The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —Wasn’t it fun, said Agnes Deigh leaning against a garbage can. Herschel, scratching the sotted front of an evening shirt beside her, agreed, with the sound of a thing drowning. He excused himself, and when he had thrown up in an empty doorway returned singing. No doubt about it: tonight he was going to manage it. —Your strip-tease danse was shocking, Rudy, he said. —Where’s Tertullian? I can’t lose him, Rudy said, and slipped a white hairless arm through Herschel’s, pulled the evening cape tighter and with almost masculine exasperation thrust the long blond hair out over the fur. —Call a cab, baby, for God’s sake. I feel awful. I feel like I was going to have a miscarriage.

  Agnes Deigh returned a moment later, from between two parked cars. She was talking. But there was no one to talk to. There was no one there at all. The sound of thunder approached from the street’s corner, a Department of Sanitation truck stopping every ten or twelve yards to open the huge maw at its back and masticate the immense portions left out to appease it with gnashings of reckless proportions, glass smashed and wood splintered between its bloodless gums. Agnes, leaning alone there, was suddenly frightened less than ten bites away. She was, as much as her haze of consciousness would allow her, terrified, and set off up the street in the opposite direction, loping in frantic steps as though dodging among trees, an injured doe in a landscape of Piero di Cosimo fleeing the patient hunter. She reached a lighted doorway, struggled into the vast and empty interior, and collapsed into a pew.

  Ed Feasley and Otto were moving at seventy-three miles an hour. But neither of them wanted to go to Connecticut, and when they realized that they were taking that direction the car swung about with a scream, and was saved from what might have been a fatal skid by hitting its sliding rear against a lamppost. It headed south. —I want to see how fast I can make that ramp around Grand Central, Ed said, full of spirit. As long as he was conscious, he liked to have a good time. He had been having one, continuous, for years, and never a moment of craven doubt in any of it. He was not afraid: not a grain of that fear which is granted in any definition of sanity. In college, he had entertained himself and others, quiet evenings in his rooms when his allowance was cut off, by beating the back of his fist with a stiff-bristled hairbrush, then swinging his hand in circles until the pressure of descending blood broke small capillaries and spotted the rug and ceiling with spots turned brown by morning; or standing before a mirror with thumb and forefinger pressed against his carotid arteries until his face lost all color and he was caught by consciousness as he fell; or dropping lighted cigarettes into the trouser turn-ups of a friend’s two-hundred-dollar suit; or setting fire to his hand dipped in lighter fluid; or setting fire to the extended newspapers of people in subways just before the doors closed, leaving him on the platform overcome with laughter at the fugitive conflagration. He liked a Good Time.

  The car stopped so suddenly it might have hit a wall. Otto straightened up from the dashboard holding his head. They were in front of a hospital. —What is it? he asked, brushing at a spot on his sleeve until he realized that it was a band of light from the streetlamp above.

  —I’ve always wanted to pat a stiff on the head. They shave them, Ed Feasley said. A minute later they were in a basement corridor of the hospital, talking to the watchman. He was lonely. They just wanted to know how to get to Connecticut. They were told. The watchman left on his round.

  In a large refrigerated room, Ed Feasley raised a sheet and stroked a smooth pate. He groaned with pleasure. Otto opened drawers, and closed them. Then he turned with his prize. It was a leg, small enough to be a woman’s, quite old, slightly blackened around some of the toes and its detached end neatly bound with tape. But Ed’s felicitous imagination had been busy too: with some effort, he had brought together two lonely corpses of opposite sex, erected now in the act of life. But even that mortal pleasure failed to change their expressions, leveled into disconsolate similitude by their shaven heads.

  Otto was having trouble keeping the leg wrapped. —You ought to get rid of that sling, Ed Feasley said. —It’s just a gag anyway, isn’t it? Here, give me the leg, and he left with it partially wrapped in the bit of blue cloth under his arm.

  The car roared south in the dawn’s early light. —We have to do something with it, said Feasley, nodding back at the fragmentary passenger in the back seat. —We ought to give it to somebody. Somebody who needs it.

  —There’s a girl I’d like to give it to, Otto said. —I’d like to give it to Edna Mims, God damn it, in a box, a nice long white flower box from Max Schling.

