that rigid flotsam-- in a
huge white shell.

Again I received a strictly lateral invitation to wholly exist in a region
imposing a supine inhabitance. A region whose architecture, the aroma of an
aura, being parallel to Paradise, is only visible to a horizontal gaze. Should
one stand up to it, it must disappear.

Somehow, unable to dissolve into mist, and thus too dense to enter a mirage,
the nearest I could conform to the arid aquatic was in becoming crustacian.

Being an outsider did not interfere with my participation in the ebullent
calm behind Insel's eyelids, where cerebral rays of imprecision, lengthening
across an area of perfectibility, were intercepted by resonant images audible to
the eye, visible to the ear; where even ultimate distance was brought within
reach, tangible as a caress.

As all this 'lasted forever' it seemed incompatable that Insel should
slump back into a larva. Yet there he was-- extinguished again in unregenera-
tive sleep.

I turned to go. A scatter of objects on the table attracted my attention.

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Among some weary sous and tiny strangulated worms-- broken shoe laces-- lay evidently the bone of some prehistoric fish. A white comb shrill with the accumulated phosphorous of the ages. Insel had emptied out his pockets.

I went about my cleaning. Ordering several bidons of gasoline, I poured them into an enamel tub, and suspending the suit by a wooden pincers, I dipped it in.

The sun was shining, the kitchen blazing white. Before the open windows that which seemed most substantial about Insel, like a corpse let down from a gallows, fell to its knees in the volatile fluid.

Then the ghastly thing began to turn pale. I set upon it in opposition and that white contorted outgrowth of a brain almost tangled in the whisk-brush--

Had he really intended as much in his challenge-- or did this Polar region of a mania-- these maps of Himalayan ant-hills with their scabs of pure vegetation embossed upon the back-drop of his clothes, depend for their pictorial clarity on some accord between his cerebral vibrations and mine?

Being tired and bored, I went in to see if in exchange for some more food, I could make terms with Insel.

He appeared uneasy. Rolling his eyes like runaway wheels spoked with interrogations. His expression was such as I had never seen. Terror solidified.

"I am a prisoner here!"

It did not recur to me that his classic complaint is an echo in the corridors of asylums.

Tearing my visionary trappings of meat and such from me with his flippant accusation, Insel did not at all want to know, "When shall I see you again?"-- He had never seen me before.

My everyday self shuddered-- 'Blackmail! Almost as awkward as dead tramps.'

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I reflected, but I had become so nicely attuned to Insel's moods that my parasitic clairvoyance, of its very nature, being constrained to see eye to eye with him, immediately veered to his view-point, I concluded I must in a temporary aberration, have kidnapped this gaunt guest whose snarl was unsociable.

"Beefsteak", I quavered, as if enticing a surly hound.

Insel, completely jammed between infinite walls, was not having any steak.

I must dislodge his attention.

Seemingly at hazard my dilemma linked up with one of the kind of infantile anecdotes Insel always greeted with glee.

"Have you heard about the Hungarian immigrant lost in London?" I inquired as engagingly as I could. "He wanted to find his consulate and could not understand why the policeman only shrugged his shoulders when he explained he was 'Hungry'."

Strange how unerringly the unconscious picks its way. I had 'found' Insel for himself again. To the Titan of Hunger - the police - man's shoulders heaved in the shrug of all humanity ignoring Insel. This recognition shook him with the most sophisticated laughter I have ever heard in my life.

"Your suit has turned white," I announced.

A gleam of crafty assurance stole into his transparent eyes.

"You will never 'get out' while your suit is white," I threatened, "all 'die madchen' are on the other side of the wall--"

"Oh," said Insel with a conciliatory smile, "I only want them to look at."

"Well, they won't look at you until your suit is black; and as we're about it you'd better let me clean your shirt."

His shirt was of a dark grey design rather mellow. When I suggested renovation he clutched it by the open throat.

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"See," he said, lifting it with a cautious yet ostentatiously off-hand gesture, "the neckband is worn ragged inside-- it's not worth it." He was cowering in some apprehension that constricted him, that even devitalized his hand. Become as the hand of a victim of infantile paralysis, it flopped over with the edge of the stuff. He had an air of shifting-- just so far-- the bandage of a wound.

Not for the first time, with Insel, I received a subliminal flash of an apostate Saint Sebastian writhing with arrows-- in such privacy, it would be indelicate to intrude upon it with whatever assistance.

On looking back, it seems inconsistent, that once the elation he inspired in me died down-- I should have continued in my obsession of conserving something very precious with an Insel changing to an incubus, playing his silly psychic tricks on his clothes-- raving of imprisonment and the gnawing of 'knochen'. It had left me with the solicitude one might have for a valued friend with whom one has been on some glorious drinking bout, when he shows up next day at a disadvantage in a particularly nasty hangover.

One last struggle with the suit-- and it turned black again. Insel must have forgotten about it.

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"Breakfast," I announced.

This time Insel did not stir.

His head, although returned to normal volume scarcely indented the pillow. He was set in the perfect quadrates of a couch, having no rumple anywhere. As he lay upon it without taking contact with it, the comfortable bulges of covers tucked under a mattress sharpened to corners of trigonometric exactitude.

The smoothing systemizing vibration that straightened his surroundings, obviously did not issue from his frame, which had half-died for contributing vitality to some focus of force.

Perhaps they were transmitted by his hair. I have always presumed that hair with its electric properties will not remain unutilized in a future evolution of the brain.

His hair - what little was left - was so fine, that without amalgamating, it had the unity of surface of the horny plate with which hair furnishes the extremities in its aggregate form of a nail.

Tentatively - I touched that hair, repeating 'Breakfast' on a cheerful note - to appear as if I were patting his head to wake him up.

In a decreased microscopic degree, my fingers encountered the same onslaught as had my whole person in the corridor. A sharp crackle of inconceivably minuscule machine-guns carried to some psychic centre of my ear.

The effect was astonishing as when I had tapped him on the arm. Insel did not awaken - he turned his head as if he were pushing it up into strata of delight above him. Which on contact melted upon his face in a slow smile.

He was smiling as if the tip of the wing of an angel had fanned him.

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Again, as I watched, I had the sensation of 'breaking point', an expec-
tance of a spring flying loose to whirr insanely.

His face, like stale bread smeared with his private honey, stood still.

Then it broke.

With the unforeseen ugliness opening up suddenly emerging hippopotomi the
gums in their hideous defenselessness observed me-- an obscene enjoyment of
ill-will pleated his clamped lids.

His teeth had not decayed. They were worn down.

'Der Todtenkopf' hung in my tract of vision like the last of Alice in
Wonderland's Cheshire cat.

Getting in touch with Insel was the whole itinerary of Good and Evil.

In the passing away of a miasma Insel awakened. Although never much the
better for food, his temperament having relieved itself of some disproportionate
impulse in that monomaniac gape, he now seemed normalized.

It was a serene creature who began to breakfast. Whatever introspective
conflict usually engaged him, it had ceased.

"You really look rather well now. Why don't you just stay and have that
rest cure here. I'll hire Bebelle to feed you - do everything for you while
you lie down and drowse till you're quite fit. "I must get back to St. Cloud."

"Impossible," moaned Insel, instantly sagging, "I have to return to my
troubles. You do not understand. They are my life. It waits for me."

"Nonsense, you spent the night in Montparnasse in one incessant gurgle
of laughter."

"It was a hollow laughter," he intercepted, sepulchrally. Insel had
resumed his 'line' which seemed so inadequate.

Should I risk an attempt to reveal to Insel those real-essences in Insel?

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Real-essences to a slight degree rationalized for my mind, they might be either
the very symptoms of the so-called madness in him, or precisely the incognizable
cause of his befuddlement.

"Insel," I set out determinedly, "You must get over your ugliness - it's
an obsession! That's not all there is to you - you have some intrinsic quality
I have never found in anyone else. It's difficult to tell you about it because
I have no idea what it is. But it's something so valuable it's one's duty to
keep you alive to discover its nature.

"Several alienists have offered to examine me - regularly -" said Insel,
with self-complacence, "twice a week!"

"It's not pathological - only unprecedented. A king of radio-activity
you give off-- Insel," I asked puzzled, "how does the world look to you? Like
an Aquarium?"

Insel looking no less puzzled than myself, I was taken aback. But I went
on in the hope of striking common ground.

"It was the evening outside the Lutetia I experienced its effects. A sort
of doubling of space where different selves lived different ways in different
dimensions at once. Sitting on the side-walk-- floating in an Atlantic Ocean
full of skyscrapers and ethereal cars. That was not particularly important - the
wonder was the sense of timeless peace - of perfect happiness--"

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83

Insel sat bolt upright in his couch and let out a thin screech like a mad cat; looking exactly as if he had caught a mouse he had watched for a long time.

"No." He wagged his poor bald head judiciously, "It cannot be - I can only love forever."

