My Brother's Foot [Revised]

That summer, the heat sat on us like a second skin. We had moved to the Fields for the peace and quiet my father missed in the City, and for the fresh air my mother hoped would whisk the quickly establishing staleness out of our adolescent minds. To our collective surprise, a three story house out here still cost more than our apartment in the City had, and my mother, who disliked cars but whose feet would only carry her so far, declared this an outrage. “They should be the ones paying us to live this far from the post office.” My mother liked to accompany her correspondence on its way to the stamp and seal, and believed it would only arrive where it was headed if she personally told the cashier how and when it was meant to get there. Another extravagance the increase in rent cost us was our habit of dining in restaurants, and within the first week we were bored out of our skulls.

Like an island, the Fields were surrounded by the ebbing and tiding of fog. Every night, the fog rolled down from the hills enclosing the valley, and every morning at sunrise it rolled back up, uncovering a crawling heat as if someone had lifted a doormat. It radiated from beneath the grass, fed by the sunlight the valley caught like a funnel. In the midst of it all, my brother and I, relieved from our scholarly duties for the summer, lounged like washed up corpses amidst the clusters of furniture that seemed out of proportion in the vastness of the new house. The house itself was relatively cool, my parents kept it dark until sunset, and while this shut out the heat, the lethargy summer brought with it found a way in nonetheless. Like an unwelcome guest it sat between us on the couch, spread its glaze on our eyeballs as we were watching TV, and laid its fingers between the pages of our books, blurring the lines we were trying to read.

After weeks of our sighing and moaning demonstrations of boredom, our parents pulled a tent from one of the boxes in the garage and exiled us to the edge of the Fields so they could finish unpacking in peace. Being our parents, this impromptu camping trip came with a set of rules: access to the house was denied, except in the case of emergencies and uncontainable bowel movements. “Emergencies are for people who can’t deal with the pace of life,” said my brother and during our three days of exile I saw him occasionally emerging from behind a bush, wiping his ass with a fern.

I went back into the house once during our three days, while my brother was snoring at the wall of the tent. I had to flush twice and tried to muffle the sound of it the best I could. When I got back into our tent, the night’s cold had crawled under my clothes. I slipped into my sleeping bag, pulled my legs to my chest and held my wet feet with my hands.

On the last morning, I woke up to my brother sitting up in his sleeping bag. “I’m so bored,” he said, rubbing his palms on his knees.

“What time is it?” I plucked sleep crumbs from between my lashes. The fog was still clinging to the tent and the fabric hung low over our heads, heavy with moisture. From below, I could feel the heat gathering in the grass.

My brother shrugged.

“There’ll be breakfast inside,” I said, but he flicked a finger at the wall of the tent, sending drops rattling back into the morning air.

“Too early,” he said.

“I thought you didn’t know what time it was.”

He reached into his bag, pulled out his wristwatch and without looking at it, threw it into my lap. “It’s too early,” he said again.

I patted around the tent for my socks. When I had unraveled and pulled the left one up to my ankles, he said: “How do people live like this?”

I shrugged and said: “So leave.”

He nodded, then he reached out and slapped the back of my head.

Outside, the fog started rolling up the hill, nestling in the treetops like clouds of bats, and the sun that had climbed the sky behind a screen of moisture threw itself into the valley with full force. My brother opened our tent to let some air in and started packing up his sleeping bag. I knelt down to shake dust and potential spiders out of my pillow.

“I’ve got it,” he said, and sat on the fat roll he had turned his sleeping bag into.

“You’ve got what?”

“Give me your towel.”

“What for?”

He grabbed my bag and threw its contents on the floor of the tent. I quickly reached into my unraveled sleeping bag and pulled out my towel. “Here.”

He took it and frowned. “What’s it doing in there?”

“Keeps it warm,” I said, gathering the things he had scattered and put them back into my bag.

He sat cross-legged and put the towel on his lap. He watched me collect my things for a while, then pulled his right foot up to his face and examined the sole, the nails, the few black hairs growing out of each knuckle. Then he rubbed it vigorously between the toes with my towel.

“Hey,” I said, “you’re going to wash that.”

He pulled out some dark grime from under his nails with the towel.

“You’re definitely washing that.”

“Shut up,” he said, and examined the foot some more, turning it in his hands. Then, pulling his calf up to his face with both hands, he gently started to nibble his toe.

I made a retching noise. “You’re gross,” I said, but got no reaction.

He took his toe out of his mouth and wiped his spit off it.

“Do we have a – “

I followed his gaze to the tent wall. “Do we have a what?”

He shook his head and pulled his eyes from the wall. He looked at the foot he was still holding with both hands, then lowered his face toward it and bit into his toe.

It came off with greater ease than either of us expected. There was the sound of someone stepping on a twig, and my brother’s head flung back with a toe between his teeth. We both stared at his foot and saw no blood, no broken bone, no carnage of any sort. The toe had simply come loose, and in its stead was a smooth flat surface crowned with a minuscule flesh-coloured cylinder. My brother coughed with surprise and the toe landed in his lap.

It just lay there on my grey bath towel, and where my brother’s teeth had snapped it off the foot, we saw a round opening the size of the cylinder. Finally, he picked up the toe and held it over his foot, pressed it down onto the cylinder. It fit, but there was no clicking noise, which, somehow, I had expected. It just sat on its former place a bit loosely, and when my brother flexed his toes toward the ground, it slipped off and fell to the ground.

From the house, we could hear our father call us for breakfast.

“Tell them I don’t want any,” he said, picking up the toe and holding it up at eye-level.

“You tell them,” I said. My spine was so tense it itched. The hand I was sitting on was falling asleep.

He shrugged and closed his fist around the toe.

“Does it hurt?”

He looked at me. “Does what?”

“Your foot,” I said, “does it hurt?”

“No. Doesn’t feel like anything, actually.”

“What about your toe, does it – you know, can you feel anything?”

He opened his fist. The toenail had turned dark brown and looked like velvet, or maybe mould. The skin around it was taut and pink.

“It looks like a mushroom,” I said.

He nodded and threw the toe into his open mouth like a peanut. In my head a voice yelled “What are you doing” but it didn’t quite reach my mouth, and he bit down. It sounded exactly like biting on a peanut, and the tightness in his eyes gave way to a glint of excitement. He opened his mouth wide and bared his teeth at me. Large strands of pink were sticking to his teeth, stretching between his jaws like taffy. He closed his mouth again with a satisfied smacking sound.

“What does it taste like?”

He grinned, and the bright pink made his teeth look whiter, and somehow bigger than usual.

“Just as expected,” he said.

On our way back, he made me carry both our backpacks and the bag I kept my towel and spare clothes in. “We’ll get it later,” he said when I tried to pack the tent into its sleeve. The straps of the backpacks cut into my shoulders and the extra weight pulled me backwards. He walked next to me, slowly, balancing on the heel and side of his foot and occasionally holding on to my shoulder for stability. When we reached the house, the skin around my ribcage felt tight as a stocking.

At the breakfast table, my mother poured us each a glass of orange juice and made us eggs and toast. After three days of water and salted crackers, I was licking my plate within a couple of minutes. My brother sat there, looking past us all, with what appeared to be simultaneously a frown and a grin. Occasionally, he took a sip from his orange juice. “Eat your food,” my mother said, and he just nodded without touching it. I drained my glass of juice and asked for another one, which my mother poured me with a smile. “Well at least someone’s hungry.” My brother into the distance and said: “Can I have some coffee?” My mother looked at my father and raised her eyebrows. Then she smiled. She reached into the cupboard, pulled out a mug and placed it on the table in front of my brother. My father poured coffee into it. They both watched him drink and smiled at each other. I sipped my orange juice loudly, and the acid felt like sandpaper on my gums.

Now that we were back in the house everyday rules once again applied, so when our mother sent us upstairs to brush our teeth, we did so. The mid-day air came into the bathroom through a crack in the window and ricocheted sluggishly off the tiles like the bubble in a lava lamp. In the mirror, my brother’s chin twitched with the back and forth of his toothbrush. Right next to it, my forehead crumpled with each stab the bristles of my toothbrush took at my sore gums.

For the next twenty-four hours, the toe travelled through my brother’s intestines, big and small, and came out at the other end looking no different than any other piece of meat consumed and digested by a human body. And then there it was, in the toilet bowl in front of him, and he called me into the bathroom and said: “Look.” I looked and said “what?” “Look,” he said again, “that’s it.” I held my breath and moved closer, worried for a moment this was a practical joke at my expense. “How can you tell?” He grinned and flushed with one hand in his pocket, like a man about to close a deal.

