The Face of Days
“Yes, those: the thoughts untended to, undealt with, undisposed of;
“Suppressed, dismissed, subsumed;
“Yes, those thoughts.
“They have remained with us beneath our veneer of contentment, gathering force, gathering the kind of mass that only thoughts and feelings can amass–
“And they have collapsed on themselves.
“They have become so huge they have fallen into their own gravity. The fears of death and inner convictions of misery—these have expanded over the centuries, growing as the numbers of people have grown, expanding as the population has expanded–
“And they have collapsed to become these, our dark stars, the glowing structures in the night, stealing the happiness we so effortlessly produce. The happiness we thought had no cost produces phantoms.”
“Beni’s mind failed,” she said. “That’s why he disappeared. He couldn’t face being around people with his mind like that.”
“How could his mind fail?” said Edwin, the Englishman who always managed to find himself here at Henri’s. “He never had one.”
“He had a good one,” I said. “Just always off on new tangents. Couldn’t keep his mind anywhere.”
I gazed at Jacqueline as we spoke, treasuring her glances. Tonight I noticed her eyebrows. They had a superlative naturalness. They sat upon her face, arched but not in a pronounced way, only slightly darker than her hair. I hoped Beni would never return.
“I knew Beni,” said Madd, the other American. “A lost man.”
“Lost?” said Edwin. “I gathered from what you said earlier that everyone’s lost. That’s the first thing I’d agree with you on, even if it’s cliché. Or maybe because it’s cliché.”
“I mean I saw him disappear,” Madd said. “He told me he was going to walk into the wall, and he did so.”
“You just told us you don’t believe the wall exists,” I said. “And now you’re saying you saw Beni go into it?”
“The wall doesn’t exist,” Madd said. “As far as I’m concerned. I can’t see it. I’ve tried. I’ve gone down to the beach at night and walked up and down, and I’ve gone through the spot where people say the wall is, and I can’t see anything and I don’t feel anything. I go right through. I sincerely wish I could see it. You’d think a science fiction writer would be privileged to be able to see something when no one else can, but it seems to be exactly the opposite thing. I can’t see what everyone else sees. In fact I’ve traveled to see some of the other spots where miraculous ghosts appear along the Mediterranean and I don’t see a damn thing anywhere. All I see is people acting like fools about something that isn’t there.”
“But you saw Beni disappear.”
“I sometimes think some of the receptors in my brain are burnt out,” Madd said, ignoring what I said. “I saw God once, but it felt like a scientific experience. During a trip, I won’t say what kind of trip I was taking, or where, I contrived a mechanism for testing the existence of God by means of presenting bait He couldn’t refuse. He fell for it, and I witnessed the act of God eating a soul. The entire event had all the warmth and life of the death of a loved one wearing white hospital clothes in a white hospital room surrounded by people dressed in hospital white. But the experiment was unrepeatable, despite the scientific feeling of it all. Lack of affect. I think that’s what I have, an inability to feel affect, not effect. I feel effect all too well. Maybe that’s why I concluded that God doesn’t exist, after all, even having seen Him. Would God have left me without a sense of affect if He existed at the point in time when I saw Him?”
“You mean any sense of feeling?” Jacqueline said.
“Maybe it’s that simple. I fear it isn’t,” Madd said, his eyes focused on the wine bottle.
It had gone quickly. I raised my hand to Henri, who understood without coming nearer the table.
“You certainly have feeling,” she said.
“Not of the normal variety.”
“But what about Beni,” Edwin said. “If you lack affect, and if lack of affect makes you not see the wall, then you saw Beni go into something that must have been pure affect.”
“Of course,” said Madd. He greeted the arrival of the new bottle of wine with a smile, and filled whichever glasses were empty. “I was with him at the time. We were in our cups, totally over the edge of the cliff, drowning in our own good will, and we drifted down to the beach to splash the water of the sea on our faces. That water has redeeming value, you know. It’s seen most of what’s worthwhile about the human race, and a lot of what isn’t worthwhile, and it’s a variety of invoking the goddess to splash your face in it.”