I gave one gasp - then as always when taken unawares, my mother reproved me from my subconscious - a sophisticated middle-aged woman making immodest impressions on an innocent schlosser's son.

"You misunderstand. I had thought of you as a 'Will o' the Wisp'."

Insel took no heed, he was practically licking his chops.

Quite as if it were an impulse habitual to me, I decided to slug him.

Then he began moaning again - of suffering, which one moment, he could not allow me to share, and another, he refused to cause me.

"It would be too fearful for you - the Parting," he pointed out. "You see," he confided affectionately as if promising me a present, "I am going to get her back--"

A spiral craftiness wormed into his eyes as I asked, "Where is she?"

"In South Africa," he answered with some impatience, as if I should have remembered.

This girl in her role of 'only beloved' was almost as unsettled as Insel himself. Only yesterday she lived with her Lesbian in Berlin - and now "Since she left me she has married twice and borne four children." Before very long she actually split in two--

"Es war eine Schwartze und eine Blonde--"

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84

"When was she black and blond?" I exclaimed, intrigued.

"Last night, outside the Select-- I saw at once they had fallen for me," said Insel, ignoring he had been fast asleep.

"But Insel," I laughed, "can't you remember how terribly miserable you are because you frighten the women?"

"All that is changed now," said Insel looking me over with sadistic compassion.

Quite forgetting my determination to slug him - I glowed with the satisfaction of a successful psychiatrist-- 'I have cured him of his fixed idea--' I congratulated myself--

Then with his lightening variability of mood, his eyes diluting in a difficult introspection,

"Outside the Lutetia," he pondered wonderingly. "That's funny. I had exactly the same experience."

'You couldn't', I was about to retort, 'it's not in Kafka,' but checked myself, wishing to keep him on the subject of his radiation.

"That's why I adore talking to you - why I cannot allow you to suffer for me. I know too well what suffering is." - and suddenly he threw up his head. The almost mummified chords of his throat vibrating in an ecstasy.

"Die Liebe-- wie schön -- wie schööo-n -- Love-the one beauty of Life." He gloated with the same singing inflection with which he had been wont to celebrate steak. There is nothing else, he concluded. Evidently he was sane as any man in his therapeutic measures for saving woman from vain regret.

Without transition his fixed enchantment turned to a staggering stare. "Dir Liebe?-- It's the strahlen!" he hooted across to me in the haunted voice of the obsessed.

"Insel," I urged, bewildered, "don't look like that. Your strahlen are

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evidence of something in you-- something noble."

"So Edel--" I trilled in remembrance of my contact with that flawless spirit. But as if leaping out of himself for once to take stock of an Insel I did not know and as if what he saw was horrible, Insel took that clear, that soaring word and wrapping it in bitterness, hurled it at himself.

"So Edel," he echoed, infinitely disabused.

"At all events," I said as a pleasant jolt-- "I am going to bring you your suit. You're going to look so fine."

As I passed the table I missed the phosphorescent bone.

"Hadn't you a comb?"

"It's here," said Insel - stretching out a skeletal arm toward the floor - there stood his shoes. In one was stored the white comb. The other was stuffed with a huge white handkerchief. They were his wardrobe.

A warm appreciation stole around my heart for that adorable domesticity of the tramp, which first attracted me, when in my childhood, a clown, taking off his tattered overcoat displayed a washhandstand built into the lining.

At that moment my friend Insel was very dear to me.

Then in a sudden I realized how always, and inevitably in attempting to follow it, I must run off the track of Insel's mind-- himself unaware that nothing about him could ever stir from a so-mysteriously-appointed place, Insel had retrieved his comb 'pour se faire une beaute', awaiting my arrival with his breakfast!

With a kick of tiny annoyance at a toe of his wardrobe, "Personally, I do not admit the power of the microbe, but if you do - I fear you'll be poisoned," I warned him.

Then I gave him his suit.

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When I came in again, Insel was pacing the studio in stealthy meditation. His mischievous assurance was so much his axis and at once so exteriorized that his whole implication seemed to have contracted to the finger of old fashioned comedians pressed to a nose under a crafty eyelid-- Insel was feeling so sly-- Then, going into reverse - as it was time for him to leave, he began fiddling abstractedly with a gratitude he did not know what to do with. "You have been very good to me," he mumbled shamefacedly. "There is nothing I would not do for you-- if ever", inspired, "you have a pair of boots which need cleaning.. "

"Insel," I exclaimed encouragingly, "You needn't say things like that about yourself."

With a jerk he pulled himself out of an underlying complex.

"That was a figure of speech." And inclining towards the couch with the bowing, palm-of-the-hand-drooping, invitation with which saints in primitive pictures lead the eye to some sacred centre, "Now you be ill, and go to bed so I can nurse you," he pleaded adoringly.

I had to refuse. As I came to think of it, I wouldn't know how to be nursed when ill.

So Insel, as if in prison or barracks, began folding up his sheets and blankets, I took a seat. With the stuff of my cape draping the chair, I felt like an emperor taking pride in a supreme buffoon.

There is no grace on earth to compare with a willowy man afflicted with levitation.

"It's pure selfishness my allowing you to do this. It's up to Bebelle - only I do so enormously enjoy your plastic geometry," I observed to Insel, who, as if fitting a label to perfection, swayed his dreary silhouette of aereal bones, against a lifted sheet bleached in the reflection of his phosphorescence.

-87-

"What am I to do with you? The taximeter is ticking, the surrealist's waiting.
Pull yourself together - quick! I'll take you along."

"However did you get that hole in your trousers, it's new --" I demanded,
detecting, as we got into the taxi, a perfect round of perforation letting out
a tiny light from his thigh. I suspected him of replenishing his beggar's capital.

"It was there before" said Insel sanctimoniously, as if referring to a halo
earned by excessive martrydom.

"You might as well come up to see Ussif with me," I suggested.

"No," said Insel, "none of the surrealists will have anything to do with
me. They know only too well, if they did, I should try to borrow money."

"I should have thought you'd be *worth* a little money to a surrealist. He
might learn what supereality is about - you are organically surreal - "

"I don't do it on purpose," said Insel dejected.

"I know you don't," I assured him warmly. "You only 'do' Kafka on purpose -
you're so much better in the original."

I kept my promise of going to his room on my way back. Strangely -
the very name of the street he lived in had the sound of a ghostly exhaustion.
His attic was on the seventh story.

Along the narrow open passage with its bare iron railing the Chambres de
Bonnes moved past me as I looked for his name on the doors, when, coming to a
closed iron shutter fleeced with dust and cobwebs growing in patches like a
moss of soot or hanging in grey festoons about its slits, I felt the liveness
of the air decrease, and "Insel" written in the archaic hand of some automatic

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writings drew up my eyes-- . To that darkened crack which outlines the magical
versatility of a barrier measuring a yard across and with merely the touch of a
hand diminishing to a strip three inches wide. That cover of a living book whose
history may come to an end before you can get it open; or cut short your personal
adventure by remaining shut; out of this oblong outline of Entrance and Exit
there leaked a perceptible seepage of Insel's torpor.

Noiselessly, indolently, the door vanished. I walked into its chasm and
Insel led me to his painting set in the pacific light of a large attic window.

"Dass ist die Irma?" he said with the secretive in-looking twinkle that
lit up his eyes with recurrent delights. And suddenly it dawned upon me that
one thing about this man that made him so different to other people was that
contrary to our outrunning holding-up-the-mirror self consciousness, his was
constantly turning its back on the world and tip-toe with expectancy, peeping
inquisitively into its own mischievous eyes. Or, in some cerebral acrobatic
recoil, that being who is, in us, both outlooker and window, in him, astonish-
ingly, was craning back to look in at the outlooking window of himself, as if
there were something there he might forget, some treasure as to whose existence
he wished to remain assured, some lovely illusion inside him, he must resee to in-
sure its continued projection.

"Die Irma," he repeated lovingly to introduce her to me, and the magnetic
bond uniting her painted body to his emaciated stature-- as if she were of an
ectoplasm proceeding from him-- was so apparent one felt as if one were surpris-
ing an insane liason at almost too intimate a moment. He was glittering with a
pleasure as dynamically compressed as the carbon of a diamond.

A narrow canvas, nigger-black, whose quality of shining obscurity was the
effect of minutely painting in oil on some tempera ground, die Irma stood knee

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deep on an easel.

To her livid brow, rounded like a half moon, clung a peculiarly clammy
algaeic or fungoid substitute for hair. Beneath it a transparent mask of hori-
zontal shadow was penetrated by the eyes of an hypnosis; flat disks of smoked
mirror, having the self same semblance of looking into and out of oneself as
her creator.

Perhaps in a superfine analysis, this is what all men really do, but as
a natural inter-play; whereas Insel and his picture were doing it with alterna-
ting intent. Indeed the great thin uninscribed coins of her gun-metal pupils,
returning his fascinated gaze, were tilted at such an angle as to give a dimly
illuminated reflection of an inner and outer darkness.

