The Recognitions (90 page)

where the nurse, watching the doctor leave, poured the wrong solution into the glass without spilling a drop, and left her old patient gazing at that submarine chimera. Stanley's mother gazed. It moved gently, suspended, as though melting there before her eyes. She dug nut-sized knuckles into her eyes, and looked again. Gumming imprecations of an exhausted nostology, she slept. She woke, jolted into consciousness by a belch, pulling her three limbs toward her, startled. What was it? She looked into the glass. There was nothing in the glass but a placid clear solution with a slight pink precipitation on the bottom. It was too much. She must get where she was going while there was still time. Who but a priest, dead for a thousand years, could have read the words which formed themselves on those remnants of lips, as she made her way informally across the room, moving as though encouraged by fitful gusts of wind, weightless, like a sail without a ship, toward the windowsill. The window slid up easily; the shade rolled up like a shot. The forceps shifted, the music began, and she crossed herself, nightmare of the girl she had been two generations before, running to the water's edge, stopping for a breathless instant there to commend her own salvation before she dove in. Transfixed below, the darkness unfurled upward, pierced by-lights at each point in its ascendance until it hung, impaled, on the city. Over and under the ground he hurried home. Mr. Pivner's lips moved as he walked. Perhaps it was this complement which gave him, as the seasonal festoons gave the pitted face of the city, this intense quality of immediate realization, real no longer opposed to ostensible but now in the abrupt coalescence of necessity, real no longer opposed to factitious nor, as in law, opposed to personal, nor as in philosophy distinguished from ideal, nor the real number of mathematics having no imaginary part, but real filled out to embrace those opponents which made its definition possible and so, once defined, capable of resolving the paradox in the moment when the mask and the face become one, the eternal moment of the Cartesian God, Who can will a circle to be square. Mr. Pivner's monologue was neither gibberish nor absent mumbling. In a clear, if inaudible voice he was accounting for every one of his movements. It was difficult to know (and he might have had difficulty himself, saying) whether he was carefully preparing an explanation, or believed himself actually before a Tribunal where he had been summoned to account tor his movements. What had once been anxious inclination was become severe practice; it might have been brought on by the hours he had so recently suffered at the hands of the police, an inquiry which had been, by the standards of almost everyone else who passed through the station house that day, an indifferent, even tedious procedure, in light of the compass of their own applied, and again detected, talents. For Mr. Pivner, it worked quite the other way; and it was, perhaps, just this quality of merciless boredom with which his captors treated him, the entirely disinterested manner with which their relentlessness pursued him, that impressed his own impersonal presence in the world most deeply upon him. Under their questioning, he began to see himself capable of almost anything, someone to be watched, and accounted for after those awkward incidents which composed the biography of the city whose turbulent diary he was accustomed to following in the newspapers. He looked at his wrist watch, lowered it as his lips kept moving, and abruptly raised it again, first to his eyes, then his ear, and walked faster. He bought a newspaper, turned his corner, and it was not until he was mounting, motionless, in the elevator, that his lips stopped, finishing his account to the Tribunal as he approached his own door, and the locked-up disposal of witnesses waiting to confirm him. The key half in the lock, he paused, listened, and moved frantically, shaking the door to get it open and himself through, to strike at the light switch and reach the telephone which he seized and raised so quickly that it hit him in the eye. —Hello? hello? He heard that sound of patient vacancy which is called the "dial tone." —Hello? hello, operator? His hand quivered over the dial: he spun it all the way: (—What number were you calling, ple-ase.) —Operator? Oh, didn't this . . . I'm sorry, I thought I heard it ring. He moved more slowly, returning to the hallway to remove his hat and coat, and pick up his newspaper. He placed the newspaper on the table beside his chair, turned on the radio, and went into the bathroom. He came back carrying his medicine and a syringe, paused to change the station on the radio for no reason but to change it, and returned to his chair to relax into that state of spiritual unemployment which he called leisure. Then her eyes caught his, staring out at him wistfully from the harsh newspaper reproduction where she stood patient in long white stockings; and Mr. Pivner looked confused, as though he'd been abruptly handed back among the classic peoples of pre-Christian times, whose dates, declining with the advance of time, had always given him the feeling that they had lived backwards. He picked up the paper, and his eyes followed automatically the feature story 562

