The Physics of Sorrow (34 page)

“Cheers. So what about the whiskey?”

“From Corecom, the hard-currency store. Like I said, we’ve thought of everything.”

“And why are you doing it? If it’s for the money, there are more conventional ways of making a buck.”

“I’ve got money, although I never turn it down. That’s not the reason, though . . . Let me be frank with you,” he refilled our glasses, “I don’t feel like living in modern times. Nothing but shit . . .”

“There was plenty of shit back then, too.”

“Maybe, but to me it smelled good. The world is already bugging out big time, there’s no way you haven’t noticed. I want to invite you to join in. I want you to come up with . . . days, everyday life. I know that’s a tall order. The holidays are easy, those I can manage. But these folks need a script for daily life. I’ve already got some clients interested in that.” He went over to the bookshelf and pulled out a few of my books. “I’ve got them all. You gave me the idea to a certain extent, I’m indebted to you.”

“Oh no,” I try to protest. “I never gave you the idea of bloodying up my brow.”

“That whole inventory of socialism was a brilliant idea, along with the stories from back then, too. I use them as a handbook, we recreate a lot of those things. People drink Altai soda and cider, we brought back those old bottles of Vero dish soap. We’ve already got a few manufacturing workshops up and running here in town.”

“This is a nightmare, okay, I’m going to wake up now . . .” I have the worrisome feeling that I can’t control the plot of the story or even my own lines.

“No, this is a story that you just think you’re writing, but actually, you’re inside it. I’ve known you since childhood, you’ve always been a space cadet, it’s not hard for you to flit off somewhere.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Let’s just say you’ve been invited to join in your own project. Don’t forget that it’s your idea, I’m only the manager.”

He takes a sip from the glass, I barely touch my lips to mine.

“We’ve got some more serious plans as well. The Doctor will arrive shortly, I’ve given him the Yellow House, we’ve fixed it up. He’ll be doing experiments there. Regression therapy . . . regeneration of cell memory . . . a sanatorium for the past, gentle electroshock stimulation . . . He’ll explain it to you better himself. But we urgently need fabricators of the past.”

For a moment it crosses my mind that some Anti-Gaustine has implanted himself in Baby Cakes. And my every thought occurs to him sinisterly turned upside-down. For the first time, I want to stop, to give up, to jump ahead in time. Turning back is not always innocent. The past can be a dangerous place.

“Quite dangerous,” Anti-Gaustine’s voice adds. “Incidentally, the Yellow House is not far from here at all and if we open the window, we’ll hear a very familiar . . .”

I didn’t hear whether he said “voice” or “howl,” because I got up
and hurled myself through the window headfirst. That always helps with nightmares.

T
HE
M
INOTAUR’S
D
IARY

I have no idea how much time has passed since I’ve been here. I don’t remember whether I came in by myself or whether someone locked me in. The darkness is so thick that time has gotten lost. Only in darkness is there no time. I don’t know how old I am. I’ve been forgotten. I feel like pounding on the door until they hear me and open up. There’s only one unsolvable problem and therein lies the whole horror. There is no door.

Here’s what I’ve discovered. It’s so obvious that it’s almost impossible to see. The deoxyribonucleic acid of every living creature with its double helix is structured like a labyrinth. A vertical labyrinth that unwinds in a spiral. The genetic instructions for all forms of life are written in a labyrinth. So that means it’s the perfect form for preserving and transmitting information. That’s why DNA has remained encrypted for so long. We are made of labyrinths.

DE

OX

Y

RI

BO

NU

CL

E

IC

AC

ID

Deoxyribonucleic acid. Deoxy . . . An ox plods through the primordial soup of the world. I write it out over and over again until I lose myself in the labyrinth of that name.

Except that there’s some mistake there, some bug, some hitch. Which automatically turns me into a Minotaur. I walk through the whole labyrinth of my own deoxyribonucleic acid to find that mistake. I am locked up in one, the other is locked up inside me. The labyrinth in the Minotaur.

Things that resemble a labyrinth

The human brain. The cranial folds of all mammals.

A body’s nervous system or a nerve taken individually with all of its branches, nerve fibers, axons, and so on.

The serpentine of the small intestine and the internal organs.

DNA

Banitsi
,
burek
,
saralias
. All the winding, phyllo-dough sweets of the Orient.

The flight of bees, the language they use to communicate with one another, the interwoven figures. The language of bees is a labyrinth.

A forest.

The root systems of annual and perennial plants.

The structure of the inner ear with its membranous and bony labyrinth.

A city without a river that you find yourself in for the first time. The absence of a river is important. Otherwise the Ariadne’s thread of its course easily shows you the way.

Secret routes taken on a walk with a mistress you are keeping hidden.

Doodles on a scrap of paper while having a boring phone conversation.

The pubis of a young woman. Here the labyrinth comes before the cave.

A ball of yarn.

The labyrinth sketched out by the reader’s eyes.

If you look closely at a rose for a long time, you will see the labyrinth within it. And the horns of a beetle-Minotaur.

