Dagon by Fred Chappell Page A

of your crazi­ness.” She went out.
    He lay moaning for a while, and then managed to collect himself. The photograph was in wet bits, tangled in the quilt. He began to console himself with the jar.
    Or there were times he would be gently mel­ancholy, even rather humorous; would smile sadly but not bitterly and speak in a calm even voice. “The lachrimae rerum ,” he would say. “There’s something in the part of a landscape you can see from a window that gives you the clearest idea of what Virgil’s phrase really means. The way the window limits the land­scape, you know; it intensifies the feeling of being able to see the universe in miniature. Which is what you do when you think of those two words, though I don’t think you do it con­sciously at all. But in the back of your mind somewhere there’s a real picture of the small­ness of physical existence, of its real boundaries; and there’s a corresponding sense of the immen­sities of the void, of nothingness, which encloses physical existence and to which it really belongs. And then to include the human personality, oneself, in this small universe is to see oneself really minuscule.” He chuckled softly. “It’s all a question of proportion, you know.”
    â€œYou’re as full of shit as a Christmas turkey,” Mina said.
    He nodded and smiled gently. He felt very old. “I don’t mean to bore you, he said, “but I know I am. But you can see—can’t you?—how hard it is for me to keep my mind alive, to keep it going. With the weight of the circumstances, well, with the way I am now, I feel I’ve got to keep my wits about me somehow. I know these are nothing but foolish empty speculations, but it begins to seem more and more that my mind won’t operate on the material that’s given it. The things that happen more and more don’t mean anything, and I can’t make them mean anything. And as limited as my life has been—and it’s always been severely limited—I was al­ways able to make something useful out of a few events. By ‘useful’ I guess I mean intellectually edifying or…or morally instructive. That’s what I mean, in fact: every event that happened to me was a moral event. I could interpret it. And now I can’t. It seems to me that a morality just won’t attach any more; events won’t even attach to each other, no one thing seems to pro­duce another. Things are what they are them­selves, and that’s all they are. Or maybe I’m just troubling myself to no end. One of my troubles always, too many useless scruples.”
    â€œScrooples,” she said.
    She had got his checkbook from somewhere, and she got him to sign all the checks, blank. He didn’t hesitate; it couldn’t have mattered less. He felt a detached mild curiosity about the pur­poses to which she would put the money, but he didn’t question her. He knew she wouldn’t have told him, and anyway he had no use for it. What could he buy? He himself had been sold, sold out.
    The days got hotter. The weedy field below was noisy with grasshoppers. The sun was white as sugar and looked large in the sky.
    Sometimes he was very depressed, kept a strict silence. He thought of suicide, thought of slashing his wrists. He pictured his long body lying all white and drained. Perhaps there would be a funeral for him in the brick house, in the dark disused sun parlor there, his body lying in a soft casket beside the disordered piano. But he knew that that was all wrong. There was no doubt he would be cast just as he lay into an open field and left to ferment in the sun. Muskrat food. Yet this seemed appropriate; it was, after all, a proper burial, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t expect any more than this for himself. In fact, he would stop expecting. —It would take him en­tire hours to think through a daydream like this, and then