The Endless Week, page 18
Every morning, she arrived with liquids to boil, to put on his thighs, his arms, tea, mud, metals to heat, pliers, screwdrivers, knives. Sometimes, she convinced him his final day had come. She said: You die today. And the child-father yelled: Please. She pressed the knife against his throat and she said: It’s time. She laughed. She pissed in a bucket, she had the cows and the dog and the sheep piss in the bucket, the child-father had to break records for holding his breath in piss. She timed him. She always had a stopwatch around her neck. She looked like a track coach. She said: You can do better. She didn’t take breaks. She dunked his head in gasoline. She asked him to drink it, he drank it. But he wasn’t allowed to die. He wasn’t allowed to drink too much gasoline. Not too much bleach. Not too much detergent. Not too much acid. Being dead was forbidden.
One day, after tying the child-father to her bed, the cousin pulled a small feather out of the pillow. She tickled the bottom of the father’s feet with it all day without saying a word. That day, the father lost the biggest piece of reality. He hallucinated. Then the cousin’s cheeks turned pink and her eyes rolled back into her head. She said: Thanks.
Other times, the cousin put music on headphones, very loudly, the same song, 200,000 million times. The worst songs. The shortest. On loop. A slogan. She chose music from an advertisement:
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
All day long.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
The child-father clenched his jaw and unclenched it.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
The child-father could feel tears coming out of his ears, but the tears came and they went.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice.
At night, the child-father heard the song in his head. He heard it in the shower. He heard it at mealtime, on loop. Sometimes he said it out loud, he repeated: Rice tonight would be nice some rice my love some rice. His parents looked at him. They thought: He’s slow.
When you’re a child, you don’t know things have an end. You can’t know. You can’t leave. You can’t turn your back. Children go along with anything. You hit a child and the child goes along with it. The child-father no longer moved. He knew she would hit him. He didn’t exist, she just hit him. She could have hit another child. Any child. However, when she hit him, the child-father existed at the highest level, the greatest level of existence, he multiplied. He became life the way you do in accidents. Accidents free your thoughts. Your heart rises above your head. That’s why everyone loves stories about catastrophes. Everyone loves stories about sicknesses and kidnappings, killers, stories about cellars, earthquakes, airplane accidents. Everyone listens to the stories of calamities, epidemics, tragedies, even animals do. If they could, animals would watch news stories about their species. They would listen to a story about an animal killing an animal, chopping it up or shutting it away, holding it prisoner or robbing it. One day, the cousin died. Young. She was burned alive. At home. Because of a candle.
The father said to his children: You shouldn’t leave a candle lit. Salim, if you light any candles, you have to keep an eye on them. Got it? If you light a candle, you need to stay close to the candle. You need to watch it. Your eyes should never leave the candle, Sara. If your eyes leave the candle, that’s a mistake. There are a lot of mistakes in the world, and mistakes lead to death.
The father looked up. The neighbor was watching him through her binoculars. She was gesturing. She was pointing at something. The entrance to the house. The father walked to the door, he opened it. He found a blue flower with mold on its petals. He went back to the kitchen and he placed the flower, gently, into the trash.
*
Do dead people have erections? Someone dead for an hour? Someone dead for a day? Someone dead for a minute? Someone freshly dead? If a dead person has just died, can you make them ejaculate? She thought about it and then she stopped thinking about it, then she imagined the size of her coffin. Sara imagined it was black, no, she imagined it was red, then she thought about people who are very tall or very fat. Are coffins for people who are very tall or very fat more expensive? At what weight does the price go up? At what width? What size? How many euros per centimeter? The world is paranormal. Life isn’t natural. Life is in nature, but life isn’t nature. You don’t find life in nature. If you look for life in nature, you find nature. You never find life. You find a rock, but you don’t find life. You can’t say: Look, here’s life. You can’t point at the planet and say: That’s life, that’s it. We don’t have pieces of life. We can’t point at the universe and say: That’s life, that’s it. We can’t point at life, point at a baby and say: That’s life. We don’t know where life is located. We can perceive it deep in a person’s eyes, in their pupils, but you can’t say: This is life, by pointing at a living person, pointing at their pupils. It’d be easier to see life outside of life. Sara thought: I’m experiencing life at the same time as other people in the world. People in the world are detailed. Everyone goes through life with their millions of details. There’s meaning in people’s bodies. On a person’s back, on their neck, on their hands, everything is expressed on people. A shoulder is expressive. The back of the head is expressive. There are expressions in hair, in each lock. Every part of the body on every person expresses something. It’s too much.
