Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [111]
must be taken. I will capture him." "I wish you loads of luck." He then took me by the wrist with a sharp pressure and said, "I would not blame you, Mr. Henderson, for wishing this to be delusion or a hallucination. But for my sake, as you have applied to me for reciprocal truth-telling, I request you to be patient and keep a firm hold." About a handful of sulfa pills would do me a lot of good, I thought. "Oh, Mr. Henderson-Sungo," he said, after a long instant of thought, keeping his uncanny pressure on my wrist--there was seldom any abruptness in what he did. "Yes, I easily could understand that--delusion, imagination, dreaming. However, this is not dreaming and sleeping, but waking. Ha, ha! Men of most powerful appetite have always been the ones to doubt reality the most. Those who could not bear that hopes should turn to misery, and loves to hatreds, and deaths and silences, and so on. The mind has a right to its reasonable doubts, and with every short life it awakens and sees and understands what so many other minds of equally short life span have left behind. It is natural to refuse belief that so many small spans should have made so glorious one large thing. That human creatures by pondering should be _correct__. This is what makes a fellow gasp. Yes, Sungo, this same temporary creature is a master of imagination. And right now this very valuable possession appears to make him die and not to live. Why? It is astonishing what a fact that is. Oh, what a distressing picture, Henderson," he said. "To come to the upshot, do not doubt me, Dahfu, Itelo's friend, your friend. For you and I have become united as friends and you must give me your confidence." "That's okay by me, Your Royal Highness," I said. "That suits me down to the ground. I don't understand you yet, but I am willing to go along on suspended judgment. And don't worry too much about the hallucination possibility. When you come right down to it, there aren't many guys who have stuck with real life through thick and thin, like me. It's my most basic loyalty. From time to time I've lost my head, but I've always made a comeback, and by God, it hasn't been easy, either. But I love the stuff. Grun-tu-molani!" "Yes," he said, "indeed so. This is an attitude which I endorse. Grun-tu-molani. But in what shape and form? Now, Mr. Henderson, I am convinced you are a man of wide and spacious imagination, and that also you need � You particularly _need__." "Need is on the right track," I said. "The form it actually takes is, _I__ _want, I want."__ Astonished, he asked me, "Why, what is that?" "There's something in me that keeps that up," I said. "There have been times when it hardly ever let me alone." This struck him full-on, so to speak, and he sat perfectly still with his hands mounted on his large thighs, and his face with his high-rising mouth and his wide, open-nostriled, polished nose looking at me. "And you hear this?" "I used to hear it practically all the time," I said. In a low tone he said, "What is it? Demanding birthright? How strange! This is a very impressive manifestation. I have no memory of a previous description of it. Has it ever said what it wants?" "No," I said, "never. I haven't been able to get it to name names." "So extraordnary," he said, "and terribly painful, eh? But it will persist until you have replied, I gather. I am touched to hear about it. And whatever it is, how hungry it must be. The resemblance is also to a long prison term. But you say it will not declare which want it wants? Nor give specific directions either to live or to die?" "Well, I have been threatening suicide a lot, Your Highness. Every once in a while something gets into me and I throw my weight around and threaten my wife with blowing my brains out. No, I could never get it to say what it wants, and so far I have provided only what it does not want." "Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes. Well, this is such a remarkable phenomenon, isn't it, Henderson? How much better I can interpret now why you succeeded with Mummah. Solely on the basis