Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [76]
that I had been quartered with a corpse and had seen guys hanging upside down by the feet and that the king had made at least one dubious insinuation. Besides, my fever was increasing, and I had to make a special effort to remain alert. From this I developed a great strain at the back of the neck and in my eyes. I was glaring crudely at everything about me, including these women who should have elicited quite another kind of attitude. But my purpose was to see essentials, only essentials, nothing but essentials, and to guard against hallucinations. Things are not what they seem, anyway. As for the king, his interest in me appeared to increase continually. Half smiling, he scrutinized me with growing closeness. How was I ever to guess the aims and purposes hidden in his heart? God has not given me half as much intuition as I constantly require. As I couldn't trust him, I had to understand him. Understand him? How was I going to understand him? Hell! It would be like extracting an eel from the chowder after it has been cooked to pieces. This planet has billions of passengers on it, and those were preceded by infinite billions and there are vaster billions to come, and none of these, no, not one, can I hope ever to understand. Never! And when I think how much confidence I used to have in understanding--you know?--it's enough to make a man weep. Of course, you may ask, what have numbers got to do with it? And that's right, too. We get too depressed by them, and should be more accepting of multitudes than we are. Being in point of size precisely halfway between the suns and the atoms, living among astronomical conceptions, with every thumb and fingerprint a mystery, we should get used to living with huge numbers. In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy by it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that's good. But I used to have great confidence in understanding. Now take a phrase like "Father forgive them; they know not what they do." This may be interpreted as a promise that in time we would be delivered from blindness and understand. On the other hand, it may also mean that with time we will understand our own enormities and crimes, and that sounds to me like a threat. Thus I was sitting there with my pondering expression. Or maybe it would be more factual and descriptive to say that I was listening to the growling of my mind. Then the king observed, to my surprise, "You do not show too much wear and tear of the journey. I esteem you to be very strong. Oh, vastly. I see at a glance. You tell me you were able to hold your own with Itelo? Perhaps you were practicing mere courtesy. At a snap judgment you do not seem so very courteous. But I will not conceal you are a specimen of development I cannot claim ever to have seen." First the examiner in the middle of the night, waiving the question of the corpse, had asked me to take off my shirt so he could study my physique, and now the king expressed a similar interest. I could have boasted, "I'm strong enough to run up a hill about a hundred yards with one of your bodies on my back." For I do have a certain pride in my strength (compensatory mechanism). But my feelings had been undergoing a considerable fluctuation. First I was reassured by the person and attitude of the king, and his tone of voice. I had rejoiced. My heart proclaimed a holiday. Then again suspicions supervened, and now the peculiar inquiry about my physique made me sweat anew with anxiety. I remembered, if they were thinking of using me as a sacrifice, that an ideal sacrifice has no blemishes. And so I said that I actually had not been in the best of health and that I felt feverish today. "You cannot have a fever, as manifestly you are perspiring," said Dahfu. "That's just another one of my peculiarities," I said. "I can run a high temperature while pouring sweat." He brushed