Set This House on Fire (45 page)

“I shook her off, a bit brusquely, I reckon. No Montparnasse tart—especially one who had confronted me as if she were my own guilt made incarnate—was going to spoil my balmy day, see? So I suppose I said something rude, and sideslipped off jauntily down the boulevard, tipping my bottle to old bronze Balzac at the intersection and spreading a general benediction all over the place. But the come-down had already begun. I was—well, to put it mildly, I’d begun to feel poorly. God knows, I didn’t want to—and whether it was the girl who’d been the catalyst for the thing I just don’t know—but I wasn’t more than a few blocks down the street when I began to feel real seasick. And the thing was, you see, I
was
sick. I’d been sick for months without knowing it, and sick from what? Why, from the aforesaid booze and from abuse of the carnal envelope—as I once heard a fancy Methodist preacher call it—and in Paris, God help us, the headquarters of all that’s magnificent in groceries, from an almost insane campaign of slow, steady malnutrition. But that wasn’t all I was sick from, of course. That was the least of my sicknesses, if anything. What I was really sick from was from despair and self-loathing and greed and selfishness and spite. I was sick with a paralysis of the soul, and with self, and with flabbiness. I was sick with whatever sickness men get in prisons, or on desert islands, or any place where the days stretch forward gray and sunless into flat-assed infinitude, and no one ever comes with the key or the answer. I was very nearly sick unto death, and I guess my sickness, if you really want to know, was the sickness of deprivation, and the deprivation was my own doing, because though I didn’t know it then I had deprived myself of all belief in the good in myself. The good which is very close to God. That’s the bleeding truth.

“And to top it all, I was a
fool,
you see? I thought all that bliss and wonder and insight and peace had come to me because at last I’d been given the key, because I was a genius and if a genius waits long enough he’ll be handed revelation on a silver platter. But I was wrong. I was a fool. That hadn’t been any real revelation I’d had: it had been a sick drunken daydream, with no more logic or truth in it than the hallucination of some poor old mad starving hermit. No wonder there are so many visions recorded in the register of the saints. Flog yourself long enough, starve yourself, abuse yourself, and any meathead alive will start seeing archangels, or worse. Yet I didn’t know all this that day. I didn’t know it, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why it was, as I kept on walking toward the Luxembourg, that I’d begun to feel weak and dizzy and ill. Or why it was that all my elation and delight had begun to fade away. Maybe the whore had something to do with it. No, what was going to happen was going to happen, but I’ve often thought she helped bring it on quicker: the guilt, you understand, and the dismal, messy image coming back to me—the sour sheets and the whorish counterfeit lust and myself, slobbering and humping away while Poppy lay home weeping. Triple bleeding God! Anyway, by the time I got to the Luxembourg I was feeling
bad.
I was clammy all over and trembling and as I passed a store window I looked at my face in a mirror and I was a pasty white ghost, just like the girl had said. And to top it all, worse than this was the anxiety I’d begun to feel—this dread, this fear that something horrible was about to happen. I remember stopping outside the entrance to the gardens. I took a tremendous wallop out of the brandy bottle, and I stood swaying there for a minute, waiting for it to lift me, to bring me back up to the summit; but I was gone, I was plunging, and I didn’t know it: at last I was getting my rightful punishment and I was plunging fast. Not a goddam thing happened: the brandy only made me feel worse. But in the midst of all this I was still determined to draw something. I was still determined to prove to myself that I could, that all this crazy passion and glory I’d felt hadn’t been a fraud, a hoax. Well, somehow I managed to maneuver myself into the gardens. It was crowded with sun-worshipers and I stood there for a bit waiting for this little wrinkled custodian of a woman while she scurried around and found me a chair. She seemed to take hours. During a spell like this, you know, time becomes elongated, pulled out like a hunk of taffy. You just sit and suffer and squirm and wait in agony for the next event to happen—because it’s that event which will show you that you’re still alive and in touch with the universe, rather than suspended in a timeless, crushing terror—but the event takes ages and ages to come. As I say, the woman seemed to take hours to fetch this chair. I just stood there, weak and hollow and terrified, shaking like a bishop with the clap. And when she finally brought it I had a surge of momentary relief and sank down into it as if it had been a throne.