Her hands, as if nailed to her hips like crossed swords, jutted out from
her body which seemed to be composed of rippling lava that here and there hardened
to indentations like holly-leaves growing from her sternum-- her male hands that
hardly made a pair, for the one had the bones of the back marked all of equal
length and the other, one finger too long with an unmodeled edge which curved
like paper against the background.

He hung over die Irma like a tall insect and outside the window in the rotten
rose of an asphyxiated sunset the skeleton phallus of the Eifel Tower reared in
the distance as slim as himself.

Beside the picture I noticed that the gutter of his upper-lip was interrup-
ted by a seam, a fine thread of flesh running from the base of the nose to his
mouth that accentuated the compression of his lips in their continual retention
of the one remaining tooth which, so thin as to be atavistic in an adult, was
like a stump forgotten in a croquet ground, left over from the Game of Life.
An incipience or reparation of harelip? And Irma? In this very same spot she

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puffed to a swollen convergence.

"But Insel," I asked, "her upper lip is about to burst with some inavowable disease. You have formed her of pus. Her body has already melted."

"Exactly," he answered with mysterious satisfaction.

"I don't care for it," I decided.

"And I," said Insel, with the reverent intonement with which he accompanied his tacitly implied admittance of myself to his holy-of-holies, "thought that *this* picture would be just the one that *you* would like."

Time hovered, suspended in the attic air as the powders of life in the noxious mist of the exhausted city below. When suddenly the soporific lure he sowed in his magnetic field-- shattered. Insel was snatching at the emptied flesh on his face in the recurrent anxiety inspiring his wilder gestures.

"She ought not to *be*," he cried out, "if you don't like her, I am going to destroy her."

His cerebral excitement seemed to inflate his head, rather as a balloon from which his wasted body hung in slight levitation.

"Come down to the floor, for God's sake," I said per-emptorially, "What does my opinion matter? *I'm* not the museum."

"But you're right," he insisted. "I have been going in the wrong direction. Die Irma's *out*."

"And don't use me as a sop for your terror of working."

"It's really not that-- but a technical question. Die Irma ist nass." *

"She isn't, she's bone dry. I felt her."

"I assure you, underneath---"

"Everytime I've come to Paris you've said the same thing. Pull yourself together Insel, you've got to finish this for the museum. For you it's work or

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* nass = wet

death. Can't you figure it out?" I urged helpfully - "When you have money and can eat you paint a picture so as to have more money - when you haven't any more money."

"It's more complicated than that," he objected again - "die Irma is wet - "

I was getting exasperated - When the balls of our eyes catching each other, we both began to laugh.

"If you had heard the Lesbian's synopsis of Frank Harris' confessions, you wouldn't even trouble to mention it - "

"I shouldn't care to read this Lesbian's confessions - it is a Lesbian who has taken the love of my life away from me."

"Well now, I wouldn't mention that either. Of course, it does not matter with me - anybody can tell me anything - you know what I mean - when you surrender your arms, chuck them on to neutral territory. I know it's a touch that modernizes your romanticism, all the same, I'd advise you never to make that particular confidence to a woman 'ou connait ca'."

But Insel was past advice. With a look of dogged emptiness he recited for the nth time the story of those Mädchen "who shut themselves into the house a fortnight for fear he would shoot them."

Mostly when speaking of his loves of the past he became quite normal; subnormal really, for his adventures in the actual world had been of an excruciating banality.

As I was also engaged for dinner, I asked the time. Insel who was sitting on a wooden stool stretched out his arm - it reached much further than its actual length would warrant.

Behind the curtain in the corner, carefully secreted under empty boxes, neatly stacked, was his wrist watch. He did not bring it out - his arm seemed

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in some Einsteinien contraction to shorten the necessary distance for focus-
ing the hands.

It was seven o'clock. I took my leave. Insel, astonished as if this
were the first break in a timeless conversation, snapped in half; or at least
bowed like a poplar in a sudden gale; his dessicated limbs the branches.

Staring vainly towards the door I was opening - he choked in the voice
of a Robot, "Morgen komm ich im gericht. Tomorrow I go to court - I am going
mad!"

"Then don't forget your little afternoon," I reminded him - "I dote on
madmen."

As I was leaving, he seized his palette and dripping an enormous brush
into a pile of ebony pigment painted with a heinous neigh of victory, "Die
Irma---Out!"

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My intermittant intrusions on Insel's inexplicable Eden of mischief had set their mark upon me. Some of his secretive twinkle had seeped into my eyes and lingered there, eliciting comments from my friends. I became more popular.

Insel, however, did not like it at all-- as if I were a thief, a stark sternness shot with flashes of sadism replaced his usual intonations of abased tenderness while, awkwardly enough, I continued to feel myself elfin.

One day when I had returned from a lunch he came in to fetch his 'Kafka'. I had a good time and prattled to him sociably, "Alceste-- the duchess-- everyone was intrigued to know why I am so jolly."

"So lustig,"* Insel hissed-- a maniac sadism flaring up in his eyes, and for the first time I saw him as dangerous. "So lustig," his hiss growing shriller and I could feel his hatred twining round my throat as he took a step towards me. But a step no longer the airy step of the halucintaed-- it was the pounding tread of the infuriated male. "Lustig," he squeaked, his hiss exhausted.

He approached no nearer. Probably my absorbed interest in examining his insane pupils dominated him. Anyway, although it now surprises me-- it seemed I could not be afraid of him-- our 'entente' in the visionary lethargy of that primeval chaos we were able to share was fundamental and secure. Confronted with his surface vagaries, I felt at once collected-- as if I might have been his 'keeper' since the dawn of creation.

"Insel," I said placatingly, "If it would improve your health were I to suffer a hopeless love for you, I'm quite willing. Not today-- I have a cocktail party-- but some other time, I promise," (thinking of my bouts with the grand sympathique) "-- you shall see me suffer horribly."

*Jolly

Insel, unconvinced, let out a low growl which sounded like one more 'lustig'--
while that strange bloom, as if he were growing feathers, spread over his face.
He turned into a sugar dove. It flew about the sitting room, dropping from
under its wings a three ringed circus. In one ring echoed the cracks of a whip;
in one ring rotated an insane steed of mist; and in the other ring Insel's spirit
astride an elemental Pegasus--.

"Horror," said Insel and I jumped, "Would I have to grow a <u>beard</u> in order
to make myself attractive to you?"

The grand sympathique (which eventually turned out to be a duodenal ulcer)
must inevitably go on the rampage again. Very soon it did. There was no re-
source to Insel's healing 'strahlen'. Since his screech of a vanquishing cat
he had, as far as I was concerned, subconsciously thrown them into reverse.

For a while I was helpless; then one day when the pain calmed down some-
what, I crawled up to Insel's-- still trusting he would finish Die Irma for
America-- to give him a hundred francs. That is, I never gave him anything. I
am not generous. The few 'billets' necessary to keep him going were fully covered
by the valuable drawing he had forced me to accept. It would be easy to sell if
I needed the money.

It did not occur yet to me how unsuccessfully I had succored him, for when
first I met him he had been merely a surrealist-- his biography was coherent--
steadily since I had 'interfered' in his affairs he had grown hallucinatory.

"It's all very well," Frau Feirlein argued with me, "I was here when you
advanced him five hundred francs for the Gallery-- the very next day he hadn't
a sou."

To me it appeared fitting Insel's finances should flicker in and out like
himself. For the present no power on earth could dislodge from my mind that

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luminous effigy of generic hunger-- or shake my serene unquestioning insistence on its preservation. Something unknowable had entered into a game with my intuition.

He let me in and returned straight to his needy couch, teetering on the end of his spine in a double triangle as he drew up his knees to replace his feet under cover. I was overcome by a rush of nervous sublimity carried by the air.

"If this is madness," I said to myself, breathing his atmosphere exquisite almost to sanctification, "Madness is something very beautiful."

My relinquished conviction of his unutterable value returned as I looked up in the bare swept room. An especial clarity of the light I had noticed before to be associated with his presence was this evening so accentuated I could actually dissect it. Its softly bedazzling quality was not of any extra brightness, but of a penetrant purity that uplifted my eyes. I could discern among the unified flood of customary light an infiltration of rays as a rule imperceptible, filaments infinitessimally finer than the gossamer halo round a lamp in the fog-- a white candescence that made the air look shinier, with the same soothing shimmer as candles at mass in sacred houses, only indescribably acute.

I was not unfamiliar with it. That different light I had seen etherealize the heavy features of Signora Machiabene an hour before she was stricken to death. That very essence of light I had begun to perceive during the prolonged moment when a dislocated vertebra had thrown me beyond the circumscription of bodily life.

There is no saying in what bliss consists, yet I could see it incorporated with Insel's face, bathed in that different light, as he lay under his only blanket, his limp hands clasped behind his head.

"I see through the wall," he said, his voice at peace. "I can lie here hour-long watching my neighbors live their dear little lives. Sometimes they

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47

play a gramophone and on its way to me the music has become miraculous."

