I put my hand to my nose. The smell is overwhelming. At first I think, it must be death. Someone has died, I think nervously. Helen, oh no. But it is not an awful, disgusting smell that one associates with decay and a body’s rotting, just an overpowering one. Sweet and sickly, like a cheap commercial perfume. I do not appreciate most perfumes; but I love the natural scent of flowers, of roses and camelias, of course, or of cut grass on a summer’s day, or newly mown hay pitched next to a red barn. I even have liked the earthy stench of horse manure. The smell of sex is incomparable.
Helen’s room reeks of distress, if distress may be said to have an aroma. But the first response that bubbled inside me and then formed into a word was, Insanity. This is insane, I say to myself. Perhaps I uttered it aloud. The room is not messy in the usual sense. It is out of order, entirely. The Greeks have a word for it — chaos. Could Helen have lived like this?
First, all the walls are painted black. It is dark in here, the windows having been covered over, and I cannot find a wall socket. When I do, I flip the switch but nothing happens. There is enough light to see shapes and images fuzzily. Clothes and rags have been thrown everywhere, bits of torn paper are piled in odd shapes, unusable paintbrushes left in strange places, and on the black walls daubed in what I take to be shocking pink are ragged forms that Helen must have drawn when beside herself. Her bed — there is no bedspring or backboard — is littered, covered in stuff — clippings, pins, beads, odds and ends, junk. The mattress, which has several cigarette burns, is on the floor. There are no sheets in sight and worse, no pillow, which reminds me of something John had said about Helen’s not having pillows on her bed when he knew her in New York. This did not jibe with my idea of Helen. I can’t remember why John mentioned it. It will come to me, undoubtedly.
Papers are everywhere, books — Bliss’, I am sure — strewn about as if a great wind or hurricane had blown through, wreaking havoc, concocting this strange disorder. Hundreds of what I take to be photo-booth portraits of Helen and her friends lie in a box next to the bed. Holding some up to the light, I can just barely see them, but am able to ascertain that her friends are in all manner of costumes, making funny, ridiculous faces — pulling a face, my mother used to say — and Helen herself is posing archly, this way and that, with hats, makeup, props. There are Polaroid pictures as well, of long-haired young men who are sullen but attractive. One or two is nude. One of them is or must be John.
Cups of half-drunk and moldy coffee on the floor are a discordant note among many discordant notes — in my presence Helen never drank coffee. Or did she? I bend over to sniff one of the cups; this may enable me to tell when she left. I do so virtually in the style that cowboys and Indians are shown doing in movies when they search for their man and study the tracks of his horse. This seemed entirely silly to me a moment after I’d done it. There are dead flowers in filthy vases and magazine pictures — primarily of politicians and celebrities — thrown about in no discernible pattern.
And that is what I am searching for — a pattern. Just as I become cognizant of this, I look up and, as if it were fated, the wind blows through a broken window and stirs some of the papers on the bureau, which is also painted black. I walk to it. The mirror above it is covered only partially in paint. Revealed by the breeze, under one piece of paper on the bureau is another. I peer at it intently. I see my name. It is written in bold block capital letters, HORACE, just that, and under my name a few blotches or stains, and some lines crosshatched over what may have been other words. Stuck to this piece of paper is yet another. On it is writing, again in bold capital letters but more shocking: FUCK EVERYTHING. OEDIPUS WRECKS. Beneath this is a drawing of what looks to me like a duck, of all things, but it may be another creature. On the back of this piece of paper is pasted a map of the southern half of Crete. A large glittery dot has been placed on it, close to several small towns, yet not at the towns precisely, rather beside or in the middle between them. But it is really too dim in here for me to tell. I delicately take up the pieces of paper, precious and strange, and hold them in my hands. Then I walk out through the French doors — whose windows have been covered with newspaper clippings — onto Helen’s terrace, where I had often seen her ensconced, had watched her from the restaurant or from my windows. Now I look toward my windows, but see nothing. I am happy that Yannis is not spying on me.
I thrust the papers up, holding them at arm’s length to the sun, to benefit from its natural light. I thought I might see through them another message, a code that could not be read on first glance, especially in her room. It was dark as a cave in Smitty’s room. But I see nothing, just that the paper is cheap stationery. I scratch my brow and walk back into her room, look around furtively, to see if, with another stroke of fate, some other bit of evidence would make itself known to me. I wait in silence. I am not sure how many minutes pass. But I wait, conscious of time whiling away as I stand in near darkness. And then it happens, again, a stroke of luck or good fortune: a streak of light pierces the darkness through a crack in the French doors and settles on one of the black walls. I walk over to the lighted area and scrutinize it. I discern that the forms Helen has painted are rather crudely drawn cartoons of male and female genitalia. I stare at these for a while, shocked, I suppose, by the girl’s boldness — and wit. Yes, wit. They are witty drawings in their way, now that I can see them. In shocking pink — chalk, I believe the medium is. Chalk. Then I become sensible again of the stench and decide to leave, to return another day, perhaps, should it be necessary. I have no idea what is producing the smell.
I am satisfied, even fulfilled, for it seems to me clear that Helen has left all this for me. It was her way, I told myself, her young way, to leave abruptly, to split, not to explain but also not to be truly angry, as I had feared and expected. Helen is not really obvious, though she may appear vulgar or crude to one less accustomed than I to the terrible power of the imagination — and to its necessary excesses. It is true I was shocked by some of what I found. The disarray could be understood merely as disarray as poor childhood training even, as youthful revolt, but I am determined to find its sense and reason. And I am assured that she understood that I would recognize this, it, and would have gotten it — felt, as John put it the other night, the groove, or gotten with the groove, I forget which. But most important, and with this I breathed deeply and exhaled fully, surely I knew where she had gone, which had been the intention of my mission. The dot on the map signaled the spot she’d traveled to or, I ventured inwardly as I descended the rotten staircase, it is where the Gypsy woman has taken her — to her home, there to initiate Helen into the mysteries.
Yet, and this is a strange matter, I who am so curious, I who desire nothing if not to know every secret, I was suddenly not certain if I ought to pursue her and whether I ought not to be a little afraid. Of Helen, that is. Though I was certain I would detect an underlying structure, if I thought hard enough, even in her abysmally messy room, there was still evidence of a mind and a life that was foreign to me, more foreign to me than the Greeks. While I knew that Helen was a member of a new breed, that realization, which I’d had early, had been an abstract idea in many ways. When we were together, though we often disagreed, or rather, though I talked and she listened, so that I often did not know her opinion, I did not doubt that I had made an impression upon her. And I also believed that in our souls we were in deep and profound unity. Why I thought this I am not sure, but as I have written elsewhere, she was, I assumed, like me. And again, her youth was an advantage all to itself, her youth and that special androgynous quality of hers that I find and found so compelling. Like that of an angel.