You don’t believe it, though. You’re not one of those people who still carry around a futile hope after five years, twenty years, twenty-five years have passed, and you remember what the psychiatrist said, how when someone finally convinces themselves to do it, they get excited, cheerful, they seem happy, energetic, and everyone thinks they’re getting better, but in fact they’re not getting better, they’re just grimly, morbidly happy because they’ve finally decided to do it, and you remember what that train engineer said, how the bright headlights had shown a woman headed straight for the tracks, how she’d had a great big smile on her face, an apparently happy smile, a last happy smile, before she got splattered all over the front of the train, but it wasn’t her, that was just a documentary you heard on the radio, and it was awful to listen to, but you listened to it nonetheless. It couldn’t have been her, because her body was never found, although you’re sure she’s dead, and the worst part is, you can’t be sure she doesn’t have a soul, and, therefore you can’t be sure she’s not in hell, you don’t think she is, it goes against all reason to think that, but what really gnaws at you is that there’s no way to be absolutely one hundred percent sure. It doesn’t help to tell yourself that these aren’t thoughts you’ve freely chosen, that they’re thoughts that have been forced upon you, they’re thoughts that think against you, they’re thoughts like an executioner’s tongs around your limbs, they’re thoughts that push and shove and herd you into a corner, though you have no idea why they want you there, only that they do in fact want you there. You realize now that you’ve got a death grip on the aluminum metal railing, and that you don’t have your gloves on, and that your fingers are freezing. You shove your hands into your pockets. A big trailer with a flapping tarpaulin throws ice-cold air your way as it vanishes beneath your feet.
The dog is enormous, it comes to above his thigh, it has thick gray fur, it looks like a cross between a musk ox and a wolf, and even though the young man with the leather jacket has got it on a leash, you can tell the older man with the gray beard is still afraid. The young man’s voice is low but intense; all you can hear are snippets. we don’t own the exclusive rights to joie de vivre. and . some must sacrifice so that others. You see that the bushes and trees out in front of the building have been swaddled in burlap against the coming winter. Religious people, you think, drone on about the mortal coil and the soul shaking off its earthly bonds, and in a way she is free, because she’s well beyond the reach of all sickness, all injury, all breast cancer, arthritis, psoriasis, kidney failure, angina pectoris, blindness, hemiplegia, appendicitis, diabetes, brain tumors, blood clots, slipped discs, muscular atrophy, fractured thighs, cuts, cerebral hemorrhages, the list would go on forever, you think, if you cataloged every misfortune that could befall someone over a long lifetime; when you come right down to it, she’s as invulnerable as a fluffy white cloud floating over a bloody battlefield on a bright summer’s day, but she’s not floating, you think, because she’s not in heaven, she’s lying in the ground, waiting, maybe she’s lying in the same ground you walk over every day, just lying there waiting, because if she’s going to go to hell, then she’s not there yet, in fact, she’s got no idea hell exists, she’s past all earthly experience, to put it bluntly, she’s dead, literally dead to the world, and, therefore she has no concept of time, which means that the time spent waiting is like no time at all, and even if thousands of years were to pass between Judgment Day and the resurrection, it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her, and the fact that you can be walking around knowing that Judgment Day and the resurrection haven’t happened yet doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her, because she has no knowledge of it, and when she’s raised from the dead and wakes up in hell, the transition will be instantaneous, speaking phenomenologically, it’ll feel like she was never gone at all, the transition from her very last moments of life on Earth to an eternity in hell will be direct, after all, the dead don’t care if only ten days or a whole ten thousand years have passed between the moment of death and the day of resurrection, which just goes to show, you think, that these religious hypotheses are presumptuous, to say the least, because they nullify time as a dimension, and they punish those sins and reward those good deeds that were committed in time outside of time.
