LITTLE BLACK

BY TEEMU KASKINEN

Aurinkolahti

Translated by Kristian London

I was standing at a door downtown. It was night. I had stood outside this door on many nights before and would do so again. It was no big deal.

I was a doorman, a security guard. I had had plenty of time to think about it and had come to the conclusion that a door and security were two sides of the same coin—security was nothing more than a symbol, an abstraction that people from different parts of the world used different words to define. The Finnish word for security guard, järjestysmies, was derived from järki, sense. Järki had a sharp sound, it struck like an ax. A door could be equally ax-like. You could put a man’s fingers into the crack between the doorjamb and the door and crush them to a pulp. You could do the same to a man’s head. Sufficient mass, a sharp blow, and a solid door were all you needed to inflict a mangling he’d never forget. But unfortunately even I couldn’t afford such nihilism.

Doors opened or they remained closed. They brought security to the world. They were security—always either open or closed. They let you pass or blocked your way. Doors were a metaphor for the universe, a binary computer code you could use to explain everything the human world could possibly contain.

Everything consisted of ones and zeros. Ones got in. Zeros didn’t get anywhere. All roads were closed to them.

The door was security was the door. Everything was material. But above the material world wandered creatures of another sort—us—to whom the laws of this world did not apply.

I was Cerberus. In Finland, doormen were called Cerberuses. That always made me smile. I thought it was pretty fitting.

* * *

When people were trying to get in, I didn’t care how drunk they were. Their intoxication amused me. But if they dared to give me a disparaging glance, if they dared to raise their eyes to mine without fear or trembling, I wouldn’t let them in. And if they dared to play the familiarity card, well, that was even more reason for me to send them on their way.

I only let in enough Africans to avoid racism charges. I let in Indians and Russkies in similar measure, because I knew neither felt any love, kinship, or sympathy for Africans. Black women—I would have let in more of them. It was too bad more didn’t try. Africans kept close watch over their own. Nubians left their princesses at home and went out in gangs to screw easy white Finnish women.

That’s the way it always went. Over the past twenty years, Finns had been methodically taught that anything that came from abroad was better than anything Finnish. They called it multiculturalism. And the more distant and exotic the goods, the harder you grasped for it. And so the diseases spread.

I personally wouldn’t have touched a single one of those young women who got shit-faced at the nightclub week after week—at least not without a condom. Of course I had a couple of times. Now and then I’d tell one of the last of her herd, one of those slutty stragglers who hung back by the door after last call, swaying and coatless, to wait a second. A bouncer’s charisma almost always worked; I’d be rewarded with a vacant, inebriated smile, a limp kiss, and a blunt promise of more. And then once the place had emptied, I’d walk the bitch back to the men’s room for a minute before calling her a cab.

From time to time, colleagues and acquaintances would ask me why I kept working as a doorman after I had been promoted to investigator. I’d wondered that myself many times, asked myself the same question.

The answer: I enjoyed carrying out justice and wielding power.

* * *

A mixed group joined the end of the line. I had time to observe them before they got to the door. It was probably a bunch of coworkers, men and women, a couple of foreigners, and a tiny figure in an electric wheelchair, a weird-looking young guy whose face was normal but limbs were all shriveled. He was maybe thirty. His gaze was steady, his hair came down to his shoulders. He looked intelligent for a cripple. His twisted hands were resting on his wheelchair armrests as if nailed there. His twisted feet were stacked one on top of the other on the footrest. He had to be paralyzed from the waist down. I wondered what sort of human-factory quality control had failed so miserably to let a man like this into the world.

Evidently the cripple couldn’t read my mind, because he eyed me without concern. Something in the way he looked at me made me anxious. I let people in, the line moved forward. This gave the cripple an even better vantage point to watch me. How did he dare to look right at me that way? It was just a little too familiar. He didn’t even seem to be bothered by the fact that he was deformed. What exactly did he see in me? What was he going to do when he got up to me, start telling me what disease had crippled him? I didn’t want to know. The thought alone repulsed me. Deformed, disabled people like him always thought their illnesses and problems were fascinating to us healthy people. But inadequacy wasn’t interesting. Defective was defective. Worthless was worthless, the zero class for whom the door would remain shut.

