Three Messages and a Warning (9 page)

That morning, however, he awoke with the sensation that something had happened to the light. At first it was a subtle intuition, a change in the periphery of his visual field inducing dark ruminations, a certain parsimony in the dust attracted by the ray of sun filtering in through the window. Once he had his glasses on and his breath under control, he inhaled vigorously until he thought his lungs would explode; his sense of smell, once again he could confirm it, was a reliable ally: the air was charged with an electric tension which he had only sensed on late afternoons in summer just before a deluge broke. A strange density had slipped into the atmosphere like a swarm of insects; it was, in fact, easy to hear a remote buzzing, a generator-like murmur reminiscent of thousands of elytrons soaring into the distance. He pricked up his ears. There they were as always—as every morning, as every night—the sounds which populated his auditory universe: cockroaches scurrying in the corners of the hotel, the whisper of spiders weaving their webs, the screech of rats looking for food—how many times, he thought, had his hunger impelled him to feed on them?—the mosquito’s transparent song, a butterfly’s rubbing against the glass, the termites’ tireless litany.

Something, however, was missing in this secret world.

Birds.

The birds had hushed, contributing to the strangeness which saturated the air.

And the flies, the flies too seemed to have disappeared in pursuit of new decay.

And the smell: a mixture of ambush and emptiness, of geologic fermentations and virgin asphalt.

And the light: a thick grayish ink that oozed between the curtains and drenched the rug.

And the murmur, the remote elytrons of absence.

He leapt out of bed, his senses sharper than usual. A glance at the magazines and newspapers accumulated on the floor after a two-week confinement confirmed something that the shadows of the night had relegated to the background: the train of the century was running—and would continue running, as far as the rails would allow—towards the abyss to which a humanity run awry was driving it. As headlines and magazine covers were reporting, almost all the cars of that train had been reserved to transport baggage which was both ominous and absurd: biblical commentaries and forecasts, unrehearsed meteorological shows, an increase in the number of suicides, a boom in religious sects, a collective mania. In England, a woman had dressed her children as angels before making them swallow a poison which hadn’t been heard of since the nineteenth century. In Iran, a group of young men had set a mosque on fire as part of a plot to eliminate any trace of the Muslim creed. In Australia, a tsunami known as the Last Wave had left tens of thousands dead. In Egypt, an elderly man had hung himself in his tent across from the Pyramid of Cheops with a message “for humankind” hidden in his tunic. In a small American town, organizations for Aryan purity were scheming to get rid of racial minorities “forever.” In the city on the outskirts of which he was staying, an accountant had killed his immediate superior by stabbing him in the eye with a pencil. Eternity, he thought, pocket apocalypses: man has not learned the lessons of history, he is still the ignorant student who recorded his confusion in the caves of Altamira—it’s just that the caves have become tabloids. The crude drawings of bison and birds and solitary, emaciated silhouettes are now the photographs of a perplexed crowd.

As he went into the bathroom, he felt the air stirring around him as if it were a robe: it was that rarefied, it was that dense. He closed the door behind himself, and once he was safely in the semi-dark, he took off his glasses, leaning into the mirror. What better light than shadow in which to face the reddened gaze of his mornings, the effects of the sun reduced to a constant trickle of tears? He grabbed one of the hundreds of bottles of eyedrops strewn about—on the sink and on the toilet, on the floor and in the shower—and dedicated himself to his daily balsam ritual: a cataract for his sick eyes, recommended by an ophthalmologist who had died a couple of months earlier. After his prescribed rubdown, he shaved, washed his face, soaped his groin, armpits and neck, and then rinsed himself. He dressed slowly, enjoying the dark friction of his clothes, which he kept in the bathroom so he could avoid encountering the morning light—years before he had decided that closets were the realm of insects—whistling the jingle from one of his favorite commercials, something about eyedrops or maybe blood donations. He combed his hair, put on deodorant, a bit of cologne, and his glasses, and he left, ready to challenge the brightness.

He drew the curtains, and the spectacle afforded by the window, though he had intuited it already, still managed to surprise him: it was the spectacle of absence. There were empty cars, doors wide open, in the parking lot and in the middle of the highway which passed in front of the hotel; the few birds—mostly crows, as far as he could see—remained motionless on the electrical and telephone wires; the flies seemed to imitate them, petrified on the gravel and the glass like fossils of an extinct species. The sky was now a kind of hospital for cloudy bellies, heavy with rain, which crept along lazily and allowed the sun’s invasion only with great difficulty. Eternity, he thought, let’s see what they think about this eternity.

