The Fourth Circle Read online

  As a matter of fact, Sarah read what she wanted in my face since I was not only incapable of forming a grimace of agreement but also, because the TV would only hinder my thinking, unwilling to do so. In fact it turned out not too bad in the beginning: Sarah considerately turned the sound completely down and the screen around, moving her chair from my bedside to a place near the window, so that I learned about the program only from the vari-colored reflections on her face in the semidarkness of the room. Whether I wanted it or not, I began to watch that face for increasing periods, following the dramatic changes on it, not infrequently spiced by tears, influenced by twists in the third-rate melodramatic plot on the screen.

  Sarah noticed that I was looking at her and came to yet another erroneous conclusion about my wishes—again because it suited her, although at the time I couldn't see this. She apologized, turned the screen back toward me and moved her chair close, sure that I must, naturally, also want to watch the soap operas she so enjoyed. So I became an unwilling watcher of countless tear-jerking plots set in tasteless scenery, unable to turn my head away or even to lower my eyelids. It is true that I could still somehow manage the latter, but I refrained, primarily for fear that Sarah's feelings might be hurt. Without being aware of it, I was already enmeshed.

  Fortunately, sentimental serials were not aired too often, so this enforced watching did not, at first, detract much from my research, which was now entering its final stage. In the vibration of strings—that basic form of matter, actually indivisible as the ancient Greeks in their simple way believed atoms to be—a fundamental cyclical structure was appearing, repeating itself all the way through to the circular structure of the Universe, simultaneously infinite and finite, corresponding to the cyclic flow of time, without an arrow, without the paradoxes of cause and effect or any apparent beginning in the Big Bang. A structure in which the four primal forces of nature finally became one, accepting gravity, rejected for so long, into their sisterhood....

  I felt—I suspected—that I was on the threshold, that just one step separated me from shaping a final theory, but all my previous experience told me that such a line cannot be crossed in a straight walk, that enlightenment—a dazzling bolt of lightning that would drive the last wisps of darkness from my mind and leave me in a clearing of pure light—was necessary. However, enlightenment was certainly not what was streaming from the cathode tube, and Sarah soon thought of a way to compensate for the relative scarcity of the shows she yearned for in the regular TV program. The answer, simply, was video.

  One evening she brought with her a largish bag, and with the sweetest smile from her repertoire, which included that beautiful little dimple that would appear on the point of her chin, she regaled me with the news that she had obtained a supply of cassettes of romantic classics. I do not know what meaning she took at that moment from the usual rictus on my face, but I tried my hardest to give an impression of utter despair. It was soon clear that this was a flop when, chattering with unwonted animation, she began to arrange the cassettes next to the VCR, which so far had been used only once—when I was shown that sentimental film about me by Spielberg.

  And so began a marathon retrospective of a genre for which I have never cared much and which was, under present circumstances, the last thing I needed.

  Sarah appeared more and more often on the night shift, which pleased Brenda and Mary. All the cult heroes of romantic films, particularly older ones, began to parade before our eyes, drawing sighs and tears from her, grimaces and twitches from me, which she readily interpreted as reliable evidence of similar delight.

  More than once she got carried away and reached for my hand, so that the end of the film would find us holding hands like a young couple at the cinema.

  On the first such occasion, as the flickering magic vanished, Sarah snapped out of it, releasing my atrophied hand from her grip. Gradually, however, she began to find this contact quite normal, until soon she did not hesitate to snuggle up to me during the most exciting scenes—such as the one at the end of Casablanca, which we watched at least ten times on several successive nights. But immediately after the film she would stand up, straighten her crumpled uniform, and mumble a few unintelligible words, supposedly in apology. I cannot say that this intimacy was not pleasurable, though it filled me to a far greater extent with unease.

  Just as I was on the brink of despair at the mountain of cassettes, which she tirelessly exchanged for new ones, and unable to communicate to her in any manner whatsoever that I was not in the least interested in these tear-jerkers, my mind being occupied with things of far greater importance that could be lost forever if I did not achieve maximum concentration, her decision to proceed with Stage Two of her plan came to my aid in an unusual way.

  Again she carried it off with perfect unobtrusiveness so that I suspected nothing. After the end of some accursedly pathetic movie, starring that icy Garbo, whom she for some reason holds in high esteem, Sarah did not turn the video off at once, as she usually did; instead, she first turned me over on my other side, since I had been lying too long in the same position. The tape ran past the credits, rolling on before my eyes, and then on the screen appeared the remains of an earlier recording on the same cassette: my bedroom was at once filled with the passionate sighs of a naked couple at the height of sexual arousal. The frame, almost clinical in its detail, removed any doubt: this was pornography of the hardest core.

  Although Sarah, occupied with turning me, could hardly fail to hear the noisy rapture of the young couple, she did not react immediately. A good fifteen seconds elapsed before she bustled over to the VCR to turn it off, red to the ears, which rather suited her, leaving me half turned. This apparently sincere embarrassment and the torrent of apologies that followed, full of accusations against the perverts at the local video club who contaminated great love films by keeping copies on tapes infested with such revolting trash, deceived me at first, so that I failed to notice the unusualness of her delay in stopping the tape.

