Sickly-green, shaped like a bowl, decorated with orange-and-custard colored butterflies, as well as rust-colored leaf-shaped ornaments, which are symmetrical, stiff as flatbread and look like they’ve been carved from paper-thin slivers of ice, not to mention the yellow knob below, with its fancy, tongue-shaped spurs, like a creation of baroque confectionery, triumphantly adorning the bowl’s underside, the ceiling light’s southernmost pole, a decorative pastie stolen from a dancer at some lugubrious night club. The ceiling light. You remember that on dusky summer evenings, when the window stays open to combat the heat, that light has a magnetic effect on mosquitoes, moths, and flies, especially on flies, which after a series of restless, aimless forays, usually come to rest up there with the dust and the other dead insects, which are silhouetted against the glass when the light is on, dead actors in a dead shadow theater. The flying clock. You’ll never forget that evening she went out (for a so-called girl’s night) and never came home, you think, and that fly, a run-of-the-mill housefly, had somehow picked your light out of a hundred thousand other city lights glowing through that wet summer twilight, it had begun to wander around the inside of the open bowl, or rather right along the edge, the periphery, and with the lightbulb behind it, its shadow grew to monstrous proportions, until there was a giant fly shadow sweeping along the ceiling, rhythmically, tirelessly, around and around, following the identical course in the identical direction, a living piece of clockwork, with the light and its dead counterparts behind it, working around and around the same pointless course, the same giant shadow sweeping along the ceiling, a living, or rather a dying piece of clockwork, around and around, the same giant shadow thrown from the same mindless little insect; blind donkeys on a creaking treadmill, horses or scrawny oxen totally ignorant of what they’re doing when they pump water from a well or grind corn by plodding around and around the same circle, completely ignorant, but no, that’s not right, you think, because this was an entirely useless exercise, no corn was being ground, no water pumped, on the contrary, little bits of the fly’s energy stores (assembled by feasting on sugar, sweat, shit, jam, nectar, carrion, whatever else it had happened upon in recent days) were disappearing with every lap, miniscule particles of energy vanishing with each pointless lap around the edge of the lamp, although there was no visible change in its velocity, its speed remained more or less constant, except for the occasional short pause, like a pause for thought (sort of), as if the fly were capable of assessing its situation, before resuming its pointless trek back to its starting point, the same point every time, or another point, any randomly chosen point on the circle, around and around; an unflagging clock, a flying clock, it had nearly driven you clinically insane, as if its circling had been accompanied by an unbearable, agonizing drone. And you couldn’t stand up to turn off the light and make it stop.
A buzzing, followed by the weak, shuddering gurgle of Freon gas wandering the manmade grottos and galleries of the air-conditioning unit and nothing more. There’s no meteorological peep from the world outside, no howling wind, no rain tapping against windowpanes. The day might be calm and snowy, or cold and calm and clear, but you can’t see it, you can’t stand up and push aside the curtain to see out, or look at the thermometer to find out what the temperature is. You’re just lying there. And you think, as you’ve thought countless times before, that given the fact that you’re just lying there, that you’re stuck lying down, and that you’ll remain in this position until further notice, the white light switch, for example, which you can just make out on the far wall, is quite as unreachable as a star seen through the window. However, stargazing isn’t a possibility either, because the window is as unreachable as the light switch, not to mention whatever’s outside the window, a solid dark mass, say, punctuated by scattered lights hugging the landscape’s slopes and inclines as if they were a part of it, whereas human development is, in reality, a kind of ad-hoc parasite, but be that as it may, the space between, beneath, and behind the lights is surging with people, who are invisible at this distance, but who are people nonetheless, people you’ll never see, never greet, and maybe that’s just as well, you think as you lie there, as you continue to lie there. With your grotesque body, which looks like a half-squished grasshopper; you could, you think, just as well be reduced to a head, a talking head, which could be carried out on a covered silver platter at dinner parties, at which point someone would lift the lid up and, miracle of all miracles! you could talk, talk to the guests, converse with them intelligently on all manner of subjects, as if you were a real person, and not just a head, which is what you actually are, before the guests finally leave, and you politely tell them good-bye, and someone replaces the lid and carries the silver platter with your head back to the cupboard. Or something along those lines.
It’s eight minutes after six o’clock. What on earth is she doing up, or better yet, what’s she doing out at this time of day? you ask yourself. You’ve lived as many years as there are seconds in a minute, plus seven. If a year were as long or even as short as a second, you would’ve lived a whole minute and seven seconds by now, and in that case, you wouldn’t bother asking the powers that be for another thirty seconds, say, in which to get older and grayer. Except for the possibility. Iffing. The subjunctive. Unless. All those people, you think, who can walk, walk on their own two legs; when someone yells go! get out of here! be off with you! to them, they can go on their way, get out of there, take off, even run, sprint if the situation calls for it, all those people who think you’ve simply resigned yourself, that you’ve faced your fate, as they say, with a brave and cheerful grin, that you’ve long since, once and for all, given up the thought of walking, although you, like every other cripple, dream at least twice a week that you can walk, and at least twice a month that you can run, and at least three times every quarter year that you can dance, although every day, while you’re still awake, you imagine what it’d be like to be healthy, you imagine miracle cures, new medical breakthroughs, revolutionary treatments, and the indigestible, sickly-sweet stuff of your fantasies gnaws at you again and again, every single goddamn day. But not now. At the moment, you’ve really got to pee.
You shout the hated name into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by the reading lamp, shout it in the direction of the half-open sliding door, which leads to the living room, where, you figure, there’ll be a half-open door leading to the hallway, where there’ll be another half-open door leading to the kitchen, and possibly one to the bathroom. You imagine you can hear your voice moving through each room, searching, peering into the space between the countertop and stove (where lint and dirty dishrags tend to collect), like one of those little whirlwinds kicking dirt up off the sidewalk in springtime, climbing a couple of stairs, peeking out into the courtyard before giving up and vanishing entirely. Where is she? Where is the telephone? The effort is exhausting, but you manage to shift the upper half of your body — the part of your body, that is, that still works — into a position that allows you to fumble around the edge of the bed; after discovering nothing but the empty telephone base, with its four indentions that resemble a stylized face either singing or talking, you give up and wrench yourself back into a prone position; that means the telephone itself is in the living room, and that you can’t reach it, and that you can’t answer it if someone calls, that you’re stuck patiently waiting until the phone has rung a set number of times, until the caller finally gives up, all you can do is wait until the last ring you hear is really the last ring, one of them will be the last, after all, and then the silence will be like it was before.