1. It's difficult, how much time has passed is difficult to tell. If
I could feel my face, how badly I need a shave, I could guess how long
I've been here. But with my hands tied and my eyes covered it's
difficult, and the fact that there's no sound, nothing but silence.
Let's say three days. Three days ago during breakfast my wife
said: "You're not yourself today."
I was sitting at the kitchen table, silently spooning sugar into my
cup. I looked at her.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing, it's just that -- "
She shrugged, went back to buttering her toast. The way she did it
always annoyed me. She used too much butter -- that was one thing -- and
she spent an excessive amount of time spreading it around. Because of
all the butter. There was too much of it. So she had to work it in,
into the bread, the toast, with her knife, back and forth, back and
forth as if she were plastering a wall.
"What do you mean?"
She shrugged her shoulders. First the right one, then both
together.
I put down the spoon. It clattered against the saucer loud, loudly
so that she'd know my mood, that I wasn't going to be shrugged off.
"It's just an expression,"she said. "A figure of speech."
She was right. It was just an expression. An innocent remark. One of those things you hear every day. Then comes a day when you hear it as if for the first time and the world opens up dangerously, yawns
in your face, shows you its abyss. The world changes, you feel a
shiver down your spine, and things are not the same anymore.
"What do you mean I'm not myself today?"I repeated.
"Well, for one thing, you never come down to breakfast in your
pajamas."
That's true, I don't.
"And you didn't shave this morning and you always do."
Also true. But that morning I couldn't stand the thought of it,
the sting of the water and that, that scraping! I was hung over. I've
been drinking lately -- in the cellar. I'd taken to sitting there
nights, watching TV and drinking to get away from them a little while.
I wanted to think and there was always such a racket, such a lot of
noise. So for the last month or so I'd been going down to the cellar
after dinner to think and watch TV and get -- not drunk -- in a better
frame of mind. That night I'd gotten into a wonderful frame of mind.
My mind was glistening!
That's how it began. With that one simple observation of hers. A
perfectly meaningless remark. She meant nothing by it. It was simply
not like me to sit down to breakfast unshaved and in my pajamas.
I should have let it drop. But, as I said, the world opened up at
that moment and I stared open-mouthed at the abyss. If I wasn't
myself, then who was I?
I never believed this idea that there's something inside.
Something you can't see, touch, x-ray, find with a knife. You know
what I'm talking about. I believed in the body, the brain, the mind,
in memory -- all that made us who we are and different. I lost none of
those things. So what did I lose? I don't know and yet I feel
something is missing.
Not to be yourself -- what does that mean?
I went outside to take some pictures. Taking pictures makes me
happy. I went out after that disturbing conversation with my wife,
left her to finish buttering her toast. I didn't bother to change, I
went out in my pajamas. At that point it didn't matter how I was
dressed. I did have the presence of mind to put on my raincoat and
shoes. It was a cold morning, damp and foggy. A fog floated above the
trees. The tops of the trees had disappeared. I wasn't going to take
any pictures today. I'd have to find some other way of killing time.
I had no intention of going to work either. To hell with work! I
never liked it, I saw no point in it, and now that I wasn't myself I
saw even less. She could go earn her own daily bread to butter!
I was never one of those who defined himself by what he did for a
living. Maybe that's what went wrong. If I had liked my job, if I had
thought it important, I could have kept on going no matter what. Habit
would have carried me back and forth, back and forth. Inside, I could
have dissolved, washed away like sand in the rain, but something of me
would have been left for the world to see and call by name.
I walked around. I went and stood at the newspaper stand and read
the headlines. They didn't interest me, they didn't concern me, they
had nothing to do with me.
And all the time the fog was getting thicker and thicker.
Tired, I started to walk home where my thing were -- my books and
bottles, my camera equipment. I went down the street and round the
corner and it was gone. The fog was sitting where my house should have
been! I felt around in it. Nothing. Not a sign, not a clue. Just a
vacant lot full of trash, old plumbing and a tub, an old-fashioned tub
with feet.
I've made an assumption. That there's somebody here besides me.
That I'm not talking to myself. That I'm not alone.
As I was walking the streets looking for my house, a car passed --
my car -- and sitting inside were my wife and kids, wife in the front
seat, kids in the back, and next to her a man, a complete stranger. I
had the feeling as I watched it pass that he had replaced me.
I started to follow but then it too disappeared in the fog. I
stood on the sidewalk a while, listening. The world sounded far away --
because of the fog maybe -- faint and far away, as if heard through a
sickness. The fog wrapped itself around me, all that white morning
wrapped me.
