The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  And if there is no God? It is possible that there is no God. But if not, what? Your atheist is as cruel a sectarian as your Jew, Catholic, Churchman, Nonconformist, Mohammedan, or what-have-you. All belief begets fanaticism…. One might make an equation: Father, Son, and Holy Mother equal persecution and pain. They are interdependent. The young sucks the old for milk; the old sucks the young for blood; and so spins the Wheel.

  Then where can one fly? Into Nothingness? No, no, no—Man’s mind balks at that. But he has the right to choose his own company, by God!

  —Ah, ah—there he goes with God again! Well, and why not? Charles Small, petty, petulant, sickly little creature that he is, rendered calm by exhaustion, considers that there must be, in his unsavoury self, something more than snot, guts, blood, salt, phosphorus, iodine, keratin, carbon, iron, nitrogen, and so forth to the value of five shillings. If this were the case, Charles Small would be the equal of Shakespeare, and the old man would exchange peroration for peroration with Demosthenes and Cicero….

  No, there must be the soul, the struggling soul, wriggling like a bubble out of the stinking soft mud of the stagnant pool of the flesh, striving to burst and be free. As for God … who knows? All this universe may be one little part of God, the all-encompassing God—good and evil—as ecstasy and bellyache may be contained in the same skin.

  It is too high, too deep.

  Charles Small knows one thing, and that is, he is no good—and with this, with a sour eructation, he falls asleep, worn out.

  *

  But there is no rest for the wicked, no peace for Judas Iscariot—except that questionable respite suggested by that silly Saint who said that for one little day in every year Judas was allowed to crawl out of the boiling sulphur, out of the torments of the everlasting fire, and cool himself on the ice floes. And if that was God’s mercy, by God, God could keep it! Charles Small can see Judas wriggling out of the fires that die not, into the bitter eternal cold, and lying there on a drifting Arctic berg, with chattering teeth, trying to acclimatise himself; knowing that he has one short day; tortured by hope, tortured by fear, tortured by the anticipation of to-morrow’s dawn; cursing God for His mercy, which is a refinement of cruelty, His day of grace which is—if God is really omniscient—a subtle supplement to his eternal torment … There could be no peace for Judas cooling on the ice floe; only chattering of teeth in the sudden cold … poor Judas (Narwall’s all-knowing God must have foredamned him to burn in hell). He wants to get back to hell; he is used to it; he has had a couple of thousand years of home-cooking in the blue sulphurous flames, and the cold burns. He misses the barbed tridents of the barbed-tailed torturers. He wants to go home to his quiet room in hell … God, as the sectarians see Him, must be either a blithering idiot, like Narwall and I. Small and the rest, or the Devil in disguise.

  There is no such God. If, by any chance, such a Narwall, such an I. Small, of a God exists, Charles Small wants none of Him; for he sees through the peep-hole of that God’s narrow mind, has learned to laugh at His thunder, shrug at His curses, sneer at His exercise of superior force over His children. Narwall’s God, God damn Him, is a very powerful Narwall; I. Small’s God is a universal I. Small, a continuous portentous rumble of thunder and a flashing of summer lightning, powerless to reward or to punish—something in which Charles Small could never have believed if the old man had not created Him in his own image….

  He drops into that heavy sleep (that blessed respite) as Judas flops, red-hot out of the Pit, to sizzle and steam on the ice.

  Sleep, sleep … an interlude, a recess…. Hell has adjourned to refresh itself, to strengthen itself for another go at him. Hell can wait. Narwall’s God has given it all Eternity, and Hell’s fires need no stokers; and the Pit is always wide open. But in sleep Charles Small finds no rest. Out of the darkness come little hooks, like claws out of the black pads of a great cat, hooking him, while a remote throaty voice says: “Wait a bit!” and now he is dragged down and down through nightmarish corridors, backward and forward—back to what he remembers and hates, and forward to what he dreads but recognises as inevitable. And in the inevitability of it lies the horror of it…. Down the nights and down the days and through the arches of the years he flees himself, trying to elude himself. He may leap into the air, but the shadow is waiting to catch him by the heels in the staring moonlight. If the light is behind him, the shadow of himself is in front of him, and when he turns and tries to run back, his feet are lead, his blood is water, and out of the corner of his eye he sees that long shadow waiting for him on the moonlit road, and knows that he must follow it. When he stops, it stops. It can wait. But he must go on. As he moves, the shadow of himself obligingly leads the way, along that empty road without perspective, that endless road, that haunted road of moonlight and mist, down which a creature that might have been a man is dragged in silence at the heels of his shadow….

