Selected Stories Page 7

Au fond d’un monument construit en marbre noir...

  When you’ll sleep, My Beautiful Darkling

  In the depths of a tomb built of black marble...

  Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal

  They caught him doing an unmentionable thing in the middle of the clearly lighted fairground, while a middle-aged lady looked on with interest before she decided she should be screaming. When she had made up her mind and started screaming, two policemen making their regular rounds came along and brought the man in. This is the tape, taken at the Twelfth Precinct of the City of Ghent, East-Flanders, on April 10, 1979, at 10:45 PM.

  You must help me find Cathy, you must, do you hear me? Let me loose, goddamn it! I won’t run away. But what are you sitting here for—on your fat behinds in warm chairs, sipping hot coffee and swapping dirty jokes? Why do I have to pay all those goddamn taxes every bloody year—just so you can be sitting here, while Cathy is out there somewhere? You’re all so bloody fast when it comes to giving a parking ticket to some poor sucker, but when you’re really needed, where are you, eh? Tell me, where are you then? I’ll tell you, you’re here. Sitting on your asses.

  All right, I’m sorry. Please excuse me, officer. No, I certainly don’t want to make any trouble, not here and not there, either. I didn’t do anything wrong; it was your men that brought me in, though I protested. The lady screamed, you say? Well, no, I don’t know why she should have been screaming. I didn’t touch her, did I? I made no move toward her, did I? So?

  Yes, yes, I’ll be calm—but you see how confused and afraid I am right now. No, I didn’t want to offend you or any one of the other policemen here in this room... I said that? I did? Well, I’m sorry. I apologize to all of you. I certainly didn’t want to hurt your feelings, and I realize now that’s what I have done. Please excuse my harsh words.

  You see? It’s better now. I couldn’t stand the thought that I had hurt any one of you; if I hurt you, I hurt myself. I’m very calm now. Thank you, the coffee is excellent. And very hot.

  Yes, I will do my best to remain calm and explain it all to you, but it is very difficult. Maybe it would be better if you’d just let me go find Cathy myself and... no? No? Oh, well. But time passes, and who knows where my beautiful darkling, my Cathy, is right now? I want you all to help me find her. I don’t know where else I can turn, if you can’t help me. Together we can find her, I’m certain.

  How old is she? Cathy? How could I know that? How old is a darkling? How old or how young is Aphrodite, how old is Circe? A creature as young and beautiful and desirable as Cathy has no real age, and I have never needed to ask that question.

  Of minor age? No, absolutely not—what do you take me for? I’m no Lolita hunter! Of course, nowadays you never can tell, you know, with their oversized breasts and padded bra cups—but you can pick out the teenagers right away. Well, I can! A woman of a certain age gets something particular, a way of moving—you know, not just hip-swinging like those juniors, but a real way of moving with her whole body. They get a certain expression on their faces, a kind of emotional ripeness scripted in their eyes and on their faces. Cathy was like that. Besides, I could read her, so...

  You don’t understand me? God, why am I sitting here wasting my time, instead of searching for her? Why won’t you help me, instead of asking all those stupid questions! Cathy must be waiting for me somewhere out there, and you’re keeping me here.

  All right, all right. I’m sitting down again, see? Look, I won’t stand up again. There’s really no need to be so cruel to me! After all, I’m friendly and polite to you. And please put that evil-looking stick away—you really don’t need to use it on me. I’m not drunk. I’ll gladly blow into your stupid balloon, and it won’t turn green. I’ll even take a blood test. But hurry up then, so we can go and search for Cathy. That’s all I want.

  Where does she live? How should I know?

  I’m not much of a help, you say? Why do you think I’m here?

  All right, I’ll start from the beginning. But that’s just so difficult, because you aren’t like me. You’re strong-willed, a bit stubborn and angry even right now, because you have to listen to me, and you think I’m just rambling and making up a story as I go along. That’s what’s wrong with all of you: you can’t understand, don’t want to believe. How can I tell you something which is not rational? You’ll just have to try to believe me.

