Against the Day (121 page)

Foley,
in one of his canonical outfits, was seen leaving town the next morning, with
what was described as a grumpy expression on his face.

Kit woke to see
looming over him the face of a Dr.
Willi Dingkopf, framed by a haircut in violation of more than one law of
physics, and a vivid necktie in fuchsia, heliotrope, and duck green, a gift
from one of the patients, as the Doc presently explained in a voice hoarse from
too much cigarette

smoking, “Handpainted, as therapy, to express, though
regrettably not control, certain recurring impulses of a homicidal nature.” Kit
gazed at, or perhaps into, the tie’s ultramodern design, in which its disturbed
artist had failed to include much of anything encountered in the natural
world—yet, who knew? maybe if you studied it long enough, familiar shapes
might
begin to emerge, some in fact what you might call, what was the
word, entertaining—

   
“Hey!
what are you—You just
hit
me with, with that
stick?
”

“An ancient technique, borrowed from
the Zennists of Japan. Why were you staring so at my necktie?”

   
“Was
I? I didn’t—”

“Hmm
. . .” writing in a notebook, “and have there been any. . . voices? seeming to
arise in the classical threespace but, if we perhaps would take one more,
conceptually allbuttrivial
. . .
step?
into a further, as you would say
. . .
dimension?”

   
“Voices,
Doc? from another dimension?”

“Good!
reasoning powers, you see? you’re getting saner already! You must not feel
alone in this, Herr Traverse. No! You have merely undergone a small
perturbation of the Coconscious aggravated by chloral abuse, which, once out of
your acute phase and among these wholesome surroundings, tends to pass
quickly.”

   
“But
I didn’t say I heard any voices. Did I?”

“Mm, some memory loss as well
. . .
and, and ‘Traverse,’ what sort of
name
. . .
you are not
also
Hebraic,
by any chance?”

   
“What?
I don’t know
. . . .
Next time I talk
with God, I’ll ask.”

“
Ja
—well,
now and then one finds an
Hebraic indication,
accompanied byfeelings of
being not sufficiently Gentile, this is quite common, with corollary anxieties
about being
too Jewish
. . .
?”

   
“You
sound anxious yourself, Doc.”

“Oh,
more than anxious—alarmed, as I observe, strangely, you are not. By the
millions now into your own country they are
streaming
—how naïve do
Americans have to be,
not
to see the danger?”

   
“Jews
are dangerous?”

“Jews
are smart. The Jew Marx, driven by his unnatural
smartness
to strike at
the social order
. . .
the Jew Freud,
pretending to heal souls—it is my livelihood, of course, I take
exception—the Jew Cantor, the
Beast of Halle,
who seeks to
demolish the very foundations of mathematics, bringing these Göttingen people
paranoid and screaming to my door, where naturally I am expected to deal with
it—”

   
“Wait,
excuse me, Herr Doktor,” somebody piped up the next time

Dingkopf delivered this speech, which happened to be during a
grouptherapy session, “Cantor is a practicing Lutheran.”

   
“With
a name like that? Please.”

“And
far from ruination, what he may have led us to is a paradise, as Dr. Hilbert
has famously described it.”

   
“Dr
. . . .
David
Hilbert, you will
note.”

   
“He’s
not Jewish either.”

   
“How
well informed everyone is today.”

The
Kolonie
proved to be a wellventilated complex of glazed yellow brick
buildings, solidly constructed on the principles of Invisibilism, a school of
modern architecture which believed that the more “rationally” a structure was
designed, the
less visible
would it appear, in extreme examples
converging to its socalled Penultimate Term—the step just before
deliverance into the Invisible, or as some preferred to say, “into its own
metastructure,” minimally attached to the physical world.

“Until
one day one is left with only traces in the world, a few tangles of barbed wire
defining the planview of something no longer quite able to be seen
. . .
perhaps certain
odors
as
well, seeping in, late at night, from somewhere upwind, a wind which itself
possesses now the same index of refraction as the departed Structure
. . . .
”

This
was being explained earnestly to Kit by someone in a guard’s uniform, whom Kit,
in his innocence, assumed was a guard. On the shoulder of the uniform was
displayed a patch showing a stylized human brain with some sort of
Teutonic
axblade
sunk halfway into it, which Kit took for
Kolonie
insignia.
The weapon was black and silver, the brain a cheerful aniline magenta. The
motto above read
“
So Gut Wie Neu,
”
or “Good As New.”

They
were out on the “Dirigible Field,” a notional sort of plane surface where
Klapsmühle
activities included earth displacement, rock excavation, and surface
dressing, under the supervision of a platoon of “engineers” with reallooking
surveyors’ instruments and so forth, who did not appear to be inmates of the
Kolonie,
though around here one so seldom could tell.

There
was great excitement in the
Kolonie
today, for at any moment, a real
Dirigible was actually expected to come and land at the Dirigible Field! Most
of the residents had never seen a Dirigible, but there were a few with no
shyness about describing it to the others. “It will come to deliver us from
this place, all are welcome, it is the express flight to Doofland, the
ancestral home of the mental inmate, it will descend, a gigantic triumph of
bohemian décor, luminescent in every color of the spectrum, and the Ship’s Band
will be playing old favorites such as Ό Tempora, О Mores,’ and ‘The
Black Whale

of Askalon,’ as we happily troop on board, into the
streamlined gondola suspended exactly at the Point of Infinity, for the
Dirigible’s secret Name is the Riemann Ellipsoid,” and so forth.

