Daphne, when she understands what’s happened, begins to laugh. The more downcast he looks, the more she laughs uncontrollably. For her, the thing isn’t serious at all, it’s a gas. She wets her hand with his angelic sperm, and still laughing, spreads it on her thighs and belly. With her index finger she paints three lines across her forehead, and dots the lobes of both ears. Now he laughs too, not entirely willingly. She understands it’s better not to make too much of it, and begins to caress his head, his fine, very black hair. She kisses his neck and his lovely neatly shaped Indian nose. Sorry, she whispers between one kiss and another. Afterwards you get another chance, she says. It’s not easy not to laugh, but she’s determined to control herself.
They begin to kiss and touch each other as before. He’s smiling now, but his breathing is a bit odd, like a dog when it’s terribly thirsty. Or as if he’s had a great fright, or is still fearful of something. She makes every effort to put him at his ease. She’s not worried; she’s known cases like this and they usually resolve themselves in no time at all. She kisses him all over, and touches his private parts very expertly. But he’s terribly awkward. He’s as gorgeous as the sun itself, and his head with its glints of petroleum seems to glow with a halo of purest light. But his body is as tense as a steel cable holding up a suspension bridge. And he’s not smiling anymore. He doesn’t want to look like a fool, but his member is just not getting hard. And he doesn’t think it will get hard later, and the more he thinks about it, the more unlikely it seems it ever will. This is why he feels bad. He’d like to be able to say Stand to attention right now, as a god could. But he is merely a normal human being.
He’s young, full of energy, he knows he’s very attractive, he wants that girl above all things, but for some reason his member just lies there shriveled up like a punctured football. It doesn’t want to harden, not even a little. This is why he’s so ill at ease, why the cold sweat. He never dreamed something like this could happen. He’d like to be somewhere deep underground, not in that fish tank made into a bed. Daphne tries again to rouse him, she changes position and takes him in her mouth, cupping his testicles in one hand and poking her naughty fingers between his buttocks—a recipe that’s usually infallible. The Hellenic member remains limp, while Aryaman has become a marble statue, his expression a baroque wince of pain. It’s beautiful, like everything about him, but still a mask of suffering. It’s clear he just wants to die. She switches out of sex mode, and draws him close, pats his back and his head to make him understand that it’s nothing serious. Actually, the thing makes her feel even more tender about him. And above all, she loves lying next to that beautiful body as night begins to fall. It makes her happy.
Soon she’s asleep. It’s a very deep and slightly unnatural sleep: an immersion in the abyss of anesthesia, or a voyage to Hades. When she wakes it’s totally dark outside and there’s no one by her side. She sits up and leans over the edge of the tank to look around, but the Indian isn’t there. The events of the day pass through her mind, but as if they had taken place a long time ago, and the contours are vague. She tries to focus, asking herself how that heavenly young man could have known of her hacking activities, given that she’d never talked to anyone about them, and certainly not her neighbor. That too is very strange. But it was no dream: there’s a large stain on the sheet that’s still not entirely dry. She sniffs it: yep, it’s semen. And there are two empty glasses in front of the sofa. The printer cable is still looped over the back of the chair with the legs sawed off.
The following afternoon when she returns from the supermarket she stops by her neighbor’s, and as always he receives her with heartrending smiles, patting the palms of his hands together like a man applauding. Her throat caught in a noose, she asks if his cousin is still staying there. He stares at her, blinking his deep-set eyes in their dark orbits; he doesn’t understand. Articulating her words carefully, she explains that she met his cousin the day before; he came by to ask for a printer cable, and she wanted to know if they had solved the problem. He continues to smile very politely, but he still doesn’t understand, if anything he understands less. Your cousin, she says, pointing a finger at him and looking around. I have many cousins, but they are not here, he says, pleased to have finally grasped what she’s saying.
Okay, but yesterday afternoon your cousin came by to ask me for a printer cable, she says again, arms miming a printer and a cable. She thinks she may be going crazy. Her body seems to be leaving her, it seems to be turning to dry wood. With his usual delicious Hindu politeness, but also very firmly, he repeats that none of his cousins are in the vicinity. Maybe next year my cousin comes, he says, waving a hand to make it clear it’s still not certain. This time he doesn’t smile, he seems unhappy to disappoint her. She apologizes and drags her wooden legs over to the old fishmonger’s, looking around for some proof that yesterday’s otherworldly encounter indeed took place. But she had washed the glasses before going off to the supermarket and cleaned up in the hopes the celestial Indian would return. There are no other signs of his supernatural apparition. She goes to look at the sheet, but the stain is no more. She inspects it inch by inch passing the fabric between her hands, but no stain is to be found. By some strange set of circumstances (set of circumstances!) it disappeared when it dried out. Just evaporated. She hunkers down on the floor and begins to cry, and the blind cat leaps onto her knees, muttering in the furtive but high-strung language of cats that yes, it is a bad, bad moment.
EXTERMINATE THE THOUGHTS
I’ve hit rock bottom. It’s language that reduced me to this state, it’s the agitating, incitement-to-riot effect of the written word and the smokescreen of uncontrolled feelings that words belch out, as the fire grows more and more enraged with each bucket of gasoline tossed on it. Every language contains all the folly that humans are capable of; language just spills it from their mouths. It makes no difference whether it’s coming from the oral cavity of a god or of the last clandestine migrant to arrive; the important thing so far as language is concerned is to foment, to befoul, to devastate. You write one sentence and you toss on the first bucket of gasoline, immediately the flames of hyperbole and intolerable grief flare up, and the more you write, the crazier you get, the more you’re convinced you believe what you’ve said, the more you’re on your way to pure madness, to plotting nefarious plots. Whereas if you never think, or worse, write, you won’t have moods or feelings, and you can live blissfully and serenely for billions of years. With no risk of screwing up.
The problems arise with the very first thought, whatever it is. Because that first damn thought will immediately invite another, which will be: Am I right to think that? Not to mention the third, which will almost certainly contradict the first, without, however, dismissing the second. And the fourth will be Why do I exist? and the fifth, Do I really exist? and the sixth, Am I in love? and so forth and so on, and all the while you’re behaving ever more inappropriately, ever more rashly. Thoughts are infectious, they contaminate actions, they create monsters.