Boswell (50 page)
To my shock, however, I discovered that while I had some tenuous access (through friends, through friends’ friends) to many of the people on my list, I had nothing like the first-hand knowledge of them I needed. I had thought I had done better than that, and I saw that I was dependent on The Club to complete the circle of my intimacies. Of the two hundred people I picked as first choices, I knew only nine well (that, is, only nine knew me) and had been introduced to only fifty-seven others. How I would get the remaining hundred and thirty-four to come to The Club I didn’t know, but at last, starting with my basic nine, I hit upon the idea of an elaborate series of chain letters. (It seemed far-fetched until I remembered that Christ Himself had started with only twelve apostles.) Thus, Nate could be responsible for Frank Sinatra, Sinatra for Darryl Zanuck, and so on. From my reading and personal knowledge I worked out detailed charts demonstrating the overlapping of thousands of relationships, like some cosmic genealogist showing the real though attenuated connections between apparent strangers. Incest, I saw, was a real principle at work in the world.
I was still faced with the problem of reserves, of creating alternates for first choices who would not or could not attend. Now my problem was the reverse of what it had been in the beginning. Then I had been overwhelmed by the apparent superfluity of the eminent; now I was aware that any substitution was bound to be unsatisfactory.
It was the creation of the second team, however, that ultimately brought out my most exquisite sense of nuance and that made the fiercest demands on my artistic imagination. Again I created not power itself but the illusion of power and glamour in depth. A Magi done with mirrors, as it were. In a way I was almost sorry when later I had to scratch off each alternate candidate as first choices made their decisions to come. (It would have been one more thing I had gotten away with.)
Once my lists were prepared the real work began. There were instructions to give the basic nine, schedules and suggestions for follow-ups. All this took time and I saw that the first meeting would have to be pushed back another two months. It was necessary, too, to guarantee the loyalty of my nine workers. Margaret and Nate were easy, of course, but many of the others I had not seen in years. I set aside three weeks for winning them over, and began by trying to revive their interest in the old flamboyant Boswell.
DR. MORTON PERLMUTTER. INSTITUTE OF MAN. UNIFERSITY OF ILLINOIS. CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS. I AM BEHIND CONVOCATION OF CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY, ARTS, MANKIND, RELIGION AND WHAT HAVE YOU. FANTASTIC OPPORTUNITY TO STUDY LIFE AS IT IS LIVED AT THE TOP. MORE FUN THAN A FIELD TRIP TO PAPUA. FREE EATS. FREE SPEECH. FREE LOVE. NATE’S PLACE. NEW YORK. DETAILS FOLLOW.
My Dear Rabbi Messerman,
Shalom:
Your presence is respectfully requested at the charter meeting of a new spiritual organization whose membership will be made up of the world community’s leading religious and secular authorities. Although I will not burden you now with the full details, we are hoping to attract some of the Yeshiva people in Cincinnati, as well as several of the more important
goyim.
When further details and the reservation blank arrive, please indicate whether you prefer fish or fowl.
Field Marshal Augustus Lano,
Presidential Ranch House,
Los Farronentes, QR.
I am sending you this through one of my contacts in the International Red Cross in the hopes that it reaches you in time.
There is about to be established in New York a new secret organization whose purpose, the
vis-à-vis
confrontation of world leaders in an atmosphere of peaceful cordiality, is one which I am sure you must endorse.
It will be necessary for you to come to America for this. Because of the willful perversity of an unfortunate official policy toward you your current status is one of
persona non grata,
and it may be more convenient if you could arrange to come up by two-man submarine through the St. Lawrence Seaway. You could swim to Cleveland and make it from there to the Turnpike and New York. However I leave these details to you. More follows.
Today Los Farronentes, Q.R. Tomorrow the world, eh, Lano? P.S. How’s the crabgrass?
Dear Harold Flesh,
Some of the boys thought Nate’s. Hush hush. Q.T. S.S. N.K.V.D.
