The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —O king, greatest of the gods, thou sun, the lord of heaven and earth, god of gods, thy breath is potent, if it seem good to thee, forward me on my way to the supreme deity who begat thee and formed thee, for I am the man Gwyon.

  —I invoke thee, O Zeus the Sun-god Mithra Serapis, invincible, giver of mead, Melikertes, lord of the mead, abraalbabachaebechi . . .

  He stood, his hand on the bull’s horns, and the expression on his face of a man waiting for something which has happened long before.

  Each time Janet’s eyes reached the foot of the page, she returned them to the top, to verse eight of chapter twenty-four of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, —All these are the beginning of sorrows, and read the column down again. She stood and bore this repetition silent for some time, until at last, after hanging for a moment on verse twenty-four, her gaze shortened to her bare hands clasped before her, and under the care of her eyes they opened, sustaining the shock of her pupils in two dark scars on the palms. The palms were clean, but the rest of her hands as she turned them, from the nails down along the ridges and jointures of the fingers, were not. Suddenly her left hand closed, and she dug the firm flesh on the back of it with her forefinger.

  Through the window the snow fell fast and heavily, the leisured dignity of perfect flakes lost in bitter water-soaked streaks to earth, each moment passing in more frantic declivity until the artifice of its identity had entirely disappeared, and it was rain.

  The sound of thunder drew her to the glass. She stood looking out. Then she raised her hands and tried to rub away the two blots on the windowpanes she had left earlier, but she could not, and her hands moved more and more slowly until they stopped, and left her staring down at the carriage barn, barely discernible below. As she looked, a hand came back to her face and commenced moving over it, not in caress along its surface, nor excitedly, but deliberately resting on her features in one position after another; until that hand stopped, the thumb along the ridge of her nose and the palm over her mouth, and she drew her left hand back to grasp the empty folds at her breast.

  A minute later and she’d pulled the frame of type from the flatbed hand press in the corner, unlocked it and spilled the letters all over the floor, banged the Bible closed, hesitated a moment over it and then pushed it off into the pile of metal spellingless letters and come out her door. Her steps creaked in the hallway, but the Town Carpenter’s voice came on from behind his door as she passed, evenly absorbed in reading aloud to the dog, —“While we go now to bring the Wanderer up, it should not be forgotten that the house, completely furnished, is awaiting him, and he has only to knock at the door, enter, and be at home” . . . (They were in volume I of Lew Wallace’s The Prince of India, or, Why Constantinople Fell.)

  At the other end of the hall Janet reached the empty sewing room and went straight in among the roses upside-down, the green-capped pink-faced dogs faded on the west wall behind the chaise longue where she suddenly saw him sitting rigidly erect, his drawn fist plunged into his neck so that his arm stood out like a wing, and his brows noticeable for being contracted so forcefully that they seemed to have seized the face and held it in this stifling grasp. Apparently he was asleep. Janet bent close, studying the thin face, the slightly crooked nose, the rough chin and bare throat. The left hand lay in his lap as rigid as the rest of him, the fingers doubled in upon themselves and the veins standing out around the clotted blood, where Janet reached and prodded the torn place with her forefinger. Not a muscle moved in his face, nor anywhere else about him; and Janet turned and ran out, down the hall, and the stairs, and out of the house, leaving him there in the darkening room, where he slept in this same tense numb position until the roses had faded to stripes, and the walls themselves had lost their boundaries.

  He waked staring straight ahead to that full consciousness which only sheer horror attains: his blood stopped. For a prolonged instant everything stopped and the blood, without motion, was cast as a solid of unbearable weight and impenetrable density.

  —No one knows who I am.

  It was a full minute before he moved; and when he did he burst to his feet, as though to shatter this irregular surface of space enclosed by merciless solids. —No one in this house knows me, he brought out; but his mouth was so dry that the words came to pieces before he got them out where his own ear could resolve them, and he stood sucking the inside of his mouth in upon itself, plying the barren, abruptly unfamiliar hollow with his insensible tongue until its features dissolved, and he could repeat, —None of them knows who I am.

