II
I’m in a lot of pain.Pain is just a feeling.
You are not your feelings.
Feelings are great.
It’s great that you have feelings.
Do you have feelings.
I feel ambivalent.
Don’t be that way.
That’s what I feel.
I’m dying.
I’m also dying.
I’ll die before you.
I’ve lost a lot of blood.
I’d have thought you would lose consciousness.
I think that’s the moon?
It’s moving too fast.
It’s too small.
How big is the moon?
You’ll die before me.
Are you in pain?
Again and again the night climbed out of the ground around them. They talked endlessly. The absence of light stimulated their exchanges, as did their motionlessness. They had both lost their legs. One was in worse shape than the other. One was lying on his stomach with his face buried in the mud. The other sat upright against a stump blown by bomb or thunder. He could see the other in the daytime.
God hates me.
God loves you in a special way.
God is trying to destroy me.
You are trying to destroy yourself.
The world is trying to destroy me.
I am convinced that God hates you in a special way.
Something is trying to destroy me.
God won’t let it happen.
God loves me.
Those that love God above all are loved by him in return.
God is trying to save me?
Those that God loves above all must carry that burden to the end.
They needed nothing else. They were not waiting. They were content. The moon is about the size of a human thumb. Let me tell you a story said the man whose face was buried in the mud.
The sky was sad as I made my way; it was dark, it was cold, I was almost out of petrol. I scried a storm of incredible size on my tail, I stopped at a gas station. Sleeping trucks, dying neon. Dead tractors, vibrating tungsten. The man wrapped and sleeping, already frozen, maybe. The store, the gas. I tapped him until he woke. I woke him gently. He told me the way and sold me a map. He told me lies and gave me a drawing resembling nothing. And he traced on it a line that matched no roads, he said: The snowballs have flown their arcs in the bleak blank sky of December. He whispered in my ear when I leaned above the map: What God wants, that is good. The air was cold and heavy. The air is laden with some negative charge, thick with menace. I ignored the cryptic messages, the air, the atmosphere. I went on my way.
I slept at the wheel on the endless expressway where quarry trucks and excavators slept alongside. For hours I flew beside the open fracture, the giant sloping steps. The storm was behind. It always seemed bigger whenever I checked the rear view mirror. Bigger but not quite closer. The first bridge was narrow and long and below the water was hard as rock, there were glinting and hollow sculptures of men and horses in it caught in heroic stances by the sudden freeze. I drove in the helices and was in a city that reminded me of Osorno.
The citizens had left or barricaded their homes. I felt the gaze of ghosts from behind the shattered windows and their blown curtains, from between the slanted slits of the planks that made venetian blinds around the gaping wounds of the restless shelling. The city was flooded. The city was beset by plagues and the blinded lepers remained wrapped in rags mourning their maculas on the swaying doors that were tied with ropes to the lights and the gutters and made for unsteady sidewalks. The black bones of burned buildings rose like scaffolding where sat crews of crows. The water was slick and thick and black, and flammable. It lapped at the smoldering rubble and sifted the jewelry of the dead from the ashes of their coffers. The children running on the rooftops wore the rings and made piles of dirty snow at the edges to push down on the limping lepers below.
In the burning cold, I saw the lighter elements and the trash and the litter lifted up by a sudden, swirling gust of wind, and flying in spiraling flocks around the spire across town, and the wind gathering the mass of the pictures and the clothes, the leaves, the notes and letters until it formed into an opaque column of twisting grey volume around the church tower and sent its bell spinning and beating a rhythm of tolls that made the oil shudder. This I saw against the backdrop of the encroaching ice, the unfolding mass towering into the low-hanging clouds and sizzling with blue lightning within. I was huddled with a blind bat while the blizzard tore down the remainder of my car like a piece of paper.
The city’s basically been beaten down to bits.
And here you are.
I’m a worm in the night.
I was a worm in the night, cold as a stone I was. There were inscriptions on the bare walls of the basement, obscene drawings. They made a fire on the ground with old books and they filled the air with a black smoke that clung to our clothes and didn’t escape from the windows.
Why are you telling me this.
You’re in a lot of pain.
Pain is just a feeling.
What’s happening.
Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether it’s happening or just happening to you.
I can’t keep living.
Let me reassure you now, it’s happening.