  —That’s it! said the driver. —She’s the girl you used to go around with in college? She’s a good lay. We’ve got to get the box now.

  The sudden light of Madison Square showed day approaching rapidly, though the sky was not yet colored with dawn; but with this clearing sky above, and the knock he had got on the head, sobriety and trepidation descended upon Otto. —We’d better not, he said.

  —No, come on, it’s a fat idea.

  They thundered into Washington Square. Otto tried desperately to think of an alternative, something safer, someone defenseless. Then he said, —Stanley.

  —Stanley?

  —We’ll tell him it’s a relic. He’s a Catholic, and he must want a relic. We’ll give him the Pope’s left leg.

  —He won’t believe it.

  —He’ll believe it.

  —I wouldn’t believe it, even if I was Catholic.

  —He’s a Catholic. He’ll believe it. How does he know what the Pope’s leg looks like?

  —How does anybody know, except the Pope?

  —Except the Pope. There’s more than one pope.

  —The rest are dead.

  —All right, they’re dead. This is from a dead one.

  —Well then he can’t have been dead very long.

  —Look, we don’t have to tell him it’s a pope’s leg. Stanley lives in a basement apartment. All we have to do is break the lock on the grating, we can do that some way, and slip it into bed with him. He’ll wake up and think it’s the Pope.

  —The Pope in bed with him?

  —But then he’ll find that there’s no one attached to it. Then he’ll know.

  —What’ll he know?

  —Why then he’ll know that the Pope is dead.

  The car turned toward Sixth Avenue.

  At four in the morning, the nurse told Stanley that his mother was sleeping well, that he had better go home and get some rest, they would get in touch with him immediately if anything happened. Mother lay in one of those bed machines which can be cranked and warped in any direction, to accommodate whatever vagary of accident or human ill. But even now, though the black beads lay quiet in her fingers, she was not asleep. Not at all. After a reassuring look at her teeth in the glass she had closed her eyes and pretended sleep, so that they would go away, mortally tired she was of all of their quietened voices in hope that she would live, their faces drawn in dolefulness trusting that she would not die when that, in unequivocal reason, was all she wanted.

  For one thing, she was certain that somewhere along the way they had left a pair of scissors inside her. For another, they had played music to her when they made the amputation (this was called therapy), and she could not get the tune out of her head. When she thought of her missing limb, she remembered the tune; then as her weary unmusical mind dragged her helpless through that tune, she remembered the leg, which would at this point begin to itch. When she inclined to scratch it, it was not there. And as she bent her body, the scissors would shift. Then the tune would commence again. Could she wait? while one after another of her parts was carried away, in a bottle, in a glass, on a tray. What shabby presentation would she make, when she appeared at her final Destination? Her thumb twitched on the crucifix, and a lonely movement of the sheet toward the end of the bed betrayed her wakefulness, where her foot tapped against a metal rung. No one noticed it. Stanley went home.

  He let himself into his room, bolted the door and fixed the chain,
and lay down on his back, fully dressed, staring at the crack in the ceiling above. At first, he had only measured that crack once a week, but in these last few months he measured it every evening, and since the beginning of December, two ways: along its broken length, and the straight distance from the corner of the room to the end of the crack. In twenty months it had lengthened one and five-eighths inches. How long could it go on? before that ceiling, with the sudden impatience of inanimate things, would yawn open over him, and fall with the astonished introduction of the lives above into his own. Who could live in a city like this without terror of abrupt entombment: buildings one hundred stories high, built in a day, were obviously going to topple long before, say, the cathedral at Fenestrula, centuries in building, and standing centuries since. A picture of that cathedral hung on the wall across the room, and when he lay down it was either to stare at the ceiling, or, on his side, at that print, the figure which seemed to be gathered toward heaven in the spired bulk of the cathedral. Fenestrula! If ever he should get to Italy, it was in that cathedral that he wanted to play the organ; a lonely ambition, solitary epiphany. Meanwhile he carried concealed a small hammer and chisel, escape tools, and tried to avoid travel underground.

  On the ceiling grew the graph of Stanley’s existence, his central concern: Expendability.

