Agape Agape by William Gaddis

disease that Plato mentions and the primitive idea that crazy people speak in divine languages and above all yes above all the catharsis of abandoned music and dance we’ve talked about that haven’t we, should have looked into that yourself Pozdnyshev, should have tried it. Should have learned the tango Pozdnyshev, the most elegant, merciless, disciplined abandon never would have killed her, learned the tango you never would have killed her and if I had I wouldn’t be here now, listen. Listen where’s my clothes, can you help me? Ought to go out and get some fresh air, get out of this dim suffocating airless lightless little no no wait not yet no, these demons of Homer’s and Golyadkin’s doppelgänger who’s gone with his bed in the morning when Petrushka brings in tea and explains that his master’s not at home shouting You idiot Petrushka! I’m your master!! Can’t get away, each one of them haunting the Other, hounding the Other, following him everywhere with his piercing terrifying glare and a few vicious remarks enough to drive a man mad, moves in with him moves out to some dirty little hotel room like this one but follows him home like a dog finally simply has to end it, simply has to get rid of the Other, he wasn’t mine was he? He was my fiction wasn’t he? Not easy no but it’s got to be done, my creation wasn’t it? Like Levochka thinking your thoughts so you can have them? Lie back here and see things falling into place like reading the Tarot, no reason that betrayal can’t be positive is there? Beautiful little innocent climbs into my lap fell on my neck with kisses while we put together this fiction of appearing as the nonperson my joy! My honeyed muse, my sometime daughter, scraping it away now for the real nonperson here because there’s finally no getting around it is there. Because what I’ve been dreading, what I’ve feared, what got me here in the first place no surgery no but this, this hormonal chemical God knows what treatment has put me out of business, out of being a threat yes maybe I never was. Maybe I never was! That was the great betrayal wasn’t it, where it all started, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned. Listen. Can you, can you pull a shade over there? The sun’s getting in my eyes, sitting still here in a room God knows these shadows of the real state we’re all living in, dim shapes, those weightless shadows the chorus held up to Ajax in his slaughterhouse survive now simply as gossip like everything else in the end where they’ll say I never really planned the whole property transfer to them out of love but just as a scheme to avoid taxes? Where they’ll say I’m the one who betrayed my daughters because I’d really surrendered nothing, the baby king who tyrannizes through the sheer blackmail of his existence, that I betrayed them and you and everyone yes, the artist as confidence man that I betrayed even myself from the fear of trying to carry the unforgiving burden of the real artist, to try to hide the failure of everything I’d promised there left stranded, like some maiden aunt’s Torschlusspanik at being left unmarried on the shelf, art and entertainment and technology, of authenticity and the true story of its philosopher corrupted by his sister as gossip of the most sinister sort, of love as the ultimate fiction and music the most refined form of Levochka’s sensual lust building up like the pressure of steam that would burst the boiler if the safety valve of sex didn’t release it he tells us in that frenzied metaphor of mechanization reaching everywhere, of art without the artist as a threat and the end of him at the twist of a knife but it wasn’t that crude, no. No it doesn’t really matter because that’s what gossip does, isn’t that what gossip is? Dawn breaking on the handsome face of mortal youth, verweile doch! du bist so