I remember dreaming the night before everything changed. A very
vivid dream. I've been wondering if that's when it happened -- the
thing that happened to me. I assume I was dreaming. It could have
been real, I suppose, though unlikely.
In the dream I was sleeping. In the dream I woke. Sitting on a
chair by my bed was an old man. He didn't speak, just sat smoking
cigarettes, an old man with white hair, looking at the floor and
smoking silently. He was God. It was dark in the room, a dark night
outside the window. But there was a little light on the floor around
the chair where he sat which made me think it was him. Who else could
it have been shedding a ring of light?
I didn't notice what brand of cigarettes.
I fell asleep again, or dreamed I did, and when I woke it was light
out and he was gone. The chair was there where he'd sat and looked at
the floor. I might have put it there myself. I don't remember. I
might have. I moved it back under the desk where it belonged. I went
back and looked for -- I don't know what. Evidence. A ring on the
floor left by the light. Ash. But the floor was clean and unmarked.
If it weren't for the chair having moved --! I could, I suppose, have
moved it myself for some reason known only to drunks.
I shook off my uneasiness and went downstairs to breakfast,
neglecting, as I told you, to change out of my pajamas and shave.
2.
I'm becoming raw. Do you understand "raw"? As if I'd been
scraped, my insides -- scraped clean with a knife. As if I'd swallowed
ground glass. Yes, that's more what I mean. Swallowed ground-up
glass. I hurt inside. I picture thousands of tiny cuts, red wounds,
sensitive linings, membranes, fissures -- red and oozing. Not a pretty
picture. Better not talk about it.
But isn't it strange now I'm lost that I should be so sensitive? I
never suffered in my life. Only a twinge here and there. Toothache.
Headache, a touch of arthritis, neuralgia. The usual aches and pains.
Not what I'm feeling now! It's as if the, the thing that's gone -- call
it what you like -- got torn out, extracted like a tooth from the gum.
Or when they knock a building down, a skyscraper -- after they've hauled
away the debris, nothing's left except the hole, an immense hole in the
ground bristling with pipes and conduits. Imagine they're nerve
endings and you'll have some idea of the pain, the pain that comes from
absence. Something's been ripped out of me leaving the nerve endings
exposed.
I had hoped to feel nothing at all. That there would be nothing to
feel, no pain when no self, no person to feel. I was wrong. It lies
coiled in the skin, in the cell -- a thin ribbon of steel waiting to
rend.
They drove off into the fog and I haven't seen them since.
I was taken into custody a little while later. I didn't see them,
the ones who grabbed me. They must have been hiding in the fog. They
put a bag over my head, a sack. Rough, burlap. It smelled like
onions, an old onion sack maybe. They put it over my head and tied a
rope round my neck. I felt panic -- because of the sack more than
anything. It was hard to breathe through the burlap and onion smell.
Not entirely dark. Not black. I could see light dimly. They treated
me roughly but were careful not to strangle me with the rope. That
gave me hope.
They pushed me along the sidewalk into a car, shoved me into the
back seat. Someone got in next to me. The door slammed. The car
started and went. Nobody said a word. Light flickered through the
burlap. We must have been going under bridges or maybe through woods,
the light flickering through the trees. No one made a sound. The car
hummed. Finally it stopped.
I was pulled out of the car and pushed through a door. I hit my
head on the doorway. They went through my pockets, without a word,
looking for -- what? Papers? My identity papers? I had none, I was in
my raincoat and pajamas! Besides I had lost it, my identity. And I
was sure I no longer resembled in the slightest any picture of me taken
before my, my -- transformation, assuming the old man who came and sat
by my bed, a chain smoker, was he -- the Ancient of Days. Unless it's a
fulfillment of the promise, the prophesy that we are to be made over,
like new, given a new identity. If so, what's mine, and is that why
I've been brought here? To receive it? Or has one thing nothing to do
with the other? Have they brought me here because I was wandering
around in a fog in my pajamas? Just another vagrant, which I've become
suddenly, having no home, having mysteriously lost my house.
That stranger who drove away with my wife and kids -- he might not
have been a stranger at all, but me, the me I used to be who is now
changed beyond recognition. A stranger in fact to all shreds of his
former self. It's possible, I suppose it is. Most things are in the
infinitely complicated scheme of things.
Since then, not a word, not a sound. Maybe they don't speak my
language but that wouldn't have silenced them. It would only have
emphasized my isolation, my incomprehension. I wonder what would be
worse -- silence or if they spoke in a language I didn't understand? As
if I were a text undergoing translation.