“And that was the beginning of the end. Because as I sat there with the pad limp and useless in my hand, the terror and the dread came back like a great cold paralyzing blast of wind. Just sitting there in this Paris sunlight, I never felt so lost in all my life before. I was like some hulk which has slipped its moorings and drifted out onto the sea, surrounded on all sides by reefs and ruin and yawning deeps. I wanted to cry out but I had no voice at all. I had a panicky need for escape—flight—and I had the desire to run away in all directions at once, but I figured that wherever I ran I would be chased as if by a wolf by this unimaginable, nameless, ravening terror. The Luxembourg Gardens seemed to spread out on all sides of me in light-years of space—I swear to God—and the people were as far off and as unreal as people in a dream. And through all of this, as I sat there shuddering and hammered by fright, I felt that the most precious, the most desirable, the most marvelous thing on earth would be to be shut up tightly—alone—in the darkness of a tiny single room.

“And I know where that room was. It was back home, back on that little street where I’d come from, and I knew that if I didn’t get there quick, if I didn’t get back into that safe, dark, enclosing space within a matter of minutes, this terror would conquer me, break me down, and I’d turn into a goddam lunatic right there in the midst of that peaceful Sunday in the Luxembourg, and begin hooting and shouting, or start clobbering people or maybe worse, or just gallop out and down the street and climb to the top of St. Sulpice and jump off. So I got up from that chair as steadily as I could, knowing all the while that people were looking
at
me—well, curiously, and I edged myself on out of the gate to the gardens, and then I began running. Not fast, and not slow, either—just this pounding, steady, determined dogtrot down sidewalks and across streets and through red lights and in between moving cars, all the while saying to myself, half-aloud, in a sort of under-the-breath monotone: If I stop running all will be lost, I’m scared now, more frightened than I’ve ever been in all my life, but if I just keep running and get back home I might be saved. And I remember somewhere crossing the Boulevard Raspail seeing a
flic,
and hearing him shout as if he thought I was a thief and half-expecting him to pull out a gun and shoot, but trotting on heedless, still babbling to myself, and leaving him far behind. And on a side street near the Avenue de Maine, too, colliding with two little girls playing jump-rope and hooking my foot on the frigging rope, half-falling down, but recovering myself without missing more than half a step and then plunging on, all awash with sweat and horror. Then finally I was on the little street again, and then at the doorway to the house, and I burst in and ran up the stairs two at a time and exploded back into the studio with my mouth wide-open like a gargoyle in a frozen voiceless scream. And how I managed the last part I don’t know, but I got the shades down all over the place, shutting out the light and the street below, and I got into bed and pulled the blanket over my head, and lay there trembling and whining like some miserable old woman who thinks she hears someone outside trying to break into the house… .” He came back from the window and, sitting down, lit a cigar.

“Well, as I say, I lay there for a while, trembling and screaming inwardly. But I felt a little bit better, I guess: I was home, at least, I was in the dark, I was safely back in the womb. Some of the fear went away finally, and so with the cover still up over my head I drifted off to sleep. It’s not a very pretty picture, is it—this newt, this hot caterpillar, wrapped up in woolly slumber?”

