Mad Meg

Words, however, gentlemen, WORDS! words do more than fly from their tails, burning like the peacock. The words I mean were meant for grander sounds than the groans of the stoically wounded, for half-whole fathers by their fires—to warm the children’s bedtime toddy. I mean those words which, when beautifully contrived and drawn together by an Angelo, stain the sky they’re shouted at, outshining any sunset. And when we put our thoughts together well, men think well of us; when our speech is passionate, they feel strongly, when our vision has become entirely verbal, it will be as if we’d lifted covers from the blind; they’ll canary in their cages, and there’ll be daytime always. In defiance of nature and every law, night will die neglected. Words, then, gentlemen—not in Mother’s homesweet mottoes, but in the miseries of history—those that go like loneliness through the soul: these are the words I mean.

And I wished for an interruption, a catastrophe, a cave-in under our seats; I wished all those cool cellars where barrels of beer were stored would open their mouths and quaff us until we were quenched.

Think of the safety a word sets before us. Does the word ‘prick’ stick us? what bumps when ‘bump’ is spoken? is there any blood in ‘bleed’? And they are just a beginning. We’ve plain desires, but complicated cookery. Men look at them—these words—and see . . . salvation. Soon then, so beautiful they seem, so full of peace and promise—whatever their subject; upon our sentences stand others nearly as lovely; we take an almost holy office from their Being, and in this heedless way, continue into commentary. Thus the thief consoles his paid-for dinner with a pilfered fork. There’s no end to this ludicrous folly. Accounts again are rendered; thought takes thought, not things, for substance; language replaces life; history usurps the past, and we make sounds about sounds without limit; we steeple up a church to worship all the names we’ve given Time.

Mad Meg. His hot hall held us like a thermos.

. . . un mot meilleur, et meilleur que meilleur . . .

 So you seek safety in your sentences? Well, they seem safe, safe as sofas. Safe as sticks before they detonate. For if some smooth Bible-shitter mistranslates his text, for instance, sick from what he’s eaten maybe, drunk, malicious, who knows? does it matter? can we care? he may alter history for a thousand years—hence for a thousand thousand—hence forever. My good German gentlemen, consider. This false text, this shabby botch, this piece of presumptuous incompetence, this snot from a Jew’s nose, this, and not the “True” text—this is what we worship, found our church on; it’s the wind we use to pump up our philosophy; it’s the banner we go to war with; it’s the lance with which we run a million through, and in whose name—isn’t it?—as simple servants of the Lord—aren’t we?—for the general welfare and the greatest happiness—don’t we cheat and lie and steal and jail and shoot and hang, electrocute, and break and smash and burn, confine, and rape and flay, interrogate, and blind and wound and murder, bomb and cannon, confiscate? It’s not the pen that’s mightier than the sword. It’s not the ink or printing press or sudden plenitude of paper, but the spiritual system which these invoke, as patricide once figured forth the Furies—concepts, gentlemen, Plato’s pitiless angels, the featureless Forms; so that now even a dense dry cold book—Das Kapital—can consume a city. Whole families, countless generations, can be impaled upon a verb—fried, boiled, quartered by the Word . . . the word which was with God from the beginning.

Silence fell from his slowly tipped-over hands. I thought I would do sums to keep my sanity, like men long in solitary.

Myths . . . Myths grown fat and syphilitic . . . Myths are history, and myths are made, preserved, and propagated in some language. Now then, my pure, young, decent countrymen: whose tongue shall be the one to wag?

Tabor took hold of his tongue with his fingers and pulled it roughly through his mouth. Just listen to me, would you. What am I saying? What is fake or false about a tidal wave? I denounce one text to turd you with another. Mine, I say—ours, we cry—is the true text. Heedle-deedle-da. What is this Truth we so freely prattle of—whose coming will cure plagues, throw extra walls around beleaguered cities, turn the spear’s bite into a tummy tickle? Honestly now . . . my fair-haired, blue-eyed gentlemen and hope of Germany—we do not care, will not give a soft stool for the august verities if what we believe is convenient; if it dishes our enemies to the ground; if it makes us rich; if it fends off our fears; puts us in bed with women, kicks others out, and deprives them of the pleasures which, from some inadequacy, we cannot share. What trivial nonsense truths are, how false in fact their elevation. It’s a mere name, yes, a flattering designation, a title like Right Reverend, the Honorable, or Most High (any baron’s is better), a pure canard, this Truth; it’s Descartes’ deceitful demon set in his cups to dream a doubting I—yes—it is a cacofogo’s gloat then, just one more tasteless jape of Nature, or, if you like, the last itty-bitty fib of God.