  I can taste thoughts.

  So, now I’ve said it. The old drunk has said what he knows you won’t believe. But it’s true nevertheless. I said “taste,” not “read.” It comes close sometimes, but I can’t really read minds. It’s more like feeling emotions... a kind of spiritual... of mental empathy, I guess. I touch your minds with my thoughts, and I know how you feel, and so sometimes I can make an educated guess as to what you’re thinking. Like you there, the officer with the red zits on his cheeks, you’re feeling bored, but you have flashes of internal excitement, very jumpy feelings—so I would say that you’re annoyed you’re having to stay here with me when you’d rather go home and watch the football game that’s on television this evening. And you there, the one who’s scratching his nose all the time, your mind feels very stubborn and cold, as if you’re thinking about which cells are still empty so you can put me in one of them for the night and get it over with. See?

  I haven’t had this... empathy all the time. It started only recently, some years ago, just like that. After the car crash. I still could drive a car then, but now the doctor won’t allow me. I sometimes have moments of forgetting everything, and that could be dangerous while driving. And I don’t have a car, of course; not since the crash.

  I work in a metal factory by day. I fill little plastic boxes with nails. The whole day through. The factory doesn’t have much capital, so they can’t afford a machine to do it. But they can afford what they have to pay me. The doctor took care of that: they had to hire me. But they don’t pay much to an... invalid. That’s what they call me. A mental invalid. Though it was their fault, the crash, I mean. I had been working for them for years. They paid me more then.

  But it was a boring job. Sometimes you just could feel yourself drifting away into sleep. That’s what must have happened to me as I was driving home, that evening after work. I was very tired, and must have fallen asleep at the wheel. Suddenly I woke up with a shock, but by then that traffic sign was already straight in front of me—a metal pillar coming down on me, bending forward as if wanting to melt with the car and make love to it. The car was a total loss, and I had to remain in the hospital for over three weeks. A fractured skull, a brain concussion, some bones broken, but nothing really bad.

  But something had happened inside my head, because shortly after I was released it started. Now I’ve gotten used to it, of course, but in the beginning I felt it like a... disease. A mental disease. So I went to several doctors, but they couldn’t help me. They all said that I was perfectly healthy and normal, in mind and body. But when that metal pillar came down on the roof of my car and hit me, it must have touched something in my brain. Revived some part of the brain that most of us never have learned to use, or whose use has been forgotten through the centuries of evolution. I’ve learned to live with it. More than that, I’ve grown to like it sometimes, and now it’s the only way of living I can imagine. Sometimes I find myself wondering how any of you can feel alive without the power I have. It’s so much more full, complete, knowing how others feel about you and not having to believe their words. But I’m digressing...

  So, that evening I want to talk about, I was walking about the fairgrounds.

  Yes, I was alone, walking about the fairgrounds. What’s so childish about that? I know you’re thinking that. But many adults like fairs even more than children, believe me—after all, I know!

  I just adore fairs. Of course, to me it means much more than just the multicolored turning lights of the merry-go-rounds, the many different sounds and musical tunes reaching you from everywhere in a wild and insane cacophony, crea
ting a beautiful chaos. It’s much more than the smells of hot chips and fritters, and warm apples on a stick, and popcorn with melted butter, and ice cream. A fair to me means people. All kinds of people—everyday and not-so-everyday people—and how they feel. What you see at a fair is nothing compared to what I feel. All those emotions, reactions, feelings—they come at me in regular waves like an enormous sea in which I swim and try not to drown. I taste their emotions as I would appreciate the many colors in the most beautiful and extravagant paintings by modern masters. It must be... No, I can’t really explain it to someone who is not as I am. I can only tell how it is. Or try to.

  Yes, yes, I’m coming to it. I am sticking to my story. But how can I tell you about Cathy if I don’t tell you this before? Else you’ll never understand about Cathy, and the strange way I met her. After all, you don’t pick up a beautiful goddess at a fair just like that, do you?