"You have never known ennuie," I laughed, forgetting as completely as he
evidently had, if indeed he had ever been conscious of, the tortured glow-worm
of the Boulevard night, the inarticulate confidences of one cut off from mankind;
the sleepless seeker after an unmentionable salvation who, blinded by his own
unnatural glitter, was so wounded by the dawn; that distracted man who, terrified
of isolation, hung onto my hand while he flopped and darted like a fish on the
end of a line, stung by a mystifying despair.

"Never," he assented, beatified, "I am eternally content. My happiness is
infinite. All the desires of the earth are consummated within myself."

"Aside from that-- What are the people in the next room _doing_?"

"Just being-- I ask no more of any one. _Being_ in itself is sufficient for
us all," he answered enraptured.

Seeing I had taken up one of his drawings, he instantly arose. Always--
there was something of the depths of the sea about him and his work, also of
eventual evolution as in the drawing I was looking at where to a rock of lave
a pale subaqueous weed clung in the process of becoming a small limp hand. The
tips of its fingers were stealing into pink.

Insel himself had fearsome hands, narrow, and pallid like his face, with
a hard, square ossification towards the base of the back, and then so tapering
as if compressed in driving an instrument against some great resistance.

"You were a lithographer, not an engraver?" I had once asked him, puzzled
by what his hands looked as if they must have been in the habit of doing, and
we concluded this conformation could be an inheritance from the schlosser's
driving power. But out of this atavistic base his fingers grew into the new
sensibility of a younger generation, in his case excessive; his fingers clung

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together like a kind of pulpoid antennae, seemingly inert in their superfine
sensibility, being aquiver with such minuscule vibrations they scarcely needed
to move-- fingers almost alarmingly fresh and pink for extremities of that
bloodless carcass, the idle digits of some pampered daughter; and their fresh
tips huddled together in collective instinct to more and more microscopically
focus his infinitesimal touch. All the same, there was something unpleasantly
embryonic about them. I had never seen anything that gave this impression of
the cruel difficulty of coming apart since, in my babyhood, I had watched the
freak in Barnum's circus unjoin the ominous limpness of the legs of his undeveloped
twin.

"Let's have a look at your feet," I said as he came weightlessly towards
me. He drew off his slippers, padding over the bare boards on the drained Gothic
feet of a dying ivory Christ.

"What's this?" I teased, pointing to a lurid patch on his instep, "a chancre?"

"No, it's only where my shoe rubs me. I bought new shoes when I sold that
picture and they hurt me," he explained, frowning helplessly.

"Why not try pouring water into them and wearing them till they 'adapt?' It often works."

A strange bruise. It shone with the eerieazure of a neon light. But once
within range of Insel, nothing seemed unaccountable, as though he submitted to
an unknown law enforcing itself through him. Each item of his furnishing, he
having touched it, had undergone the precious transformation of the packet he
had folded in my home. His hand, in passing over them, must have caused their
simple structure to obtrude upon the sight in advance of their banal identity.

A row of powdered-soap cartons, set upon a shelf, he had stood up to the
significant erectness of sentinels, their impressive uniforms consisting in the

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sufficiency of their sheer sides. He showed me they were empty. Altogether
his place had an uncommon dignity. Within a stockade of right angles he had
domesticated the steady spirit of geometry.

The room, with its two tiny matchboard tables, its curtains of washed-out
cotton across an alcove, full of its supplementary radiance, had an air of
illogical grandeur beyond commercial price.

Every now and then the sharp of his flickering sadism, a needle occasionally
picking up the dropped thread of memory, would prick through his frayed conver-
sation, woven of disjointed themes like an inconsistent lace eked out with
stocking darnings.

He recalled my promise-- to demonstrate unfortunate love whenever a twinge
of pain contracted my features. He peered enthralled at the havoc pain played
with me. His delirious peace expanded to full blossom in the smile of Buddha.
One felt his utter joy at sight of my disablement had leapt to such a blaze he
must melt off it, his fragile person dissolve in his delight, were it not for
some mysterious source within him replenishing the exaggeration of his unabating
intensity.

"Gestatten Sie?" I inquired ceremoniously, unable to hold out any longer
against the pathological rat gnawing at my entrails. And I subsided on his
couch. Above a certain degree of agony, one is willing to subside anywhere.
However, my slight repulsion dispersed as I lay down. Indeed, like the saints
whose dead bodies did not decompose, Insel's electric exudation in some process

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of infinitesimal friction seemed to cleanse him of his grubbiness of the poor,
to free him of any accretion natural to normal man. His couch was almost fra-
grant with that faint half-holy purity that hung about him.

"What color was this once?" I asked, as I drew up his grey blanket.

"White," said Insel.

It was incredible. That twilight sheer duration lowers upon all pale
fabrics had so penetrated the thick wool, one could only believe with difficulty
it had not been dyed-- a perfect job at that-- no spot, no smirch, no variation
in tone disturbed the unity of its spread surface. For a moment I entertained
the idea that Insel had worked all over it with the microscopic point of his
lead pencil, for it seemed no earthly dust could defer to such patient order.
Anyhow, I decided everything in the place is bewitched, and let it go at that.

Insel, intently keeping watch, had moved his stool some distance away as
if to find his range for an inverted 'Aim of Withdrawal'. Spinning himself
into a shimmering cocoon of his magnetic rays, introvert, incomparably aloof,
"They're mine" he exulted as clearly as if he were crying aloud.

Too simple to fully imagine the effect of these rays, he had, it would
seem, only an instinctive mesmeric use for them. He might even feel them as
a sort of bodily loss compensated perhaps by rare encounters with one able to
tune in.

"I shall make you some tea," said Insel affectionately, and hushed as a
nurse, he began swimming about from his little sink to his wooden shelf-- or as
a panther softly pacing before a vanquished prey-- . I noticed now, as always,
whenever one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at home, there was appro-
priately just enough dust of tea leaves left at the bottom of a packet for
brewing the last cup-- he would open the door to you holding precisely the fag

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end of a loaf for the last bite. But today he served a minute carton from an
automatic machine in the Metro. Out of it he rolled into my palm a bonbon,
virulent green, less than a pea in size.

"Aren't you having any?" I invited, convivial as a gourmet, for in his dimension this was a spread feast and the hot unsavoury tea had eased my pain. The very teenyness of his sweetstuff made it more seductive than a giant Christmas cake. But he shook his head impishly in abnegation. I looked inside the carton. There was nothing left.

In the concentrated one-sided luxuriance of our party he evoked his dazzling future-- the work he no longer seemed able to do waxed so sublime in his visions (and also in mine as I watched all possible loveliness evolve from his elemental mists, and the creeping to maturity of the almost invisible herbage left from under the withdrawn tide of his hovering waves.)

His fame was to be fabulous, his wealth extravagant-- so that at last the great Insel would (with a gleam of furtive cruelty for me) marry, as far as I could make out, so increasingly incorporeal he grew in his grand exhaltation, my daughter's photograph.

"That will be really nice," I responded genially. "As I come to think of it a son-in-law-- ."

"Exactly," he burst out wildly. "You and I, we could have such a wonderful time together."

"-- a son-in-law with rays--" I brought up short, "-- and what would my daughter be doing?" Then hurriedly, thinking to profit him by the occasion, I urged, "You must _paint those pictures_-- otherwise, you will grow to be too old to marry her."

"Ah, well," he waived, with that sudden doleful look he had of gazing into

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an abyss when confronted with whatever imperative of whatever consummation.

"No matter! It would suffice me just to know her, to have the joy of watching her evolve. It would be a very wonderful thing indeed to take part in the Entwicklung of a young creature." And I realized there was nothing, nothing, in all the world elementary enough to serve as object for such simplified observation as his. Everything must henceforth for him drowse in an impotence of arrested development.

This very word, Entwicklung, was so much Insel's word; its sound seemed to me onomatopoeic of his intellectual graph. For my alien ear it had a turn of the ridiculous as though a vast process had got twisted in a knot of tiny twigs, haply to unravel and root, and branch against the heavens.

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I remembered those stacks of manuscript he had assured me were at my disposal in the days of the 'biography'. "You promised to show me your notes," I reminded him. "May I not see them now?"

He was coy about his literature, sidling along side himself in a sort of dual fidget impossible to describe, as if doing sentry duty before his own secrecy.

After a long persuasion he brought out a blotter, the kind for ecoliers sold in bazaars. Covered in black, stamped with a golden sailing ship, its funereal hue intended for neutralizing ink drops in a kindergarten, this unassuming blotter, the one thing in the place having any tradition, had a decorative air of intruding from a frivolous society. It contained a single sheet of paper which he handed me with great precaution. Very few lines were written upon it. They formed a square block in the center of the page covering little more than the area of a postage stamp.

Hardly had I caught a glimpse, when "Can you see it?" he inquired suspiciously and snatched it away.

