I wrote and drank and the dreams came and went, my wife’s anxiety weighed on me from afar, and that made my tongue … somewhere out there, my wife was playing computer games all night long … I was in bed too … but I was freezing. I worried about getting sick, but I was so sick already I didn’t even know it. My head blew up like a balloon.
The three of us would meet by the phone and try to get through to the caretaker, but he’d either say something incomprehensible or just hang up. We thought about phoning home … I’ll call up the hordes, said the Hungarian … don’t do it, Attila, the singer said … you know how that turned out … we didn’t want to tell the folks back home … what it was like here … we were ashamed we’d fallen into a trap, they all thought we were livin it up in some castle, they envied us … an it was obvious to us now what was goin on … the old Kulchur flimflam: Need to launder some cash? Just get yourself some artist type, give a little to him, a little somewhere else, it’s all in the interest of the common good, an the wheel keeps spinnin an the tanker sails through the taxes, flag hoisted high … Kulchur figured we’d scoop up the cash, which we got the first day, an bolt … like everyone else there did … that’s why the floors, that’s why the windows, that’s why the heating. An that carnival of ghouls in town. It was obvious why the artists from the desirable states used the cottages only in summer. We were idiots. Idiots. East bloc idiots. Toss in a bone! the singer croaked. An a pig an some dynamite, the young authors said. We went our separate ways to create.
And the days went by. And several days, O brothers and chiefs, I was touched by death. I knew I couldn’t look over my left shoulder. It was there and it had time. I fought for my time and had visions. I lay in bed, only getting up to go to the bathroom, and sometimes not even then. The days rolled over me, sometimes fast, others extremely slow, and I forgot myself. But often I wrote. There were times it didn’t work. My tongue slithered up from the pages and coiled around my neck. I was losing strength and that’s what I wrote about. But death was out to get me. I would’ve put on my paint, leapt on my horse, and gone to meet death like a man, but I didn’t have the strength. And besides, there was no horse, I made that up, or we would’ve devoured it ages ago. And after one distraught message from my wife, it struck me she was no doubt out there somewhere this very moment full of tenderness savagely fucking … striding along, hopeful of dark and dirty intercourse, of several in succession, or maybe coldbloodedly coupling. I had no charged objects there, nothing to help. My nerves were inflamed and my eyes kept tearing. All I could do was write, so that as the letters added up I’d know I was alive. My wife sent me anxious inquiries, and stayed home alone, playing computer games all night long. At least I knew she always prayed afterwards. I wrote: