Morbid Tales

by Quentin S Crisp

  ‘What have you been doing since that time? I’ve heard absolutely nothing about you.’

  It seemed he, too, was suddenly eager to bury the hinted subject of his previous remark, and his tone changed. He sounded like someone pretending to be sensible after they have just been caught in the middle of some solitary performance of make-believe.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve done very little in my life except to recover from that incident, and thankfully I have recovered.’

  Sasha was interested. These words promised a safe route by which to talk about the past.

  ‘Do you mind talking about it?’

  ‘No. Like I said, I am now fully recovered. The measure of one’s recovery is one’s ability to admit one’s past illness and talk about it without concern. I see myself as a victim of the contradictions in the way society rears its children. But I am an adult now, so I must take responsibility for myself.’

  He paused and licked his lower lip, his eyeballs seeking something in the top left corners of his eyes. Although he spoke with something like eloquence, his words seemed to Sasha unexpectedly lifeless and controlled, as if they bore no relation to whoever was looking out from those eyes. Why did she feel disappointed?

  He continued in the tone of a university lecturer.

  ‘After that incident I suddenly became worse. Before they had suspected all sorts of things about me, but had been unable really to give a name to those fears. Now there was real evidence that something was wrong with me. There was something different that they could treat, or punish. That visit must have been some sort of crisis for me, because I began repeating my . . . behaviour regardless of the horror that people held me in because of it. I think I maybe even forgot the original meaning of the experiment, and just became addicted to the act itself. Any animal would do really—dogs, rabbits. It makes me sick to think of it now. Even at the time I felt sick. And I did other things too, anything to re-enact that “initial crisis”.’

  Suddenly he rolled up the sleeve of his left arm. Sasha flinched inwardly to see his flesh raised in a crude map of white scars. The impression that he had been shattered and impossibly glued back together was suddenly heightened. Sasha felt a touch of the unreal. She reached out without thinking and ran her fingers lightly over the scars. There was something irresistible about them. When she touched his arm, he did not flinch or withdraw. Instead she experienced another déjà vu, this time unplaceable, but certainly with the scent of childhood about it. Games of make-believe. The wounded soldier and the nurse. This was like some schoolboy play for sympathy when words had failed, and she wanted nothing more than to indulge it.

  ‘You did this to yourself?’

  ‘Of course. It would make me feel charged up, like a superman. I felt ready for any sort of heroics, as long as I was bleeding: fighting with teachers, escaping out of toilet windows, jumping from one roof to another. There was nothing like the feeling of something breaking to pieces, a pane of glass shattering. It was as if it released some sort of energy, full of possibilities. And if it was yourself, and not just the glass that was broken and letting in the air of the world, the sense of freedom and possibility was almost unbearable.’

  ‘But how long were you like that for?’

  ‘That’s practically been my whole life. Things have only recently come back into focus. But if anything saved me it was that sense of harsh reality that invaded my body when I cut myself open. It seems to me that human society is bent upon a whole contract of lies. It starts in childhood, when we are brought up on all sorts of happy-ever-afters, which we then reject in early adulthood. But then, in order to enter into a relationship with someone and start the cycle over, those lies once again become necessary. It’s surprising that more people don’t go mad really. I don’t know why I should be any kind of exception. I could not reconcile this lacklustre reality, utterly devoid of magic, with the idealism my parents had infused in me.

  ‘Thinking about it, since I first did what I did with that kitten, it’s all been a kind of panic. I realised the world doesn’t work how I thought it does and I was utterly lost. But the world wouldn’t panic with me. I needed to do things so that the world seemed to be in tune with my panic. Well, it was obvious I couldn’t survive in normal society and I was passed from one institution to another. Perhaps I even liked it better that way. On the one hand it matched with my state of panic, and on the other I was being looked after.

