Notes from a Room

He’s disappointed me somehow, hasn’t he? X asks me. Then why am I so silent? he asks. It’s time to blow the lid off this silence of mine, he tells me. I’m full of shit, he says. Come off it, he says, you’re no better than me. At least I’m honest. Why are you so silent, was it something I said? He thinks he understands, he says, he’d do the same, it’s no wonder, but he wants to hear me say it. Say it, he says.

X doesn’t think he’d mind prison too much, he tells me, at least not solitary confinement. His room is like a prison as it is, he says, this room he carries about inside him. He’s already in prison, he says, all he does is sit here. Sometimes he walks around, feeds himself, evacuates. It sounds melodramatic, he shrugs, like everything I say, but hey, I didn’t choose it. He doesn’t think he’d mind isolation much, he says, the walls wouldn’t make much difference and the seasons mean nothing to him. The interrogators wouldn’t know what to do with him, with their stupid games, he says. They’d just think I was arrogant and try to break me down, he says. Whoever heard of such a creature! he says. An abomination, he says, that’s what he is.

X tells me he becomes more of a problem to himself every day. He shouldn’t think so much, he says, especially about himself. Isn’t that what they’d say? he asks. He’ll lead himself into perdition, like his own demonic double, taking his own hand. Perdition, what a thought! he says. But it makes sense, he says, we can only lead ourselves into perdition, we have to be willing to be led by ourselves. Maybe they’re right, he says, maybe he shouldn’t think about himself so much. Maybe he should get a dog, maybe that would help.

X feels like the end or beginning of something, he tells me, he’s not sure what. He just wishes it would either end or get on with it, he says, he’s had it with being bounced back and forth like this. It makes him feel wrong, he says, out of step. That’s why I’m so hesitant all the time, he says, and so embarrassed. I’m embarrassed about living like this, in this series of endless endings and false starts. Amateurish, he says, as if no one had ever lived before.