My penumbral life began in the autumn following an excruciatingly hot summer. How easy it is to call everything into question once you start. The longer I stared at my surroundings the less sense they made. The blanket of rationalization we knit for ourselves — which is billed day in and day out as the ultimate truth — is easy to undo once you get hold of a loose end. One jerk and suddenly all flaws are exposed, revealing a jumble of competing realities: a global summit, delegates dozing off in the plenary session while hostesses in outlandish costumes pass up and down the aisles, popping candies (or maybe pills?) into the open mouths of the participants, who munch away in their sleep. And when their mouths reopen they rise one by one and sleepwalk to the podium, where they regurgitate the same pablum, which at the end of the day is collected and served to a patiently waiting press, which reports on achievable policy goals and the best possible deal under the circumstances. These are not living breathing beings so much as middlemen of destruction. It doesn’t go down well with the Comfortable & Contented when you shamelessly insist on unraveling the yarn. The louder I voiced my opposition, the more stubbornly I was ignored, little by little the neighbors stopped inviting me to their beloved grill parties. Cheers! The keg’s just been tapped and we’re in complete agreement, everybody gives a lot and doesn’t take much, we’re all easy-going and eco-friendly, let’s not get bent out of shape, despite everything life’s pretty bearable. If I contradicted, Helene would give me a chiding glance from where she was sitting with her lady friends, who acknowledged my existence the same way a mechanic might regard a car headed for the scrapyard. I knew she was only waiting for the suitable occasion to slam the door behind her. As the time we spent together shortened to weekends only (and not many of those, as my field trips alternated favorably with her bridge tournaments) we had less need to put up with each other; it was a pain to be locked up all day and all week with her in the same house. You have to get help, she told me one day, I don’t know what’s with you, but you’re losing it. That made me furious. She had hurled the first stone.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this but you took out the wrong insurance, and that was a pretty stupid thing to do”—I had picked up one of her special dishes—“because we don’t really need fire insurance or flood insurance. What we do need is a policy to protect us from a madman on the loose in our own house, a man on the verge of losing it at any second, and we need it now and we need it desperately too bad you didn’t take out that kind of insurance, what a shame”—at that point the Gmundner deer bounded into the wall and burst into pieces—“uhoh that’s what it looks like when the madman goes berserk”—here some pieces of Delft majolica smashed into a window with a great fortissimo—“who knows what’s next, nothing’s safe anymore”—and I banged my open palms against the china cabinet with all her porcelain treasures, a decorative bowl slid off and fell on my shoulder before shattering on the floor—“did you think I’d simply put up with everything? Didn’t you think I realized how you’ve been trying to force me into your Procrustean bed? Do you think I’m some kind of fairground steer waiting for my fellow humans to guess how much I weigh?”
“Fellow humans?” Helene interrupted after a grating scream, “What fellow humans? You no longer have any fellow humans.”
Here I fell silent. I had been weighing the Portuguese rooster in my right hand but I set it back down and concentrated on taking a deep breath. If she was right and I really had lost my mind then we’d no longer know if I was sick or if I had found freedom and release. We fled to the TV to avoid further interaction and stared at the screen with fierce tenacity, following nature shows the way a hunter tracks a wounded animal, we sat silently on two armchairs while a mutual contempt stretched out on the big brown sofa between us, consuming everything that had once united us, back when we were all we needed, on clear nights under a handful of stars. Nothing could placate me, every digitally reproduced animal struck me as a captured creature that was first castrated and then skinned. And so we suffered through evening after evening until some foreign station broadcast that wondrous news bulletin about masses of snow plunging into a valley, even though he wasn’t live at the scene of the catastrophe the reporter’s voice quivered opera-like with fear, so stunned he could only stammer, while I perked up wide awake and leaned forward in my seat and started rooting for the majestic avalanche. “Down the hill down the hill!” I shouted, and then with renewed courage and strength, “Into the valley into the valley!” and when the snow swallowed the first house so quickly the structure didn’t even have time to collapse I shouted, “Show no mercy show no mercy!” Then it rolled over a second house, and a third one, an entire farmstead, I cheered out loud when the entire village vanished into the snow, and the anchorman was reduced to silence for several seconds until a technical glitch was solved and the white surface vanished from the screen. Helene stood up and walked out of the room, ostentatiously shaking her head. A few days later a letter from her lawyer put an end to our television evenings. I dumped our TV in the bin for hazardous waste: broadcasts that sublime were far too rare an occurrence.
Back on board ship no one looks at me directly but everyone does so behind my back, as though I were dripping with foolishness — humiliating events like that quickly make the rounds. Mary might understand why I behaved the way I did, but she is nowhere to be seen (she was with the first party that landed early that morning, she had greeted me briefly before hurrying ashore). For lunch all I have is soup so I can retreat as quickly as possible. Even Ricardo refuses to give me his usual welcoming grin. The lecturers at the table eye me with concern, no one reproaches me for my lack of self-control, even though each would have dealt with the situation better, they are more than lenient, perhaps because they would regret having to do without me. Beate gently asserts that we can’t make a crooked world straight, Jeremy tells about the time a military transport vehicle ran him off a road in the Rocky Mountains. He’s just illustrating how he drove his rickety pickup into a spruce tree when I stand up, nod curtly and leave the dining room, avoiding every sideways glance. There’s nothing in the cabin to attract my attention. I’m lying down on the bed, staring at the fire alarm when Paulina bursts in, a breathless bundle of nerves.
“What happened?”
“You’ve already heard?”
“You got into a fight with one of the passengers?”
“With a soldier. It wasn’t a fight.”
“Soldier, what kind of soldier?”
“A Chilean.”
“How so? What did he do to you?”
“He was smoking right in the middle of the penguins.”
“What do you expect from a soldier?”
“Not to smoke.”
“The people who join the army aren’t usually the brightest.”
“It’s not a question of intelligence.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s a question of respect.”
“And you get into a fight over that?”
“It wasn’t a fight. He didn’t stop smoking when I told him too.”
“He didn’t listen to you, that’s what it is, you always expect everyone to listen to whatever you say.”
“It’s not about listening to me but to their own common sense.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do something like that and you don’t know what’s going to happen next?”