It took him almost two months, but eventually, piece by piece, limb by limb, my brother ate himself. The majority of that time he spent in the bedroom we shared. Our parents were apprehensive at first, but with a characteristic stubbornness, he quickly won them over. His investment in what they came to call his “project” was reason enough for them to leave him be. Occasionally, my mother would attempt to lure him to the dinner table with dishes that had been his favourite, but after the consumption of both his feet and his right leg up to his knee made using the stairs difficult, she allowed him to stay in his room during meals. The bedroom was on the second floor, and while the use of stairs was out of the question, I still wanted my brother to be able to move around. I offered him my old skateboard, so that he could use his hands to pull himself forward, but he refused. My father, who had overheard the conversation, told me not to treat my brother like an invalid. “At least he’s working on something. You would do well to do the same.” He took my skateboard away and locked it in his closet. The same night, my brother ate both his hands, making the skateboard useless anyway.

From then on, my parents decided I was in my brother’s way. They took my few belongings out of our room, leaving behind only my unmade bed, and put them in a cupboard in the living room. One of the downstairs sofas could be turned into a bed, and I was to spend my nights there, so that my brother could work undisturbed on his project, and perhaps complete it should he choose to do so. The house was big, but we’d been used to a small apartment, and my parents weren’t quite used to the freedom occupying the upper floor of the house had given us kids. They could have allowed me to stay in the small guest room next to theirs, but they insisted the living room was a more suitable place for me. They said it would do me good to rise and retire with the natural flux of the household, and that being more aware of other people’s daily routine would remedy what my mother called my “constant attention-seeking.”

The nights in the living room were brighter than what I was used to. At night, my parents turned off the light in the living room and went upstairs, and I laid down on the makeshift bed shaded my eyes with a hand. The room upstairs had heavy curtains allowing us to sleep in near total darkness, but downstairs, the room was flooded with the yellow light of the porch, and until the embers in the fireplace expired, their glow served as an unnecessary nightlight.

While everything else in the house was changing, the Fields didn’t become any less boring.

Upstairs, my brother had now eaten both his arms to his elbows, and was experiencing difficulty holding on to things. He found it almost impossible to read his novels about people lost at sea. On most nights, I could hear my mother make her way to his room to read to him, and in the beginning he let her, but more and more he started chasing her away, and sometimes his refusal extended into a shout that came tumbling down the staircase and slid underneath the door into my ears. I would lie awake then, with a hand behind my head and think about the voices he had used to read me stories that would keep me awake at night when I was still too young to make out the words on the pages.

My brother’s project continued in this manner until nothing was left of him but his head. He had been all head for three days when he called me into his room.

I sat on the bed next to him. His hair was greasy, but he didn’t look tired. His skin was rosy and clear, and his eyes were gleaming.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

He grinned. “Pretty good.”

“You look different.”

“That’s because I feel different. I’m so close now.”

I nodded and looked away. “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

He bit his lip. He sucked it in as far as he could, then let it slide back out.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m not sure how to finish this.”

He furrowed his brow and his pupils widened like they had in the tent when he first bit off his toe.

“Do what you just did, and pull,” I said.

He looked at me. I shrugged and raised my palms. “I don’t know. It’s your project.”

“Damn right,” he said.

He bit his lip again, and instead of pulling it into his mouth through suction, he bit further and further, until his lower lip had disappeared and his teeth were biting down on his chin. It looked very strange. He kept biting and biting until his head folded back in on itself and disappeared between his teeth.

It took him ten minutes, and when he was done, I hadn’t moved a muscle. The only thing that was left on his pillow was some of his hair, which he somehow hadn’t managed to eat, and his teeth, white and hard and smeared with pink.

I got up and walked out of the room to call my mother.

When he had been gone for a week, my mother cleaned out my brother’s room, burnt incense to scare away the moths, and put a lock on the door. She mounted his teeth and what remained of his hair onto a styrofoam head and put it on display on the mantlepiece. “Where’s your boy,” guests would ask, ignoring my presence in the room, and my mother would point to the mantlepiece and say “This is what he left us.” My father, sitting in his chair would add: “Went out there and made something of himself. He’s making us proud.” And my mother would nod as the guests said “Aaah” and admired the faceless grin above our fire. If they had brought their own children with them, the story of how my brother had gone out there and made something of himself was repeated to them in a tone caught between pride and bitterness. My brother’s teeth grinned over the scene from above a spitting and cracking fire.

