Oneiron Page 3

  Ulrike strains to pull her mind together: there is no God to take revenge by dying. God does not exist. Ulrike squeezes her eyes shut tight and strains some more: click says the Colt lighter. A flame emerges (this is the best moment) to suck into the Lucky Strike cigarette. Lungs fill, her whole body tingles, a gust of wind blows through her head, and God disappears. There!

  Ulrike opens her eyes and decides to focus on movement so she can keep up with Shlomith, who has already moved away. Shlomith has clearly become smaller than the others (not thinner, thank goodness, just smaller—this is called perspective, a phenomenon that even the congenitally blind know, so it isn’t just a convention; Picasso was wrong: perspective is more real than any god or goddess).

  So Ulrike takes her first step.

  If someone were to describe that step, say by comparing it to Neil Armstrong’s great (for the human race) small (for himself) bounce on the surface of the moon, they would be lying. Ulrike does not bounce. And Ulrike’s step also does not resemble the first, tentative, sideways thrust of a foot by a ten-month-old baby (which is usually followed by a fall, then crying, then another attempt), because Ulrike steps right after Shlomith without faltering. But it is also not a normal step. Because although Ulrike’s right foot moves sixty centimeters away from her left foot (which is a perfectly common “now I need to hurry” stride for her 159-centimeter frame) and although Ulrike pulls her left foot after the right (or, rather, in front of the right, as is the way in walking), she does not progress. She does not move away from the others. Dumbfounded, she turns her gaze to Maimuna, who has risen and is now standing again. But Maimuna only smiles mischievously and starts walking after her leader, without offering a single gesture of instruction to the helpless newcomer.

  Nina and Polina are the ones to come to her aid. Purposefully they take Ulrike by the arms, one on either side. First step in place. Think about a swamp. Polina suggests this, but she soon realizes that Ulrike probably doesn’t have any experience with swamps, unlike her. She recently read a long, stunningly illustrated article about the peat bogs of Western Siberia. And she has no time to ask Ulrike about possible excursions she might have taken on the banks of the Danube before Ulrike is slogging away almost perfectly. She mimicks Nina and Polina’s walking extremely skillfully. It is like kneading dough with one’s legs—you have to think more weight into them, you have to think the resistance. Ulrike will soon hear that each woman has her very own resistance: Polina has swamp, Wlibgis has snow, Rosa Imaculada has a slightly waterlogged feather pillow, Nina has swimming floats (the orange arm floats for children sold in every discount store, la bouée pour les enfants à partir de 12 mois) placed on her feet in the deep end of a pool, and Maimuna has one thousand and one thoughts. She can do all manner of bizarre tricks in this white material, Ulrike has already noticed, and it is a result (although neither Ulrike nor anyone else knows it) of her not thinking of any resistance at all when she moves. Shlomith, on the contrary, thinks of food. Ultimately for her the hardest thing to bear is that she can’t even abstain from food. She is accustomed to abstinence, which triggers deep feelings of joy in her with near Pavlovian consistency. This is why at one moment in her mind she might be treading a square kilometer carpet of roasted marshmallows, in the next stomping sugary potato pudding, or then (if for one reason or another she wants to spur herself to especially quick movement) wading in her favorite food, a vat of miso soup filled to brimming with tofu cubes.

  Motion and thought. It is so simple. Ulrike thinks of Hanno’s parents’ water bed, where screwing had always been unreasonably difficult. The rhythm was too different, and it made it all far too embarrassing.

  Thus they finally get moving. Ulrike, Nina, and Polina walking in a line, Rosa Imaculada and Wlibgis treading behind them. Each in her own way. Presumably as a result of this first, somewhat traumatic image, Ulrike’s style becomes flamenco furioso, a banging rhythm executed with an exaggerated straight back: see how with each kick the tips and heels of the shoes gradually wear through the double-laminated vinyl surface . . . Bring on the flood . . . Let them all drown . . .

  Ahead, beyond Shlomith’s narrow frame, something red suddenly flashes. For a moment it disappears behind Shlomith and then appears again, a tiny red spot that grows, disappears, then comes into view again a little larger. Some sort of shape begins to take form. It isn’t a blotch or a hole but a separate thing like Ulrike herself and the other women. Something that could be touched. Clearly it could be touched, but what is it? Red, rippling. It seems to be a little higher than them, and the closer they trudge to it, the more clearly above it is. And then: they are beneath it. Ulrike bends her head and looks into it. A hollow cage like a calabash gourd, with red hair fanning all around as if floating in water but completely motionless.

