Count the present days until today arrives (ME in 2016)

 

After disobeying Fay's initial instructions, I had switched to a low but distressed voice: ----- Nicht schiesen (!) ----, begging her to allow me to remain lying down, with my prominent chin pointing toward my feet. She suggested I lie on my stomach, at least, to experiment with something new while trying to find a pertinent (I mean direct) correlation between fiscal space and interest rates in the world. No way: either there wasn't one, or it was such a confusing task that it seemed impossible to articulate rationally. I was very white, and purple under the eyes; my face felt like it was covered in stellar mud. I felt the tomb of the universe through my skin ---------------------------------------------Indeed, Fay was right: I was no longer dressed for life, but rather undressed by those colorful Bermuda shorts; marked, lost, hesitating now between turning my back again or, rather, in an unprecedented middle ground, on one side. It must be said that Fay's sartorial taste was entirely Dior, which made me think everything would have turned out differently for her if she had chosen someone else. However, I had a pressing need to move on. I saw nothing in front of me but handwritten words: Now that your quality is ardent and hard, like the organ that surrounds itself with a moist, round fire until dawn and even a wide, respected volume of fire. Now that your voice is not the importunate caress that presumes or disrupts the stillness of a summer reclining on the brief and difficult leaf or in a dream that happy memory bent exactly in its recollections, on its last unheeded beaches. Where is what your hand warned and your breath advised? Flight in its charred disdain is now another shell, another word of difficult shadow. A soft darkness perverts that moon extended in the slant of the seagull and the wandering line. Now in your ears and in its harsh blows, a long beach strikes again, leading to its memories and to the happy rendezvous of Apollo and withered memory. A memory that festered with fire and respected the festoon of leaves as the discourse of caressed fire named them --------------------------------- She sat on the edge of the bed and ate a piece of my German bread; perhaps she was too weak, at that moment, to go any further than that with the product of her plunder. Spasms of laughter, like when crossing a swamp on foot. ----- It's impossible for this to go on like this for much longer (.) -----, I said. It was sometime in the afternoon, and on a faded day, so it didn't matter that it was afternoon. The still air seemed without promise or memory of what heat was. I had pressed my cheek against her leg and gripped one of her arms with as much energy as if I were glued to the wall of a cliff, plunged into a vegetative state impervious to psychology, to persuasions to the contrary. My voice pounded the air in the room like a drum, or like when we make a cloth dance in a basin of paint. I was no longer entirely human, at that moment, and Fay sensed it. She saw in me an aura of heroic purity, having conquered the street people through contempt and risen so high above the esoteric storm clouds, even though she saw me lying down most of the time. Someone who was constantly drinking water, coffee, smoking, stretching my limbs and cracking my joints, searching for a magical substance secreted by my own blood under certain conditions. Perhaps impressed by the extraordinary rigidity of my muscles and the speed of my bloodstream, she finally gave up. Every woman has her temptations, and surrender was Fay's temptation. Outwardly, her vision materialized in me the "pure giant," who kept the scum aside, walking invisibly down the street: thin, with enormous hands, veins bulging all over my body, who had been a laborer, a farmer, a lawyer, a dive miner, a wanderer, a stevedore, a sailor, and now what she called a "horizontal actor." ----- Very attractive, these guys (.) -----, she confessed to me one day.