That cocky intellect interrupted me all the time. He always dismissed what I had to say. One particular day, when I tried to tell him that a grand change is coming, a fatal one that is brewing from underneath the earth, he chuckled and dismissed me again. He pissed me off so much that day, I decided to follow him and find out where he lived. It turned out that his paranoiac tendencies were more developed than I had thought. Maybe that is how he’d survived the executioner’s bullet and the fanatics’ knives. How often had he said, Only the paranoid survive, my friend? As I was following him, he looked back and saw me. I pretended to stop and look at a car meter and count my change, but the eccentric professor ran and crossed against the lights, jaywalking the red, the green, the yellow, the purple sky, the blue people, the pink dogs, the squirrels, the wet pavement. He was almost run down by a taxi. He ran like he had never run for his life from dictators or prophets. I was too conspicuous to pursue him further. And really, I just wanted to know more about the suave beggar. I wanted to steal his reading glasses while he was asleep. I tried once to do it at the café, but he hung his glasses around his neck with a rope that dangled below his ever-shifting eyes.
Salaam, I said today, as I pulled a chair from the next table.
The men in the café all nodded briefly and kept on flipping through the newspapers.
I waited a little, and when the waitress came and asked me if I needed anything, I told her I was leaving. And so I did, without saying a word to anyone. On my way out, I looked back and saw the glasses of the professor emerging from beneath the news like a crocodile from a swamp. The bastard watches me all the time. I will get him one day!
AT HOME AS I WASHED, I saw long pieces of Shohreh’s deep blue hair swirling in the waters around my feet like eels. And as I was getting out of the bathtub, some force pulled me back. It was as if gravity was magnified; the soles of my feet felt heavy with the weight of iron and chains, my ankles felt anchored in water, I moved sluggishly. I felt heavy, but also a part of me had become light and fleet. I tried to move myself by hanging off the shower curtain, then the towel rack, but instead I became more immobilized. A deep, deep sense of fear and sadness overcame me. I felt I was the last human on the planet. I heard the sound of water, like synchronized drumming, going down the drain — an army on the move with chariot and horses. I saw the mirror shifting and meeting my face, and in the mirror I saw fuzziness and an elongated face that was still mine, but it was as if I had grown whiskers from my forehead. I am going to shave it, I thought. I should shave it. I grabbed the razor and passed it across my forehead. Then the sadness intensified, which made me drop the blade. I wanted to ask for help, but no one, no name, came to mind, and I was certain that no one existed anymore. Perhaps everything had been destroyed by some bright light that had flashed and levelled all that was on the surface of the earth. I reached the door but felt paralyzed, as if some poisonous fang had bitten me. I also felt light, and fragile, so fragile, so weightless that I could be swept up and pulled under by anything. An insect or a shaft of light could carry me; the water could equally sweep me down towards the noise made by armies of galloping horses, flying beneath sabres, helmets, and bright flags held by boys, and villagers turned archers. And I panicked, thinking I was the only naked one in the battle. I somehow managed to partially cover myself with a towel and clung to the bathroom door, but then the door shifted back and forth in front of me. All I wanted was to cross it, to get to the other side and throw my carcass on the sheets of the wounded and the dead. And a part of me felt thin, as if I were on top of a spear and fretting like a banner in the wind. I watched myself, conscious that another me was escaping.
At last I rushed into the bedroom and violently closed the window and pulled myself onto the bed. Maybe I am just hungry, I reassured myself. Maybe I am just tired. A part of me was still thinking clearly, though. I was split between two planes and aware of two existences, and they were both mine. I belong to two spaces, I thought, and I am wrapped in one sheet. I looked at the ceiling. I felt it shifting for a very brief moment, sideways, then down and up. And then that terrible sadness came back into the world like an omnipotent blinding cloud, and tears dropped from my eyes for no reason, as if I was crying for someone else.
IN THE AFTERNOON, Reza knocked at my door. I buzzed him in.
Your building always smells — cooking, curry or meat, or something, man. You look like shit. What were you doing? You cut your forehead? Did you fall?
I went back to bed and covered myself up. Reza, there is tea in the cupboard above the stove, I said. Boil some and bring it here.
I do not want tea.
I do, I said. Could you please make some?
He went to the kitchen. And I could hear him, squeaking complaints. He came back with the teapot. There are no clean cups, he told me. You need to do your dishes, man. It is dirty in there.
I stood up, went to the kitchen, washed two cups, and came back.
Oh, I don’t want any, he said.
What do you want?
Money, he said.
You must be kidding, right?
Well, I got you the job at the restaurant, didn’t I?
Fucking asshole, I said. Leave my house.
But he stayed and did not move an inch. He had a smirk on his face.
Leave, I said. I am serious. I am not feeling well.
He opened the curtains and said: Why do you live in the dark like that? Open some windows; you need light and fresh air, brother.
Leave, I said, faintly. Leave now.
Reza walked down the stairs, cursing the trapped smells.
I flung the door closed behind him, and drew the curtains.
THE NEXT DAY, I went to the welfare office to fill out some papers — a routine procedure. The bureaucrats want to make sure that you move your ass out of bed once in a while, that you shuffle your feet in the snow to prove that you are alive and willing to lift your legs to the fourth floor of the old monastery-turned-government building. You have to sign here, here, and there before you get your money.
I picked one of the six lines of waiting people, making sure I was behind someone who looked like he had taken a shower. Why should I smell poverty? I live it! In one of the other lines, who should I see but the professor himself. I watched him with a big smirk on my face and waited until he saw me. Of course, the coffee beggar buried his face in a newspaper and pretended not to see me. I told the woman who had lined up behind me that I would be right back and went straight over to the man. I would not have missed such an opportunity for the world.
When he couldn’t help but see me, the professor acted surprised.
Hard times, I said.
Well no, no. I am here for a business meeting, a consultation job for the government.
I nodded. I looked at him with that same big smirk. Then I pulled a dollar from my pocket and asked him if he had change.
He pulled out a bunch of coins and started to count.
I said: It is not for a phone call.
He looked up at me and stopped counting his dimes, and his hand was about to close in a fist.
I need a bus ticket, I said, and I am short a dollar and twenty cents. I will pay you right back, when I get the cheque in the mail. And without waiting for an answer, I picked dimes and quarters out of his palm. I wanted something from him. It angered me that the socialist does not want to be identified as poor, a marginal impoverished welfare recipient like me. At least I am not a hypocrite about it. Yes, I am poor, I am vermin, a bug, I am at the bottom of the scale. But I still exist. I look society in the face and say: I am here, I exist. There is existence and there is the void; you are either a one or a zero. Once I was curious about the void. If I had died on that tree branch in the park, I would have experienced the other option. Although. . experiencing it would have meant that I could see and feel, and that would have thrown me back into existence, which would eliminate the notion of the void. The void cannot be experienced. The void should mean perishing absolutely without any consciousness of it. It is either a perpetual existence or nothingness, my friend.