It expands and continues into the day, which enters feebly and late through the glass panes of the door, beyond which a hard rain is falling. But my mental and muscular paresis is complete. I don’t get up from my chair, my bodily functions slow to a halt, I don’t even feel the need to eat, and I have no thoughts. Then night falls again, and somehow I’m able to recognize night because I had feared it and hoped it would not arrive. Sleep comes too, though wakefulness never lets go, sleep that is stupor and silence among objects both nearby and unreachable, known and unrecognizable, disfigured.
•
For two nights and nearly two days, I lay in that chair, dead but not clinically, or in whatever state is closest to the absence of life. Nothing has remained in my memory, although the events are recent; I may have exhibited some motor reactions but they left no trace. Recovery began with the body; I urinated behind the chair, knowing I was doing so, while on the psychic side I said to myself, “Enough,” and I knew I said it. I recalled the tragic Bach chorale.
It was worse. The trauma had reduced me to the (not entirely negative) state of a thing. Now I was returning to awareness, and fear.
Fear that served as its own measure, that justified itself, fed on itself. Ruminant. Evil. Ready to see itself as perfect, pure and unprecedented. Here is what I recall of its beginnings. The very start.
Chronicle of fear
I am standing in front of the glass door and I say to myself: up until yesterday the world was uninhabited. But in a tolerable way, like an apartment whose owners are on vacation. Today it is a tomb, wide open and empty. The Roman sentries about to faint. No, just one sentry.
I wonder what to do. Where to hide, where to find refuge.
I won’t go home again, I say to myself, that’s impossible. And I won’t stay here. Here there were sixty, seventy people, and they are all dead, no doubt of that anymore. Every one of those rooms upstairs is a slab in the morgue.
But elsewhere it is all the same, I reply to myself. Every house, every room, is a coffin.
Nature, though, lives on elsewhere. With all its usual manifestations: rain, now turning to sleet, beginning to lay a white cover on the road. This is natural, of this earth.
Who knows, I reply. In every depiction of agonizing death, there is frost and ice in addition to flames. I don’t want to believe it but I could well be dead myself, like the others.
And yet, I am breathing, and moving. Not long ago I ate some chocolate.
I seem to be breathing, and eating. But it is an illusion.
•
I look around for the tinfoil from the chocolate. It’s there by my feet on the carpet, but it doesn’t reassure me.
The night (I say to myself) when I came back from the cave of the siphon, I went to bed with the black-eyed girl, the Browning 7.65. And I know I pulled the trigger. And that gun doesn’t jam.
And did you aim it well?
I pointed it at my mouth. And in the morning there was blood on the pillow.
But the dead don’t see themselves or their own blood that they have spilled.
How do we know that the dead don’t see themselves?
I pulled the trigger. But did I remove the Browning’s safety? I don’t think so. The blood on the pillow can be otherwise explained; I hit my head on a rock.
Excuses. To pretend I’d survived. I had to be an exception. Instead, the night of June 2 was my last, too. The rest of it, the aftermath, is nothing but a trick of solipsistic presumption.
No, it’s not true that I insisted on being an exception.
Yes, I did insist and I’m certain of it, even though I pretended to doubt, and to consider the alternative.
In any event, as of yesterday, everything has changed.
And I, too, have changed. As of yesterday I’ve begun to understand that death is certain to come, and that something is keeping it back, and it’s not kindness, and not sleep, either. Something that resembles a precipice. A profound experience, very profound. But down, not up.
•
Fear takes root in paralyzing trauma, it rants and raves. It’s inevitably a disease of discursive reason; it doesn’t affect angels and animals.
15
THE UNKNOWN is upon me, and I am alone, with no means of escape. I have no aid, and no counsel. Who can I hope will save me? Science and philosophy, maybe, which are still with me, if only in the tiniest degree, and in glimmers. But they didn’t predict any of what has happened, and are ignorant of it. It is I who knows that in any case; what is happening is not contemplable, it goes beyond that.
A human creature is not born to face this. That’s the one thing I know for certain. It is therefore a mistake, a shocking sort of negligence, that a single human being should have been left behind.
The last man. Man in a double sense, but one of these two senses doesn’t interest me here. I don’t judge myself, I have no assessments to make. It’s clear that I have survived, and that is distinctly absurd, unfair, and grotesque.
Let me die. For better or for worse I must join them. I was not different from them; they all resembled me. Including the ignorance and the presumption.
The woman from abroad who wanted to know about those window grates at St. Vilcifredo, the plump little woman dressed in pink, ate her lunch, played bridge, and then was assumed. Where and how doesn’t matter. She is no longer here.
I am still here, and chasms of fear yawn open in me. Fear that grows concentrated even as it spreads, as it saturates everything. A gelid black substance in which I’m miserably, foolishly stuck, like a fly frozen in ice. “Where can I go?” I wonder, “Where can I hide?” And I understand that I cannot go anywhere, the fear is all around, and identical. Once I had the singular vice of solipsism, and my word (to the others) was No Trespassing. And then I found the exit barred to me, indefinitely. When an earthquake struck, we used to take comfort in the fact it would end. Now it doesn’t end, I can’t hope anymore to hear the “danger’s over” signal, the all-clear. Time has stopped.
Before me, who was ever afraid? It wasn’t fear, that sensation that always came to an end sooner or later, that affected some or many at once, that was shared, spread around. Foreseen. That some even sought out and enjoyed, maybe. I keep on thinking that fear was born for me, and in fact I have the proof, that it was created for me, against me, that I’m the target, the goal.
And everything is fear. This snow out of season, the stagnant air with its cemetery smell, the outsized throb of the electric clock, these lights that skewer me. I’ve been sitting here all night, my head between my knees, hands pressed to the back of my neck like someone awaiting a beating. Yesterday, also.
I’m cold. Outside the snow keeps falling. I get up; I’ve seen a bottle of Henniez water on a table, and I drink some. Back to the chair, where I cover myself once again with Battaglia’s redingote and close my eyes. For a few moments, my mind drifting, I return to my usual native unhappiness. The one I’ve hauled along with me for years, and that now, tried and true, feels comforting.
I finger the past absentmindedly, a rough past. I test myself in a search for lost time, which on the whole, whether it involves recovering distant or recent experience, offers me little.
Once more I coast by that island that Karpinsky has been in my life. I struggle to reconstruct him in all the details of his person—his physical person, and I tell myself that his ordinariness, and the carelessness with which he dressed, were meaningful—I try to reconstruct his behavior toward me, and toward Wanhoff, who detested him, and toward the other patients. I struggle, but the results are meager.
On the lawn behind the clinic a gardener is mowing the grass, and from the window of my room I watch Karpinsky walk up to him, and bend to pick some spontaneous flowers, wild flowers. I’m lying, dressed, on my bed and Karpinsky says, “Yes, I’m going to spring you from this place soon, but keep in mind that you will have to suf
fer.” Contrary to Wanhoff’s rules, Karpinsky has agreed to sit at my table in the dining room while I eat. I’m chatting away and I ask him how old he is and discover that he’s the younger of us two. “Fact remains,” he says to me, “you have a lot more years ahead of you than I do.”
A prediction that proved correct. (But how did he know that?) I’m still here suffering. Purifying myself?
Dr. Karpinsky (I’m thinking aloud), remember me.
I’m talking nonsense; the dead have the gift of nonexistence. Of not seeing in any case, not hearing, not knowing. Impassive, as Mylius put it.
•
I am alive, I’m still on this earth.
On this earth, there is no eternity, only moments, hard as they are to calculate. Trauma admits intermittence; just now I sneezed, outside the snow’s no longer falling, a spider, or a huge fly, is slowly measuring out Battaglia’s mahogany countertop.
An idea runs through me, this time a coherent thought, not a ghost or a memory. A thought that creates a connection.
Not that I have analyzed or examined the matter; I don’t have the desire or the strength. But I did replay the scene of the beginning of the end, the scene of the prologue to the Event. In the cave of the siphon. Between two cells of a random one of my cerebral gyri, a link formed, involuntary and absolutely automatic. I was exempted because I was inside a cave. Inside a mountain.
That meant the consequences (my separate fate) were fortuitous, and physical in nature. This still doesn’t explain what happened, and even less other subsequent events. But it allows me to embrace a provisory explanation; the logic of function and fiction41 makes sense again.
And more important, it suggests possible action to take, something to try. It’s comforting. It permits me to sleep. I slept for a couple of hours in fact. True sleep.
And now I’m thinking.
There were various other human beings on the night of June 2 in environmental circumstances similar to mine. All around the world, but also here near Widmad. I mean the miners at Alpa. At Alpa there’s a gold quartz mine.
When I awake it is dark, around three or four in the morning. I’m weary, my mind fragmentary and clouded as when coming out of total anesthesia, and when I look around I’m unable to understand where I am and what’s happening. I have only a vague desire to move and the warmth of some uneasy hope. Prying myself from my chair, I go to look through the glass. I can’t unwind, the cold and the inertia make me tense. Nevertheless, something has been set right. I have a plan, and with it, I sense, I can chase death away from me and from around me.
I will return to the real, the human. The human.
I’ll go to Alpa. Will I make it?
First, I’ll need a minimum of energy, I must eat. Eat. And I must also wait until day comes; I’ve never been to the mine, I don’t know the way. So I’ll wait.
I’m retracing my thoughts of the past. I call up the time-honored image (mine, I invented it just a few days ago) of the pyramid, or rather the two pyramids, facing in different directions and joined at their bases. At the top point, the original hominid, forefather of the human race, down to the billions of men living in the final era. And from those billions back to the successor: the second pyramid shrinks rapidly down to me, survivor and heir, the only exemplar of the species still alive.
But the two points, top and bottom, have no substance, they are mere symbols. There was no original progenitor, hominid or man, that’s just a conjecture. And thus, at the bottom of the inverse pyramid, the individual at the point—me—cannot, finally, be anything but a mental construct. Geometrically, it’s simple: the apex of a pyramid, upright or upside down as it may be, is a mere point. With no substance. So I have no grounds to exist.