I didn’t let them in.

The women in the group were furious. I said that they had all had a little too much to drink. One of the foreigners called me a pig. I laughed. Once again, I got to hear what a cold, racist country Finland is.

* * *

People who ended up here from the third world would call my homeland a bad, cold-hearted place for just about any reason. Compared to the bloodbaths of the Congo, the Taliban state of Afghanistan, and the drug wars of Mexico, apparently prosperous, centrally heated, well-lit Finland was hell.

We all know that tribulations refine us. We all know that a certain number of trials are necessary to turn men into men.

If people from anus mundi felt like they had leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire when they arrived in Finland, that meant Finns were the most refined people on the planet.

We didn’t need civil wars or natural catastrophes to turn us into men. Even without them, this hellish country of ours, which was either too bright or too dark, had polished us into sparkling human diamonds, the wisest people on earth. We could have easily solved the world’s problems. We would have been the right party to resolve complicated global issues, make farsighted decisions, pass judgments that in their earth-shattering fairness would have brought all the less capable and more childish nations to their knees.

But we didn’t bother. We didn’t want to share our wisdom with stupid people. Stupid people wouldn’t have learned anyway. Not worth the effort.

* * *

I grabbed the cripple’s wheelchair and turned him back in the direction he had come. The party finally left. They looked like they had been punched in the face. But they would have been even more disappointed if I had let them in. As a matter of fact, I had done them a favor.

At night, downtown Helsinki was a network of bars and nightclubs, a web into which thousands upon thousands of gullible victims flew over and over, only to be eventually ensnared.

The illuminated darkness of downtown offered the promise of joy and jubilation, of drunken, good-natured fun, of rendezvous with friends and encounters with strangers. On weekends, countless people headed out from their homes imagining they’d gain entrance to an adult amusement park fueled by alcohol and good music.

Of course they never did, since no such place existed on the Helsinki peninsula. We Cerberuses made sure of that. The meager joy that the Helsinki nightlife offered mortals was arbitrarily rationed. And it was specifically the arbitrariness of the rationing and the anonymous absoluteness of the control that ensured the end began before the beginning, before the door. The end started in line.

Those who made it in were able to drink absurdly overpriced beer or sticky-sweet drinks, enjoy pan-European top-forty trash, shitty service, and a decibel level that made your ears bleed and prevented any sort of rational communication.

Everything was inane, expensive, crude, desperate, and pitiful, including the establishments, the staff, and the customers. Only the lack of light and the blood-alcohol levels prevented the customers from seeing it all. The staff saw but didn’t care.

We were paid to guard the gates of hell.

I let in more of the unsuspecting drunks who didn’t look me in the eye.

* * *

The next day was a workday. I was interviewing a young Iranian woman. She had arrived in Finland almost a year earlier, which was the amount of time it took the immigration office to process asylum seekers’ applications. I didn’t believe a word of what she told me. I never did. Of course, she might have been telling the truth, how would I know? Maybe her husband, a teacher, really had been arrested on suspicion of antigovernment activities and tortured to death in some prison. Maybe she really did fear for her life. Maybe she really had managed to escape Iran along smugglers’ paths without a passport, without proper recollections of the route, of the people who arranged the trip, of her traveling companions. More likely, she had flown from Tehran to Turkey and from there across the border into Greece, or on a forged passport directly north, maybe all the way to Finland. Or else some nice relative had sent a Finnish passport to her in Iran. There were a lot of ways. There was no point thinking about all of them. My job was to decide whether she would be allowed into Finland or not. That was the only thing I had to think about.

The woman’s name was Noushafarin. She was beautiful in a classically Persian way. Roman nose, slender, black-haired arms. The pits of her shirt had darkened during the interview; I could sense the sharp tang of woman-sweat in my nostrils. I wondered what evolutionary development made females from that part of the world sweatier and hairier than European representatives of the gender. Was it a result of natural selection?

