17.

Once a week I’m given a bath. A real bath, they strip me naked. That’s when the acrid stench of my immobility hits me. Then they lay me in the bathtub and sponge me down. The water laps over my shoulders, and my arms, legs, and breasts move under the surface. I feel alive. When they lay me in the special tub, if they think there isn’t enough water, they turn the faucet on right by my head. They don’t know how the hot droplets pelt my face, get into my eyes, pierce holes in my skin—my skin oozing with memories.

I walk in through the fogged-up glass door, the air inside is hot and heavy, you can only gulp it, not breathe it. It smells of green tea, stupefying and dense, the light allows only contours. When my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom I take a seat across from a stone trough in the middle of the room that holds aromatized salt—this is why the room smells as it does. Before I take my seat, I scoop up a handful, as if this is something I do all the time, and rub onto the skin of my shins and thighs coarse crystals to exfoliate my dead skin. I haven’t had a look around. I pay no attention to you. Nothing is ever enough for you. You are petty, hard, and you shut out everything around you. Something always threatens. A woman and man are sitting across from me; she, like I, is wrapped in a thin cream-colored towel, tucked in under her armpits, reaching halfway down her thighs. She is sitting with her legs crossed, massaging her neck. Although she has done her hair up in a ponytail and wiped off her makeup, I recognize her from the hotel restaurant. By now I can see better. He has thrown a towel over his lap, sits down next to her, raises one of his legs—bent at the knee—to the bench and leans on his arms behind his back. He is big and strapping, she—all soft and small.

So go ahead, lie down all alone in our room and savor your limitations. I was all wrong. I’d thought that out of all this time that had broken us we’d grow a protective shield, but here you go, reverting to the old ways. Back to the room, to loneliness, to the box. Will it ever be possible to leave this behind? Will you and I, the two of us, be the two of them across the way who are simply sitting there in a sauna, without obsessing over every nuance of their shadow, without longing for approval in the eyes of random passersby? Can we feel the warmth of the air on our skin and let our pores breathe? Can we lead normal lives? This is what I was thinking then, while you were waiting for me up in the room, while I was thinking that a total immersion in loyalty could heal everything from before. I also assumed that other people were normal. I resented your reflex, I worked to understand it, nourished it, held it close, pushed it away and then resented it again. Blaming you that my loyalty in joining you inside the stifling box you have chosen for yourself hadn’t done you much good. For me, immersed as I was in our anxious pseudocoma, everyone else looked as if they were lounging on a rolling meadow with their arms raised high and legs spread wide. But when I took a closer look, I saw his hand traveling between her legs. I saw how he rudely pushed her towel aside, pulled out her breast, and kneaded it. I saw how both of them were looking at me. He, with brazen arrogance, she, embarrassed, but with a flicker of hope. At first I was confused. I didn’t want to look away, I felt awkward about feeling awkward. I felt awkward at her awkwardness and I was furious at his brashness, at the easygoing way he tugged the towel off her breasts, so confident that everyone else was prepared to bow down before his erect prick. I felt ashamed about you, though you were lying in bed several floors above. In the end I stood up, confused, a demonstrative attempt, through the dark, moist air they couldn’t see how abrupt my movements were, and the glass door with its pneumatic closer couldn’t be slammed shut. What was I after here? Even if this offered a certain flavor of freedom, on the edge of murky swimming pools, through the nakedness, everything became clear and transparent. The women who, frowning with worry, pinch their belly skin while sucking it all the way back to their spines. The men who pat their flabby paunches with tenderness and pride. The world is mainly divided into these two and a few others in between, while you were waiting for me there in the bottom of our room, beneath all the gut-wrenching divisions.