Though my brother had, boredom never left. In his absence, his boredom was handed down to me like a heavy pair of shoes. When I complained, my mother would point to the mantelpiece and say, “Look at your brother. He went out there and made something of himself. All you ever do is complain. Maybe one day, when you’ve achieved what your brother has achieved, you’ll have something else to say.” Then she would turn off the light and close the living room door behind her. I would get up and tap my finger against my brother’s teeth, then against mine. While mine felt soft and porous, his sounded thick and full, and their corners were as sharp as a saw. I would turn around and sit back down on the couch, and pull my knees up under my chin.

Bones [Class Assignment]

The bone lay on the table between dishes and cutlery and clashed with the colour of the tablecloth. Sarah bent down and picked up a fork that the bone had pushed over the edge of the table. “I don’t see why,” she said, “I have to be the one to keep it.” 

“It was his favourite bone,” said Tom, who was leaning against the doorframe because his shoes were muddy and the kitchen floor was clean. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his coat and he was determined to leave them there. 

Sarah threw the fork into the sink. 

“Well, I can’t keep a bone around the house, it’s not sanitary.” 

Tom looked at the dishes that were piling up in the sink and said “Where’s Frank?” 

Sarah shrugged and started collecting the dishes around the bone. 

“Did he find a job?” 

“Look, can you just take that thing somewhere else?” Sarah pointed at the bone with her chin. “I don’t want it in the house.” 

“Dad said to give it to you.” 

“Well why doesn’t he take it?” 

Tom took a step into the kitchen and Sarah said “Tom, for God’s sake, I just cleaned.” 

He bent down and started fiddling with his shoelaces. “Mom doesn’t want it around, I guess.” 

“Well neither do I,” said Sarah and turned on the hot tap. The bone sat on the table and looked like a mushroom. Tom undid his shoes and stepped on the cold tiles in his socks; the floor was slippery and he went to sit down. “He’s been weird,” he said. 

“Who?” said Sarah and slipped on thick, green rubber gloves. 

“Dad. He’s been talking about the neighbours digging up the yard again, and on the phone he sometimes thinks I’m Leonard.” 

“That’s weird. What do you tell him?” 

“I say Leonard’s dead, Dad, this is your son, Tom.” 

“Don’t be cruel,” said Sarah. 

“I say it nicer than that.” 

Sarah looked out into the yard at the unfinished swing set. Moss was climbing up its limbs and the chain that held up one of the swings was starting to rust. “He’s doing fine,” she said, “he’s just tired.” 

“Tired from what? He’s not doing anything.” 

“Maybe that’s the problem, maybe he needs exercise. Mom keeps telling me he complains his shoulders are sore in the morning. He should really take some vitamins.”

 “What, vitamins and exercise? Don’t be crazy.” Tom reached out and touched the bone with two fingers. 

“You know what I was thinking,” Sarah said, “they should sell a part of their back yard. I mean, it’s too big for them now, they hardly go there anymore. They could sell that bit at the end, it’s mostly dirt anyway. Mom says she doesn’t like looking at it, she’d rather see someone actually do something with it.” 

“Why don’t they just hire a gardener?” 

“Not everybody makes as much a month as you, Tom,” said Sarah, and scrubbed a layer of grease off a dish. “If they sell it,” she continued, “they could use the money to travel, get out of the house a bit, you know?” 

“Where are they going to go? Dad gets nauseous when he travels, and Mom can’t let anyone pick up after her, ever. Remember when we stayed at that hotel in the Mediterranean and she wouldn’t let the maid into the room until we’d cleaned up beforehand? Remember that?” 

“Vaguely,” said Sarah. “Frankly, I’m surprised you do, weren’t you five at the time, or something?” 

“Yeah, well,” Tom and knocked against his temple with his knuckles “It’s served me well over the past, this thing.” 

Sarah put a few dishes aside with a clunk and looked out of the window again. A couple of crows had assembled on the crooked wooden beams. “Mom says another reason she wants to get rid of the rear part of the yard is because she says she can hear people digging there at night. She says she’s scared to get up and check, you never know what kind of people they are… But in the mornings the earth is all loose and kind of spread all over the place.” 