  Now Ulrike is forced to learn another new skill, the skill of rising upward. Maimuna has already dived to the surface: the red hair has become the level relative to which everything else is defined. Everyone is going there, to the level of the hair, and Ulrike must rise too, but once again: how?

  Maimuna had raised her hands like a diver, squeezing her head between her long arms (plug your ears!) and clenching her right thumb in her left fist (hold tight!), and then she pushed off, and now she is there. Polina of the Swamp grabs something with her hands (peat moss, tormentil roots, bog star stems, sawgrass blades?) and heaves herself up little by little, with some backsliding. Wlibgis of the Snow simply digs herself a tunnel to crawl through. Rosa of the Feather Pillow licks her hands and then squeezes and rotates the nothingness to make small, apparently rock-hard balls she can place as steps. Nina of the Waterwings thrashes and falls and lurches up, and Shlomith of the Miso Soup launches into a series of movements that look like vomiting. Throwing herself back-first with the force of the retching, she moves in fits right up to the hair.

  Ulrike thinks of a flood. She thinks of Hanno lying naked on his stomach at the bottom of the empty water-bed frame, drowned. She thinks of her shoes and the shreds of PVC fabric stuck to her heels. She thinks of Hanno’s parents’ bedroom and the stains on the ugly brown antique wallpaper. She begins to fall. Slowly she begins to float farther away from the women and the red hair. Instinctively she lifts her hands toward them, like a child asking to be picked up; she kicks and pushes but only continues to move away. She screams like she is drowning (actually people who are drowning don’t scream), and as she shrieks she senses how the sound disappears somewhere, as if it has never left her throat. She hears her cry for help, her echoless, impotent wail, and still it seems to come from somewhere else. She waves her arms and sinks, until she feels Maimuna’s firm grip under her armpits. Do not think bad things, Maimuna whispers to her, only good things, and in her panic, Ulrike thinks of cyclamen. Eyes shut! Maimuna orders, and Ulrike obediently closes her eyes and curls up in the middle of a meadow of cyclamen. The sun shines, birds sing, and a butterfly lands on her arm as they begin to rise.

  This is their campfire. Their gathering place. Whenever they wish to speak about something together, Shlomith says, they come here to Wlibgis’s wig. It was veeeery kind of her, Shlomith drawls—that Wlibgis donated her beautiful, artificial hair for this use. Although, privately, Shlomith really thinks that Wlibgis’s wig is rather second-rate. And that one could only get truly beautiful wigs that actually looked genuine from the Hasidic Jews in Borough Park, who covered their married women’s hair not with scarves but with hair creations, each more lavish than the last. Women who covered their hair with sheitels were always well groomed, with an enviable polish that rivaled that of manikins; bad hair day was not in their vocabulary. When a mother of a family she knew came down with cancer and started chemotherapy, she immediately demanded to go to Borough Park. Her Hasidic wig had been more beautiful and natural than her own hair ever was. The cancer took the woman, but the family didn’t want to give up the wig. They set it on a beige velvet display head and the display head on a dresser in the living room, and told everyone who visite
d that some day, if one was very lucky, cheerful vanity might catch the fear of death in a headlock.

  Ulrike glances at Wlibgis, at her misshapen, lumpy head, flat at the back; her whole head actually looks like a pickle. The sacrifice has undeniably been great. Or maybe not. Perhaps it hasn’t been a sacrifice at all. Do things like hair, clothing, or hygiene mean anything any more at this stage? On the spur of the moment, Ulrike lifts her hand and sniffs her armpit. She smells nothing. Nothing bad and nothing good, not sweat and not the Angel by Thierry Mugler she had undoubtedly sprayed there in the morning as she left for work. It had been a pathetic gift from Hanno. She had wanted perfume but received deodorant.

  We don’t stink any more, Shlomith says, noticing Ulrike’s gesture, because we might not be alive any more. There. Now they are getting to the point. This was Shlomith’s style. At times she could be rather un-American and spit things out without any warmup laps, and this is why they had come to the wig now: to explain the situation to Ulrike.