  Everything wore out. What was more, he lived in a land where everything was calculated to wear out, made from design to substance with only its wearing out and replacement in view, and that replacement to be replaced. As a paper weight, on the pile of lined music composition paper tattered by erasure, lay a ceramic fragment from the Roman colony at Leptis Magna in North Africa. It was slightly conical, a triangular shape, dull, unglazed, and thumb prints were almost discernible in the scalloped edge: valueless as objet d’art, it had what might be credited as tactile value, and little else, except that it had been made to last. And Stanley, eating in the neighborhood with pressed metal cutlery, drinking from paper cups and plastic cups, often sat silent at table for minutes, weighing the dishonest weight of a plastic salt shaker, considering Leptis Magna, still standing on the Libyan shore of the middle sea. Phonograph needles? razor blades? thrown away entire, when their edges and points were worn. Automobile batteries? someone had told him that batteries in European cars lasted for years, but here companies owned those long-life patents, and guarded them while they sold batteries to replace those they had sold a year before. But there was more to it than gross tyranny of business enterprise; and advertising, whose open chancres gaped everywhere, only a symptom of the great disease, this plague of newness, this febrile, finally paretic seizure dictated by a beadledom of time monitored by clocks, observatories, signals on the radio, the recorded voice of a woman (dead or alive) who dissected the latest minute on the telephone when you dialed NERVOUS.

  Stanley looked at his wrist watch. He was almost never seen in any but frayed and soiled clothing, but he owned others. In the closet at his head, which was locked, were three suits, two almost new and the third never worn. There were two pairs of shoes, brown and black, which he took out and dusted every week. He had two hundred new razor blades, and a porous stone on which he could get old ones almost sharp, which accounted for his half-shaven look. (Some day he hoped to own a Rolls razor; but he understood their sales were discouraged here by American razor blade manufacturers.)

  Those were the outward signs. But like every legitimate terror, this obsession with expendability ran through every instant of his body’s life. Stanley had haircuts infrequently, and even then only a trim. He did not wash often. People must suspect this. What did they think? But better, perhaps: let them think what they would. Every abrasive contact with the wash cloth and caustic soap must wear down the body a little. But here came another enigma: if washing wore things out, what of clothes? He always wore a shirt just one more day, not only making it last but keeping his supply of clean ones (and some never worn) ready. But when, eventually, the one he wore went to the laundry, wasn’t it necessary to use the most harsh soaps and treatment to get it clean? Therefore wasn’t it wearing out faster?

  Still, he was most upset in these calculations over the prospect of the Last Moment. Would he have time to wash himself to perfect newness, dress in unworn, uncreased garments? Perhaps not. Perhaps he would be snatched up as he was! a picture so discomfiting that when it really came upon him, he would surprise everyone by appearing spotless for a day or two, leaving unanswered (except in his own apprehension) the cordial question, —Where are you going, Stanley? Perhaps what had happened to him when he went for an army physical examination was meant to be a lesson: told to undress, he was so mortified at the dirt on him that he went to the bathroom where the only place he could find to wash in privacy, in secret if you will, was the toilet bowl itself, Would he have time?

  The perfect naked death of a baby (right after baptism).

  What of Saint Catherine? appeared in pieces, did she? rolling that wheel before her. But there, she had that wheel, Saint Lawrence the gridiron, as witness to their unseemly appearances. But not in this world: things wore out, and you lost them in a thousand ways, preposterous and unconnected with any notion of devotion, martyrdom, sacrifice . . . What of Mother? a thought which had been running under the surface of all these others. What of her?

  And at that moment a stab of pain penetrated a tooth, and slowed to a blunt ache as he turned his face to the wall, and his eyes to the crucifix there. The dull throbbing persisted, he took his jaw in his hand of cold thin fingers and turned his face again. On a low table near his head, under gathering dust and black flecks from the river and a railroad shunting track, were newspaper clippings, sequestered for no reason but to avoid throwing them away, un-matching pictures and unrelated information one shred of which might, at some extremity, be demanded. On top lay the most recent, the feature story on the Spanish girl to be canonized in the Easter week of the year ahead. The pain in his jaw subsided as he stared at her picture upside-down hanging from the table’s edge, and his mind confused its thoughts and images, more vivid and irrelevant, as it did always when he lay this way, as unable to sleep at night as he was torpid during day.