Tabor grins, claps his hands, applauds. Nevertheless, he says, more than Trismegistus, he declares, more than Cagliostro, he insists, it’s both the magic and the magician.

You shall listen. I shall tell you. It’s a war of lie against lie in this world where we are, fancy against fantasy, nightmare throttling nightmare like two wedded anacondas, and anyone who’s taken in is nothing but a bolo and a bumpkin. But that’s just exactly what we all are—hoddydoddies—aren’t we? Aren’t we all so hungry, anxious, eager, to believe? like men in prison, aren’t we skinny to be screwed? and don’t we think that we’ve escaped to freedom when we drink our wits out, dance our reason loose, and crack our nuts between the fat legs of some four-mark whore?

Nothing in the manner of the time prepared you for Mad Meg’s little obscenities, but going to his classes was like going to a circus or a carnival, a brothel even; certain standards were suspended for the visit. He was unreal, something to be stared at from a distance, something happening in quite another space, just as the space of cages, where monkeys calmly fondle themselves, seems removed by even more than species from ourselves. Meg was an aborigine on display, and you lined up to see him. But if we did not take him seriously, weren’t we moved? He was bottled in his lecture hall, a specimen, or kept there like a creature in the zoo, and it was precisely this which allowed him to reach us. When the panther can’t pursue and take us, and we’re safe behind his lines, when even his eyes are painless, and

Sein blink is vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe

so müd geworden, doss er nichts mehr hält,

then we can begin to admire his strength, his lazy grace, and lose ourselves in his beauty. Well, there was nothing exactly beautiful about Magus Tabor; he had no grace; but he did have uniqueness; he was one of a kind, and you felt the authorities, like scientists, were studying him too. So Tabor was not a dangerous explosive as he liked to hint, though that is indeed what he passed for. He was merely a fuse. While the sky outside collected its energy, inside, Mad Meg loosed the storm.

You all want fine degrees to dangle between your legs, gentlemen, don’t you? Desirable. Correct. But proof of what virility when this fresh phallus sprouts from your head like a sniffly nose? In any case, it isn’t reason that’s the slut; it is not learning. It’s the Truth this learning lusts for that’s the royal pig; and we are pulled behind our skull’s cock like a carriage—powerless without it, we mistakenly think, to reach a destination.

Wahr-heit, he’d say, coming down disdainfully on the final t. On any journey, she’s a cold, infested inn with fine signs. Dich-tung und Waahr-heit. Which one’s the man and which the wife? Ah, she’s an easeful prostitute, this handsome doss we long to lie our minds with, for she will bed-bite, infect us with a slow and deadly sickness. What a price— to have a climax like the mayfly’s.

I knew that the last weeks of Tabor’s life were his last weeks when Tabor fell silent. The phrase, in this case, was not a cliché. I saw him fall. And his eyes would fit on some nothing beside me and seem to glaze. One hand on my arm, he would suddenly peer into emptiness like Rilke’s panther, the hand gripping me as if he wanted to take me along. I can’t see the past, he told me. I’m blind. When he did speak he spoke slowly, mechanically, wearily turning a crank. My one -ruth, he said, I -un -uth. Hissreee -ass -tee -ages, -ree. And very slowly he would pull one finger away from the rest, and then another, until he held three. A chancre, I made out he said, a sore, the source of the event. This was followed by a pause, a false calm. Then that sore or invitation would break out everywhere. Quibbles, quarrels, strikes, riots. This second stage was divided from the third as the first was: by an interval of peace. Then the disturbance which had been on the surface would sink inside the situation, and the nation would begin to come apart from within. And I would watch him shake and his eyes dim. That extraordinary seeing was gone.

You shall listen a little longer. My unravelings reach their end. What I’ve said to you today, and every day so often through the year, is very obvious, very plain, very easy, very simple and straightforward, very clear. Gentlemen: now I close. If the study of history is the study of language in one form or another, and if we really fabricate our past, not merely—weakly—live it; then we can begin to see how the world was Greek once, or was Roman, since every page of consciousness was written in these tongues then. All the central documents—laws, ploys, poems, reports, abiding wisdoms, letters, scientific learning, news—were couched in Greek or Latin phrases, and the chief historians consulted them, composed their chronicles from the same speech, in the same words. Don’t you see that when a man writes the history of your country in another mother-language, he is bent on conquest? If he succeeds, he will have replaced your past, and all your methods of communication, your habits of thinking, feeling, and perceiving, your very way of being, with his own. His history will be yours, perforce. Per-force! I say make others—why be made? I say that we, after adolescent stresses natural to growth, and now arriving finally at our militant majority, should accede—we should invade! capture the Kingdom, take our rightful place, recompose the world in our, not someone else’s, image, and impose our way of seeing on the rest of this poor aged blindness men call Europe. And what is Europe for us? a beginning! Our hemisphere’s been Hellenized, Romanized, and wrapped in Christianity like a shroud. We wait—wait—wait—wait—wait—wait. Tabor kept the cadence with his fist. When will our turn come? Gentlemen, our circle has squared. Our turn is here. Thus set, we lean into the mark, and we must leap with all our energy and learning toward the tape. Conquest via history is the only kind with any permanence. But we must, to succeed, believe in ourselves, believe we are magnets, centers, sources. Then all shall be drawn to us. Why? How can we do this? We can do this because we have a dream round our head like a halo, a crown. It is the dream of all men: to re-create Time. Don’t you feel it? It’s like a cloud—those dark thunderheads outside—clouds zebra’d with lightning. To call the cuckoos from their clocks, halt heaven with an upraised palm, hold the sun from its horizon: only we can do it!

Oh, gentlemen, it has been Sunday in our country far too long.

Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen!

The students were murmuring, stirring in their seats. I saw several in tears. Meg regained silence with outstretched sleeves.

Could any history of Western Europe, written in Romanian, become a classic? The dying states, the Spains, can they produce it? or the little and the lost—Albanias or Belgiums?—the chronic losers—Polands—can they call up the necessary visions? Nor can the parasites of war, the Swiss or Swedes, who always feed in safety (for they’ve no gumption in them, no divinity), lift their weight up the steps toward empire. To undertake such a task, let alone succeed in it, requires in the historian a sense for the inevitably destiny of his people and the importance, in furthering their aims, of dominating, assimilating, altering everything, of replacing the customs of the nations to be conquered with the folkways and traditions, the laws and literature, the confident future of your own. Enlist yourselves in this army. Give up small loves and local loyalties for this; sign your fortunes over to it, never waver; in the face of every enemy persist; and then I promise you, young gentlemen, that the future—the future shall speak only German!

GERMAN      GERMAN     GERMAN     GERMAN

came the reply, the shout—the students standing in their chairs.

GERMAN      GERMAN     GERMAN     GERMAN

The dignitaries rose and faced us in a line. GERMAN, they cried. GERMAN! was our antiphonal response. GERMAN. . . GERMAN! GERMAN. . . GERMAN! Magus Tabor had disappeared—he had not engineered this demonstration for himself—but it was a long time, and a few seats were broken, before we filed out and struggled through the raining streets to soothe our tired throats with beer.

At Death’s Door

His eyes seemed unnaturally bright, as if there were no other stars.

I suppose I had expected the standard—that is, the sterilized—hospital room, empty of everything except the equipment of death, perhaps a few useless flowers, lots of white to flatter the patient’s pallor by aping it. Certainly Meg was shivering in the center of a wide expanse of sheet, but otherwise the walls were brick, the courses gray from the years they’d been about their business, the single window small, with an almost waxy pane, so that from where I stood in the open door its view of the world was smeared. The sill’s paint had peeled without a beach’s burn, and the uneven stone floor felt more like one a medieval castle might put beneath your feet, cold too, though it was summer and otherwise warm in the town.

Oddly off center, a solitary bulb, inadequately shielded by a green metal cone, hung from the ceiling at the end of a thick, black rubber-covered wire, and when you pulled its beaded chrome chain, the lamp’s green shade bobbed.

I had not been summoned, so I appeared in “death’s door” with some trepidation. One glance told me that Mad Meg would be mad no more. Or rather, it would now be his body which would behave crazily, allowing his soul to lie still as a stage on which others trod. The air smelled slow as smoke.

I did not understand, then, what it meant to be brought down by your own bones, though I had certainly observed the steps made by last legs, dragged against their will into making another move. I naively thought of it as learning to walk once more, as though babyhood had been born again, but I know now that what I was seeing was the breaking of a skill not its unmaking, the losing of a learning like one who loses love. There is no second childhood sitting like a bench beside the grave.

Mad Meg wasn’t to die in midcry, amid the consternations of his concepts, full of his own vinegar and other people’s piss. He would die in his shroud, chilled to the skin, and consequently cold beyond mere touch, a cold which began within the soul and froze its slow way out.

