The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in
	the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of
	both causing and cursing the notion of "Terra," are too well-
	known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at
17.05	length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans—and
	not to grave men or gravemen.
	Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary de-
	lusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little ma-
	chines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they
17.10	did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geo-
	aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side,
	like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and
	the ormolu horrors that meant "art" to our humorless fore-
	fathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something
17.15	highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly
	purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved' ("it
	is, isn't it") sidesplitting to imagine that "Russia," instead of
	being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province ex-
	extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United
17.20	States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred

[ 17 ]

	as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean
	to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's
	Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more ab-
	surdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abra-
18.05	ham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water
	and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of
	"America" and "Russia," a more complicated and even more
	preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time—not only be-
	cause the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite
18.10	match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition,
	but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another
	existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre con-
	confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with
	not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-
18.15	yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this
	"scientifically ungraspable" concourse of divergences that minds
	bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra
	a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into
	any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irra-
18.20	tionality.
	As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his
	passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry)
	even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of
	Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in
18.25	their attitude toward the possibility that there existed "a dis-
	tortive glass of our distorted glebe" as a scholar who desires to
	remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm!
	Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In
	Ada's hand.)
18.30	There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and
	"false overlappings" between the two worlds were too numer-
	ous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events,
	not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness;
	and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only

[ 18 ]

	confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world;
	that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and
	hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with
	identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an
19.05	infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains,
	at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging develop-
	ment.
	The modest narrator has to remind the rereader of all this,
	because in April (my favorite month), 1869 (by no means a
19.10	mirabilic year), on St George's Day (according to Mlle La-
	rivière's maudlin memoirs) Demon Veen married Aqua Dur-
	manov—out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend.
	Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse
	vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have
19.15	been influenced by a queer sort of "incestuous" (whatever that
	term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which
	works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he
	fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in un-
	mentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was
19.20	both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and
	brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and
	double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of
	epithelial alliterations.
	Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than
19.25	Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she
	spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sana-
	toriums. A small map of the European part of the British Com-
	monwealth—say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar
	and Palermontovia—as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty
19.30	and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with
	enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the
	Worlds, Aqua's bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a
	modicum of health ("just a little grayishness, please, instead of
	the solid black") in such Anglo-American protectorates as the

[ 19 ]

	Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern
	Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course,
	Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from
	the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically
20.05	unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely
	attractive... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and
	thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when
	she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to
	her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-
20.10	Zvukov ("Heart rending-Sounds").
	After her first battle with insanity at Ex en Valais she re-
	turned to America, and suffered a bad defeat, in the days when
	Van was still being suckled by a very young wet nurse, almost
	a child, Ruby Black, born Black, who was to go mad too: for
20.15	no sooner did all the fond, all the frail, come into close contact
	with him (as later Lucette did, to give another example) than
	they were bound to know anguish and calamity, unless strength-
	ened by a strain of his father's demon blood.
	Aqua was not quite twenty when the exaltation of her nature
20.20	had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically, the initial
	stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of
	the Great Revelation, and although she might have found just
	as easily another theme for her delusion, statistics show that
	the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation caused more
20.25	insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with
	religion had in medieval times.
	Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds
	identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another
	world and this "Other World" got confused not only with the
20.30	"Next World" but with the Real World in us and beyond us
	Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with
	translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eight-
	een-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere
	where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had be-

[ 20 ]