  I did think of it the next day but soon convinced myself that it had to be a mistake and that my other impression—that Sarah, in turning me over, had held me unusually low down on my body, not under my shoulders but rather around my hips—was equally unreliable. After all, what conclusion could I possibly have drawn from all this? Paranoia may be of some use in scientific research but is usually of none at all in normal life. Usually. Although the fact that you are pa-ranoid does not, of course, necessarily mean that there isn't actually somebody out there trying to kill you...

  Sarah, fortunately, was not trying to kill me, as I soon understood when her intention finally became clear. Now that the lead-up was over, matters proceeded faster, although several days went by before she took the next step. The videos stopped altogether and Sarah spent two evenings reading innocently, as at the beginning of her tour of duty in our house.

  Although I was now on the alert, her reserve lulled me, so that I was not much upset when, on the third evening, she switched on the video again, turning the set in my direction. Filled with a sense of foreboding, I wondered which cassette it would be, but when I saw the opening frames of Casablanca, an involuntary grunt was wrenched from me, followed by unchecked dribbling. Not again!—was my hopeless thought, but she obviously interpreted the sound in the wrong way. She sat down quickly on the edge of the bed and looked me straight in the eye, the regard, one would imagine, of a mother for her infant. Or one lover for the other.

  She began by wiping the spittle from the corners of my mouth with a piece of gauze then brushed the hair from my forehead, proceeding to slide her hand along my neck and chest, supposedly smoothing the thin coverlet, muttering something unintelligible as she did so. All I could make out was that she had to do something, something hard for her; several times she mentioned the word

  "love," once "a great physicist" and once "a child." Her eyes were glassy, which in a moment's panic I took for madness; then I unmistakably recognized erotic arousal in them. I should have fe
lt relieved, but I didn't.

  When her hand slid to my navel, she jumped as if she had touched something hot, then stood up from the bed, turning her back on me for a moment. I suppose it was not easy for her: judging by the slight trembling of her shoulders, a strong internal struggle must have been going on, the outcome of which was uncertain. The only problem was that she had not asked me whether I was willing to take part in the whole business. Quite simply, my participation was taken as read.

  Unfortunately, that sort of thing is inevitable when one is laid low with this idiotic amyotrophy.

  The shaking of her shoulders stopped, indicating that a final decision had been reached. She turned to me with a somewhat defiant look on her face, arranged her hair with a nervous swipe of her hand, went over to the VCR, and ejected the tape of Casablanca After a brief search through the heap nearby, she found another. There was no more hesitation in her movements as she placed this new cassette into the video recorder. She then resumed her position next to me on the edge of the bed.

  Her gaze was on me, not on the screen; she knew full well what was on the recording, so that she had no need to watch—my reaction was much more important to her. For a moment I looked back at her, puzzled, then at the screen.

  Of all the surprises I could have had, this was the greatest: before my eyes flickered a perfectly familiar sight—this same bedroom. The frame was showing my bed, in which I lay immobile, eyes closed. The recording was undoubtedly made at some late night hour, while I was already asleep. But who....?

  As if reading the puzzlement in my eyes, Sarah bent down near the edge of the bed and proudly lifted a small Sony camera, obviously capable of recording even in very poor light, since no additional lighting was noticeable in the picture.

  Then she stood up from the bed, went over to the TV, and placed the camera on it, undoubtedly in the same spot from which the previous recording had been made.

  Before she returned to me, she pressed a button on the camera, turning on a small red indicator near the lens which showed that a new recording was in progress.

  I did not like this double recording at all, but how could I express my disapproval? By fresh outbreaks of grunting and slobbering? What good would that be, when for Sarah it always meant something else? I therefore had no option but to stare helplessly at the screen, still without any clue as to what was to follow.

  I did not have to wait long.

  Sarah soon walked into the frame, not with the usual restrained, modest walk of a shy girl, but with exaggerated movement, swaying her hips and running her fingers through her long hair. She did so in a sultry, seductive manner, but I was still not sure whether she was joking or whether she really meant it. She came over to my bed, leaned over me and began to imitate passionate fondling gestures, but without really touching me, probably afraid of waking me up. After this make-believe touching, Sarah went on to make-believe kissing. Bending slowly, she started with my toes, leaving out no part of my body that her lips could approach through the bedclothes.

  While I, an unwilling participant, watched without blinking this perverse erotic game on the screen, the camera on the TV set was making another recording of the same sort, but with me awake. Sarah's hands, with their long, skilful fingers, on which I noticed now for the first time the garishly lacquered nails—had they been like that before? I wondered—began to imitate the gestures on the screen, but this time not in pretend caresses—this was for real. I felt them all over my atrophied body, the muscles of which have been deactivated forever, although the skin has remained as sensitive to touch as always. There are certain tissues, too, the motoric movements of which are not of a muscular nature...