I asked another question. The interpreter, Yalda, translated into Farsi. I eyed the interpreter and the asylum seeker and compared them to each other. Not bombshells, but both decent looking. The asylum seeker had darker hair: a couple of strands had slid out from under her scarf. I clicked the recorder off. I could sense both women instantly become a degree more alert.

I asked Yalda to translate: Did Noushafarin like to give head?

Yalda didn’t say anything.

I asked again. Yalda asked Noushafarin something, definitely not what I had asked. The other woman answered obediently.

I asked if Noushafarin liked anal sex.

Yalda was quiet for a minute, just gazed at the table in front of her and breathed, her cute, bra-enveloped tits rising beneath her shirt.

I asked if Noushafarin liked taking cock in all of her holes.

Yalda glanced at me; her expression seemed angry. I didn’t like it. I put my hand under the table and pinched her leg, hard.

Yalda shrieked, then bit her lip. I let go. Noushafarin looked surprised. Yalda asked her something. Noushafarin once more responded obediently.

Yalda said that Noushafarin took cock in her mouth and vagina, but didn’t particularly care for anal sex.

I asked Yalda if she had definitely asked everything correctly.

Yalda nodded. Then she started to cry.

I announced that the questioning was over for the day. I roughly gathered the papers into a stack on the tabletop and rose to open the door. Noushafarin understood and disappeared into the hallway. I closed the door, grabbed Yalda by the waist, and slammed her stomach-first onto the table.

“Smile,” I said.

I climbed on top of her, shoved the middle finger of each hand into her mouth, and pulled the corners back toward her ears. She moaned. I let go.

“Start translating,” I said.

Yalda nodded.

“I hate you,” I said.

“You love me,” Yalda interpreted. Her accent excited me, just like always.

“I want to use you and hurt you.”

“You want to help me and take care of me.”

“You’re my little black whore.”

“I’m your little black sweetheart.”

I pulled the shoes from her feet, lifted her skirt, knelt down between her legs. Her black underwear was stretched across her butt as if it was a size too small. I pulled a switchblade from my pocket and flicked it open. Yalda whimpered. I spread her legs with my shoulders, I slid the blade into her crotch, past her panties, she felt the prick, I opened her pussy wide with the tip of the blade and my left thumbnail, its bitter, cloying scent greeted me. I pressed the blade of the knife into the already-sticky crotch of her panties and severed it. Then I slit the panties up the side, ripped off the shred of fabric, climbed back on top of Yalda, and shoved it into her mouth. I stabbed the switchblade into the table in front of her face, she let out a muffled squeal. I opened my zipper and shoved my hate-engorged cock all the way in.

* * *

As usual, Vuosaari was full of kids. I headed south from the metro station, walked down the stairs to the landing where the work of art stood: three tall, winged figures of tangled pipe standing in a shallow pool. Water flowed through the pipes. This masterpiece had been broken for a while; one of the pipes was leaking. Water burbled into the pool and straight down onto the stones from somewhere up above. The whole piece was like an out-of-order urinal.

The gravel path continued southward, toward the seashore. The rolling lawn was dotted with sharp-edged boulders of black granite that rose greedily from the earth, like the fangs of deep-sea fish. The clusters reminded me of a black-and-white photo I had seen once of a Chinese man whose mouth sprouted an unheard-of three rows of teeth. The freak’s gob had been jammed so full of skewed, protruding teeth he couldn’t shut it.

The new side of Vuosaari stretched back on either side of the path: light, pastel-colored buildings, a school. Two massive steel frames stood in the schoolyard. It was impossible to tell what they were; they were too tall to be shelters and the poles continued up at least twenty feet. Maybe they were gallows.

There weren’t any churches or mosques in Vuosaari. At least I didn’t see a single one.

It was a beautiful autumn day.

* * *

I had read the free paper in the metro. It said that excrement, human shit, had suddenly flooded out of the sewer and into a street downtown. No one knew why. There was even a picture in the paper. The shit had risen out of the gutter in front of a restaurant and quickly spread over a broad area. People had waded through it, horrified. None of the interviewees, not even the city’s director of technical operations, could explain why the shit had decided to rise from the sewer onto the street on that particular day.