  ‘Anyway, that cold air seeped into my cuts and scars, deeper and deeper, until I realised that was all there was. The air around us—it’s a perfect symbol of the impersonal reality of life. Between me and my parents there is only air. They too will fade into the air, like everything else. In the meantime, there is only now and here, the pain and pleasure of my cuts, the objects whose outlines are eaten away and made visible by the invisible air. The air separates all things, it makes us all alone and unknowable, it is our essential homelessness. This truth seeped into my bones and all of a sudden I was sober and wide-awake and could not even think of jumping through windows or dissecting animals. All such acts of passion seemed ridiculous. I realise now that I must simply try and take advantage of my environment. The weight of responsibility for each and every decision rests on my own hands. I feel it even now. Life is nothing but a finitude of moments, objects, senses. This finitude is a very delicate thing, very precarious. You can feel it jostling, almost like waves. Of course, it is sad, in an utterly flat, utterly unemphasised way, some might say insupportably so, but the fact is, anything can be supported. And by the same token it is also very beautiful, like the air, in an utterly unemphasised way. And it’s all we have, until that jostling finally breaks upon the shore of nothingness that we call death.’

  ‘And so you’re happy now?’

  ‘Come on. I’m balanced. Happiness and balance are two very different things. Do you know anyone who is happy?’

  Sasha did not know if she could bear this perfect recovery. It was true that she did not know anyone who was perfectly happy, but this perfect sanity seemed just as untenable somehow. Yes, like the air, it might be absolutely neutral and objective, but was it human? But then, Sasha remembered some of her cousin’s opening remarks when she had entered the room, and it seemed to her they could not have been made by the same person. She had reacted badly. It was hurtful. But how could she possibly change things now? How can one summon magic back into a world from which all magic has fled? Does the whole world always hinge on such trivial details as a thoughtless or dissembling response to another’s words?

  Cousin X’s fingers began to twitch and dance like a dismembered invertebrate. His nails clicked on the surface of the table. His expression remained utterly cool, but a sort of twitching, restless discomfort seemed to be set off randomly and almost imperceptibly in separate parts of his body, like a few rocks falling before an avalanche.

  Abruptly, he shoved back his chair and got to his feet. He fumbled in the crumpled pocket of his suit and produced a box of matches and a near empty packet of cigarettes. Sasha noticed the yellowish black of nicotine stains between his nails and the fleshy stubs of his fingertips. Half turning to the window, he flicked a cigarette into his mouth, struck the match and sucked at the tiny burst of fierce flame, all with the fluency of a magician releasing a flock of flapping doves from his sleeve.

  ‘My one remaining vice,’ he said between inhalation and exhalation. ‘Look,’ he said with a puff of smoke, ‘I can and do admit to myself all I’ve done, but of all the people in the world I’m more afraid of what you’ll think than anyone else. Christ! Was what I did that first time really so terrible? I don’t think so! I think it was hysterically exaggerated. I think if no one had made such a fuss then maybe I wouldn’t have done all the things I did afterwards. I was just a kid, for Christ’s sake! You know, first I had to go to a foster home, but before long even they didn’t want anything to do with me. They had to put me in a secure home, lock me up! That’s where I was, in a place that shouldn’t exist,
a prison for children, an embarrassment, the proof of the world’s failure to control its offspring! No doubt you’ve heard the stories in the press about some of the horrors that have happened in these places. I was one of the horrors!

  ‘So much blood! When I think of the blood that I shed over the years it seems like a miracle. Where did it all come from? How did I go on bleeding day after day?’

  He was turned towards the window with the dull white light robbing his face of the shadows that gave it character and identity. His eyes were white, glittering, icy, as lacking expression as the glass in front of him.

  ‘You can’t blame me for how I am now. It’s the brute fact of survival. I’ve been pushed through madness and come out the other side, and in the process the rags of my dreams have been stripped from me, and here I am, utterly naked. It happened almost overnight. Suddenly I saw everything with painful clarity. Everyone saw that I was now eminently sane, incapable of further acts of passion. I suppose they were a little reluctant to admit it, because, perhaps I had become frighteningly sane. But this sanity, like the blood, was another miracle. Sanity gave me the status of a sort of Messiah. I could walk through walls. No doors were locked for me. It just took a while for the tumblers in the locks to fall open and I walked out of the place.

  ‘This is my hardest test. The hardest thing I have ever done. I know what I have to tell you. There are plenty of things I suppose I ought to be ashamed of. But I know instinctively the one that is my dirty secret. I’ve done worse things, perhaps, but nothing else is so tangled up with the mess and ugliness of my heart. Even the fact that I’d choose this secret, that I have to build up to it, that it is, in a sense, so trivial, is terrifying. It’s a kind of embarrassment that is so intense it is horror. You could destroy me, even now, with what I’m about to tell you.’

  ‘Then don’t tell me.’

  ‘Don’t say that. I have to tell you. It’s . . . you see it’s really stupid, but the more I say the worse I’m making it for myself. I just have to say it. Sasha. . . . Those animals that I killed and cut up, that’s not all I did with them. I did worse.’

  There was a silence. She waited for him to continue, since he seemed about to. But the silence just seemed to twist in his throat.

  ‘I understand,’ she said.

  He was relieved and disappointed not to have to say the actual words. But then the feeling of having been cheated, or having failed, grew stronger.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I do.’

  He looked in her eyes and saw she understood exactly what he was implying.

  ‘Dead and alive,’ he said. Then to make sure, ‘Whole and in pieces.’

  That was good enough. The fact was in the air between them. It was as good as said.

  Sasha’s reaction to this confession was still a mystery. Behind those eyes there could have been disgust or any number of feelings. It was hard to imagine a positive response. But her composure, at least, was entirely intact, and that was a good sign. The confession had been an ultimate turning inside out. Normally Cousin X felt little connection with the external world of matter. Now, suddenly, it was as if outside and inside were the same. The table, the books, the window, the walls, everything was suddenly a manifestation of his personal inner-world. The whole world was naked with a nakedness greater than that of the physical. He had never felt so vulnerable. But at the same time, now that his confession had become the furniture, buildings, the solid and random clutter of the real world, it also assumed a kind of stability, a kind of unassailability. It was a simple and unalterable fact.

  Finally Sasha shrugged.

  ‘I’m not shocked,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure if I’m even surprised, particularly.’

  These words of acceptance, in essence not readily distinguishable from indifference, almost took his breath away. He wanted to hug himself to try and cover what he suddenly felt was a ludicrously exposed body. The air, so recently his metaphor of choice, now resolved to a very ordinary and irreducible truth, sacred and transcendent in its dullness. ‘What difference does it make? It’s me! It’s still me!’ Pure consciousness. Cousin X felt queasy in his very safety.

  He turned to the window again. Now Sasha felt questions rising in her and realised this was what she had suppressed all along, out of spite or fear.

  ‘Why did you do it? Tell me! Why did you kill the kitten?’

  ‘But don’t you know? I did it because I didn’t want us to be separated. I thought if I could find the link between the body and soul, the most basic mystery of how the world works, then we could be together, truly together, and free, for ever and ever.’

  Sasha bit her lip.

  ‘You mean it? That’s why you did it?’

  Of course it had been her parents’ interpretation of the incident she had taken on. They had persuaded her with the self-righteousness and self-deceit of all parents that their feelings were hers. But before the incident she would have cared more about her cousin than the kitten anyway. And now she realised it had all been for her, all of it. Not just the first kitten, but all that her cousin had told her of his life since. The madness, the blood, the obsession, then the icy logic, a single thread of consistency as tight and sharp as a garrotte leading to the present moment. She had been tricked in the name of her own welfare, and she had only just woken up.

  ‘I’m afraid I failed,’ her cousin continued. ‘There was some inconsistency between dream and reality I just couldn’t fathom.’

  ‘But it might work now. I’m sure it would if we try again. We understand each other now. We had to do it this way.’

  He turned and looked at her. After the endless blood and the silent, thunderous sanity, here was another miracle. He took a few seconds to go over in his mind what had apparently come out of her mouth without her even thinking about it. Then:

  ‘Lock the door.’

  She walked across the thick carpet and did as he said, turning the heavy iron key in the lock.

  ‘We’re going to show them a real escape act. We’re going to disappear into thin air.’

