Nexus. Генри Миллер
we were polishing off the remnants he informed me that there was a comfortable room upstairs with twin beds. “Now we can have a good talk,” he said.
I was ready enough for bed but not for a heart-to-heart talk. As for Stymer, nothing seemed capable of slowing down the machinery of his mind, neither frost nor drink nor fatigue itself.
I would have dropped off immediately on hitting the pillow had Stymer not opened fire in the way he did. Suddenly I was as wide-awake as if I had taken a double dose of benzedrine. His first words, delivered in a steady, even tone, electrified me.
“There’s nothing surprises you very much, I notice. Well, get a load of this. . . .”
That’s how he began.
“One of the reasons I’m such a good lawyer is because I’m also something of a criminal. You’d hardly think me capable of plotting another person’s death, would you? Well, I am. I’ve decided to do away with my wife. Just how, I don’t know yet. It’s not because of Belle, either. It’s just that she bores me to death. I can’t stand it any longer. For twenty years now I haven’t had an intelligent word from her. She’s driven me to the last ditch, and she knows it. She knows all about Belle; there’s never been any secret about that. All she cares about is that it shouldn’t leak out. It’s my wife, God damn her! who turned me into a masturbator. I was that sick of her, almost from the beginning, that the thought of sleeping with her made me ill. True, we might have arranged a divorce. But why support a lump of clay for the rest of my life? Since I fell in with Belle I’ve had a chance to do a little thinking and planning. My one aim is to get out of the country, far away, and start all over again. At what I don’t know. Not the law, certainly. I want isolation and I want to do as little work as possible.”
He took a breath. I made no comments. He expected none.
“To be frank with you, I was wondering if I could tempt you to join me. I’d take care of you as long the money held out, that’s understood. I was thinking it out as we drove here. That note from Belle—I dictated the message. I had no thought of switching things when we started, please believe me. But the more we talked the more I felt that you were just the person I’d like to have around, if I made the jump.”
He hesitated a second, then added: “I had to tell you about my wife because . . . because to live in close quarters with someone and keep a secret of that sort would be too much of a strain.”
“But I’ve got a wife too!” I found myself exclaiming. “Though I haven’t much use for her, I don’t see myself doing her in just to run off somewhere with you.”
“I understand,” said Stymer calmly. “I’ve given thought to that too.”
“So?”
“I could get you a divorce easily enough and see to it that you don’t have to pay alimony. What do you say to that?”
“Not interested,” I replied. “Not even if you could provide another woman for me. I have my own plans.”
“You don’t think I’m a queer, do you?”
“No, not at all. You’re queer, all right, but not in that way. To be honest with you, you’re not the sort of person I’d want to be around for long. Besides, it’s all too damned vague. It’s more like a bad dream.”
He took this with his habitual unruffled calm. Whereupon, impelled to say something more, I demanded to know what it was that he expected of me, what did he hope to obtain from such a relationship?
I hadn’t the slightest fear of being tempted into such a crazy adventure, naturally, but I thought it only decent to pretend to draw him out. Besides, I was curious as to what he thought my role might be.
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” he drawled. “Supposing . . . just suppose, I say . . . that we found a good place to hide away. A place like Costa Rica, for example, or Nicaragua, where life is easy and the climate agreeable. And suppose you found a girl you liked . . . that isn’t too hard to imagine, is it? Well then. . . . You’ve told me that you like . . . that you intend . . . to write one day. I know that I can’t. But I’ve got ideas, plenty of them, I can tell you. I’ve not been a criminal lawyer for nothing. As for you, you haven’t read Dostoevski and all those other mad Russians for nothing either. Do you begin to get the drift? Look, Dostoevski is dead, finished with. And that’s where we start. From Dostoevski. He dealt with the soul; we’ll deal with the mind.”
He was about to pause again. “Go on,” I said, “it sounds interesting.”
“Well,” he resumed, “whether you know it or not, there is no longer anything left in the world that might be called soul. Which partly explains why you find it so hard to get started, as a writer. How can one write about people who have no souls? I can, however. I’ve been living with just such people, working for them, studying them, analyzing them. I don’t mean my clients alone. It’s easy enough to look upon criminals as soulless. But what if I tell you that there are nothing but criminals everywhere, no matter where you look? One doesn’t have to be guilty of a crime to be a criminal. But anyway, here’s what I had in mind . . . I know you can write. Furthermore, I don’t mind in the least if someone else writes my books. For you to come by the material that I’ve accumulated would take several lifetimes. Why waste more time? Oh yes, there’s something I forgot to mention . . . it may frighten you off. It’s this . . . whether the books are ever published or not is all one to me. I want to get them out of my system, nothing more. Ideas are universal: I don’t consider them my property. . . .”
He took a drink of ice water from the jug beside the bed.
“All this probably strikes you as fantastic. Don’t try to come to a decision immediately. Think it over! Look at it from every angle. I wouldn’t want you to accept and then get cold feet in a month or two. But let me call your attention to something. If you continue in the same groove much longer you’ll never have the courage to make the break. You have no excuse for prolonging your present way of life. You’re obeying the law of inertia, nothing more.”
He cleared his throat, as if embarrassed by his own remarks. Then clearly and swiftly he proceeded.
“I’m not the ideal companion for you, agreed. I have every fault imaginable and I’m thoroughly self-centered, as I’ve said many times. But I’m not envious or jealous, or even ambitious, in the usual sense. Aside from working hours—and I don’t intend to run myself into the ground—you’d be alone most of the time, free to do as you please. With me you’d be alone, even if we shared the same room. I don’t care where we live, so long as it’s in a foreign land. From now on it’s the moon for me. I’m divorcing myself from my fellow man. Nothing could possibly tempt me to participate in the game. Nothing of value, in my eyes at least, can possibly be accomplished at present. I may not accomplish anything either, to be truthful. But at least I’ll have the satisfaction of doing what I believe in. . . . Look, maybe I haven’t expressed too clearly what I mean by this Dostoevski business. It’s worth going into a little farther, if you can bear with me. As I see it, with Dostoevski’s death the world entered upon a complete new phase of existence. Dostoevski summed up the modern age much as Dante did the Middle Ages. The modern age—a misnomer, by the way—was just a transition period, a breathing spell, in which man could adjust himself to the death of the soul. Already we’re leading a sort of grotesque lunar life. The beliefs, hopes, principles, convictions that sustained our civilization are gone. And they won’t be resuscitated. Take that on faith for the time being. No, henceforth and for a long time to come we’re going to live in the mind. That means destruction . . . self-destruction. If you ask why I can only say—because man was not made to live by mind alone. Man was meant to live with his whole being. But the nature of this being is lost, forgotten, buried. The purpose of life on earth is to discover one’s true being—and to live up to it! But we won’t go into that. That’s for the distant future. The problem is—meanwhile. And that’s where I come in. Let me put it to you as briefly as possible. . . . All that we have stifled, you, me, all of us, ever since civilization began, has got to be lived