These I followed with other letters—matey, detailed, sincere. I sent brochures, gifts, reply-prepaid telegrams. With some of these men I had, in our mutual past, already vaguely alluded to a Club, for this was not a new idea with me. Many were used to doing me favors, but I let them see that no favor they had ever done me was quite complete without this one; I played on their sense of being allowed to participate in a human continuum outside their own, generating in them not duty, not love, but the high privilege of knowing some human fact in perspective—a small immortality. No one knew as well as I the irresistible appeal of the words “for old time’s sake.” Ultimately, of course, they had to come round.
Then I set to work on the other fifty-seven. Again I wrote letters, feeling something already historical and marked about the very pen that inscribed
“Mon cher Picasso,”
“Dear Oppenheimer,” “Exquisite Miss Taylor,” and taking an almost physical pleasure just in folding the paper and addressing and sealing the envelopes. It was as though, stamped, these already enjoyed the status of official documents, artifacts, the thin, blue, barber-pole- edged airmail envelopes like a kind of money. I sent the letters special delivery; it was satisfying to know that they would have to be signed for, that whoever got my letter would see my name,
my
handwriting, handle something
I
had handled. It was only the spurious tactility of the famous, the special sense that they alone could give of possessing an almost healing power in their touch. It was only the barbarous, talismanic power of the autograph book, and I should have known better, but for the time I was caught up.
On a chart I devised I kept a strict accounting of when and to whom a letter had been sent. I allowed three days and then followed up the letter with a person-to- person phone call from the booth in the Columbus Circle subway station. It was perhaps the most intensely active period of my life. I didn’t spare myself for a moment. My room on Fifty-eighth Street became my office; stationary, stamps, rough drafts of letters, charts, lists and telegram blanks were everywhere. I felt like Marx loose in the Bronx. Late into every night I wrote, rendered, revised, polished, aiming in these letters to the fifty-seven for the fat, safe, exactly perfect pitch of ultimate respectability.
It was spring and warm for that time of year in New York. I worked away with the windows flung wide, unconscious of hunger, discomfort, heat, weariness, time. It must have been then that I caught the draft.
The cough was dry, hard, a sustained and piercing howl from the chest. I could bring nothing up with it. Worse during the day, it seemed to have something to do with the light itself, with the very sunshine. It didn’t seem to have any connection with my body. My throat did not tickle; my chest, when I blew out long, deep experimental exhalations, seemed clear. But every so often the rhythm of my existence was broken by a sudden, irrelevant explosion, strident as a signal.
In a few days I began to notice after each seizure a light residual sensitivity low on my left side—not an
ache,
rather a kind of flesh memory of contact, as after a handshake, or a pressure, not in itself unpleasant, like the thin sensation that you are still wearing your hat just after you have taken it off. Gradually, however, and almost in direct proportion to the subsidence of the cough, this pressure developed from increasingly less vague sensations into an intense and unbearable pain. I had the impression when I moved my hand inside my pants to touch the area that it actually glowed with a special localized heat. “I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble,” I groaned. Nor did it ease my fear when just two aspirin killed my pain. I’d been had. What, I thought, two aspirin? For this? For what
I’ve
got? I felt that my body was playing with me, teasing me into a phony confidence.
It was clear that something strange and bad had happened to me. My malaise, spontaneous as a sneeze, had been generated full-blown, complete, with no symptom less intense than any other. After a week it became apparent that whatever had struck me had done so with a peculiarly adaptive kind of cunning, with an almost biological sense of justice. By keeping careful track of what was happening to me I soon noticed that no two symptoms ever occurred simultaneously. It was as if what had been true of my life was true now of my chemistry—that not even my body was capable of doing two things at once. As the cough subsided the pain grew. As the pain subsided something else took its place and kept it only until some other threat presented itself. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
There was something else. Besides this waxing and waning; this sweeping of my body’s circuits by progressive symptoms—a kind of vulgar, physical absurdity, almost like one of those garish movie marquees which operate according to some fixed mechanical cycle, one light popping on only after another has blinked off—there was a weird inconsequentialness to these tokens. The unproductive cough, the pain in the left side, too low to be connected with my heart, on the wrong side for appendicitis, bespoke a kind of triviality that belied the cruel realness of their presence. The other symptoms (I had accepted from the beginning that these were
symptoms,
that not even disease could present itself without a mask) seemed just as far-fetched, almost comic. For several days I seemed to be possessed in turn by all the basic drives. During one period I was always hungry, and no matter what or how much I ate I failed to satisfy myself. The hunger was as intense as the pain in my side had been—what one imagines starving men feel. In the next phase I was constantly cold; I had to get my winter sweaters and overcoat from our apartment and went out dressed as I might be in the depth of a cold winter, despite the unseasonable April heat. After that I felt an almost overwhelming sexuality. I brought magazines to my room on Fifty-eighth Street and pored lasciviously over the pictures of the girls, as susceptible as a pubescent boy to the silly accompanying text. Almost any casual contact with a woman—a clerk in a store, a girl beside me on a bus—was enough to set me off. Once, after staying up late writing my letters, I went to an all-night cafeteria for some coffee at about three
A.M.