  Originally the wig campfire had been Nina’s idea. Into Nina’s cute little head had popped the thought that they needed some reference point, some common place of refuge, so why on earth shouldn’t they create one for themselves? Whipping her arms about and slurring her R’s, Nina explained her idea. Polina was the first one to understand what Nina was actually saying: Nina was talking about the wig on Wlibgis’s head. About the unnaturally red artificial hair that suited the cancer-ravaged woman so surprisingly well. Nina glanced at it constantly but didn’t dare to say out loud that Wlibgis would have to give up her hair now. That it was what she wanted to use to make them a homey little fire, a place to gather and chat. Because weren’t all the world’s stories told around campfires once? Like about how the world was born from an egg, the horse from the sand, the foal from the foam of the sea. The wolf from a coupling of virgin and wind, iron from breasts of motherless nymphs, frost from a serpent that gave suck with no teats. Agony from stones of suffering ground against a mountain of pain. Tumors from a golden ball dragged to shore by the fox. Death from arrows carved from splinters of the World Tree. And Summer Boy brought blood! Later, when everyone has settled in properly, the noses have been blown, and the tears cried, and everyone gathers around the comforting crackle of the fireplace, the confessions begin. It’s now or never: Mom, I’m pregnant. Son, I don’t have long to live. Dad, I’m moving to Sicily. Dearest daughter, I’ve never liked women that way, not even your mother. Best friend, I’ve done something terrible, something I can’t take back. I’ve been living a lie all these years. I don’t love you any more. I love someone else. I emptied our retirement account and invested the money in stocks that crashed today . . .

  Polina had stopped listening to Nina’s clumsy coaxing ages ago. She stared at Wlibgis’s hair. The tangled fibers were hypnotic, concealing an endless supply of new, blazing filaments, new burning secrets. Confessions it might be nice to listen to as a fly on the wall! Polina couldn’t imagine herself confessing, telling the others her personal business; she didn’t really have any, but she could see from the others that they did. Polina saw Shlomith explaining the reasons for her anorexia; the brutal image of femininity that had locked the poor woman in her decades-long prison. She saw Nina dishing the dirt on her relationship troubles, and Rosa Imaculada crying about the violence she had experienced. And someone had probably mistreated Maimuna too. Hadn’t they all been hurt somehow? In Polina’s vision, even mute Wlibgis burst into speech. Wlibgis, if anyone, looked like a victim, and it had nothing to do with her illness. It welled from her gaze. Polina had looked into the eyes of the dying, had seen grandeur in those eyes, resilience and self-respect, but Wlibgis’s gaze was like her dying mother’s gaze had been during her final weeks: servile, false, just playing for time. If you just visit me every day, death will stay away! That was what her mother’s gaze had communicated to her, and it was a lie.

  Polina couldn’t restrain herself any more. She grabbed Wlibgis’s hair and snatched the wig from her head. There now! There’s our fire to sit around and talk! Polina thrust the wig down with all her might, and as if by magic the hair spread and began to fall slowly, drifting slightly to one side, finally coming to rest about half a meter below the soles of Polina’s feet, as handsome as a lion’s mane.

  This was how, through the application of a little violence, their campfire was lit. Of course Wlibgis didn’t like the change. The others were also shocked. How could Polina act that way! And so suddenly! However, the wig was enchanting nonetheless. When they stared at it, peace spread through their minds, and concentrating was easier. The entire group began to try to appease Wlibgis as she sulked. She wouldn’t have to look at her own bald head here, Nina said. Instead, now she could see her fabulous hair in all its glory whenever she pleased, Shlomith exclaimed. Maimuna said Oooooh! and dropped to her knees to press her cheek to the hair, and Rosa Imaculada followed suit, letting out a sigh of Beleza! but did not, despite the visible bending of her knees, succeed in dropping down next to the hair.

  Wlbigis looked at her choices. Either she would kick Maimuna in the head, shove her bodily away from the hair then take Nina’s hands, which were already on the wig, straightening and fluffing it, shake them loose and make herself altogether difficult, or she would give in. She decided to give in.

  Ulrike lifts her nose from her armpit and looks at Shlomith, who does not avoid the girl’s bewildered gaze. On the contrary, Shlomith stares greedily at Ulrike, practically salivating for a reaction. Shock? Disbelief? A hoot of laughter? She’s already experienced it all. Everything except calm acceptance, the kind that might be expressed in a nod: fair enough, we might not be alive any more.

