Grim Tales (9 page)

He was powerless – he said – to resist the impulse to write once it had seized him. My muse – he said, his voice made strange by what emotion his friends could not guess. Often, when he had shut himself up in his room to write, they heard him weeping. He is with his muse – they told each other, embarrassed. Had they known it was a suicide note he had been helplessly composing, they might have saved him. But perhaps not – so inexorable was his muse, so obedient his hand.

The end of the world came; and to save his family from the horror which would befall those who must await their own end from storm or famine, fire or pestilence, he poisoned them all. As he was about to hang himself, an angel appeared and said to him that he had dreamed it – dreamt that the end of the world was come. He stared in horror at his wife and children lying dead in the room with him as the angel, with an inscrutable look, withdrew – its wings stiff with insolence.

In small ways, too, the end of the world came. For example, a wooden crate was caught in the waves as they struggled close to the beach to return to the open sea. A man from the town on the other side of the dunes took off his shoes and went into the water to bring it ashore, hoping to find inside whiskey or something else of value he might sell in town. While he wrestled with it, a wave knocked him down and his head hit a corner of the crate so that the blood flowed. All the same he managed to bring it onto the beach and was delighted to find that it contained a disassembled motor-bike. This he could sell easily. Rather than tell his brother what he had found (for he owed him money), he explained the cut on his forehead by saying that Rolf, a man they both hated, had waylaid him in the alley behind the fish market. His brother, who wanted Rolf's pretty wife for himself, went to the man's house and knifed him where he stood in the doorway. This was the first attack.

His was an amnesia whose consequences troubled not only himself but also that part of the world in which he came into even the most casual contact. Streets, houses, entire cities vanished, as – one after another – he forgot them. It was as if he – his disorder – were capable of the dissolution of matter itself, such was its virulence. In defense of all, indeed for the future of the cosmos, he had to be exterminated. Is this not evident?

She had only to look at him (“those eyes!”) to make him put on his coat, leave the house, drive to the harbor where, at this restless hour, the ferries have already embarked for the opposite shore and, with his eyes staring straight ahead at a landscape invisible to all but him, plunge into the blackening harbor without ever waking.

He went into the haberdashery to buy a shirt, leaving his wife to look at rings in a jewelry-store window. When he came outside again, she was gone. An old woman standing at the jeweler's window seemed almost to recognize him. He noticed how loose the ring was as she twisted it round and round her withered finger.

The train stopped at the station every afternoon at 5 – every afternoon the same, except holidays and Sundays. This day, however, the train did not stop although it was neither a holiday nor a Sunday. At least no one saw it stop; no one saw a train at all. But they felt a wind rise up against them and heard the roaring of a train hurtling past. Looking down from the station platform, they saw a man lying between the tracks, his body “as if torn apart by beasts.”

A cat jumped onto the table and the thrust of its hind legs against the chair sent it crashing backwards into the aquarium. The China town, so long submerged, emptied of water, which poured through the broken glass wall into the dining room, flooding it and soon even the house itself. Now the city is submerged – its streets and houses inhabited by fish.

He left his apartment building and walked to the restaurant where he liked to eat his breakfast. The streets were empty; but he thought little, if anything at all, about it. On the way, he discovered that he had forgotten his wallet. He returned to his building, opened the door and stepped through it into another street. All that day, he walked through one door after another only to be met immediately by another street. A street with no one on it except him. By nightfall, he was nearly mad with loss, realizing that his life – spent largely indoors – had, for a reason which could only be characterized as “sinister,” vanished.

He was one who was writing a book of tales. In the middle of his book, he left a note in which he confessed to all things – no matter how wicked or shameless – that were set down in the book, like fiction. In it, he mentioned lightly, as if wanting it to be overlooked, that at the end of his writing of this book he would write another, his last, in which he would disappear forever in a manner to be decided later.