The Lass Who Kissed a Frog by Lee, Caroline (bookreader txt) 📕

with a stove, chairs, and a table at which I can eat and where I can put my typewriter, as well as berths to sleep on, a small pantry, lamps and kerosene. Where I can put my typewriter: me, shipwreck of shipwrecks. In what bottle will I seal my manuscripts, to what waves will I confide them? I haven’t asked myself the question.

Here’s something important, however. Nobody in my new residence has passed away. On the night of June 2, between Saturday and Sunday, the car was certainly empty. It welcomes me with a good clean smell of rough pinewood.

•

And thus I’ve taken permanent possession of the Inheritance. I’m fully aware of the situation. Trans-historic, post-theological, metaphysical it may be, absurd, impossible, but I’m digging in. I shall take from it what I can.

Karpinsky once told me of an episode in the Freud-Jung correspondence. Jung wrote to Freud, on a postcard: “I propose a summary of our experience as psychologists in four words: Inside and out, man is a creature of habit.”

Freud replied: “Agreed! And allow me to add a footnote. The more traumatic the stimulus, the more urgent and vital the need to adapt.”

18

I ADAPT. Intermittently.

I have spent hours thinking about whether I’ll fall back on the black-eyed girl.

What are the chances that I’ll try again? None, I think. Because suicide requires a beneficiary, or beneficiaries. Someone whom we have decided to punish or, on the other hand, to instruct (see Brutus). I have no beneficiaries, and so I can no longer kill myself, just as I can no longer send a telegram.

This is sophistry.

To begin with, there’s a question to be resolved: To what extent am I still alive? That is, the possible subject or object of suicide? That pitiful doubt is fundamental; indeed, if I were to take my own doubts seriously, those of a Hamlet or a Descartes would appear mere jests by comparison. Inertia and cowardice, hiding behind decorous excuses, hold me back. Pretexts. My agnosticism was but willed ignorance; my amoral readiness, pure escapism. Pretexts. I could define myself thus: a funerary mentality that encounters actual death with dismay, while yearning for the essence of Death, Death triumphant and universal (from which of course one is exempted.) Someone who has created this entire story down to the last detail, invented the so-called Event of the night of June 2, in order to have a haven of hope, to realize the ancient dream of immortality, an immortality (we understand) that is mine alone, alone as I always wanted my life to be.

And so this entire story is merely the lugubrious invention of a crazed solipsist—and petty slacker—who stubbornly refuses to believe he will die.

•

This morning I was awake before daylight, after a dreamless sleep. Awake, and soon thereafter I was on my feet walking, in a state of perfect automation. Or a raptus.

In the waking subject a raptus is caused by a) a permanent condition of stress, or b) an acute emotional impulse. In my case both causes pertain and the condition is imposed, forced: it’s mine and that of outside forces at once. I started up the car and drove off without, for a while, having any idea of what I was looking for or where I was headed. In practice, my destination was Teklon, the airport. My reflexes quite pointlessly readied, I drove fast. I was crying.

In truth, howling. Not in fear, not in pain—in agony. A frantic nostalgia, the harsh privation of and bitter regret for an irreparable loss. In forty minutes I was at Teklon. Without an instant of hesitation I headed for the offices, in a building to the right of the airport entrance that I had never before entered. I searched for cardboard and paper to write on. I made twenty or so signs, working feverishly, and then I placed them around the customs’ hall, the ticket office, in the bars and outside in the plaza leading to the runways. They all said the same thing: “Anyone who comes by please contact me, please get in touch”—the message was written in English, lingua franca of airports—“whoever you are, for heaven’s sake come find me or get me word somehow. I am at Widmad, only thirty-seven kilometers away. Look for the man-who-was, there is but one of me. The person writing this is that same ex-person, he’s all there is.”

Consciousness was not yet will; I did what I did without proposing that I do it, passively, and the text of my message proves it. Gratefully, I accepted the relief it brought me. I saw nothing at Teklon, my stay there was brief. I think I saw, out there on the runway, that the Tupolev 62 is still resting a fraternal wing on the Pan Am DC9.

I’m at Widmad now. Wondering whether I was dreaming, whether I just invented this parenthetical anxiety to find people. Invented it, I mean, in order to justify my actions.

And now I’m back home. I think back to the vision of those two airplanes side by side on the runway. It could be paramnesia. But halfway up the valley, did I or did I not discover that the creek had flooded the road? My wheels sank into the water up to the hubcaps. I go to look at the car; it’s lathered with mud, fresh mud. I drove those roads, it’s not paramnesia.

This problem of paramnesia, of false memories, already afflicted me back at Villa Verde, during the final period in the clinic, when I was getting better. Karpinsky tried to reassure me: “Not at all—no need to be alarmed, the matter has nothing to do with your neurosis. No, the Analysis considers this a positive symptom. And here,” he said smiling, “we can put our faith in the Analysis.”

O Dr. Karpinsky, I beg you. I need to see you. I don’t care where or how. But we must meet.

At times I find myself talking to him aloud, as if he were here before me.

Karpinsky, my