"How could I?" I demurred, "the words are scarcely visible--" Reassured, he gave it back to me.

"You've no idea," he sighed, "the pains I take when I write to you, forcing my hand to form letters big enough for you to read."

"Liebe Herr Insel," I cajoled, "You read it to me."

At last he did so.

It was a beginning.

'My sister and I walked along the road. Coming to the town gate we gave it a good thump.'

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"Do you know what a town gate is?" asked Insel professorially, "it's like
a tower."

'All the townsfolk came out of the gate, swarming about us to look.'

As ever, with Insel 'to look' was a deadlock, he had written no more.

I proffered the necessary compliments. Agog with glee, he shimmered with
satisfaction. This communication of an actual transcription of a mental
process had reinforced his sociability. His contacts ordinarily depending
almost entirely on his strahlen, for the moment our companionship was complete.

In reading aloud his manuscript he had formed an extra alliance with me--
as literateurs, producing in Insel an enormous self-respect.

Nevertheless, it was a sympathization going on in some sphere to which I
had no access.

Anything he perceived sufficiently to accept or that _thrust_ itself upon
his attention (as in _my_ case) was instantly distilled in his precious essence.
Behind his brow a void wraith, glorified, evaporate, dissociated from its
originator, myself, to mix with his gaseous cerebration.

Insel let out a shrill crow. "Ess gibt nicht zwei vie sie-- There are not
two like you."

Sparkling, entranced, he sat on his wooden chair as on the throne of the
conquistador, for whatever I contributed to his transcendental enjoyment he
was loathe to let me go.

But I was beginning, myself, to feel unnatural. I distinctly detected my
voice in ventriloquial emulation echo the wistrul, surf-like swooning singing
of his-- 'Sterben' Man mü-ü-üss-- Man mü-ü-üss-- ' as, worn out with pain,
assuring him I must leave because I was tired, I said, "Ich bin so mü-ü-de."

Insel, responding to this bemused inflection, or rather, fusing with a

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ullulation so singularly his own it almost obliterated our duality, I witnessed
in him an inconceivable reversion of a standard transmutation. The *changing*
of *sadism* into *love*. Not gallant love. The indiscriminate love of a saviour.

Suffering, I had so gratified him, satiating his sadism-- even to extinc-
tion, his gratitude refluent to me, enveloped me.

At last with a sacrificial decisiveness Insel consented to let me go.
"Ja," he assented, bending over me in solicitude, "Go," he stretched out one
of his thin branches in benediction, "Go and sleep." "Schlafen." His word
was drowsy-- so long drawn out. It did not cut the air as ordinary words do.
Agelessly sailing, it passed across me-- oblong and idle-- spacious as an air-
ship, its narcotic cargo a dream of a slumber unknown to normal man.

The rays that Insel so busily had been spinning around himself in an
immeasurable tenderness released, attained once more to me.

Instantly all pain vanished. I sprang up elasticized. To an identical
rhythm Insel and I, on a buoyancy, were danced toward the door bobbing and
smiling good-bye in a mutual appreciation which I felt must be glittering off
me as it did off him.

When I got to the train it was steaming out of the station; casually I
skimmed onto it scarcely noticing this, for me, at other times, impossible
achievement-- I felt so airy. In the car, whenever I thought of Insel, I was
shaken with a helpless laughter-- a strange mixture of extreme friendliness and,
inexplicably, derision.

The painless buoyancy lasted well into the night when, as I sat calmly
at work in my hotel bedroom, I unexpectedly disintegrated. My body, which had
hitherto made upon itself the impression of a compact mass, springing a multi-
plicity of rifts, changed to a fractional covering I can only compare to the

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spines of a porcupine; or rather vibrant streamers on which my density in
plastic undulation was being carried away-- perhaps into infinity. A greater
dynamism than my own rushed in to fill the interstices. Looking down at my-
self I could see my sensation. The life-force blasting me apart instead of
holding me together. It set up a harrowing excitement in my brain. An atomic
despair-- so awful-- my confines broke down. I lost contour. Once more I
found myself in the 'impossible situation' in which one cannot remain-- from
which there is no issue. I cognized this situation as Insel's. A maddening
with desire for a thing I did not know-- a thing that, while being the agent
of his-- my-- dematerialization alone could bring him together again. A desire
of which one was 'dead' and yet still alive-- radial starfish underpattern of
his life, it had communicated itself to me. I was being impelled to the pitiable
aerial choreography of Insel when in the closed cab he had chased himself along
the incalculable itinerary of his dissolution.

In a darting anguish consciousness in pulverization peered from the ends
of uncontrollable antennae for something unattainable.

I had more space than had Insel in his cab, yet the inslanting facade of
my room under the eaves with the red glow of its wall paper got 'in my way'.
Having no idea of what was happening to me, I seemed to have also unsuspected
reserves of will power. I put up a pretty good fight against this incredible
dematerialization-- it took me hours to weave myself together-- but at last,
exhausted yet once more intact, I fell upon my bed and slept.

Next morning my face looked 'destroyed' like Insel's.

Although I was all of a piece, my very bones were weak. I had to walk
carefully. I found out why, when climbing slowly up the hill to the station
to buy a newspaper, I was cleft in half. Like the witch's cat when cut apart

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running in opposite directions, suddenly my left leg began to dance off on its
own. Thoroughly frightened at this bisectional automatism, I somehow hopped
to the fence on my right and clung to it in an absurd discouragement.

The day after that I thought I was normal. Walking serenely at my
habitual pace, I went to a shop in the village before keeping an appointment
for lunch.

Without association (as usual) the idea of Insel rose in my mind. Quite
different to thinking about someone. I was overcome with that imbecilic
self-satisfied laughter, that Parnassian guffaw. It had nothing to do with
any humor known to the intellect; being a sort of blank camouflage for all
intellection. With me it was always filtered with a faint derision. But even
this derision I took for granted. Brought to a halt under the full force of
my mental hilarity, I felt constrained to <u>continue to share it</u>-- with what--
with whom? To do so I turned sideways. Whenever this <u>idea</u> of Insel occurred
I could not go straight ahead-- I had to turn to it-- as when I had tried to
sum him up on the Boulevard.

My feet remembered that lightness, that skimming of the pavement-- I was
engrossed in a merriment beyond existence. When this merriment ceased, I found
myself in a part of the country I had never seen before.

I had kept track of the time to avoid being late-- as that gust of laughter
caught me it had been twenty to one. I walked into an open yard where a man
was washing a car. He informed me it was twenty to one and that it would take
me half an hour to get back to the place where by all the laws of possibility
I should still have been. He allowed me to telephone my friends, to begin
lunch without me, that I had got lost-- at the other end of the wire it was
twenty to one.

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All this was comparable to an incident that occurred when I made friends with a little girl whose intelligence was like a jewel in a case too tightly closed. A backward child, one of those partial imbeciles, who, not being 'all there', showing only half their human nature, are either angelic or diabolic. Probably their own halves are all they respond to in other people, for Fifi, when she said "Bonjour" with a smile of benediction, would discover "Madame, you are as sweet as a rose."-- "Monsieur, you are bright as gold." Her being subnormal lent an elfin prestige to her slow serenity among her associates, offspring of peasants and small tradesmen, who attended the informal court she held in the parlor behind her parents' shop.

Rigid as bygone queens in her orthopedic corset, she accepted the offering of every conceivable kind of toy duck from her wondering courtiers, with a lunar giggle that never precisely applied to anything. Her passion, her concretion of sublimity, took the form of a duck. "God is playing hide-and-seek," she would announce, "So the Virgin Mary has married a duck and they live in the top story of the Riviera." And once when I found her watching some live water fowl by a pond in a farm-yard-- "Why do you love the duck?" I asked her. "Il dort dans son dos," she perfectly replied.

A fearful future opened before her if she could never keep shop, and the medical specialists consulted on her behalf promised she would become like average children should they graft a bit of the bone in her leg as a wedge into her spine, thus rectifying her crookedness and relieving the brain. But this operation, successful they said in many other cases, failed with this half-wit angel, who, incidentally, had predicted the year of her own death.

So Fifi died most uncomfortably, lying very much like a trussed duck,

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only on her tummy-- her leg being bent up behind her for the grafting and bound to her back-- screaming in a nursing home until she had no more breath.

Only once, in talking to this little girl, had I seen her unhappy. An unhappiness intense as it was brief. A drip of anguished words revealing how she received as an awful animosity her mother's solicitous efforts to get her to 'make sense'.

While undressing to go to bed that night, as if a flash of sympathetic insight 'put me in her place', I suddenly found myself imprisoned in Fifi's mind.

Strangely enough, it was analagous to my sensation of utter helplessness when dislocating my cervical vertebra, I had found myself without any instrument with which to contact the universe.

But now I was at the mercy of an imperfect instrument. The antennae of contact with the world in some way crippled for their function seemed-like umbilical cord in abnormal birth-- to be wound round my brain in a fearful constriction, implacable as iron barriers.

