The Waterworks (24 page)

“It was easy to misunderstand him—to perceive him as only a physician, with the interests and the regrets of a physician … to give him ordinary motives…. One day he asked if I’d
permit him a small experiment on my person. I lay down upon his dispensary table and he attached two anodes of a small magneto to my head, one at each temple. These were connected by wires to a pair of needles with their points resting against a revolving wax cylinder set in a wooden box. He explained everything as he went along. The cylinder was turned by a gearshaft attached to a small brass steam engine. The entire procedure didn’t last a minute, and as he had promised, I felt no sensation at all—no pain or anything else. Afterward he showed me on the wax drum what he said was a graphic representation of the electric impulsings of my brain … a fairly regular figuration similar to the path of the sine and cosine in mathematics. This remarkable picturing device was of his own invention. He told me he was assuming for purposes of his inquiry that I was a mentally fit person, though I might have my own doubts of this … and then showed me by comparison another cylinder, which recorded the activities of the brain of a man afflicted with a terrible disease whom he had brought into this place after having seen him wandering about on the street. This was the unfortunate known to us as Monsieur, a tic-ridden, stuttering spastic, full of grimaces, grins, and wild-eyed faces, a continuous hysteric whose presence you couldn’t endure for more than a few moments, he was so relentless in his mimicking behavior, this poor soul, giving back to you every fleeting expression on your own face, including, and especially, your repugnance or pity for him. Every gesture, everything that caught his eye, Monsieur gave back in compulsive imitation, and he was never still a moment, it was a kind of helpless raging theatrics of behavior that Sartorius said had to arise from a defect of the brain tissue…. When you analyzed it, he said, it was merely an acceleration and intensification of normal
human activity. The cylinder showed a wild disarray of peaks and valleys, irregular, jagged, profuse.

“He kept this unfortunate in a dark room by himself and maintained him as you would a horse in a barn. The interest for Sartorius was not charitable. He showed me what happened when Monsieur was brought in among the fellowship of elderly gentlemen. He became calm, placid, and even allowed the attendants to bathe him—but only so long as he had in his field of vision the old men sitting about in their vacant, expressionless way, indifferent to everything around them. After a while, he took on their stillness. And astonishingly, at the same time they began, mysteriously, to stir, and show irritability, one or two of them were even taken with small palsies of the hand or foot…. No, this is no mere physician…. You know, while I’ve always posed as an intellectual … and am in fact well read and informed in the crucial questions to be asked … nevertheless, I have never had that vitality … that marks a great intellect. I make an invidious comparison here. I’ve never occupied the convictions of my thought but suffered them as a man might pick up something that’s too hot to handle. You couldn’t know this, Mr. McIlvaine, because the attitude I always brought to you, along with my work, was a calculated … arrogance. But I was overwhelmed in the presence of this man’s mind. Dr. Sartorius is not a doctor … except as medicine engages with the workings of the world. He thinks with pieces of the world. He sees into its structures. If he has one working principle, I think, it is to connect himself to the amoral energies human life in society generates … irrespective of its beliefs.

“As you know, I always felt like a foreigner in my own country … estranged, a born alien, dissynchronous with my times … so that every stone street of this city, and every stone
mansion, I saw at times as a kind of Ptolemaic ritual of madmen … so that what you thought of as your homes, with their hearth lights inside, I could imagine as the temples of cruel and savage cults. And then you set these temples one next to another on avenues, and drove your iron engines between them and strung your wires overhead and set your wires humming … and I was no more than a phantom on this grid … born without the faith, the body, to make this obsessionally ruled, tracked, and wired … exchange … my native city.

“So I was … available … to his influence. It was like coming ashore on the freshened winds of a newfound land. The manifest thoughts of Sartorius were a field of gravity, drawing me to him. What I saw in him was an aristocratic dominance over men like my father. He was supreme … indifferent to everything but his work, so lacking in self-consciousness that he didn’t even take the trouble to record his experiments—he knew what they were, and how they went, it was all written in his mind, and since he lived in himself as the sole occupant, he had no thought for Science, that he would contribute to its history—or for posterity, that he would even require a name on his gravestone, when it came to that. His marvelous brain was oblivious to its own feats.

“It was my idea that he should have a secretary, a personal historian, it was my idea, my initiative. Dr. Sartorius, lacking vanity, didn’t think about these things.

“And what was this work, at least as I could fathom it? What was its driving principle? I saw him transfuse blood from one living being to another. I saw him with a hypodermic tube inject cellular matter into deadened brains. I saw first one, then another, of the orphan children begin to age, like leaves turning yellow. Was this the work? Though I saw some of it, I was in crucial matters kept ignorant. For all the freedom I was given,
I was not admitted to the surgery for certain procedures, which took hours. And all the life in the building was presumed salutary, from top to bottom, everything for a purpose, for life’s purpose, whatever the agency of man could do was done here.

“But the customs of New York, like the past life of the old men, were invoked, they were used, as everything was used, for their therapeutic value. There were dinners, dances…. What you must understand about Sartorius is that he was never committed to one therapy, he made corrections constantly, he was truly disinterested, and as ruthlessly critical of his own ideas as of others’. He sought out what was aberrant in brains and bodies, as if the secrets of living beings could be more easily exposed there. Normality obstructed the scientific vision, it suggested a self-assurance of form that life had no right to claim. But where existence was afflicted and grotesque, it announced itself as the truly unreasoning thing it is. He regularly examined people who made their living from their deformity. He went downtown to their museums of living wonders and freak shows on Broadway. Dwarfs, midgets, acromegalics, mermaid claimants, so-called wolfmen. Gynandromorphs, poor souls imperfectly participating in the anatomies of both sexes. He drew their blood. I came to understand the pure scientific temperament as it shone from this man. It produced a mind that was unshockable, a man for whom there was no sacrilege, a being whose life was not staked on any fixed or unchanging idea that he had therefore to defend for the value of his life … in the way, you’d expect, for example, from Dr. Grimshaw.