  Ulrike looks in turn at each woman gathered around Shlomith. Did they understand what that grotesque woman had suggested to them? That they were here but that they weren’t after all? Verdammt! Was that how this bag of bones explained all of this?

  That was one explanation, yes. One possible theory. Not invented by Shlomith but by arrival number two, Polina. When arrival number five, Wlibgis, appeared and in rapture mouthed the words, I’m alive! No more pain!—at that moment the matter became as clear as day to Polina. Her final doubts disappeared. They were all as dead as rocks. They could go without food and drink. They had no need for sleep (privacy, yes, and then they closed their eyes). They had no need for any of the other normal, daily bodily functions, such as urination or defecation, for example. No one even missed the movements and gestures associated with urinating and defecating. No one mimed them just for the pleasure of miming them, unlike the choreography of eating (although they soon tired of that as well). Only Maimuna’s bowels had worked here, once. This occurred around the time of her arrival, soon after she had rolled out prone and materialized from the white. She squatted and squeezed a small, dry turd out of her anus. Then everyone had gathered to admire and wonder at it (it didn’t smell, which they noticed), and that was that. The only known shit in the whole place. Things like that simply stopped existing—the feeling of pressure on the bladder, grumbling intestines, heaviness in the anus, sphincter contractions, the rhythm of holding in and release.

  Of course Maimuna’s excrement existed. It existed so strongly, so disturbingly, that with one accord they decided to move away from it. The shit didn’t actually disgust anyone as such, its presence simply confused them. It was something at once too familiar and too strange: the Last Time embodied in shit. And that was why it began to signify things they didn’t want to remember yet. The condemned do not enjoy their final meals either, do they? (According to one former prison cook, a cheeseburger and French fries were the most popular last meal. He prepared 220 last meals in Texas from 1991–2003 while serving a fourteen-year sentence for kidnapping his brother-in-law and raping his ex-wife. In a way, it’s sad that the average murderer in Texas headed for a lethal injection wants to eat that specific variation of the hamburger invented in the United States in 1935, and not, for example, a double cheeseburger or a bacon cheeseburge
r, not to mention any other foods. Why didn’t anyone ever order vorschmack, for instance? Fortunately some had the sense to cut loose. They ate until they were so bloated that death must have felt like a relief rather than a punishment.)

  Or when a person has sex for the last time with their beloved (or with anyone)—isn’t that sad too? At least it’s something. It’s strange and significant. The last intercourse before the car crash that takes a spouse. Or the more common case: the last intercourse after which intercourse simply stops. Too old. Can’t or won’t. Not interested. The last sex was five years ago on the sixth of April, at home in the bed as usual, in the usual way, a bit limp, a bit dry, prodding but well intentioned, and then—that was that. All the sex you would ever have.

  And there is always a last time, Shlomith says, breaking the silence and drawing together every possible incomplete thought that might be spinning in the new arrival’s head. The last time of all last times. And because in these exceptional circumstances it is possible to experience that specific last time (fortunately Ulrike had been very gifted in this regard), there was no reason to skip the intervention. Simply put: Shlomith licked Ulrike down there because soon she wouldn’t be able to experience anything like that any more. No physical pleasure and no pain. She licked Ulrike down there because every woman present—Shlomith, Polina, Rosa, Nina, Wlibgis, and Maimuna—desired pleasure (each in her own way), or at least just touch. She licked Ulrike instead of, for example, beating her, because these women weren’t sadists, and if they were, they didn’t have any room here for sudden, inordinate bursts of violence. They knew without saying it that now was not a time to rock the boat. The mere thought of violence felt more improper here than in that other world, where there were police, law books, trials, judges, fines, prisons, and in some countries even capital punishment. Here there was nothing. Presumably the target of the attack wouldn’t even be injured, at least not permanently. Again, this was one of their hypotheses, and they had even done some cautious tests a little before Ulrike’s arrival by pinching each other. Each found that the pinching felt the same as squeezing or scratching an arm that has gone to sleep under a pillow. It felt like nothing. They saw it with their eyes, but the skin on the arm didn’t react, and they started to laugh. There they sat next to each other, scratching and pinching and squeezing each other. Nothing that held true before held true any more. That was what they wanted to demonstrate to each other with the pinching, even though none of them knew what to do with this fact. Or did this fact comfort them? Did it fill them with faith, did it give them a reason to go on? And what did going on mean? What the hell would they do after they stopped pinching each other? None of them knew, and that was why they were all laughing.