The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (144 page)

She asked with a smile, as though Stanley were playing a game with her, but he said,

—Now, lie down. Lie down. You lie down for a minute . . .

—But where is he? the smile left her face as she looked at him.

—Now you lie down for a minute . . .

—Where is he? she cried out.

—Who? Stanley brought out finally, standing as though afraid to approach her for she had come more alive than he had ever seen her, ever, he realized, except at night when the lights had gone out.

—The man . . . they took out of the sea? She became unsteady for a moment, appealing to him.

—Why they . . . he . . . the one they brought up in that thing, he’s probably in the ship hospital, he . . . but you . . .

—Oh yes . . . she whispered hoarsely, —take me. She came toward Stanley, toward the door behind him. —Take me there, take me to him.

—No you . . . now you lie down. He seized her arm and they struggled. Her strength was remarkable, more than his, but desperate and unable to sustain itself, while Stanley fought to hold her away from the door, to hold her back and away from himself, as though he knew from experience what he was doing, though even this did not mitigate the terror in his eyes, struggling with certainty, and the certainty that he would finally lose: for he was shocked at her strength, but not with surprise, shocked with familiarity. It was the same strength he fought at night: the same dreadfully familiar twisting body, the same hard fingers twisted in his, nails cutting the backs of his hands bending them back, drawing them down, the same leg wound around his, the shoulder wrenching away and then dug sharply into his chest, the same arm suddenly flung round his neck, the same hot face, and hot breath, and the hair blinding him, suffocating him, wet with his own sweat and burning with his own breath, until now he got two arms under hers, and with his hands up on her shoulders from behind held her away, her head flung back, fingertips digging into his arms, he stood unsteadily with a leg through between hers and her body still twisting against his where they met.

He was weak, and he clung to her. All this time the motion of the ship had kept them up, where one who might have lost balance on a level floor and gone down was buoyed up from behind as the deck rose, but now, as the port side came up again, and no struggle to sustain them, they went down. His balance gone, Stanley managed
to push one more step toward the bed, and there came down on top of her.

—Let me . . . take me . . . she whispered, almost piercing his shoulders with her nails, as he still held her, and could not let go. He could not move, though she writhed under him; he could not breathe, though her breath poured up at his face and was withdrawn sharply, raising his chest on hers; and though her eyes were closed he could not close his own but stared at all this, familiar and dreadfully light. Then Stanley’s shoulders shook, and he twisted hers back in his hands. His elbows dug into the bed and his chin came up, his legs hardened and his feet lapped one over the other came rigid and straight to the toes, the rigor of death setting into every extremity as life went out of him, dissolving his senses, melting everything in him until it was drained away, and his head dropped, eyes closed on the pillow.

He recovered suddenly, pulling himself up on his elbows, the same shock of consciousness that woke him every morning. It seemed a full minute before his heart took up beating, and then pounded relentlessly. He threw his face down into the pillow, and pulled the pillow up on either side of his head, his whole frame shaking. Then he raised his head and looked round the empty room. He threw his feet over the side of the bed and stood up, caught his balance on the back of a chair, started a step and then, his eyes fallen on his unfinished work, palimpsests on one side of the table and clean scores on the other, but vacant, staring eyes, he hung there, suspended, —Anathema . . .

Then he moved slowly. Stepping with feet wide apart he gained the chair, where he sat down and drew off his trousers and then, without looking down, his drawers. Then he got up and wet a towel and, looking away from what he was doing, saw first his face in a cabinet mirror, turned quickly to escape it from that to the wall and saw there the yellowed crucifix, moving gently on its nail. He closed his eyes and stopped, a hand to his forehead, and there was a knock at the door. He waited, his shoulders drawn tight, paralyzed. The knock sounded again. He stepped to the door, not knowing whether he was going to open it or hold it closed.

—My dear boy. . . . he heard from the passage, and waited, holding the door, until there was a snort, and heavy footsteps, receding. Then he opened the mirrored cabinet door, got out a pair of clean drawers, gazed at the blue suit unworn since his mother’s funeral, hanging there, swinging gently as though to recall him to it, and turned his back quickly. He got on the clean drawers, hopping about on one foot and then the other, informally, as though pursued by puffs of wind from different and unexpected directions.
He hesitated over the trousers he’d been wearing, fell back on the bed pulling them on, and was out and up the passage a moment later, the drawers and the wet towel wadded into a bundle which he threw over the side when he reached the deck.

