Hospital of the Transfiguration

by Stanisław Lem

  He doesn’t stand a chance, Stefan thought.

  Stefan himself had no interest in her. She was beautiful, even very beautiful, with extraordinary eyes, but something about her repelled him.

  As they walked, Staszek remembered Sekułowski and decided to introduce Stefan to him.

  “A fantastically brilliant man,” Staszek explained, “but scatterbrained. You can have a great conversation, but don’t set him off. And watch your manners, will you? He’s very touchy.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Stefan promised.

  They went outside to get to the recovery wing. The skies were clearing, the wind tearing great holes in the gray, fluffy clouds. Fog wafted low over the trees.

  They came across a man in a short coat pushing a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He was a Jew, powerfully built and dark-skinned, with a beard that started almost at his eyes.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said to Stefan, ignoring Staszek. “Have you forgotten me, doctor? Yes, I see that you don’t remember me.”

  “I’m not sure,” Stefan began as he stopped and returned the other man’s bow. Staszek stood by in obvious amusement, kicking at a weed with the tip of his shoe.

  “Nagiel, Salomon Nagiel. I did your dad’s metalwork, don’t you remember?”

  Something clicked in Stefan’s mind. In fact there had been a handyman with whom his father would sometimes disappear into the workshop to build a model.

  “Do you know what I do here?” Nagiel continued. “I am the First Angel.”

  Stefan felt foolish. Nagiel came closer and whispered earnestly, “A week from now there’s going to be a big assembly. The Lord God Himself will be there, and David, and all the Prophets and Archangels. Everyone. I have influence there, so if you need anything, doctor, just let me know, and I’ll take care of it.”

  “No, I don’t need anything.”

  Stefan grabbed Staszek by the arm and pulled him toward the door. The Jew stood watching, leaning on his shovel.

  “Who knows what laymen think an asylum is,” Stefan was saying as they turned into a long corridor with yellow tiles. At a landing another corridor led off to the left, lighted by small, widely spaced lamps that somehow suggested a forest. They moved in and out of darkness as they walked.

  “The symptoms you’ve seen so far are pretty typical. Delusions, hallucinations, motor excitement, dementia, catatonia, mania, and so on. But pay attention now.”

  He stopped under a frosted-glass lamp at an ordinary door with a handle and lock.

  They entered a small, airy room with a bed against the wall, a few white chairs, and a table with an orderly stack of thick books on top. Numerous sheets of paper crumpled into balls lay on the floor. A man in violet pajamas with silver stripes sat with his back to the door. When he turned around, Stefan recalled a photograph from an illustrated magazine. He was a tall man, almost handsome, but putting on weight that was obscuring his sharp, regular features. He had prominent eyebrows flecked with gray like his temples, and his eyes looked bright, lively, and strong, capable of staring relentlessly, now vacant with relaxation. They were colorless, and picked up the hues of their surroundings. They were light now. The poet’s skin, pale from his confinement indoors, seemed almost transparent; under his eyes it sagged into barely perceptible pockets.

  “Allow me to introduce my colleague, Doctor Trzyniecki,” Staszek said. “He’s come to work with us for a while. An excellent participant in discussions of ideas.”

  “But only as a dilettante,” said Stefan, pleased at Sekułowski’s brief, warm handshake. They sat. It might have looked strange: two men in white coats, stethoscopes and hammers sticking indiscreetly out of their pockets, and an older man in wild pajamas.

  They chatted about this and that for a while, and then Sekułowski remarked, “Medicine can offer a pretty good window on infinity. Sometimes I regret not having studied it systematically.”

  “You are speaking with an expert on psychopathology,” Staszek said to Stefan, who noted that his friend was more restrained and rigid than usual. He’s trying his best, Stefan thought.

  Stefan said that no one had yet written a novel about medicine believably depicting the profession.

  “A scribbler’s job,” the poet said, smiling politely but dismissively. “A mirror to everyday life? What does that have to do with literature? By that view, doctor—contrary to what Witkacy says—the novel would be the art form of the peeping Tom.”

