Moise and the World of Reason Read Online Free Page B

each other had that been their impulse. There was just enough light still coming from the candle for me to see Moise extending her delicate hand toward Skates as if to offer her a polite welcome, and then this fantasy of a confrontation occurred, and before I tell you about it, let me assure you that I am aware of the regrettable sound association between the name “Skates” and the word “skater.” You must believe me though when I tell you that the skater and Skates were two polarities, the skater being love and Skates at the opposite pole. All right. Now this is what was now occurring at Moise’s announcement party. Skates threw both her skinny arms high into the flickering penumbra by the threshold, her face contorted with loathing, and began to make this loud hissing sound that continued and continued and continued. I will always hear it. It was worse than the hissing sound of any imaginable reptile since the age when the giant ones ruled the earth.
    And yet Moise seemed not to hear it at all.
    Eventually it stopped, as all things eventually must, and at the very instant it stopped, the candle went out altogether and it was totally black in the room, it was not just black in the room and the corridor but an intensification of black.
    But next, and then?
    I did not realize until then how dreadfully people fear dark when it is both total and sudden, even when the light that preceded it came only from a candle that was flickering toward its instant of extinction.
    The guests were now all in motion and collision. They were tumbling among and over each other in panic toward the door onto Bleecker, that is, all except Moise and Skates and myself.
    Skates struck a match and resumed her hissing. And Moise, still seeming not to hear it nor to have noticed the flight of guests, repeated her announcement with slight variation.
    â€œThe world of reason has ceased being tenable to me. It was once somewhat but now is not anymore. I have used all my paints to exhaustion, linseed and turp are all gone, brushes worn to bristles on splintered sticks. So matters stand, you see, and to say that they stand may seem ironical to you, if this were a time when”
    â€œSssssssssss!”
    â€œSince matters in such a state cannot be thought of as standing nor as standable, either. However”
    â€œSssssssssss!”
    â€œHowever, in all circumstances, before accepting surrender, one last resistance seems required by the nature of all still existent.”
    How long it might have continued is a matter for speculation had not the little clutch of attendant bitches behind Skates, probably feeling that she had scored her point, begun to draw her back along the corridor to the street, some striking matches as they moved her, and it made me think of how the Queen Ant is moved by the colony and that is an incorrect statement for at that moment it made me think of nothing: it makes me think now, in retrospect, of a malignantly fertile insect, yes, perhaps a sort of huge driver ant being hauled about by drones in the colony of malignant creatures, a thing I once saw magnified by a microscopic lens in a copy of the
National Geographic
.

    Last month received a rejection slip from a little mag called
It Is
and the Editress had scrawled on the slip, “Incoherency is but is not.” Oh, well.
    Of coherency, I usually attempt it.

    I was now alone with Moise, I mean I was
then
alone with Moise. We were not visible to each other but our hands were in contact.
    â€œWas that Skates at the party? Did she hear the announcement? Was someone blowing a whistle? The light was so dim that—”
    â€œLove, don’t you remember?”
    â€œDid they all?”
    â€˜What?”
    â€œGo before the request?”
    â€œNo, no, if you mean Tony.”
    â€œI meant Jane too.”
    â€œOf course, and I think the actress”
    â€œBut she lost consciousness, she, she
did
, she fell down, I think she meant well but