It was dark, night swelling and falling around him, and there was a moon. He clung there staring at it. And in its light the ship seemed to fleet over the surface scarcely touching the water but to break its crests, a spectacular unreality which sent a shudder of excitement through his emptied frame, fleeing with no more weight than the weak ship’s lights above him. He clung as though to save himself from going over, not falling, but simply going over the side and out onto that swarming brilliance where everything would be all right at last.

When he would look back over it all, what had happened, and what was yet to happen, this was the last moment of the voyage that he honestly, clearly remembered.

Father Martin’s face was illuminated full from an uncurtained porthole, standing with his back to the rail on the First Class deck. Up the steps, Stanley started to rush toward him when a light sprang up in the face of the man talking to the priest, a light cupped in one hand against the wind, to show the face strong in profile, the eye shining from its surface. The light went down, drawn by a cigarette, flared up as the man shrugged, and went over the side a red speck. —Of course I still am, my dear fellow. We’re both probably working on the same thing now.

—You haven’t changed, the priest said after a pause.

—Semper aliquid haeret . . . you remember?

The priest turned his back and went up the deck. Had he followed him, Stanley might sooner have found what he was after, for a few yards on Father Martin was stopped by a hospital attendant to whom he listened for a moment and then followed quickly. But the shadow remained at the rail and Stanley turned away from it, and soon got lost.

In a bar, Don Bildow caught his coattail. —I didn’t know you were on board! . . . I want you to meet Miss Hall. Mrs. Hall? Mrs. Hall.

—How do you do, excuse me I . . .

Don Bildow, in a threadbare light brown suit, yellow and brown necktie, and plastic-rimmed glasses, stood up looking translucent. —Wait . . . he said, turning his back on Mrs. Hall.

—But I can’t, I . . .

Don Bildow was clutching a recent copy of the small stiff-covered magazine which he edited, and, from the stains on the cover, it looked as if he had been carrying it for some time. From his eyes,
it looked as if he had had a good deal to drink. “Mrs. Hall” was watching him critically from behind. —Listen Stanley, I’ve always thought of you as a . . . somebody I can . . . somebody I share a lot with . . . said Don Bildow with a hand on Stanley’s shoulder, appraising him for some mutual infirmity, —and I . . . listen Stanley, have you got any Methyltestosterone? I’m with this girl, see? This Mrs. . . . this girl, and she . . . you know she wants me to go up to her cabin with her now but I haven’t got . . . I didn’t bring any Methyltestosterone, I mean I had some but my wife . . . I left it . . . Have you got any?

—I . . . excuse me, I don’t even know what it is, I have to go. Stanley broke away from the limp grasp, and turned a few feet away recalling, thinking he might have asked Don Bildow if he had seen her; but Don Bildow was back deep in conversation, telling “Mrs. Hall” about —My little daughter, she’s only six and she was all swollen up when I left, I shouldn’t have left I know it, I have terrible guilt feelings about it, all swollen up in the middle . . .

—And you’re the young man who wanted to trade some Dramamine for some Phenobarbital?

Stanley turned to the tall woman, automatically held out his hand as he was accustomed to do when something was offered.

—But what do you need them for, you’re all right, the tall woman’s husband demanded. —You can walk, I can’t even walk.

—They’re not for me, she said to him, —they’re for Huki-lau . . . now where did that boy go?

At the door, Stanley had to wait a moment.

—After you, Senator.

—After you, Mister Senator.

—Senator, you’ll be doing me a great service if you’ll go first and help me out, I can’t even see the door, sir.

Stanley saw her pass, outside on the deck, running. —Excuse me, I . . .

—What? . . . Senator?

—Excuse me, sir, I . . .

—Oops! . . .

—I’m sorry, I . . .

She was not in sight, but Stanley hurried in the direction she’d gone. He dropped the sticky pills into his pocket, found the tooth, and ran clutching it. Rounding another corner, he saw her feet through a flight of steps; but when he reached them, and got up them, she was gone again. He stopped to get breath. A man in a dinner jacket approached, and Stanley, thinking, stopped him to ask for the ship’s hospital.