  “I was thinking of the whole complexity of the profession… the transformation of a person who enters the halls of the university knowing people only on the outside and… comes out a doctor.”

  He knew that sounded stupid. To his unpleasant surprise, Stefan realized that he was having trouble formulating his thoughts and choosing his words, that he was confused, like a freshman in front of a professor, even though he felt no awe of Sekułowski.

  “It seems to me that we have no more knowledge of our bodies than of the most distant star,” the poet said quietly.

  “But we are discovering the laws that govern the body.”

  “Not until the majority of biological theses have their antitheses. Scientific theory is intellectual chewing gum.”

  “But allow me to ask,” Stefan replied, slightly impatient. “What did you do when you were sick?”

  “I called the doctor.” Sekułowski smiled. His smile was as bright as a child’s. “But when I was eighteen years old, I realized how many morons became doctors. Since then I have had a panicky fear of illness, because how can you entrust your body to someone more stupid than yourself?”

  “Sometimes that’s best. Haven’t you ever felt like confiding things you would conceal from those closest to you, to the first stranger that comes along?”

  “And who, according to you, is close?”

  “Well, your parents, for instance.”

  “Mommy and Daddy know best?” Sekułowski asked. “Parents are supposed to be close? Why not the coelacanth? After all, your biology teaches us that they are the first link in the chain of evolution, so why shouldn’t intimacy extend to the whole family, lizards included? Do you know anyone who ever conceived a child with a warm thought to its future intellectual life?”

  “Well, what about women?”

  “You must be joking. The sexes deal with each other out of complicated motives, probably a consequence of some twisted protein that lacked something here and had something sticking out there, but how do we get from there to closeness? To intellectual closeness. Is your leg close to you?”

  “What does my leg have to do with it?” Stefan could see that he wasn’t holding up his end; Sekułowski was batting the conversation around like a ball with a racket.

  “Everything. Your leg is obviously close, because you can experience it in two ways, with your eyes closed as a ‘conscious feeling of possessing a leg,’ and when you look at it or touch it—in other words, as an object. Unfortunately, no other human being is ever more than an object.”

  “That’s absurd. Surely you don’t mean to say that you’ve never had a friend, that you’ve never loved?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” Sekułowski exclaimed, “Let’s assume that I have. But what does that have to do with closeness? No one can be closer to me than I am to myself, and sometimes I am a stranger to myself.”

  He lowered his eyelids heavily, as if resigning from the world. This conversation was like wandering in a labyrinth. Stefan decided to persevere and do his best. It might be fun.

  “But your literature is no bargain. One takes hold of words too one-sidedly and glosses over details…”

  “Go on,” the poet encouraged him.

  “A literary work is a matter of conventions, and talent is the ability to break them. I’m not saying it has to be realism. Any literary style can be good, provided the author respects the internal logic of the work. If you have your hero walk through a wall once, you have to let him do it again…”

  “Excuse me, but what is the purpose of li
terature, as you see it?” Sekułowski asked softly, as if he were falling asleep.

  But Stefan had not finished; the interruption confused him and he lost his train of thought.

  “Literature teaches…”

  “Oh really?” The poet sighed. “And what does Beethoven teach?”

  “What does Einstein teach?”

  Stefan’s impatience now bordered on irritation. Sekułowski definitely had an overblown reputation. Why go easy on him?

  The poet smiled quietly, very satisfied. “Nothing, naturally,” he said. “He’s playing, friend. Except that some people don’t know it. Turn on a light every time you give a dog a piece of kielbasa, and after a while the dog will salivate at the sight of the light. Show a man enough ink scrawled on paper, and after a while he’ll say it is a model for the universe. It’s neurology, obedience school, that’s all.”

  “What’s the kielbasa in that example?” Stefan asked quickly, feeling like a fencer scoring a touch. But Sekułowski was not slow with his riposte.

