Now it was that the gray blot, which had long been roaming the outskirts of his brain, suddenly took form and turned into a thought. Striking his brain like black lightning. The fedora fell from his unclenched fingers. The man bent down, retrieved the hat, even mechanically brushed the brim with his cuff, yet he was entirely in the power of the thought that had suddenly seized him.
He walked on amid the staccato of footsteps, among the hurrying elbows hooked around briefcases, and thought: why live?
His steps took him past letters revolving on playbill pillars, past gray tires parting the crowd, through air full of dust, shouts, stench, and hats greeting hats, past his own reflection falling into shop windows, onto tin price tags, rubber galoshes, cardboard boxes, and mannequins, and again he wondered: why?
It was unbearable. Everything in him rebelled, his thoughts all rose up against the intruding “why.” The thought was spreading, like a splash of sulfuric acid on cloth. He felt his self-control shifting from him to it. A passerby, whose eyes lit upon his face, stopped and stared warily after him. His forehead was drenched in sweat. Trying to conquer this mental spasm, the man, shielding himself from glances, clapped on his hat and pulled the brim low. At that same instant the thought—like the thread that slips out of the needle—fell out of his consciousness. Everything broke off as abruptly as it had begun.
3
The man looked dazedly every which way—in search of the reason—at the space around him and at the time behind and ahead of “now.” The one thing he did not think to do was to look under his hat.
Any convolution of the brain, like the line of any lane, has its own chronicle of events. Thoughts wander along the brain’s gray pavement now as part of a syllogism, now unto themselves, like solitary passersby; some are bent under loads of meaning, while others raise their heads aloft like empty ears of corn.* The thoughts in the head of a man hanging on the telephone line also hang all day on associative threads, exchanging associations. Some thoughts live alone, recluses shut up in their neurons. Others scurry about the brain’s convolutions, proposing themselves for completion. Come night the brain-city, covered with its cranial crown, falls asleep. The dendrites’ ladders pull back from one another. The thoughts all fall asleep—and only the night watchmen, dreams, wander the brain’s deserted convolutions.
With the dawn, light also dawns in the mind. Thoughts rise from their neurobeds, fitting this subject to that predicate. Logic does its morning exercises: minor premises leap over major ones, major ones over conclusions. The awakened world outlook looks out for all it’s worth.
It’s not hard to imagine what happened when, one fine moment, into the broad thoughtlight of that subcranial world of thoughts came dusk-colored Whylive. Whylive walked along, sheepishly trailing his shadow and trying to avoid unpleasant associations. But the associations noticed him right off and, gritting their meanings, stared after his Whylivish gait. Someone barked: “Get him!” Someone else said: “Why should Whylive live?” The thoughts banded together and went after Whylive, dogging his steps. He was about to dart down one of the brain’s convolutions when out came, arms linked, several hostile associations. Whylive quickened his step. But the distance between him and his pursuers kept shrinking. He broke into a run. The thought-gang was bearing down, threatening to overrun and disthink him altogether. Mustering what strength he had left, Whylive passed into a deserted brain fold and ran all the way to the cranial wall. The chase had not abated; he could hear the barbed tread of thoughts gaining on him. He had to decide. Ahead, traversing the temporal wall, was a cranial seam. Whylive squeezed into the seam and jumped out the other side. Right in front of him, its yellow leather pressed to the man’s temple, was the fedora’s inner band. Gasping for breath, the fugitive jumped in between the felt and leather and froze, listening for sounds inside the man’s cranium.
The chase seemed to have abated, having broken off somewhere back there, on the far side of the frontal wall. Whylive sat very still in his refuge. In the history of wandering thoughts, this had never happened before: dire need had forced an idea to move from the brain to its environs, from a head to a hat.