account of the little Spanish girl soon to be canonized, while his mind rummaged its rich embarrassment of glories and defeats no longer news, for recognition. He opened the page, and saw the headline on the bus gone down a Chilean ravine, killing one American and eleven natives, before he realized it was an old paper, and looked at the date to be sure. He folded it quickly and thrust it at a wastebasket behind him. He found the newspaper he'd just brought in, and settled back with a sigh, a weary sound suggesting a suspicion, if he had stopped to reconnoiter, that if the evil thereof is sufficient unto the day, so is it to a place. For had he known, no great disaster had occurred in that region of Chile where the bus crashed since the nineteenth century, when the cave-in of a burning church gave hundreds of bereaved families grief sufficient for decades; and these eleven new and sudden deaths were enough to be mourned for another score of years, deeply felt without publicity, realized in their full right as suffering and death, ungalled by the attrition of a world's tragedies circulated elsewhere on what had been, but remained, there, hectares of green trees. If you can count, you can paint ... he read, an advertisement in the evening paper. New Subjects for your Paint-It-Yourself Collection . . . and his lip drew in the tic which came when he was weary: for over this artistic suggestion loomed the specter of his retirement. "Yes, even if your artistic talents are zero, you'll be able to decorate your house, from wall to wall with fine paintings and be able to say: 'I did it myself.' " The music was Francesco Manfredini's Christmas Concerto, ap-proaching resolution in the last movement only to cease abruptly in favor of a voice, a voice laden with the viscous pauses of sincerity, feigning itself the last movement of that concerto interrupted with such confident presumption as though, in those minutes of music the listener had got, not bored but lonely, even alarmed at being left so long abandoned to the allurements of some possibility of beauty. Isolating in confident repetition the name of a product which had the distinction of never having been a word in any language, the voice came to the rescue, stickily compelling, glutinously articulate. "Just match your numbered pre-planned canvas to the numbered pre-mixed paints. If you can count, you just can't miss . . ." be read, before he turned the page, this reasonable appeal, his head already nodding over retirement from the means which had become the only reasonable end. Still it was to him that they appealed; and a hand went to his pocket, where the past (his own, for there was no other) lay coined in justification. With his last attention, he noted that the Burma Translation Society had published How to Win Friends and Influence People, and that U. Nu (Thakin Nu) hoped for more books, so that his nation would not "remain static as ignoramuses . . . This indeed is a matter of life and death to all of us." His eyes closed slowly; and when he thought, he fastened his hand on his extravasated heart, glad if only of recognition and familiarity, proof against Reason, and the cries of the mendicant Past. When the doorbell rang, Mr. Pivner started violently, and grabbed the telephone. —Hello? hello? The doorbell rang again. —Oh . . . I'm sorry, he said to the sound of patient vacancy, —I thought . . . He received the large package from the delivery boy, a wild-eyed figure about twice his own age who stood waiting dumbly for something more than his words of gratitude. —For me? Pzimer? Is it addressed to me? Oh, I ... wait, he said, unnecessarily, —here . . . He fetched a quarter up from his pocket, which was accepted with a grunt. As the old man turned away, Mr. Pivner stopped staring at the package and cried out, —Wait! Here, I ... merry Christmas. He handed over fifty cents. The robe was too big. Nevertheless, the pattern was so conservative, and the material so fine, that this seemed rather a mark of luxuriance than some deliberate hebetude on the part of the giver; also in a way it marked the thing as a gift, for had he got it himself it would have fit perfectly. For that reason, any notion of exchanging it left his mind directly it arose there. The card said simply, "Merry Christmas from Otto." And though he was surprised when he realized it, was it really any wonder at all that Mr. Pivner, whose world was a series of disconnected images, his life a procession of faces reflecting his own anonymity in the street, and faces sharing moments of severe intimacy in the press, any wonder that before he knew it, he had be-seeched familiarity, and found himself staring at the image of Eddie Zefnic, as he sat running the end of his finger over the fine ridges of wool challis draped across his knee. Wearing the robe, he stood up. He looked about him for something to do, something which, done while wearing the robe, would establish it as his own. First thing he noticed, there on the photograph album, was his syringe. He picked it up, noted that he had intended to attach a new needle, and went into his bedroom to get one. He opened a small upper drawer; and as he took a needle out the dull luster of gold caught his eye. He lifted the watch out by its chain, and dangled it there for a moment before he opened it. He pressed the stem with the heel of his palm, and caught the opening spring of the hunting case on his fingertips. Then he stood staring