in the front seat of the squad car. I addressed my thoughts to it. A man like Can-tabile took advantage of my inadequate theory of evil, wasn’t that it? He filled all the gaps in it to the best of his histrionic ability with his plunging and bluffing. Or did I, as an American, have a theory of evil? Perhaps not. So he entered the field from that featureless and undemarcated side where I was weak, with his ideas and conceits. This pest delighted the ladies, it seemed— he pleased Polly and, apparently, his wife the graduate student as well. It was my guess that he was an erotic lightweight. But after all it’s the imagination that counts for most with women. So he made his progress through life with his fine riding gloves and his calfskin boots, and the keenly gleaming fuzz of his tweeds, and the Magnum he carried in his waistband, threatening everybody with death. Threats were what he loved. He had called me in the night to threaten me. Threats had affected his bowels yesterday on Division Street. This morning he had gone to threaten Stronson. In the afternoon he offered, or threatened, to have Denise knocked off. Yes, he was a queer creature, with his white face, his long ecclesiastical-wax nose with its dark flues. He was very restless in the front seat. He seemed to be trying to get a look at me. He was almost limber enough to twist his head about and preen his own back feathers. What might it mean that he had tried to pass me off as a murderer? Did he find the original suggestion for that in me? Or was he trying in his own way to bring me out, to carry me into the world, a world from which I had the illusion that I was withdrawing? On the Chicago level of judgment I dismissed him as ready for the bughouse. Well, he was ready for the bughouse, certainly. I was sophisticated enough to recognize that in what he proposed that we two should do with Polly there was a touch of homosexuality, but that wasn’t very serious. I hoped that they would send him back to prison. On the other hand I sensed that he was doing something for me. In his gleaming tweed fuzz, the harshness of which suggested nettles, he had materialized in my path. Pale and crazy, with his mink mustache, he seemed to have a spiritual office to perform. He had appeared in order to move me from dead center. Because I came from Chicago no normal and sensible person could do anything of this sort for me. I couldn’t be myself with normal sensible people. Look at my relations with a man like Richard Durnwald. Much as I admired him, I couldn’t be mentally comfortable with Durnwald. I was slightly more successful with Dr. Scheldt the anthroposophist, but I had my troubles with him too, troubles of a Chicago nature. When he spoke to me of esoteric mysteries I wanted to say to him, “Don’t give me that spiritual hokum, friend!” And after all, my relations with Dr. Scheldt were tremendously important. The questions I raised with him couldn’t have been more serious.
All this went to my head, or flowed to my head, and I recalled Humboldt in Princeton quoting to me, “Es schwindelt!” The words of V. I. Lenin at the Sniolny Institute. And things were schwindling now. Now was it because, like Lenin, I was about to found a police state? It was from a flux or inundation of sensations, insights, and ideas.
Of course the cop was right. Strictly speaking, I was no killer. But I did incorporate other people into myself and consume them. When they died I passionately ‘mourned. I said I would continue their work and their lives. But wasn’t it a fact that I added their strength to mine? Didn’t I have an eye on them in the days of their vigor and glory? And on their women? I could already see the outline of my soul’s purgatorial tasks, when it entered the next place.
“Watch it, Charlie,” Thaxter had admonished me. He wore his cape and held the ideal attaché case and the natural hook umbrella, as well as the sturgeon sandwiches. I watched it. A plus forte raison, I watched it. Watching, I was aware that in the squad car I was following in Humboldt’s footsteps. Twenty years ago in the hands