4
His wife was typically unfaithful with a typical lover. The lover wore a size 17 collar and had 15-inch biceps. In his youth his thinking had been dispersed more or less evenly throughout his nervous system, but later it contracted to the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae which, as we know, govern the sexual impulses. The lover supposed that women differed only in the color of their skirts, which in the dusk, by the way, was indistinguishable. He and the dusk were good friends. And when, after umpteen embraces, the fidgeting of a flat key sounded from somewhere in the hall, the lover dove into the darkest corner, seeking help from the dusk. Close by—past the door left ajar—strode the familiar heavy footsteps. To the right, another door slammed. Tidying himself up, the lover tiptoed out into the hall, exchanged a soundless kiss and snatched his hat from the coat-rack hook. In his hurry, he failed to notice that the hat was her husband’s. The submissive gray fedora felt rough between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
5
The lover ambled down the sleeping city streets, fanning himself with the hat. The sky winked with green stars: the way to life was clear.
His chest easily inhaled the black air. He was thinking: how nice that life has no meaning, how nice that I’ve just dined with a woman, while on the table at home ham and a bottle of white wine wait, how nice that somewhere on high someone is thinking for those of us who need not think. He looked ahead: coming toward him was the hump of a bridge. The late-night city lights wanted to drown in the river—but could not: the water and wind kept dandling them on the black ripples. He reached the middle of the arc and leaned over the balustrade. From above he felt a smattering of raindrops. He must put on his hat. There, he was ready.
Whylive, feeling the pressure of hot human bone against the leather of his temporary quarters, bestirred himself. Damn it, he was not made for extra-cranial ordeals. He recalled the brain’s warmth, its pulpy gray cortex, the cozy depths of a thought’s convolutions. Whylive scrambled out of his leather hideaway, squeezed through the parietal seam and jumped furtively into the stranger’s brain.
Some brains are mind-centers, always alert under the glare of ever-bright meanings, their convolutions crisscrossing like so many New York streets and avenues. Other minds are quiet, but hardworking, like a fishing village. They love the sleepy pauses (Descartes* slept eleven hours a day), but once awake, they cast their trammel nets into the truth and patiently wait for a catch. Still other minds are former minds, ones fallen into decay; having run through their stock of thoughts, they have sunk beneath the Lethean sands of seconds and become museum brains, rarely visited by tourist-thoughts. Such was the brain of the man who donned another man’s hat with another man’s Whylive hidden inside the leather band. Missing its old brain, Whylive jumped into this other man’s head and quickly began—with the zeal of an actual tourist—dashing around all of its secretmost cul-de-sacs. Traces of Whylive were in every neuron, every nerve fiber and filament. The man, grabbing hold of the bridge’s balustrade, stood facing the half-drowned lights. Between his hat and forehead cold sweat dripped. “Why live?” burst from his lips. The man leaned lower, then lower still—and a splash of parted lights was the curt and cold reply to those two words.
6
Everyone in the district loved Grandpa Khodovitz. He worked as a watchman and signalman six kilometers downriver. Today, as yesterday, and the day before that, he had risen with the first yellow streaks of dawn, thrown his fishing rods over his stooped shoulder and trudged down the sandy slope to the riverbank. The signal flags—white and red pennants on a gamma-shaped mast—were in order. Khodovitz baited his hooks with worms and cast them into the still-sleeping morning water. A small fish flirted with death, gently tugging at a float, then darted away into the depths. A steamboat would arrive from the city in twenty-three minutes. Khodovitz bent down over
his rods to check on the worms. The first was in order. The second also. The third—what the devil!—had gotten stuck, stretching the line taut as a guitar string. The old man gave it a yank: swimming toward him was something gray and round with a high dome. Ten seconds later, shaking his head in surprise, Khodovitz was inspecting the draggled gray hat on his hook. My, oh my.
7
Watchman Khodovitz was in the habit on Sundays of going to the local tavern for a few gulps of beer. “A few gulps” should not, of course, be taken literally. Bubbling up over the foamy beer came recollections bursting with blather, friendly clinks of mug against mug rang out, while the pipe smoke tried to rise up to heaven, and the waiter’s cheeks tried to turn as red as his red calico apron.
This time “old man Khodovitz” was met with particular pomp. A dozen beer mugs rose respectfully to greet him. This honor had been prepared by the honoree himself: the carefully dried and ironed gray fedora given him by the river, the city fedora which he, not without a certain shyness, had carried the whole way wrapped in a foulard, now adorned—with its gleaming graphite ribbon, elegantly creased crown and gray silk cord—the old man’s hoary head.