Assuming they aren't dumb. Unlikely, unlikely to be waylaid by a
gang of mutes, a religious order sworn to silence. For what reason?
For a reason to be revealed in time, God's own?
I think the answer lies in something more mundane, inclining
towards my earlier speculations that I was taken into custody for
loitering in my pajamas on a public street with no visible means of
support, no place of residence -- in the visible universe anyway -- with
a camera that was confiscated and, I assume, by now opened in a dark
room, its tightly furled secrets prodded, poked and prodded by a fat
finger belonging to some functionary of whatever's responsible for
having me detained.
3.
God is light. If God was in my room, what effect did his light
have on the film in my camera?
Maybe he's fogged it. Ghosted it. Maybe when they develop it,
they'll see his face but won't recognize it through the cigarette
smoke. There may be nothing there at all, nothing at all to see. An
over-exposure, just the blackened negative, the nothing that comes from
too much light, an excess of radiance. Impenetrable. So that the
print, the white paper print, remains unmarked by the light shining
through the enlarger. Obscures it. Arrests it, the light, so that
there is no image -- nothing, nothing to see, nothing to enlarge,
nothing at all.
Which proves nothing about God's existence.
I only hope there's nothing incriminating on the roll. Nothing
damning. Although what that might be I can't imagine, being innocent,
a perfectly innocent amateur photographer. Family photos. Snapshots.
The wife and kids. The house, backyard, the car, the cat -- all gone,
vanished in the fog.
What am I doing here?
4.
It's dangerous to lose your identity. You can replace your
passport, your papers, your collection of family photos if you've had
the foresight to store the negatives in another place in case of fire
or theft. Otherwise they are irreplaceable, those images, you'll have
to start again taking new pictures. Or with a new family, starting
your life over. Sometimes it's easier that way, easier to begin a new
life than to cry inconsolably over the loss of old pictures. But your
identity -- that's another story. There's nothing you can do. When
it's gone it's gone. You just have to wait for it to come back. And
if it doesn't -- well, there's little you can do except wait. There is
no master "you,"no template. No negative you can store in another
place and use to reproduce yourself. And as to going out and starting
over -- it's not that easy, is it, starting over? Not easy to set
yourself up somewhere else. Because you're empty, you've been emptied
out. Canceled. With nothing to go on, nothing you might use to
reconstruct even a rudimentary self.
It's not the same as amnesia where you don't know your own name or
whether you have a wife, children, a car, a house, a cat. When
everything's been erased you can start fresh, let people and events
write all over you. Sooner or later you'll remember who you are, or
you'll become somebody new. But this -- I've been left words, my name,
pictures in my head of a wife, kids, house and cat. I can see them all
here in the dark. So it won't be easy to build over top of them as if
they had never been. Even though they might not recognize me now -- so
changed am I though in what way changed I'm still not sure I understand.
Close your eyes and listen. I'm a voice coming at you in the dark.
Close your eyes. All black, my world behind the blindfold. Black and
empty. The world has fallen away. I'm afraid that later, later
they'll come. Stub out cigarettes on my skin. Put wires into my ears.
Shove hot wires in -- beat me with iron rods. Beat me. Sometimes I
feel something terrible hovering close to me. It beats against my
cheek like a wing. Why have they brought me here?
When I'm released. If I am. To where, where released and into
what when they finally let me go? If they do. If they do where will I
be then? And who?
5.
Where I am, what's it like? I haven't seen it. I haven't run my
hands over the walls. If there are walls. I may not be in the narrow
space I imagine but in a public square, a compound, a dark and endless
plain though there is no wind, no sound. Too silent for out-of-doors.
A gymnasium maybe or some vast hall. An auditorium. A court room
sitting bound and blindfolded before silent judges. Is anyone there?
Am I in a hole, is that it -- a hole, a well, the well of despair?
I read about that well. They put monkeys in it to see how much they
can stand, how much they can suffer and for how long. They all went
crazy, of course. What did they expect? Despair first, then madness.
It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. I need to know -- I have a
right to know if there is anyone here besides me!
I'm beginning to fall apart.
I had a skin condition once. The skin began to flake around my
nose, my eyes, my eyelids, the corners of my mouth -- fell away. I was
afraid it would go right on flaking, little by little, until the bone
showed. The skull. Of course there was no danger of that happening.
It was only a minor skin condition. Eczema. But every morning when I
woke a new layer of dried skin had peeled away during the night and was
left hanging in shreds from my face ready to be sloughed off into the
wash rag. My morning ablutions, washing away skin -- an erosion, an
erasure -- I was being slowly erased by my own hand.
