Collision

To think I might have been dead, he said to himself, ashamed, as if this were a curse of the heart, raising a bundle of bones to a man’s height. As if it were suddenly forbidden to touch even words that had dropped to the ground. Besides, he was afraid of finding his body in a metal press. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. the tram stood jammed above him like an icebreaker’s prow and all that was left of the car was a grotesque pretzel with a chunk bitten off by the dentures of a demented angel. Something dark was dripping on the rails, and a strikingly pale wind was leafing through a book still warm. People were forming a circle and with deaf-mute sympathy awaited the play’s catharsis, like maggots emerging from under the wings of a beheaded chicken. From afar came the approaching wail of sirens, congealing in the jinxed air-conditioning of that day and that minute. Dewdrops were falling on the back of the neck like remnants of atmospheric dignity. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. No, thank you, he said, I’ll wait; for a silent film had started to run without subtitles, without colour and without answers. And what about the magnetic monopoles escaping seconds after the Big Bang, protons violating the irreversibility of the flow of time? What about the giant molecular clouds under the galaxy’s shoulders, conceiving the embryos of stars? What about the loneliness of the first genes accumulating amino acids in shallow primeval pools at the expense of entropic usurers? What about the desiccated starfish like proto-eagles’ talons dug into the bed of a vanishing sea? What about the mortal migrations of birds observing the sun’s inclination and the roar of sex hormones? What about the caged half-crazed orang-utan who vomits because he has nothing else to do? What about the mice which for a thousand years have learned to sing and the frogs balancing on one leg like the thigh of a beauty queen from Mesopotamia? What about poetry, an enterprise so disorderly it twists the rulers and increases the squint of school inspectors? And what about the little girl in the leukemia ward who, on the toilet, tried to show what kind of moustache the kind doctor has, but as her skinny sticks of hands let go of the edge of the bowl, she falls in and so tried again and again? And what about the weak-kneed intellectual, the professor who understood the approximate universe but forgot the traffic rules? No, thank you, he said to some uniform, I don’t need anything. My papers are in my pocket but I can’t reach there. And he tried to smile a little at this embarrassment of complicated creation. It’s all my fault, he said, thank you. And then he died.