  But even before these words were out, something else had assailed him. He began looking wildly round the room, where shapes refused to identify themselves, and endured only in terms of the others, each a presence made possible only by what everything else was not, each suffering the space it filled to bear it only as a part of a whole which, with a part standing forth to identify itself, would perish.

  —Who was here? he whispered. Already the inside of his mouth was afloat with saliva, so that he swallowed, raised the pool on his tongue and exhausted its surface on the roof of his mouth and swallowed again. —She was here, he said, gripping his chin in his hand.

  Starting again, the blood on its course had set every interior surface of his body stingingly aflame with the thrill of its own existence; and he stamped his feet, and shook his hands in the air. —This . . . this . . . he whispered hoarsely. Then he grabbed one hand with the other and gripped it tight as he could, until the balance of that was out and he exchanged them, gripping the second with the first, and finally got out of the room with his hands interlocked before him, the fingertips of each one straining in upon the bones of the other.

  There had been a good deal of noise in this last hour or so, books thrown and dropped, the type-metal words smashed into their meaningless components, doors banging, and all these fragments were recapitulated now in the thunder, as he broke out into the hall and down the stairs repeating, —Don’t you know me? Don’t you know who I am? You know who I am. Don’t you know who I am? . . . , words which broke the surface, and followed one another as discordant articulations of his heavy breathing.

  Reverend Gwyon had gone out a minute before, hatless, across the bare boards of the porch so heavily that they seemed not yet to have recovered silence, when he reached them and made out Gwyon’s great figure striding down the slope toward the carriage barn. He followed precipitously, sliding and slipping on the soaked pores of the snow as though it were the headlong incline of twenty-five years past; and before he’d reached the bottom he did fall, headlong, so that the crust of the snow gashed his cheekbone and, for the moment he lay there, smothered his rehearsal, —You know who I am. Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know me? . . .

  The rain was coming down the more heavily for the saturated surface which awaited it; and he was drenched when he gained his feet. Just then there was a crash of thunder.

  Gwyon had already made the carriage barn and thrown the door open. There was electricity there, and Gwyon stood just inside, his great hand on the switch and his thumb jamming it back and forth, back and forth, with no consequence but a snap. —Damnation, Gwyon muttered; and then, aware of someone behind him, said, —The bull. I came down to make sure of the bull . . . But Gwyon had hardly got the words out of his mouth before his upraised arm was grasped in the dark so heavily that it almost pulled him over; and the lightning followed so fast on the words that followed, that both were gone, and the transformation was complete, when Gwyon heard,

  —Father . . . Am I the man for whom Christ died?

  Louder than laughter, the crash raised and sundered them in a blinding agony of light in which nothing existed until it was done, and the tablet of darkness betrayed the vivid, motionless, extinct and enduring image of the bull in his stall and Janet bent open beneath him.

  Then it seemed full minutes before the cry, pursuing them with its lashing end, flailed through darkness and stung them to earth. Water fell between them, from a hol
e in the roof. The smell of smoke reached them in the dark.

  With no warning uncertain flicker, the light came on. Before them, a metal wash-tub lay on the floor with a square hole riven through its bottom. The door was charred and smoking around the hinges and the lock.

  Then the shadows round the walls were set dancing in duplication, each steady dark shape mocked by a distorted image leaping round it, as the Town Carpenter appeared with a lantern and stood swinging it in the door. —There now! he said; and though his voice was not loud it rang with confirmation, as he entered and walked over toward the bull’s stall. —There! he said, swinging round, and the lantern with him, —There’s a masterful pizzle for you!

  The bull shifted on its feet, sounding its weight on the board floor, and turned its head from them and withdrew.

  Gwyon was gone. They both turned to the door at the same moment to look; and by the time they reached the door together, Gwyon’s figure showed halfway up the slope toward the house.