A football, booted from very far
away, now came sailing overhead, and some mistook it momentarily for the
Dirigible, whose arrival, it was hoped, would not conflict with any of the
football games that seemed to be in constant progress on the Dirigible Field
all day long and particularly in the dark, which was actually the preferred
condition, though it made for a different style of game.

“This ball has about as much bounce
as
the head of Jochanaan,
”
somebody
cried out, a reference to a recent therapeutic excursion the inmates had made
to Berlin to see a performance of Richard Strauss’s opera
Salome,
from
which Dr. Dingkopf had come away muttering about “a severe neuropathic crisis
of spirit abroad in presentday Germany,” although the group
themselves—not unreasonably, given Strauss’s own description of the work
as a scherzo with a fatal conclusion—had kept breaking into insane
laughter, which soon spread from the oneandahalfmark seats to the “normal”
folks in the rest of the theatre. Since this trip,
Kolonie
attendants
had been obliged to put up with the new catchphrase, whether on the football
field or in the dininghall (“What are we eating?” “Looks like
the head of
Jochanaan
”),
or to
listen to the religious bickering of the Five Jews, which somehow was the only
part of the opera that everyone, it seemed, had memorized, note for note,
perhaps to annoy Dr. Dingkopf, who did begin to show the strain after a while,
being reported wandering about the grounds at odd hours singing
 
“
Judeamus igitur, Judenes dum
suhumus . .
.” in a distracted tenor.

“
Ich bin ein Berliner
!
”

   
“Excuse
me?” The patient seemed anxious to speak with Kit.

“He will not harm you,” Dr. Dingkopf
assured him as attendants adroitly steered the patient away. “He has come to
believe that he is a certain wellknown pastry of Berlin—similar to your
own American, as you would say,
Jellydoughnut.
”

   
“How
long’s he been in here?”

Shrug.
“A difficult case. The
jellydoughnut
being such a powerful metaphor for
body and spirit, to find one’s way back to sanity merely through reason becomes
quite problematic—so we must resort to Phenomenology, and accept the
literal truth of his delusion—bringing him into Göttingen, to a certain
Konditerei
where he is all over powdered with
Puderzucker
and
allowed to sit, or
actually recline, up on a shelf ordinarily reserved for the pastries.

When he starts in with his
‘
Ich bin ein
Berliner,’
most
customers try only to correct his diction, as if he is from Berlin and has
meant to say
‘
Ich bin Berliner
’
—
though sometimes he is
actually purchased
—‘Did you want a bag for
that, madame?’ ‘Oh, no, no thank you, I’ll eat it right here if I may.
’ ”

   
“Well—if
that
doesn’t bring him back to reality . . .”

   
“
Ach,
but no, he only remains inert, even
when they attempt to
. . .
bite
into
—”

Several hours
later
, Kit became aware
of a huge, soft, indistinct mass in the gloom of the dormitory, giving off the
unmistakable scent of freshlybaked pastry.

   
“Shh—don’t
react, please.”

   
“It’s
O.K., I was only lying here, observing the wallpaper in the dark.”

   
“Oh?
Really? Is it—what is it saying to you?”

“It’s
already led me to certain unexpected conclusions about the automorphic
functions. How’s everything with you?”

   
“Well
first, allow me to point out—
I’m not really a jelly doughnut.
”

“Got
to say, the resemblance is, well, amazing, and you can talk, and everything?”

“It
was the only way one knew of to contact you. Your friend Miss Halfcourt sent
me.”

Kit
had a look. Another victim of enchantment—all Yashmeen had had to do, he
reckoned, was give this customer a kiss.

“It’s
like invisibility,” the apparition continued, “only different? Most people
can’t admit they see me. So in effect they don’t see me. And then the
cannibalism issue of course.”

   
“The
. . .
I don’t exactly . . .”

“Well.
Puts them in a bind, doesn’t it. I mean, if I’m human, and they’re considering
me for breakfast, that makes
them
cannibals—but if I
really am
a
jelly doughnut, then, being cannibals, they
all
have to be jelly doughnuts as well, don’t you see?” He began to laugh merrily.

Kit
glanced up at the radium dial of the clock on the wall. It was half past three
in the morning.

“Let’s
be on our way, shall we?” The oversize pastry item led him down a corridor,
around a few corners, out through an equipment room into the moonlight. “I’d
like to escort you all the way out, but it’ll be breakfast time soon and
. . .
well, you understand.”

They
found Kit sleeping by the fence. Dr. Dingkopf was waiting back at his office
with a great bundle of release papers to be signed. “Your British friends have
interceded on your behalf. What does my own professional

judgment matter, twenty years of clinical experience, next to
this sinister

tribal conspiracy
. . .
even
in England
. . .
not the pureblooded
nation it once

was
. . .
Halfconrt
. . .
Halfcourt? what kind of a name is
that?”

Yashmeen caught
up
with him at the café
they’d been in the other evening. He hadn’t exactly got back to sleep nor seen
much point in shaving. “Come. Let us walk Der Wall.” It was a peaceful morning,
a breeze ruffled the leaves of the lindens.

   
“How
much do you know of Shambhala, Kit?”

He
turned his head, peered at her out of one eye. Wasn’t everybody being a little
too damned businesslike this morning? “May have heard the place mentioned once
or twice.”