I might have continued thus forever, drifting, slowly pondering the array of possibilities always open before me without ever definitively choosing one, had it not been for the appearance, two days past in my hat, among the worn, discarded coins of strangers, of a crumpled scrap of brown paper. Having been hurriedly balled up, it slowly expanded as I watched it. On it was traced in grease a notational siglum indicating, I realized, that the administration was not satisfied with my report, with my resignation.
What more can I say? This second, supplemental report I hope will answer whatever questions remain. When I have finished it, I will once again find the theater. I will leave this, the last of my notebooks, on what seems to me the proper seat, and will flee. Where I will go, I don’t know, nor can I say what will become of me.
I have, if I am to be honest with myself, felt myself observed for some time. Nothing I can place my finger on, just a deep, uneasy feeling: a ghost of movement, a flicker. Perhaps over time this will fade. Perhaps not.
Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?
Bauer in the Tyrol
Late in the year, during a trip to the Tyrol, the sky so gray throughout the day that he felt himself to be living in a perpetual twilight, Bauer lost confidence in his ability to work with plaster. Stuck a dozen kilometers outside of Imst, his wife ill and watching him from her bed in the mountain inn, he spread newspapers over the parquet floor between the bed and the wall. Sitting on the bed, his back turned to her, his knees nearly touching the wall, he began mixing the plaster in a bucket stolen from behind the inn, bending the armature wire into slender standing figures which he set upon the windowsill. He could feel his wife’s eyes on his back, never for a moment did not feel them, and perhaps it was this, he told himself at first, which was causing him to lose confidence. He could feel her eyes and hear her cough, and could hear as well, when she was not coughing and even sometimes hidden within the cough itself, the way the air caught in her throat as she breathed. Through the window, past the stiff wire figures, he could see a sky as dull as a pewter plate, fog, scraggled pine swags. If he opened the window, he could hear the awful torrent of the river and the screeching of unfamiliar birds — sounds that dampened out, at least for an instant, the air catching in his wife’s throat. But sounds that proved in the end at least as irritating. He would reach into the bucket and scoop up plaster in his hand, smearing and clomping it onto first one armature and then another until there was an array of lumpy figures glistening on the sill. They were, at that moment, not bad, even bearable — standing figures, barely human, each no taller than a pencil and nearly as thin, as if seen from a great distance, hands to sides — but nothing special either, nothing he had not done before, no progress, a standstill. He would sit watching them as long as he could bear, a sheen condensing on the surface of the wet plaster — the air is wrong here, he told himself, it is not me, but a problem with the air. But soon, he took each figure up again, prodded it with his fingers or his pocketknife or a wire, gouged it down to nothing or pushed more plaster onto it until he had thoroughly ruined it. Then, stripping each figure down to bare armature, he would begin again, working from the gray of the morning sky to the gray of the evening sky without success, until plaster made his fingers too thick, until plaster was daubed all over the curtains and on the sill and on his legs too, the wire figures destroyed and cast aside.
Lighting the wick, he lay on the bed beside his wife, trying not to touch her. He lay there regarding the ceiling, listening to the air catch in his wife’s throat. The quality of the air, he told himself again, was wrong, thus the failure of his figures in plaster, thus the way said air caught in his wife’s throat. She wanted nothing, would eat nothing. If he brought her food, she softly refused to eat it; water she sipped at once or twice and then pushed the tumbler away. Once or twice in the evenings, in the first evenings of their unexpected and sudden residence in the mountain inn, she would stop breathing for a moment, just long enough to gather her breath and open her mouth to speak. He should go out, she would suggest, he was not needed, he should get some fresh air. He hardly bothered to answer, just lay on the bed beside her, tightening his jaw slightly. Soon she stopped talking altogether, and when he looked over, her eyes were closed, her breath still catching in her throat in that terrible way that made him wish she were dead.
He lay there until the candle guttered and went out, and some nights he kept lying there still, in the dark, his eyes open. One night, he stuffed bits of paper into his ears and covered them over with semihard plaster from the bucket. Then, he could not hear her, but he could still feel her beside him, the fevered heat steaming off her, her body turning there and there, and he could hear the sound of his own blood too loud in his ears, and that was as bad to him as his wife’s breathing, perhaps worse. The bed, too, he felt was too narrow, and to keep from touching his wife, her damp flesh, he found himself at the very edge of it, one shoulder hanging off. He would stay there and after a time either fall into a terrible, fitful state adjacent to sleep or lie there until he was certain he could not sleep, then get up, leave the room, go down the hall to the common bathroom, where he would sit all night, carving at a cake of soap with his pocketknife. The soap, too, frittered away, growing slowly smaller and smaller until he was working with a brittle splinter of it hardly bigger than his thumbnail, a tiny, vanishing human figure, hardly human at all. And soon he would cut once too deeply and it would crumble to nothing in his hands.
The air, he had been told, was invigorating. When he and his wife had arranged to make this trip to the Tyrol, they had been perpetually told, by everyone they met, that Tyrolean air was invigorating. He had not found it so, had found precisely the contrary: that the air was exvigorating, if such a thing could be said, there was something wrong with the air, a problem with the air. He would breathe it in, but each time he breathed out, it would take something from him. He would breathe sitting against the bathtub, his knife still in his hands, crumbs of soap over his hands and legs. He would breathe and then each time he exhaled he would think, there a little something, there a little something, and feel himself to be less and less. But, he would tell himself, it has not yet reached the point where there is little enough of me that that little something catches in my throat when it goes. He would close his eyes, thinking, there a little something, there a little something, and then for a few hours, on the bathroom floor, he would fitfully sleep.
In the mornings, particularly, it was clear to him that his wife was dying, and each day it was clearer still. He knew he was waiting in this inn for her to be dead, that in the bed beside her he was waiting, knowing that each time he climbed into bed beside her again, a little more of her was dead. One day the breath would catch in her throat and stay caught, and then she would be dead for good. There was, he argued with himself in the morning, looking at his wife sprawled in the bed, no real moment between dead and not dead for the body, for the body was changing, always changing, but even as he said it he wondered if it were not a lie.
And then, as the day progressed: plaster again, his back to his wife, the windowsill. No cough now, cough gone a few days back, a lessening, only the sound of air catching in her throat, and the body no longer so moist, harder to sense now with his back to it, closer in its dryness to bone. The catch in her throat still hard to hear, but in a different way now, like a clock. As he worked, as he destroyed the slender plaster figures one after the other, then built them up again, then destroyed them again, he found himself turning to look at her, her closed eyes, her face. The structure of her face seemed to have changed, he thought, the skin wrinkling differently, and it was hard to think of her in the same way, as the same woman, which made him, above all, a little less disgusted, a little more curious.