  —There now, said the Town Carpenter, nodding and swinging the lantern out. His coat had come open to show long-underwear buttons to the waist. He’d pulled on his trousers and galoshes to come out, and the trousers were on backwards. —It’s that I came down to look at, he said, swinging the lantern toward the balloon stand, which was as good as he’d left it. Then he held the lantern aloft, over the figure poised in the doorway of the carriage barn.

  —There, he’s fallen!

  The Town Carpenter reached out and seized his arm. They could both see Gwyon on the ground up near the house.

  —He’s fallen. Will you let me go help him?!

  —And would you humble him, the Town Carpenter answered without relaxing his grip, —by helping him back to his feet?

  He hung there in the Town Carpenter’s hand until Gwyon had recovered and mounted the porch steps. Then the Town Carpenter opened his hand slowly, eyes fixed on him, until he suddenly wrenched away and ran up the hill laughing.

  The Town Carpenter lowered the lantern and looked into the barn again, murmuring. Then he snapped off the electric light, pulled the door closed, and trudged up the slope hitching the binding front of his pants as he went. At the kitchen door he raised the glass chimney, blew out the lantern and went in, pulling a light cord as he passed, straight over to his pot on the cold stove. There were voices, or a voice, in the dining room, or down the hall, he did not know and did not listen.

  —“Away, to hell, to hell!” Do you remember that?

  The Town Carpenter rolled up his sleeves, took a piece of yellow soap from the metal sink, and dipped his hands into the pot.

  —“Oh, might I see hell, and return again, How happy were I then!” Yes, yes, that’s it! Back there!

  The Town Carpenter found the soap among folds in the bottom of the pot, lifted it out, and dried his hands. —Something amiss, he murmured as he pulled out the light, —we must simplify, as he tramped toward the back stairs.

  Janet came from behind the door of the butler’s pantry. She stopped when she heard the voice down the hall, or in the dining room, she could not tell, but stood for a moment listening, thoroughly wet, her skirt torn, her hair matted down. Then she came on.

  —Yes, back there, that’s the place! They’re waiting! Yes, the harrowing of hell. That’s it. Then wood splintered, in the dining room.

  Janet found him alone there. He had just split the top of the low table under the window down the middle. —What is it? Janet asked calmly, coming closer.

  —Damnation, he answered, backing round the table.

  —Damnation? she repeated, clearly and quietly, as he got round and backed through the door.

  —Damnation? he repeated questioning, and stopping as she came close, holding to the door frame.

  —That is life without love, Janet said. —Who weeps for you?

  He turned and broke down the hall.

  —Whom do you weep for? she pursued him. He reached the front door and turned to stare at her, advancing in her torn blood-streaked skirt. —Do you not know that luxury, that most exquisite luxury we have? she kept on until she reached him.

  —You . . . he burst out, holding a quivering hand before him, —were you . . . you down in the . . . barn? . . .

  Janet was up beside him, so close that their rough cheeks almost touched. —No love is lost, she said, and kissed him on the cheek where the snow had torn it.

  He stared at her an instant longer, and bolted out the front door.

  The Town Carpenter had found a note under his door when he entered his room. He read it aloud to the dog, who raised her head from the pillow to listen. —Dawn tomorrow, a great deal of work to be done in the church. It was on an outsize piece of paper, and signed Gw. At the foot it said, “Return vol. 18 Plants to Raym Britannica.” All this was written in very large letters.

  The Town Carpenter held it up to the light, and finding no other message he started to file it in a drawer which jingled with bottles when he opened it. But he turned with the paper still in his hand, took out his huge gold watch, weighed it for a moment without opening the case, and laid it on the dresser. Next he brought out a flat gold case and stood running his thumb over the inscription.

  The dog whined; and a minute later the light was out, and the Town Carpenter’s voice sounded weary in the darkness. —Move over, you’re taking too much room. Did I brush your teeth? Here. Move over. Go to sleep. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow.

  The Depot Tavern showed one of the few lights in that end of town.

