It’s not the thought of death. No, that’s not the reason you ache in the springtime, like the chill you get by drinking water after you’ve sucked on a cough drop, although it’s not really an ache either, but a sorrow, a stab of worry, over what? you wonder, and continue: over life unlived; not anger or angst about the fact that in the near future you won’t be experiencing anything at all (your fear of death actually decreases as you get older), but the nagging feeling that you haven’t experienced enough, that you’ve never really lived life, and even worse, that it’s too late to experience anything more, or rather, that the experiences you’ve had weren’t the experiences you were meant to have, that somewhere along the way you took a wrong turn, though you can’t say where exactly that was, and now it’s too late, and as a result your life has in one sense been wasted, like a losing game of blind man’s bluff. However, worse than that, you think, is the terrifying suspicion that your life wouldn’t have been any different, not in any substantial way, that it wouldn’t have helped to have made other choices, sought out different people, lived in new places, had a different career, been husband and widower to another woman, and so on, that a reorganization of all these different factors wouldn’t have resulted in less of an ache during springtime (now), although you actually hate the winter and love the spring, and are always glad when it comes. Why is that?
Stuffed top to bottom with strange nylon creatures in garish colors, most of them some variation on the theme of monkey or bear: the small, inconspicuous ones, which are either brown, turquoise, or bright pink, are shaped like fetuses and occupy the lowest shelf, followed by a row of slightly larger ones, which are green and orangish-yellow and covered in black spots, as if they’ve contracted the plague, and these also have pointed black collie noses and outstretched arms, as if they’re coming in for a hug, and on the upper two shelves are meter after meter of the really big animals, some of them elephants with blue-spotted trunks, although most of them seem to be a kind of raccoon with a horizontally striped coat, like a prison jumpsuit, like a bleak, abbreviated rainbow composed of dark green, yellow, and orange, though some of them also have dark stripes over their mouths, like a gag, or over their eyes, like a carnival mask, and there are also a few white bears with pink bows around their necks, although their (outstretched) hands, feet, and face are skin-colored, and they’ve got black snouts and round, black eyes; the white on their head and ears make them look like caricatures of Danton (wearing a powdered wig). A skinny, ungainly youth with a scraggly beard stands in front of the shelves and shivers (his hands are shoved in his pockets) as he waits for customers.
You know it by heart. Although you haven’t called her number, not yet. It would be unseemly, you’d look like a vulture if you did it now, so soon after her husband’s death, you think, and besides, you haven’t seen her for almost forty years, she’ll be old and ugly (like you). This argument isn’t entirely convincing, there’s something else there, and you realize, as the ungainly young man hands a stuffed animal (a plague-ridden one) to an older, well-dressed woman (who smiles happily), that you don’t want her now, you wanted her back then, you wanted her almost forty years ago, because if you got her now, it’d be too late, you’d only be getting the scraps, the leavings, the leftovers, the sweepings, the last remains of a life together, the so-called twilight years, during which you’d just sit and wait for the other to die; broken bones and heart attacks, prostate complaints and arthritic hips, hair loss and varicose veins are nothing compared to the fact that you have no future and no expectations. What’s left of you both isn’t enough to keep the dream of what you once were alive, you’re like a pair of candlesticks that have been burned down to the stub, flickering in time to the host’s rattling snore, shedding a little light on what’s left of the party, empty bottles and glasses, crumbs and greasy, crumpled napkins.
Without meeting your eyes, the tired man bearing all the signs of alcoholism stuffs the cork into the barrel and cocks the air gun before handing it over. No, your hand is still steady, you haven’t come down with old-age tremors yet, your vision (in your one working eye) is still good, and you remember the trick of pulling the trigger as you breath out, the second at which your body is relaxed and (theoretically) motionless (instead of holding your breath the whole time, like an amateur does); still, you’ve gotten too old and stiff to rest the elbow of the arm supporting the gun on your hip. You slip a tiny bit and squint when you shoot. You miss. Your target looks like a small tin container (brown), about the size of a matchbox, positioned about three or four meters away. The man behind the counter prepares the weapon again while his eyes follow someone or other, and he continues looking at whomever this is as he hands you the gun. You miss again. Upon closer reflection, however, you decide that that image wasn’t entirely accurate; the dog, you think, you’re like the host’s dog, sneaking into the dining room in the wee hours of the morning, after the candles have long since burned out, to greedily, clumsily gobble up the leftovers, the bones, the stringy pieces of meat someone left on the side of their plate, the congealed gravy, the cold potatoes, because in all the commotion, someone forgot to feed it.
You miss the third time too. And you realize then that all the concentration and technique and effort in the world won’t help, it’s simply impossible to hit a target with a cork, much less one that’s stuck directly into the muzzle, or, anyway, if you do hit the mark, it’ll be thanks to luck, the game you’re playing is just another type of fair-lottery, because in the first place, you can’t control the trajectory of a cork, unlike a real projectile, because it doesn’t rotate along its own axis as it leaves the barrel (as would a bullet shot from a rifle), and secondly, the cork is so light that it’s bound to follow an eccentric ballistic path, which must only rarely coincide with the location of whatever it is you’re aiming at. You might as well toss the thing by hand, or spit it from your mouth. No, dogs don’t know what a party is, and therefore don’t know when the party’s over; you’re more like the overly enthusiastic brother-in-law, who wakes up half-drunk in the wee hours of the morning and proceeds to drain whatever’s left in the bottles before moving on to the half empty glasses, who helps himself to a stale piece of cake in the meantime, dumping the crumbs from the desert plate onto his hand (gastroliths: smooth, black, fist-sized geological fragments; the label tells you that some dinosaurs swallowed stones to help them digest their food, and that these stones have been found along with fossilized skeletons), before tossing them back, so that he’s got a powdering of debris on his wrinkled, sweat-stained shirt and crooked tie, and after a while he’ll start trying to rouse his sleeping friends (or enemies) with cheerful cries, noisemakers, and hubristic exclamations, all of which sends stark, unrequited echoes through the room, where the morning light is beginning to pick out the last details of the party’s debris, an embarrassingly thorough examination, but that doesn’t cramp his style, for him the party isn’t over, the party’s never over. No, even at seventy-one years of age you haven’t given up, you want to use up every bit of the cloying, moldy remains of love (if it’s got anything to do with that at all) left at the bottom of your life; you completely lack the ability to let hope die. You’ve often wished you could just give up entirely, but that’s an inhuman task, you think, you’ve got to be a god, or at least a holy man, to simply give up, to resign yourself to the meager pleasures afforded by the daily grind, though even those pleasures are few and fading, swiftly fading until they’re almost out of sight, while you drool — and will most likely go on drooling all the rest of your days — over the last sorry scraps of time, of experience, of life, whatever the hell that means.