  “Einstein, or some other worthy authority, is the kielbasa. Isn’t mathematics a form of intellectual tag? And logic, chess played by the strictest rules. It’s like that child’s game with string, where two players twist it around their fingers in artful combinations, adding more and more twists until they come back to the starting point. Have you ever seen Peano and Russell’s proof that two plus two is four? It takes up an entire dense page of algebraic symbols. Everybody is playing, and so am I. Have you seen my play The Flower Garden? I call it a chemical drama. The flowers are bacteria, and the garden is the human body in which they multiply. A fierce battle between tuberculosis bacilli and the leukocytes is going on. Alter seizing the armor of the lipoids, which is a sort of magic cap of invisibility, the bacteria unite under the leadership of the Supermicrobe, defeat the leukocytes, and then, just as a blissful and blessed future is unfolding before them, the garden sinks under them. In other words, the human being dies and the poor little plants have to die along with it.”

  Stefan did not know the play.

  “Forgive me for talking about myself,” the poet said. “But each of us, after all, is a kind of blueprint for the world. The trouble is that the plan is not always well executed. An awful lot of bungling goes into the making of human beings. And the world,” he said, looking down through the window as if he saw something amusing, “is just a collection of the most fantastic oddities, whose existence no one can explain. The easiest thing, of course, is to make believe you don’t see anything, that whatever is, simply is. I do it myself all the time. But it isn’t enough. I cannot remember the exact figure—my memory is failing these days—but I once read the odds of one living cell arising out of the multitude of atoms. It was something like one in a trillion. And that those cells should come together in however many billions you need to make up the body of a living human being! Every one of us is a lottery ticket that hit the jackpot: a few dozen years of life, what fun! In a world of superheated gases, nebulae spiraling to whiteness, and the cosmic absolute zero, suddenly a protein pops up, some greasy jelly that immediately tends to decompose into a puff of bacteria and decay. A hundred thousand subterfuges sustain this weird field of energy, which divides matter into order and chaos. A node of space crawls across an empty landscape. And why? Haven’t you ever wondered why there are clouds and trees, golden-brown autumn and gray winter, why the scenery changes through the seasons, why the beauty of it all strikes us like a hammer-blow? Why does it happen that way? By rights we should all be black interstellar dust, shreds of the Magellanic Cloud. The normal state of things is the roaring of the stars, showers of meteors, vacuum, darkness, and death.”

  He leaned back on his pillow exhausted and said in a deep, low voice:

  Only the dead know the tunes

  The live world dances to.

  “What does literature mean to you, then?” Stefan dared to ask after a long pause.

  “For the reader it is an attempt to escape. For the creator, an attempt at redemption.”

  “You’re a mystic…” Stefan was not doing well in this conversation: he couldn’t play his best cards, because Sekułowski would snort and drop down from infinity.

  “A mystic? Who told you that? Here in Poland you publish four poems and they pin a little card on you with a label that sticks beyond your death: ‘subtle lyricist,’ ‘stylist,’ ‘vitalist.’ Critics—or critins, as I sometimes call them—are the physicians of literature: they make wrong diagnoses just like you, and in just the same way they know how things ought to be but they can’t do anything. So they’ve mysticized me now, have they? Well, one more weirdness to add to the million others: though possessing brains, they can think with their intestines.”

  “This conversation is slightly one-sided,” Stefan said, deciding to rally his forces for a frontal attack to conquer Sekułowski. He had completely forgotten about medicine. “Instead of a dialogue you’re having a double monologue with yourself. I do know your work. Somewhere you propose the existence of a consciousness different from the ‘Consciousness of Being.’ You describe the nonexistent worlds of Riemann. But as you say yourself, the world that surrounds us is interesting enough. Why do you write so little about it?”

  “The world that surrounds us? Oh, so you think I dream up worlds? But you have no doubt about the identity of the world that surrounds—for example, the one you’re sitting at the center of, on that white chair?”

  Stefan thought and said, “For the most part, no.”

  Sekułowski heard only the “no,” which was all he needed.

  “I see a different world. Recently Doctor Krzeczotek let me look into a microscope. As he later told me, in it he saw pink buffering epithelia, among which appeared, in a palisade configuration, dark diphtherial corynebacteria of the characteristic spadiceous configuration. Do I have it right?”

