Maybe This Time

The arms weren’t my arms. I looked down at myself and knew the mirror was after me again. It all happened more quickly this time, since I went along with it. The washing, the hands, just like before, my head held under water. But I let it happen, and, as if to reward me, the water was now cold.

The bay window opposite was wide open and the woman had gone, but I was still not alone.

I covered the mirror and burrowed into bed under the towels I had dampened to cool my skin. Like everything else in the room, I too was draped in sheets, and I tried to remember how things could have come to this.

It worked, or at least I thought it did. I remembered a story, my story, at least I thought it was. And the calmer I became by thinking about this story, the more sharply the pain returned, and I was pleased to be forced into alertness. The pain would pass, and I tried to distract myself by concentrating on this thought, which worked for a while, until I noticed that everything I remembered vanished the moment I thought of it, vanished permanently, as if it had never happened, as if I had never experienced it. As soon as I remembered something, I seemed to forget it. No matter what I thought. The last few hours. How I came here. There was an answer, which appeared like a familiar face in a crowd, but it immediately disappeared and was as strange as all the others.

The letter, I thought. What has been written can’t disappear. The sealed envelope was on the table next to yesterday’s notes.

I didn’t recognize a thing. Among the sentence fragments that had been cut and reassembled without apparent rhyme or reason, the words origin and downfall appeared again and again. Origin and downfall, sometimes crossed out and rewritten, or one replacing the other.

There was no address on the envelope. I held it up to the light and could just make out some writing on the paper inside.

They can come, it said. They can come and get me.

The courtyard in front of the house was, in fact, a public square, I now realized, surrounded by iron railings, the paving stones bright and baking in the sun. Mothers sat on the benches. Their children ran from the shade under the trees out into the warm sunshine and back again. The window opened at the first touch and the cool breeze soothed my skin.

On one of the benches I noticed a girl who looked familiar. So did the dog licking her hand. I had already met them.

Who was to come and get me? To go where?

I didn’t dare open the letter and decided to look only at the notes on the table, but first I made sure that the door was still locked.

They can come. They won’t find me.

I picked random notes from the piles of paper, and the sentences on them seemed to be written just as randomly. They were unintelligible paragraphs in which I tried to defend or justify myself, though why it was impossible to tell, at least for the moment.

No one can escape themselves, I read, there is no escape from one’s self, and I heard myself laugh in a voice that was not mine. I had escaped from myself long before.

These sentences were no help, yet some stuck with me. I couldn’t get them out of my head. It was as if they might explain what had happened. But they didn’t. I am preparing my departure. I am leaving my name to the lies.

Next to the bed was a sheet and I pulled it over the sentences with a movement that was not mine. I hadn’t left, and the sentences couldn’t be trusted. Nor could the noise that had been coming from the next room for some time now.

The door to that room was not completely shut, I now noticed, and a draught moved the door, opening and closing a gap. In that room, too, everything was draped in white.

No one knew I was there and I wanted it to stay that way, so I shut the door. The knob was pleasantly cool in my hand.

At this point I also became aware of a smell that had not caught my attention before, even though it was a strong one and permeated everything. It was the smell of the elderly, of medicine.

Into whose story had I fallen, I wondered. The story had as little to do with me as the smell. Just as I didn’t fit here, so nothing here fit me, except for the notes, and I had no idea what I should do with them. I had covered them like everything else. The sentences were not to be trusted. These are the facts, they said, there is evidence against me and who will believe me, no one. Protestations followed reproaches, all sorts of claims that meant nothing to me, suppositions and self-incrimination, paragraphs rendered unintelligible.

Next door, the floor creaked.

Encounter

It raised its head and froze in this posture as if to threaten an enemy, then resumed its march again. Its carapace gleamed in the sun. Its pincers snapped audibly on nothing. Occasionally it would grip a stalk of sturdier grass with them and, as if searching for a better view of its surroundings, it would hoist itself up, only to let itself drop once it had reached the top of the stalk or the upper side of a leaf, and lay motionless on the ground. It would remain almost completely immobile for a while, then suddenly continue on its way with a violent start, or it would circle around the next stalk and burrow its head in the earth at the base, or it would turn and set off in the opposite direction. Again and again, it would stop dead, perhaps sensing a threat. Then it would struggle on, its body rising and falling, towards a cluster of paving stones set in the grass and leading to a gravel path. The carapace creaked as it scraped the stones, and the animal stumbled and fell onto its back. It jerked itself back onto its feet and crawled into the cooler grass, continuing its march. The struggle seemed to tire the animal since it frequently stopped to lie full length on a stone, and each time it took a bit longer to lift its soft, defenceless underbelly. In one attempt to push itself off a stone, it tumbled over the edge onto the gravel. Its limbs waved in the air. Its underbelly was noticeably lighter than the rest of its body. It rose and fell continuously, swelled and collapsed in on itself. An ant ran across it, briefly touched its face, its jaws, and disappeared under the pebbles. Then the ant returned and crawled over the creature’s face and up to its eyes. The ant gnawed and tore at the eyes. It disappeared again and returned, biting deeper into the creature each time. The creature must have injured itself in the fall, because it was now dragging its left side. And yet, despite this handicap, it moved nimbly over the gravel, which was spread so sparsely in spots that patches of earth, the same colour as the creature, could be seen amongst the rocks. Whenever it reached one of these clearings, it tried to burrow into the ground, but soon gave up and hauled itself along towards the kerbstone from which it had fallen and which it intended to climb over. It did everything it could to get back to the grass, but its little legs foundered on the stone’s smoothness. It laboured almost obsessively along the edge of the path until it found a gap in the kerb through which it could squeeze onto the lawn. There it lay still for a time and began to tend to itself. It ran its antennae carefully over the damaged limbs and brushed them across its mouth. Its mandibles moved back and forth as it crouched and stretched. With a jerk it managed to flop onto one of the stones, but landed on its back. A violent trembling shook its hind legs and spread through its whole body, then abated, growing calmer until it subsided completely. Meanwhile the shovel-like forelegs banged wildly against its head. Its mouth opened and closed ceaselessly, as if begging, and its underbelly collapsed and stayed flat. Its lustre was gone except where the ants were at work. They had come out of the grass in droves and swarmed over its body. The forelegs had stopped banging and hung motionless in the grass. Its mouth was wide open. The ants crawled in and out and made off with their booty. They nibbled and gnawed at the body and hollowed it out until it was light enough. Then they carried the husk away.

The Light in My Room

I turned off the light and looked out towards the island. I heard someone calling, but I could not see that far in