Anatomization

Scrubbed of all traces that might recall our labors in the potter’s field, and secured by one another’s whispered assurances, we talked until morning, across the table from one another and then again at close range on the ancient couch. The inhuman sound no longer rang in my ears, like a boyhood fright it had faded from my mind mere hours later, and might have become a thing of laughter rather than horror if West himself were not still plainly troubled. I wonder if he heard it still then, the indelible impression of that hideous sound, whether he did all his life when the silence grew oppressive. West’s rooms were, to our good fortune, windowless; an outside viewer would have found the sight peculiar, without the expected sounds of revelry to accompany the gas lamps all ablaze. In the queer, strong light I had been able to make out what before had only been suggested in the dark – my friend was alert and clear-eyed, his appealing voice as composed as any day in the classroom discussing chemicals and the poor constitution of the local soil and where to proceed from here. Despite this, he trembled slightly, twisting and fretting in place, and I found I could not look away from him. West had captivated me even in his most ordinary attitudes, bent over a dissecting tray or attending our lectures. His brilliance shone from him plainly, caught me up in admiratory rapture; then in the light, he blazed. Had I been an artist and not a scientist, I would have worked myself to the point of madness endeavoring to capture the look of him on canvas, the terrible and saintly boy that he was then in that uncertain moment.

His hands were very white as he gestured in service of a particular point, railing at the Dean’s folly or the ignorance of humanity at large, and the deft restraint that would have been his livelihood as an ordinary surgeon had long since fled. I was not the only one who had screamed that night, in blind panic, and there was something endearing in this strange vulnerability that I did not fully understand. These were not the symptoms of strain I would later observe in him, agitated even at the point of exhaustion and always fearful, pursued by the same shades we had narrowly escaped that night. This was a nervous excess, the euphoria of a schoolboy having gotten away with a wicked deed. Later years would show him steely and resolute even under mortar fire. I did not understand it yet, but that night I was witnessing a rare freeness of expression in my friend, in another man a frenzy. But this feverish energy ran itself out long before our topics of conversation had exhausted themselves; the demands of weariness eventually did run us down and dim West’s uncanny fires.

Without hesitation or indeed explanation he removed his spectacles, laid his fair head in my lap and permitted me to stroke his hair. I was less inhibited in that moment regarding the physical quality of our friendship than I might otherwise have been; here we were alone, unquestionably alone, united in something thrilling and terrible. That night, when we did retire to bed, we went there together – half from convenience (shrinking in agitation from every shadow and both being disinclined to doze fitfully in an armchair after the night’s bruises and labors, though as students we were both familiar with that exigence as it occasionally came to us) and half under compulsion by the strange connexions that now bound us.