The capital. You’ll obviously have to take a boat to the capital every now and then to withdraw money from your account (the island might have its own bank, you’re not sure), to make any special purchases, swing by a bar, a restaurant, a brothel (if necessary), but otherwise you’ll spend your days swimming, sailing, fishing, organizing a shell collection, building a ship in a bottle, gathering breadfruit and hacking coconuts open with a machete, wandering along the beach, strolling through the woods, sitting on the terrace, sipping a drink while reading newspapers and magazines out of date by a week, a month, reading about events and people that don’t concern you now and that will never concern you again.
The men who are starting their workday or continuing their workday even before the day’s really begun, down there in the scorching heat and metal fumes, you imagine them sweating and toiling away, protecting their eyes with glasses, their heads with helmets, their faces with masks, their hands with asbestos gloves, their feet with steel-toed boots, their lungs with dust-absorbent cloths, down there in blue-collar hell, clueless idiots torturing body and soul for every red cent, and the worst of it, you think, is that they can’t imagine doing anything else, they can’t even fantasize about living a life without work, they’d never accept a paycheck for sitting on their asses (when people like that have a day or even half a day free, they throw themselves into any number of other projects, like carpentry, painting, wallpapering, brick or tile laying, car repairs, roof repairs, weeding, ditch digging, woodcutting, hedge clipping, lacquering, insulating, welding, finishing basements, furnishing attics, and so on, with a frenetic urgency, you’ve seen it, as if they’d been diagnosed with chronic work syndrome and knew their bodies would crumble to a fistful of dust if they stopped moving even for a moment) and therefore, you think, they don’t understand the true value of money, they think it’s only good for buying things, whereas, you realize, with a sudden flash of insight, what it actually guarantees is freedom from work (presuming you’ve got enough of it), from any and all work; a smile tugs at the corner of your mouth as you drive by in your taxi and think of all the stupid idealists who’d rather slave for the state than for a private firm, who think it’s better to crawl on their bellies through public shit than make a living crawling through private shit, who believe hauling a res publica baby grand up five flights of stairs will give you less of a backache than a commercially owned piano, and you smile as you think of all the people bitching and moaning about unemployment, as if idleness, not work itself, were the problem, as if standing in line to get by was more grueling than trying to maintain an earnings account (with all its attendant pleasures); all those idiots, you think, who don’t understand the fact that work itself should be abolished, who haven’t even tried to abolish it in their own lives. Sleepwalkers. Mice. Mice on little pink plastic wheels in a pet-shop window, mice expending useless energy on machinery owned by somebody else.
When the taxi starts up again, your head is sucked back against the seat, so your chin juts straight out, and the shopping center, which is still closed, vanishes behind you. Without taking the weapon out, you (silently) undo the safety and curl your pointer finger halfway around the trigger, just a hint at the gesture that will for now remain unfinished. Then you withdraw your hand from the bag. You see the driver looking at you in the rearview mirror, when he’s not keeping an eye on traffic, that is, but he seems to be watching your face (which probably looks flat and preoccupied; perhaps he mistakes you for one of the very few veteran drug addicts who’ve managed to reach their mid-forties), more than your hands. You tell him that you’ve changed your mind, that you don’t need to go all the way to the forest’s edge, that instead you can get out at the first bus stop (you point) after the light.
The morning sun has reached the empty white flagpoles that stick up out of the enormous soccer field, which together with its walls of bleachers and narrow windows resembles a medieval citadel, and you recall that people have actually died in similar sports arenas, which come to resemble battlefields, and in a way are built for war, although they’re not meant to keep invaders out, but to keep opposing sides in; a long time ago, soccer games (presumably) took place off the field, and were (presumably) played in different ways from village to village, including, but not limited to, kicks and punches delivered to your opponent; therefore, you think, it was ultimately the demand for order, for game regulation that has since led to scenes of catastrophic disorder, when a mass of spectators, or at least one part of them, decide to run amok behind the arena’s protective, citadel-like, Romanesque walls, whereupon the strictly regulated playing field, with its white lines and banners, becomes a scene of terrifying chaos. You also think of all the betting slips you’ve turned in over the last twenty years, and the fact that you’ve never won much.
They’ve begun their leisurely springtime detonation, they’re more than buds now, and you can see how each chanterelle-shaped shoot (which looks like a tiny frozen splash) will soon explode to form a clearly defined leaf, whose bright, hazy green will eventually outshine the sooty, greenish-brown tangle of twigs, like a spotlight with a colored filter being turned up little by little until it reaches its full brilliance; eventually the bush will be covered by countless clusters of green leaves, and you’re suddenly reminded of the bushes at school all those years back, and how you could slide your thumb and forefinger up a thorny twig with a quick, firm motion and end up with a little rosette of leaves pinched between your two fingers, like a handful of tiny, green bills that were worth less than Monopoly money, that were only good for tossing in a playmate’s face. Cheap laughs. This summer will be as cold and rainy as it always is, you think. Somehow or other you’ve got to come up with the cash. You’re getting impatient. The reflection of light from an awning window being pushed out (on the top floor of the office building opposite) hits you squarely in the face, causing you to shut your eyes instinctively (a second too late, as always), though this time it’s only an intense, bluish white burst of light, as if a bomb were going off outside your window, accompanied by an almost simultaneous report (which literally causes the panes to rattle), and sounds more like a canon shot in a shipyard (or something along those lines) than a rolling, peeling crash of thunder heard at a distance ever does.