  Staszek nodded.

  “I saw an archipelago of brown islands and coral atolls in a sky-blue sea with pink icebergs drifting on a trembling, stream.”

  “Those atolls were the bacteria,” Staszek remarked.

  “Yes, but I didn’t see bacteria. So where is our common world? When you look at a book, do you see the same thing as a bookbinder?”

  “So you doubt even the possibility of communication with another person?”

  “This discussion is too academic. All I will admit is that I do exaggerate certain lines in my sketch of the world, and that the attempt to be consistent can lead to inconsistency. Nothing more.”

  “Logical absurdity, in other words? That is a possibility, but I don’t know why…”

  “Each of us is a possibility, one of many, that has emerged from necessity,” Sekułowski interrupted, and Stefan recalled an idea that had come to him in solitude one day. He voiced it, thinking it might be impressive.

  “Did you ever think, ‘I, who was once one sperm and one egg’?”

  “That’s interesting. Do you mind if I make a note of it? Unless, of course, you’re gathering your own literary material?” Sekułowski asked. Stefan said nothing, feeling robbed but unable to make a formal protest. The poet wrote several words in a large, sloping hand on a sheet of paper he took from a book. The book was Joyce’s Ulysses,

  “You have been speaking, gentlemen, about consistency and its consequence,” said Staszek, who had been silent until now. “What do you have to say about the Germans? The consequence of their ideology would be the biological annihilation of our nation.”

  “Politicians are too stupid for us to be able to predict their actions through reason,” answered Sekułowski as he carefully replaced the cap of his green and amber Pelikan pen. “But in this case your hypothesis cannot be ruled out.”

  “What should be done, then?”

  “Play the flute, collect butterflies,” retorted Sekułowski, who now seemed bored with the conversation. “We achieve our freedom in various ways. Some do it at the expense of others, which is ugly, but effective. Others try to find cracks in the
situation through which they can escape. We should not be afraid of the word ‘madness.’ Let me tell you that I can perform acts that seem mad in order to manifest my freedom.”

  “Such as?” asked Stefan, although he thought that Staszek, whom he glimpsed out of the comer of his eye, was making some sort of warning gesture.

  “For example,” said Sekułowski amiably, at which he wrinkled his face, opened his eyes wide, and bellowed through distended lips like a cow. Stefan turned red. Staszek glanced off to the side with a grimace that bore the hint of a smile.

  “Quod erat demonstrandum,” said the poet. “I was too lazy to resort to something more eloquent.”

  Stefan suddenly regretted his effort. Why cast these pearls before swine?

  “This has nothing to do with genuine madness,” Sekułowski said. “It was only a small demonstration. We should expand our potential, and not only toward the normal. We should also look for ways out of the situation that others don’t notice.”

  “How about in front of a firing squad?” Stefan asked drily, but with inward passion.

  “There it may be possible to distinguish oneself from the animals in the manner of meeting death. What would you do in such a situation, doctor?”

  “Well, I’d… Stefan did not know what to say. Until then he felt that the words had been sliding off his tongue automatically, but now an emptiness filled his mouth. After a long pause he croaked, “It seems to me that we are marginal. This whole hospital—it isn’t a typical phenomenon. The atypical made typical.” His formulation cheered him. “The Germans, the war, the defeat, here it’s all felt very indirectly. At most, as a distant echo.”

  “A yard full of wrecks, is that it? While undamaged ships sail the seas,” said Sekułowski, looking up at the ceiling. “You, gentlemen, try to mend the works of the Creator, who has botched more than one immortal soul.”

  He got up from the bed and paced the room, loudly clearing his throat several times as though tuning his voice.

  “Is there anything else I can demonstrate for you, gracious audience?” he asked, standing in the center of the room with his arms crossed. His face lit up. “It’s coming,” he whispered. He leaned forward slightly, looking up so intently that they all froze, drawn into a vortex of strange anticipation. When the tension became unbearable, the poet began to speak: