This time the candle is positioned on the seat of a red leather chair, which illuminates the woman on the stool at chest height. She’s clearly wearing a nightgown, which has been drawn up to her thigh and is also falling open, so that her breasts tumble out. Her hair is wrapped up in some kind of scarf or turban, her face wears an expression of mute concentration, she’s bending her head so her neck disappears and it looks like she’s got a double chin, her lowered eyelids tell you she’s focused on her hands, which she holds between her stomach and breasts, while she clenches them tightly together so that only the thickest finger joints are visible, entwined (taken out of context, they actually resemble horse teeth); her thumbs are bent and pressed together at the nail, where, if you look closely, you can see (or think you can see) the louse she’s in the process of squishing, hence the candle placed at chest height. You call to mind the popular theology prevalent in her century, the belief that from the dawn of creation it was already predetermined which souls would enjoy eternal salvation and which would suffer eternal damnation, so that the damned were damned long before they ever actually existed, and the saved were saved long before they ever existed too, and life, strictly speaking, was just a superfluous, symptomatic demonstration of what had already been decided and would remain so from eternity to eternity; in which case, you think, earthly life might as well be declared null and void, and the damned simply declared damned directly in the hereafter and the saved saved directly in the hereafter and then the damned sent straight to hell and the saved sent straight to heaven, from eternity to eternity, without letting ordinary life break out like a pox, and in that case your scars wouldn’t have had to wait millions of years to meet your face, instead they would’ve been standing there all along, distinct and clear as Cartesian ideas from eternity to eternity.
The small popping sound where nail meets nail and the louse meets its end. Maybe it’s audible in the otherwise empty room. Maybe she can feel the fetus moving inside her, as her hands rest upon her swollen stomach, where the fetus is growing, its cells continually splitting, while the louse, for its part, is dying between her thumbnails. In any case, at least this woman is focused on something real, something that actually is (namely, the louse), in contrast to the first woman, who sits by her mirror in apparently richer surroundings and meditates over death and transience, focusing all her mental energy on what doesn’t exist, or doesn’t yet exist, or once existed, or something that contains all these qualities, because she’s not staring at a louse, or at the mirror, or at the flame, or at the flame’s reflection in the mirror, no, she seems to be staring at the darkness, or at the contrast between the light and the darkness, as if she’s already anticipating the darkness that’ll fall the moment the flame flickers, flares up, and dies, or more precisely, the moment the red-orange glow vanishes from the wick, sending up a wisp of smoke (which will be invisible in the darkness), although she’ll recognize the strong, unmistakable scent of a candle gone out, but all she’ll see is the wavering afterimage left by the flame, and finally just a few flickering, fluctuating points of light.
That moment hasn’t arrived. There’s still time to wait and think, to stare into the mirror, as you’re doing now, without seeing anything but the glowing flame and its reflection, the elegant flame that flickers and writhes and shifts color, although it stays more or less blue around the wick, more or less red along the outer rim, or white, a white light filtering as though from a slit falling on a strip of paper, accompanied by a weak, rattling, grumbling, electrical sound, like the kind made by an old adding machine, and you realize you must have been traveling for a while now, though you don’t remember anything that happened after you stepped into the car. Obviously, it’s happened again, you’ve had a complete and total blackout without dreams or visions, and it lasted longer this time, as if your life were a film and some spiteful person had gone and clipped several minutes out of it, or as if it were a book with page after page of perfectly printed text, and then a blank page, and then perfectly printed text again, as if you’d been brain-dead, a dead brain stuck in a living body for about five minutes (or however long it’s been), and even though you’re awake, you’re in danger of disappearing again, it could happen any minute; you don’t like it, and you should probably see a doctor, you think, after you’ve done what needs to be done. There’s light enough (though the morning rush-hour traffic hasn’t even started) to see the buds on a birch tree, like little green tongues sticking out of dark husks, when the car stops at the next intersection, while, in answer to your question, the driver informs you that it’s a data feed with information about routes, mainly about routes, but also reports of bus stops with long lines, blocked roads, possible traffic accidents, hazardous driving conditions (for example, a drunk guy impeding traffic on this or that street), stolen cars, or other criminal activity.