  She returned, crossing to the other side of the table where he stood, and stopped inches in front of him. Nobody had ever spoken to her like that, she remembered. All she wanted to do was hear more of those words. Words from another world. She reached out to catch his shoulder and they kissed, brokenly, bruisingly.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Cousin X, his eyes once more bright and feverish. ‘It will work now. Now is exactly the right time. Everything has led up to this. If we leave this room still in our bodies we will have lost the chance forever. There is no contradiction between all I have told you and what I am about to do now. I am absolutely sure. We have to do this.’

  He fumbled in his pocket for something.

  ‘Do you still have the vision?’ she asked.

  He smiled. ‘Yes. I still have it. Everything glitters with it. I never mention it. Just let it glitter, my own little secret. It’s glittering now. We don’t want to be interrupted. So try not to make any noise, OK?’

  He paused and looked her up and down with drunken slowness, then stopped at her eyes again. The movements of both had become as thick and sweet as honey.

  ‘It’s strange. Can you believe it? I’m actually happy. How strange.’ His words faded into a fey resonance, as if he were talking to himself. He finally pulled the object from his pocket. Sasha recognised it with something like a shock. She felt a sudden cold in her stomach, and then she too was smiling as widely and drunkenly as he.

  He dug his thumbnail into the groove of the blade and it opened. ‘I kept it,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, pleased with his own cleverness. Then he twisted the blade slowly in the air between them.

  ‘Trust me.’

  A Lake

  In the earth around the lake was the same flat, tired mustard colour as that of a construction site beaten into sterility by Caterpillar tracks. But here there were no such tracks, only the powdery cracking of dry earth. A wind
as dry and sharp as the edge of a leaf of paper rubbed past Stephen’s hand. The ash he flicked was scooped by the freak breeze and whisked into the still semi-circle of water between the rocks on which he stood. As the ash touched the surface there was the briefest of hisses, like the singeing of a gnat’s wings. Then, in underwater slow motion and silence, the ash disintegrated and sank to the bottom. The wind tousled Stephen’s hair in intermittent hot stirrings that seemed to come from nowhere.

  There was a raw vividness to the lake and its environs that Stephen was almost tempted to think a sort of heat haze, but here was none of the distortion of such haze. The visual rawness remained, without distortion, making his eyes feel gritty. If it had been smell instead of vision that was affected, he might have been overcome by the acrid fumes of petrol. Everything looked as if it were about to go up. All that was needed was a single spark. Stephen sucked in the foul chemical taste of the tobacco he was addicted to. It even occurred to him that this cigarette was dangerous here, and he could hardly suppress the childish fear that if he threw it unextinguished into the dirt, the whole basin would ignite in a mountain-shaking explosion. Due to Stephen’s regretful habit of sucking every last puff out of his cigarettes, he was already down to the butt. He tossed it into a rock-pool where it turned to mush. He felt a sense of anti-climax that was, paradoxically, overwhelming.

  The fir-forested slopes of the surrounding mountains were, of course, picturesque. It was a starved, threadbare and rock-strewn beauty, however, with somewhere a deficiency that stopped it from being breathtaking. Somehow Stephen felt he must concede the site’s beauty, yet there remained a vague feeling he had been cheated. It was not this beauty masquerading as conventional that fascinated him, however. The precise symbol of his fascination was not difficult to pinpoint. It was simply the rotting carcasses of fish that were strewn oddly about the ambiguous margin where the water lapped on land. Some of the carcasses were scattered on the rocks, too. Stephen did not know what kind of fish they had been, although they appeared to be all of one species. They were of an oval, flattish shape—flat vertically rather than horizontally—and perhaps a foot in length. The size, however, was difficult to determine precisely since there was nowhere a whole specimen to be found. They lay in fragments like corpses on a battlefield. Stephen was momentarily taken with the idea that perhaps they had been trying to drive themselves up on the land in an effort to escape something, and he wondered what it might be. Then he thought of the perverse, self-destructive instincts of lemmings. Could this be another example of nature’s occasional perversity, like the mother rabbit who devours her own newborn babies? What was it that suggested such ideas to him? He decided it was something in the stinking flesh itself. The remains looked spent and colourless, as if the fish lacked even the will to decompose. The eyes were blanched and clouded and the gills looked like the wrinkles of an old and dusty leather boot.