	come nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the
	black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and
	tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the
	cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of
21.05	sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old
	creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies
	of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of
	this our sufficient world.
	Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in
21.10	the margin.)
	Poor Aqua, whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles
	of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist's
	paradise, a future America of alabaster buildings one hundred
	stories high, resembling a beautiful furniture store crammed
21.15	with tall white-washed wardrobes and shorter fridges; she saw
	giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to
	carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent
	from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or
	Wark. She heard magic-music boxes talking and singing, drown-
20.20	ing the terror of thought, uplifting the lift girl, riding down
	with the miner, praising beauty and godliness, the Virgin and
	Venus in the dwellings of the lonely and the poor. The un-
	mentionable magnetic power denounced by evil lawmakers in
	this our shabby country—oh, everywhere, in Estoty and Can-
21.25	ady, in "German" Mark Kennensie, as well as in "Swedish"
	Manitobogan, in the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets as
	well as in the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka, and in
	"French" Estoty, from Bras d'Or to Ladore—and very soon
	throughout both our Americas, and all over the other stunned
21.30	continents—was used on Terra as freely as water and air, as
	bibles and brooms. Two or three centuries earlier she might
	have been just another consumable witch.
	In her erratic student years Aqua had left fashionable Brown
	Hill College, founded by one of her less reputable ancestors, to

[ 21 ]

	participate (as was also fashionable) in some Social Improve-
	ment project or another in the Severnïya Territorii. She or-
	ganized with Milton Abraham's invaluable help a Phree Pharm-
	acy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a mar-
22.05	ried man, who after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed
	to her in his Camping Ford garçonnière preferred to give her up
	rather than run the risk of endangering his social situation in a
	philistine town where businessmen played "golf" on Sundays
	and belonged to "lodges." The dreadful sickness, roughly diag-
22.10	nosed in her case, and in that of other unfortunate people, as
	an "extreme form of mystical mania combined with existaliena-
	tion" (otherwise plain madness), crept over her by degrees,
	with intervals of ecstatic peace, with skipped areas of precarious
	sanity, with sudden dreams of eternity-certainty, which grew
22.15	ever rarer and briefer.
	After her death in 1883, Van computed that in the course of
	thirteen years, counting every presumed moment of presence,
	counting the dismal visits to her various hospitals, as well as
	her sudden tumultuous appearances in the middle of the night
22.20	(wrestling with her husband or the frail but agile English
	governess all the way upstairs, wildly welcomed by the old
	appenzeller—and finally making the nursery, wigless, slipper-
	less, with bloodied fingernails), he had actually seen her, or been
	near her, all in all, for a length of time hardly exceeding that of
22.25	human gestation.
	The rosy remoteness of Terra was soon veiled for her by
	direful mists. Her disintegration went down a shaft of phases,
	every one more racking than the last; for the human brain can
	become the best torture house of all those it has invented, estab-
22.30	lished and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on
	millions of howling creatures.
	She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap
	water—which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does
	predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one's

[ 22 ]

[ 23 ]

	this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...).
	Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak dis-
	tinctly—or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot
	torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor to bother about small
24.05	talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and
	odious, and when at her first "home" she heard one of the most
	hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) gar-
	rulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German
	into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water
24.10	altogether.
	But that phase elapsed too. Other excruciations replaced her
	namesake's loquacious quells so completely that when, during a
	lucid interval, she happened to open with her weak little hand a
	lavabo cock for a drink of water, the tepid lymph replied in its
24.15	own lingo, without a trace of trickery or mimicry: Finito! It
	was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in
	her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recol-
	lection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and
	physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for
24.20	sanity, the other, plead for death. Man-made objects lost their
	significance or grew monstrous connotations; clothes hangers
	were really the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians, the folds of
	a blanket she had kicked off her bed looked back at her mourn-
	fully with a stye on one drooping eyelid and dreary reproof in
24.25	the limp twist of a livid lip. The effort to comprehend the
	information conveyed somehow to people of genius by the
	hands of a timepiece, or piece of time, became as hopeless as
	trying to make out the sign language of a secret society or the
	Chinese chant of that young student with a non-Chinese guitar
24.30	whom she had known at the time she or her sister had given birth
	to a mauve baby. But her madness, the majesty of her madness,
	still retained a mad queen's pathetic coquetry: "You know,
	Doctor, I think I'll need glasses soon, I don't know" (lofty

