Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (tohfa e dulha read online .TXT) 📗

ever afraid? It wasn’t fear, that sensation that always came to an end sooner or later, that affected some or many at once, that was shared, spread around. Foreseen. That some even sought out and enjoyed, maybe. I keep on thinking that fear was born for me, and in fact I have the proof, that it was created for me, against me, that I’m the target, the goal.

And everything is fear. This snow out of season, the stagnant air with its cemetery smell, the outsized throb of the electric clock, these lights that skewer me. I’ve been sitting here all night, my head between my knees, hands pressed to the back of my neck like someone awaiting a beating. Yesterday, also.

I’m cold. Outside the snow keeps falling. I get up; I’ve seen a bottle of Henniez water on a table, and I drink some. Back to the chair, where I cover myself once again with Battaglia’s redingote and close my eyes. For a few moments, my mind drifting, I return to my usual native unhappiness. The one I’ve hauled along with me for years, and that now, tried and true, feels comforting.

I finger the past absentmindedly, a rough past. I test myself in a search for lost time, which on the whole, whether it involves recovering distant or recent experience, offers me little.

Once more I coast by that island that Karpinsky has been in my life. I struggle to reconstruct him in all the details of his person—his physical person, and I tell myself that his ordinariness, and the carelessness with which he dressed, were meaningful—I try to reconstruct his behavior toward me, and toward Wanhoff, who detested him, and toward the other patients. I struggle, but the results are meager.

On the lawn behind the clinic a gardener is mowing the grass, and from the window of my room I watch Karpinsky walk up to him, and bend to pick some spontaneous flowers, wild flowers. I’m lying, dressed, on my bed and Karpinsky says, “Yes, I’m going to spring you from this place soon, but keep in mind that you will have to suffer.” Contrary to Wanhoff’s rules, Karpinsky has agreed to sit at my table in the dining room while I eat. I’m chatting away and I ask him how old he is and discover that he’s the younger of us two. “Fact remains,” he says to me, “you have a lot more years ahead of you than I do.”

A prediction that proved correct. (But how did he know that?) I’m still here suffering. Purifying myself?

Dr. Karpinsky (I’m thinking aloud), remember me.

I’m talking nonsense; the dead have the gift of nonexistence. Of not seeing in any case, not hearing, not knowing. Impassive, as Mylius put it.

•

I am alive, I’m still on this earth.

On this earth, there is no eternity, only moments, hard as they are to calculate. Trauma admits intermittence; just now I sneezed, outside the snow’s no longer falling, a spider, or a huge fly, is slowly measuring out Battaglia’s mahogany countertop.

An idea runs through me, this time a coherent thought, not a ghost or a memory. A thought that creates a connection.

Not that I have analyzed or examined the matter; I don’t have the desire or the strength. But I did replay the scene of the beginning of the end, the scene of the prologue to the Event. In the cave of the siphon. Between two cells of a random one of my cerebral gyri, a link formed, involuntary and absolutely automatic. I was exempted because I was inside a cave. Inside a mountain.

That meant the consequences (my separate fate) were fortuitous, and physical in nature. This still doesn’t explain what happened, and even less other subsequent events. But it allows me to embrace a provisory explanation; the logic of function and fiction41 makes sense again.

And more important, it suggests possible action to take, something to try. It’s comforting. It permits me to sleep. I slept for a couple of hours in fact. True sleep.

And now I’m thinking.

There were various other human beings on the night of June 2 in environmental circumstances similar to mine. All around the world, but also here near Widmad. I mean the miners at Alpa. At Alpa there’s a gold quartz mine.

When I awake it is dark, around three or four in the morning. I’m weary, my mind fragmentary and clouded as when coming out of total anesthesia, and when I look around I’m unable to understand where I am and what’s happening. I have only a vague desire to move and the warmth of some uneasy hope. Prying myself from my chair, I go to look through the glass. I can’t unwind, the cold and the inertia make me tense. Nevertheless, something has been set right. I have a plan, and with it, I sense, I can chase death away from me and from around me.

I will return to the real, the human. The human.

I’ll go to Alpa. Will I make it?

First, I’ll need a minimum of energy, I must eat. Eat. And I must also wait until day comes; I’ve never been to the mine, I don’t know the way. So I’ll wait.

I’m retracing my thoughts of the past. I call up the time-honored image (mine, I invented it just a few days ago) of the pyramid, or rather the two pyramids, facing in different directions and joined at their bases. At the top point, the original hominid, forefather of the human race, down to the billions of men living in the final era. And from those billions back to the successor: the second pyramid shrinks rapidly down to me, survivor and heir, the only exemplar of the species still alive.

But the two points, top and bottom, have no substance, they are mere symbols. There was no original progenitor, hominid or man, that’s just a conjecture. And thus, at the bottom of the inverse pyramid, the individual at the point—me—cannot, finally, be anything but a mental construct. Geometrically, it’s simple: