Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  Diddy sitting in the compartment, pondering the curious size of things. A grayish twilight is coming down. Looking inadvertently out of the window, Diddy catches the moment when a light goes on in a distant farmhouse. A vigil light, perhaps. Saying to the weary husband and father still astride his tractor, finishing a day of strenuous labor: Come home for your hot supper, to your children who will scramble into your lap, to your wife’s ample bed. Though himself without the safety of home, Diddy responds to the signal. Longs to get out (now), into this plenitude; off the train while space is still open and empty. For soon the ground will be filling up, the houses coming closer, crowding to the edge of the tracks, multiplying and eventually congealing into large buildings. Soon the train will bisect a town. Then, after a shorter interval, plunge through another town. And finally to the city where we all have to haul down our luggage from the racks overhead, and get off.

  Then, marooned in the city to come, Diddy will have to face what he’s done. Or not done. All of which has been thrown into question. He blames this on the girl, but it’s not her fault, really. The confusion, and the need to complicate matters, must lie in him. For the coarse menace of detection and punishment, Diddy has substituted the subtler menace of uncertainty. He has given his anxiety the form of an enigma.

  * * *

  The untidy aunt has awakened, and gone back to sleep again. Diddy and Hester in the glass-roofed club car (now), the last car in the train. Diddy sits with his back to the rear door of the car. Doesn’t want to watch the tracks narrowing so hastily behind the train, or be distracted by the two couples at another table playing bridge. Hester is having a daiquiri, Diddy a rye and water.

  “I have to ask you about what happened back there … between us.” Diddy is uneasy, embarrassed. “What do you feel? Now.”

  “I’m fine,” she says tonelessly.

  “You’re not sorry about it?”

  “Why should I be? I enjoy making love.” Something bitter in her voice that pains Diddy. She could be angry at his story about the workman, which she apparently finds preposterous, and at the fact that he had first lied to her. Or she could be angry at his present line of questioning, find it presumptuous or in bad taste. Diddy chooses to think it is the latter, and becomes offended himself.

  “Do you often make love with strangers?” Diddy the Jealous.

  “Do you?”

  Diddy sighed. “That was a stupid thing to say. Forgive me.”

  “There’s no point in not doing what you want, is there?” said Hester. “I mean, if nobody’s stopping you.”

  Diddy sighed again, and took the girl’s hand. How complicated everyone is! “Tell me something about yourself, besides that you’re having an operation.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. When you’re blind, it’s all inside.”

  “Have you always been blind?”

  Hester didn’t answer that question, but went on haltingly with the one before. “How can I describe my life to you? People wait on me, they have to. And I think a lot, listen to music. I’m fond of flowers. I’m—”

  “Do you cry sometimes?”

  “You asked me that before.”

  “I know. And you didn’t give me the answer, remember?… Please answer. Maybe I want to know because I cry a lot myself, and I’m not ashamed of it.”

  “The answer is yes. Often.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably not for the same reason you do.”

  “How do you know? Anyway, how many reasons are there?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s because I’m unhappy. If that’s what you’re imagining. Maybe I cry because I’m bored.”

  “I’ll bet anything that’s not true,” said Diddy. “Why do you say that? Is the truth too private? Am I prying?”

  “No, I would like to tell you. But all I can think of is that I cry because there are tears.”

  Diddy didn’t like that answer. He wanted her to be unhappy, to be like him. “Are you very lonely?”

  “Not exactly. But I don’t have enough things to touch.”

  “Things? You mean people?”

  “Yes. People, too.”

  “Do you love anyone?” Diddy the Possessive.

  “I don’t think so. At least, not the way I think you mean. When you’re blind, people are changing all the time. The same person is never the same person. He’s new every time he speaks or moves or touches me.”

  “Do you love your aunt?”

  “Oh, no. Not love. But I like things she does. Her constant talking is awful, but I like her touching me. And reading to me. She’s a coordinator of children’s services in the public library.”

  Diddy, relieved, felt bold enough to approach what he really wanted to know. “Do you love me? I mean now.” Diddy, an old adept at unrequited love.

