The next few days leaked together. I didn’t have to go back to work until the following week. I continued to strip the apartment, removing all the pictures and mirrors. I phoned the Salvation Army to collect the redundant furniture, the television and stereo and my books. I lifted the carpet. The concrete floor beneath my feet felt actual and solid.
Finally, I was left with an armchair, a lamp, a small kitchen table and a straight-backed chair and my bed. The living room was silent and empty. A white box of silence and emptiness. Even then I was haunted by objects. I sat for hours watching the strip of light hitting the edge of the table until it seemed to peel off and unfurl. A shirt bundled on the floor in the corner of the bedroom took on the look of a dead animal and I had to pick it up with the dust-pan to throw it out.
I masturbated constantly, until I was sore and exhausted. To stay erect I had to drain every single image from my mind, erase everything, until my head and body were filled with air and I could float away on the flux of orgasm.
Then I would lie on the bed feeling broken into pieces, wondering if the sound of my beating heart was somebody coming up the stairs.
When I went out to replace the food I had dumped from the fridge, everything in the world outside was chaotic and deafening. The perspective of the footpath looked deceptive and I felt that I could overbalance at any moment. At one moment I felt huge and ugly and conspicuous and the next, infinitesimal. The traffic was a metal stampede and the people in the street were grotesques, with snout faces and crippled limbs. In the supermarket, the fluorescent light reflecting up off the polished floors blinded me. It was crowded with shoppers, cramming their smug trollies with goodies. I was terrified I would meet someone I knew. But then, I had forgotten what I looked like so maybe they would too.
I grabbed bread and cigarettes and a stack of frozen TV dinners. Then, as I passed through the cosmetics section, I suddenly found myself filling my pockets with lipsticks, mascara and eyeshadow. I made no attempt to disguise what I was doing and, miraculously, nobody seemed to pay any attention. I thought then, that perhaps I really was invisible.
When I got home the impact of what I had done struck me like a blow and hot blisters of sweat erupted all over my face. I collapsed in the chair and shakily lit a cigarette, imagining trying to explain myself to the store detectives and the police, the stupid words dribbling out of my mouth. Being arrested and charged and locked up in a cell.