up and sit down!”
Now I was electrified. Fish, was I? An electric eel, rather. All asparkle. And famished. Perhaps that’s why I glittered and sparkled so. I had a body again. Oh how good it was to be back in the flesh! How good to be eating and drinking, breathing, shouting!
“It’s a strange thing,” I began, after I had wolfed some victuals, “how little we reveal of our true selves even when at our best. You’d like me to carry on where I left off, I suppose? Must have been exciting, all that stuff I dredged up from the bottom. Only the aura of it remains now. But one thing I’m sure of—I know that I wasn’t out of myself. I was in, in deeper than I’ve ever, ever been . . . I was spouting like a fish, did you notice? Not an ordinary fish, either, but the sort that lives on the ocean floor.”
I took a good gulp of wine. Marvelous wine, Rhine wine.
“The strange thing is that it all came about because of that skeleton of a play on the wall over there. I saw and heard the whole thing. Why try to write it, eh? There was only one reason why I ever thought of doing it, and that was to relieve my misery. You know how miserable I am, don’t you?”
We looked at one another. Static.
“It’s funny, but in that state I was in everything seemed entirely as it should be. I didn’t have to make the least effort to understand: everything was meaningful, justifiable and everlastingly real. Nor were you the devils I sometimes take you for. You weren’t angels either, because I had a glimpse of real ones. They were something else again. I can’t say as I’d want to see things that way all the time. Only statues. . . .”
Stasia broke in. What way? she wanted to know.
“Everything at once,” I said. “Past, present, future; earth, air, fire and water. A motionless wheel. A wheel of light, I feel like saying. And the light revolving, not the wheel.”
She reached for a pencil, as if to make a note.
“Don’t!” I said. “Words can’t render the reality of it. What I’m telling you is nothing. I’m talking because I can’t help it, but it’s only a talking about. What happened I couldn’t possibly tell you. . . . It’s like that play again. The play I saw and heard no man could write. What one writes is what one wants to happen. Take us, we didn’t happen, did we? No one thought us up. We are, that’s all. We always were. There’s a difference, what?”
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