The Nightmare Had Triplets (23 page)

    To that, Hagith replied only: “Homage to thee,
Smirt, sole lord of Amit now, dear Master of the Shining Ones! all homage to Smirt, whose names manifold, whose transformations are sublime, whose purpose is hidden! But a thing done has an end. The appointed hour has struck. So must we depart, because the term of our stewardship is over. So must cry farewell to you, dear Master, whom we may not imitate joyously any longer.”

    “I regret that, Hagith, I regret it in all sincerity: for while your efforts to realize my books, to actual my philosophy and my vision of human living were not wholly successful, yet I always felt you did your best. Nobody can do more. And besides that, the imaginings of Smirt were perhaps a little beyond your merely divine powers.”

    Then Arathron said: “That is a true saying, O Lord of Amit. Yet is it equally true that we future tax-payers must go upon the journey appointed for every Shining One.”

    “Ah, but, but, after all, my dear Arathron,” Smirt consoled him, “you are only false gods, you should remember, out of an anonymous German work first published as lately as 1686.”

    “And are you sure of that, dear Master?” said Arathron, brightening a little.

    “I am quite sure,” Smirt replied. “You will doubt find a copy in the Library of Congress.”

    “To think of that now!” said pallid Ophiel, smiling outright. “We did not know that Congressmen liked to read about us.”

    “Congressmen, my dear Ophiel,” Smirt remarked, “are very often surprising people in all sorts of ways. But, as I was saying, your tenancy of this place has been so much clear gain. As false gods, you were not entitled to be here at all.”

    “And besides that,” said tall golden-colored Bethor, chuckling, “inasmuch as we are only false gods, it does not matter the least bit what happens to us. I see the point, dear Master; and it is a great comfort.”

    “It should be,” said Smirt. “It should delight every one of you to reflect that in defiance of all justice, and in violation of all probability, you have thus had your fling in my dream: for nobody, be he god or man, can hope to have more than that anywhere. As for the impermanency of your divine fling, alas, gentlemen, I can but remark that this is a characteristic of every known form of fling. All greatness is perishable goods: you have perhaps heard that Queen Anne is dead. We must face these losses. You would do well, my dear friends, to observe with what equanimity I am facing your losses at this very moment. For, as becomes a sound logician, I grant that all power and mirth, and all beauty, must perish inevitably, and that I, even I, it may be, shall not endure forever.”

    But at that, the disemployed Stewards of Heaven cried out, in anguish,—

    “Dear Master, pray do not talk to us about any such horrid notion!”

    “Well, well,” Smirt soothed them, “it may be that contingency is not likely. Still, I am forced, through a proper sense of modesty, to consider that off chance now and again, because the urbane are not ever vainglorious.”

    Then all the Shining Ones departed out of Amit, a great deal cheered by Smirt’s consolations, although Smirt noticed that a black dog, which had a white tail and four white feet, followed after the seven large ash-colored figures and sniffed at fourteen no longer divine legs rather hungrily.

    Now at Smirt’s elbow stood an untidy young man. And he demanded of Smirt,—

    “Did you ever shout into a hurricane?”

    “Well, what between one thing and another,” Smirt answered, “I am afraid I never quite around to shouting into a hurricane.”

    My question (the untidy young man continued, frowning) was rhetorical. So please do not put me out by attempting to answer it. I repeat, then, Did you ever shout into a hurricane? That is what I am condemned to do, crying out my just demands for applause and opulence and the homage of all publishers, in the bared teeth of a tempest,—a tempest of mediocrity which engulfs me, and which scatters among its howling winds the cry of my genius, just as mediocrity has always tried to subdue into nothingness the rebellion of superior persons.

    It may be that you find the statement extreme, that you think me presumptuous. Yet should gold be esteemed the less golden because it happens to be covered with the slime and muck of unrecognition? I am like Prometheus, now that the vultures of despair eat continually at my liver, for the editors of all known magazines have rejected my manuscripts. With such
bitterness does fate as yet treat me. I intend, nevertheless, to raise a proud head above the stale levels of mediocrity.

