You remember then that you’ve already got one shoe (and one sock) on, and, therefore, you’ll have to take your shoe off before pulling (both) slippers on, but then again, you could always wear a shoe on one foot (the left) and a slipper on the other, which would probably be uncomfortable, because the shoe has a heel and the slipper doesn’t, forcing you to limp, or you could try finding the other shoe (no doubt a hopeless task). You finally decide to take the shoe off and pull the slippers on, and so you do that, careful to avoid sudden movements. When you’ve got both slippers on, you miraculously discover your robe beneath a pile of dirty clothes, which soundlessly avalanches off the chair when disturbed, and because you’re freezing, you pull the robe on over your white shirt and pants.
A pattern that repeats itself with slight variations: one last car manages to sneak by the yellow light, and the next car, arriving too late to slip by, resignedly applies its brakes (the going is slow, the roadway slick), coming to an abrupt stop and forcing the car behind it swerve a little into the bike lane, a movement more or less evenly transmitted on down the line (to which you can see no end), something that (from your bird’s-eye view) makes the line of cars resemble a lazy, segmented worm bunching up, until all the cars have come to a complete stop a few meters closer to the intersection; in the meantime, the other traffic light has turned green and the first car either gets underway smoothly or with a slight jerk (analogous to the abrupt stop made by the cross traffic), and this movement is transmitted from the first car on down the line, something that (from your bird’s-eye view) looks like a segmented worm slowly lengthening out, until one of the cars resignedly applies its brakes as the light turns from yellow to red, so that the same process begins again in the opposite direction. Slight variations in the pattern result from cars putting on blinking orange lights and then turning right or left. Seen from your window (while you’re quickly pulling on your robe and fastening its belt around your waist), the whole thing resembles an enormous cross, a cross whose arms are in constant motion, first one way, then the other, like a kinetic memorial marking the spot of a deadly crash.
Did you remember? The possibility you could’ve forgotten causes your palms to break out into tiny beads of sweat (you could inspect them, but you don’t), and you feel your pulse throbbing in the veins of your wrist, and your muscles tensing for no good reason, and you move somewhat more stiffly, but you move, you have to see for yourself, you direct your tottering steps toward the kitchen, trip over a pile of newspapers (they lose their precarious balance and slide out into a rough fan shape), though you manage to keep your balance, you pause in front of the refrigerator door before you jerk it open, causing something (bottles?) to rattle. Milk, cheese, butter, margarine, ketchup, Swiss cheese, yogurt, caviar, geitost, eggs, cucumbers, mayonnaise, sausage, orange marmalade, tuna salad, parmesan cheese, capers, cauliflower, Thousand Island dressing, cheese spread, garlic spread, chocolate syrup, even apple juice, but no bottle of beer, not so much as half a bottle of beer in sight, that can’t be possible, you begin to pull the potpourri of glasses, plastic bottles, squeeze tubes, and random packages out of the refrigerator and to set them on the counter (while you stupidly and against your better judgment think that if she were here now, she could’ve told you exactly where the beer was) to discover whether, for some unfathomable reason, the bottles might be hidden behind something else; it’s possible, but the refrigerator is empty, or rather, it’s empty of all the basic necessities, or, to put it another way, it’s full, full of everything but the one thing it should be full of.
You’re waking up, or rather, you’re sobering up, your tongue feels thick and your mouth feels parched, your throat feels like a rubber hose that’s clogged with dirt or something similar, something that’s wedged in there good and tight, the hose coiled like a corkscrew, and in a last-ditch effort you wrench open first one smoke-colored drawer and then the other, rummaging through the so-called vegetable drawers that usually hold forgotten edibles, rotten carrots, moldy tomatoes, soggy cucumbers, all of them in the process of liquefying into a viscous green scum, and where, at the bottom, you miraculously discover (you must’ve put them there for safety’s sake, so to speak, because you were expecting guests, or, more precisely, because you didn’t want your guests drinking them all up) five squat, more or less neckless bottles, dewy with cold, your hands are beginning to shake, but not too bad, you’re able to unscrew the lid, there’s no point in fetching a clean glass, or a dirty one for that matter, you chug the liquid straight from the bottle, while your hands quiver like some electrical gadget, rivulets of cold foam streaming out of your mouth, down your neck, dripping onto the white breast of your shirt, but you get most of it down, you’re drinking beer, naturally, only losers stoop to hard liquor, how disgusting, you think, you’d just puke it right back up again, but this is beer, cold beer from the fridge.
They swell and fizzle, the small, thin, transparent membranes form domes that then burst all along the glass’s rim, extending out almost over it, so that it looks like foam rubber, no, you think, something living, something that’s in perpetual motion, a motion that is actually a decline, because the number of gas bubbles entering the liquid itself (perfect miniature globes that ascend quick as lightning, one after the other, virtually single file, as if they’re following an invisible thread, which is completely perpendicular or maybe slightly bent) is less than those departing (the foam spheres that burst), and you notice how the soft pillow of foam begins to sink together in the middle, and you know that if you wait long enough the whole crackling, quivering blanket of foam will be reduced to an irregular whitish margin around the glass’s inner circumference, with a few tendrils extending down toward the drink’s surface, where a similar whitish streak will float like sea scum at the beach’s edge, and the streak will waver when you lift the glass to take a drink; but right now the foam is still high, the bursting bubbles are large, and when you lift the glass to your lips, the fizzing gets louder, and you get a foam mustache on your upper lip, which you wipe off with the back of your hand as you set the glass down.
Tranquility. A feeling of deep tranquility sets in after you finish your second bottle, and you uncap the third with ease. A cheerful feeling is bubbling up inside your breast, a profound relief that the anthropophagic winter morning can no longer eat you alive, that you can simply watch the intersection from your window, where the morning rush is just starting to thin out, and it’s beginning to snow, and new-fallen snow is swirling around car tires like goose down, and in a sparsely trafficked side street there’s a pale mist, like cigarette smoke distributing evenly across a surface, or like sheer gauze, hanging over tire marks in the old snow, and if you press your nose and cheek against the cold window and squint down to the end of the street, as far as your eyes can reach, you can see how the contours of the building and street disappear into the warm vagueness of falling snow, hundreds of thousands of swirling flakes culminating in gray opaqueness, which after nearly three bottles of beer strikes you as poignant and beautiful. Suddenly, you remember (and feel a burning pain well up inside you, like northern lights shooting across your emotional horizon, like a form of emotional rheumatism) that once upon a time you stood exactly as you’re standing now and watched her change from a leisurely strolling shadow to a clearly defined individual, as she was emerging from the falling snow: first she was just an anonymous, dark shape, who could’ve been any Tom, Dick, Harry, or Jane (as most people are Tom, Dick, Harry, or Jane to you), and it was just a simple, more or less random spark of intuition that told you to focus on that shape in particular, and as she got closer, you realized that there was a chance, an increasingly good chance that it might be her, and then you’d recognized her clothes and her walk, and finally you’d felt the eureka that comes from recognizing a face at a distance (when the face is still alien, simply a schematic face, a face that could belong to anybody, but at the same time uniquely individual), and then you’d seen her stop at the door. A moment afterward, after you’d spoken with her on the intercom, that is, you’d pondered the seemingly enormous chasm (in time as well as in space) between the nameless shadow you’d first observed and the familiar voice that belonged to her and her alone.