And you gouge your nails into the slippery walls to avert him, to defeat him, to retrieve your freedom and uselessness, terrified of waiting in the lightning flash of a single, blue instant in a corridor of silent perdition.
• • •
The dream began with a streak of light. You caught a glimpse of the bustle, oblique and smoky, through the slit, cracked open like a door. The pedestrians crossed rapidly, noisily, the way they used to. Their eyes were lowered, as though inspecting insects with cyclopean curiosity that you rarely felt. In the evening they were tired: they panted and grunted inside their cabins and cells and coops. You snuck out of your hiding place. The moonlight fell drop by drop. The pathways kept descending: all paths headed down. You heard voices confronting each other. You heard severe summonses and punishing blows, and you went on stammering like a mute who tried to learn how to speak far away from the ravaged fortress. You would return late, feeling your way through the braided knot of oblique streets.
A long hall like a silent tunnel or a tall, milky glass. You were a regular at that underground shelter. The waiters and patrons knew you. The smells of roasted goat, of beer and rum, the aromas of plum brandy, vodka, vermouth, kebabs, cognac, spiced meat, pickles — a redolent mix — mastika, ouzo, syrups, and slivovitz: everything mixed together and then dispersed.
A cold, empty hall, fresh and clean, it smelled of nothing. You clutched the chilly glass several times. You raised it slightly. Behind you, someone brayed like a mare, a hostile laugh followed by silence, and then somewhere in the back, the sudden laugh again. You turned to look.
That’s when you saw him, young as ever, the collar of his blue shirt turned up. His partner had bleached-blond hair like an unkempt haystack, and a chubby child’s ruddy cheeks. Her swollen, sausage-like fingers played rapidly over the table. Far away, at the other end of the hall, maybe farther, they sat — though in the peculiar architecture of the place, they might have been a step away, as if you were sitting right beside them. He hadn’t changed. Young as ever, he was embarrassed by his painful perpetuity. She was all suave voice. Ready to kill her, he kept looking at her who was looking at you, stock-still, the frozen glass in your hand.
A babble of stories swirled through the air. Reflected in the half-open eye of the victim whose voice kept whispering like a fat fairy. The young man from long ago hadn’t moved an inch. The victim stared at you without blinking, though there was flirting and clinking glasses, too. Dumbfounded by their byplay, you stared unmoving, and your glass grew warm.
Multiplication of intimate sounds: wine swishes, bottles clank, her speaking, her breath striking glass after glass, and in the peculiar time of that place, the encounter goes on a little while that’s also long; you watched them again after who knows how long. The waiter wrote something in his notebook. Then the young man in the blue shirt paid. The waiter bowed down to the floor. You could see his white jacket bend forward. They took the first enormous step: the distance between you and them had compressed, or perhaps they had been next to you the whole time. The blonde’s mouth opened and closed over her yellow teeth, but you couldn’t hear a single word; he was watching her as if there was no one else around, and he couldn’t have seen you. They moved forward — but somehow, as though fixed in place, without making progress — and suddenly they were no longer there.
They disappeared. The restaurant: empty, mute. They had passed within a step of your table. They were beginning to climb the steps toward the hole of light that led to the street. When she looked at him, you could see the white of her eye. Smiling, he bent to settle the red jacket slipping off her shoulder. He put an arm around her shoulders in a delayed, gentle, weary gesture — a protective pause before the crime.
They were climbing the first step. The room filled with your dry, old woman’s howl.
— You didn’t caress me like that!
Hurried and powerless, you moved your lips in hatred. Without raising, your voice struggled, suffocated, crying into the void, strangling each syllable.
— You never caressed me like that!
A thick voice, an old curse, inaudible, internalized.
— You never caressed me like that!
Again and again, with every step they climbed. They weren’t turning around, and they weren’t hurrying, as though they couldn’t hear your thunder from beyond the grave; you could still see their legs, his shoes and her bare feet with filthy nails that had grown bent and crooked like a wild animals’ — enormously wide feet with warped, black nails.
Your scream broke off, useless as baying at the moon.
You wrenched your hands from the icy wall, touched your forehead with your fingertips. Your eyes had closed. . You were in the corridor once more, inside the nightmare of a long, vaulted corridor. Your fingers felt for your lips and throat, in case they had somehow grown old and shriveled. Hadn’t some friend or brother crossed the corridor too, hearing how you cried in your sleep, ages ago, before you turned into an old woman trapped between narrow walls and buried forever?
There hadn’t been anyone. Not one person heard the cries of your pitch-dark terror. But day invaded. The illusion broke: light struck your eyes, amazed by this repeated, recognized dawn. You were the same as yesterday, punished by the long wait, the cold and endless corridor.
• • •
Out of the stillness or disquietude of waiting, the red orb will follow the rotating ray. The advance opens purple curves onto the burned sky of stars and lights still-becoming: incandescent trajectories.
That waiting was just the hesitation at the starting line, a premise that begins with possible death or liberation for other births and other deaths. The moment for movement had to come: for the blood or fire to become a red projection that gives birth to curves, spirals, serpentines, stairs, and steep trails for the hurried traveler heading toward nowhere. It had to come, for YOU are the mate, the partner, the second person who names the living or the dead, the dialog that separates and gives birth, the mobile point, a step away, a rest stop: you are THE OTHER, come to disrupt our sleep, attack our panic, you are isolation or indifference, the confirmation that we exist.
They would have to set out: the rotating spirals on which you must arrive at the moment,YOU, the change, the transition and transaction, the offering from somewhere remote, distant, and unknown, or from the unstable — doubling or dividing — self, from duality, or the choreographed special effects with which we contain ourselves, divide ourselves, make ourselves whole, fragment ourselves, multiply ourselves, and destroy ourselves.
• • •
The one who delayed would need to be punished in the end.
He will go downstairs in the morning — the son of the earth will run toward any shelter where he can be alone and free. An ordinary morning: the mannequins, Mişa the comrade spy, then the exchange of calm, cretinous words, the rumble of typewriters, the rotation of upholstered doors, Sebastian Caba’s smile. From the neighboring workstation, you would continue stalking the fugitive, who couldn’t be stopped by you.
He will meet the rain, crucified on the decayed wall, Christ-like among the ruins, exposed to pedestrians and patrols.