    I hear you mutter, impatiently, What the hell is this jabbering about? It means, Smirt, that all passes. At an appointed hour the Stewards of Heaven have passed from their thrones in Amit, and you reign here alone. At an appointed hour you too will pass; and I intend thereafter to become your successor here. I like the looks of the place just as it stands, but when my time comes I shall liven it up a little, with a copy of
Das Kapital
and a few strong-backed young women.

    In the mean while I write—oh, God, yes! quite unsuccessfully. Somebody or other, as you may remember, calls it spoiling good white paper with strange black marks. Yet in spite of myself I continue to make such marks upon paper. I hate writing. It is detestable. It is horrible. It is torture. It is agony. I hate it like death. Yet as one clings to life, so do I write in order that I may supplant you, Smirt.

    But that is not all of it. I write in order that I live. I do not mean, in order that I may support myself: Poppa is quite well-off, on account of our famous capitalist system. No: I write in order to giving
me my one unanswerable reason for existing. I seek alleviation of this most dreadful of dreadful diseases, worditis, in the balm of that applause which is due to my genius. Upon the more foggy side of oblivion my present lack of a suitably appreciative audience becomes just plain agonizing hell.

    Yet,
sacre dios,
do you think I complain? No: I say my say and have done. I am a man of few words. That is strange, because I have many sensitive nerves. I feel life in many different forms. I suffer in many variegated forms. So it would appear but natural that I should need many words in order to express myself fully. Yet I do not. I am gifted with concinnity, that most enviable of endowments, which I found only last week in the dictionary.

    Do not confound this rare talent with diffidence. An unrecognized writer, like a whore, knows no shame. That modesty which they continually outrage flees from both of them; and this fact is remarked on by their near relatives. When you happen to be very proud, as I am (for we have a family crest), these comments become painful. But I am like a betrayed—no, I mean, a knocked-up and unwed woman; nature has made me pregnant with The Word, and I must have lexicological parturition or die. In childbirth there can be no modesty. Modesty is an attribute of success and attainment: I shall have time to be modest after I have kicked you out of this place and my genius is recognized everywhere. Meanwhile
I demand recognition in vain, and the gnawed crusts
of egotism are all that sustain me.

    It is very peculiar that I should find life a futile affair, for I am eighteen, with a fine sense of humor, and all women love me. Genius attracts women irresistibly, the canoodling pretty bitches. Then when they get knocked-up they carry on like hell. You would think it was my fault, to hear them talk, and Poppa is as bad as they are. These bourgeois people do not consider that I may be the genius who will interpret the youth of this age, the youth that is so hopelessly muddled, the youth that finds sex to be the actual motivator of all life.

    Yet I do not know if this is true, or even just what it means. I often say things like that. They quite upset Mumma. Nevertheless, I am certain that I have genius, and I need not be backward about showing it. I am gold covered with the muck of this world’s stupidity. Where is that magazine editor who will wash away the scum of oblivion so that I may scintillate. It does not matter. He will come by-and-by. Until then, I ask you, I just simply ask you, to look at stuff they do publish!

    I try to content myself by speaking, with cool moderation, these few well-chosen words. Yet words at their best, as I said only the other day, in a rather neat little study of a boy that screwed his sister,
then had to cut her throat afterward, words are blurred tags attached to our qualities and to our passions and to all other affairs; and we human beings are like hurried shoppers looking for life’s bargains in a department store’s dim basement. The first tag that our eye catches we are apt to accept. “Smirt” is a word. People accept it just now. The tempests and the oceans of my genius will end such nonsense.

    For words, I repeat, are like shouting in a hurricane, they are like a half-teaspoonful of sugar in the salt sea, and they are like a number of other things which do not at this moment occur to me. I must think up a few more comparisons at leisure. I must not, you understand, speak rashly about words, merely because I happen to be a master of words.
Noblesse oblige.

    For I am a real writer. I do not write for school girls, or truck drivers, or grocers. I write for the elect few. It may be that you, Smirt, think that I am a flickering light doomed to expire without hardly casting a shadow, without ever finding a suitably appreciative audience. I do not concede that.

    To the contrary, when I listen to the subconscious Me which is my genius, then I pity you, Smirt, for I know that I shall ultimately write much better than Smirt has ever written, and that I shall see into life more deeply, and feel life more sensitively, and react
to life’s horror and vileness with, as it were, a wider gamut of overtones. My work will be me strong and virile than is the filigree fiddling of Smirt because my superb and forthright work will be a love child, a very lusty bastard begotten upon realism with the phallus of agony.

    Oh, I do not mince matters. I say “bastard” and “phallus” right out, with the boldness of self-assured genius. You have already heard me say “bitches” and “whore”; and I say all sorts of other startling things. My titanic and lascivious utterance abounds in such discordant chords. And, far from destroying its symmetry, they bind all yet more tightly together.

    As I told a girl only last night, when we were playing stink finger, and talking about Me, my intrepid indecencies are like mortar mixed with ambrosia, binding together blocks of translucent alabaster. For these things just come to me; just all of a sudden I can feel the repressed energy of my genius flare with gigantic sunbursts of cosmic power, and then I say things like “bitches” and “whore.” I do not really have to invent these things.

    It follows, Smirt, that very soon I shall have a story accepted by one or another magazine: my genius will thus find its suitably appreciative audience; and then Smirt will be quite forgotten, you big piss-ass, because of his fundamental venality.

    Now when the untidy young man had finished speaking, he went away, picking at his nose, and using the proceeds thriftily. And Smirt shrugged his shoulders.

    “Dear me,” said Smirt, “but what an extremely blatant and unprepossessing person is my heir presumptive, with his demands for a suitably appreciative audience! I was not ever, I believe, not ever quite like that. Still, one does catch the resemblance.... Yes, it very well may be that my dream is now making bold to imply a somewhat impudent moral. So I cry a fig for all dreams!”

    Nevertheless, the intrusion of this boy bothered him. Smirt seemed to be finding everywhere in his dream, like a vague and undesirable permeation, the auctorial temperament. It had seeped, as one might say, from the All-Highest to Company and to the bungling Stewards, descending thence to the lowest
possible point, to its nadir, in this lewd and loud mouthed and wholly unpleasant stripling.... Yet boy—that was the odd part—might possess his quota of genius, after all.

    “Each one of us,” Smirt reflected, generously, “must go through this pimply and autopathic stage in some form or another, at the beginning of every aesthetic career.”

    Afterward one learned, more or less, how to produce one’s own notion of art in a manner somewhat farther removed from rebellion and blatancy. One became, it might be, urbane. The trouble was—and Smirt admitted its existence frankly—that nobody’s notion of art was intelligent save only Smirt’s notion.

    So did Smirt, very reluctantly, see himself as a small lonely island of intelligence, about which lapped an unfathomable and unending and unconquerable ocean of stupidity. The varying notions of All-Highest & Company, of the Stewards, and now of this loathsome boy, had displayed, rather pathetically, an earnest desire to penetrate the secrets of creative art, in the same instant that these notions proved each of these persons to lack the needful ability. Smirt—and he must face the fact bravely—was an unparalleled genius, to whom all other creative artists were abysmally inferior; and for whom nowhere in the universe was there a suitable audience, or even a worthy disciple.

    “Well, and what follows?” Smirt said, with unshaken courage. “The thought is not strange to me.”

    Indeed, this thought had come to him upon several occasions (he could now recall) during his recent stay on Earth, in the time when Smirt was writing his elaborated and jewel-colored prose, of a sort, as Smirt very slowly learned, which was not any longer appreciated, or in fact quite understood, by most of Earth’s literate persons.... For a quaint heresy had sprung up among human creatures, somehow. They believed that prose, howsoever magically constructed, was only a vehicle, a species of trash wagon, meant to convey such rubbish as were human ideas, from the author’s mind to the mind of his reader. Yet no human idea, Smirt reflected, was either truthful or of any lasting use, because human ideas were evolved, of necessity, by man’s fallible mind from the data misreported by man’s inadequate senses: all human ideas were perceived, by-and-by, to be ephemeral: and the artist who for his medium employed human ideas, it mattered not of what nature, was but a sculptor who modeled in snow.