The pen quivered over the paper, added inae to comatulid, and then carefully crossed out that free suffix; and then brought comatulid into the tangle of black ink, as she moved toward that world not world where the needle took her. It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest: "Love's dart" that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; "sweet cautery," the "stolen heart," the "ravished understanding," the "rape of love": in Provencal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, "dying of not being able to die."
What did the devil teach Gerbert, Archbishop of Ravenna, in exchange for his soul which Gerbert bartered to learn all, and become Pope? The devil taught him algebra and clock-making, for a world where there is no space, only distances; no time, only minutes and hours; where things are numbered, and even Christ bowed with finite care when he gave SS Elizabeth Matilda Bridget a written account of the kicks, blows, and wounds he had received, numbered the skull fractures 100, the drops of blood 38,430 (though another girl was later to receive a letter through her guardian angel numbering those drops of blood 3,000,800). The world in which the Virgin's titles number 305; and Sir Arthur Eddington decides that the electron is not subject to scientific law. The cosmos of Sir James Jeans, reigned over by a deity whose symbol is the square root of minus one, where in closed rooms they argue the weight of the crucified man sufficient to cause strangulation, and the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton calculates that Jesus in assumption, being drawn up through space at a moderate rate, would not yet have reached the nearest of the fixed stars.
When the devil appeared to Gerbert, to claim his soul, Gerbert resisted; and disappeared in a fork of flame.
The tracking point of the pen moved on the paper, and it was gone, Esme had lost it, and lay in the agonized exhaustion of this recovery of her temporal self. Still, on the edge of the chasm into which she could not fall, Esme quivered with anticipation of a sound which would interrupt, waiting fearfully for the signal to recall her from that edge. In the silence of waiting, she recovered herself; slow, she stepped back; silence, she began to talk with herself; stillness, she moved with exaggeration as though she were being watched, needed to be watched suddenly, to have another consciousness present, aware of her, containing her, to assure her of her own existence. There was no one. Even her voice sounded with a disembodied quality which frightened her. She sat there quiet again with the pen over paper, reduced in despair, her face expressing nothing but empty misunderstanding at being alone.
Across the air shaft from her closed window a woman ironed on a board. A man in underclothes appeared to stand beside her for a moment, talk silently and disappear. Then with no change in her expression Esme was crying and she turned her face from the window where she had been watching unbeknown. On the paper she wrote,
In a nicely calcimmed
Apartment is a left-behind Opera chair against the wall Masquerading for a ball, an exercise as significant as those ceremonies carried out at the insistence of the people during papal interdicts in the medieval Church, when saying the Mass was forbidden, but "the brethren had only to ring their bells, and play their organ in the choir; and the citizens in the nave were quite happy in the belief that Mass was being said behind the screen." Esme wrote regretfully, pouting,
Your name is said in a far-off place By someone alone in a room You do not hear it but it was spent. And the miracle of transubstantiation? only a glimpse; and only the fragrance of its death remained, the heavenly fragrance, as of lilies, which rose from the body of Saint Nicolas of Tolentino, after he had reproved his sorrowing brethren who brought him a dish of doves on his sweltering deathbed, and with a pass of his hand restored their plumage and sent them flying out of the window of his cell; only the scent of lilies, rotting in the fruit jar beside her.
She lit a spirit lamp, and sat beside it for a moment before finding a teaspoon in which to liquefy an injection of heroin, staring into the flame, and the lilies beyond it. — If I am not real to him, she said aloud, staring at the dead lilies, — then where am I real? And the book of Stevenson, which she had laid open on a pile of books beside the lamp, threatened to catch fire. She took it down, and read there, again, "You are a man and wise; and I am but a child. Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain; but those who learn much do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive the dignity of the design — the horror of the living fact fades from their memory. It is we who sit at home with evil who remember. . and are warned and pity. ."
knock knock knock sounded on her door, in ruthless precision of recall to time in its aseptic succession of importunate instants. Her lips tightened. — Who is it? she called.
— Chaby.
— Jesis Christ why don't you put some lights on? he said when she let him in. He walked past her to the light cord.
— Because I'm alone, Esme said. Her weight hung on him, and without a word he bore her down.
As the afternoon ended, Otto was walking alone, south, on Madison Avenue, his own face expressing an extreme of the concentration of vacancy passing all around him, the faces of office messengers, typists turned out into the night air, dismally successful young men, obnoxious success in middle age, women straining at chic and accomplishing mediocrity who had spent the afternoon spending the money that their weary husbands had spent the afternoon making, the same husbands who would arrive home minutes after they did, mix a drink, and sit staring in the opposite direction. With his dispatch case, and an unkind thought for everyone he knew, Otto carried his head high. Affecting to despise loneliness, still he looked at the unholy assortment streaming past him as though hopefully to identify one, rescue some face from the anonymity of the crowd with instantly regretted recognition, and so rescue himself. He even strongly considered conversation with strangers; and with this erupted the thought of his father whom he had arranged to telephone, and appoint a place for their first meeting. With this, Otto took sudden new interest in every very successful middle-aged man who passed, coveting diamond stickpins, a bowler hat, an ascot tie, and even (though he would have been shocked enough if this were "Dad") a pair of pearl-gray spats. It was a problem until now more easily left unsolved; and be damned to Oedipus and all the rest of them. For now, the father might be anyone the son chose. The instant their eyes met in forced recognition, it would be over.