Exercises in logic, these; innocuous, free of substance. Quite different from genuine ratiocination. This kind of thought is a good omen for me, it suggests my crisis is coming to an end. I’m recovering, coming up the slope. Ready to begin again.
16
STILL, the fear could come back. I’ll rely on a reagent then, to neutralize it.
The basic danger—the human being—is no more. The rest, what’s alive, is harmless: it is nature, in me and around me. Under the circumstances, any ordinary individual in my place would have a good chance of dying of old age. Illnesses are socially transmitted, directly, or indirectly (in the latter case, as in ailments caused by the tension that once derived from a shared existence, and so forth.) Now, there’s not much more than a bolt of lightning that can touch me, or an earthquake or a meteorite. Remote things.
It’s conceivable, I suppose, that the Event could repeat itself, directed specifically at me, but only just conceivable, and it would be presumptuous to fear it. It was a global phenomenon, aimed at the genus, not the individual. A single person’s unlikely to be rewarded or punished, that would be a waste. It would make no sense to replay the world championship of soccer just to test one individual, even if he were a revenant Pelé.
Now that the crisis is over, I react with exaggerated good cheer. With moony superficial optimism. Was that predictable?
•
A minor problem remains, however, a benevolent problem. I wonder what I’ll do. Precisely in the banal sense of how I’ll occupy myself, how I’ll fill up my days.
Necessities? Alas, I won’t have any, they’ve all been provided. For centuries humanity has labored with the sole intent of accumulating reserves. Food, drink, clothing. Fuel. Thanks to their work, I will not return to the animal—or Marxian—state, where the individual is entirely engaged in an effort to produce, and lives only to acquire the means to live. It was that animal state I was counting on, to avoid boredom and the so-called worm of doubt. Now I have no idea what to fall back on. Woe to him that is alone, (for there is no end to his toil)42: does the ancient curse now merely condemn me to forced leisure time? That would be odd. The successor’s plight is forced membership in a working man’s club?
I’m rambling. When I was eighteen, I took part in the usual youthful transgressions (dropping acid), and I was pretty sure that sooner or later I was going to end up in the madhouse. Another risk I no longer face. It’s not that a person is crazy, he or she is held to be crazy (or holds him or herself so) in relation to behavior different from his/her own. A point of comparison is needed, as when you want to establish whether someone is sexually manly or not. Adam didn’t think to himself, “I’m so manly,” because he had no point of comparison. By the same token, I cannot go crazy.
I’m rambling. I empty my bowels. I eat. I have postponed the visit to Alpa. I sleep again, two hours, no dreams. The day passes like this; outside it is snowing again. When I wake I feel comfortable. I move over to touch the radiators. They are hot. A thermostat has switched on deep in the heart of the Mayr; Providence (technology) exists and has come to my aid. I’d better atone; I regret my past skepticism, it’s offensive.
So well-being has arrived, finally, and relative security. Tomorrow I’ll go to Alpa. Now, it’s enough to get my strength back.
•
To get to Alpa, I’ll need a means of transportation. But I’m not going to drive the same compact car I always choose. I don’t want to get too close to their personal things.
I set out on foot. I have to climb almost 2,000 meters; the road snakes back and forth up the coldest and poorest slope of Widmad. My mountaineering instincts help me to locate and follow the shortcuts. I soon arrive at the roof of the valley, a roof of dark clouds knitted together.
I head into the clouds, meeting the shadows I left behind down below, and simultaneously remembering an obscure passage from the Apocalypse that the good Borges chose as the epigraph to one of his stories. It’s a strange thing to recall, timely too: as the end of the world approached, some people in search of salvation went to live in caves and grottoes in the mountains, went the story. This Apocalypse, and Borges with it, lend a timid confidence to the difficult r
oad I’ve taken. I was tired before I left and have no support beyond my Spanish brandy and those scattered writings.
When I arrive it is, or seems to be, afternoon. Fresh snow blankets the shacks of the mining village. There’s a large hut of corrugated sheet metal where they crush the stone. A cable car station, a power transformer cabin, a dozen chalets. The settlement’s before me, but not the settlers; I see none. If I do see some, live ones, that will disprove the Apocalypse, and I’ll feel I’m a character in a book. The world will become a double world, flimsy and ambiguous like the symbolic ones Borges embroidered. But at least that despicable alternative will disappear. Me: chosen one, or outcast.
No one comes forward, though. On the mountainside a row of iron pylons leads up to the tunnel into the mountain. I explore a long stretch, keeping close to the rails of the narrow-gauge Decauville track. The tunnel is very hot, all the lights are on; I stumble over piles of tools on the ground, picks, hammers, shovels. Miner’s helmets with lamps. The people who were using them, wearing them on their heads, are not here. I’m about to turn back when a roll of thunder nails me to the wall.
O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.
•
For an instant, fear overwhelms me again. I wait, trembling, for the rocks to come churning down, sealing me in this enormous tomb forever. I have the time to remark on the sacrilegious audacity that brought me here, and to curse it. I wouldn’t have time to escape, and I don’t try to.
The rumbling grows distant. Or decreases. It stops.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 10