Every time someone came up to talk to her, she thought they were too close. She saw people according to their details, because there is always a detail that surpasses the person. There’s always an enlarged pore, a hair, or excretions, tears, odors, fat, zits, lumps, an eye that sparkles.
The eye of an older person, for example. That eye is so old. That eye seems so sticky. Your eye is so sticky. It’s hard to look at it. Did you just put oil in your eye? Are you going to die in a second? Everything is so close, it’s sickening.
Why is reality so close? Why are people so close? Why does reality always stay too close by? Why can’t it move farther away? Can’t we put it aside for a few seconds? Can we get some room to breathe?
She wished she could change their faces with her phone, change the faces of passersby with software. To make them blurry, farther away, less real.
Other people are other people, it’s weird. People exist. Their movements exist, they move around and they breathe. There’s nothing stranger than that. You look at a head, you look at the heads of other people, and it’s so weird. Then you look at your own head, but it’s even weirder, it’s weird up close, it’s weird and personal. It’s weird from the inside. We have heads. They belong to us. They’re our heads. But there’s nothing weirder than that.
You look at your head in a mirror. You don’t know what’s inside. It’s not something you can understand. You move your eyes, but you don’t know how they work, it’s not something you can understand. Even if you study science, you can’t understand how a person is made.
There’s this hole full of teeth in our faces, we fill it every day with liquid things and solid things, but we don’t understand why. When you think about it, it’s just weird, everything we are, there’s nothing weirder than us. We feel pain, we walk, and we breathe. We take in air, it enters us, then we spit it back out. We talk, we talk, and you can’t imagine anything weirder, because there isn’t anything weirder.
Nothing is weirder than a person in the world, there’s no equivalent. People are weirder than everything else. There’s nothing weirder than going to sleep and waking up every night and every day. Nothing is weirder than growing, being born tiny, measuring a few centimeters and stretching out, becoming long, becoming taller than children.
There’s nothing weirder than forgetting. Seeing a thing and forgetting it. Living through a scene and forgetting it. Forgetting parts of your own life. Forgetting your birth, your own birth, a part of your life, forgetting years. Living through several years, forgetting those years, there’s nothing weirder. Is there something weirder? There’s nothing weirder than being 100 percent sure of ending up dust. Looking at dust and thinking: I’m going to become that dust. We act as if everything were logical, but there’s nothing less normal. We say: I’m here, I’m alive, as if it were simple, but when you think about it, there’s nothing weirder than having skin that goes soft. There’s nothing weirder than having hair that goes white and falls out. Living for years by calculating time according to the light of a star on fire that shines on us, isn’t that weird? There’s nothing weirder than this system, than this life, this day-to-day, these habits, there’s nothing weirder. And animals? All these animals. All these creatures that move around us and near us. All these creatures with different shapes, different bodies, but they all have a face, there’s nothing weirder or more complicated or more beautiful.
There’s nothing stranger than coming from other people, being born from each other, being born from another person’s body. Living in someone else’s stomach, being conceived by other people, nothing is stranger, and nothing is more normal. It’s normal, because it’s all we have. It’s our life, it’s normal, we can’t say: No.