As he himself said, or tried to say, when you die this way you die bit by bit, death’s rattle is continuous: first, perhaps, as a slight cough squatting in the lower lungs, or a dryness which makes the skin rough, a burning in your urine as though it had been heated on the stove, accounting for the burble in the kidneys, but then, maybe, it sounds the knell of alertness as the eyes fade from things like evening light and distraction sits in the center of sensation like a turd on the dining table; or it’s your grip, and you can’t make a fist, your nails lose their luster, your speech its zip, you cannot easily wet your lip, or see your shoe where it’s slipped beneath the bed, and when you slide to its edge the floor is so far away, as is every feature of a familiar face or the taste of food in bowls you have to holler at to see, while tingles try themselves out along your legs which you haven’t flexed sufficiently today though you were told to by the orderly, because you were attending a funeral for your fist (the ceremony seemed a bit hurried this time), and were at that point in the rite where you were expected to say something fitting about those formerly serviceable fingers and the ball, better than twine, they could close into, except the throat had become rough the way a road is worn by the heaviness of its traffic, and appeared ready to match the other humiliations of your illness with insufficiencies of its own—so soreness spreads in the sheets which have made it until you have no real skin beyond this unpleasantly encompassing sensation, and even your ability to have a rest, a good snooze at least, is gone, though you haven’t the strength to toss and turn, and then you begin to pass in and out of yourself like a fly in a room—that’s the buzz your ears hear as they try to shut down—hence you hunger for silence like a piece of cheese to soften in your mouth, though nothing any longer has a name, neither parmesan on the pasta, nor swiss in the trap, nor brie on the bread, nor cheddar melted over meat, nor chunks of feta among the greens; moreover, you really haven’t any hunger—eating is the hospital’s habit—you haven’t any needs but the need to be released, drawn into your illness like an arrow in a bow—and then you know you are a goner—okay go, you say, let’s go—but the going still goes on like the slow drip of a tap, your nose, your catheter, IV—an abbrev which sounds like someone crying out pain—IV IV IV—or maybe you are hooked up to other items of instrumentation, so the departure of your life reads like tables for the train, tides for which the ferry delays: when will the waters rise? when will your local leave? but you are condemned to remain; they shall find you stiffened in your seat in the waiting room, bag by your foot where your vials were stored, right hand open on your knee where it was trying to make a fist when you snapped like the snapping of a pencil lead, always all of a sudden—damn.

I did not know what you did in front of death, what you said to the dying, how you conveyed concern, whether you could be any kind of comfort because those who had so far died in my life had died out of sight, behind—it seemed—dozens of doors, and I had simply sat in a rolling car and then on folding chair till it was over. When somebody said: “go play.”

Nor had I read about it much during my growing up, as many adolescents did, nor let my head entertain seductive thoughts of the Beyond, flirting with what seemed so remote, so romantic, so unreal, there was nothing to fear, little chance my winks would be misunderstood, my smiles lead to a mistake; that I’d be asked for a date and have to hold a bony hand during the last dance, listen to the bones shake as I was doing now that Magus Tabor had turned into his palsy, and not another symptom showed but the paleness of the blur his body made, quivering constantly and uncontrollably, fluttering where it was loosely wrapped, the white sheet—all he had to hide in—like a sail so battered by the wind I heard the cloth snap.

Yes, the eyes were alive, the eyes of a bad storm, and I tried to fix on them as they were fixed on me, but naturally their gaze had to seem accusing—who knew what dared to enter them and stand before their bar?—guilty because I was well; I was sturdy and upright, imbecile as always in his presence, on the brink of uttering inanities so complete as to bring a smile to the surface of his shivering, delight to his dingy demise—as he might have described it—nevertheless he seemed uneasy skidding like a spoon across a greasy plate, and I was eyed apprehensively, as an insect might eye the approach of my foot, while I stood there in the door and almost said, “Hi . . .” “Well . . .” “I’ve brought you . . .” “Thought you might like . . .” “Any better . . .” “It’s nice out today, not so warm . . .”

