Day 1 II

Into the darkness, out of the light, my eyes wrestling with the gleaming red-and-silver residue that sudden darkness leaves in the underside of eyelids, I could see (feel, even) a roll of footsteps like drums, but miniature drums, a parade behind the wall (and thus visible through its cracks), mice and cockroaches and several arachnids and then more mice marching as if the room had become a factory or an army base for house insects allured by filth and misery and death. Then she came in sight and one of my hands covering my averted face, gluey and dripping wet, a rush of nauseous sweating, I thought, drops rolling down invisible yet ubiquitous like tears of a lost, feverish, child, astray and abandoned and helpless, at night in the middle of a desert or a forest or a unending beach. Then she became experience, my experience, the image of her at the end of it all, abstracted at first and then unwillingly processed and rationalized, and then with experience came a surge of escalating anxiety and a desperate need to wail at the corpse, why in god's great name would anybody do that to themselves, she looked like what would seem a human pendulum were that a macabre photography, the more horrifying since it was within the reach of my blood, a corpse recently become a corpse, slowly losing the shimmer of life, and becoming the color of dawn, a pale purple donned with dark pink strokes, the corpse swinging violently for a moment and then decelerating, then swinging violently again, a few feet away from the double-door of her quarters which I had just opened, the wood-and white double-door from a room up in the attic floor, the eight story, originally a large room with a pyramidal ceiling, divided in three at a certain point and made into servant's quarters, its walls slanting upwards then sideways and meeting at a single forty-five degree angle, a pyramidal ceiling that had become the decorative enclosure of a huge casket.
I could barely remain on foot, my hand grabbing furiously at my own trembling thigh and with the mounting amount of sweat an excruciating, vertiginous feeling, as if all of my insides had been upended and then set on fire by some hidden hand, I closed my eyes with inexplicable violence and started swallowing, swallowing nothing, trying to revert to nothingness to evade the crudeness of the moment, the brick-colored, soiled floorboards at first shaking mildly, its dormant fury escalating by the second, the earth beneath me about to explode or implode, the rumbling of the room's tarnished bones making it unstable, as if the mouth of a god lying supine underneath the floor were blowing at it, inhaling and exhaling, the floor rising and falling, rising and falling and then the movement stopped and for a moment I thought that maybe next time the floorboards would explode and then what of this moment, what of her and her corpse, what.

On the right hand of the room there was a window entirely draped, its edges trimmed by whatever musty, murky light could subtly seep in, almost as if it were decorative, a necessary but uncertain addition to an already bleak, bleary tableau. The light from the outside was a neon light, beaming like a rocket one second before exploding, the room felt like a run-down casket unevenly closed at a funeral at noontime, the dying wood pleading to be lowered into the humid earth, into the cold, crumbling earth, its smell penetratingly fresh like that of mint. It was like a large black square carved on the wall with white edges, the drapes fluttering for a minute because of the wind, let in a little more light, blotting out the square and then the wind would falter and the edges of the square would return, this train of action emulated more and more until it became as regular as a habit, the light and wind playing together, flickering at different times as if someone were turning the moon on and off like a light-bulb, or as if the moon itself had become a broken neon-sign in the sky, communicating the terrifying sort of hope moonlight has always given to men, both to strays and prudes alike, the sort of hope that still lingers there but out of the meager reach of a human hand, relentlessly unattainable, a light in the dark that ironically illuminates the way towards more and more darkness. The flickering became maddening and I had to close my eyes, it went too fast, the room became hallucinatory ground, the light in the window would come and go at a ferocious pace and I stood there grabbing at my thigh and clenching my teeth and softly but warmly weeping, the light would come and go and so would my senses until this finally ended and I let out some air and opened my eyes again.
The four edges of light were immediately accompanied by the dying gleam of an old, gray light-bulb, suspended from a pair of wires entwined like the hand of a dying old man, it had been off but it turned on unaided, I turned around to see if someone was there but I knew beforehand I was alone, she was alone, we were both alone even if we were present in the same room at the same time. The bulb was suspended at arms distance from her drooping head, intermittently shedding its pale, spotted light on both the body and the unfortunate witness, she had once said that we're not observers but witnesses at the park the other night we took a short but refreshing stroll through benches and sand-boxes and parked bikes under tall willow trees and the smell of white roses and pink roses growing within enclosed gardens, great glory to Paris the beautiful, but thus it goes, there is always a sort of metaphysical crime in the beautiful, why did I move to Paris so soon, why so soon.