He left the room and breathed deeply; it had been years, maybe decades since he had given himself over to the smell of desolation with such pleasure, such indolence. He began to walk through the parking lot, hearing with amplified clarity the crunch of the gravel and the hustle and bustle of the ants, examining the cars one by one. He saw trunks exhibiting their contents with an utter lack of modesty, suitcases and bags with the still-fresh prints of escape, clothes strewn on the floor recalling the installations of certain contemporary artists. He laughed at the idea. Who would have believed, only a century ago, that something so common, so anonymous as clothing, would be elevated to the status of an art object; why that modern zeal to glorify the disposable, the perishable? Before, he thought, art had boiled down to a canvas and a brush, to capturing the battle between light and shadow. Before, the body in all its irregularity was immortalized; today the wrapping counted much more, so much more that the body had disappeared. It was still there, of course, the corpus delicti: shirts and pants, blouses and skirts, shoes and sneakers—a hollow corpse. Before, he thought, immortality dressed differently.

He walked down the middle of the highway, stopping from time to time next to an empty car, letting himself be caressed by the mountain wind which hurried towards the south, when an image whirled into his mind. It was the memory—vague, intertwined with the strands of a dream—of a bustling dawn filled with voices and steps coming from all directions, motors and honking horns and doors opening—the sounds of flight, the music of involuntary exile. This memory was joined by another which planted a new smile on his lips: the cable TV pornography marathons to which he had enjoyed subjecting himself for the past few years. Far from transporting him to
the orbit of onanism—the words belonged to someone he had met in one of the bars he used to frequent before he began to
devote his nights to sleep—pornography amused him so much that he had come to think of it as the display which best attested to the ridiculous human parade; nothing was more comfortable than to enter a hotel room—how many had he stayed in these past months? By now he had lost count—lie back on the bed, find the remote control, and spread out the banquet of fragile, transitory flesh given over to an obviously fake frenzy. Frenzy? he thought; frenzy the blood which clambers through veins and arteries, the eyes which shrink from the sun. Frenzy that of the flesh which surrenders itself to the dark, to the fondling of eternity.

The image of three or four bodies moving like pistons in some primary machine accompanied him all the way to the tollbooths lined up perpendicular to the highway, marking the limits of the city which had sheltered him since June, and which had vanished miles ago to make way for a mountainous rural landscape—the end of civilization. The air paid his toll with its persistent whistle; the booths—he had already smelled it—were deserted. He inspected them, however, one after the other. He saw a calendar with the image of a naked woman offering her generous breasts to the spectator along with an icy blue stare. He saw a bodybuilding magazine with its pages ripped, a coffeepot filled to the brim. He saw a radio playing only static, which he decided to leave on; he thought of how lovely it would be to hear the batteries draining as the day decline,d and he regretted that he could not wait while it happened. Standing in the middle of the highway, his heart and lungs swollen with joy, he immersed himself in the morning’s leaded plateau and felt, for the first time in a long while, that he could eat up—no, drink down—the world in great gulps. He then exhaled a sigh which soon became a shout of celebration, a bellow which reverberated in the distance where the city shimmered.

As if in response to the echo which remained hanging in the air, a ray of sunlight pierced the clouds and landed suddenly on a gas station located beyond the tollbooths, encircling it with a misty halo—a revelation in the confines of empty space. Dazzled, his mind become the museum where he had seen an Edward Hopper exhibit one afternoon; he let himself be drawn like a magnet towards the light which seemed to flow from one of Hopper’s most desolate canvases: “Gas,” if his memory didn’t fail him, with its service station attended by a man in a vest, waiting for a car which might save him from paralysis. Keep waiting, he thought as he looked around; maybe someday one of those ghost cars will rescue you. After all, even immortality needs fuel.

Hurried steps—the first sign of human life in several hours—made him turn towards the gas station just as three young men were leaving the attached store carrying cans and cereal boxes. He realized that he was watching a robbery by the way they flung the packages into the trunk of the car which was waiting for them with its motor running—behind the wheel there was a fourth figure—by the look of terror that one of them gave him before shouting a warning at his companions, by the obscene finger that shot from one of the windows as the car sped towards the south, its tires screeching. What a shame, he said to himself, and shook his head as he remembered the man in Hopper’s painting; maybe you’d get lucky the next time. When he got to the gas station, he kicked a box of Corn Flakes and noticed how the ray of sunlight languished, how the darkness gained territory; then, humming the theme song to an old movie, he strolled between the pumps. He saw them as an apt legacy of humanity: monoliths for a future with neither gasoline nor cars, totemic remnants of a culture which had forged its own eclipse. The fugitives’ car merged into the horizon, which quickly regained its faded consistency.