Good thing this darkness is here, this basement, so I can stay here, turning back time, running through its corridors, shouting, mooing. The darkness helps me get used to it. When the one who is coming
comes, I’ll be ready. The transition will be truly smooth, from one darkness to another.

I remember, or I imagine that I remember, strange things. I remember afternoon, towns baking in the sun, deserted streets that grow crowded toward evening. I remember, and this is my earliest memory, my mother hiding behind a curtain and waving to me, I’m laughing, because I get the game, I head toward the curtain, I’ve just learned to walk, but she’s not there. Sometimes I see rooms with high ceilings, a girl from behind, a cart disappearing into a field, an injured man in a strange city, a book in which I read my own story, full of mistakes.

I remember that I was once happy. It lasted about six minutes. It happened in the Kensington Gardens in West London, early in the morning. I can’t find a reason for that happiness, which is proof positive of its authenticity. Any other kind of happiness is a conditioned reflex, like in Pavlov’s dog. The stimulus comes and happiness is secreted, like gastric juices.

I was walking down the pathway, breathing deeply and sensing things with the body of a child. That is the key. With the body of a child.

I haven’t gone out to the street in eighty-four days. I only slip out late in the evening to get the newspapers out of the mailbox, they’re how I count the days. I don’t want to meet anybody. I’ve stopped shaving, my jaw has gone stiff, probably because I haven’t talked to anyone. Can your mouth atrophy?

I stop eating for some time. In any case, my supply of tin cans and provisions has been drastically diminished. I consider reducing my
weight as part of going back in time. Children do not weigh 180 lbs. I feel better in this thinning skin. I’m looking more and more like that child-Minotaur. I don’t know whether I’m a boy, the sickly thin person has no gender or age.

When Theseus came out of the cave, he was leading a child by his left hand. The myth has erased that child from its memory. Myths don’t like children. Just imagine how incredibly awkward it would be. The hero Theseus with his short sword, Theseus who had defeated the giant Periphetes, the bloodthirsty bandit Sinis, the wild Crommyonian Sow, the hulking Cercyon, the cruel Procrustes, the Marathonian Bull, and so on, in the end sees a frightened child. Theseus tosses his short sword on the ground and leads the child out of the labyrinth.

That night he tells Ariadne: you know what, there was no monster there, just a little boy with a bull’s head. And that boy somehow reminded me of myself.

(Theseus and I really do look alike, yet at the same time he is handsome. Perhaps he sensed that one and the same divine father was peeking out from behind both of us—at once god and bull. My brother begotten by a god, I by a bull.)

Ariadne doesn’t pay attention to his words, but only hugs and kisses him, telling him that they have to get out of there right away.

The truth is, while looking for loopholes for the Minotaur in the story, I keep dreaming ever more frequently of my death in a basement, run through by a short, double-edged sword. The hand and the sword come out of the darkness of another time, they have travelled for so long that my human-faced killer is completely worn down from the journey, his arm is weak, and I myself have to help him with my own execution. To make a door with a sword in my
very own body. My whole life I’ve been trying to lead the Minotaur out of myself.

But what if my killer (that which will kill me) doesn’t notice me in the darkness and passes me by? What if I hide, like way back on that summer night when we were playing hide-and-seek and they forgot me . . . And I stand there hidden for a long time, while death goes about its business for years, a century. And what if outside there are now other people, a few generations have passed, and I won’t be able to share the apple of a single memory with anyone? If that’s the price . . . I hear myself yelling, howling, mooing like a bull in the corridors of that basement, because I no longer know which language is mine. I’m here, don’t pass me by, here I am. Moooooo . . .

IX.

ENDINGS

T
HE
S
TORYTELLER AND
H
IS
K
ILLER

Had the Minotaur perhaps thought to use Scheherazade’s strategy? I see him with Theseus, the two of them walking together through the endless corridors of the labyrinth, with the Minotaur spinning endless tales. But what can someone who has been locked up in the darkness of a basement his whole life tell stories about? About a dream, in which he has a human face, about his mother’s face, which never turns around, about his memories from an old bomb shelter where he lived amid piles of boxes and newspapers on the eve of some ending, which never came about in any case, about being trotted out at village fairs, about murders in bullfights and slaughterhouses, about the labyrinths of cities, where he “wandered lonely as a cloud,” about all the books he has gotten lost in . . . Theseus walks beside him, the ball of string in his hand unwinding, Ariadne’s thread mixes with the thread of the stories . . . Some things he doesn’t understand, other things strike him as so unbelievable that his own feats and adventures pale in comparison. In the middle of one of the stories in which some ancient hero was wandering the corridors of a labyrinth to kill the monster, the Minotaur stops and says to Theseus: your ball of string has run out. But Theseus was so entranced by the thread of the story that he didn’t even understand what ball of string he was talking about. You’re here to kill me, the Minotaur reminds him. Now we’ve arrived at precisely that corridor
of the story. If we continue on, you won’t be able to go back, because your thread won’t go any farther. But I don’t want to kill you, Theseus answers. Someone forced me into this story. While you were telling me tales, I visited more places than all the ancient heroes combined. I want you to continue on with the story.