And I realized I could now make out the rest of the room that I had imagined a thousand ways in the past two weeks, there it lay, empty as it was, with a double bed inclined forwards, at the center of the room with its headboard against the wall, one of its carved legs gnawed by either insects or time or even space, not holding the bed anymore as the floor was holding it, fractured as it was. On top of the bare blue-and-white striped mattress, abounding in stains of different colors, from black to yellow to red where a pillow should be, there lay a red satin sheet crinkled and rolled up into an imperfect ball, the way she probably left them this morning when the white light of a winter sun probably woke her up with the anxious feeling that she may not make it through the day, nor probably would any of us. Above the bed there stood a white shelf perfectly nailed to the wall, empty except for some papers and a menorah, the shelf almost as an extension of the whitewashed wall on whose surface it seemed as if somebody had spilled copious amounts of black water, a liquid dark but transparent whose twists and turns, alongside with some worn-down, cracked portions of the wall, gave the impression of old, stale blood sliding perpetually down a wall upon which somebody has been hanged and then crudely mutilated. To the right of the bed, the shut window began shining and then dying, shone and then not with exceptional regularity, shone and then not and at this time the room would lay in total darkness were it not for the light-bulb, slowly swinging from the ceiling like the root of a plant, pulled out, then turned upside down.

A dripping noise caught me staring at a desk to the left of the bed, an empty mahogany desk, probably a worthless antique, unused, its surface covered in ash and the stamp of smoke from a fire that at some point burned there. I scanned the room for a leak in the whitewashed ceiling but I could only see cracks and chinks and holes everywhere, surrounding the clinging light-bulb like a field land-mines, the dripping noise eluding me but growing louder and louder, as if amplified by a megaphone, it grew so loud that I desperately covered my ears and then my head, first getting on my knees, then leaning forward so that my back looked up to the ceiling and my eyes could sweep the grimy floor from the closest distance possible. I felt the drip fall on me slowly yet the rumbling remained relentless, falling down on me steadily, I had to look up, prey to that damaging curiosity that leads already oriented men astray even on familiar turf. The air thickened, it became hard to breath, heavy, unwieldy, almost like mist but more solid, accompanied by a sickening smell of rusty iron and then I knew it could only be blood, the liquid on my face and my shoulders was sticky enough and thick enough to be blood, it was dripping from her hands and feet while her corpse swung, crucified without a cross, hanging there like a human pendulum with its arms bobbing sideways. Every word spoken in my mind was slurred, ambiguous, hard to make out, the dialogue with myself suddenly turned into someone else's soliloquy, I listened but did not think, the voice under the impression that it was she the one existence from which time emanates/emanated, as if each swing of her unflagging body were a second for us, brought to life by her movement, each drop of blood a millisecond, her messianic flesh and blood not forgiveness but life or time, which are the same, the voice speaking louder, affirming that hers are/were the hands of a clock from time immemorial, the original clock of the world, these her hands are dripping blood that in reality are seconds in the passing. Then the smell of rusty iron became unbearable and the voice ceased, she is not time and time will not stop because of this, suicide does not stop time, not even for the dead, I thought, but how appealing, how aesthetic, how appealing to give the world the gift of such a ghastly work of art, yet how disappointing not to enjoy the praise and approbation of fellow men, suicide is an art as much as any kind of deliberate death is, murder, torture, poetry, who said art is or should be always beneficial. It was as if the fumes of her blood were also narcotics, then the light of the window started flickering again and her body suddenly swung faster and faster, loosing all her blood and returning it to the soil, the floorboards rising and then falling again like waves in the sea, an ebb-and-flow of rotten wood, then the light-bulb shone steadily for the first time and the rope attached to one of the two beams that keep that pyramid of a ceiling together broke and plunged the body into a subtle free-fall which shook the unstable ground for a moment and then settled it quietly, with its face turned to the ground. From the light-bulb then flowed more and more light and the it too died, it turned dark and there was darkness and then the moon out the window died as well and then there was more darkness, but a less radiant darkness than the one at the outset, this time the darkness was stripped of all threat, the result being a hopeless darkness and thus an active one, a darkness immediately devouring creatures coerced by resignation not to care or even to flinch in its face, ruthless, the velocity of things dissappearing and with it maybe the vague notion of time we possess, I was on my knees in an almost timeless darkness, and if not timeless, then an irrevocable and necessary darkness.