* * *

I went and picked up our little ones from day care and took them home. We lived on the Sunny Bay side of Vuosaari, a short walk away, near the beach. The area differed from the rest of Vuosaari in that it was built in the 2000s, it was nicer, wealthier, not a single municipal flat, there were stone foundations finished with granite panels, gleaming white walls. Graceful apartment buildings rose in front of the breakwaters and the beach of pale sand and the blue-green sea. It was quiet, the only people we came across were a couple of dog walkers. Some members of the middle class were having a smoke outside the pub near the breakwater. In this sense, Sunny Bay didn’t diverge from the rest of Vuosaari. People spent time indoors—watching TV, surfing the net for porn, screaming at their kids. I never saw anyone outside. Ever. Except passersby like myself. And them only by chance.

My wife had already come home from work. She was helping my oldest son with his homework at the kitchen table. My wife was blond. I had married her for her money. If you were a police officer, you could get any woman, because there was nothing a Finnish woman admired more than a police officer. Finnish women respected power. They loved a straight back, a uniform, broad shoulders, and short hair. They saw in them the promise of rough treatment and countless violent orgasms, just like women everywhere around the world. But in addition, Finnish women thought policemen were intelligent. That was unusual and extraordinary. I couldn’t understand where this belief had originated from. As far as I could tell, I was the only intelligent policeman in Helsinki.

My wife had not proven to be easy prey, however. I’d had to chase her for a couple of years, swear my loyalty, praise her many qualities, her beauty, which no man before me had had the sense to see. Yet she still didn’t warm to my offers of marriage; she considered them premature, there was something that wasn’t quite right, she kept telling me, something gave her pause, made her uncertain, made her rear up on her hind legs. Her alarm bells were ringing. At times I thought she had seen through my façade. In those instances, I figured the best thing to do was to start tearing up. I’d spontaneously cry about how lonely I was, what a loser I was, what a bad place the world was. I’d say I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t good enough for her. I appealed to her sympathy, continuously gnawed at her guilt. It worked. Her alarm bells kept ringing, but she gradually got used to the sound, developed a hearing problem and no longer noticed the ringing of the alarm. Instead, her ears began to ring. The perpetual tinnitus resulting from my demands and complaints blocked the precise frequency that up until recently had worked as a warning device, protecting her from harm. So we got married. And we had children. And we bought an expensive flat in Vuosaari with her money.

I wondered why my wife was intermittently shooing away fruit flies. Then I noticed that there were two tomatoes on the kitchen table. It looked like they had been there for a few days. Peculiar splotches like stretch marks had formed on the skins; both were dotted with white spots. When I picked up one of the tomatoes, my fingers almost went through it, the bottom had split in several places and the rotten juice had dampened the tablecloth with a sticky yellow ooze. The same thing had happened to this city: it was splitting apart like an enormous rotten tomato and spilling its shit at people’s feet.

I threw the soft, stinking fruit in the trash. It was nasty to the touch, and afterward I had to wash my hands with dish soap for a long time.

* * *

I walked from Sunny Bay to the other side of Vuosaari, where the normal people lived, where the school and the day care and the municipal housing were. The pastel-colored concrete buildings there had been erected in the ’90s. Their curves and metal grills and pointless protrusions looked surreal in the light of the evening sun. This was exactly what the washed-out future of the French and Italian sci-fi comics of my childhood had looked like. Living in the future was great.

Noushafarin and her two children had been set up in a one-bedroom rental. The apartment was located on the ground floor, so I didn’t have to worry about getting into a stairwell, I just threw myself over the low, brick-faced wall and I was on their patio. I knocked on their back-door window. The face of one scared child appeared, then another. One of the kids ran away. The other one stayed there staring at me. I smiled at the child. Noushafarin came to open the door. She was surprised. I told her that I had come to inspect her apartment. She didn’t understand, she just looked at me fearfully. The children had learned enough Finnish that they understood. They translated for their mother. Noushafarin let me in, but I could tell from her movements that she wasn’t entirely convinced.

I had brought a laptop with me. I set it down on the kitchen table and found some Disney cartoons on YouTube. I pulled a couple of bags of candy out of my pockets and gave them to the children. They sat there satisfied, watching cartoons and eating sweets, as I led their mother into the bedroom.

I flung the bedspread onto the floor. I stripped off Noushafarin’s shirt and explained to her that this was normal procedure for Finnish police. The living conditions of asylum seekers had to be regularly inspected. It was our duty as police officers to find out whether an immigrant was worthy of the trust of the Finnish nation or not.

Trust had to be reciprocal. If Noushafarin trusted me, I trusted her. And if I trusted her, the entire bureaucracy of Finland would be on her side. We’d get the papers in order and the asylum would be granted.

I was the one who let you pass or blocked the way. Whether the door would open or remain closed was up to me. I was the doorman in these parts. Noushafarin needed to understand that.

I could hear Donald Duck’s nasal squawking and children’s laughter in the background.

Noushafarin had frozen; she was practically immobile. I undid her bra, her plump breasts plopped down; I sucked and bit the dark nipples, groped her full, juicy ass, which was heavy in a completely different way than the pale asses of Finnish women. I pushed her down onto the bed and rolled up her skirt. I pulled off her panties, then I took off my own clothes. I knelt next to her head, grabbed her hair, and forced her to give me a blowjob. Once I got into it, I tested the rest of her holes too. I finished by shooting my sperm between her full thighs, lifted the bedspread from the floor and tossed it over her naked body, dressed, got my laptop from the kitchen, and exited the same way I had come.

As I walked home, a blue-and-white police cruiser pulled up next to me on the sidewalk between some buildings. Slowed down for no reason. My colleagues would find no crimes here.

* * *

I interrogated and interviewed the entire next day. I took occasional coffee and cigarette breaks. Yalda was subdued, almost teary. I gave her a warning. I was the one who chose the interpreters and called them in. If Yalda had any interest in serving the Finnish bureaucracy in the future, she had better show a little gratitude and serve with a smile, cheerfully. I couldn’t stand a woman who went around with her face like an elephant’s cunt.

Once the last of the Somalis had disappeared I was alone with Yalda. I told her I had paid a visit to Noushafarin the previous day. Yalda didn’t say a word; she didn’t move a muscle. It was as if she were dead. I grabbed her by the hand, pulled her up against me. I grabbed her face and bit her cheek. She wailed. So she was still alive.

I told her I was satisfied with our arrangement on the whole but that I had something better in mind. It felt stupid and unnecessary for me to set limits to my desires. Besides, Yalda needed to be ready for anything. When it came down to it, I was the one who put bread on her table. If it weren’t for my help, there was no way an immigrant woman without a translation degree would get well-paying interpreter gigs.

Yalda asked what she could do for me.

I said I wanted her to ask Noushafarin over for a visit. I wanted both of them at once, at the same time.

Yalda asked when.

I was on the verge of saying tomorrow, but as I looked at her mouth and the fine whiskers growing above her upper lip, I felt a familiar twitch in my trousers.

“Tonight,” I said.

Yalda fell back into silence and then nodded compliantly.

I gave her a time and told her what my wishes were.

She nodded again.

I loved foreign women. Compared to Finnish women, they were real women, obedient, feminine. Independence-obsessed, hard-drinking, thick-waisted Finnish women had lost their femininity. It was impossible to love them. The words of the famous Finnish poet once more came to mind:

 

I ask you, man of Finland,

would you be prepared to sacrifice your life

on behalf of these Finnish maids?

 

I would not.

 

I would risk my honor as an officer only if I knew,

That behind me stood a faithful, hard-working woman who respected me

From India, Japan, or

Pattaya, Thailand.

 

For a Finnish woman, I wouldn’t even bother

to button my pants.

 

My wife had made dinner. I ate it for appearance’s sake and left. She told me to take condoms with me or buy some from the minimart. So she suspected something. Or had already understood something. I didn’t respond. I didn’t bother explaining that I never used condoms when I was on official business. I pushed the door shut behind me. Finnish doors opened outward. I knew that better than anyone. It was hard to force your way in, and you could leave even if you didn’t have a key.