A charwoman, middle- aged and fat, was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor beside my table, and it was all I could do to stop myself from climbing on top of her.
Endlessly symptom followed symptom. My urine seemed thick. I was conscious of a hypersensitivity of my hair ends; it was torture to put a comb to my head. My hands fell asleep; my skin burned; my gums swelled. My heart tumbled heavily in my chest, like one casket loose in the hold of a ship.
My sleep during all this had never been so profound, yet I was as tired during the day as an insomniac. I awoke each morning to some new outrage, sudden, unanticipated, yet somehow already familiar, sadly certain and permanent as a doom. I might have been a city held in patient siege by wily, dangerous enemies. One morning I realized, with the queer rush of relief familiar to one who has at last learned some unpleasant rumor about himself, that I was going to die. I knew this. I was, simply,
going to die.
That’s what it would come to. I was incurable.
Much as I had thought of death I had given almost no thought at all to ill health. Now I perceived that death was a consequence of something that happened to your body, and this obvious truth struck me with a force that I would not have imagined. I understood that what I had thought of as oblivion, annihilation, was rooted in a bedrock of matter—that, as was now being demonstrated to me, a thousand things could go wrong, a million; that there were no guarantees that life would or needed or even wanted to go on; that whatever chemical experience meant when we said
life
was as consequential and in effect as accidental as the arrangement of fallen leaves on a lawn; that anything could happen; that one thin tissue bruised in a trip on the stairs could pollute others; that fatality was a chain reaction, death some ubiquitous thing on springs inside us, neither waiting nor ready to pounce, but set to go off at the merest untoward, uncircumspect jostle. I saw my body as something volatile as a bomb. Hypochondria was deep wisdom and ludicrous folly; there was nothing that we could do.
Thinking this—seeing myself not as someone who would one day die, but as one who was already dying, who even as he lived broke down whatever odds there were in his favor, who against his will recklessly used up his single provision, his small store of time—I began to feel a tremendous, almost heroic power. In the streets I sensed a strange, previously unknown force within me, as if I were in possession of some dread, terrible secret, which, were I to disclose it, would permanently affect the lives of others. Living, I was simply one among others; dying, I was above them, imprudent and colossal as some lame-duck hero. Although in one sense The Club had never seemed so important, it was irrelevant compared to this new thing. I saw again, but in a fresh, totally unexpected way, that I had not been prepared to die, that I had only been prepared to dread and hate death. While this was unchanged—while, indeed, I saw my death as the greatest of tragedies—my new reaction was neither tragic nor sad. Instead, I felt a weird giddiness, a strange lightness of heart and mind. I did not want to die, but the sense of rude power I experienced when I knew that I was dying was the most stimulating thing that had ever happened to me.
It was in this mood and to test this power that I began my series of death experiments.
Fully clothed I lay down on my bed. Placing my arms full length, unnaturally stiff, beside me, I arranged myself as in a coffin and closed my eyes. I tried to put all thought out of my mind, but the effort of keeping my body rigid produced a constant strain on my consciousness. It was unsatisfactory, and after a few minutes I gave it up; shockingly, whatever else it was, death was not uncomfortable.