  —I wouldn’t dare go out in this, said the small man with beer, staring through the glass into the clear night. —I’d go in over my head somewhere.

  The man with the blue woman tattooed on his arm was about to comment when the door banged open, and the draggled figure who arrived demanded cognac before he reached the bar.

  —No cognac, I got only some brandy here.

  —All right, brandy. A glass of brandy. Here wait, I said a glass, not a . . . not that thing.

  A tumbler half-filled was put before him, and he took out a twenty-dollar bill.

  The small man sipped his beer, and looked wonderingly at this extravagant diversion.

  —Here, what’s that? What’s that?

  —What? . . .

  —Right there behind you. In the glass.

  —This here? This coconut?

  —Good God . . . it’s a griffin’s egg. Let me see it.

  —This here’s a coconut.

  —Let me see it. Where did it come from?

  —Some guy sent it to me, he was in the service . . .

  —Let me see it.

  —You shake it, you can hear the milk inside rattling. Hear it?

  —Yes, yes, I hear it. Good God . . . will you sell it to me?

  —Sell it?

  —Here. Do you want more?

  —Well, I . . . for a coconut I couldn’t hardly ask you . . .

  —Here, twenty more. Is this enough?

  The small man’s hand shook as he put his beer on the bar, silently, not to interrupt. The glass was almost opaque, spotted with fingermarks, for he had been holding it all the afternoon.

  Further up the bar, the blue woman who had been reclining for some time was suddenly snapped up and strangled until her forehead almost met her knees.

  —When’s the next train?

  —Where you going?

  —Down.

  —Down where?

  —All the way.

  —In a minute, in three or four minutes there’s one, the small man brought out, greatly excited to hear himself speak. —In three or four minutes there’s one, he repeated. —There’s one in three or four minutes.

  They held their breath until the door banged again, shivering the pane between them and the night. Then they stared at the empty glass, and the two twenty-dollar bills on the counter. Even the twelve-point buck seemed to have a dusty eye on it.

  The train arrived in New York at eleven that night.

  The cab slipped
on the wet pavement, in and out of the slush in the gutters, thrusting itself ahead of everything else in the frenzied motion of the streets, tearing open the half-darkness of side streets with its lights and its noise.

  When it pulled in at the curb he leaped out, thrusting uncounted bills into the driver’s hand, and dropped his weight against the door as he reached for the bell. But the door was not locked, and he got into the downstairs hall. There he was stopped by a voice shouting in a fury from above,

  —I tell you I goin to do it, Mister Brown . . . There was a heavy thud, and three more. —I tell you, I tell you I goin to kill you, and now I doin so . . . Mister Brown, and the sound of hitting, again and again, as he got through the vast living room, up the stairs past the polychrome wood saint in the niche extending the scar of the arm offered in benediction.

  He switched on the light on the balcony, and there was silence. He looked into Recktall Brown’s bedroom. It was empty. Then he ran down the hall, round the corner and on to the last doorway.

  Fuller was alone. He was standing over his bed in his underwear with his broken umbrella in his hand, and the spread on the sagging bed rumpled and torn where he’d been beating it. —I caution him I goin to do it, Fuller said hardly looking round, the gold of his teeth a quick glitter in the light from the hall.

  Two suitcases stood packed at the foot of the bed, both cardboard and tied with heavy twine. The high-crowned straw lay on top of them. On the table, among a number of cigar stubs, and the razor blade which Fuller used to pare them with, was the cigar whose wrapper had peeled when Recktall Brown had bitten off the end, now wrapped in a cologne-scented handkerchief. Under the table, all over the floor, bits of paper were scattered: RECKTIL BROWN, REKTELL BROWN, RECKTILL BROWNE . . . covering the pile of crucifixes stacked against the wall.

  —Where is he?

  —Mister Brown take a short trip, say he will return tomorrow. Sometime when he vexed he become very unpredictable.

  —What was it?

  —He taken a ticket from me, Fuller answered, his chest shaking under the buttoned front of his underwear, yellowed by his life in it.