  Oh yes, I know what you’re thinking, you there with the red running nose: a little streetwalker maybe searching for a client. But it’s not true—not someone like my Cathy! I don’t like to have her insulted, not by someone who...

  All right, sorry; maybe it wasn’t at all what you were really thinking, officer. I’m still very confused. I won’t say what I read... what I think again.

  So that evening I was walking about the fair. When was this?

  About... a year... two years maybe... ago. Yes, it was after the crash, of course. Didn’t you hear what I told you? The cigarette between my lips had gone out, and there was a wind, so I stood in the protection of two fair booths, striking two, three, four matches to relight the cigarette butt. It tasted bad at first; it always does after it has gone out once. But how could I stay irritated in such an atmosphere of enjoyment, such a mental storm as was being created all around me? The real fair was inside my head, spinning in all the rainbow’s colors against the bony insides of my skull. Emotions flapping on bat wings, opening up to me like beautiful dark flowers, shrieking their madness at me inside my head. I was alive!

  The bored little horses, the noisy shooting galleries, the yelling guys selling lottery tickets, the screaming jukeboxes, the pinball arcades—that’s not the real fair. Even the people themselves sometimes don’t really look real at all. It’s as if they're only projections of what’s inside them, the outer shadows of what’s really alive inside them and making them tick. So many empty faces, staring eyes, moving shapes, hands, bodies, feet, the smells of sweat and drinks. My body noticed all this as I passed through them, no doubt looking to them like a shadow, too—one in the crowd, unimportant, not to be noticed.

  And I knew what they were really like. I felt the discomfort of the women with their breasts pressed into bras much too small, the sweat between their clammy fingers, the itch between their legs where they couldn’t scratch in public though they wanted to badly. I felt what it was like to be human, and this feeling made me feel alive. Then. Their emotions passed through me like a picture gallery. And all the faces whispered one thing, the only thing they all had in common: hunger. It is strange how many kinds of hunger exist, how everybody is always hungry for something: food, a badly needed rest for painful feet, fun, a cigarette, though the doctor has forbidden it, the feeling of a woman’s breast, the coolness of a drink followed by the burning inside one’s stomach. It was all there; it always is.

  A group of young people passed me. They were half drunk already—their jackets full of buttons and silver chains and crazy symbols, but their eyes already old and sullen. I felt them laughing at me, with my cigarette butt that I was trying to light. One of them was thinking that maybe it was a joint, and for a moment I thought about offering him my innocent cigarette but then thought better of it. They felt very aggressive, you know, and there was worse drifting just below their conscious feelings—a wave of dark unvoiced anger that could be directed at anyone. I didn’t want to be beaten up by them. They sometimes did this to older people, I felt it. Not that I think of myself as “old”—not after what Cathy proved to me.

  A group of girls was walking right behind them, and their thoughts were so very different. You never can catch them and hold them; they’re always changing, always on the move to other targets. One of them had a new set of false teeth and they hurt badly but she couldn’t take them out. And another one was worried because her breasts were still much smaller than those of one of her friends who was much younger than she was. Their fingernails were painted silver, a glittering of stars, and they kept reminding me of daggers, and of their feelings, just like those silver nails: so bright and glittering.

  The glitter passed. I don’t know if I told you, but there’s a limit to what I feel. A couple of meters only. I suppose I would be hopelessly insane if it were otherwise. Can you imagine all those feelings crushing down on me at the same time? No, I only receive what is within a couple of meters. If there were no limit, I wouldn’t need you now, would I? I would be able to find Cathy myself, anywhere!

  I met many people that evening. I remember a very old man who was suffering from a chronic thirst. And there was a young fellow with a very young girl in his arms, very much in love with him. Her feelings were all rose-red and hot, and he kept on thinking about an older woman whom he wanted to have very much. There was a very young boy, though he must have been older, who kept on counting inside his head how much money he should keep back to go to a whore that night. And there was also a small girl who was very, very angry at her parents because she had to go home just as the fun was starting, and if you can’t realize how burning the anger of a child is, I can’t tell you, not in human words.