Yalda also lived in Vuosaari. My realm was small and easy to rule, everything was within arm’s reach.

The women were waiting for me in their little black panties, just like I had told them to be. Yalda looked almost relaxed, Noushafarin almost weepy. It didn’t bother me. As a matter of fact, her subdued misery excited me.

Both women were wearing colorful robes. I took them off and tossed them in the corner. I shoved my left hand into Noushafarin’s crotch and my right one into Yalda’s crotch and squeezed their flesh. Both of the women had shaved themselves porcelain-smooth. I released my grip and went over and sat in the armchair. It had been placed square in front of the window, in accordance with my wishes. The venetian blinds were halfway closed. A serving table had been set up next to the armchair. On it stood coffee prepared Turkish style, wine, and grapes. All in accordance with my wishes.

The armchair was cheap, from IKEA, and on the floor in front of it lay a large, multicolored Oriental rug, presumably purchased from the same place. I ordered the women to stand on the carpet. They did so and took off their bras and panties. I compared Noushafarin’s and Yalda’s bodies. Both of them pleased me. Noushafarin’s breasts and hips were heavier, softer. Yalda was taller and slimmer. I ordered both women to lie down on the floor while I tasted the Turkish coffee. If it had been any less sweet, it would have been far too strong.

Noushafarin lay down on her back, Yalda climbed on top of her. Their heads were between each other’s legs. Neither had tried to look me in the eye, even once. That was good.

I pulled the belt from my pants and gave Noushafarin a couple of whacks on the legs, Yalda a couple on the back. I ordered them to make more noise and enjoy themselves. They began to slurp and smack more loudly.

I poured myself more bitter coffee and ate a couple of grapes.

I drank half the wine and dumped the other half over the women. Then I told them to screw each other with the empty bottle.

I took off my clothes and joined them on the rug. At first the combination of eight limbs and six orifices offered plenty to experiment with, but eventually I started feeling nauseous.

I climbed back onto the armchair. Yalda shoved her slender hand into Noushafarin according to my instructions. I watched this performance, sprawled in the armchair. I started shivering. The little coffee cup on the table started to bother me. I put it on the floor. I put it on the floor again. And again. It was still in my hand. The Oriental carpet in front of me rippled, the patterns swirled downward, down, down, endlessly down. The women were standing somewhere behind me but when I turned they weren’t there. I wondered where exactly they had gone, but then their naked bodies were writhing on top of each other in front of my eyes, dark hair billowing. I tried to count their limbs, but I couldn’t. I tried to pay attention to what was happening, but then I had to piss so I went into the bathroom. The coffee cup was still in my hand; I tried to figure out what to do with it, and suddenly I realized I had put it into the toilet bowl. I knelt down in front of the bowl and thrust my hand into it. The surface was smooth and warm. The hole was tighter than I had imagined, and now I was unable to pull my hand out. I stared at the toilet bowl, which had sucked my arm in up to the shoulder, and to my horror, I couldn’t remember what I had lost in it. Then I realized I had lost my soul in the hole. I yanked my hand out, and it was bleeding. Blood was streaming across the floor, the walls had turned black, they were like charred wood with embers still glowing in the cracks. The medicine cabinet mirror was gone; beyond it I saw a scorched landscape—when I looked left, the whiteness blinded me. When I looked right, I heard a screeching and my heart began to beat wildly from terror. I turned away, but I had already seen it—a pyramid of human skulls gnawed clean, at the top of which sat Death herself, a long-legged, dusky-haired woman whose legs continued forever, continued on and on, the higher I looked the longer they continued, and I never did see where they ended. I felt myself growing cold, disappearing, becoming a movable part of this dull, lifeless world. The whole world was nothing but death and fucking. I was lying on the bathroom floor, staring at the darkness that had appeared in place of the ceiling. I had turned off the lights, whispering shadows moved above, they dangled from cords that swung in the breeze. I was the same kind of human shadow hanging from cords. My jaw hurt. I looked in the mirror and opened my mouth and instantly started to shriek in panic—my mouth was so full of teeth that I couldn’t see my tongue anymore. I was a deep-sea predator that trapped its victims with a glowing lure. Predator fish were swimming all around me.

