But I still want to come to you, come closer. Closer, to press my eye to the fluid flesh between your legs. To see at last what’s at the bottom of your silence. Yes, I love you, to shut my lids. The eye in your flesh, I love you, to open my lids… to shut, to open, quick, to shut to open, oh to fly with my lids. To open your cry within you with my lids. With my lashes, my long lashes. Thoroughly bedewed by you.
No answer, no echo. We’re no longer under cover, our hair flutters beneath the yellow sky. We’ve been released, females, and all that we were, released from the factory, from the country, from the camp, from life… let us be let go, wretched tools that we were, let us go silently, don’t let go my hand, God in his heaven waves his hat to us.
No answer. I knew I had failed to describe the females; they were absent still, absent from this town, absent from my description. Absent like light and life in these streets… I grasped the monstrous and merciless theft of reality that had been perpetrated against me. And it grew dark around me, and dark inside me too… if, against all expectation, they had suddenly appeared now, I would no longer have been able to perceive them, they would have found no place inside me. — As if to rob even my last thought of its vitality, suddenly the lamps shone out from the dark police building, switched on one by one behind the windows of the station house. A beam of light spilling onto the street made my champagne bottle blaze on the curb by the gutter. Blaze… as though to keep a thought from leaving my head, I squeezed shut my lips and my eyelids: if the females didn’t exist, then I need not exist either. I seized the bottle, uncorked it, and poured it over my head. The gasoline soaked my hair, flowed over my face, flowed down my collar, and drenched my shirt, very little gas, but enough to run slowly under my belt; my pubic hair must have taken on a loathsome oily smell. My trousers clung smoothly to my skin, the last drips of gasoline petered out on my thighs. It was enough for a torch, for a human torch right outside the police station. I searched my pockets for matches. Cursing, I rummaged through my clothes in search of matches, but I found none. What could I do? Ring the station doorbell and ask if they had matches? I was afraid they’d guess my plan before I could carry it out. — So I didn’t even have matches on me—were they in one of the pieces of women’s clothing I’d tried on?—and before I reached home the gasoline would dry on my skin. I had failed as utterly as it was possible to fail, I completely lacked existence, I couldn’t even look forward to an existence as a jet of flame soaring to the sky. — All the same, I suddenly had doubts, the situation was much too crazy not to have doubts… after all, I could always buy matches tomorrow. Tomorrow was another day. The thought of buying matches calmed me down a bit. Amid my doubt I’d heard a menacing tone in my thoughts. Scornfully I tossed the bottle back into one of the trash cans as I passed.