That day the beer gurgled with particular ease down the funnel-like throats. The fedora hugged the old man’s temples and listened attentively to the toasts and the clangor of beer mugs. The old man drank, responded to the jokes and congratulations, and with every gulp became gloomier and more inexplicable to himself.
The trouble was that Whylive, soaked and shivering in the hat into which he had jumped from the drowned man’s brain, as one jumps from a sinking ship into a lifeboat, wanted the warmth of human blood and intracranial shelter. At the first pressure of head against hat, he had slipped into the old man’s porous, sclerotic brain and begun to make himself at home.
Only half-inhabited, like a hamlet after the plague, the old man’s brain was thinly populated with thought-invalids and thought-pensioners. They received their meager wages of approval, friendly slaps on the back, “that’s right, old man” and “tell us again,” but they got around on logical crutches, limping and hobbling. At the sight of the intruding Whylive, those decrepit neurons hid in their burrows, leaving the brain entirely in his power.
The morose old man pushed his beer mug away and, deaf to all entreaties, deserted the merry group. He walked home through the night and the wind’s warm buffets, pulling the unpleasantly tight hat down over his brow and muttering: “Why live?”
The morning steamboat, when it arrived from the city, did not meet the usual signal flare. The old man was hanging from the ceiling of his lodge, his head in a noose. Below, under feet twisted in a death spasm, lay an overturned stool.
8
Manko Khodovitz was six days shy of his eighteenth birthday. He needed those six days in the worst way. Manko had a bride, but to marry her before his eighteenth—even a day before—was out of the question.
Manko read by syllables. But the syllables in the telegram sent from the big city (Manko had never been to a city) were few, and he grasped their meaning. The meaning was simple: his uncle, a river watchman near the city, about whom he dimly knew from his late mother’s stories, had died; he, Manko, must go to the city to receive a small, but greatly unexpected inheritance. Manko estimated, in his none too nimble brain: with that money he could build a log hut, buy a cow and maybe a horse. All of which would give him far more weight in the eyes of his bride’s parents. That evening Manko set off by train for the city.
Everything was going perfectly. Manko received his money, which he immediately tucked inside his shirt in a little pouch; the few possessions in the city-owned lodge of his late uncle he sold to a neighbor. Everything was in order. His train was in an hour and a half. But on his way out, with a last glance round the silent lodge, Manko noticed in the corner on a wooden peg, showing gray through the grayness of the dusk, the fedora. He snatched it off the peg and walked out, wedging the door shut behind him.
At first—as far as the city—he carried the gray hat in his hand. But after two or three passersby stopped him with “That for sale?” Manko changed his attitude toward this part of his inheritance. He took off his own rather greasy cap, stuffed it in his pocket and covered his shock of wiry black hair with the smart gray city hat. Why not! Manko walked on toward the station, whistling merrily, head thrown back. But with his every step, Whylive took another step inside his head, and a leaden heaviness descended on the boy’s brain. He had a simple village brain. As the log huts in a village straggle along one road, so too straggled the boy’s one-road thoughts. And they straggled toward one thing: his bride. But now, peering into himself, he could not make out her image. Between her and him, making the vilest faces, stood Whylive. Manko bought a ticket, stepped automatically into a car with wooden benches, and sat down.
Beside him, at his elbow, someone was pottering, unknotting trunk-cord knots; someone else was extracting short nasal tapping sounds from a long pipe with his lips. A kind-faced woman opposite Manko nodded and said: “That’s a fine hat, boy,” while an old man, rummaging in his yellow-white beard with bony fingers, spat: “The boy’s a high hat.” Manko did not notice when the train’s axles began to turn. Something snakelike was sucking at his heart and greedily swallowing his life. He turned his sweat-drenched face to the window: trees ran past, shaking their wooden fists at him; a dirty gray cloud seeped like a sticky blindfold into his eyes. The anguish had become unbearable, like vomit rising in the throat. Manko got up and rushed out into the vestibule. A bridge clattered under the wheels. Beyond the lattice of girders flickering past was free air, and below—the steep drop of the embankment. Bending over from the top step, Manko tore his left hand from the railing. Why live?
At that same moment, a great gust of wind tore the hat off his head. Before “Why live?” could escape Manko’s white lips, Whylive, trying to avoid death, had jumped into his now familiar abode. Manko was hanging by the last three fingers of his right hand. The wheels veered suddenly, pitching him down into the abyss—one finger broke away from the railing, but the other two still clung to it and to life. With superhuman effort, Manko pulled his body back from the drop. The wind tousled his hair and pummeled his burning cheeks. Trying to catch the breath leaping out of his throat, he stumbled back into the car. He was met first with puzzled smiles, then with laughter: “So the wind took your hat. Wait till the wind gives it back . . .” At those mouths wide with derision, a merry Manko laughed out loud, showing teeth white as piano keys. Oh, what did the wind’s work matter when his work was nearly done: here, inside his shirt, was the packet of money, while ahead was love, life, newborn life, and again love.
9
Meanwhile the hat—with Whylive hidden inside its leather band and grasping at stalks of grass—was rolling down the embankment . . .
So let it roll. But to my words I, their author, say: stop, stay where you are. This story has been strung together like a string of beads. The cheapest of devices, yet one that still somehow commands a per-line fee and the reader’s attention.
Well, where might the gliding Whylive wind up next? In the hands of a railway watchman, a drunkard who has turned his life into a constant whylife; in the chance hands of a passing cyclist who claps the hat on his touring head with Whylive speed; in the cloakroom of a summer theater where it would be so easy to mix up hat checks and so force Whylive to move house yet again . . . Indeed, there’s no telling where. And is it worth wasting our imagination?
Only one thing matters. The gray fedora, passing from hand to hand, must turn—sooner or later—into a dirty fedora, an old, worn, and frowzy hat from which all pates with any self-respect recoil in disgust. In short, by the last chapter of this story, the former fedora—with its torn silk cord, frayed ribbon round the crown and sagging brim—has been given away to a beggar.
How clearly I see this last chapter of the head-changing fedora! The beggar stands under a zenith sun. The sun beats with its yellow rays on his scabrous skull.
<
br /> But according to beggar’s etiquette he must not wear the hat on his head—he must hold it in his hand, outstretched for coins.
Meanwhile poor Whylive, sitting under the blows of those hard coins, dreams in vain of jumping into a human brain. No, that is scarcely possible now: Whylive must live like this, under the jabs of coppers, the lashing of sunrays, and battering of raindrops. And the renegade Whylive will have to solve—this time for himself—the problem: why live?
1933
PAPER LOSES PATIENCE
(Sketch)
EVERYONE knows: paper does not blush.* It puts up: with lies, and filth, and misprints, and bad consciences, and poor style, and cheap pathos. Everything.
But only, as this story shows, until it won’t.
This occurred one November morning when wet flakes of snow and drops of rain were bickering about what it was now—fall or winter. It so happened that on just that murky morning paper lost patience. Paper was sick of bearing letters on its flat submissive sheets, letters and again letters; myriads of meaninglessnesses masquerading as meanings; a dreary downpour of words that made either pools or books—who could tell?
Paper—one must consider this too—has its own long hard life, its own difficult school: first it grows, digging its roots into the ground, and halloos to the clouds floating by overhead like scraps of diaphanous gray wrapping paper, then it is cut away from those roots, thrust into pressing machines at paper mills, drowned in vats of boiling water, dried, squeezed . . . But why go into it?
By the time paper has dried, the machines have taught it patience. Now its flat white sheets learn literacy. Paper is struck with sharp lead letters, pressed against ink-slathered matrices. Paper puts up with it.
Until it won’t.
To establish the date in question is not easy: paper, having sent typefaces packing, also forced numbers into retreat, along with the letters. This brief but decisive engagement could be called the Battle of Tabula Rasa.
Unwitting Street Page 7