—You don’t look ill, my boy. Stay out and get a little air, thet’ll straighten you up quicker than all the ductors . . .

Stanley ran on over the metal plates, and finally he did reach the ship’s hospital, but she was not there. At any rate he did not see her when he came in. Few of the beds were occupied, and round one stood a screen against which shadows moved, and he went there.

From within came the steady murmur of Spanish, interrupted but unbroken by subdued words in Father Martin’s voice. Stanley stood listening to the confession, bound, not understanding its features but only what it was. Then the murmur subsided, broke in a cough, took up again more rapidly and abruptly ceased. There was silence. The shadows on the screen moved, and then Father Martin’s voice took up, a monody hardly breaking the reciprocal sounds which bound the ship in motion, no more pressing or importunate, and no more faltering than the movement of the ship itself into the darkness. Bells sounded somewhere, clear tones which penetrated the misereatur, hard separate sounds which signaled the Latin syllables with consequence: Stanley was counting them. For no reason, he had never learned the simple system of ship’s bells and seven might be any hour; but now each one pinioned his tension, waiting for the next, listening, as he waited watching the shadows, for one of them to take form and move of itself. Then the bells stopped and left him swaying on the firm undulations,

—Per istam unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam . . . He smelled oil, or it seemed, burning oil, —indulgeat tibi Dominus . . . the shadow of an erect thumb drew out elongated on the screen. —Quidquid deliquisti per oculos . . . Then he saw her, moving slowly and more clear as she approached the light, her dress wrinkled and torn at the bosom, hair in disarray, and catching light her eyes were wild. —Deliquisti per aurem . . . the voice came on with intolerable slowness, and that because its progress seemed to draw her on and restrain her at once. —Deliquisti per manus . . .

When she broke and ran toward the screen Stanley stayed her no more than a shadow thrown across her. Nor did her body when she flung it forth heaving with sobs, seem to disturb more than a shadow so suddenly fallen upon him the figure laid out there, exposed for the last touch of forgiveness upon the flesh where all of its impulses reared in one. And like a ragged shadow her hair almost covered his lined face, and her left arm round his head and his shoulder in her other hand so forcefully that it appeared to rise slightly from the bed, nothing moving but her lips on his ear, —Oh yes . . . her voice broke but she would not leave it, —Oh yes, oh yes . . . Oh yes . . .

The left hand of the man on the bed came up slowly. It moved as
though with life of its own into the shadow of her thigh, and there under a final hieroglyph of veins it came to rest.

Then there was no sound, of voices nor of any voice: and without, her shape flung down there appeared no longer dirigible. The only thing to bind time together was the reciprocal motion of the ship: yet in the moments of the prow dropping forth into a trough far ahead and shaking the fragments of its advance down in shudders all about them, Stanley had long since begun, repeated every motion of battle, every twist of the past convulsed nights, every skirt and dash in this sciamachy brought up firm now with Father Martin’s hand on his shoulder until he straightened himself back to its force, straining away at last, rending away his spoil and leaving a dead man laid out in the light.

Together they staggered down decks, down steps, companionways, passages, nearly fell in the pool shifting just before their own door, and once inside it was as though they’d never left: buff-painted metal walls studded with double rows of rivets, metal above transected by a steel I-beam, steel under foot in plates lapped with rivets, the closed door flush and no way out but the ventilator, and this whole severe enclosure of angles driven by vibrations, in motion with no direction, it was more than as though they had never left it, as though they could never leave it, and had never been anywhere else. Stanley looked at his wrist watch, as though knowing what time it was might confirm something.

—Why did you take me away from him? she asked quietly.

Stanley looked up from the watch face to hers, and gaped at her. —But he wasn’t . . . he isn’t . . . you . . . That’s all he could say; but she was still waiting, standing still against the roll of the ship and staring at him, her plain dress wrinkled and torn at the breast where he’d torn it, and on her face a look like she’d had that day he found her in the hospital, a day in his childhood it struck him now. He took one step toward her and raised his hand. —Now . . . and he stopped as though something had caught in his throat: he had started to tell her to lie down, as though that could ever be an innocent proposal again, and a pain of a novel and intimate sort shot through him from behind to confirm the cleaned empty feeling his weak legs supported in witness.