“Quit running yourself down so,” I said with honest irritation. “It’s all over and done with, you know.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Well, anyway, I went off to sleep. Only it wasn’t sleep. Instead, I was in a car with my uncle and we were driving along a street in Raleigh, and he was taking me to the state prison. Funny, how I can remember the details just as clearly and vividly as if it had really happened. He was taking me to the state prison in his car. I saw the high stone walls up ahead and the guard towers. And I can remember the feeling of despair I had, because for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what my crime was, or anything about it, other than that I had done something unspeakably wicked—surpassing rape or murder or kidnaping or treason, some nameless and enormous crime—and that I had been sentenced not to death or to life imprisonment but to this indefinite term which might be several hours or might be decades. Or centuries. And I remember my uncle saying in his calm bland voice not to worry, son, he knew the governor—I remember him calling him Mel, Mel Broughton—and was contacting him, and that I’d be out in no more than a couple of hours. Yet as my uncle stopped and let me out at the gate and said good-by, and as I walked through the gate and heard it clang behind me, I knew that my uncle had already either betrayed or forgotten me and I would rot there in that state prison forever. And it was funny, too—because, when I dreamed this, I was long emancipated (or at least I thought) from that kind of ignorance—how as the gate clanged shut my next thought filled me with a despair that was almost as great as my uncle forgetting me: and that was that just about half and even more of the prisoners were bound to be niggers, and I’d be spending the rest of my life among niggers. But then after that the dream got all switched around, as dreams do, and the real horror commenced: it wasn’t the niggers—though a lot of the prisoners seemed to be black—but my own crime that dogged me and terrified me. Because I was in the prison uniform now, and the prisoners had all gathered around me and were pointing at me, and sneering, and looking at me with hate and loathing and disgust, and calling me filthy names; and I heard one of them say: ‘Any man that’d do that should be gassed!’ Then I heard the others start to hoot and holler and shout: ‘Gas him! Gas the dirty sonofabitch!’ And it seemed that only the guards, who were themselves scornful and mean to me, kept the other prisoners from coming at me. And I kept struggling for speech and trying to say: What have I done? why am I here? what is my terrible sin? But my voice got all lost in the shouts and the cursing of the other prisoners. Then again the dream became confused, and time seemed drawn out into infinity, and the days and months and years passed forwards and backwards, and I seemed to be forever climbing endless steel prison ladderways and going through clashing gates and doors, chased down by a guilt I couldn’t name and burdened with my own undiscoverable crime. And all around me not even the companionate misery, but only the loathing and the hatred, of my fellow-damned. And throughout this the wretched and ridiculous hope: that somehow and at some time my uncle would get the governor to turn me loose. Then the dream got switched around again and once more I heard the other prisoners saying: ‘Gas him! Gas him!’ and then as God is my witness I was suddenly stripped to a pair of black skivvy drawers —that’s the way they gas you in North Carolina—and with the warden at my side, and two frock-coated preachers fore and aft, I was being led off to the lethal chamber. Well, I guess only up to a certain point is a dream like that supportable, even to one like me who was plunged into his own handmade hell. And so then I woke up beneath the blanket half-smothered and howling bloody murder with the vision in my brain of the dream’s last Christ-awful horror: which was my uncle, my kindly good old baldheaded uncle who’d reared me like a daddy, standing with a crucible of cyanide at the chamber door, grinning with the slacklipped grin of Lucifer hisself and black as a crow in his round tight-fitting executioner’s shroud… .”

He halted, then shivered as if from the cold. And he didn’t say anything more for a long while.

“Well, I jumped up out of bed sucking for air and clawing at space, and I stood in the middle of the room, shaking in every bone. I don’t know how long I’d laid there but outside it was night. Through the cracks in the blinds I could make out a glow of lights over the Gare Montparnasse and far off a couple of red beacons shining on the Eiffel Tower. And there was a radio blaring somewhere down on the street, I can still hear it: the applause and the laughter and the whistles and the voice booming:
‘Vous avez gagné soixante-dix mille francs!’
And there I was in the middle of the room, shaking and clattering as if I had St. Vitus dance. And trying to get something said—a half-assed prayer or a word —but unable to move my lips, as if every voluntary impulse inside me were frozen and paralyzed with horror. And thinking over and over: If I had a drink, if I just had a drink, if I only had a drink—but knowing I’d left the bottle along with my sketch pad in the Luxembourg Gardens. And then not knowing what to do … suffocating again with anxiety and dread, and hopelessly burdened, as if the weight of all this air-filled void around me were pressing me down with invisible hands. Then I called out for Poppy, but still no one was home, and I saw them all dead and drowned, lying beneath the streaming Seine where I had told them to throw themselves. Then for the first time in my life, I guess, I honestly, passionately yearned to die—I mean in a way that was almost like lust—and I think I would have willingly done myself in in an instant if it hadn’t been that the same dream which pushed me toward the edge also pulled me back in a sudden gasp of crazy, stark, riven torture: there wouldn’t be any oblivion in death, I knew, but only some eternal penitentiary where I’d tramp endlessly up gray steel ladderways and by my brother-felons be taunted with my own unnameable crime and where at the end there would be waiting the crucible of cyanide and the stink of peach blossoms and the strangled gasp for life and then the delivery, not into merciful darkness, but into a hot room at night, with the blinds drawn down, where I would stand again, as now, in mortal fear and trembling. And so on in endless cycles, like a barbershop mirror reflecting the countless faces of my own guilt, straight into infinity. And so, lacking a way out, lacking anything, I went over to the bed and crawled back under the covers and hid myself from the night.