The first thing that surprised him when he walked into the self-service store was its tidiness, the almost prophylactic atmosphere which reigned inside. The metal shelves, gleaming beneath buzzing lamps—his sense of smell assured him that all dust had been completely eradicated—displayed their products with an order bordering on monomania, making him think of ads, of the set for a commercial about to be filmed; from one moment to the next a man might burst in, smiling from ear to ear, with a Hopperesque vest and unleashing a string of discounts and promotions.

He wandered between the shelves, searching for some trace of the fugitives—barely even a can of Campbell’s soup which he picked up and put back in its place—when his ear detected a rustling he had previously overlooked: the rubbing of fabric against a metallic surface. He crossed the labyrinth of canned goods and discovered that his imagination had not deceived him this time; standing next to the cash register at the entrance to the store, a man wearing a vest and round wire-rimmed glasses was obsessively cleaning the counter, absorbed in the cloth which traced concentric circles, the stains which he scraped at with a fingernail he then sucked, only to resume his labor. Circles and fingernail, pause, circles and fingernail—and so on until infinity, the inexorable ritual of cleanliness.

In the operating-room light of the store, the clerk shone as if they had just finished painting him, as if he had only recently emerged from a fresh canvas. Who, he thought, could have forced the man to clean forever and ever under these surgical lamps? He imagined Hopper’s painting, the empty space the escaped figure would leave, the bewilderment on the face of the spectator who would make the discovery, the newspaper headlines: “Escape in the Art World,” “Hopperesque Creature Flees.” Who would fill that hole, what would the reward be for reporting the figure’s whereabouts?

He cleared his throat and spoke to the clerk:

“How are you . . . ? Good morning.”

In the silence that followed, the rubbing of the cloth seemed scandalous. Circles and fingernail, pause, circles and fingernail. The man’s blood flowed with astonishing calm, immutable. Cold blood, he thought. The blood of waiting. No relation whatsoever to the warmth of fear.

“How are you?” he repeated. “How’s everything going? I saw that some guys . . .”

He stopped himself when he noticed the gun resting on the counter, half hidden by the cash register, and that the man moved only to continue cleaning. Circles and fingernail. Pause. Circles and fingernail.

“Excuse me,” he insisted. “Are you all right?”

Without looking up or interrupting his work, the man finally spoke. His voice was, in fact, sharp—a fingernail tracing circles on glass.

“Take whatever you need,” he said. “I only ask that you don’t make any mess.” He paused and added: “Those fellows did as they were told, and they had knives. I told them that it had taken me hours to arrange the store, that they should take whatever they wanted. Even in shelters you have to eat, they said. I know that, I said, why? We don’t have anything to pay with, they said. I know that, I said, I don’t give a damn, take what you want and get the hell out of here. You aren’t coming with us? they said. I can’t, I said, I haven’t finished cleaning.” Another pause while he brought a fingernail to his mouth, and then, between his teeth: “I’ll never finish . . . There’s so much dirt . . .”

“And what do you want that for?” he said, pointing to the gun as he approached the counter.

As if an electrical charge had run through him, the man raised his eyes—two exhausted, reddened spheres where the spectacle of absence was reflected clearly. The rhythm of his blood continued, unchanging.

“What do I want it for . . . ?” he repeated, for himself more than anything. He let go of the cloth and began to caress the butt of the gun like a sleepwalker. “What do you think? To open the door when I finish cleaning . . . What a dumb question.”

“The door . . . ?”

“My brains, all right, so you’ll understand me.” The man snorted and raised a fingernail to his mouth mechanically. “So that I can open them up when I finish with the stains . . . If I finish, that is. There’s so much filth . . .”

The buzzing of the lamps seemed to intensify. The murmur, he thought, the elytrons of absence. Then he said:

“Is it loaded?”

The man spat out a bit of nail, which he immediately cleaned off the counter with the palm of his hand. He answered after a few seconds.

“It has two bullets . . . You know, in case something doesn’t work out.” After a pause he continued, in a more confidential tone: “Tell me honestly . . . Which is better: to get ahead of eternity, or to let eternity catch up with us?”