The city is shaken violently. The streets crack open, close again at once; a lamppost buckles, goes dark, straightens, and resumes its post. Rain is coming down hard. It distorts whatever lies beyond the window. Water hurls itself against the glass. Paul gazes impassively at the city.
A stream creeps headfirst down the building opposite, scraping past windows weary of keeping intact the lives they defend. The dark sky lights up, then turns black again. A wave of sound makes the pane tremble. Paul is waiting for another flash. The storm falters. Something is screaming loudly inside his head. He closes the curtains.
Time to prepare. He adjusts the lighting; the furniture casts longer shadows. He puts away a few magazines, straightens the flowers. In the bathroom, he sets the bathtub taps, places the thermometer in the water. He inspects the bedroom, takes off his clothes, leaves them on the floor, slips into a bathrobe, then returns to check the bath. A few drops of the required plant essence, his toiletries swept aside, a stick of incense lit, he urinates. Back in the living room, he picks up his phone and opens the music app.
The app first offers his usual selection. He hesitates, then chooses a playlist of vocal works instead. The phone sends the signal to the console; the speakers awaken. Music takes possession of the waiting. Little boys from overseas begin to sing a requiem. Little beings who must still be innocent, perhaps fat. Little men whose obliviousness rests on the simple desire to break their voices, sooner or later, should impurity come calling.
Paul sees himself as a child again. He cannot remember learning the word dirty. Perhaps, perhaps it did not exist. Perhaps, perhaps life taught it to him while he was making himself dizzy spinning in circles. As a child, to brush against vertigo is to learn to speak a little with Death, at least within the confines of nascent feelings in their purity. Paul cannot remember what was said back then. He proceeds as usual. Childhood lies far behind him; it will reclaim him somewhere along the bend of age. Perhaps?
The Requiem gathers force. “I’m still alive,” he reassures himself. He returns to the window and opens it again with a gesture rougher than he intended. Violently, then. He must calm down. Wait for her. Make himself body for her. Make himself soul for himself. Make himself body and soul: a whore. The word is stronger than he is.
He checks the time. She is late—again. She is playing. And time is something she buys. “She can buy anything she wants, so why not watches…”
The rain has stopped, but the wind keeps sending the water lingering over the city into a waltz. “Chaos. It smells like chaos.” He gropes inside himself for confirmation. It is not there. Or else it has hidden far below the surface, crouching like a sated beast in the warm depths of the trees. Still, he calls out. Silence tells him to be quiet. “Damned chaos,” he repeats. He is thinking aloud, and his voice startles him. He is too nervous; a new kind of unease is roaming through the two of them, his soul and his body.
Another impossible encounter, and so easy after all. All he has to do is pretend. His life then has no horizon left; it clings timidly to his adolescence and borrows its Babel climaxes. Beyond those borders, blasphemy is no longer possible; heroes lick other people’s saliva and steal their swords. They exhaust their enemies by becoming impostors. Vertigo in an adult is frowned upon.
He begins a deep breath. His breathing follows the movement, climbs a few steps, catches the air at the top and draws it powerfully back down. Paul breathes again. On the window, his fist is white. His spine remains taut, like a dog poised to defend itself.
Fifteen minutes late. She will be here soon. For two years now, she has been about to arrive, swallowing fifteen minutes of his time—or rather, of his soul. Two years, once a week, multiplied by fifteen minutes. Paul counts the drops of water; the arithmetic is difficult. He picks up his phone and opens the calculator: 1,560 minutes. Twenty-six hours.
The number gleams on the screen. The display goes to sleep, then dark. Paul’s large body falls asleep as well. He misses the morning. He wishes he had not entered the day. His sheets had been crotch catchers. He had done nothing all day. Only waited some more, broken the morning, counted the hours. A life enumerated, exact and without logic, like a labyrinth. And no one is stopping him from leaving this prison.
All he can do is return to the window. Outside, the world is iridescent and orchestrated by administrative measures. A searchlight revolves. A slice of night reveals its violent underthings in turn. Certain clouds threaten the skyscrapers. Aeolus has punctured the waterskins. The traffic lights take control of the storm. The city is pregnant with countless glimmers. It founders in the darkness. A shadow crosses a street. It suddenly reminds him of his dream the night before.
He was getting up in the night. Red silhouettes stood motionless at the windows of his apartment: women without faces, bodies aflame, lined up across the entire span of every window. At regular intervals, one of the bodies disappeared and reappeared inside. Paul would take out a knife and stab the zombie woman through. As it entered the flesh, the blade made a dull sound, like pricking a sausage to see whether it was cooked. The silhouette fell gently, then began whispering curses. He bent down to silence her but could not, because eyes, hidden until then, opened in fury. They were horrible, murky. Paul backed away and, in a desperate effort, struck the monster again with his knife.
When he awoke, Paul was gripping his sheets tightly in his fist. He had balled them up and pressed them against his stomach. The cradle’s defences last forever.
He checks his watch. Thirty minutes late. Is she doing it on purpose? “She wastes everything. Throws it all out the window.”
The Requiem chants and rests. Very long notes strain toward some unknowable certainty. “Fraudulence over everything?” The streetlights suddenly go out for good. A power failure divides the avenue in two, and the window returns Paul to his body, polished by exercise. The body, immutable—or rather, patient—takes time to oxidize in the pollution of suffering, and that helps him remain beautiful. Yet it eventually wears itself out under the effect of too many drugs injected by life. Beautiful people have a fleeting chance of passing for eternal. Ugly people, those without Paul’s skin, lose themselves in theogonies.
Nothing can be held against the surface of this flesh. The talent of beauty is there. Without shame, Paul delights in it. “Plenty of time ahead of me,” he thinks. “And so little hope,” his unease corrects him.
Paul avoids the trap his thoughts have laid for him and tries to silence them. How can he hope, why should he, where are the anchors? The ocean pitches, inventing the horizon now.
Instead, Paul concentrates on the indistinct image the window gives back to him. He inspects himself. It has become a compulsion. The body is raw, chiselled by will. But certainly not the face. That is the face of someone who knows paradise and uncertainty. Paul does not want to look at his face. He stops at the lips. “Not the eyes,” his mind warns him.
Suddenly he is afraid he will turn into one of those red women of the night if he keeps staring at himself this way. He closes the curtains. The doorbell rings. Forty minutes late. Bitch.