Some evenings I go for walks near my complex
to places you would not accompany me
to places like gaps between other places
to places like ellipses
to places beneath the lines between the lines
and I walk to these places wearing your favourite thoughts
with the dirty rucksack on my back, my sutured intestines, my trigeminal neuralgia, my source of renewable pain, my anticipatory Braille, and my climate-controlled oral cavity, musty with low-calorie words unspoken, unswallowed.
I collect cylinders of me from the basement packing unit. Handlers in hazmat suits pipe me into this body through a 12 mm cadmium cable connected to a PVC console. My skin, which is 100 per cent organic, erupts in roseine indurations because my edges are sharp and not all fragments have dissolved in the day’s currents flowing in from power plants and box files.
My shadow, gripping me tight, steps into the night. We visit a mall designed for humans. After a full body scan by compound-eyed gun-toting nematodes perched on the minarets of a fortified gateway, we enter the ground floor, and walk past giant OLED screens beaming episode 17 of Game of Drones Season 60, past unicellular speakholes that guzzle attention from fingers curled into claws, from pockets fat with envy, from shoulders raised to ears, and past speakholes that burp from bodies and bags, and tables and chairs, while molecular mouths work words into space and eyeballs roll on the floor like marbles.
The corpuscle-red elevator arrows pause at every floor but the one we’re waiting on. The girls, the girls are everywhere, with grass-like fringes and geometrical earrings and anti-tank tank tops and ponytails that bounce in inverted parabolas. The girls, with their lavender flesh their metaphysical stockings their electrostatic hair their baby doll squeals their designer smiles their plug-and-play masks consume their day’s quota of adipose before their next prayer at the gym where they will excrete through the pores of their fair and lovely skin what they digested yesterday.
Backlit hoardings are the only rabbits that point their noses at me directly, urging me to buy a flat and win a prize that will take me to Italy, or France, or Alpha Centauri. I sidestep a legless man on twin casters. His face is a socket with holes that can hypnotize. I look away. He yells after me, ‘I see in your face a punctured embodiment of hope.’
I reach a bus shelter and wait. The route that takes me home is not listed here. I lean against a metal pole and ask my thoughts to wait. They are in a hurry. I inform them politely that I shall not throw my body into an opening for bodies.
And then I did.
Bin bags are important characters in the story of your life. They all have the same body, the same form, the same shape, but each has its own unique content, its substance unlike any other, its themes and motifs as distinct as your fingerprint, your saliva, your iris. Their black lips extend over the rim of your bin like a smile. The future of waste shines bright like the sun.
Bin bags, they come in different sizes. Baby head, dog head, adult human head, donkey head, horse head, all the way to elephant head, though the last ceased to be available for purchase online after Amazon quit stocking it following violent protests from a religious sect that worships the faecal matter of tusked mammals and uses them as holy ingredients in Yajurveda-accredited sacrificial yajnas.
Bin bags, they also come in varying microns of thicknesses – from 5 to 125 microns. The thicker they are, the better for the soul of the user, which is still biodegradable. But they’re only ever black in colour in the Hindu Aryan Indian Republic, and only one kind of black.
In Stockholm, I’ve seen greater consumer choice in colours and design. I’ve seen bin bags in purple, in fuchsia pink, peacock green, Bali blue, Olympic bronze, banana yellow, Brandeis orange, and Persian rose, with pictures of Tibetan babies on them, and designer ones too – both the regular labels – Versace, Armani, Tommy Hilfiger, Ferrari, Givenchy – and celebrity lines. Some years ago Shakira launched an exclusive line of hip bin bags that shake themselves every time you put stuff into them so they can accommodate more stuff in them. Deferer is launching a bin bag that’s exclusively for discarding bald old tennis balls. And Namak Haram has launched its own line of bin bags for draping the heads of people you’re beheading.
But don’t ask me why there is no consumer choice when it comes to bin bag colours in HAIR. All we get are the same old depressing pasty black with nothing on them but creases and crinkles. Our laws are dated. We need to reform them, deregulate the sector completely, open it up to FDI. But since you and I can’t wait for all that to happen – we know how slowly things move in the HAIR – we’ll have to make do with the boring black ones.
On the positive side, all this is irrelevant. Because if you’re not good with hands, your life expectancy goes up. Like if you can’t do a simple noose knot. Or a slash job, cutting precisely, longitudinally, from the wrist down. Or kiss a syringe with your veins. Then you’ll need the bin bag anyway. To draw it over your face. Wear the world of black stored in the bag body. And consummate your last date with oxygen. While loving fingers compose a constriction for your neck.
But this is important: remember to leave on your final face a suitably forensic expression for the post-mortem.
And as the day after wakes up, yawns, stretches its fingertips in your newly minted void, the garbage boy is sure to come punctually at ten. He knows, better than you, the value of what you bin.
After he collects your offering and dumps it in his wheelbarrow, who do you think will recycle you?