4.
Is it possible that God is rewinding the film? We are in the uncertain memory of a God who has started to forget. To lose all recollection of what he had said in the beginning. In a world made of names, forgetting them is its natural end.
God is not dead. God has forgotten. God has dementia.
—the yellow notebook, G.
That which I don’t dare do (or say) turns into Gaustine.
But still, he is too radical with that “God has dementia.” God has only just begun forgetting. Sometimes he mixes up times, gets his memories confused, the past does not flow in one direction.
What is going through the head of a God who holds all the stories in the world? Both the happened and the unhappened. All our stories in every second of this world.
—the yellow notebook, G.G.
5.
I don’t recall when exactly he started to become more real than me. People were reading about Gaustine, they were intrigued, they were looking forward to his next appearance, they asked what was taking him so long. The magazine in which I published short stories about him from time to time doubled my honoraria. I could see Gaustine giving me that ’60s wink: Dude, half of that’s mine. You don’t need anything, I would reply, after all, I thought you up, didn’t I? Oh, did you, now? He would arch his eyebrow. Can’t you think up something better than this turtleneck and these round glasses of mine? Why don’t you write in a light blue Pontiac or at least a Mini Cooper for me?
Go on, get lost, I would snap, I can spare you a Vespa and nothing more.
Over the years it became ever more difficult to discern who was writing whom. Or perhaps some third person was writing us both, without much particular effort or consistency. Sometimes I am the happier and better man, that’s how they write me and I soar, but just a paragraph later they clip my wings and I’m wobbling around like a pigeon in the dust. I tell myself: Don’t forget that you’re from the other side of the story, don’t forget that you’re from the other side of the story . . . You’re writing it, it’s not writing you. The second you start to get the feeling that someone else is writing you, your goose is cooked, the demons have captured you, that which you fear most is upon you, your brain is emptying out like a barn in winter. No, I’m still holding it together . . . I still shut the doors tightly, or so it seems to me.
I am the one who writes . . .
When I write, I know who I am, but once I stop, I am no longer so sure.
6.
All the radio stations play music and news from past decades. What’s happening today doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter which decade was chosen in the referendum, everyone is living in their own. We thought that the past was organized like a family album with carefully ordered photos: Here we are as kids, here’s graduation, here I am in the army, my first wedding, my daughter’s birth . . . Nothing of the sort.
I have found a small semi-legal radio station that tries to report today’s news. But it, too, is forced to broadcast the past (in all of its anarchy).
7.
Today it occurred to me to cook something I haven’t tried to make since I was a kid—egg on a newspaper. This is the simplest recipe I know. You set a piece of newspaper on the burner and crack an egg on top of it. Back in the day, the problem was that there were no eggs, now there are no newspapers. Thank God I found a newspaper. I turned the burner on low, and the room was filled with a scent I hadn’t smelled since I was eight years old. The scent of egg and toasted paper, a dry scent. I recalled how some of the letters would be imprinted on the egg whites. I also recalled how back then newspaper was used for everything. My grandpa would wrap the cheese in it and when we sat down to lunch I could read the headlines on the hunk of feta.
In the summer people would put newspaper on the windows in place of blinds, and also so that flies wouldn’t dirty up the glass. Speaking of flies, that brings to mind the bare light bulb sticky from flies that hung from the ceiling in the village; my grandma would make a lampshade of sorts for it out of newspaper, which would quickly get yellowed and scorched.
The egg in a newspaper turned out quite tasty.
8.
I slept badly, I dreamed of a flood and wild beasts, fires . . . in short, Old Testament dreams, a true nightmare. On top of everything, I was out of cigarettes, but I didn’t feel like going out, I had enough of a supply of tobacco. I just needed to find rolling papers. I didn’t have any newspaper left, and notebook paper was too thick . . . I had an old notebook made of thin sheets, almost rice paper, from back in the ’90s, filled with old poems which were no good in any case . . .
9.
Blind Vaysha Syndrome
A case has been reported of a girl who sees only the past with her left eye and only what will happen in the future with her right. Sometimes the borders between the past and the future grow so thin that with her left eye she sees the moon setting while her right sees the sun rising. Other times the borders grow so distant that the face of the earth from the first days unfurls formless and empty before her left eye, while before her right—the planet in its final days, ravaged and once again formless.
Blind Vaysha Syndrome, as it would become known in science, is characterized by precisely this simultaneity of past and future, with the ability (and misfortune) to see the world in its before and after at one and the same time, but never in its present, here and now. It is different from the syndrome of those inhabiting the past or of those who live only in the future, and it is twice as severe.
Clinical picture: A painful sense of not belonging to any time, quick jumps between past and future, functional blindness despite having normally functioning pupils, attempts at self-harm and suicidal tendencies. Similar to so-called Unbelongers Syndrome.
Patients cannot go out unaccompanied, because the street they are walking down does not yet exist for one of their eyes, while for the other eye it is a highway with cars zooming past. Experts expect the frequency of cases to double in the next one to two years.
—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses
Sometimes G.—I’m not even going to write out his full name—truly infuriates me. He has infuriated me before as well, the funny thing is that now he is doing it even when he is not here. The very fact that he is not here, but instead is grinning between the lines, is outrageous. His whole unscrupulous monopolization of everything infuriates me. This fictitious fellow has run wild and forgotten himself, where does he get off? Hang on a second, I thought you up, I can write you off . . . A single sentence would be enough, for example, “Gaustine passed away on that first day of September,” and it’s all over.
My whole life someone has been taking advantage of my warm southeastern heart.
10.
Years ago, while I was still traveling, I stopped into a Sunday mass at the Dominican church in Kraków. It was February, cold and gloomy, snowflakes were flitting around me. I saw a girl in a short coat sitting on the steps, parents with a baby carriage and two sniveling kids pressed up against them fearfully, an old homeless man wagging his beard in rhythm like a metronome, the faces of anxious people. I had the feeling that I had seen these same faces and bodies, this same scene, at some point during the ’40s, (I was born twenty years after that.) What will people’s faces look like when the Last Days come? Will those faces be marked with a sign, or will they be the same as ours?