THE FINITE PASSING OF
AN INFINITE PASSION
1
A flash of lightning: the great heavy banks of air part, there is a vacuum, and then a terrific crashing-together, a cataclysmic noise. So time parts for certain events. A life seems to come apart, to be violently slashed apart. But then it comes together again and time resumes again; ordinary life resumes.
Jesse did not have much time to contemplate himself.
His years at the University of Michigan were to break into a few sharp images for him: the memory of certain buildings late in the afternoon; the canned goods—spaghetti, corned-beef hash, stew—he bought to eat alone; the residence halls he worked in; his job as an attendant at a public health center in Ann Arbor; the wet paths and hills of the arboretum where he walked sometimes by himself or, in the last year of his studies, with Anne-Marie, his fiancée. When he began to think of himself, to contemplate himself, his entire body reacted as if in sudden panic—there were things he must not think, must not contemplate, must not remember. Over the years he developed a studious, grave exterior, a kind of mask that covered not only his face but his entire body, his way of moving and breathing.
To stop from thinking of himself he thought of his work. He felt a feverish impatience with his work, the progress he was making—two years jammed into a year and a half did not please him, left him exhausted and grim. Five years jammed into four; eight years jammed into six and a half.… No, he was not pleased, he did not have time to be pleased. Alone in his room, he contemplated the books that were always before him, yet to be read. He ran his hand along the edge of the books, those hundreds of pages, mysterious from the outside, neutral. Most of the books were second-hand. He was $2500 in debt; he had to take a semester off to work, but the work was not enough to pay back much of his debt to the university—just work in a boys’ residence hall, dirty, exhausting work in the kitchen unloading big containers of food, scraping piles of plates, leaning far into great greasy pots to scour them out while the very hairs on his head prickled with revulsion.… Time yawned. At the table in his room that he used as a desk he leaned forward and cradled his head in his arms, feeling how raw, how exposed his brain was, how in danger it was of disintegrating. But time resumed. Daylight resumed, after even the worst of his dim, baffling nightmares, and he awoke to normal life. He was in disguise as a normal young man.
Twenty years old: he lived in a basement room on Williams Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was his first year of medical school and he had classes from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon; then he went back in the early evening to take part in experiments some of his professors were doing—insulin tests, dermatological tests, one of the worst of them a psychological test in which Jesse and other students lay in darkened rooms for forty hours, without any sounds to distract them, losing and regaining and losing their minds. In his gross anatomy laboratory, a pickled cadaver, much-handled. Death stank. He came back to his meager dripping room with the raw odor of chemical preservatives on his hands. Death was familiar in such shabby corpses, it had the air of a public place, a public rest room. It was not really important. What mattered were the structures of the body’s systems, the utter undissolvable reality of their existence in any body, alive or dead.… He was twenty-one years old and still in that Williams Street room, walking several miles every day back and forth to the Medical Center, his mind sorting out problems, experiments, the case histories of patients in his clinical work he had to prepare. He studied pathology; he became fascinated with the microscopic. Sick for two weeks in the university infirmary with an influenza that was going around, he dreamed of the cells of tissues, the bizarre changes of fetal cells in animals exposed to radiation, and it seemed to him that death would not be so terrifying: only a completion. There were reversible and irreversible problems. The reversible ones panicked him because they must be handled, must be explained, life must be continued.… His hands were rough from steel wool and scouring pads and disinfectant and the splintery handles of mops, so he changed jobs—he was an attendant at a city welfare clinic for one winter, never quite well himself, his head filled with facts, formulae, the important faces of his professors, and the blurred, dying faces of the very poor, who were always trapping him into conversations: You are so young, the old people sighed, breaking his heart. What is it like to be young? They were baffled, not remembering their own youth. No, it was impossible to think of them as young. Jesse wanted to turn from them and cover his face, feeling his skin, his facial structure, as if it were a deceit, a mockery. He would have liked to scream at them that he was not young. He had never been young. No, never young!