My brain, like a bird in ceaseless hurt, beat its wings for the conscious liberation against a cage-- or rather, a sort of immature sieve, which would spring a hole intermittently; here and there letting a glimpse of phenomena through-- phenomena fitful and unrelated.

Caught in a horror of active impotence, I struggled in terror-- unlike Fifi, I could get out.

This gratuitous experience was as nothing to that of disintegration when, on the contrary, one became aware of forces inherent to phenomena, which, being beyond the range of registration by the normal instrument-- the conscious organism as it exists in our present stage of evolution-- resulted in a super-

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sensibility so acute it shattered itself to splinters.

The intuitional self is incapable of surprise, but my everyday self was amazed. I felt that for dabbling in the profane mysteries I had got more than was coming to me.

Less than anything on earth did I require a face destroyed as Insel's; for some while I should walk with misgivings--.

I racked my brain for an explanation of my soaring respect (respect being a sentiment foreign to me) for a loafer who in the light of common sense proved to be actually silly.

Insel, who, so sensible of his essential mystery-- communicated that sense of imminent magic inevitably, just when one was in the 'thick' of his influence would illustrate his 'power' with a story such as how, after dining with married friends, he had predicted to his wife, "*That* union will not last long."

"Und thatsachlich," he concluded with an expression of awe, "They separated within the year."

He suffered, it would seem, from the incredible handicap of only being able to *mature* in the imagination of another. His empty obsession somehow taking form in obsessing the furnished mind of a spectator.

From a distance one remembered him vaguely as an indulgence in a quaint innocuous vice. Still I could scarcely go further with him than dissolution. I decided it would be useless to see him again.

My brain still seemed to be vibrating out of time, when early one evening on leaving a library I wandered into an old church. Somebody up in the organ loft was playing Bach. A sublime repetitive patter of angels' feet soled with assuagement, giving chase to one another in a variable immobility of eternal arrival, they trod my cerebral vibrations from disarray into tempo once more.

* "And as a matter of fact"

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I had not thought of my casual prediction that the whole of Insel's life
would hang upon a key-- when on mislaying my own key to my apartment he pro-
duced the duplicate I had lent him in the days of his 'eviction'-- and *forgot*
(the place was still at his disposal) to ask me for it again.

It was a long while before it occurred to me that his girl's watch was
lying at the jewelers. By then, all that remained of Insel was a vague impression
of trompe-l'oeil. I wrote him to call for this love relic, he having assured
me that should I have it sent to his address his concierge would seize it to-
wards arrears in rent.

Insel, an eroded scarecrow, greeted me with the somber dignity of a dejected
god.

"Why did your girl give you such a rotten watch," I teased, "the jeweler
won't guarantee it."

"One takes what one can get," said Insel with no trace of emotion as I
handed him the erstwhile 'Adam and Eve in primeval embrace'." His present
concern was for getting back the key. Determined he should not have it, I
pretended I was returning to Paris.

Lolling on either end of the great couch, supported by our elbows, our
feet on the floor, we were at ease for conversation-- the conversation would
not begin-- Insel being taken up with contracting to some intense concentration
that gradually pushed out a sort of pallid ethereal moss to cover his ravaged
face.

At last, to my raised eyebrows, "Ah, Liebe Frau Jones," he complained
in prayerful peevishness, "it's not so easy for me-- I don't mean anything to
you anymore."

"I know," I said contritely, "I get these wild enthusiasms for things--

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1/2

they don't last."

"And we might have had such a wonderful time together," he sighed.

I could not make out why this fantastically beautiful creature should have both hands round my throat, when Insel, shrunken to a nerve, his eyes fixed as blinded granite, sat at that distance with his fists so tightly clenched. Fingers of automatic pressure rapped their tonnage of abstract force on my jugular-- the blood on my brain surged in a noisy confusion-- "You are going to give in-- obsessed by my beauty-- having no hope-- endlessly resigned-- "

All the air wheezed in my exploding ears as a last breath "-- suffering-- suffering-- suffering-- choked by a robot!" This was not all that suffocated me-- myriads upon myriads of distraught women were being strangled in my oesophagus.

I had know exhaustive desperation but no such desperation as this-- with its power of a universal conception-- of limitless application; Being impersonal made it the more overwhelming.

"You-- are-- going-- to-- give-- in."

"To whom?" I wondered-- my eyes closing. "To Insel? Or this incredibly lovely monster made of dead flesh."

"Thou art fair my beloved, thou--," rose from a subconscious abyss.

Not wholly convinced I wrenched my eyelids apart-- my cerebral current, flowing an infinitesimal fraction of a second faster than the normal, registered Insel. I caught him at it. Swift as the leaves of the shutter on a camera when a snapshot is taken, there came together upon his concentric face a distinct

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enlargement of Colossus' photograph that always stood on the sittingroom mantlepiece the other end of the flat.

Simultaneously it came back to me how Insel, on his first visit, had taken that photo between his hands to stare at it inordinately as if for reproduction, for a long time, and at length bringing it nearer to his eyes.

"Such beauty as this," he said, "could scarcely happen more than once in a hundred years." He himself put it at two thousand, I had laughingly observed.

"Stop it," I commanded, letting fly a fearful kick at Insel's brittle shin. As if he were anaesthetized, the kick seemed not to hurt him-- he received it with the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness.

"The pet! The lamb!-- it does television, too," I told myself delightedly.

"Insel," I laughed, enthusiastic over him once more.

"Seien wir uns wieder gut-- I give you the key-- dinner-- My man Godfrey-- the loan on your picture-- you go to the Balkans-- you are the living confirmation of my favorite theories."

As for Insel, he emerged from his 'raptness' babbling of Colossus-- Colossus as he had himself foretold me having taken on an immortality as an evergrowing myth. Insel claimed him as a kindred spirit with ideas identical with his own.

"How entirely he would have accepted me-- my art-- We would have been as one-- "

I argued at length against this sudden conviction. "Do you know," I asked, "who, for the so-called precursor of surrealism, was the supreme painter-- Rubens-- " Only then did Insel's illusions miserably dissolve.

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After the Powell film, we instinctively returned to Montparnasse-- eating at a chic bar. The barman and Insel behaved as brothers-- I vaguely noted a sort of ritual-- the passing and repassing between them of half a cigarette. They addressed each other as 'du'. "No-- for 'thee'-- " Insel would say, placing the stump on a glass shelf as one handles a treasure.

Some days later I saw this barman out of doors wearing one of the richest overcoats I had seen in Paris. Evidently such acquaintances could hand out 'leavings' superior to the plain nourishment Insel acquired from the Quakers.

We sat around the Dome and Insel x-rayed. All the girls, as they giggled along the Boulevard, he disrobed-- more precisely, he could not see that they were dressed. As if on an expedition for collecting ivory, he handed me their variously molded thighs-- weighed them with an indescribable sensitivity of touch.

"This one," he assured me, "in the summer is firmer-- turns to gold-- "

Recalling how terribly Mlle. Alpha had said he dated, I presumed he was claiming my interest by indulging in what Boulevardiers of the old days called 'undressing the women' in his own unbelievably tangible way. "I don't need them to take off their clothes," he remarked.

In the Select Insel became actually involved with his watching of a red-haired girl he raved of as 'die Rothhaarige'-- her thighs were peculiarly long and agile. "She's a bit of a lesbian," he sighed, filled with some inverted reminiscence of antagonism.

"Look here, Insel-- You're crazy about that girl-- and all you do is sit around xraying her-- Get up-- go and speak to her-- "

"She'd be too expensive-- "

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"Colossus never had any money."

"Colossus was beautiful-- "

"What about it? You're looking unearthly. She might get a thrill out of it-- try-- forget the expense-- I'll back you-- Go along."

But Insel subsiding in his inexplicable negativism, refused to stir.

"Listen," I admonished him, "all this is really unwholesome-- and sitting boxed up in an attic adoring that canvas Irma all day-- you'll become impotent-- "

In a burst of the extravagantly sophisticated laughter I had heard him emit once before, "I only wish I could," he assured me.

"What a subject," I reflected, "the virility of the starving man." But the 'Select' was undergoing change-- opening out to aqueous space in darkling shadows of metallic liquidity as in the vision of the Lutetia, that strangely etiolate phallic ghost floated like the stem of a water-lily. Before it had terminated in a battlement akin to that of the castle among chessman; now it was topped with a little crown of thorns.

Through the chill shimmer of this unreal deep-- the hallucinatory blue the 'Cupole' had painted on the backs of dreary houses as a setting for its garden cafe-- the blue I would wish the sky to be showed us another dawn.

"Look,"

"There should," said Insel, extremely worried, "be a lighted lamp-post there."

"There is," I reassured him, "lower your head-- see it was cut off by the blind."

This was the last of the two or three nights I spent with Insel in Montparnasse.