  He shuddered at Esme, seduced by an apprehension in a world real enough to her: appalled one day when an airplane moving with the speed of sound had disemboweled the heaven above them and eviscerated its fragments in nausea from their bodies walking below. Alone, he might have thought nothing of it, but shut it out as he did all the frenzied traffic of the world. But her terror shook him; and she was right. And if on the other hand, they’d met that early Jesuit Father Anchieta in the street on a sunny day, sheltered under the parasol of birds he summoned to hover over him and keep pace, she would have appreciated such resourcefulness without profane curiosity, probably not have repeated what she’d seen to a soul. But the airplane! Had she met Saint Peter of Alcántara, Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Peter Gonzalez, walking, as they did, upon the waves of the sea, why, there was more reason in those excursions than that streak of cacodaemonic extravagance sundering the very dome of heaven.

  Stanley moved suddenly, sitting up as though to break a spell. He sat rigid on the edge of the bed, clenching his teeth as though to discipline the activity of his mind, which he could hardly stir during the day when he tried to work. How could Bach have accomplished all that he did? and Palestrina? the Gabrielis? and what of the organ concerti of Corelli? Those were the men whose work he admired beyond all else in this life, for they had touched the origins of design with recognition. And how? with music written for the Church. Not written with obsessions of copyright foremost; not written to be played by men in worn dinner jackets, sung by girls in sequins, involved in wage disputes and radio rights, recording rights, union rights; not written to be issued through a skull-sized plastic box plugged into the wall as background for seductions and the funnypapers, for arguments over automobiles, personalities, shirt sizes, cocktails, the flub-a-dub of a lonely girl washing her girdle; not written to be punctuate
d by recommendations for headache remedies, stomach appeasers, detergents, hair oil . . . O God! dove sei Fenestrula?

  Still he did not get up, but sat staring toward the dim shape of the print of the cathedral. Beneath it was the table where he worked, a cardboard practice keyboard in the center, piled at both ends with papers in uneven stacks, one weighted with the ceramic fragment, another with the Liber Usualis opened upon the Missae pro Defunctis, his own cramped scribblings in the margins of majestic words between the bars, —Quántus trémor est futúrus, Quando judex est ventúrus . . . And one page was marked with a tattered piece of notepaper. It was a Misereris omnium, and on the paper was written this piece of verse by Michelangelo, and beside it Stanley’s broken attempt at translation:

  O Dio, o Dio, o Dio, O God, O God, O God,

  Chi m’a tolto a me stesso Who has taken me from myself

  from me myself

  Ch’a me fusse piu presso Who was closest (closer) to me

  O piu di me potessi, And could do more than I

  most about me

  che poss’ io? What can I do?

  O Dio, o Dio, o Dio.

  Specks of dirt on the floor caught his attention from the corner of an eye, and as was his habit he reached out and flicked at them, to see if any moved of their own volition. The tooth throbbed; and as he lay back he thought again of his mother, to whom his work was to be dedicated when it was finished. He looked at his wrist watch, turned off the light, and in closed eyes embraced a vision of the antiphonic brass of Giovanni Gabrieli pouring forth from the two choir lofts in Saint Mark’s, to meet over the heads of those congregated below.

  His work, always unfinished, was like the commission from a prince in the Middle Ages, the prince who ordered his tomb, and then busied the artist continually with a succession of fireplaces and doorways, the litter of this life, while the tomb remained unfinished. Nor for Stanley, was this massive piece of music which he worked at when he could, building the tomb he knew it to be, as every piece of created work is the tomb of its creator: thus he could not leave it finished haphazard as he saw work left on all sides of him. It must be finished to a thorough perfection, as much as he humbly could perceive that, every note and every bar, every transition and movement in the pattern over and against itself and within itself proof against time: the movement in the Divine Comedy; the pattern in a Requiem Mass; prepared against time as old masters prepared their canvases and their pigments, so that when they were called to appear the work would still hold the perfection they had embraced there. Not what was going on around him now, a canvas ready when it had been stretched and slavered with white lead, or not prepared at all, words put on paper, flickering images on celluloid, with no thought but of the words and the image and the daub to follow. (Stanley’s work was done on scrap paper which he ruled himself and on envelope backs, old letters, or old scores which he had erased. He was saving a pile of new paper for the final composition.)