It’s better to sweat than to freeze, he thinks, but it’s not good to sweat. From where he’d sat beneath the umbrella on the café’s terrace he could almost see it all, a cartographic perspective, a bird’s-eye view, and the sand didn’t look like it had steadily crept up from the coast, as it’s done for centuries, but like a dull, sluggish river of glass had flowed down the valley to harden at the bay, and through the heat haze he could just make out a flock of small, white, apparently motionless sails framed by two green land masses; it was only by focusing on one of them that he could see how the distance between a boat and, for example, one of the islands steadily decreased, until the sail was completely lost to sight behind it.
It’s dark now. But not completely dark, because a little light still slips in through the curtains, both through the small gap in the middle (which is only a few centimeters wide, and on either side of that bright slit the hem stands out as two thick, dark streaks that shrink or vanish when the fabric is twisted inside or out) and through the fabric itself, whose pattern (stylized clowns, sea lions, circus horses, and elephants repeating at regular intervals) is almost invisible, as if it’s been washed out. This creates an unusual effect, something you can’t see when it’s light inside and dark outside (although now it’s dark inside and light outside), namely a trace of the weave, the crisscrossing threads that together make up the curtains, like when someone draws a shirt over your head and you struggle against it, and you can see light through the fabric, but not anything else outside the fabric, and your breath leaves a stain on the cloth, and when your head finally emerges (with force) through the neck you can see a damp spot on your breast. You immediately forget it, and when you remember it again, the spot is already gone.
Not complete darkness, but a kind of darkness would descend after she’d placed her thumb with its long, red nail upon the switch (like a stubby, round nose that grows when the light goes out), after she’d closed the book and leaned over you, and her pearl necklace had brushed the hollow of your neck, which had felt cold and ticklish, so she’d had to hold it up with one hand, while she’d pressed her cheek into yours, and you could smell her perfume and also a hint of the day’s dinner (mutton stew with a sickening, sludgy, grayish-white consistency, with tough, cartilaginous pieces of meat and hard peppercorns that explode like firecrackers of taste when you bite into them; you can’t leave off, you do it until they tell you to stop, spit them out, and put them on the rim of your plate); so a hint of mutton stew on her hair and clothes. If she’d left the door open, light would’ve fallen into the room, but she won’t do it, she refuses, she says you’ve got to get used to being by yourself in the dark, otherwise you’ll never get used to it, you’ve been in school for two years now, there’s nothing dangerous in the dark; so no light comes in from the living room, only a little from the window.
You’ll build a machine. You’ll have it finished by tomorrow or at the very least the day after. Of course, you could also practice jumping so far from the bed that you won’t need a machine, but that strikes you as impossible, you can’t even keep up in gym class; therefore, you’ll build a machine. There’s no point trying to tell yourself that darkness changes nothing; maybe she believes that, maybe she doesn’t, but in any case it’s wrong, because darkness happens, it fills a space, and it could also be full of something, like the way a drawer is full of silverware, or the earth is full of insects that scatter in panic when you lift a rotten log, even though darkness could also be a balloon, a balloon filled with black air. But every time your bare feet touch the ground (or, rather, the Mickey Mouse rug beside your bed), the same fear grips you, because something could be down there, there’s enough room beneath the bed to hold skinny, bony arms with long, calloused fingers (or claws) that’ll stretch out and grab you by your ankles, just like aunts do when they want to see how scrawny you’ve gotten (their fingers clamp around your legs like iron shackles for a few long seconds until they let go), but these will never let go, instead they’ll jerk you back hard and fast so that you tumble to the ground, and then they’ll drag you into the darkness beneath the bed, and you don’t want to imagine what’ll happen then, the very thought makes your palms sweat and you have to dry them on the bedspread; but it’s hot in here too, so maybe that’s why you’re sweating, it’s still summer, after all. It’ll be a sweeper machine with two long, crablike arms, but the arms will end in rotating steel brooms instead of pincers, and they’ll be mobile, and the brooms will scour the space beneath the bed from corner to corner, and if they actually find something, they’ll sweep it up as mercilessly as a street sweeper clearing the roads in spring, and the machine will open wide and swallow the thing whole, securely trapping it within its metallic breast, and the brooms will stop sweeping, and a red light on top will start blinking, and an alarm (like a clanging bell) will start to ring. Then it’ll be time to call the police, so they can come fetch whatever’s trapped inside, though you’ll have to keep away any careless or curious people, since they might accidentally open up the machine, and then the thing might escape, and then the police will have come for nothing; but when they’ve hauled the “monster” away, then maybe you can see it down in some animal pit (like a bear pit in a small-town zoo, round concrete holes that let you watch from the rim while big, snarling bears pick their way across rocks and claw-marked stumps), where it can’t get at you, you think, where despite its horror it’s powerless, and perhaps you’ll get to poke it with a long stick or a ski pole, and when it whimpers in pain, you’ll know it’s just getting what it deserves, neither more nor less than that, that its reign of terror is truly over, that now there’s nothing beneath the bed, that the space is empty, and that in emptiness lies safety.
It’s not completely dark yet, though you can see how the light outside (not sunlight, just a weak, vague gleam coming from nothing and nowhere) steadily dims, so the difference between the light of a few minutes ago and the light right now is like the difference between a wet and a dry sock, or to put it differently, darkness is beginning to overgrow the room, as grass, weeds, and rushes overgrow a forest pond, if darkness were a weed, it would definitely be overgrowing the room, but light still slips in through the curtains, especially through the slit in the middle.
It’s still summer, but it gets dark earlier. If you’re really quiet, you can creep to the window and peek out (outside it’s still daytime, or rather, it’s the remnants of the day (late evening) that you don’t have access to, all you can do is stare, like you stare at unattainable, expensive model airplanes in store windows), like you stared through the hospital window after visiting hours were over and they left without looking back. They had no idea you were watching, they seemed to be talking, once they even stopped and exchanged a glance, he looked back toward the pale yellow building (like he was thinking of returning?), but only back toward the entrance, which was beneath you, not toward the window way up where you stood, and then they grew smaller and smaller, like pieces on a pocket chess board, you’d thought, before disappearing down the stairs behind the hedge with its round, white flower bulbs (the bulbs were just a blur from the window). The stairs and the sidewalk were empty, but you’d still stared, stared at that emptiness, until two white hats had appeared, surfing along the hedge like paper boats in a stream, and two nurses, arms crossed and jackets over their shoulders, had come strolling along, until finally they were so close you had to press your nose against the glass to see them, and then you’d seen the door (or rather the last third of the door) shut behind them. It was before that, though, while your parents were still walking down the sidewalk, but before they’d disappeared behind the hedge, that you’d thought about death; or rather, you’d understood that if you hadn’t gotten the operation, you would’ve died. And your scar, which itches beneath your pajama shirt, that long, forceful line crossed by a bunch of smaller lines and surrounded by red, swollen skin, looks like a zipper (as if you could unzip yourself and look inside), or a rough seam (you’re a sack someone ripped open so they could take something out and maybe put something back before sewing you up again), anyway, your scar makes it look like you’ve been given a stamp of approval to live, as pigs in the slaughterhouse are given a blue stamp of approval to die.