We crossed again to the "Dome" to have breakfast. Sitting beside him,

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I could see a man in white armor conduct a ballet. Serried rows of mustard pots drew up before him, their porcelain bellies burdened with amber. They moved to and fro as with a wooden spatula he lifted off their stale crust of night, filled and leveled them, and set each one down to be armed with a clean bone spoon.

"Woher kommt diese halbe Mucke?" Insel grumbled, insanely hacking with his knife at a tiny aeronaut shade circling an inviolate orbit, because he could not make out "Where this half a fly comes from." I knew it was only a baby fly, yet all the same it loomed above him hugely as an insectile cherubim cut off from its entrails in a like unanatomical constipation to Insel's monsters.

The rest of the day till two o'clock when Insel, as usual, it seemed must
'appear in court', we spent in an incredibly concentrated and somehow heart-
rending arithmetic, reckoning up whether Insel, out of the three thousand francs
loaned on his picture, could possibly afford a new pair of boots. We had al-
ready decided he must have a warm overcoat when, although it was not particular-
ly chilly, little muscles in the side of Insel's nose, self-animated, leapt
up and shivered. "You are freezing," I discovered in startled concern, scanning
his fragile flimsy features.

"I hardly feel it-- I am used to it," said Insel, dolefully heroic, "It
is only discomforting to those who are with me."

But I teased him a bit when we said good-bye, alluding to a lunch with
the Alpha when to our mutual hilarity we had made out how only two hours after
leaving my studio after that utter collapse, he had stumbled into hers.

"He looked ghastly," she told me, "He had not eaten, he had not slept--
his heart had ceased to beat!"

Insel, whom I had seen so sly, had been vainly hoping to get his beefsteak

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1/7

fresher.

"How on earth," I inquired, "do you compose your totenkopf in so short a
time? Pretending to Mlle. Alpha-- "

"Why," Insel answered pat, with the queerest inflection of intimacy, as
if I were some virgin he had raped, "I thought you would not _like_ me to tell
her I had _been with_ you."

"It's marvellous," I assured him in amused admiration, "Your knack of
dying on doorsteps. At will! At any moment! You might make a good thing out
of it. Perhaps you do. Insel, I believe you put _lots_ of money in the bank!"

I could feel a distinct change in his aural temperature, but I was laugh-
ing too much to pay attention. An impression of a sacred stronghold 'blowing
up', that shadow-tower of iron rag the clochard-deity Insel had built, like
an ant of his wasted tissue, was so very, very faint--

In view of America, I was constantly on the hop-- busy with buyers of
furniture-- packers littering the place with straw.

Arriving for some appointment, I was unprepared to run into an Uneasiness
in the vicinity of my home, although it remained closely sealed in its shutters
and nothing by day ever went in or came out. Les concierges, their aides and
cronies, the grocers at the corner, all were under the apprehension of the
place being haunted. Even Bebelle, whom I came across in the street, had, on
going there to clean, turned and fled.

"Madame," she said in hushed warning, "In there it is dark at noon.
Terrible clothes have clotted on the floor-- Never before have I seen what was
lying on the bed."

Insel at last must have been evicted and at some unknown hour crept into
the flat.

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Someone was living there.

On my throwing open a window, he hooked his arm round his neck, rubbing
the mastoid, "I have lain here for two whole days," he said, ferocious with
dignity, "I have a stiff neck."

A hard-eyed, low class German, his very existence an insolence, wearing
a shirt from a cheap shop-- Insel must have thrown himself away with his old
black sweater above which his former face had risen like a worn, pocked moon.

Unquestionably, I had cured him. Here was the 'normal' man. An Insel
unobsessed. Someone 'replacing himself', his mesmeric, melodic voice exchanged
for a hostile creak.

This culminating phase of my eerie experience-- Insel's residence-- remains
confused, as I was busy directing packers.

Cavilling and bilious, whenever he caught sight of me he hardly refrained
from spitting. Our relative positions entirely reversed, I had become for him
a strange specimen, to whose slightest gesture he pinned an attention like that
of a vindictive psychiatrist.

"Ha-ha!" he neighed irately, "I find a little 'still life' in this flat.
It would surely be of the greatest interest to Freud."

We had, in our 'timeless conversation', with Insel's concurrence in my
'wonderful ideas', superceded Freud. I must always have known he had never the
slightest idea of what I was talking about-- yet only now did this fact appear
as negatory.

The still-life that intrigued him was a pattern of a 'detail' to be
strewn about the surface of clear lamp shades. Through equidistant holes

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punched in a crystalline square, I had carefully urged in extension, a stiff
celluloid coil of the color that Schiaperelli has since called _shocking_ pink.
Made to be worn round pigeon's ankles for identification, I had picked it up
in the Bon Marché.

Out of this harmless even pretty object an ignorant bully had constructed
for me, according to his own conceptions, a libido threaded with some vicious-
ness impossible to construe--.

I was astounded.

It would be only natural that my jerky vibrational currents (which behave
so much like a 'polter-geist' that things when I touch them are apt to vanish,
adding a superhuman difficulty to my work) should impinge on Insel's abnormal
precision with the force of a shock, although in the hallucinatory dimension
it was this very extreme of antithesis that must set up the telepathic, tele-
visionary machinery of our reciprocity.

"What do you suppose," hissed my horrid guest, who somehow behaved like
an alienated husband, "would happen to me if I were to lose anything?"

"Oh, I suppose," I countered rudely, "I'd buy you another."

Being the intrinsic complement of Insel's enmity, logically my loathing
for the real man was unconcealed, while he must actually hold himself in
check not to assassinate me, for no crueller abhorrence could ever issue from
the human heart than Insel's for me.

There were brief abatements of his fantastic normality as when on coming
up from the telephone I encountered only a creature of pathos in the hall.

"You would not notice, would you," wistfully, "that I have polished everything in the flat."

"No," I concurred, "I would not have noticed that."

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Insel was long in swallowing his disappointment, then cryptically, "Gut,"
he snapped, "and I am always amorous when drunk."

And again, for fear I might forget the loan, Insel went limp as he had
to the air raid siren. That unaccountable bloom he put forth when passing
from one condition to another made his features appear to be of crumpled velvet.

Sitting on a chair of average height, he seemed to have sunk to bottomless
depths, at the same time his imploring face peered at me-- from the floor.

Craven to a degree that rendered his cowering august, of that meekness
befitting a supplicant at the door of heaven, Insel was knowing an alibi so
sublime-- I again lost all knowledge of who he was.

"Here," I hailed the will-o'-the-wisp, "after all I will give you the
little box." This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the
American surrealist, Joseph Cornell, the delicious head of a girl in slumber
afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler, of bits
cut from early Ladies' Journals (Technically in pupilage to Max Ernst) in
loveliness, unique, in Surrealism-- the tidal lines of engraving cooled its
static peace. Under the glass lid a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and
one of witch's blue came raining down on the grey somnolence when one lifted
it up.

I should have preferred to keep it myself had I not suddenly realized
she belonged in those idle lands to which the unreal Insel intermittently
returned.

I only went twice to the flat while Insel was living there, but I flitted
in and out so busily-- those hours retain no sequence. As part of his loan
I had arranged for a strictly non-negotiable ticket and brought him a first
thousand to speed the acquisition of that overcoat.

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Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man to catch so many women. He seemed to be somehow barricaded with women. All my indulgence for human misdemeanors (which are so commendable when aesthetically good-- such as the stellar combine of Insel and his ebony wives, his ivory eroticism in appraising thighs) was unavailing, confronted with this blatant lubricity of the normal Insel which, as he boasted, although in proper decency of word, seemed as did once an astral Venus to flow in his very veins: The dregs of all the secret gutters that carry off the unavowable residue of popular conceptions of physical life--

When I arrived with the rest of the loan, anxious to clear him out, my once luminous clochard had composed himself in the kitchen holding his usual insignia, the heel of pumpernickle, this time one in either hand-- extreme oval ends-- unbitten-- of an absent loaf. He looked forbidding as had they been bone.

"Did you get the overcoat," I inquired amiably.

"I may as well tell you," he snarled, "that I don't care for all this supervision-- I had not the time. You understand-- the last nights in Paris," he raved ecstatically, "Es ist so schon das leben, wen mann so leben kann-- It is so beautiful living, when one can so live."

His emaciation no longer of flesh had become an exteriorized act of the flesh in which the last ooze of the spermatic juices might have been, in some fearful ennervation, spent. Instead of being suffused with that liquidity of relief following upon embrace, his eyes, in some ultimate heat, were boiled to the creamy, soiled putrescence of stale oysters in a stew.

I did not reflect that this enormity of sensuous filth was probably as irreal as his nervous aromatics distilled from his astral collusions with a goddess. It was a mental impossibility to associate these opposite phenomena.

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Had I recalled the earlier irridescent Insel, it could only have been as a
figment of my insanity.

An alarming presentiment occurred to me. "Insel," I gasped, "You've
blown that thousand francs."

