A creek. There’s a wide creek down there in the dark, an occasional weak glint (probably due to clusters of leaves being cast together and torn apart against the darkening sky, which still retains a little light, and then the current itself) speaks of water in motion. You stand there silently looking at it, until she bends down to inspect something on the bank, something reddish, roundish, and oblong; she picks it up, sees it’s an empty can, and lets it drop back down (a weak, metallic thud in the silence), as she says, without looking at you, Have you ever raped anyone? and you say, What? but she continues on, One time I met this guy in a bar when I was abroad and everyone said I was crazy to go out alone like that he described in detail how he’d rape me he was an expert he’d stick two fingers up my nose and hold my mouth shut so I couldn’t scream while he pinned my arms behind my back when I said there’s no way he could do all that and he didn’t say a word he just rolled up his sleeve to show me his forearm it was bulging with muscles he lifted weights at a gym he was very nice and polite before he left he bought me an orange juice and gave me his address.
You don’t know what she’s talking about, the only thing you understand is that you don’t understand, and you think that she’d never do that, under no circumstances would she ask such a question or tell such a story in such a way, or maybe you’re just kidding yourself, you don’t know her that well, in fact, you don’t really know her at all, maybe she really could (the very thought makes you sick) ask such a question and tell such a story in such a way, even though she doesn’t seem like the type, but maybe she’s just not as impulsive. If you’d foreseen this little adventure (or “adventure”), you think, you would’ve stopped taking the stupid medicine, you don’t know where this is headed, if it’s heading anywhere, and you don’t know what stopping the medicine would do to you; at worst, it’d be a choice between living and not having sex or dying and having sex, or more likely the reverse, and you suddenly, somberly say, No, I’m not the kind of guy who rapes women, if that’s what you’re after, and she says, That’s what I thought, and she puts her arms around you and rests her head against your shoulder, and says, again with drunken sobriety, You’re so sweet. That’s just the kind of phrase you hate. Or do you? You feel her breasts pressed against your chest. You hear the wind tear at the trees above you, the steady, faint, wild motion of leaves, branches, and twigs, like a roar fighting to escape the throat of a savage beast.
The small forest is nothing more than a dark indiscernible mass of growth now, and while you concentrate on what you should say or do (besides stroking her back and holding her tight), you stare silently into the growing darkness (literally growing, but then again not really, because nothing, neither the trees, the flowers, nor the grass, is still growing); the twig (or the top third of it) is completely drenched with fire, as blood drenches a bandage, a flameless smoldering, reddish orange and yellowish white; you imagine how the parts jutting out the farthest on the bumpy surface will change to creamy white every time he blows on the fire, before fading back to light red.
You watch him hold the twig up to the small iron lamp, whose chamber (shaped like a miniature bowl) is presumably filled with oil, though the oil is still unlit, because it’s the glow from the twig’s tip, not from the lamp itself, that hits the boy’s face, casting a triangular shadow up from his nostril and digging a deep furrow into the area between ear and cheekbone, leaving his whole head from forehead to neck in shadow, so that his face almost looks like a two-dimensional mask (why are you suddenly thinking of a “slaughtering mask,” which is a completely irrelevant association? is it because cattle killed with this instrument often have white facial markings that themselves resemble masks?), with only the irregular shape of the cartilage of his outer ear illuminated by a weak sheen of light. However, even as the twig’s glow brightens or dims depending on whether or not he’s blowing on it, so the sheen of light across his face likewise brightens or dims depending on this same exhalation; in other words, the illuminated areas of his face expand and the shaded areas contract every time he blows air out, and the shaded areas spread and the illuminated areas contract every time he stops to take another breath.
You’ve forgotten the exact numbers, but you can still picture the long covered table and the guests sitting beneath the leafy apple tree, which had just dropped its flowers, as clearly as if it were yesterday, though it was the summer of your sixtieth birthday, and with a touch of nostalgia you think that this boy is still young enough to find lighting an oil lamp an exciting process, even though it will eventually become a rather irritating and mundane ritual (lighting an oil lamp, that is, at the fall of night), though right now it’s an important, almost sacred task that’s been entrusted to him and him alone. You see nothing of the room around him. If something happened to the glowing twig, if it were tossed in a bucket of water, say, the room would be pitch black. (Sometimes you’re gripped by a sudden feeling of rage or scorn, if not to say shame, at the way you cling to this half-darkness, this century-old chiaroscuro with its warm, muted colors, this anachronistic-analgesic refuge, which, despite everything, is still comforting, where the grave is a cradle, cradling you with its soundless, seductive gondolier rhythm, though you’re not dying, you’re only sleeping with eyes that are open, thirsty, eyes that imbibe from the comfort proffered with darkness’s benevolent hand; all this while trying to forget the other thing, the terrifyingly white light, the blinding white light, which is neither natural nor artificial, and which shines in a corridor without beginning or end, without doors, without windows, without other people, just a plain concrete corridor where the white light will continue to torture you for the foreseeable future, because you can’t close your eyes against it, you race through it in panic, you race and race and never get tired, you can’t escape, you’re never any closer to the exit than you were when you started, and if you turned and ran the other way you wouldn’t be any closer to the entrance than you were when you turned around, it’s completely silent here, but still you hear an endless screaming, the air is unbreathable but you never suffocate, there’s nothing to see, but you can’t close your eyes, you’ll never escape the painful white light, the piercing white light without a cubic centimeter of dark, the light of terror, pain is light, and there’s nothing that can put it out, light is pain, darkness is peace, oblivion, it can never be lifted, you don’t know much, but you know that; you want to forget the corridor, and it works, it usually works, but it’ll always be dimly lit somewhere inside of you, as if you were a lamp someone had turned down low, a lamp that someone could just as well decide to turn up high again — namely, when you’re forced to race through yourself in a panic once more.)