No one can say: No, I’m not okay with this. No one says: I’m not okay with breathing. I don’t want to digest things anymore. Trees don’t make sense. There’s something wrong with the sky. I don’t understand the sun, storms shouldn’t be possible, they’re too weird. Why am I not other people? Why am I just one person? We would have accepted anything, we’d have accepted floating, for example. We’d have accepted light not existing. We’d have accepted any face, any head, we’d have accepted any appearance, anything could have seemed normal to us.
We understand things around us with the knowledge inside us. We look at the sky, and we remember the sky, we look at the ground, and we remember the ground. We look at a person, and we remember people. There are organs inside passersby in the streets. The passersby produce substances with their organs. If people didn’t have bodies, they’d feel calm. If there were no bodies, everyone’s parts would be close together. Their eyes in their feet. Their heads in their tongues, in their hair, on their backs, like a circle, a ball. People would be balls.
And Ball, Sara, thought, was the name of her cat when she was eight years old. When he shed, she collected his fur, she put it in a jar she filled with warm water, and the water became special, thick, soft, gray. At night, to fall asleep, Sara touched the fur in the water. She put her hand in the jar and her hand fell asleep.
At the age of eight, Sara decided to burn down the Earth. She started with a field near the town, but then she wondered why the world hadn’t burned down before. Firefighters didn’t exist in prehistoric times, in the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance. Fires could have grown, they could have spread, they were free, but the fires stopped. They gave up.
She burned branches in the field and newspapers under a bridge at the edge of the town, the fire rose, but it also died. She burned water. She put water in flasks and the waters burned in the fire, they burned because water burns. We don’t know why fire stops, there’s no explanation. Oceans could burn. Fire burns puddles, it could burn the sea. But fire gives up. It doesn’t have any confidence. It can’t keep moving, but people keep moving and they have no shame. People go inside somewhere and, wherever they go, they have no shame. People pick a place to be as if it were their place. A person gets on a train and they look for their place. That’s all they look for, that’s all they want, that’s their only thought. That way of lifting their nose, lifting their eyes, partially opening their mouth, the person murmurs their number, it’s their number, their place, their seat, they repeat it: Seat sixty-eight, nose up: Seat sixty-eight, I’ve got seat sixty-eight, as if that seat belonged to them, as if life were just waiting for them. And their body says: It’s me. It’s mine. Here’s my train car. This is my seat. This is my car. I’m in this car. This is my train. I’m taking this train. I’m going somewhere. I’m here.
When you look at a person, you can hear them saying: I’m here. They don’t even have to open their mouth. Humans walk on the ground, and the ground belongs to them. Someone enters a room and it’s as if they were saying: This room is mine. A man appears in the street and it’s as if he were saying: I’m here. Everything is mine. I’m existing right now. Someone goes into the sea and pushes the sea aside. They push the water, they go in, they go into the sea. The sea is their place.
Because she couldn’t look at people, Sara looked at pieces of people. People weren’t finished. They didn’t have enough time to have a finished face, not enough time to learn to speak, not enough time to learn to move, they were real, and so they were poorly made. Wherever you go, there are people, even in small cities, you only run into people, even in forests, in the mountains, you always end up running into someone. There are always humans who are always people, who are always too close and too real.
But there were gestures Sara wished she could save in her phone to remember people by. A gesture from her father, a gesture from her brother, her grandmother’s last gesture before becoming paralyzed. Do people who are paralyzed remember their last gesture? Before becoming paralyzed, I was brushing my teeth. Before becoming paralyzed, I was waving to a friend. This is my last gesture: I was pointing at the sky. Before becoming paralyzed, I was turning the steering wheel.
People say mummies don’t have any gestures left, but one day, in a catacomb, when she was visiting the city’s underground, Sara saw the mummy of a duchess. Everything was dark in the crypt, the attendant had said: No touching. Sara went up to the mummy, she heard wind in the mummy’s throat, she saw the chest go up and down. She said: I think she’s alive. And the attendant said: No. She’s been dead for 1,200 years.