"What are you?" he sneered venemously, "an inquisitor?"

'He has notions as to how white women should be handled, too,' I laughed
to myself as I hurried down the corridor to the dressmaker.

I was determined to take conventional leave of a guest who would be gone
when I returned to Paris. It would put me to great pains, I supposed, breaking
through animosity so unaccountable it left nothing intact but surprise. Still,
it was pretty bad if I could not prevent the 'epidemic quarrel with me' from
spreading to even this lunatic whose essential void I had found so soothing.

After my fitting I invited him to come down to the cafe, intent on butter-
ing him up, on bluffing him into forgetfulness of having allowed me to discover
his awful alter ego, (in cases of the sane, this alter ego seldom got to work
until out of my sight) curious to see if we could part on good terms.

As we stood face to face with nothing in common, the last people on earth
likely to become acquainted, I saw him force back his loathing, to accept. Our
mutual distaste was noxious on the palate. We each had a pressing engagement
for dinner.

I remembered Geronimo taunting me that I was 'no psychologist'. "You
just walk into a man's brain, seat yourself comfortably in an arm-chair to
take a look around-- afterwards, you write down all you have found there," he
had said. Then what the hell in Insel had I 'walked into'? His complaint
was true. Nobody saw in him what I saw in him. A kind of consciousness un-
conscious of its own potency. Even now he was disgusting to the point of

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revelation.

Insel had also the idea of bluffing a conformative wind-up to our
illusory alliance. Resorting to his earlier priggish decency, once we were
in the back of the cafe, he hung his head, apparently poisoning it with spurious
shame, and mumbled: -

"The bad thing about me is that every now and then I come to a blind
alley in my life-- where somebody has to help me."

"Now look here, Insel," I persuaded him with stimulant hypocrisy, "If
it were not for that basic something in you-- no help would be forthcoming.
That which is valuable one does not help, one responds to a cosmic imperative."

He began to look as if he had been overdoing the shame.

"There was some mention," I added offhandedly authoritative, "of your
busting a thousand francs. You seemed on the defensive. But why? The artist
requires color in his life." This fallacious insight melted Insel's imitation
shame, disclosing the very really wounded face of a child who has long been
sulking for being misjudged.

"You told me," he burst out unhappily, writhing with reproach, "that I
put lots of money in the bank."

So that was it. Insel, with his organic magnifications, had become a
foul lout, because he was feeling-- cross.

"I didn't," I fibbed, striking the suitable note, "I said you hid it under
the carpet." Neither of us had a carpet-- we immediately floated off as if on
the magical mat of Bagdad, talking on-- .

I could feel any word I was saying fit into Insel's brain appeasing as
a missing piece in a jig-saw puzzle.

At once-- it was growing late-- he clamored for me to stay with him;

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for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize duration; forever.

Probably I was the collaborative audience to his finest act, the giving off of that calm equation that always reduced me to hushed respect. He grew in power in his silent 'role' in ratio to my reaction. The ultimate self, august in certainty, put forth a soporific bloom that covered his damaged face.

Only now I remarked that on the emergence of this ultimate self in its intangible armour of nobility depended that prolongation of time I so often experienced in the company of Insel, for at present there was no aquarium diffusion, none of that virtually giggling attainment to Nirvana. No x-ray excursion nor any fractionation. His mediumship concentrated in a sole manifestation. This interference with time.

I could not make out whether the cause was a shift in the relative tempos of a cosmic and microcosmic 'pulsation', whether *my* instant-- the instant of a reductive perceiver-- passed through some preponderant magnifier and enlarged, or whether a concept (become gnarled in one's brain through restriction to the brain's capacity) unwinding at leisure, was drawing my perception-- infinitely soothed-- along with it. For again this novel aspect of time seemed, like light, to arrive in rays focusing on the brain at a minimum skin to images on retinas; and the further one projected one's being to meet it, the *broader* one found it to be. Anyway, it was useless trying to analyze it. This alone was certain. It was absolutely engrossing to the mind, although nothing brief enough for us to cognize *happened* in this longer time, which occurred commensurately with the bit of lingering I was wedging in for Insel between contiguous hours in defiance of occupational time.

Rarely, at intervals of aeons, Insel and I would look up at each other

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in an utter yet somehow communicative impersonality, the final relationship
of distinct similars confronting the same phenomenon.

Intimately confidential once more, Insel was trying to disentangle before
me _the thousand directions_. He had showed them to me previously, in answer
to my asking him why he did not work although I had left him materials in my
studio.

"So often at dusk I come here to stare at that white canvas," he had told
me dreamingly, "I see all the worlds I could paint upon it. But um Himmel's
Willen! Which one? I can create everything. Then what thing? A thousand
directions are open to me, to take whichever I decide-- I cannot decide."

I had long ago worn down in contemplation of that multiplicity of direction.
How _far_ my mind had travelled; never to come to the _beginning_ of any route.
Surely, for Insel it should have been different-- starting with the spectral
spermatazoa that seeped from his brain through his gardening hands.

The glare in Capoulards Cafe grew dim. Insel's brain floated up from his
head, unravelled, projected its convolutions. They straightened in endless
lines across a limitless canvas, a map of imminent direction. On the whole
of space were only a few sign-boards on which grew hands, alive and beckoning.

"Of course," I was saying, "I don't know where you are-- wherever it is
is very far away. And I am just as far away. I have existed before my time."

"How true," said Insel.

"Whatever I have found out belongs to a future generation."

"How true," said Insel again, devoutly.

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"And by the bye," I commented, "the sentiment of one generation is the neurosis of the next. All that stuff you have of 'suffering for love' is the most awful slush."

"I know-- I know," he agreed with fervour.

-- indefinable lines of cerebral nerve marked on the map of inertia, un-
realizable journeys. Along one route, die Irma dissolved to a puddle of serum,
to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficult;
that volatile fungoid lichen outcrept one as one picked one's way, grew tall
until one must turn back.

My former trust in the ripening of Insel's work had had its foundation
in that very 'parting of the ways' he told me he had come to, where he turned
assured toward some thing eternally immune to his host of elementals.

It had taken so short a time for this parting of the ways to subdivide
into the thousand directions. Yet even now he was rich in postponement. While
that commonplace back of a woman watching for signs on his painted firmament
turned in anonymous patience to this chart of unarrival.

The curtain of the sky came down and she was not there-- "If the painting
no longer 'goes'," Insel surprisingly was ruminating, "I shall do as you do.
Write. What a profession. One carries one's studio about with one. A sheet
of paper--."

Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the blank of orientation
faded-- the thousand directions withdrew, leaving us at a destination.

Nothingness.

It was not black as night nor white as day, nor grey as death-- only a
non-existent irritation as to what _purposed inconsequence_ had led us into the
illusion of ever having come into being.

-131-

The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were *still there*-- Two unmatched arrows sprung from its meaningless centre-- were surrounded by a numeral halo-- I *had* to leave Insel, it was ten to eight.

"How goes the book," he asked with his former appreciative intimacy as we passed out of the cafe. I was feeling exceptionally 'good' about my work just then, vainly imagining I had criticized my last incompletion.

"It is going wonderfully," and with a flash of that exhibitionism of the spirit succeeding to inordinate periods spent with no means of communication-- I threw out my hands-- elatedly believing I had reached the stage prescribed by Colossus for creation, when all that one has collected rolls out with the facility of the song of a bird.

"Sehen sie, Insel," I explained, "Mann muss reif sein-- One must be ripe."

I felt Insel crack as if he had been *shot* alert.

"Can she possibly mean it," I could 'hear' him ask himself as he wheeled towards me, noticing *me* for the *first* time; and then convinced, as I stood a little exalted on the corner of the street, decide "Here is a woman with whom there is absolutely *nothing* to be done."

I must have had my hands outspread, for Insel dropped like a soft moth into my open palm-- On his face was a smile unlike all the fluctuant smiles of hallucinated angels I had watched there. It was a normal smile. Yet in the old abnormal voice of whispering emotion, laying his dried branch across my shoulder, he choked, "Ich komme nach hause."

He was 'coming home'.

-132-

Across his gentle brow floated the will-o'-the-wisp trailing a pair of
boiled oysters in its wake, Mädchen, like missiles that have not gone off,
he scattered abroad.

"But Insel," I reminded him, "You have an appointment for dinner."

Insel gaped at me.

The illocal foci of his pupils exploding incredulously, darted in all
the directions of the radial underpattern of his life. It took some moments
to sort these simultaneous impressions. When I had done so, I longed to get
even with Insel, to say "I have absorbed all your 'strahlen'. Now what are
you going to do?"

I said nothing of the kind. Because firstly it was not true, and secondly,
it might inspire in him a worse obsession; for one thing one feared as above
all else menacing Insel was some climax in which his depredatory radio-activity
must inevitably give out.

So all I said was "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," smiled Insel, his bitter-sweet stare both dazed and stoic,
"Danke fur Alles-- Thanks for everything."

-133-