The long, rolling Pacific thunder, which you can hear from your bungalow’s terrace up above the sandy beach, where blue waves gather themselves before being smashed to foam upon the sand, there’s no winter here, you think, no season but the long, endless summer, but even then trade winds ensure it never gets too hot. You ask if the machine lets him send messages out too, but the driver tells you that he has to use the radio for that. Your driver likes to go fast (he’s pushing the speed limit), but to keep the ride smooth, staying in high gear as he cruises along the four-lane highway. As you pass by, you see a store selling light fixtures, hundreds of them in every conceivable shape and size, and every one of them is lit inside the old, white, wooden house (probably a private residence once), as if the fixtures were a flock of odd creatures clumped together for the night, fireflies, say, or maybe a hive of bees, or else rocks, clusters of rocks containing gleaming crystals, precious stones, diamonds even, and, horrified, you contemplate the enormous electric bill this kind of extravagant advertising must produce, money that could’ve been better spent elsewhere.
Like white cliffs in the morning sun, right after the intersection with the two gas stations (competing businesses, one on each side of the street; a man in blue overalls is spraying down the asphalt with a long rubber hose in front of one), the massive high-rises, which seem lifeless and abandoned, a kind of gigantic monument of the past, temples, ziggurats, or mausoleums that cause explorers to speculate on why they could have been built and what function they might have served. Carefully, you slide your hand down into the brown bag and fondle the butt, with its well-rounded, ergonomic form, and your fingers close joyfully around it before you heft it, testing its weight, before abruptly letting the weapon drop back into the bag, without a sound, and instead rest your hand on the thick, padded door handle. You’re glad you know how to hold your tongue, otherwise they would’ve just laughed at you. You know the name of the island backward and forward, all of its weak, rolling vowels, like undulating waves, and the bungalow is supposed to be up the hillside a ways, with a view of lush green lava-formed ridges, and with the beach down below, located just a few minutes away down a winding path, a nice, leisurely stroll, you think, in the tropical warmth, which allows the perpetual use of shorts and sandals and a loose, short-sleeved shirt covered in flowers.
They work around the clock, probably to keep the ovens going: brown smoke floats on the spring breeze. You’ve seen the gigantic portal crane lower its circular magnet toward the veritable cairn of scrap metal, an amorphous pile of twisted shapes, old machinery, car wrecks (you take a moment to ponder whether the car you’re sitting in will ever end up there), tin plates rusted through, ruined vats, and so on, together with a random assortment of other pieces of metal, some larger, some smaller, whose original function is impossible to guess at now, and if someone told you the scrap-metal mountain was the result of an explosion, a terrorist bombing, a city at war, with such scrap pouring in day and night, the result of the perpetual war, you’d almost believe it; and it has a surprisingly subtle spectrum, which runs the gamut from soot black to snuff brown to brick red, though the predominate shade is dark brown, so that one could argue that the scraps are actually colorless, just as (until they’re smelted down) they’re functionless, superfluous; and you recall how the crane’s heavy, circular magnet was lowered like a safety harness from a helicopter toward the scrap heap, and how the powerful electric current was switched on (presumably by the crane’s operator, who sits in a compartment, like someone in a tree house, up at the top of the crane), so that a prescribed amount of scrap metal instantly became stuck to it, like pieces of Styrofoam stick to your fingers and are almost impossible to shake off (because of static electricity); at this point in the process, the crane would lift a trembling assortment of metal fragments off the large pile (although each time you’ve also noticed that a few pieces at the very bottom manage to free themselves from the magnet’s magical sphere, tumbling the few meters to the scrap heap below), up to a predetermined height, and (free now of hindrances) the crane (its huge portal shape spanning the factory complex) began to roll, accompanied by the squeaking, rumbling whine of its motors and other movable parts, especially from where its massive wheels met the tracks; at which point, when that crow’s nest of scrap metal had reached its target behind the foundry’s walls (something the crane operator could obviously judge from his vantage point on high), it was swiftly dropped straight down through a massive hole, where a fire was burning, you recall seeing the flickering reflection of flames and the puffs of smoke up along the walls; if you were more imaginative or more poetically inclined than you actually are, you could’ve compared the process to the descent of dead souls (the bits of scrap metal) into purgatory (the foundry), where, after a period of time, they’d emerge again in renewed, changed (purified) form, but that old-fashioned, forgotten symbolism simply doesn’t occur to you.