  If sleep is a little death, in the name of God how can one face the terrors and the dangers of the Coming Night—the Big Sleep? Oh, fools! What has the God of Retribution to do with ice and fire, when all He needs to do is chain you to yourself, never letting you escape from yourself? Who would not gladly exchange Remorse for burning sulphur, or Shame for the Absolute Cold? It is better to be gnawed by the hounds of hell, than to bite one’s own finger-nails in self-contempt. One may defy the black dogs; but who can defy or outface his secret self? … Judas does not boil in a pit—Judas is not worried by fanged monsters; that would be too easy. No, Judas lights his own fires and provides his own pitch-forks, and nauseates himself not with silly little satyrs and serpents, but with the eternal contemplation of himself as he made himself; by the inescapable secret knowledge of himself; he hounds himself, finds himself and bites his nails … Forgive us our trespasses wails Charles Small, God, give me dreamless sleep! For when his exhausted flesh goes limp in the mysterious little death of Sleep, all that is Charles Small—all that he knows to be himself—comes doubly awake. From the back of his head comes a beam of light that beats against the inner walls of his lowered eyelids and shows himself to himself, laying bare all the agonising secrets that he never dared to confess to himself…. But horrible, horrible … for now the dirt that is himself is sucked clean of the sugar of self-justification, and there it is in three, four, five dimensions—Nightmare!

  No rest for the wicked—it isn’t so. Whoever said that should have said: No rest for the man who knows he is guilty; for the amoral sleep sound. Only the transgressors have nightmares—only those who know the difference between right and wrong, and, looking over their shoulders at the Good, slide with delicious terror to the Evil, just for the fun of the run…. The good man, the man of God—the Unknown God—can make do with nothing. The ravens will feed him, and even if they do not he can go unfed forty days and forty nights in his wilderness. How? By wrapping himself up in himself, but there are selves and selves. The pure man is a piece of the Eternal; indestructible, an infinity beyond the bone and the meat of the perishable self.

  But Charles Small is vulnerable. He is a man moyen sensuel, and as soon as he switches off the light and closes his eyes there rises that ghostly moon that throws the distorted shadow that drags him, whichever way he turns, into the mist … the impenetrable mist….

  The world whirls away, but not into God’s quiet darkness—into a horrible, howling, dizzy vortex spinning so that it is neither black nor white, neither light nor dark … like the gramophone record again…. And Charles’s sleep is not a sleep, but a sort of dark exercise in gymnastics. He takes flying leaps over the vaulting-horse of himself into a bowl of fog; he does Swedish Exercises—meaningless bendings and stretchings and pawings and gropings, all alone in the cold, obedient to a great Voice. Right hand over left hand, gripping with knees and feet, he climbs a rope, up, up, and up, until he is hanging between heaven and earth on a thread, clouds above and mist below; holding fast with hands and knees that are losing their power to hold…. And then—oh, woe!—he is falling and fal
ling until he hits the soft mattress of his springy modern bed and, crying to sleep again like Caliban, closes his feverish eyes…. But what happens when he closes his eyes again? He is standing on a window-ledge a thousand feet above the ground—he cannot keep his balance—he falls, sickeningly, into a brief spell of consciousness, wakefulness from which he prays the good Lord to deliver him … and drifts back to sleep to dream of a railway station. He has arrived in the nick of time; the train is whistling. Somewhere on a platform, to the left of parallel rails that have no perspective, stands one forlorn woman; he must get to her, but his feet are nailed to the ground…. And then with an ah-cha, ah-cha! the train goes away in thunder, snorting out its nightmarish steam, steam through which he can see nothing but himself, abject, fumbling from pocket to pocket for a lost ticket and finding nothing but the memory of things forgotten. In his hands, emptiness. The train gasps and whistles away towards the wide sea … and as the train goes away the little figure of the woman recedes … only he can see her eyes. Then he runs blindly out of the station and is horrified to find himself on the lip of a precipice that goes down a sheer mile into a black fog, into which he knows he must fall. And fall he does, dying a thousand deaths, to hit the mattress of his soft bed.

  And from this mattress he bounces, his heart ticking like a metronome with the weight in its belly, back into the pocket of confusion that is Charles Small. Yes, the Curse is upon him—he cannot stay awake and he dares not sleep for fear of the dreams that may come. Like a guilty creditor, he sees himself coming round the corner, and tries to cross the street to avoid himself, pretending not to see himself … dances like Nijinsky in and out of thunderous traffic; slides like a ghost between clashing bumpers while colours change from red to green—bilious green—runs, runs until he breaks through the throng of men and women who are baring their teeth in laughter, and finds a lonely alley, into which he jumps…. Under the white moon the muddy cobblestones look like the back of a crocodile that must take him by the legs and drag him down through the rotting driftwood into the mud. But this is only the way it appears. He is free, for the moment; he has shaken off the Thing that pursues him.

