You can’t see the curtains’ weave any longer, and you certainly can’t see the pattern (stylized clowns, sea lions, circus horses, and elephants repeating at regular intervals), though the small slit down the middle retains an echo of the day. If you listen closely, you can hear the clatter of plates and silverware in the sink, as well as the distant sound of a radio playing low, probably in some other apartment. When you get home late from a walk, you always notice that some windows in the building are dark, while others are light, and that there’s an absolute boundary between the dark ones and the light ones, though now it seems like every window in the apartment, no, in the whole building is part of a blazing spaceship en route through a dark cosmos endlessly far from earth, where you find yourself once again, in the dark.
Whenever you want. Nothing’s physically stopping you, nothing, that is, but the prohibition itself. Whenever you want, for example at the very moment the light leaking through the curtains changes from pale yellow-white to pale violet-white (that is, when the street lamp comes on, which will probably be soon), you can, without getting up, but just by stretching out your arm and extending your body as far as it will go, so far that it pulls at your scar, reach the switch (the knob that looks like a little round nose) and flip it, and be blinded by light suddenly filling the lampshade, your face, the bed, and part of the room. Now is the time you can’t take any more darkness. Now is the time you do it. You do it and hope that she doesn’t decide to poke her head in to see if you’re sleeping, and find that you’re not sleeping, that, quite the opposite, you’ve turned on the light, and, with a reproachfully startled, deeply disappointed exclamation, switch the light off again, this very moment, right now, before your machine is even complete. At first the bright sphere blinds you, and the stinging light forces you to blink and shut your eyes, as if they were full of soapy water, but eventually you grow used to the strong, dazzling glare, and it strikes you that if you stare at it long enough, you might go blind, completely blind, and then you’ll never have to see darkness again, not the darkness under the bed nor any other kind of darkness, and it won’t matter if the light is on or off, but then a terrifying thought hits you, namely, that if you go blind you’ll see darkness and nothing but darkness for all eternity, and it won’t just be dark under the bed, in the closet, in the corners, and so on, but dark overall, the same darkness that, you know, sits in the center of your eye like a hole in the ice, a hole covered by a transparent film, and if you go blind the film will break, and all the darkness that’s stored in your eye, and all the darkness stored in your mind’s eye, will come flooding out to drown the earth.
Once you’ve reached this terrifying point in your train of thought, you’re forced to continue staring at the light, because now you have to make sure that you’re not going blind, and so you continue to see a circle (the bulb) within another circle (the lampshade’s interior), a circle within a circle, like a yolk floating in an empty eggshell, a round bright ball seemingly held in place by some unknown magnetism or a gravitational force, and on the bulb’s matte surface (condensated white, like a breath fossilized upon the glass) you can distinguish a few letters and numbers, though they’re indecipherable, especially because the chance way the bulb’s been screwed in means you’re seeing them upside down; as you stare, the symbols appear to flicker and fuse, and within the dazzling, milky white field, some spots even appear brighter than others, but you know that those smoky-blue, ill-defined, irregular regions are actually plains, valleys, and craters on the surface, and that the biggest ones are called “seas” (one, you remember, is even called the Sea of Tranquility, and a sea with no water must indeed be tranquil); from the earth, these dark spots appear to form a rudimentary face, the so-called Man in the Moon, but as you’re walking along, you recall that in another part of the world the (supposed) shape formed by these spots is called the Rabbit, and that whatever pattern the spots actually form is no real shape at all.
They’re sleeping? Could they be out looking for you? No. They’re sleeping. The idiots are asleep, you think. As you can see, it’s not completely full yet, because the circle is broken by a dark smudge down on the lower left, as if part of the chalky surface somehow got erased (like a piece of chalk gets a flat edge when you write with it on the sidewalk), leaving behind an irregular surface, or as if it’s being gnawed to pieces by a giant cosmic moth (drawn to the moon like insects are drawn to lit bulbs). Still, you can clearly see that it’s not a flat, two-dimensional shape, because the shadow hints at a sphere, and you can almost see it rotating on its axis high above the vacant, unlit stretch of ground you’re just now approaching, a bright spot against a bluish-black, late autumn sky. When you take your eyes off the sky, where the first stars are starting to show, the very roadside you saw earlier is visible in the controlled, muscular light of a street lamp, and you remember that earlier in the day it was a yellowish green, rectilinear mess of grass and weeds along the side of the road, and that the plants had thrown long, sharp shadows across the sand, or had cast their reflections into puddles, swaying (as blade after blade gets caught in the draft and bent double, violently rocked until the shaking subsides to a small oscillation, then to a relative calm, until the next car passes or unless there’s more wind; like a wave passing through the grass on the roadside, up to the point at which there’s no more median and the side road joins the main road) in the wake of a passing car.
The grass, which hasn’t completely turned yellow (and the weeds and the flowers, which are missing this time of year: dandelions, bush vetch, wild mustard, English throatwort), grows right up to the roadside, spilled from a neglected garden through a rusted chain-link fence and separated from the asphalt by a narrow strip of bare ground. You consider the road’s uneven surface, its cracks and its craters, the random clumps of asphalt that have been torn loose from the surface (by passing cars?): black, granular, and irregularly shaped as raisins; scattered across the relatively smooth strip of bare ground, which is a mixture of sand, dirt, and mud, where upon closer inspection, and besides the occasional footprint, you can see tracks left by car tires (closest to the asphalt), motorcycles, strollers, wheelbarrows, and so on; but late on an autumn evening, the only thing you find are faded bicycle tracks across a dried puddle (it rained a few days ago), made up of two seemingly independent lines, the first nearly straight, the second one cutting through, weaving around the first like a worm, like the caduceus’s intertwined snakes, or like the textbook twisted rope-ladder shape representing a DNA molecule, the fundamental genetic code that determines if you’ll have a stubby nose, green eyes, ears like a fox, big feet, thin hair, knock-knees, a small mouth, bad teeth, a bull’s neck, narrow shoulders, big rump, low IQ, low forehead, reduced lung capacity, a harelip, bad breath, a bird’s chest, a paunch, a sway (or the opposite: a crooked) back, stunted growth, a piercing voice, freckles, flat feet, bony and dry (or the opposite: thick and sweaty) hands, crooked toes, nearsightedness, a tottering step, strong BO.