He washed his hands often, after working at the clinic or after laboratory classes, or just because he had the opportunity, in any public men’s room. He was very poor. He could not afford toothpaste. He never read newspapers or magazines, never saw any movies, never listened to the radio. Bleary-eyed from a night of work, he would show up at classes to overhear other students talking excitedly of names that meant little to him—names of European nations, names of American politicians. These young men spoke casually and intimately in a language Jesse could not quite understand. And while he was listening to it, trying to listen to it, part of him would withdraw coldly, sensing that there was nothing in such conversation for him, nothing of value. Such things are not very real, he thought. What was real were his laboratory reports, his examinations, his grades, the way his throat closed up at the smell of food. Food, what mountains of food!—metamorphosed into garbage, scraped from slimy, crusty plates into huge garbage bins, the stench overwhelming. In the hospitals, people lay flat on their backs and tried to eat, tried to swallow, in order to keep living. If weight loss was too rapid they would be fed in other ways and, with the body’s wise instinct, they knew about these ways and so they ate, tried to eat perpetually until they died or recovered and were sent home.… Jesse had time to contemplate the noise made by mouths as food was eaten. Sometime during his second year of medical school, after he got sick, he became unable to eat in the presence of others and even their eating upset him, though he tried not to show it. He drank a lot of coffee. He ate at the table in his room irregularly, spooning food out of tin cans he heated in his sink by running hot water over them. By always focusing his eyes upon what he was reading, he was able to eat quickly and invisibly, not really conscious of eating at all.
Months of sharp, dreary weather: the ache of colds, the ache of hunger, the sleepiness in his classmates’ faces, the dull anemic camaraderie of overworked students. Jesse’s head often buzzed with fatigue. He saw himself again and again approaching a patient in a bare white room, the walls no more than concrete blocks, the lighting raw, fluorescent, vicious, he saw the patient transformed into a corpse, a thing to be fingered, wondered at, labeled, studied. Again and again he dreamed of approaching someone; he dreamed of the yellowed white sheet, the stillness, the toenails, the body hairs, the utterly simple dead face.… He told this dream to no one, and only once did he break down. He was a clerk in pediatrics, assigned to a children’s psychiatric ward; his supervisor invited him into his office, offered him a cigarette, asked him how he was doing, and Jesse began to weep. “I’m very happy to be here. I don’t know how I deserved this. I’m very happy,” Jesse said hysterically.
Multitudes of faces converge into a single blur: a sea of crowding life into a geographical unit, a nation. Is there a common language? What do the imploring hands mean? Jesse saw them threaten him before he fell asleep, and part of his mind acted at once to block them out, to overcome them. No. No. He was good at saying no, at withdrawing. He resisted people. His classmates invited him out drinking with them, but he resisted. He was always in a hurry. He had a part-time job; he had two part-time jobs. He owed more money to the university. He caught mononucleosis and was sick for three long weeks, fearing sleep and desiring it, trying to hold himself back from the twilight of drugged sleep where dreams might operate freely. What a crow
d of faces sought him out in his sleep! Impossible to interpret their messages in such a mob—better to insist upon darkness, the icy silence of the vacuum, the bursting of the atom out of the sky, the absolute zero of the polar regions! It was during this sickness that he met Anne-Marie.
He was twenty-one years old when he went to court to change his name: Jesse Vogel. He was twenty-four years old and now he lived on the third floor of a rooming house on South University; he still ate hurriedly at his desk, when he bothered to eat. Sometimes he glanced up from his work and knew there was something he must think of, someone he must recall … and he would think of Anne-Marie with a peculiar, flinching violence. She would be Anne-Marie Vogel in a few months. Anne-Marie Vogel. He loved her and he resented his need to think of her. He could not get her close enough to him, could not break through the boundaries of their flesh so that she would be near enough for him to forget. Therefore she drained him, drained his energies when he needed to work, to study, to memorize, to plan. There were other parts of his brain, dim and insoluble, unfathomable, where other Jesses existed, sinister and unkillable; and he accepted them, he could not rid himself of them. If he could have snipped certain neural pathways in his brain bloodlessly, he would have done it—with one of the neat curving little surgical instruments he had become accustomed to handling!—but it was impossible. He would always live inside himself. He would always live out those separate, frozen lives. But another part of him, the real Jesse, planned confidently for the future, thought confidently of this girl who would become his wife. After all, his life had become predictable. He was forcing his future into place.
He felt his body becoming mechanical, predictable, very sane. “Human beings fear mechanisms because they do not understand that they are mechanisms themselves. Perfect machines,” one of his professors said. This professor lectured in neurochemistry; he was a guest in the department, from Boston. Jesse attended his lectures, auditing the course because he hadn’t time in his official schedule to take it. He was fascinated with the man’s slow, gentle, gentlemanly manner, his lapses into “unscientific” words like destiny, beauty, creation—such words evoked in Jesse a sense of dreaminess, of memory, as if he had heard much of this before but could not quite recall it. “There is no machine as perfect as the human body, nothing like it in all creation,” Dr. Cady stated, speaking to an amphitheater of sleepy students, Jesse among them, attentive and intrigued, though he often came to this early-morning class without having slept the night before. It was easier to stay up all night instead of sleeping a few hours. A kind of excited momentum carried him along. Then, the next night, he could sleep an ordinary five or six hours and wake refreshed, as if he hadn’t missed any sleep at all. During such stretches of activity he hadn’t any appetite either, and he felt surges of an unaccountable joy, as if he were pushing himself up out of the sluggish confines of his body, his spirit emerging muscular and powerful and very sane.
Yes, even his spirit had become automated, mechanized. It worked perfectly for him. He had only to direct it and it responded. It grew wise.
He got special permission to work late and sometimes, in the nearly deserted laboratory, he suddenly felt a sense of panic, as if a door might open at any moment and someone might walk in—a dream ballooning out of the empty corridor outside. If he could not control the panic with a cigarette or one of the little pills Anne-Marie had given him, he went outside, hurrying out into the street. His heart pumped, his eyes were wild. He walked around the block, around the large darkened buildings of the Medical Center, sensing himself absolutely alone, as if he had stepped out of the normal dimension of time and were already in his own future. There was sanctity, purity, there he could contemplate himself without panic. What was time? The element in which he lived, automatically. What was life? He knew that a living cell performs certain miraculous acts, that it contains a kind of electricity, and that a dead cell performs no acts, goes through no sequence of characteristic, identifying acts, and is nothing. The definition of life, then, was only one of behavior: the living cell behaved, the dead cell did nothing. The living cell was godly, the dead cell a zero. Between the two there was a universe of time.
This overwhelmed him. Fascinated him. He had no time to be fascinated because he had to work, yet his mind came back again and again to such facts.… He had changed his name to Vogel in 1946. Jesse Vogel. The end of the war, the beginning of Jesse Vogel. The facts he must be concerned with in his own private, interior life were simple and unmysterious and unfascinating: he would begin an internship in Chicago in July; he would marry Anne-Marie; he would establish a certain life, professional and private. Wasn’t this enough to pit against the universe?… Sometimes, on a night when his nerves were jumpy from too much coffee, too many half-hallucinations of opening doors, cells shaking themselves to life when they were dead, precise and dead, he went out to a drugstore and telephoned Anne-Marie. She woke, answered at once, before the telephone could ring a second time, because she lived with her mother and did not belong wholly to Jesse. He could see her only a few times a week because he was so busy. Always, telephoning her late at night, his heart tripped absurdly as he listened to the distant, fragile ring that seemed already transformed by Anne-Marie’s presence.
When she answered in her soft voice, “Jesse?” he closed his eyes in relief. She had answered his call. She was real.
“Hello,” he would say. “It’s just me. How are you? Did I wake you up? Did you have a hard day?” This surprised him, the choppiness of his questions, the abruptness of his voice. He had forgotten that he was so young and demanding. If she was tired herself, Anne-Marie never said so; she insisted that she had not really been asleep but only lying in bed, thinking of him. And Jesse would ask her about her work that day, about the other nurses, about her mother, and he would tell her about his own work, going back over the events of his crowded day, the conversations he had had with other people, the state of his landlady’s domain—there were always minor domestic crises in the rooming house, with Jesse at the center, a kind of intermediary between the landlady and her other tenants. After a few minutes of this Jesse would begin to slow down, to relax. Anne-Marie would say sleepily, “I love you … you’re so serious … you work so hard.…” There was a kind of lightness about her that she seemed to insist upon in spite of her nursing schedule and her troubles with her mother. She was always offering herself to him lightly, childishly; even her problems were twisted about to seem trivial. She slighted herself: the complaints she offered to Jesse were not serious. A sense of gratitude for her, for her kindness, was focused for Jesse in the clumsy hearts carved on the inside of the telephone booth by high school girls—so many hearts, all of them touchingly distorted, dancing before his eyes—“When can I see you? When tomorrow?” Jesse would always ask urgently. And, waiting anxiously for her reply, he closed his eyes and saw Anne-Marie, this longhaired, healthy, pretty girl, freed of the very restraints of gravity itself, released in her perfect white nurse’s uniform from the old hospital in which she worked or from the aging house in which she lived, released to his arms.
Anne-Marie Vogel.
She loved him and it caused him to think, on the darkest of his dark cloudy nights, that he was really a normal young man. Not isolated. Not fated to confusion, chaos. He stood six feet two inches tall, strong in the shoulders and self-consciously erect, his hair brushed back from his forehead, thick and slightly darkening now, no longer so blond; his gaze was clear and cautious, a level stare that scanned everything before him, out to the limits of the spatial horizon, before settling on what must be seen. There was a slowness about him, a ponderousness, that seemed to collide with a certain impatience in his speech, as if he were often prodding himself awake out of a confusion of memory, the very brusqueness of his words meant to wake Jesse himself. Moods rose and fell in him, challenged him and were vanquished, moods of intense happiness—in his laboratory work and in his reading and in his love for Anne-Marie—and moods of sudden,
almost abandoned depression, a gaiety of depressions, as if he knew everything was lost and could do nothing about it, nothing to save himself, why bother? Catching his own eye in a mirror he sometimes noticed a strange intense heat about his face, the very tone of his skin heated, pink-toned, very healthy on even his dreariest Ann Arbor days, as if the subdued and even shy manner that was his usual personality were underscored by this brazen, curious stare. He had avoided people for years now, perplexed by their response to him and not really wanting to do battle with it or comprehend it: it must have been that his face, in repose, had a skeptical or argumentative look, because he sensed a nervousness, a slight hostility in men his own age or older when they were in his company. “No, no, people like you, people are very fond of you,” Anne-Marie insisted. But he did not believe her. With her he felt confidence—even normality—he felt oddly protected. As long as he was with her he did not even need to believe her.
And yet, when he was away from her, he sometimes could not recall her face. He felt her essence, her presence, but only as an abstraction—she might have been any American beauty on a billboard, advertising a brand of cigarettes or a soft drink.
One quiet night in April, 1951, he left the pathology laboratory late, around eleven, and as he passed a group of men on the sidewalk he noticed that one of the men glanced toward him, then turned to look at him. He did not return the look. The young men were mostly students and he did not want to be invited out with them, he had no time or interest … no time for drinking, no interest in talking, arguing. He was a little dizzy from not having anything to eat since noon. But when he was out on his feet like this, outside in public, the dizziness usually abated. He was too proud to walk weakly.
Anne-Marie was working at the hospital and so he couldn’t see her; she would not go off duty until morning. So he walked quickly toward home, feeling the start of a familiar panic; he walked fast, as if he thought he might outwalk the panic, might get home before it struck. All day long he had been thinking about the utterly simple, grave pronouncements of the lecturer in neurochemistry, Dr. Cady: The world is our construction, peopled by us; it is a mystery. All we know of the world, even our most precise laboratory findings, rests on the perception of the senses, but this very knowledge cannot reveal the relations of the senses to the outside world. Jesse had been struck by this; he had wanted to laugh in astonishment. He wanted to seek out Cady and argue with him. Cady was a short, slight, rather delicate man; Jesse would have to stoop a little to talk to him, he would have to speak gently to him. But he wanted, he wanted … he wanted to argue.… Isn’t the great lesson of science control? The lessons of homeostasis and cybernetics: control? What else mattered?