He could no longer form words; the air which reached his cheeks was in total turmoil and emerged in burbles between what were thin wiggling, wormlike lips, his teeth having been removed long since, and for many reasons, one that he was biting himself, and his tongue became too wounded to say “scream.” Words were Magus Tabor’s reason for being; breath was merely their carrier, their contrivance; soul was essentially the source of one’s λόγos, as it had been for the Greeks; consequently this illness shook more than his body when it troubled his larynx, wobbled his loose and emptied jaw, plucked at his palate; so that siss boom bah, had he said it, would have seemed profound, the final accomplishment of history’s poet, and an instance of poetic irony too: to the soul go off in a raucous cheer, whistling away from both steam and kettle, the ghost in the machine gone from between every run-down cam and lever where it used to lurk, escaping each murderous movement by means of irrelevance, but now irrelevant even to its own exertions. It was not as if, having lost his arms, he could still type with his toes. He had lost every medium for the spirit’s expression—all but his wary unwavering eyes.

The sorrow I felt, the loss I was realizing, was not for a life, of course, since Magus Tabor was technically still alive, but for that extraordinary consciousness which, principally, his speech was able to convey to me, as well as to hallfuls of others: how else would we have known what paced back and forth in Mad Meg’s head except from his talk, his lectures, his letters and books—those throatier roars? It’s true his body had been a burning bush, but it had burned with his message, his manner, his method, each wholly his, in the tone, taste, type, in the hiss and bite and venom of it, that made his utterance like a snake’s strike, or as he so often said with typical extravagance: I AM MY HIM; listen to my four-square tunes, and be the same. Yankee, are you? revolutionary? then be your own tea, Kohler, pour yourself in the bay so Boston may sip you and be stimulated. That was when I hoped to return to Harvard, and he was full of ridiculous quips about my future: how I should plan, what I should achieve. Well, whatever it was, I hoped not to end like this, in this last sadness, for I was sobered to the soul to know what the magic man had come to, how fate had finally betrayed him, denied him not only a hero’s death, but, in a way, any death at all, any dignity in his old age, any reverence, any, even, farewell from friends.

Nevertheless, whatever posterity might say, the fact was that Tabor had friends, and that I had not been bidden to his doomsday doorway as if I were one. I had come on my own account to pay my last respects to what was left of the composer of history’s hymnal, the singer of history’s lays. What was left to respect proved to be his accusatory eyes. Which roved when I did.

I had actually come to say goodbye in a sincere and simple way, if I could find one. But I could not wish good luck or bid Godspeed—hey, I hope you get to heaven, I think you’ve got a chance, I really do—and I could not utter the clichés which embarrassment sent to my lips: in fact, I could not say anything to someone unable or forbidden to reply, who could only tremble as if in fear, cower under the covers in shame of his situation, with his eyes glowing like an animal caught in a cave, alone, the last of his species, no longer enraged and ready to retaliate, no longer even brave.

Could I hold out my hand and hope to sync its shaking with his? could I break off a smile like a crust of beggar’s bread? speak my mind? die quickly, my friend, let’s get to death without the dance. There was no way to say: you leave one pupil, Professor, among all of those who flocked (yes, like sheep) to hear you, who gave you their one minute of admiration at the end of every holy hour; from them you earned, possibly gained, certainly obtained a single disciple; and you will die now—we both hope, soon—before your solitary follower can disallow you, before he can go back on your word, and besmirch your reputation with the tarnish which will surely darken his own. There is some strange justice in all this. That blot upon his honor, furthermore, will be your gift to him: a set of disturbingly honest and repulsively accurate ideas. For these, he comes to your deathbed now to thank you for simultaneously giving value to, and ruining, his life.

I stood beneath the green shade, soaking up its light, and leaking shadow in a puddle’s shape. The nun who had accompanied me, who opened the door and said, “this way,” had disappeared, as if by means of her strangely winged hat. I thought this was an odd place for a Professor to be, especially one whose gods all came from the Nibelungenleid, although I remembered that Santayana had hung out in a nunnery at the end. Surely Meg had not recanted his views, or had his beliefs as shaken as his body was, or taken these symptoms as a sign that, because punishments were to be tailored to their crimes, his sentiments resembled tics and twitches.

True, muscles jumped; lids flickered; conniptions folded his legs up to his belly only to extend them spastically like a jolted frog; his hair seemed to bend and straighten in an otherwise unfelt wind; his thumbs wagged as if he were hitching two rides on one road; disfiguring cramps grabbed his face, which increasingly seemed made of rubber, and sometimes I thought his ears wiggled comically and his nostrils flared like a figure pretending passion in a silent movie.

How exhausting it must be to be so exercised. Laocoön’s serpents were outside him when they twined about his torso. Meg’s were Meg, intestinal to him. And how could Tabor be fed? Food would spew out of his mouth as fast as it was spooned in. His gullet would also disgorge it. Moreover, his head wagged and bobbed like a badly managed marionette. In an instant, tubes would be tugged from their fastenings in his flesh, were they tried. Strapping him down was not feasible, he would fidget in the loops, and even wrapped like a mummy, his interior would cringe and lungs deflate. I decided to appeal to his nurse to sedate the Magus more severely, put him to sleep, overdose him into nevermoreland.