Though most of it has come off, the price tag on the windowpane doesn’t completely peel off this time either. The paper is still stuck to the glue in grungy, whitish strips resembling fuzzy mold, and it doesn’t help that the letters and numbers have become unreadable, that only one corner of the original surface, once a perfect rectangle printed with text, is all that remains (though there’s less of it now, since this time you’re able to scratch some of it away); graffiti and price tags, which can both be removed, and which both always spring up in another place, are like parasites, unconscious urban parasites, and they really bug you. You give it up. You unlock the door. The sight of your apartment makes you remember. You lost weight, you only slept three or four hours a night, that is, if you slept at all, you trembled uncontrollably, suffered through crying jags, you barely had enough energy to go to the store, your apartment was filthy, showering was a true Herculean task, your toothbrush felt as heavy as a hammer; it was like the combined weight of her disappearance and the high probability of her death rested on a piece of sandpaper that was in the process of whittling you down to nothing.
Since the bouillon is scalding hot, you drink it in small sips, though you clutch the bowl to warm yourself while you rest your elbows on the table. You shove the package of cassettes aside. You don’t know why you went and bought the damn things after all this time. It’s not like you’ve got anything left worth recording, you think; you’d originally planned to record moments of your life, but you’re not living life anymore, it’s like you’ve been shelved, placed in storage, stuck in a meat locker, and the only sound in a meat locker is the hum of the motor, the same hum day after day, never growing louder, never growing softer, just the sound of that motor, like a hum, almost a buzz, and the persistent cold wouldn’t register on tape anyway. It’s ironic, you think, that in order to keep food fresh, you make it inedible by freezing it. You’re not hungry. The water’s boiling. The two sausages in the pot have split their skin. You’re glad about that. It’s cathartic to watch something split apart. You lift your head and look out the window. It’s not snowing yet.
Sparklers. A ring of them around a bottle of champagne left to cool in the snow. Each small stick had sputtered, sparkled, and glowed with a pulsating white light, she’s the one who brought them, your hands were freezing back then, too, but it didn’t matter, you warmed them in her coat pockets while you watched the fireworks display in the snow. She had no head for the big picture, no, she had absolutely no head for the big picture, sometimes she didn’t know what year it was, or what country she lived in, but she was amazing with the little things, she was a wellspring of surprises, small gifts, which, you think, is exactly what you shouldn’t be thinking about right now, because you know where it’ll end, but you can’t stop yourself, the little hill leading down to the flat, snow-covered ground was slippery, so you’d held onto each other as you slid down it, and she was the one who patted down the snow around the open champagne bottle, stuck the sparklers in a ring and lit them, all but two, which you held in your hands. Two sparkling fountains, two miniature comets in the process of burning out, and there were brief flashes of light cast back from countless mirrors, from a different place each time; under the empty, cloudless, uneventful, intensely blue midsummer sky, you can see how the water on the horizon looks like a shimmering, rippling expanse of tin, which appears almost black in places, before it grows lighter (a long, narrow streak), then darker again, then greenish as it nears land, then yellowish, until, finally, it’s clear where water meets sand, when the waves, which a few minutes ago looked like a glittering streak on the water’s surface way out toward the small islands, are blown shoreward to break on the beach in smooth, foamy tendrils, constantly renewed, which are bowed and paper-thin, translucent membranes with even tinier ripples or wrinkles on their surface, an endless supply of waves rolling in, each casting thin films of water over the fine-grained sand, which is mixed with small pebbles that the sea has worn thin and satiny smooth, not to mention the last remains of creeping, crawling beach life (black and bone-dry above the high-water mark), namely, shell fragments belonging to mussels, lobsters, crabs, snails, barnacles, sundry tiny creatures, all these hard objects the sea eventually crushes and grinds to pieces after the life has left them, the same way the sea slowly turns stones to sand with a patience that only something completely insentient (and no animal driven by instinct) possesses. Aside from the small boats and the eternally restless sea birds, and despite the shimmering ripples and lapping waves, the whole thing gives you an impression of immutable tranquility.