at that unchanged continent face, the hands stopped upon his father's forsaken past at XII; though whether noon or midnight, he did not know. The hunting case closed with a snap on this instrument which seemed, as his hand closed upon it, capable of containing time, time in continuum, where all things, even ends, might be possible of accomplishment. Mr. Pivner put the watch into the pocket of his robe, feeling, as he did so, Otto's card there. He put the card into the drawer, where the watch had been, and returned to the other room with the fresh needle. Still, it was to him they appealed, (for that time coined dead in his pocket). In just a moment, Necrostyle will bring you the correct time. But first, friends, do you feel dull, logy, just not-up-to-much, first thing in the morning? Well . . . Mr. Pivner took his injection with great care, as he always did. When he was finished, he was told that the correct time was six-thirty. He was startled at that; and on second thought he lifted the gold watch out of his pocket by its chain, opened it, and pulling out a lever on the side he turned the stem, and brought the gold filigree hands into concert with his own affairs. —Every hour, on the half-hour, the latest news, brought to you by ... He was suddenly in a hurry. He removed the robe with reluctant care and put on his jacket. He moved around the room, straightening things, or only touching them, as the voice rehearsed unimproved details of the war which no one talked about, commencing a summary of the same news summarized an hour before, which it had taken that hour to rewrite. He hung the robe carefully, and noticing its lopsidedness as he did so, removed the gold watch and put it into his vest pocket, not pausing to thread the chain through a buttonhole, for he was in a hurry, having intended to reach the hotel well before seven o'clock tonight. He put on his coat, and the green scarf, and had his hat in hand before,he went to turn off the radio, waiting courteously, as he did from habit for the voice to finish a last-minute bulletin.—In the metropolitan area, police are on the look-out tonight for a large man with a red, noticeably swollen face, who is believed to have abducted a group of seven Boy Scouts. It had begun to snow again. Mr. Pivner hurried along the slippery sidewalk and caught a bus almost immediately. It did, in fact, wait for him, which put him in even better spirits as he sat down and looked out the window, allowing himself to marvel at this dreadnaught which bore him away to the south, and the wonders of science which made it, not simply possible, but ordinary. Then the bus drew to a stop, and moved again reduced to a crawl, a cautious hulk in the solid dark line of vehicles. Traffic in the other direction was stopped; and as though conducting tourists reverently past a venerable setting of martyrdom, the bus crept past the figure of a man on the glistening wet surface of the street. One of his feet was balanced up on the toe. His hat was four feet away, and all that moved was his smashed umbrella, its black festoons stirred by bits of wind. It was the image of the foot, so delicately awry, which held Mr. Pivner even as they went on. His bus passed another, stopped in line in the opposite direction. His driver leaned out, to call to the other driver, —Ya got a knockdown. Mr. Pivner's lips were moving again. He opened his newspaper, and stared for a moment at the headline, Minister Dies in 51-Day Fast Seeking "Perfect Will of God," trying to compose himself. Then he turned the pages looking for that ad, If you can count, you can paint . . . There were times when he had considered taking up a hobby, painting? or building ships in bottles; but something that would interest him. Seeking those words, I did it myself, his eye caught a picture: Raise Chinchillas! in Your Own Home . . . No Mess! No Trouble! They all appealed to him, counting him excellently satisfactory just as he was; but if, on learning mistrust so late, he was not: how would they reward his ingratitude? how requite his betrayal? Science assures us that it is getting nearer to the solution of life, what life is, that is ("the ultimate mystery"), and offers anonymously promulgated submicroscopic chemistry in eager substantiation. But no one has even begun to explain what happened at the dirt track in Langhorne, Pennsylvania about twenty-five years ago, when Jimmy Concannon's car threw a wheel, and in a crowd of eleven thousand it killed his mother. Mr. Pivner stared at the chinchillas. They looked warm. "Here's to fire, not the kind that burns down shanties . . ." he found himself reading a few minutes later, bound by necessity before this scribbling on the wall. He shifted his eyes, chagrined at being seen staring with such attentive preoccupation at this, and the various graffiti surrounding it, even by the young man similarly preoccupied, and equivalently occupied, beside him. But the picto-graph his eye caught was so alarming that he lowered his eyes, glimpsing in that brief embarrassed sweep, the face beside him, a haggard lace drawn over a sharp profile which stared intently ahead. And his eyes were drawn slowly back up this figure his own height, near the same stature, slowly up, then snagged, drawn up short, and back, caught on a corner of green. And he was staring at that, down at the bit of wool protruding from the coat's pocket, waist-level, 566