  If Sarah had resolved to repeat the scenario of the first recording, kissing was now supposed to follow—and indeed, yanking the covers off me, she bent closely over my feet and started to slide her lips from my toes upward, touching me from time to time with her warm tongue. I slept naked, as usual, so that I could be more easily helped in case of accident, and Sarah had seen me naked on countless previous occasions, but always with the eyes of a nurse, which awoke no sense of shame in me. Now arose two feelings that I had never had with any nurse: shame and excitement. But Sarah was my nurse no longer.

  She climbed rapidly up my body, to keep in synch with the pictures on the screen, but without missing a single part; only on reaching my loins, where she dwelled for a little longer, did she raise her head for a moment. The gaze she shot me expressed triumph at the effect she had achieved there, mixed with that peculiar expression of conspiracy that couples those who are united in sin.

  It was this thought of sin that only then summoned my wife to my mind, with a certain pang of conscience at first, but not for long. Jane would never become involved in anything of the kind; the whole affair would be to her mind distasteful, offensive even, so much at odds with the role of willing victim that she embraced passionately, primarily because of a strong tendency to martyrdom, subsumed in the deprivation of living with someone like me. In fact, she would have probably welcomed this "infidelity" as providing fresh grist to the mill of her martyrdom.

  Before the atrophy had fully set in, Jane had come to me on occasion, but unwillingly and with increasingly pronounced dislike, although she was fully aware that the illness had not at all diminished, physiologically or psychologi-cally, my libido, which has always been strong. I did not hold it against her; I could understand the disgust she must have felt, although this denied her the opportunity and pleasure of being the Compleat Sufferer. Since I could not move my hands—except those two fingers, definitely not enough for the purpose—I had no option left, after she stopped coming to me, except to relieve myself in wet dreams, like a pubescent boy. I used to curse this diabolical disease afterwards while the nurses washed me in the morning; in their expression of embarrassment, which never appeared when removing the traces of other feculence, I always discerned, for some reason, the shadow of a contemptuous smile.

  Sarah's kisses in reality caught up with the ones on the screen somewhere at the level of my eyes; when I opened them under her lips, the two sequences had already separated. The real Sarah was now sitting motionless on the edge of the bed, watching the TV as I was, looking like someone who had nothing whatsoever to do with what had been going on in my bedroom until that moment.

  At the same time, the Sarah on the recording stood up, approached the head of my bed, and began slowly to undress. She did this with surprising skill, one might say with the motions of an experienced stripper, always hinting first at what was to come, so that the undressing process took a longish time, although she wore, under the nurse's uniform, only scanty underwear. The way she took off her long black fishnet stockings and purple garters was particularly exciting.

  The undulations of her body followed some rhythm audible to her alone, the only sound coming from the TV being the slight susurration of sliding underwear.

  When there was no more to take off, she glanced roguishly at the camera, then came over to the bed and climbed carefully on to the edge, taking care not to wake me. She stood there for a few moments, half bent, reminding me of a statue from antiquity, I cannot remember which. Anyway, maybe it wasn't from antiquity.

  Then she straddled me, lowering herself to within a few millimeters of my loins, but without touching them. She threw back her head and her hips started to writhe. Long auburn hair cascaded down her bare back and from her wide-open mouth came low, throaty moans. I believed first that this was playacting, but a moment later I thought that nobody could simulate excitement that convincingly.

  In any case, the climax had to come soon, and then the matter would become clear (assuming this could not be faked).

  But if the climax came, I was denied the opportunity of seeing it. The Sarah in reality suddenly walked with nervous steps to the video and turned it off, again mumbling some vague fragments of her thoughts, among which I discerned this time something about "the wrong day," "not sure of pregnancy," and "needless waste
." It was already possible to complete the puzzle, but I was too disconcerted to do it.

  She seemed confused while she was switching off the camera too and putting it into a small bag that she placed, together with the cassette from the VCR, on the floor next to the night table, obviously intending to take these things away with her in the morning. The criminal always tries to remove traces of his crime. There was, however, one trace that could not be removed at once. Although Sarah's next action was to cover me, which she did averting her eyes slightly, with a certain look of guilt on her face, under the thin coverlet my arousal remained visible for some time yet. I could not stop it just by willpower.

  It was clear that she had no intention of doing anything further about it as she quickly sat down in the chair again after first moving it slightly away from my bed, as if to separate herself from me, and focused her attention on one of her books, her face perfectly serene and innocent as she read: the very picture of a nurse who had just tended conscientiously to all the wants of the patient en-trusted to her care and now had some free time to devote to herself.

  I was not so much troubled by the fact that she left me unsatisfied at the height of arousal to which she had deliberately brought me—a condition that naturally caused me the utmost discomfort—as I was angered by my total inability under the circumstances to concentrate on the matter that was now only a step away; I was denied the opportunity to climb that last step separating me from the top, from the plateau of light.

  The feeling of twofold frustration, of multiple anticlimax, lasted a long time. I passed a night of troubled dreams, waking frequently but escaping back into sleep as soon as I saw Sarah's stony form next to the bed, tirelessly and chastely bent over her book.