So he would die as a disturbance. That was probably proper, but it was proper only when put this way, rather than another, which was something Magus Tabor had taught me: wait for the words, he’d say, and then you’ll know what is going on; wait for the words, they will betray their occasion without a qualm; wait for the words, when their objects will become real, turn real as a face turns red with the realization they are being said; don’t deal with the unnamed, they are without signification; remember, to be is to be enunciated—said, sung, shouted— to be syllabated; I was a word, therefore I was; and while I was a word, brief as a breath, held in the head or sustained on paper, prolonged in print., bound as a book, I was like licketty, you understand, like a term on one of the tablets of the gods, like lights made of stars flicked on and off to say: here I am, I’m stage, I’m song, I’m printed on the ticket; so Tabor could die in a thousand descriptions, although each way only once: once as a disturbance, once as a sign from the gods, once as a penalty, once to signify the unfairness of fundamental things, once to be symbolic of his soul’s strife, once to remind me of what he taught, once to be simply another number in the census of the dead that day; the day—evening, midnight, dawn—he did it—he did it—died.

The hall would be ababble until that toy door opened and then a hush would fall, expectation took control of us: what would the subject be today? how would he begin? what was his mood? and that was quickly followed by intense attention, for we were ready to follow him anywhere like lost and hungry pups. Today Meg’s mood was distant, undecipherable, hidden by his shakes, but perhaps it was wrong to imagine a mood existing while he was in the grip, one supposed, of such pain, certainly in the center of the embarrassment his body gave him. All right—his body gave me.

So then, gentlemen, today we do not stand on the edge of tomorrow, as you might imagine, but we stand where we always stand, on the lip of the past, into which our spirits shall enter to become gods, the way Empedocles entered Etna.

Perhaps I misunderstood the situation. Perhaps he had become his speech, and right now his body was a vocal cord, twanging a brand-new tune and telling the tale of Time in an advanced, experimental way, while I, inadequate as always, was failing to follow and rendering his efforts useless. My memory was made of old modes. He’d say: it is an ancient dream, a German dream, but do not suppose only Germans have dreams, or that only Germans enter theirs—not at all, all enter—it is just that some dreams resemble their dreamers, and are puerile, paltry, personal, dressed in wet rags, gutter-fed and sewerish, because they are composed of the aspirations of servants; while others resemble the fluffy white and rosy clouds which painters have drawn to signify transcendence, the hole in the heavens through which Christ’s body will pass on its journey to the throne of God. It is a road that we, here and now replicate with walls of lights, rows of flags, and our own ranks, parting for the passage of our leaders toward our goals.

Mad Meg maintained that death was History’s only subject, and he returned to it again and again, his rhetoric wrestling with Doom’s inherently indefinable lack of character; for death, he said, was vacant as a student’s head, final as an exam, universal as the pox they caught. It was the quicksand into which the whole of thought sank; its finality disposed of every goal, and made every purpose pointless; its generality did the cosmos in, and all the gods.

I knew I should say something, and so I finally did. I said hello. I said I suspected he was surprised to see me. Not enough people knew where he was, I said, if they did he would have more visitors. I said I hoped he was being well taken care of. I hoped he could eat. I said I did not recognize the order signified by the nun’s habit. I asked one question: did he ever sleep? Of course I regretted opening my mouth, especially because, in order to get anything out, I had to pretend to be in a play about Hell and that here was one of the tormented I was scripted, like Dante, to talk to. I said that my work was almost over; that I would be returning to Boston soon (which was a lie because Harvard had not renewed my fellowship); that I admired the New Germany; that my experience in his class had been the most important of my life; that I hoped to emulate his dedication, if I could not match his genius; that I felt, as I felt he felt, alone with my unmentionable ideas; that I certainly could not join the political right, it was made of intellectual thugs and drones, nor the left, of course, either, since liberals were humanists at heart and humanists were vain about the value of man, foolish about his co-called higher, better, nature, and hypocrites about their equalitarian causes.

