Superabundance

I step into the kitchen. I think: I have to give a lecture soon. I don’t think: coffee cup. Nevertheless, I open the right cupboard. The refrigerator reaches my shoulder and is louder than the cars outside the window. The fridge door is heavy, the milk cold. A short while later, something hot and brown is flowing into me, it would be an exaggeration to say that it tastes good, but in any case it has flavour, and my entire existence is reduced to the interplay of my senses of taste and smell, combined with tactile and temperature information from my oral cavity, electrical impulses to my brain. They don’t ask why, they say: this is how it is.

I take a shower. I get dressed. I step out onto the street. The traces of alcohol in my bloodstream support me for a change, help me not to notice anyone but myself. In front is in front, right right, left left, and what’s behind doesn’t matter. Then, suddenly, this is in front of me, and then that is in front of me, and I feel a gentle gust of air against my eyes, moist from the cigarette smoke.

The bare walls and the parked cars are the only indication that I am moving forwards, the sky is thick and grey, the buildings are invisible. Air parts in front of my face, nitrogen molecules stream across the skin of my forehead, oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane. The air resistance seems to be increasing, no doubt clouds are moving across the grey sky up there, and no doubt they are heavy with something that I cannot at this moment sense, even though I know exactly what is coming. Then it begins, the falling. A snowflake, five, a thousand, millions, unperturbed, independently of me, they fall downward from above, while I fall horizontally through them.

I walk along Bedford Avenue. Melt water that has crept for hundreds of metres along steel trusses forms pools under the bridge, where, mixed with tiny particles of rust, it waits to evaporate. A group of Hispanics are hanging out on the corner. They too are waiting for something, though I have no idea what. On the side of the road there are old refrigerators, gas stoves, ovens, air conditioners, graffiti on the walls. I walk into a café. I order, nod, say Thank you. It’s good when everything runs smoothly, it’s good to have a role in the solar system, even if it only consists of ordering a burger, eating, paying, and then at some later point, defecating. As my fork pierces the last piece of bloody beef, I think bloody beef. Then I think about eyes and a bolt gun, and I ask myself why I can’t just think: that was really tasty. The words in my head don’t exist, I say to the words in my head.

I leave. I am standing at a crossing. On the street, people are moving in machines designed for transportation in various colours and shapes. Some of these machines send a message about the social status of the people sitting inside them, others do not. In not sending a message, they also send a message. There is noise. Lights. Solicitations to buy, enjoy, see a movie or attend an event, accept an ideal of beauty or a role in society. None of these solicitations has anything in common with the others, except for the fact that they are all solicitations. I am unable to discern any underlying structure behind all these codes. No method, no goal, together they are a swamp of emotions, convictions, duties and dreams. Images, words. Fog. Amidst the blackened slush a child’s shoe. Taxis. The freedom of not having to do anything, the pressure of being able to do anything, the brutal, or, depending on one’s mood and disposition, gentle, fact of the omnipresence of something or other. The unignorability of being alive.

When I get home, I sit at the kitchen table and try not to think about anything. It doesn’t work. The more I concentrate on pushing words out of my consciousness, the harder they come crashing back, off the walls, the furniture, the unopened letters in between the old newspapers on the table, off the colour of the sky, the shape of the clouds, the smell in the kitchen. And for a while they fly around the room and then settle over the world. Words suffocate everything innate, everything independent, they take as much Being as they can and turn it into a My. My pen, my paper, my table, my breadcrumbs on my table, my scraps of tobacco, my plastic wrapper in the terracotta ashtray on the table next to the piece of paper, my tree, inside which grew the sheet I am writing now, my earth on which it stood, my saw, which cut it down, my mine, from which the iron ore was extracted to make the saw, and what’s left is my nothing.

Now I am cocking the hammer, and now the cylinder turns, now the barrel touches my cheekbone, and instantly the pain in my head is gone, and I pull the trigger, and it digs into my fingertip until the flesh between bone and steel becomes firm enough to relay the pressure, and I don’t hear the explosion because it takes too long to travel through my auditory canal to the parts of my ear responsible for reporting explosions or else because those parts have already been penetrated by the smooth steel-jacketed bullet, destroying millions, billions of connections, an image of myself as a young boy on the football pitch, the first binomial formula and the words of the German national anthem and the reason why it’s only the third verse, shalala, all gone. Grey matter sprayed wildly across the room. Or else because the steel has already reached that part of me usually in charge of projecting the illusion that there is a ‘me’ there for whom the illusion is being projected, before I can hear it coming, or else the gun isn’t loaded, or I don’t even own a gun, or even if I did I wouldn’t have enough courage to pull the trigger, or I wouldn’t have enough sorrow, rage, boredom, hate, or I’d have too much, which would stop me from pulling the trigger, in there, where there is no steel, only soft concepts rubbing up against each other like a crowd of people who only begin to panic because they know there’s no way out.

I leave the apartment. I do not take the old industrial elevator that smells of hydraulic fluid. Instead, I take the stairs. Not down. Up. On the top floor it gets dark. The stairs get narrower, steeper, but they lead further up. I look up. I can’t see anything. I take the steps one at a time till I reach the last one. I hold out my hand. My hand finds a wooden trap door. I can feel the rough wood, the cold. I push. Nothing. I push harder. Slowly the trap door gives way. A second dawn. It squeaks, stands, teeters, falls. I step outside. From the rooftop I can see a big, empty sky. Below it other roofs, with graffiti on them. Brilliant colours above the grey city. Flowers indifferent to the seasons and to the law proliferate upon the wild stone that grows at right angles in all directions. A superabundance of surfaces.

I go back to my apartment. Outside the window the thick grey behind the tangle of steel over the river, light dissolving like the colours before it and the shapes in which people live, supposedly, and: snowflakes. A slowly solidifying screen over reality.

She’s coming tomorrow.