6.
I want to talk about photography. What I like about it is its
fixity. You can fix someone, a face, a scene, an image -- arrest it,
stop it from changing. Only photography can do that. And death, death
can do it too only it's more complicated for the person being fixed by
death because the process of disintegration does change him. What
doesn't change is our image of him. The mental picture we have stays
with us. For a long time anyway. For a long time when we think about
someone who died the picture we have of him is how we last saw him.
But the dead person himself changes beyond recognition.
I used to take pictures of everything.
Something else that's interesting -- it has to do with photography --
is the way pictures, printed pictures, turn blue in the sun. You've
seen that before, haven't you? How after a while pictures hung in
store windows turn blue. At my wife's hairdresser's I watched the
faces of women in the window, photographs illustrating different
hairstyles -- beautiful women, achingly beautiful if you know what I
mean, women rarely seen in nature, models of a perfection that is not
of this world, our world anyway. I'd watch them from the sidewalk as I
stood outside and waited for my wife to be made over, watched them
month after month turn blue as the sun stripped away -- first the
yellow, it's weak and the first to disappear, then the magenta, then
the black, leaving just the blue. The Blue Girls looking as if they'd
drowned, or taken cyanide, the beautiful drowned girls floating behind
the window, vanishing in sudden reflections of the street, fading like
a memory. But photographs never fade. At least not for several
lifetimes. Which is long enough.
Am I dreaming? I may be dreaming.
I should have been a professional photographer and sifted life a
bit at a time. Frame by frame, photo by photo. Better than a writer --
a teller of stories. Writing's of no use to anyone. Stories -- no one
cares anymore. What do they have to do with anything? Life and the
life on a page, marks on a page -- one has nothing at all to do with the
other. Just words. Pictures lie closer to what's visible and what's
not visible can't be rendered. Except in dreams, and as soon as you
put a dream to paper it loses its reality. Or unreality. It's no
longer convincing.
If someone were to take my picture now would I be a blank, a
nothing, air -- not even smoke -- just thin air?
My happiest times were spent in the darkroom. There I was in
control and it is so restful, the dark, so easy on the eyes. And the
way a face, a scene -- life composes itself at the bottom of the
developer bath, emerges under the red light and is fixed there so that
not even death can alter it. In the dark. The silent room. Not a
soul around. Just images blooming indelibly at the bottom of the tray,
wavering like the faces of the drowned.
What does it mean to be dead? On the subject of death all the
experts are silent. Still, you ought to be able to guess, have an
informed opinion -- informed by what you've experienced by living, life
being as we are told a preparation, an exercise, for death.
Is that what this is? An exercise?
Or am I dead?
The day I was born someone went to the store and bought a gun, a
high-powered rifle with a sharpshooter's scope. It sat in the closet
or on a shelf until another day, the day I got married perhaps, a
beautiful day as I remember, he went to the store and bought a box of
bullets -- beautiful too in their brass jackets.
Now he is driving towards the outskirts of town. The light
flickers over his hands as he drives under the trees.
Now he is walking through the woods. He's in no hurry, he's early,
he'll have plenty of time. He carries the rifle cradled in his arms.
The weight of the bullets makes the pocket of his hunting jacket sag.
Soon he will walk into a clearing. He's early. He has time to smoke a
cigarette, listen to the birds, the wind in the trees.
They are bringing me to him as if to a wedding. A marriage
arranged the day I was born. He has been waiting patiently all these
years. Now the day has come. The bullets fit the gun perfectly,
they're made for each other. We're made for each other. There's not
the slightest doubt that this is what I was born for -- all of us.
There's a bullet waiting for all of us. It's got our name on it --
yours and mine. No matter if we change our name, change our identity,
we can't change that. Our destiny. Which is death. In an open
clearing or an enclosed space. The jumping off point between this
world and the next.
If there is one.
7.
I'm dividing, what's left is breaking up, coming apart, dissolving
into bits, atoms, particles of consciousness. I'm in the river and the
water tears at me, the water floods me, the water is eating me away. I
can feel the life running out of me.
8.
I imagine my own death. I imagine it more strongly than I have
ever done.
I am walking the beach. It is late afternoon and the light is
falling. Someone fires -- I see the flash of the gun. I fall. I see
myself lying face down in the water with my feet in the wet sand. The
waves roll over me, tug each time at the wound. They suck the blood
little by little from my forehead until I'm white. White as a ghost.
