[Listen.]
“They are beckoning me like Proust’s ghostly trees that seemed to impart a message to him. (I sometimes wonder whether advancing age does not increase our susceptibility to the speechless plea of the dead; the older one grows, the more he is bound to realize that his future is the future of the past––history.)”
- Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last [1968]
0
Towel’s countless sopping fibers billow heavily on the rail. Sun settles behind creating an orange frame, gradually reddening, shading jaundiced, and lordly towel flaps over landscape’s nocturnal spread. More slowly now, towel less frequently drips and more hollowly billows. Sun beneath towel is a fleeting meniscus glowing red and gone away as the Earth heaves––forgotten in the universe’s vast gloom.
1
Her flesh gleams luridly, bone-dry in the light of Moon––as does mine. Neither of us had taken a dip for several hours, wind cools as it whips up along garden’s fringes, sending endless ripples over pool’s face. Pool is an oval, equally deep throughout and in its centre floats a towel. She had thrown it in. So it floats equidistant from opposed steel-silver ladders, ladders with pairs of black rubber pads that recede beneath surfaces’ vibration.
She failed to notice something. Key was concealed bundle-wise in towel, so now glinting below pool’s malachite surface, sunken, unmoving and indifferent. Towel is now beginning to sink. It will soon be submerged, and it too will sink down and rest at bottom with key. Its white will glint viridian. I place my glass beside me and with exigency decide to retrieve my things.
2
Key does not belong to any doors and there are other towels, but I move to the edge of my chair. Beside me, she had long set her gaze on something in landscapes’ darkening. So I stand. I walk forward. Pool’s shifting-beryl surface is textured in the manifold breeze. Spotted reflections of stars, warping and distorting and constantly reconfiguring positions on pool’s undimmed face.
Months prior we shared a bed and in misery’s hush, of which we were unaware that it was consuming us, we heard each other’s words and packed them away like jewels and singular stones––not knowing that they would later appear as little more than circus souvenirs or carnival tickets when found once again, stowed in drawers and forgotten satchels. Even our deepest secrets slowly turned to sallow conceit and we both looked at each other with constant scorn––not for each other, but for the very idea of love and companionship, for the idea of humanity.
I step three times forward and turn to see her. Her lips shut, buckled with an emerald stitch sent from far and deep, and I step three times forward once more. Pool’s surface loomed large.
2.01
I see how deep things are. Key sits weighty and indefatigably still, as though Earth’s mass miraculously concentrates itself into its slender and twisting shape. I feel now – if I touch it – from it would return every word ever whispered, every sight ever seen, every sound ever heard, every flavour ever tasted, every scent ever smelt, every hand held, every joy devoured, every drop imbibed, all sweet chemicals ever to intoxicate loneliness, every wet cunt and hardened prick, and every child born and every rotting body, every prince king and queen, every fallen star and every collapsed planet and every molecule ever breathed and every cancer from every animal that ever died, diseased and destitute, and all of everything else I cannot bare to think of at this particular moment in the history of the unfolding world––the moment of the last step before the edge of the pool. I stand as stars dart erratically beneath me, across my undulating window unto the cosmos.
2.1
Quite suddenly she spoke demonically. Every inch of my skin hardened and a keen vertigo held me, in that place, at the edge of a warped liquid universe, lapping against its edges. She kept speaking, voice like insect legs.
I leaped in, as far as I could, and I felt the towel in my hand as I sunk down in a gown of bubbles; my eyes were open to a rush of water bringing blurred vision; I could see light from the sky penetrating far down; I began to swim downward, head first; towel lagging behind and my hand was constantly extended.
I kicked and I kicked, exhaling an endless stream of air; I kept kicking and kicking, deeper down as though I was plumbing Earth’s depths, and my hand extended before me, reaching further and further and towel lagged, lagging with every kick, more cumbersome the more exhausted I grew, more cumbersome the less oxygen I had to give, the bubbles grew scarce, but my head remained down, and my hand remained outstretched…
0.01
Towel’s waterless shape flaps frailly on the rail. From on high fattish Moon dresses it in coats of pallor––each coat more cadaverous than the next. Moon does this despite its drifting in the other direction. Unmoored Moon. More frequently, I look back over the top of my chair in order to see it accelerating––still casting the pallor with its butter knife. It comes behind the trees, etiolates branches and, in a thousand chopped pieces, does as the Earth and heaves––forgotten in the universe’s vast gloom.
idiotic investigations 