[ 24 ]

	laugh), "I just can't make out what my wrist watch says...For
	heaven's sake, tell me what it says! Ah! Half-past for—for what?
	Never mind, never mind, 'never' and 'mind' are twins, I have
	a twin sister and a twin son. I know you want to examine my
25.05	pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten
	years ago" (showing her ten fingers gleefully, proudly, ten is
	ten!).
	Then the anguish increased to unendurable massivity and
	nightmare dimensions, making her scream and vomit. She
25.10	wanted (and was allowed, bless the hospital barber, Bob Bean)
	to have her dark curls shaved to an aquamarine prickle, because
	they grew into her porous skull and curled inside. Jigsaw pieces
	of sky or wall came apart, no matter how delicately put to-
	gether, but a careless jolt or a nurse's elbow can disturb so
25.15	easily those lightweight fragments which became incompre-
	hensible blancs of anonymous objects, or the blank backs of
	"Scrabble" counters, which she could not turn over sunny side
	up, because her hands had been tied by a male nurse with
	Demon's black eyes. But presently panic and pain, like a pair of
25.20	children in a boisterous game, emitted one last shriek of laughter
	and ran away to manipulate each other behind a bush as in
	Count Tolstoy's Anna Karenin, a novel, and again, for a while,
	a little while, all was quiet in the house, and their mother had
	the same first name as hers had.
25.25	At one time Aqua believed that a stillborn male infant half a
	year old, a surprised little fetus, a fish of rubber that she had
	produced in her bath, in a lieu de naissance plainly marked X
	in her dreams, after skiing at full pulver into a larch stump, had
	somehow been saved and brought to her at the Nusshaus, with
25.30	her sister's compliments, wrapped up in blood-soaked cotton
	wool, but perfectly alive and healthy, to be registered as her
	son Ivan Veen. At other moments she felt convinced that the
	child was her sister's, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting,

[ 25 ]

[ 26 ]

	English, the first, in Russian; somebody had said that triplets
	and heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual families;
	but there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever now (except,
	perhaps, in hateful long-dead Marina's hell-dwelling mind) that
27.05	Van was her, her, Aqua's, beloved son.
	Being unwilling to suffer another relapse after this blessed
	state of perfect mental repose, but knowing it could not last,
	she did what another patient had done in distant France, at a
	much less radiant and easygoing "home." A Dr Froid, one of
27.10	the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother
	with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-
	Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same
	man, because they both came from Vienne, Isère, and were
	only sons (as her son was), evolved, or rather revived, the
27.15	therapistic device, aimed at establishing a "group" feeling, of
	having the finest patients help the staff if "thusly inclined."
	Aqua, in her turn, repeated exactly clever Eleonore Bonvard's
	trick, namely, opting for the making of beds and the cleaning
	of glass shelves. The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was
27.20	called (who cares—one forgets little things very fast, when
	afloat in infinite non-thingness) was, perhaps, more modern,
	with a more refined desertic view, than the Mondefroid bleak-
	house horsepittle, but in both places a demented patient could
	outwit in one snap an imbecile pedant.
27.25	In less than a week Aqua had accumulated more than two
	hundred tablets of different potency. She knew most of them—
	the jejune sedatives, and the ones that knocked you out from
	eight p.m. till midnight, and several varieties of superior sopo-
	rifics that left you with limpid limbs and a leaden head after
27.30	eight hours of non-being, and a drug which was in itself de-
	lightful but a little lethal if combined with a draught of the
	cleansing fluid commercially known as Morona; and a plump
	purple pill reminding her, she had to laugh, of those with which

[ 27 ]

[ 28 ]

	in a fetus-in-utero position, a comment that seemed relevant to
	his students, as it may be to mine.
	Her last note, found on her and addressed to her husband and
	son, might have come from the sanest person on this or that
29.05	earth.

	Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have
	earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with
	Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several
	"patients," in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where
29.10	I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that
	your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where
	you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a
	clock, even when out of order, must know and let the
	dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise
29.15	neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mus-
	tache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know
	where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not
	even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she,
	but "a tit of it" as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to
29.20	say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Loin-
	taine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand.
	Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and fare-
	well, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season,
	but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day,
29.25	with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty
	pills.
	[Signed] My sister's sister who teper'
	iz ada ("now is out of hell")

[ 29 ]

[ 30 ]