I told him I hoped never to marry. I hoped to teach as he had the truth no matter what, namely that the truth was a snare. I said I hated the Reds; (said that my melancholy had brought me to the edge. I wondered who the women were who were taking care of him. I hoped he could eat. Did he sleep? Were the days long? Was he in pain? Did they change the sheets? Why was the window waxy? The floors seemed clean. Had this building been a schloss? It was time for me to leave. I still had that accent he made fun of. Perhaps he had noticed that. I had ridden out on my bike. Riding was probably good for me. Were they getting him everything he wanted? Did anyone read to him, show him magazines? Would he like a phonograph brought in? Did he ever see the papers? Did he sleep? I should let him get some rest. I would never marry. I was miserable and afraid to leave. I hated every journey, especially journeys home. Autos made me sick, trains made me giddy. The sheets seemed crisply starched, but were they possibly too stiff? How did he communicate with the nuns? Nuns, I said, gave me the creeps. All that black. These women, though, wore white. Was that a comfort—that they resembled ordinary nurses? Did he have a routine? Did his doctor visit him in the mornings? Did he take the same medicines every hour? Why wasn’t there a better light? the door was awfully heavy, more like the door of a cell; had he ever read Henry Adams? Did he still have the same opinion about the Jews?

Death makes no distinctions, he used to say. It kills us all—man and mineral, plant and animal, alike. It is dying, my friend, who is the snob. Death and dying—what a difference!—they are scarcely on speaking terms. Surely you remember the famous mistake in the Phaedo where, addled by the onset of Socrates’ state—imposed suicide, the participants accept the continuities of living and dying, appreciate their degree-divided characters, their correlativity, only to confuse them then with the finality, the absoluteness, the over-the-edge nature of death, a true Divinity, and the end of all things. Life. Death. Between them is the edge which cuts clean, Kohler, hey? as a whistle.

I could not say, as it’s been said of some, that he was a crank without a quirk, for Tabor was as quirky as they come, bent from birth, I am sure, into odd behaviors, some of which were only known to me near the end, when I visited him more frequently, and would sometimes watch him spill his tea in order to slurp the slips, or place a spoon on his saucer to listen to the silver rattle, or light matches to observe the waver of the flame. One’s dying, he said, ought to entertain.

Death, they say, is democratic. Right? It makes no class distinctions: richer or poorer, better or worse, sick or well, white or black, jew or gentile; o mortal is mortal o, don’t we moan? and mother will go though she suckled us, and father will go though he paid our way, and brother will fall and sister sicken, the snow, the poet says, is subject to the same, the beauty of the breast, damp on a wet stoop, light on a bright day, look on a face, every strength of character, very vice, every species, every holy place, the list of the fragile even has its end, though the list is as long, o mortal is mortal as mortal o, as any which can be composed; whereas the momentary song, which seeks to save itself in memory, and reemerge through another’s tongue, on other lips, which infects mankind with its rhythms, meanings, metaphors, and rhymes, its sentiments and small desires, and tries to placate the implacable by praising it, fearing its powers, praying to its priests, crying mortal is mortal o mortal o, such a resourceful tune is doomed just as certainly as the solidist theory the grandest design, the most convoluted plot, the simplest, plainest, purest line. Mortality itself is mortal, and will one day die, Being go up into the sky like a drying puddle, taking along the stain, the sidewalk, the gravel, the ground, and the very orbit of the earth, also mortal o mortal o mortal o.

My mind is a pair of loose tongs. Yes? Death . . . ? Death makes no distinctions. (And we are privy to another chorus.). It kills kings, dissolves common table salt, each grade and grain without a qualm; without the least remorse erases both roebuck and bloom; stone and stone age and stone quarry and stone townhall, it pitilessly pulvers; rivers, mountains, even seas, it removes; artifacts and foolish schemes, discoveries, conquests, tyrannies—all, everything, anyone, in any realm of being, in any land of bliss or living hell, Gone. . . . Not for good, Kohler. Nor for anything. Gone like the light out. Snick, you see, or saw, snick, you once heard, snick, snick . . . hey? . . . snip, you may have felt, prick? . . . hey? . . . click . . . hey? . . . ck.

I ought, I thought, to remain in this room with the Magus, instead of consorting with my memories of him and his decline: first, Tabor with the little limp, that tremor in the open palms I took to be a sign of his friendship with schnapps, the slight shake in the voice I put down to emotion, then the spells of falling down, when his limbs splayed suddenly like a raggedy man, followed by spasms which would travel across him like a frightened wire, the arm which would jerk so it lifted coffee from his cup, the wringing of his face, painful to observe, like a damp towel squeezing out its sop, die heaved speech which accompanied this—its hoos, hoots and whistles—as his lungs writhed in his chest like weasels caged together.