When I was a kid I had nightmares. I'd wake up shaking. Once my
mother came into my room and found me trembling. I told her about my
nightmares. She said she could suck them out of my head so that I
wouldn't have them anymore. Every night before I went to sleep she'd
come into my room and suck my forehead. I didn't have them after that,
not for a long time anyway. Not till now, now that there's no one to
suck them out.
I imagine myself lying face down while the water sucks my head
clean of nightmare. No more bad dreams ever again. Unless you dream
in the ground. Do you dream in the ground when you're dead and if you
do, what do you dream? Of worms singing in your ears. And what do
worms sing? Something shrill and terrible.
I'll lie face down until the tide comes in and there's enough water
to float me. I'll rock in a wave and then slide out to sea as if
weightless, as if I were nothing at all. A broken vessel.
No more talk about death. No more.
I've talked too much, too long. About nothing. I'm tired, I'm
tired of my imagination, the way it runs on and on. If I could turn it
off.
I'm tired.
9.
Today someone brought me water. He didn't say anything. Still,
I'm not forgotten, it proves I'm not forgotten. Someone brought me
water. The cup at my lip -- I expected vinegar, urine.
"I'm not political,"I said, my eyes in the dark of the blindfold.
He didn't answer. He must know that, that I'm not political. It
was water, plain water, it had gone flat, but it was water. He said
nothing. I smelled him. His sweat. His smell. Something he'd eaten
was on his breath. Meat. He gave me water.
I expected a mouthful of piss or vinegar but it was water. I
drank, gratefully. I haven't been forgotten. I'm not political. They
must have examined the photographs. Innocent scenes. Apolitical.
They could not have interpreted them any other way. Pictures of my
wife, the kids, the cat, the house. Street scenes, scenes of the
countryside -- all innocent, all banal. A waste of film.
Soon perhaps I'll be fed. They know now that I am not political.
I've been watered, soon I hope to be fed. And then my hands untied.
The blindfold removed. I've been forgiven. Perhaps my new identity is
being readied right now, my new papers, my prints, a new face -- some
new "I"I've never even imagined. I will leave here a new man. Soon.
If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, the day after.
10.
It's not so bad. This is not so bad. It's not so bad here. It
could be worse. I haven't been beaten. I expected to be beaten. I
haven't been abused. No one has hurt me. No one has touched me, spat
at me, reviled me. Hurt me.
I wish someone would touch me. Not hurt, just touch, the slightest
pressure, a hand grazing mine, a finger, a hand, a finger -- something
to interrupt this weightlessness, this loneliness.
To be beaten would be something anyway. To be hurt -- not hurt too
much, but a little. A small hurt to let me know I'm not living among
ghosts.
To be given water isn't enough.
To be given food isn't enough.
To be spoken to. A voice in the dark. A voice to come out of the
dark -- at me. Into me.
A voice would be enough.
11.
disappeared I no no I no me disappeared gone
12.
I am waiting for the earth to give up its dead. I am waiting for
them to shake off their coats of clay, of dust, of indifference. I am
waiting for them to shake off sleep. I am with them, the apolitical
dead, I am with them under the ground, our final resting place. Our
common ground.
I'm waiting for them to come and embrace me, wind their bony
fingers in my hair, dissolve my bonds, my body, my bounds, lead me to
where we all dance the last ecstatic dance, waiting for the roof to be
pried off and for whatever it is that is outside to spill in like water
like blood
like light.
I see them now. They are bruised with shadow. They bear the marks
of their torture. They are silent, they have lost their tongues. Pink
erasers, their tongues lie quietly in desk drawers. Everything is
blank. Documents. Passports. Papers -- everything has been erased.
The words have scuttled from the pages of books leaving them empty.
The words have crawled into the corners, into the shadows in the
corners of the room, into the sprawling dark.
The dead are approaching slowly with their slender means.
Someone's coming. The dead flinch back into shadow, press
themselves against walls, jibber unintelligibly that they have no
politics.
He is coming to lay the black pill of silence on my tongue. He
will show me the instruments, he will instruct me in pain. He is
coming for me with his radiant knife to cut out my tongue.
I know who I am. I know it now.
I will root here. My skin will whiten, my bones will dissolve and
my skin become loathsome. My body will become a finger, a thing
belonging to the dark fingering the earth, blind urgency in the dry
earth, making a place in the belly of the ground, listening without
ears to the dirt give way. A vein in the earth waiting to be stripped
out.
I know what I am. A thing belonging to the dark. A root.
Sleep the long vegetable sleep. Then dirt. Then stone and the
sleep of stone. Then stone. Then nothing.
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