‘All that remains is what is gone. Deep, deep eternity. But they want a Creator. To have their existence confirmed. Oh, the cowardly sanctification of Creation. The emotion! The ideals! The piss-ants! Their mysterium tremendum! But destruction is the only thing with permanence. The future belongs only to the anti-Creator.’
The laughter of someone who has been alone too long. I felt like running away or weeping, how could this jousting with the gods and with people end in anything but self-destruction? I didn’t run, however, I remained seated until the film came back to the moment where I had arrived the day before, the explosion of the mountain’s face; only then did I leave the Ka’abah.
The street didn’t help me catch my breath. This man, and I was his son. Abgrund rolled you in the coils of a man’s inner world and squeezed the life out of you. Now I had two parents in need of saving.
My life of nights began. The symbiosis. Nights during which her face beneath me against the white sheet flowed into other, all-too-familiar faces. Perhaps it was the fatigue, perhaps the ecstasy, but I often saw those faces rise up through hers like air bubbles — when we made love, or afterwards, when I lay on her like a gravestone and felt her heartbeat gradually diminish. Before my eyes, as they searched for a grip in the dusky darkness, I saw my drawing teacher Eve Prescott appear, and once, to my surprise, that of Daisy Farnsworth, a homely girl from my class. I closed my eyes to Paula Loyd, when she came swimming towards me through the milk of the night; when I opened them again it was Sarah looking at me. Let me be frank and admit that sometimes it was my mother’s face as well, and that I was powerless when it came to my brain’s nocturnal projections.
And so we drowned in each other, and were washed up at the first light of day in that little room somewhere in the world.
‘I have to get going,’ she said. ‘Stay as long as you want.’
She sat straight up in bed. She looked at me, the smile of someone still halfway in the dream. I had become a stammerer, someone who said, ‘You, your back, nice.’
My fingertips slid over the curve of muscle beneath her skin.
‘What are you going to demonstrate against today?’
A little sound of protest.
‘You know, some people have to hold down a job too, Ludwig.’
A few mornings a week she went to La Cienega to raise her voice against Schultz’s work. I had been waiting for the right moment to tell her, but the longer I put it off the more of a secret it became. I feared what might come of it. Euphoria and dread were never far apart, they took turns racing like relay runners. I was going to tell her. Soon. She would understand that I wasn’t him, that his hateful, pitch-black visions were not hereditary. I asked myself why I didn’t tell her right away. Was it because I wasn’t entirely sure of how they, Schultz and my mother, manifested themselves in me? Mightn’t the perversion and violence smolder on in me, Caesarion, the confluence of those two egos who had sought to reproduce themselves?
Sarah sighed and climbed out of bed, picking from among the things lying on the floor what she would wear that day.
The afternoon after seeing Abgrund for the second time, I went to Venice to wait for evening. A bar at beachside, a hamburger and a Coke, please (I’m in America, goddamn it, I’ll bloody well eat whatever I like), and inside me the certainty that I will go in search of him. Not now, not right away, but I would find him, as soon as my mother and I once again had solid ground beneath our feet. What makes me think that he longs for me the way I do for him? What makes me think that I can comfort him? That I am the only one who can enter the cage without him devouring me? In my thoughts he is always Schultz, never Father or Papa. Papa sounds preposterous, like sticking your tongue in someone’s ear the moment you meet them. I whisper Papa to him, a few times in a row, Papapapa, and can’t help laughing, it sounds more taunting than intimate.
‘Your Coke, sir. Hamburger’s on its way.’
Schultz was right, eternity belongs to that which is gone. In the same way that he, his running away, has established the course of our lives. We have lived around his absence. And then, clear as can be, the insight that she, Marthe Unger, has re-entered the light in order to be seen by him. She shows herself to the world in the hope that, somewhere in that world, his eye will fall on her. The splendor of her body, which she has kept for him, and now given back to the marketplace. The marketplace she had left because she loved him — a sacrifice he hadn’t asked for and perhaps hadn’t even wanted. Had it excited him to possess the woman who elicited such boundless desire? Was his interest, his fire, extinguished once she had given up that role for him? There had been no great crises, no drawn-out arguments poisoning the relationship, nothing had occurred that might have justified his leaving. Perhaps, when he came up to her in New York and introduced himself, he had assumed the desire of all those others, perhaps it had fed his love for her, and he had realized his mistake only on Rue Mahmoud Abou El Ela, once the others were no longer around; they were alone together now, they had only each other to fall back on.
A ragged procession of joggers, cyclists and skaters moved past the restaurant patio. I read free tabloids till the afternoon was over. Suddenly there was the encirclement of mist. The temperature dropped sharply. I paid the tab and walked into the cloud, which seemed to drip lightly, a bedewed spider’s web. I followed the trail back. I was a man on his way to claim his prize. The sensation of being able to look through walls, to see their little lives. I padded lightly down their streets, the shadow of an unstoppable predator sliding across the house fronts.
The little car was parked in front of her house, one wheel up on the curb. Two steps at a time I ascended to her castle in the air and barged into her world with a bang.
‘Jesus, Ludwig!’
Candles, incense.
‘I’ve been running all day,’ I said. ‘All I can do is run. I don’t know what it is.’
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing a white undershirt with wide armholes.
She said, ‘I spent ninety minutes in traffic and sang real loud along with Lenny Kravitz. So don’t I deserve a kiss?’
Yes, that and more. We rolled around on the bed like young cats, at the center of that little galaxy. At the head of the bed a votive candle was burning in front of a photo I hadn’t noticed before. Disentangling myself, I leaned on the mattress in order to get a better look. Two hands cupped to form a shallow bowl, in them something unformed, a slimy wad, black, tarlike. I exhaled loudly and said, ‘What is that for a mess?’
I recognized my mistake right away, saw how she answered my disgust with even more disgust. She rolled away from under me and was standing beside the bed in the same motion. Moving to the little window, she stood there, her arms crossed, ponderous, silent. This was what I had been afraid of, the wrong word, the evil charm that signaled the start of the destruction. I gasped for air, for words. I had to undo something, but didn’t know what I’d done.
‘Sarah, what’s wrong?’
‘Don’t say anything.’
Disaster was flying in on huge wings, the message it croaked was the inconstancy of all happiness. One wrong move and you find yourself irrevocably out of love. I stammered apologies and climbed off the bed. Across the twilight-blue room the severity fell from her slowly, like dry husks. The picture behind the candle, I saw now, was like a domestic altar. On the shelf there was incense, a silver rattle, something that looked a pile of herbs.