Weeks before, when he could still talk, although his voice shook is if he were riding a train, I had gone to visit him in his few full rooms, to find the bed he lay in behind the barrier of his books, wiggle my way in between stacks of mags and heaped up papers, coffee cans stuffed with rolls of manuscript, an umbrella at the bottom of his bed like a holster, the floor slippery with loose sheets, picture postcards, shillings, socks and buttons. There were balled papers he used to kick. Overturned study lamps. Posters on the wall he hissed at, on his knees. They advertised his public lectures. Now he crawled about, on a par with the rats. I could write another book, he would brag, in the dust on my discards. What would that book be, I asked, with a smile of the only sort he permitted—serious without being sober. Ah . . . you want to know about my duskbook—yes?—my book, as you would say in English, about the drying day. Now he’d grin. And grimace. They were a blend.

There is the wet death; there is the dry. At death, there are two destinations for the soul, which, for this myth, we shall assume is still alive: the heaven of air, the hell of fire. The four forces do not form a square of elemental opposition, as was formerly supposed, but an oblong like a Pullman—isn’t it? Pullman train. The wet death passes through Hell as steam; the dry death blows like pollen through the cities of the sky to make the residents sneeze: god bless is said by a multitude no one cares is infinite. His laugh would burst out like a child from school, but only for a moment—caught and stifled as a cough ought, covered by a cloth. My dry book would be about the sapless, about the loss of juice, about eyes which cannot cry, about noses which cannot run, cunts which cannot moisten, about deserts and the boring mobilities of sand, of the dry life, which can only run out, never rot, which can come apart, but never decay. It would be the life and death of persons, then, like puzzles, who are made only of small parts, of pieces of pieces, and whose reality rests on what is juxtaposed: next to next makes their nest. He laughed his usual laugh. With these, death plays at jackstraws, lifting each element from among the others without the sign of a shiver from the pile.

He laughed. I was transfixed, bidding adieu in the doorway, saying my last say. He laughed. Out of that shuffling, writhing encirclement of limbs had come a laugh as in old times—his ha! derisive, questioning, a point of pause. All the accents struck like proper bells. He had. He had laughed. And fallen face forward on the coverlet.

Yet it was not his laugh. Now could it be? It was not the last laugh. There would be others. Nor was it Laugh’s laugh. That laugh would not need a lung, a mouth, a laugher. No. It was its laugh. Its. As though it had come from a pack cards with torn corners.

I forced myself to approach him, to try somehow to pick Tabor from his overfold, and place him upright anywhere flat, as you would a tipped top, his skin as cold yet alive as a snake’s (I’m afraid I squeamishly whimpered); but, as if summoned, the Lady of Qualified Mercy was there (Meg’s name for an earlier nurse), brusquely pushing past me to slip her hands under his head. He does this a lot, she rather pleasantly said, turning what could only be called his skull, though it was jumping like a bean, to cheekside. This way he can still breathe. I muttered my apologies. He does it on purpose, she said pleasantly, he will die in terrible fear of God if he doesn’t do something about it—prepare his soul, I mean. Will he do something about it, I asked in considerable wonderment. We shall have to do it for him, I suppose, the nun nurse said, pulling him upright on the bed and wrapping the sheet tightly about his person. It did seem to slow his spasms. As you can see, she said, he can’t do much on his own behalf. The Bishop may take a personal interest. The Bishop himself, I thought. To save the atheist who is no longer mentis? Have they a waterfall for that? some sort of after-the-fact baptismal drench which can he blended with Unction’s redemptive mumbos and sprinkles?

Meg had lived like a wet, full of energy and excess, but I was not sure he had not died a dry, like a handful of seeds on a shaken tambourine.

And were he to cross that threshold while I stood here at his, would I heal the hiss of steam which Hell would heat his soul to, or would I suddenly sneeze, as the spores of him passed without further fuss into Heaven’s handsomely unfurnished outer space?

Maybe what I saw, when I saw Mad Meg writhe, was his body grappling with this question as his mind had wrestled with it earlier; and if the contest went on in the new arena as long and as furiously as it had in the old, then poor Magus. Tabor would jerk about and wiggle for what would surely seem an interminable time, repeating past gasps and grips and knotty gatherings, before his queries were wearied out, and he was allowed, as they say, to breathe his last.

Well, I had one thing at least to hold on to, as well as one relief. I had that last laugh to serve as my dusty answer, and the comfort of knowing that among his many memento mori, there’d be no death mask.