The Song of the Flea by Gerald Kersh Page A

You swine!” Hewould have thrown his brandy into the man’s face but his glass was empty: so he threw the lady’s gin-and-lime. The man licked some of it off the back of his hand where most of it had fallen, and got up slowly. Sitting, this man was of average height—a little on the heavy side. But when he stood he seemed to grow, foot by foot, like a carpenter’s ruler, until he stopped with a jerk six feet from the floor. A little publican with the voice of a field-marshal said: “That’s enough of that. Get out, you!” He grasped Pym by the arms and with the miraculous skill of a piano remover, found a point of balance and rushed him out into the street, saying: “And don’t come back here again.”
    Pym intended to go back immediately, but he walked in the wrong direction, straight into a lamp-post which became two lamp-posts. Rearing over him, both of these lamp-posts bobbed and weaved defiantly. Their heads were lighted catherine-wheels, throwing out ripples of red, yellow, blue, green, indigo and violet. “Come on, both of you,” said Pym, and grappled. Then he was clinging, giggling, to one cold wet lamp-post haloed with muddy rainbows in the moist, misty night.
    Between this and the next rib of the skeleton there was a dark emptiness, out of which blazed a public-house with a bohemian atmosphere: the customers talked louder and were untidier than the taxi-drivers and labourers in the public bar, and there were pictures on the walls. An extraordinarily filthy young woman and a pale, fat, featureless man, who reminded Pym of a chamber-pot curiously cracked, said: “Let’s have a party.” Two people produced four quarts of pale ale and Pym bought three bottles of gin. They all went out shouting as loud as they could. A coster offered chrysanthemums at sixpence a bunch. Pym got five-shillingsworth—an armful—and gave them to the filthy woman. “It is because I love you,” he said. A rim of the chamber-pot rolled down: the featureless man was scowling. But the woman kissed Pym voluptuously, fully visible in the light that streamed through the window of a Cypriot café. They went on, singing.
    Pym slid over the round edge of another rib into another darkness, and came up gradually into a studio furnished with a divan, two chairs and a table, and lighted by candles. Howlong had these candles been burning? He did not know. One of them was guttering. He was sitting on the divan arguing metaphysics with an old man whom he seemed to have offended, because the old man was saying:
    “Will you repeat what you said?”
    “I repeat what I said,” said Pym.
    The old man hit him in the eye with a small fat fist. Then a long, thin man in black with golden hair (Pym likened him to a fountain-pen) said: “You’ve been picking on everybody all the evening. Be friendly or go away.”
    “I see that I am de trop here.”
    In and out of the interstitial blacknesses between the bones of the skeleton in the cupboard Pym went rolling, down and down, to the heel of the night. Later Pym found himself in the Strand, opposite Charing Cross Station. He had some idea of crossing the road: his heels were on the kerb, his toes were in the air, and his hands were groping for something to hold on to. Two men took him by the arms, and one of them said: “For your own good, you know, you’d better come along with us.”
    “I will come along with you anywhere you like, with pleasure,” said Pym.
    They were policemen; but on the way to the police station Pym insisted that they were angels of God. He said that he could walk along in their company for ever. “Do you know, I feel as if my feet weren’t touching the ground?” he said. One of them replied: “Why, you see, sir, your feet aren’t touching the ground, you know.” Then it occurred to Pym that he was being carried. This affected him so deeply that he tried to kiss one of the policeman and, reaching uncertainly in the half dark, counted the silver buttons on a blue