If I went on like this, I would soon end up as an invalid, I thought, and had to smile, suddenly I could imagine it, me sitting there running a saw back and forth across my thigh, a satisfied smile on my face, the sheet soaked with blood. Tenacity. There would be less of me! The smaller the body, the fewer the problems! The critical, penetrating gaze I gave myself as I sat there without arms and legs: is there any more I can do without? Is there any more I can cut away?
I began to laugh. But I managed to taint even that laughter with my thoughts. Even as I laughed, I realized that the laughter would have something unpleasant about it when it died out, I was alone, it was night, I sat in an empty room, I had just cut up my face and chest, now I was attempting to turn myself into a man who didn’t take himself seriously. And this idea, manifesting itself simultaneously with the impulse to laugh, made unbearable the thought of the instant that would ensue. So I postponed it by laughing longer than strictly necessary. I clung to the image of myself in bed, the saw in my hands, the two bleeding stumps of legs, the eager movements, until the dregs of comic potential were squeezed out of it. But this extended laughter was no longer caused by an impulse outside consciousness, it was thought-induced, and therefore false. I pretended to laugh. To myself. I pretended to laugh to myself.
Exhausted I got to my feet and went up to the bedroom again. I must have fallen asleep instantly, for the next thing I remember was that the room was filled with light, and it was almost eleven a.m.
Oh, it was so good to see the sun again.
Then I remembered what I’d done, and the despair was cold and unendurable. Why hadn’t I just said no? No to the thing inside me that wanted it?
I stayed in bed for a long time, crying.
When it had passed, I went over to the window and looked down at the dock.
“Sniveling doesn’t exactly do me any good,” I said to myself. “There’s no one else here! I’m the only person here!”
I got dressed, went into the bathroom, wet a towel with ice-cold water, and laid it first against my chest, and then my face.
I didn’t look in the mirror.
A desire for more pain revealed itself, and I didn’t say no to it despite what I’d just thought in the bedroom. Pain has something to do with eternity, I’ve always thought, not the slight, short pain, but the pain that throbs and churns and keeps on.
The craving for more, more, more.
I sat on the edge of the bath and began to fill it with water. So hot as to be unendurable was the idea. The scalding hot water on my burning chest and burning face. When it was full, I undressed and dipped a foot in. But it was too hot.
I won’t lose any face over it, I thought. I let out a little of the water and added some cold, got into the bath, and submerged my body.
Even though the temperature was normal, my face and chest began to sting. The room was full of steam, and I opened the little window above the bath, and the steam tumbled into the air outside. At the same moment the water pump began to thud down in the cellar. It sounded as if I were onboard a ship.
When the vapor was out of the room, the water I sat in continued to steam, as if the outside air were peeling gossamer-thin layers off it, I thought, and looked out the window. It was as small as a hatch, but through it I could see the gravel road on the edge of the bay, parts of the neighboring houses and boathouses, the grassy slope up to the lighthouse, the waves that beat on the skerries on the seaward side of the island. These last were especially strange to dwell on, surrounded as my body was with water. Wasn’t there something ingenious about lying in a container full of water several feet above the ground, staring out across the sea? Whenever I thought this, I would sometimes feel a yearning, and it must be yearning in its purest form, because I never knew what I was yearning for. But I liked it; that sudden feeling of expectation, with its quivering nerves and abrupt rush of joy in the breast, was enough in itself. Now and then I would lie there for several hours just staring, without concentrating on what I saw, so that the landscape and its many small events glided dreamily together — at one moment migratory birds stand out against the light blue sky above the hillside, the next I see them land on the telephone wire between the house and the pole on the rise, five yards away, where for several minutes they busy themselves changing places with one another, as if controlled by short, electric impulses — up, over, down, up, over, down — and then they vanish. A fishing boat comes nosing through the inlet, it heaves to just outside the skerry by the northern end of the island, first a man throws out a grapnel, then he stands by the rail and begins to fish with a jig. The door of the house across the bay opens, a dog runs out, followed by my neighbor, with long strides he walks along the road, the dog all the while scurrying back and forth in front of him. Then the door is slammed once more, the boat is gone, the dog tied up in the yard.
It was as if holes had opened in the surface of time, I sometimes thought, where the drop in pressure was so great that the surrounding time was somehow drawn in to fill the vacuum. But also another time was operating, deep below these small ripples on the surface, a force concealed from me that stole hours and minutes, days and weeks, months and years, in whose rhythm my days were little more than the flash of a lighthouse in the darkness of night.
But what did I think about during these periods that could so pucker up the surface of time?
Nothing, I’m sorry to say. Often I couldn’t say what had been happening outside while I lay there, or what I’d actually thought about. No will, no thoughts, no feelings. Only a heart that beat, lungs that breathed, eyes that the changes in the landscape passed through.
I let my body slip under the surface once more, closed my eyes, felt my hair billow gently backward and forward in the water.
Outside a chain saw started up. I stretched over and looked toward my neighbor’s boathouse, where the sound was coming from. He was standing before a great, thick log, which he’d presumably found drifting in a bay earlier that morning. I saw how the chain whirled around, glittering in the sun, and the sawdust began to spurt from the log and cover the light green grass like snow. The blue waves that rolled up the beach just below.