  So he turns—and finds himself standing toe-to-toe with that black shadow, frightfully elongated, mimicking his every gesture and exaggerating every movement of his muscles in the ghastly light of the mottled moon that stares down at the stones and the naked mud. He is deep-frozen. His shadow peels itself away from the stones and takes hold of him, and a great cold rushes into him—the cold, the sweaty cold, that is born of pure horror…. And now his shadow is the substance and he is the shadow—they have changed places, and are flying … where? Up, and up, and up. The moon looms large. The earth is a green luminous ball. Suddenly the shadow slips away and Charles Small hangs for a moment in interplanetary space, cold and lonely before he falls, twisting and turning, begging himself to wake up—which he does forthwith, between his clean linen sheets. He has been asleep for about twelve seconds … and there is Space, Time and Eternity for you! In those few seconds he has had a Season in Hell. He has known the horror of the great heights and felt the dread of the great depths, and the numb chill of the Absolute Cold in the Outer Dark….

  He forces himself out of his sick sleep, for even wakefulness, with all its menace, is better than such sleep.

  As the old man used to say: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”

  Charles Small sits on the edge of the bed and tries to be reasonable.

  *

  But he has not the wherewithal. He cannot be reasonable in his own right. His ratiocination, like his passions and his philosophisings and his contemplations, are metrical; he has them on loan. Take away the Poets, and what is left of Charles Small? Pump out Shakespeare, Tennyson, and all the rest, and what is left of his deflated self? A few kosher fibres bled white with salt—the salt of tears—tears of self-pity and shame, which are all he has to give to the world. But what is he to do, and where is he to turn for comfort? He must go back … he must fall back upon the articulated thoughts of better men, without which he is nothing but a bladder of sour milk and tears, swelling; saved before bursting point by a squirt of bitter bile through the safety-valve of his nasty temper … but stretched, strained—a bursting bladder, a congested bowel, a gut full of wind. All that Charles has which is good, true and beautiful belongs to someone else—to someone who took his inspiration from God and the rightful Sons of God, and scraped the slime from his eyes and saw stars. Charles Small’s stars are second-hand stars, borrowed stars, for the loan of which he has pledged himself.

  With whose reason can he be reasonable, for God’s sake?

  His brain rattles inside his skull like a stale monkey-nut in its shell. Nuts! An American expression, Charles Small remembers, signifying Shucks, peelings, membranes to be thrown away … the bearded shucks, the withering bearded shucks of tall corn….

  Rattling his little dried-up brain in the flimsy shell of his silly skull, Charles Small tries to moisten himself with other men’s juices, muttering:

  “… I am a fart of all that I have met:

  Yet all experience is but an arch

  Where through gleams the untravelled world

  Whose margin fades forever and forever

  As I move …”

  … Arches, arches … Charles Small remembers a picture that haunts his dreams—as if he has not enough pictures to haunt his dreams—a picture painted by Chirico, depicting a little girl bowling a hoop down a desolate arcade, inevitably skipping to a certain corner where there lurks a horrid masculine shadow. … Those crumbling arches, those falling arches, they remind him of fallen arches, of feet, of boots and shoes, of the old man. Eternal recurrence!

  He has fled I. Small down the nights and down the days; fled him through the arches of the years … and still the old man bleddies in his ear, flaps at him with the defunct Globe—he can feel only the wind of the blow as it passes—and sometimes gets under his skin and, playing funerals, cries for him. Nevertheless, even now, it is perilously easy to gloss over the abuses and remember the day when his father, in the absence of his Goddamned mother, became himself, a good if stupid companion, and took him to Kew … and it is easy to remember the virtues of his blasted mother who, left alone, among strangers, behaved somewhat like a civilised human being, and became almost tender. God be with her, wherever she may be … damn her eyes! Touching the matter of eyes, Charles Small is hard put to know for whom he is weeping—his father, his mother or himself. Perhaps all three. Tria juncta in uno—and out comes salt water from the eyes, dribbles from the nose, and a noise reminiscent of hiccoughs … and there is another handkerchief for the laundry basket, another pennyworth of soiled life down the drain!

  … The Night of the Hæmorrhage—how was it possible not to remember it, and the awful grief of the old man, and the queer courage of the old woman who felt the wind of the scythe and heard the clicking of the bony feet of death, sure as Fate. Suddenly it seemed to Charles Small that his mother became noble, and his father became his child, so that suddenly he, Charles, became the master of the house; and as such he had to stay. What else could he do? His parents were become helpless children; he was a man. Does a proper man abandon a child?

  But does a proper man abandon and betray himself?

  So came that dawn when Charles Small picked up the suitcase that still stood by the umbrella stand, and crept out of the house like a thief, leaving a note; and betrayed himself and deserted Ivy Narwall on that smoky platform, where he left his suitcase rubbing shoulders with hers, and ran. Yes, in the recollection of this perfidy—here is hell indeed. He got back to the house in time to tear up the note he had left. The old man was looking for him. Grey, now, and wrapped in a grey dressing-gown, I. Small appeared like an old shorn sheep. He was pitiful, so agonisingly pitiful that Charles Small was almost relieved when he was confronted with his tormented mother. Attendants were making ready to carry her off, and she was thanking them for their
kindness. The old man was going off the deep end again—this time, not with a yell but with a gurgle. What was one to do, oh God, what? Charles Small knows that these people, whom he has always hated, and whose memory he abhors in a half-hearted way, were in his mind at the station. It needed only the appearance of Mrs. Narwall to take the other half of his heart out of him and send him away empty to be refilled with all that he had tried to spit out.

  *

  He remembers a dreary dream that haunted him through the years; and this was the dream: He was wandering through a park, up and down, over hill and into valley, wandering and wandering, obedient to a blind impulse, step by step into something dark and horrible. And in this dream, at last, he came over the brow of a little hill and saw, far down, an oval house surrounded by trees. He knew that here was his Doom, here was his Weird, and that here he must end. But he had to go over that hill and down and down into the valley, and up a narrow white lane until he found himself knocking at a red door framed in a Gothic arch. He knew that the house was empty; yet the echoing of his knocking sounded like footsteps on the stairs of that hollow house, keeping time to the beating of his heart, and the red door opened and out of the blackness came a hand with a wedding ring, that snatched him into the darkness and dragged him into a black gulf, a chasm without light. This had been a recurrent nightmare until he thrashed it out of himself, remembering that, one day, when the old man had to go out of town, Millie Small, in her turn, took him to Kew Gardens on a summer afternoon, and led him into the place that housed the Victoria Lilies; but was caught short, and had to leave him, so that he was left alone in the steamy half-light…. At that moment a horror fell upon him, and later, dreams. Years passed before he knew the meaning of those dreams; and, having learned that they were nothing but trivialities, his own droppings sticking to the heels of his memory, he laughed the dream out of this world to where it belonged, he coughed it into cloud-cuckooland. But then, having rid himself of a dream, he had to lie down at night with the begetter of the dream … the pond in which the mosquitoes fecundated, the coil of shit in which the green-arsed blowflies laid their filthy eggs … himself, Charles Small. There is no point in trying to escape. He is in a Hall of Mirrors. Consciousness is neither here nor there. Awake or asleep he is whirling in a wild waltz in the arms of the shadow, and when, between dances, he goes to the toilet to make himself decent, his own bones grin at himself with teeth that are his own because he has paid for them by the grace of Solly Schwartz…. It is interesting, in this connection, to consider that the work of the dentist, Parmee, will live longer than the three-dimensional work of God that was Charles Small; because his flesh will rot away and his bones will decay, but the gold and the porcelain that Parmee put into his mouth remain. … One of these days, a few centuries hence, someone will dig up all that is left of his Shakespearean mouth, and hammer it into an ear-ring, or, more likely, hand it to a Central Committee that will employ the precious metal internationally, secreted underground; or nationally isotopically, for the destruction of the world. And so runs the world away. The wardens of Belsen and Buchenwald knocked the gold fillings out of prisoners’ teeth—for gold. Who knows where that gold went? Who knows from where it came? Charles Small’s silly little fat-arsed daughter, Laura, who has recently been given a signet ring, may be wearing part of the diadem of the Emperor of All Men, or a sliver of the misery of the universe; because gold is the only thing Man never throws away. Of all the toys Man treasures, the yellow stuff is the most durable. Put your soul under your hammer and beat it into a gorgeous golden goblet—put your heel on the goblet and trample it into a jagged cake; the gold is there. The dust of Alexander, turned to clay, may stop a bung to keep the wind away. But in Charles Small’s teeth there may be something of Ur of the Chaldees, a bit of Rameses, a grain of Karakoram … and in the crown of some king a thousand years hence there may be a bit of one of the gold-filled teeth of Charles Small, since no one lets gold go to waste.