“So … similarly, and just as rides were given in charged weather in public transport through the active streets of the city … balls were held. And we all were elevated to the conservatory, lit green by the industrial sconces on the walls, and serving for a ballroom. While the orchestrion disc revolved and tined
out its lumbering waltzes, boosted with automatic bass drum and cymbals, the creatures of the immortal fellowship danced in their black ties … with their caretaker women. It was a medley of the waltz tunes of the day, to which the old men, led by their cyprians, made their obedient slow shuffles … including my father, doing his dutiful dance in a way that absolved him in my mind of all his criminal cunning. He had forgone the dignity of death, as they all had. He was reduced to a vacant old man I could look in on. Augustus Pemberton, that cold, blunt brute of greed … it had never occurred to me that he could have had any unsatisfied desires, even megalomaniacal ones. But here he was, a mindless dancer enacting this ritual, this sacrament for a religion that did not yet exist.

“So everything was Sartorius’s triumph. Though he scrupulously fulfilled his part of the contract, he was entirely without care or concern for his patients except as they were the objects of his thought. What he warranted was only his scientific attention. But this was all! And from it he was recomposing their lives piece by piece, swaddling them like infants, riding them, dancing them, schooling them in an assemblage of life’s cycles, and with his emollients, and powders, and fluid injections from the children, reconstituting them metempsychotically as endless beings.”

Twenty-three

O
F
course I’m compressing everything Martin said, or everything I remember of what he said, over several days. We would go over there in the afternoon and sit with him. He was always glad to see us. He had the gratitude of the recovering invalid. Sometimes he was silent for long minutes … with his eyes closed … till we’d begin to wonder if he was asleep. But these were reflective pauses. Sarah Pemberton worried if it was wise to have him relive his experiences to this degree. She asked us not to encourage him to overtax himself, or to sit so long with him. This was her way to deal with things … by leaving them to swell the brain. Donne pointed out to her the absolute necessity of learning everything we could … and I pointed out the benefits of reliving every moment, if possible … that Martin seemed to want to talk about what had happened … and that there was nothing as good for him, for anyone, as getting the story told, turning it into an object made of language … for everyone to lift and examine.

One day Donne felt he was able to ask Martin when and why the gentleman’s agreement with Sartorius was ended.

“I’m not sure I know,” Martin said. “There was a woman
assigned to look after me … who would bring me my meals when I was to eat alone … and provide me with the essentials and clean my room, and so on. She never said anything—none of them did—though she was friendly enough, with her smiles and nods. She was an odd-looking woman with sparse hair under her nurse’s cap, she wore the nurse’s gray, the uniform all of them wore. One day I asked her her name. I asked how many were on staff there. I was curious about everyone and everything going on. She didn’t answer—she shook her head and smiled. The proportions of her face were not normal. It was a broad face with flattened features, but somehow overendowed with bone on the right side. On the left side her ear seemed smaller than it should be. I asked a few more questions, each of which she answered with small shakes of her head while she waited politely and shyly smiling until she could go … and I realized she was deaf and dumb. They were all of them on this staff, deaf and dumb, as if they’d been recruited from one of the institutes for these unfortunate people…. I realized that the only person who actually spoke in the place, to whom I could speak, was Sartorius himself. This, once I became aware of it, became oppressive to me…. I suppose I might have given him some indication.

“Then at one point Sartorius asked me if I would submit to another procedure. He had already, with my permission, siphoned off some of my blood. He warned me it was not quite as painless as that had been … or the recording of my brain electricity had been … and therefore would require anesthesia. The procedure involved the withdrawal of bone marrow from my leg…. I told him I’d like to think about it. This was not an answer in the scientific spirit… which he must have understood before I did. Perhaps the spell of him was wearing off … but I began at night to dream of that frowning nut-brown
boy in my father’s coffin at Woodlawn…. I was dreaming of him … but it was a kind of awakening … or reawakening … to the specific therapies by which Sartorius contrived to exempt the old gentlemen from death….

“I cannot explain it—how I had … known but not known. How I had conveniently … forgotten. As if I had performed on myself some excision of a portion of the brain. But the effect upon me now … of becoming aware of what I’d known all along … was overwhelming. I was sickened … so terribly self-traduced … I could literally taste and be nauseated by … my own moral rot. I’m not sure I actually considered trying to escape … from what? But I did begin to feel the need to … breathe. Like that child in the coffin, I was buried too. This was a windowless, gaslit place … with its machinery always humming… and a humidity in the air that made me feel sometimes I was underwater … or that this was a hermetic undersea vault I was sealed in. Perhaps Sartorius saw my disturbed state, and found it—I don’t know—disappointing in some way. But he seemed to lose interest in me. He did not ask again to perform the procedure. I was not invited to watch or participate as often as I had been. I was left to my own devices…. I felt finally he had forgotten I was there … his mind had moved on without me.

“It was Eustace Simmons, I think, who took the initiative. He came in one day with the woman I’d asked all the questions of … and sat across the table from me as I ate. I had by then stopped taking my meals upstairs with the … community. I was spending most of my time in the library. I was surprised to see Simmons—you didn’t see him that much. He chatted as if he was making a social call.