There was one fantasy that sometimes calmed him down: that of controlling reality, saying that he didn’t need to drink, that he just wanted to. This allowed him to get up and walk around, to see himself as something else or, rather, something better. After about two hours, when he reached the height of his arousal, he would masturbate. Bitches, bitches, he would repeat, rubbing himself violently and brandishing the bottle in his free hand. At those moments, just as on his walks or in the storehouse, he thought of nothing in particular. He fixed his gaze straight ahead without actually looking at anything. It had been a long time since he had pictured a specific woman; he thought instead about something at once precise and undefined: a parahuman category, part of reality, a universal female type. Bitches, bitches, he would mutter, meaning no offense; he imagined, suspended in the air, a savage femininity in stark contrast to his restrained masculinity. When he finished, he would let out a few deep breaths, less from pleasure than confusion, and the alcohol would gradually stop splashing around in the bottle; the movements of his arm were nervous, electric twitches of the pressure that had finally been relieved. And yet, strangely, he drank from a glass. “I say strange the way one might say peculiar, because during his drinking hours he never let go of that bottle, though every now and then he would forget about the glass.” He did not let go of it because he saw in it a genuine importance: the glass was circumstantial — the way one might say, “There are plenty of glasses”—but the bottle was unique. Long before, Grino had read something in one of his illustrated magazines that had stayed with him: the number of bowls, vessels, and containers used by a kitchen was a function of its complexity. Glass, bottle, and sex formed, for him, a complex system that was one part private ceremony and one part daily ritual. The vague charm of the night arose from this duality and continued its work anonymously in the crystalline mounds out back. Between swigs, he might put the glass down on the table half full, but he never let go of the bottle. He went to bed when the liquor ran out. Weighed down by depression and listlessness, he stretched out on his bed and slowly relaxed his fingers, letting the bottle fall to the floor, where it stayed. In the morning, the first thing he would do after waking up was cast his eyes over empty container from the night before: he needed to verify the memory, the guide to the past. He experienced the fleeting clarity that prefigures a moment of recognition: once it has come into being but before it is fully formed. He would see the bottle and immediately remember. There was a kinship between him and the air that had replaced the liquid inside it: a solidarity that joined his confusion to the transparency contained within the glass, which seemed to render it illusory.
One night he has a dream in which he sees the girl climbing a tree. Grino is in the storehouse, watching her. Try as he might, he can’t help but notice that the way she stretches her legs has a specific, hardly innocent, beauty to it. Suddenly the girl makes a wrong move and falls; her back collides with a branch before she hits the ground. Grino is alone and does not know what to do, and this makes him feel somehow responsible. He has lived with his impotence his whole life, only now it seems inappropriate, out of place. He is aware of the risk of paralysis: that kind of injury can be dangerous. He does not attempt to revive her precisely because of his fear that she will not respond. He feels his world falling apart. Whatever happens, whichever of the two awakens, he knows that he will be blamed and will lose his job. When he wakes up in the morning, a diffuse sense of guilt keeps him from getting out of bed. Unlike what usually happens, in this case a dream broke the spell of reality. And so began his time out on the tracks.
The driver pulls out of a garage next to a house with yellow doors. The back fender appears first, then the rest of the car. Once he has it out on the curb, the owner gets out of the car and closes the garage door. This action, so often repeated, is almost like doing nothing at all; M, his father, and the other agree that it seems like an invisible operation. At the same point on the opposite curb there is a grey car, somewhat protected from the sun by the shade of a young ash tree. The man closes the garage door as though he were wrestling with a corpse; it is unwieldy, with old ironwork and worn down tracks. He goes back to the car. He seems more absorbed than distracted, as though he were thinking about something other than what he was doing. This is only natural, observe the three, when one repeats something they have done so many times before. They are a few meters away, and are not thinking of anything in particular, either. The three, this trio in search of a microscopic blue car — a metallic sphere the size of a single point lost in a sea of metal — that submits itself to the work of chance; these three realize that something extraordinary is happening (or, rather, that something strange is about to happen). Though nothing had occurred, the stage had been set. The tension of the surroundings collects around the grey car, forgotten in the shade, and makes the street seem inhospitable. And so they — absorbed by the sense of danger and forgetting all else, even themselves — bore witness to the sovereignty of physics when, against all expectations, the driver hit the parked car as he pulled away from the curb. It is remarkable the way reality occasionally makes its own decisions. The collision was slow, unspectacular, and not particularly loud, but it was enough to open the trunk of the grey car at the exact moment the three passed alongside it.
An open door rarely fails to attract the attention of a passer-by lost in thought, awakening in him a curiosity that sometimes ends in horror, as in this instance. As soon as they looked into the trunk they jumped back, their arms raised like the devout. They had come across a nest of rats struggling to escape their confinement. The driver walked over until he was standing just behind them; thus protected, he spoke, or rather yelled, in a nervous voice — a voice that, under other circumstances, would have sounded weary and monotone, but was now terrified — asking them to close it. None of them felt up to anything of the sort, not as long as a frantic rat might jump out at his face. As always, they were at a loss for what to do; the man urged them on with words that were far too imperious for the occasion. In this fact they found their excuse to postpone their action. They turned around. It would have been better if they had not; they would be left speechless by the new terror that had been waiting at their backs.
The other would never discuss this with M, but he knows that the three, as they turned their heads to look behind them that afternoon, thought back on fantastic parts of children’s stories in which animals have human attributes — clothes, language, feelings — or, conversely, in which the characters have the traits of animals. They were looking at a man whose face had been transformed. This change had nothing to do with the passage of time or with evolution — or, at least, not as it is commonly understood, as aging — the change was related to surprise, mystery, or magic. In the most literal sense, the man had the face of a rat. His features were not approximate, they did not share common traits — the way some say, “He looks like a dog,” or, “He looks like a monkey.” Instead, each detail of his face combined with the others to compose another countenance, that of a rat. Under different circumstances, this would not have surprised them at all; they might not even have noticed it. But there, with the car turned into a swarm, this face not only confirmed the apparition, it also endowed it with a sense of mystery and menace. “Close the trunk. I can’t stand the sight of rats,” he begged. For a moment, they thought of turning around and going on their way, leaving him there to face the teeming mass with which he had so much in common and yet rejected. But they did not; in the end, the rule of chance sometimes proves stronger than the will and, fearing that this was one of those occasions, the trio did not want to defy it with their actions.