Free In the Absence of Angels by Hortense Calisher Page B

was it for conviction, or the lack of it, that he arraigned me? I don’t know. I’ve gone back over what I did then, again and again, using all my own knowledge of the mechanics of decision, and I know that it wasn’t just sympathy, or a pragmatic reversal of therapy, but something intimately important for me, that made me shout with all my strength — ‘Of course I don’t believe you!’
    “Moulton, his face contorted, fell forward on me so suddenly that I stumbled backwards, sending the tank of newts crashing to the floor. Supporting him with my arms, I hung on to him while he heaved, face downwards. At the same time I felt a tickling, sliding sensation in my own ear, and an inordinate desire to follow it with my finger, but both my hands were busy. It wasn’t a minute ’til I’d gotten him onto the couch, where he drooped, a little white about the mouth, but with that chastened, purified look of the physically relieved, although he hadn’t actually upchucked.
    “Still watching him, I stooped to clear up the debris, but he bounded from the couch with amazing resilience.
    “ ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.
    “ ‘Feel better?’
    “He nodded, clearly abashed, and we gathered up the remains of the tank in a sort of mutual embarrassment. I can’t remember that either of us said a word, and neither of us made more than a halfhearted attempt to search for the scattered pests which had apparently sought crannies in the room. At the door we parted, muttering as formal a goodnight as was possible between a grown man and a small boy. It wasn’t until I reached my own room and sat down that I realized, not only my own extraordinary behavior, but that Moulton, standing, as I suddenly recalled, for the first time quite straight, had sent after me a look of pity and speculation.
    “Out of habit, I reached into my breast pocket for my pencil, in order to take notes as fresh as possible. And then I felt it …a skittering, sidling motion, almost beneath my hand. I opened my jacket and shook myself, thinking that I’d picked up something in the other room …but nothing. I sat quite still, gripping the pencil, and after an interval it came again — an inchoate creeping, a twitter of movement almost lackadaisical, as of something inching itself lazily along — but this time on my other side. In a frenzy, I peeled off my clothes, inspected myself wildly, and enumerating to myself a reassuring abracadabra of explanation — skipped heartbeat, intercostal pressure of gas — I sat there naked, waiting. And after a moment, it came again, that wandering, aquatic motion, as if something had flipped itself over just enough to make me aware, and then settled itself, this time under the sternum, with a nudge like that of some inconceivable foetus. I jumped up and shook myself again, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the closet door. My face, my own face, was ajar with fright, and I was standing there, hooked over, as if I were wearing an imaginary shawl.”
    In the silence after his visitor’s voice stopped, the doctor sat there in the painful embarrassment of the listener who has played confessor, and whose expected comment is a responsibility he wishes he had evaded. The breeze from the open window fluttered the papers on the desk. Glancing out at the clean, regular façade of the hospital wing opposite, at whose evenly shaded windows the white shapes of orderlies and nurses flickered in consoling routine, the doctor wished petulantly that he had fended off the man and all his papers in the beginning. What right had the man to arraign him ? Surprised at his own inner vehemence, he pulled himself together. “How long ago?” he said, at last.
    “Four months.”
    “And since?”
    “It’s never stopped.” The visitor now seemed brimming with a tentative excitement, like a colleague discussing a mutually puzzling case. “Everything’s been tried. Sedatives do obtain some sleep, but that’s all.