  It all kept on turning inside my head, twisting and changing, always the same in some ways and yet always different. Even the same people felt different when I met them the second or third time around. I turn like the merry-go-rounds of the fair, round and round like a crazy wooden horse, and then...

  Then I passed one of those dark, empty spaces between the fair booths, and a sudden movement made me stop.

  It felt like the touch of a shadow, a touch of a dark wing, as if someone breathed inside my brain.

  She came out of that darkness, but hesitated on the very edge of the twilight zone between the streaming light and the running dark, waiting. I couldn’t see the face of the girl; it was as if the playful lights of the nearby booths only wanted to reveal her body to me. Just as if this was a decoy that she used to bait me, a decoy that she sent forward into the light while her face remained in the protecting shadows. Her slender legs shone below the short skirt she wore, cut off halfway by soft leather boots.

  My eyes saw, but with my mind I tasted what remained hidden in the protecting darkness. I felt the waiting, the searching, the hunger and the need of my darkling.

  And I knew she felt my mind too!

  There was no need for words. Sheer accident had put us together in the same circle within a couple of meters from each other but close enough so our minds touched and felt and recognized. We could have spent our whole lives within a few hundred meters of each other without ever having known that there were others like us. My cigarette fell to the ground, and I put my heel on it and finished it off. Little red sparks flew and blackened down to ashes.

  Suddenly she turned and disappeared. I followed her down into the shadow world between the fair booths and trailers. She evaded me with the light-footedness of a ballet dancer, disappearing behind a caravan. I followed the staccato of her boot heels, so sharp and distinctive that all the other sounds of the fair seemed to fade into them. But I didn’t even need those sounds; I could follow her by keeping track of her mind. It was playful and defiant and somehow... different.

  It’s hard to put a finger on that difference; it just wasn’t quite... human, I would say. So very much the same and yet so different from other people’s thoughts, even from my own. When you taste someone’s thoughts, mixed with the now-thoughts and feelings, there’s always a reaching backward and a grasping forward of those feelings; they are always in some loo
se way connected with past experiences and with hopes or expectations for the immediate future, even when the conscious mind doesn’t really think about those. But her mind felt like... like it held nothing but now. There were no links with any past, and nothing pointing to the future. A human’s thought web is spread out, like a nucleus spreading small feelers in all directions of time. Her mind read like only a nucleus, one burning cinder of compressed energy, all focused on the here and now. She looked altogether human, yet I knew that she wasn’t, not completely. That’s why I called her “darkling” right away. Somehow she belonged there, part of the dark side of the fairground, a fleeting shape melting into its shadows.

  Though her feet touched the ground, it didn’t feel like she was walking or running at all. I only followed her mind which seemed to be floating away from me, daring me, enticing me to follow. I didn’t hurry; somehow I knew that I wouldn’t lose her. Deep blotches of darkness exchanged places with waves of sharp light coming down on us as we passed the openings between fair booths or below a lighted caravan window. I got flashes of her face, the big questioning eyes and the flashing of her cruelly white teeth between slightly parted inviting lips.

  It was as if we were acting out a ballet created only for us and by us, Cathy and me. That was her name, Cathy—a name I picked up out of the glittering focus in her mind. And she felt and knew who and what I was, how different I was and felt from the other human beings. We didn’t share the same kind, she and I, but by our being different we felt like fitting links of the same chain bracelet. Can you imagine what it meant to me to find someone who was as different as myself, who understood and accepted my being different?

  Then, when we had approached the dark heart of the fairground, where only the empty trailers and the generators stood, she waited, leaning against one of the trailers, her face again only a shadow. She tilted it slightly to one side, and her hair fell down on one shoulder. Her shoulders leaned against the hard wooden wall, and I almost felt the hardness in my own back. I went to her there. Her hands arose and approached my face like careful and tender small birds, and we tasted the desire in each other as our lips met.