TWENTY-TWO

Fake City

[Outside Time]

I poured water from a plastic cup into the soil of some kind of sick-looking plant, and the gray dirt soaked it straight up, as the soil had been dry and the plant was dying. The withered plant sat on the sill in the little window. The window looked onto the street. And the street, the street, the street was in the city, the street was in Fake City, where the cars and the buses never stop, never for a minute, no, not for one moment; these old things roll and run so heavily along, and never all that fast either, I’ll say – it’s true – never at all very fast, but they are always moving. If barely. Yes. Day or night, dark or not, there is always somewhere someone has to go.

And? And.

Me, I’m right here. Or: I am right here. Or: I was right there.

The apartment, it’s true, was a miserable apartment, a snotty little place, a room, really, with only a sort-of kitchen and my little squeaky bed and some light, and a bathroom, more or less, with an old tub but no shower. But it was my miserable studio apartment, mine, in a corner of the city, and I could at least be there, unbothered, in my little place, where I was. I was.

The plant sucked up the water, and sucked the pale light from the sky, and maybe it came back to life a little. And the window was all speckled up with dirt and dust and bugs, or bits of bugs all left behind, legs and tongues and random jointed parts, stuck there as the bugs had died and the rest of their gut-sacks had gone and their short bug-lives were well done and all over. Never mind the roaches in the corner, the ones that scattered and ran skittering for cover when I turned on the kitchen light. At least they weren’t so big. Each morning I found more dead and floating in my coffee cup in the sink, and their drowned carapaces looked to me every time so incurably sad.

I think they loved the fat that spattered off the frypan.

I think they loved the dust that grew on the floor beneath the stove.

I think they spoke a language, a language of bugs.

No, listen: each roach (this is what I think) was a word in a sentence. And all together, they formed a grammar-glob and this said something, it had meaning. It had the meaning that I lacked because I’d lost it, with all the dim yet specific stuff of memory. I couldn’t tell what it said, though.

Just as well. I didn’t really want to know.

And since, on a day like this one, I wasn’t working, there were days like this, and I had time on my hands – all the time of the dead or nearly dead – I would sit at the window and stare out, and watch the things that moved in the street, and the things that moved in the air: the birds, the blimps, the helicopters and all that. And then of course there was the silver sphere, the silver, silver, silver silver metal –