Somehow I managed to make it out of the bathroom. I stumbled into the living room. Yalda and Noushafarin were sitting on the sofa; they had gotten dressed. I couldn’t tell if it was one or two people sitting there. They were laughing. I tried to ask what was happening to me, but I couldn’t tell if I’d spoken or not. The coffee cup was on the table, where I had left it. Yalda showed me something in her palm. It was a seed, little and black. An ugly and, in spite of its minute size, plump seed. It had tiny indentations, pores. It looked like an asteroid, a body that had shot into this world from other worlds. It didn’t belong here. I was mesmerized by it even though I was afraid of it. I tried to touch it but my hand went through it. Yalda laughed. Her laughter crackled around her.

“It’s just a little seed,” I said.

“Datura,” Yalda interpreted. “Poison.”

“I don’t feel good,” I said.

“You’ve drunk poison. You’re going to die,” Yalda translated.

“It’s not going to work,” I struggled. “I’m too much of a man.”

“You’re no man at all,” Yalda said.

And laughed.

I was thirsty, but no matter how hard I tried to think, I couldn’t figure out where I could get water. I saw flowers—pale, hanging, fruitful, contorted, devilish, hellish, lusty, deadly blooms that were like images of death. Everywhere I looked, I saw the sinuous fringes of the flowers’ petals, which seemed to invite me to thrust between them; they were smooth and shiny-slick like toilet porcelain or the insides of a cunt and smelled of shit and death. The fat, green, spherical, thorny heads split before my eyes, spilling out their disgusting black seeds.

* * *

I fumbled my way out into the corridor. The women tried to stop me, but somehow I made it to the shore of Sunny Bay. Then the hallucinations stopped. The sun had set. The sea was a wall rising up before me, into which birds collided. The angular apartment buildings jutted out from the landscape like an enormous row of teeth.

I finally understood. Comprehension arrived hard and bright. Seeing everything that way—suddenly, clearly—was hell.

I wasn’t a plant or a flower, or even a proper person. I was a degenerate human monkey, a seed from which nothing would ever grow. A seed that the world would crush between its teeth, because I had never really wanted anything else. I was someone else’s bad dream.

Stinking brown sludge rose up from the gutters onto the pavement and splashed at my feet. I was this city. I was this country.

I desperately kept trying to prove that I was someone, that I was still alive. I found myself standing in front of a familiar nightclub. I tried to get in, until I realized that I was the bouncer. I didn’t let myself in. I begged and prayed. Not a chance. I tried to talk my way in, explain who I was, but then I couldn’t explain myself after all, nor could I be bothered to listen, and besides, I couldn’t make out a single word. I couldn’t find a word to describe myself; it was as if I didn’t exist. As if I were listening to silence. I thrust myself forward into hell. I tried to resist and knocked myself over. I embraced the filthy sidewalk. I kneed myself in the ribs. The door was shut and would remain shut, I had shut it on myself. I had torn in two. I was that far gone; there was nothing left of me.

I was less than zero. I was a little black dot far from the coordinate axis, an insignificant, empty point; I didn’t even have contours. I was impossible to focus on, impossible to zoom in on.

I stumbled to my feet. Everything was the same, inside and out. There was no difference between internal and external, between me and the world. What I had done to the world I had done to myself. What I had seen in the world was me myself.

I stumbled toward the beach. I didn’t have a shadow.

My cares were not the cares of a ruler. They were the cares of a beggar who had disgraced himself. My life was shit, rotting refuse.

That was the message that the cripple I had turned away had tried to communicate to me with his gaze.

* * *

The water was cold, it took my breath away, it seeped into my clothes and dragged me down. It felt as if the women were escorting me deeper, their shadows flickered at the edges of my field of vision. I knew I would die. It made no difference.

The doors were closed.

I had been dead for a long time.