Monthly Archives: April 2010

X tells me something happened around the time he started talking to me. That much he knows. Something went wrong. That much he’s established. But what? What am I doing to his words? What are they doing to him? Why is it always as if they bounce back from me and turn on him? It’s as if having started something he can’t finish what he’s started decides to finish him, or leave him unfinished. Like an animal you’ve trained to kill your enemy that turns on you and runs off. What’s going wrong? he says. Tell me what to do. But you won’t, of course.

I lost something along the way, X tells me, on my way to becoming one of life’s losers. Some kind of innocence, he says, some ability. No, not an ability. A connection. The smell of grass in spring. Mud on the pitches. Warm sand. Forest paths covered with rotting leaves. The burning cold of snow. Shouts and cries. The water, air and earth that surrounded us, engulfed us. Something got lost along the way, he says, around the time I took up with you. Go away, he says, leave me alone.

This is it, X says, it’s all downhill from here, even though I’m already at the bottom of the hill. It’s set in, he says, the decline, the disease, whatever it is. You must know what it is, he says. But don’t worry, no need to tell me, I hardly care anymore, not really, only sometimes. It is what it is, as American athletes say when they lose. No really, don’t trouble yourself, I don’t care. Only sometimes.

It’s as if you’re always a step ahead of me, X tells me, as if I’m always playing catch-up with you. Except you’re not playing, are you? Are you behind me then? Were you behind me before I even started trying to catch up? Something’s not right here, you’re stopping me from getting on. You’re holding me back, he says, you’re deadweight.

X tells me he thinks some malevolent spirit must have visited him in the womb, a bad ghost. I can feel it now, he says, is it you? Something went wrong somewhere, he says, probably as far back as the womb. You slipped out of the womb with me, didn’t you? Or maybe you slipped into the womb, grew with me, then slipped back out with me and died. That’s why you’re still here, like a dead twin, that’s why I can’t get rid of you.

There are strange, lucid mornings, X tells me, when it’s as if he sees all his things anew like when he first moved into his flat. An uncanny silence descends on everything, he says, like an interruption… He drinks his tea, leaves the flat and slowly the world’s white noise returns, a vanishing, approaching static that sweeps away the dream of silence. A murmur that beckons him through the city like a foreigner and merges with its noises and shouts, with the rippling of leaves and the cooing of pigeons, with all the city’s signs and disorders. It doesn’t make him feel any more at home, he says, far from it. It moves in and out of his own voice, inside and outside, close and distant — is it you, he says, is it your murmur? No, of course it isn’t.

X tells me he doesn’t want to think anything anymore, he just wants to drift along the stream of being. What’s the point of thinking when he doesn’t even know how to start? Better not to think, he says. No ties, just drifting along the stream of being… That means you have to leave me alone, he says, there’s nothing here for you. So this is goodbye, he says, just turn around, I’m drifting away from you, down the stream of being.

X tells me he feels like a tinker walking into a new village. I might be the region’s newest arrival, an amateur, though it seems I’ve lived here for a long time, he says. I half expect a householder, someone who knows my sort, to come out and tell me to be on my way. That’s you isn’t it, he says, you’re the householder. What am I saying, you’re the one he’s sending me back out to, he says.