would end somewhere around here. I didn’t really have an idea what would become of me in the event that my crazy plan to put a stop to all this somehow happened. All I knew was that my situation couldn’t get much worse. To be fair, all these lines were part of a text I was working on. It was just a while ago, for instance, that I’d added the part about religion and the reeking food. In order to obtain knowledge about those countries they’d give up anything to get inside the borders of, I was reading anything I could get my hands on. I needed to know what those fucking countries were like, that they were willing to die to get to or slave away ten years when they did! And everything I learned I put into my speech.
I would usually be standing when I started. It was important to be standing. For they would tend to be on the floor and early on this discrepancy in our heights would let them know who was boss. Another crucial detail was the instantaneous start. It had to be sudden! Bursting out in out-of-the-blue hollering, when they least expected it! Even better, looking at them with a childlike smile right before hollering, which petrified them even more.
Then I’d kneel and bring my face close to theirs. I loved doing that. Peering very closely at someone when only I knew the next move. Violating personal space, that minimum expanse based on interpersonal respect, was a terrific feeling! At first they would avoid looking at me and turn their gaze away but, having to eventually wipe the spittle that was spewing out of my mouth onto their forehead or cheek, would be forced to make eye contact with me through their fingers, even if for a moment. And in that moment, I never saw them. I’d be aware that right in front of me were a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a person at least twenty years my senior, but I wouldn’t comprehend.
That’s what I mean when I say that none of it felt real. Only I was real. Just me. This was clearly proof that I wasn’t quite sound in those years. But mental health wasn’t a prerequisite for my line of work. It was enough that my five senses and muscles functioned adequately. I cleaned the sewer! And if this was my job, I had to become god of the sewers! And that’s what I did … I did so many things I’d rather never have to remember, when the only chance I have of forgetting is to tell … What’s more, I did those things so I’d never have to remember other things … But trying to live today as a way of forgetting yesterday proved to be useless. Quite the contrary … the unforgettables that I yearned to forget quadrupled in number. Turns out that one needed to forget about tomorrow in the first place … forget so completely that one could believe that every dawn meant a new sun … forget so utterly that every sighting of the sun was surely the first and the last. Forget well enough to say, “I believe today’s is a bit wider!” or “Yesterday’s sun was more oval shaped, wasn’t it?” Forget enough to live every day as if it were one’s first … And to holler: “Which religion doesn’t have déjà vu? I’ll take that one!” And to be silent: Where there’s no resurrection, that’s where I’m going to be …
When I first laid eyes on Dordor and Harmin, who’d ended up doing one of the world’s most detestable jobs when they ought to have been explorers like Juan Ponce de Léon or James Cook, I knew right away that they were nothing like my father or any of the other people in the fabric of crime in which I was only a stitch. Even though I was only nine years old. But their way of conversing and their manners, along with the stories they told, made me associate them with the adventurers in the children’s books I’d just begun to read at that time. A pair of adventurers from an era when piracy didn’t yet entail gnawing hungrily on a freight ship off the shore of Nigeria …
Although they’d sampled the salt of at least four oceans, besieged by
I would usually be standing when I started. It was important to be standing. For they would tend to be on the floor and early on this discrepancy in our heights would let them know who was boss. Another crucial detail was the instantaneous start. It had to be sudden! Bursting out in out-of-the-blue hollering, when they least expected it! Even better, looking at them with a childlike smile right before hollering, which petrified them even more.
Then I’d kneel and bring my face close to theirs. I loved doing that. Peering very closely at someone when only I knew the next move. Violating personal space, that minimum expanse based on interpersonal respect, was a terrific feeling! At first they would avoid looking at me and turn their gaze away but, having to eventually wipe the spittle that was spewing out of my mouth onto their forehead or cheek, would be forced to make eye contact with me through their fingers, even if for a moment. And in that moment, I never saw them. I’d be aware that right in front of me were a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a person at least twenty years my senior, but I wouldn’t comprehend.
That’s what I mean when I say that none of it felt real. Only I was real. Just me. This was clearly proof that I wasn’t quite sound in those years. But mental health wasn’t a prerequisite for my line of work. It was enough that my five senses and muscles functioned adequately. I cleaned the sewer! And if this was my job, I had to become god of the sewers! And that’s what I did … I did so many things I’d rather never have to remember, when the only chance I have of forgetting is to tell … What’s more, I did those things so I’d never have to remember other things … But trying to live today as a way of forgetting yesterday proved to be useless. Quite the contrary … the unforgettables that I yearned to forget quadrupled in number. Turns out that one needed to forget about tomorrow in the first place … forget so completely that one could believe that every dawn meant a new sun … forget so utterly that every sighting of the sun was surely the first and the last. Forget well enough to say, “I believe today’s is a bit wider!” or “Yesterday’s sun was more oval shaped, wasn’t it?” Forget enough to live every day as if it were one’s first … And to holler: “Which religion doesn’t have déjà vu? I’ll take that one!” And to be silent: Where there’s no resurrection, that’s where I’m going to be …
When I first laid eyes on Dordor and Harmin, who’d ended up doing one of the world’s most detestable jobs when they ought to have been explorers like Juan Ponce de Léon or James Cook, I knew right away that they were nothing like my father or any of the other people in the fabric of crime in which I was only a stitch. Even though I was only nine years old. But their way of conversing and their manners, along with the stories they told, made me associate them with the adventurers in the children’s books I’d just begun to read at that time. A pair of adventurers from an era when piracy didn’t yet entail gnawing hungrily on a freight ship off the shore of Nigeria …
Although they’d sampled the salt of at least four oceans, besieged by
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