  “I did. Back there.” Hester paused. “I don’t know about now. You’re not as real to me as you were.”

  Nettled. Well, what did Diddy expect? “At least you’re honest.”

  “I try to be. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do! But it hardly matters, does it? Back there, I told you what happened in the tunnel. I told you the truth. But you don’t believe me.”

  “How can I? I have to believe what I heard. I didn’t hear you say you were going outside. And I didn’t hear you leave the compartment.”

  The girl is adamant. And Diddy doesn’t want to quarrel. He wants to be united with her, to be clear as she is clear. And to be blind, too. Still, he needs to talk; and senses that he can address her sympathy if not her credulity. She must be drawn to him, feel for him, or she wouldn’t have made love, wouldn’t consent to be with him (now).

  “I want to tell you the whole story anyway,” he says. “Even though you think I’m making it all up.”

  “I didn’t say that. Tell me.” She tightens her hand on his. “You’re awfully thin. Don’t you like to eat?”

  Diddy fights to keep from getting wet-eyed at her gift of sympathy. Think of the workman! He begins from the beginning. The walk through the tunnel, the curious obstacle and the solitary workman, outsized and brutish, like an armed angel. Then the monstrous unnecessary battle, and the unhinged body falling across the track. Propping the body against the train.…

  “You were daydreaming,” said the girl firmly. “That’s why the man seemed so big.”

  “Daydreaming in a tunnel?”

  “Why not?”

  “But I know it happened! I was there.”

  “Then ask the others.”

  “I don’t want to,” Diddy said. “You’re my witness.”

  The girl was silent. Diddy longed to rip her glasses off, to slap her face. As if that way he could make her see.

  “You’re always sighing,” said the girl. “Do you know that?”

  “Sure. That’s because I’m angry. But I don’t know what to do with my anger.”

  “Angry at me?” said Hester.

  “Yes. Very angry.”

  “Why?”

  “For being stubborn,” said Diddy.

  “You mean, for being blind.”

  “No, I don’t mean that.” Diddy sat with half-shut eyelids, unable to look at the girl. Feels imprisoned with her. The adventure is over. Time was dragging. Perhaps the trip will last forever, the train go on speeding through endless twilight. The train has acquired the physical and moral energy of a human body; it judged Diddy. And there was to be no absolution from the girl. So be it.

  There was nothing but to return to the compartment, and stare out of the window at the metaphor of nature. In the landscape’s farthest recesses, in the very experience of seeing in perspective, to find a model for the depths of what had happened.

  * * *

  The compartment again. Hester’s aunt, thoroughly awake, obviously entranced to discover that her niece has been spending so much of the train journey in the company of the personable young man sitting across from them.

  Introductions are made. Mrs. Nayburn. My niece, Miss Hester N
ayburn. But, of course, by now you two young people must be long past the introduction stage.

  Diddy, not remembering that Hester still knew neither his first name nor his last, addressed her aunt. “Dalton Harron.”

  “Well, isn’t this nice.… What do you do, Mr. Harron? If it’s not too forward of me to ask.”

  Diddy sent a despairing glance to Hester, who was leaning back in her seat. “I work for a company that manufactures microscopes.”

  “One of the big companies?” asked the aunt.

  “How interesting,” said the priest, looking up from his breviary. “What a privilege to gaze so closely upon the wonders of nature.”

  “Oh,” said Diddy hastily, “I don’t do any of the looking through the microscopes.” Wanted to bury this insinuation, awkward in the presence of the girl, that he lived through his eyes. “They’re made at the plant upstate and shipped from there. I’m in the New York office. I design brochures for mailing campaigns and work on the advertising placed in scientific and trade journals.”

  An Elementary Lesson in the Naming and Use of the Microscope:

  Place your microscope on a firm support facing the window.

  The lens through which you look is called the eyepiece; the lens at the other end is the objective.

  The support on which the slide rests is the stage.

  Below the stage is the diaphragm which controls the amount of light that the mirror throws through the circular hole in the center of the stage.

  The mirror is used for gathering light to illuminate transparent objects on the stage.

  When a solid object, such as the head of a fly, is examined, the light must come from above and from the front of the stage, since the light from the mirror cannot penetrate solids.

  “Have you had your job long?” asked the aunt.

  “Yes,” said Diddy.

  The aunt subsided, perhaps unable for the moment to think of another question. Diddy looked, questioningly, at the girl. The optical microscope was an ancient and noble instrument, essentially unchanged over the centuries. But useless without eyes, a far nobler instrument and infinitely more ancient. Was the girl born blind? One elementary piece of information her aunt hadn’t volunteered. Hester hadn’t answered him either, when he asked if she’d always been like this. Diddy wants to know. Yet hardly something he could ask (now).

  Corneal opacities usually date from birth. But not necessarily. Hester could have gone blind during childhood; her eyes badly scarred from, say, severe conjunctivitis. She might once have seen everything in the usual way: flesh, flowers, the sky. Even looked through a microscope in her eighth-grade science class.

  “What kind of microscope?” said the stamp dealer. Was he interested, too?

  Diddy’s company manufactured several of the standard varieties. Some of the less familiar types, too.

  Toolmakers microscopes.

  Metallurgical microscopes.

  Comparison microscopes.

  Projection microscopes.

  Ophthalmoscopes.

  Retinoscopes.

  Otoscopes.

  These last three, medical tools, used by eye and ear specialists.

  The aunt perked up. “Maybe they use your company’s microscopes at the Warren Institute. Your company might make something that the doctors really need, that’s going to help my Hester.”

  “I’d like to think that,” said Diddy, feeling still more uncomfortable at this tactless turn of the conversation. The girl, being blind, had become a thing; discussed as if she weren’t even present in our compartment.

  “If I could see through an instrument,” said the girl suddenly, “the one I’d choose would be a telescope. I’d like to see the stars. Especially to see the light coming from a dead star. One that died a million years ago, but goes on as if it didn’t know it was dead.”

  “Lovey, you’re being morbid again!” The aunt, nestling into Hester’s unresponsive shoulder. “I want my little girl to continue to be brave.”

  “It’s not morbid to be more interested in big things than in little things,” said the girl sharply.

  And, feeling anew the wave of kinship that flowed between them and the magical synchronicity of their thoughts, it occurred to Diddy: Then perhaps it’s not morbid to be more interested in what is dead than what is alive.

  He, at least, no longer had a choice. The workman was like one of the dead stars that Hester longed to see. Already extinguished, but still sending forth over long distances a beam of light as lifelike and convincing as that issuing from the most vibrant and contemporary star. Diddy had to remind himself that the workman existed in the past. Not be led astray by appearances. However strong the light which the workman cast on Diddy’s mind, the man was really dead. Diddy had killed a black sun, which now burned in his head. Surely the girl could see the black sun, if she tried. Even being blind. Or perhaps because of that. Was she testing him? He must hold fast to the difference between dead stars and living stars, however the evidence of his senses confuses him.

  Hold fast as well to the difference between large and small, far and near. Every moment the train bore him farther away. And night was falling, when all light becomes false. An artifice: a brave lie to stave off fear of the dark; a trick. Like all sighted people, Diddy needs to be able to tell the difference. While the girl, forced to live consistently in the dark, is exempt from that perilous task of discrimination. But perhaps she was different from most people. So different that even if she weren’t blind or her sight were (now) to be restored, she wouldn’t become confused. All light, all that she could see, would be true. Diddy no longer angry. She’d told him the truth as she knew it. And though Hester was mistaken about some of the facts, and though she might never be persuaded she was in error, there was a prodigious truth she did know. And that truth Diddy the Incomplete wanted to learn; to possess it alongside his own truth. No one should venture into the dark alone.

  * * *

  Upon arriving at our common destination, feverish Diddy carried his own light suitcase and the suitcases and parcels belonging to Hester and her aunt off the train. Pushed ahead of some other passengers waiting to engage a redcap, and half bullied the man into taking their things first. Then escorted the two women through the old-fashioned station. With its extravagantly high-ceilinged main waiting room. Walls surfaced in marble. Neo-Roman columns. World War I memorial statue of the frail wounded doughboy caught up, just as he went limp and was about to fall, in the robust arms of the Republic: a large stern woman who gazes resolutely over the head of the dying youth. A railroad station is public space, open to anybody. Though promiscuous meeting and transit may be difficult for Diddy at this time, that lofty ceiling he especially approved of; the more space, the better. But as on every trip upstate to the plant in recent years, Diddy can’t help marking the steady deterioration of the surfaces and furniture of this station. On each arrival the floor, walls, columns, bronze statue, information booth, clock, ticket windows, newspaper stand, wooden benches look more indelibly stained and grimier and more thickly littered. Not only mere negligence is at work here, surely. A question of policy or principle. Only a matter of time before the wrecker’s ball gets around to undoing this generous space, so that something smaller can be put up in its stead. But isn’t there a good deal to be said for keeping a doomed place clean and in decent repair? The claims of dignity, for instance. Especially since nemesis is proving to be somewhat dilatory in paying its anticipated call.

  Following some twenty feet behind the redcap taking their luggage on a dolly; Diddy and the aunt on either side of Hester, steering through the crowd. Between the neo-Roman columns flanking the main entrance out to the sidewalk. Diddy tips the man, then stands off the curb trying to estimate their chances of getting two taxis in the next few minutes if they remain where they are. But these services didn’t seem enough, and he dreaded letting the girl vanish from his life. Standing on the sidewalk, well back from the curb; patiently allowing—or so it seemed to Diddy
—one arm to be held in her aunt’s protective, unnecessary, unrelenting embrace. Diddy looking for some signal from the girl, not finding one. And not knowing what to look for.

  He was startled, too, by the depressing look of the city. Heavy, gray, uncoordinated. And terribly noisy. A furious bluster of noise, hard to sort out. Not at all like the insistent, demanding, authoritative sounds of the train. Did the girl mind noises when she couldn’t interpret them?

  Longish wait. When a taxi pulled up, Diddy, who hadn’t known that’s what he intended to do, got in with the two women and accompanied them to the Warren Institute. “But it’s out of your way, Mr. Harron. We don’t want to put you to any trouble.” Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. All the street lights were on, but the buildings looked like two-dimensional drawings of themselves. The hospital no different. “Hold the flag, driver. I’ll be right with you. Now, Mrs. Nayburn, Hester, please tell me.…” After being assured that the girl’s room was waiting for her and that the aunt had a reservation at a boarding house three blocks away, Diddy carried their suitcases into the hospital as far as the admissions desk. Shy good nights. Then went back downtown to the Rushland, where out-of-town executives and salesmen always stayed at the company’s expense when visiting the home office. Luckily, no one else from New York coming up for the conference was in the hotel lobby when he registered.

  Nearly ten-thirty when Diddy was shown to his room. Unpacked, showered, then called down to the desk to inquire about the first edition of the local morning paper. It came out around 2 a.m. He asked to be phoned at that hour. (Now) eleven o’clock: Diddy turned on the television and found the program he wanted. From behind a desk a bland balding man offered an allotment of communiqués from the front—large enemy losses exactly counted, our casualties light—and politicians’ tautologies; items about someone shooting his mother-in-law, a penitentiary riot, the impending divorce of a celebrated Hollywood couple; a condescending account of how the heavyweight champion smashed a young pretender in two rounds in Mexico City; and something about the weather: fair and colder, winds from the northeast. But no fatality on the railroad that afternoon. Perhaps such a death wasn’t important or picturesque enough to rate inclusion in the “News.” Diddy turned off the set, and decided to try turning himself off as well. Although the hour is early, too agitated to entrust himself to the open spaces of the city streets, with their possibilities of haphazard, impersonal encounters. But something seems almost as threatening, in a coy way, about the anonymous surfaces and the carefully neutralized smell of this room. He will have to go further into himself, away from all coherent rational spaces. Perhaps he can sleep. Of the twin beds in the room, Diddy chose the one near the window, though he didn’t open the window or switch on the air-conditioner.