There are things we see that don’t exist.
Later on, one night in high school, everyone was sitting on chairs against the walls in a garage where there was music playing. No one was speaking. Pink and blue lights swept across their faces. No one was saying anything. Everyone was taking photos of their own faces in the lights. Everyone was posting those pictures on the networks. Everyone was liking everyone else’s pictures on the network. Everyone was leaving hearts and comments. Everyone was drinking, everyone was drunk, but no one was moving, no one was speaking. Videos played on the phones. And there was this one girl who always posed as if she were in a profile picture, every moment of her life, she stuck her lips out, she opened her eyes wide. It had become natural for her. She looked like a profile picture. One day, her parents punished her because she’d stopped speaking, she was acting like a picture. When her parents took her phone, the girl’s hands continued to gesture in the air, as if she were scrolling in the air, her hands moved, her eyes stared at nothing, like the father in the kitchen sometimes. Sara would go into the kitchen and she’d see her father looking at nothing, his eyes straight ahead.
*
ghost thoughts
hi
soon I’ll be among ghosts
oh
you walk
and
your feet don’t agree with you
you should try to deform life
with a hammer
try to caress people’s eyelashes
with a screwdriver
yeah
you can deform
the ears of god
with a screwdriver
oh
I see
a chair in the air and I sit on it
I’ll pick up an animal
to show it pity
in my brain
a little ball tells the truth
give ice to your fridge
pour orange juice on your oranges
find another eye between your eyes
use a screwdriver
to uplift your wound
THE SHINING HILL
1
The female nurse says the word: Night. The male nurse bends over, they look at the sky. The female nurse speaks. The male nurse responds. They say sentences relating to the grandmother. Quietly. They say she’s dying. She’s heading for the fabric of the Earth. They examine drops of blood through a tube. The male nurse says: Rotten blood is the color of kings. The color of portraits of kings. Of a past age, red sheets, and heavy fabrics. Canvas tapestries. Pink gloves and black puddles. Red holes on the right side. Dissections of cadavers in an amphitheater. Bloodletting nobles and jus de boeuf. Horrible things are often beautiful. Horrifying things. The color of rotten blood. The explosion of a bomb. A tsunami that drowns a city. Bodies reduced to ash. A volcanic eruption. A pile-up on the highway. An avalanche. An apartment building collapsing. A cyclone. A storm. Landslides. Illnesses under a microscope. Whirlpools. Floating clothing. A bad sign. Frozen bodies. Ultrasounds of malformed fetuses. The female nurse taps the glass tube and the blood vibrates. She says: Blood is only one liquid among many liquids. Not so long ago, peace agreements were sealed by rubbing your mouth with blood from an animal or human. Animals and humans don’t share the same blood. Some animals survive without eating, without drinking, and without sleeping. She says: Some animals can remain motionless for months or years without dying from hunger or thirst. She talks about cockroaches, certain frogs, the kangaroo rat, and the Himalayan jumping spider. She compares herself to these animals, she says: I’m comparing myself to them right now. I’m comparing myself. I feel the hunger, the fatigue, and the thirst almost every hour. She giggles behind her hand. She says: I feel these needs all the time. She laughs as if someone were tickling her. She says: I have these needs. And her laughter stops. The male nurse says: People who are sick and people who aren’t sick can’t understand each other. If people who aren’t sick understood sick people, they would die. If sick people had the vitality of people who aren’t sick, their sickness would spread throughout their bodies in the span of a second. The female nurse sits on the bed. She takes the grandmother’s hand. The male nurse spreads cream on the grandmother’s cheeks and all over the rest of her face. She puckers her lips. The male nurse says: This does you good. This does us good. This is good for everyone in this room and maybe outside of it. When you feel good in a room, maybe you’re sending that good out into the world. I don’t know. We’re doing good.
