Nothing is left in my whole body except an eye, which I feel is a hole. I didn’t say “my” eye, since nothing should be granted to me when I don’t exist anymore. What is incomplete has no identity. What has no identity becomes common property, belonging to a genus and not to an individual. It becomes an unperson. Just like nouns when an article isn’t there to aid them. I lost my own article. It happened one day. It really takes a huge effort to concentrate and remember the date. Perhaps it wasn’t a day, but a divergent, motley mix of units of time that are impossible to measure. All I know is that after the language of people had shut me out, I started speaking a language that I called the language of ayn (meaning both letter and eye).
I expanded a tiny hole and glimpsed through it heads and voices, buildings and roads. As I was peering into it, all I had to do was grab hold of its edges, breathe deeply, then make one push upward to emerge with a giant, complete body, wearing a hat and coat and carrying suitcases and umbrellas.
Now I open the eye wide — more than an eye is able to be open — because I know that my continuity is dependent on it, and that when I close it, I will die and everything will disappear. I keep it open, alert, not so I can stay alive but so I can look after the tree of melancholy — to see it sending its seeds out onto the ground and growing with the passing seasons. I testify and I narrate; the language of ayn will disappear with me and won’t be the language of anyone else after me. A faithful partner will depart, untouched by the tongue of any other man. We will die together like an animal whose species was made extinct, after it threw itself into the abyss of nothingness with joy and indifference. Two, three things at the most, I narrate. I utter this world’s breath and I stop. A flicker. A fleck. Then nothing. Thanks, farewell, peace.
I settle down in whiteness, conscious that I am shaped like a cloud that will fade away later. I sit in doubtful blackness, with the eye closed. My body that no longer exists remains tattooed in me, like life on a dead face that departed without it realizing. I succeed in summoning my organs from the tissue of my garbled memory and they rise, knotted up, intermittently and uncoordinated. Or they come together, incomplete, in a chaos lacking logic or meaning. I sometimes feel myself a cubical board, broken into pieces, scattered around, having no beginning or clear destination. I must gather myself together cell by cell to be heavy enough that I can rise up again, a seemingly complete person, with my particularities and my weaknesses, even if disabled, diseased, or afflicted by the scourge.
My body — which is no longer separate from me, keeping me outside of it — is unprotected, with no claws or a back; I’m a worm, naked and slimy. It ejects me like bodies eject refuse through their excrement, because it’s become too much for them and has consumed them. Often my own body grows large. Its survival, despite its absence, is the reason for my confusion, since sometimes it flourishes and I don’t know if I’ve passed out or I’m sleeping or if I’m a dream that thinks itself awake.
Tumescent cities spread out within the folds of the miniature red veins which embroider the eye; half-flawed cities, whose buildings all around me are crumbling one wall at a time. Who could say if this rubble was a window to yesterday? Strange-tasting, bloated cities launch a metallic wail that cuts the veins of the eye and relegate its vision to blackness. Bathing in destruction. Penetrating a handful of sand. Darkness, complacency, and silence. Speechless stars. Extinguished explosions that don’t shatter or fly away, but come together. They shrink. They atrophy. They decay. Black holes floating in the darkness of the universe. That is me. Or in this way I imagine myself, trivialized, so I can find a way to understand. If not, where do I imagine I am right now, and what does the person speaking inside me purport to say?
I am Mr. Kaaaaaaa and I am an eye.
Only a few things sit with me in the first level of my field of vision. If I rub it, moving the pupil from all the way on the right to all the way on the left, I see a ceramic vase my wife made in one of the strange educational classes she took following my return from “the years of my absence,” as she used to refer to that period. Killing time, I think. Developing her true talent, she thinks, and professes openly. A ceramic vase of a confused shape, which is still in the process of maturing. It remained the color of clay, decorated with a yellow chrysanthemum. The comment on its yellowness did not appeal to its creator, leading to her face turning yellow and her right ear red — indicating a fit of anger. This is in contrast to her left ear, whose redness alerts me that I must make love with her right then, immediately.
That’s what my wife is like — or what she was like — she would erupt for the most trivial of reasons. She’s like a child. She has short black hair, wide honey-colored gazelle eyes, and a full mouth, which hides two front teeth that make her look like an aristocratic rabbit with lipstick whenever she laughs. Beautiful Jamilah excited attention with her full, taut body and its perfect proportions. Her unrelenting elegance and her mysterious femininity mobilized battalions of bottles, perfumes, and powders, filling drawers and tables if not cabinets and warehouses. Such a feminine woman is like a prairie — you think it is open and relaxed, hiding no surprises, danger, or deception, and then there you are in the middle of the outdoors, captivated, surrounded, closed in. But sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t right, if the yellow color wasn’t actually that of a chrysanthemum and if she didn’t actually possess a true, unappreciated talent, which she never realized because of her bad luck marrying me.
Like a ball in a game whose name I can no longer recall, it’s not enough for the earth to be grassy and buoyant, full of holes and flags, it needs a favorable wind, flexible arms, and an eye able to estimate distances. One tiny straw and the ball would deviate from its path, away from the holes. Since I lost my limbs and turned into a seeing eye, I became the stumbling block to my wife’s talent that designed, drew, painted, embroidered, and stitched; her marvelous small hands cultivated yellow chrysanthemums on paintings, curtains, cloth, utensils, small tables, and dishes.
“You put different elements in conversation with each other and harmonize them!” she commented proudly while pondering the decor of the corner where she decided to put me. I didn’t understand in the beginning if this was revenge — though that was the furthest thing from her sensitive, delicate temperament, which would generate streams of tears at the least emotion — or if it was a sign that she now saw me as flaccid, fragile, and weak like a chrysanthemum, yellow and waxlike.
My wife put me in front of the television the vast majority of the time. Sometimes she put me in the bedroom when she had guests over. When they came, she didn’t like them to see me as a wide-open eye — a wandering, brazen, exhausted, sunken eye — forced into being a proxy, playing roles it can’t handle in the absence of its fellow senses. In the end, she started not having people over, preferring to go out. This was less taxing on her and I didn’t care one way or the other. But I wondered what compelled my wife to put me in these particular spots so I would be visible from every corner of the house, even from the outside and the balconies across from us and next to us, lying on the old red sofa, the lone remnant from all her late parents’ furniture.