Cigarettes by Harry Mathews

Author:Harry Mathews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

In tears, Lewis complies with his instructions. Afterwards he goes to a restaurant. He can’t eat. He decides to see a movie, a revival of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. James Mason doomed to submarine exile makes him cry so hard he has to leave. He walks down rainy streets for another hour. How can Morris’s heart survive the constricting suit? He goes back, crawls once more through the bookcase, and releases his friend. Morris is panting fearfully. Lewis holds the sweating body in his arms, murmuring brotherly comfort. Both men speak words of endearment, and like all of Lewis’s visits, the evening ends in a prolific tenderness that lasts into the next morning.

Morris had imagined a prodigious book: for that place and time, The Book. It was to include fiction as well as criticism, theory as well as poetry, using the most appropriate medium to explore each facet of its subject: the finiteness of intellect and language confronting the infinity of the intuited universe. During the spring weekend they spent with Phoebe in the Hudson River valley, Morris invited Lewis to collaborate on the project. They would begin work on May 24, Morris’s thirtieth birthday. The task would take at least three years.

Sixth visit: May 23. Entering the kitchen on all fours, Lewis finds Morris busily stirring five plastic basins with a broom handle. The basins contain black matter, heavy and wet. Morris hands Lewis the stick. His efforts have left him rather pale. He now only adds water to the basins while Lewis churns them. The basins, he learns, are filled with quick-drying cement. At Morris’s bidding, Lewis carries them into the living room and sets them around the edge of a small area covered with layers of newspaper. Lewis undresses and stands at the center of the area. Using a housepainter’s brush, Morris daubs grease over Lewis’s head and body. Kneeling down, he then starts covering him in cement, first heaping it generously around his feet and ankles to form a massive base, then applying a half-inch thickness over his limbs, torso, and head. Morris leaves an opening for nose and eyes and with his forefinger jabs a passage into each ear. When he finishes, sweating and breathing hard, Morris is visibly pleased with his crude statue, whose arms stretch out sideways like a scarecrow’s, giving it an air both of solidity and of helplessness. While the cement is hardening, Morris goes off to wash and eat dinner. On his return, he tells Lewis to move his arms and legs. Tears and sweat are already dripping from the end of Lewis’s nose, and his eyes now wince with effort: he cannot budge. Morris walks back and forth in front of him while delivering his customary monologue of abuse. He has hesitated, he confesses, to tell Lewis the most important thing he will ever say to him. He has spoken already of the repulsion inspired by Lewis’s degeneracy, by his lack of sexual talent, by his lack of talent tout court.

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