“That’s crazy,” said Tom and weighed the bone in his hand, “why would anyone do that?” 

“I don’t know.” Sarah leaned against the sink and started drying plates. “I told her she’s imagining things, but you know how she gets when you doubt what she says.” Tom nodded. “Maybe it’s Dad,” he said. 

Sarah sighed. “Maybe you’re watching too much TV. Dad’s fine, he’s just tired.” 

“We should get him a new dog,” said Tom, “maybe that would cheer him up.” 

“I don’t know, do you think he has the time to take care of a dog at this point?” 

“What else is he going to do?” said Tom, “he doesn’t do anything. Ever since that stupid dog died he barely even goes to the bathroom.” 

“What the hell is wrong with you? I thought you liked that dog?” 

“Yeah, well, it bit me once.” 

“Really? You never told me about that.”

“It wasn’t hard or anything, I think he just got mad. I think I was trying to take his toy away from him or something.” 

“Will you stop touching that bone, it’s creeping me out,” said Sarah, “it’s probably full of germs.” 

Tom let go of the bone. 

“It’s probably the bone you were trying to take away from him,” said Sarah and laughed through her nose a little. 

“Maybe. That would make sense.” Tom got up and leaned on the table. “I should go now.” 

“The kids will be home from school in an hour, don’t you want to stay and say hi?” 

Tom sat back down. “Okay,” he said. 

“Coffee?” 

“It’s a bit too late for that. For me anyway, you go ahead.” 

“That’s ok,” said Sarah, “I quit a while ago. I only really have coffee with Dad anymore.” 

“Yeah,” said Tom, “me too.” 

“It’s hard to say no to him.” Sarah smiled. 

“So what do I do with the bone? You really don’t want to keep it?” 

Sarah shook her head. “It gives me the creeps. Plus I never really knew that dog all that well.” 

“Well, apart from the biting incident we weren’t that tight either,” said Tom. 

“Why doesn’t Dad keep it?” 

“I don’t know. Mom says it depresses him. Apparently she caught him crying over it the other day and she decided it had to go.” 

“Poor Dad,” said Sarah. She got up and opened the cupboard and took out a silver can. 

“What are you doing?” 

“Making coffee.” 

Tom nodded and picked up the bone again. The porous surface felt like he could crush it if he wanted to. “It’s so light,” he said. 

“Will you put that down!” said Sarah and the coffee machine filled the room with its buzzing. 

“It’s just a bone.” 

“Well, keep it then, I don’t want it.” 

Tom put the bone in his coat pocket and watched his sister fill a steaming cup. “I’ll have one too,” he said. 

They sat over their steaming cups for a while, until the screams of children burst through the door. 

Tommy and Arlo [Writing Exercise]

I suffer, hey, says Arlo, look at that thing in the window. Have you ever seen one like it? Tommy says no, he hasn’t, and he doesn’t care, the gym is two blocks away and they have no money for the bus. You’re lazy, says Arlo, what we going to the gym for. For the ladies, says Tommy, and coughs up a fishbone. The woman next to them holds on to the lamppost as though it was an elbow, a gentleman, or a tree she built her nest in but has forgotten how to climb; her hair waves in the wind like the flag of some country whose outline doesn’t look like anything to you. Her hair is brown, but the streetlight puts some gratis highlights in, and she is grateful. Arlo says keep walking and so Tommy pulls the woman’s hair out of his nose and places it back onto the current of air that has been carrying it, and he follows Arlo around the corner like a sheepdog or a sheepish dog or something in a sheepskin. Hey man, says Tommy and points to his stomach growling, he can almost see the sound form bubbles under his skin. Fuck off, says Arlo, we ain’t got time for that. The gym is two blocks away, and God knows when closing time’ll be. It’s dark and the woman at the streetlight lets her head fall backwards and her lids fall shut. A half-eaten can of beans sits on the sidewalk, and Tommy kicks it and dripping beans rain all over the pavement, the walls, and Arlo’s back. Arlo doesn’t notice, his coat is thick as a wolf’s. Smells good, he says, smells hella good my stomach is aflame don’t you know? And Tommy nods and says the gym will take care of that. Nah, the gym’s not for eating at says Arlo and Tommy nods again, but this time he looks perturbed. Hey maybe a beer before we get there says Tommy and steps on the shoe of a bum. The bum says God will punish us all and Arlo says do you see any beer round here? The sign of the bar glows yellow and then blue and Tommy points at it and says it ain’t going to get no greener. The bar is empty and smells like dogfood, but food is food and they sit on stools half their size and stare into a candle in a glass and see the body of a moth coated in wax. What cann’eh getche? A beer says Arlo and looks up at the twitching moustache holding a towel. Yeah, says Tommy, a beer. The moustache disappears and reappears with bottles and pops the caps off them and says that’ll be five bucks. Money, you mean, says Arlo, and the moustache twitches again and the beefy knuckles choke the bottlenecks. Tommy slips off his stool. They leave the bar with growling stomachs and fiery lids and Arlo says nothing for a change. They walk through puddles of streetlight and Tommy’s nose swells up and deflates with the rushing by of low beams that cut through wet spots like a stone through a window. A woman staggers by and Arlo sucks in his stomach and says evenin’ mehdayme, and she peels open a halfway closed eyelid and a tear of drool rolls out the corner of her lips. Arlo releases his stomach and Tommy says hey, and grabs his elbow. Two blocks, says Arlo, and Tommy points there it is, and the sign is blue and says GYM and the next minute it is grey and the white light that floods through the glass doors is black as pitch. Tommy and Arlo stand on the sidewalk, the bags under their eyes carved deep by the streetlight. I need to sit says Arlo and keeps standing so Tommy sits down instead. A man in shiny silver shorts and a shiny silver shirt walks out of the glass door carrying a bag that looks like a pillow. Asshole, yells Arlo, and the man says fuck you and gets into his car. Then Arlo sits down too, and they lean their heavy foreheads against the streetlight and sit there for a while, until Tommy feels a bug crawl into his collar.

Staunverbot - Nihil Admirari [Essay/Fiction]

These days, being called “impressionable” is considered an insult in the same right as “gullible”. The impressionable person is one who finds himself in awe when facing an object, concept or experience that is unprecedented within his own conscious universe. 

The loss of surprise and wonderment to the more and more common tradition of “unimpressedness”, especially in the academic world, is what Peter Sloterdijk remarks on in the introduction to his essay Streß und Freiheit (2011), and whom he calls “Verblüffungsresistenz” (resistance to bewilderment/astonishment). 

The essay as such deals with the conceptual contradiction between the rampant individualism of the West since the emergence of liberal cultures in the 17^th century, and the insistence of social sciences to conceive of societies as “constructs”, as political groups driven by the conviction, inherent to its components, that they are somehow bound together by historical, geographical or social causes, by fate or by dedication. However, what struck me about these few opening paragraphs in which Sloterdijk reminds his readers of the increasing rarity, even scarcity, of bewilderment and wonder in the realms of philosophy and social sciences, even though they are often thought, at least in Western philosophy, to underly all contemplative activity (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 2, 982b.), is the feeling of cynicism, not on Sloterdijk’s part, but one that is very common among students of philosophy especially, and often even picked up on the way as a required personality trait, as though it were, like a Bar Mitzvah, an essential part in the ritual of becoming a fully-fledged philosophical being. 

What this leaves on the tongue as an aftertaste is the impression that, if you’re surprised, if you don’t immediately accept as part of the “game” some of the “truths” that were established within the community, you are not doing your job as a doubting entity within said community (paradoxically enough), but rather, you are wasting your time and reputation with doubting things whose existence is fundamental to the very activity of doubt within each of the undercurrents existing within philosophy.

However, it is true that, when partaking in philosophical thought (always an activity drenched in social and historical awareness, no matter how deeply hidden away in your own mind you think you’re operating) doubt and wonder are more acceptable than, say, in the example Sloterdijk pulls from the realm of social sciences, which is their complete acceptance of an established “internal standard”: the existence of “societies”, both as the abstract concept a social structure composed by an accumulation of human beings, and as the very actual, very mind-blowing realisation that, somehow, this multitude of people is composed of willed, conscious individuals who each strive towards the fulfilment of their own life-narrative whilst still managing to remain, more or less, a functioning part of said “society”. The disparateness between individualism [with its sui generis, the obsession with the own unique-snowflakiness] and the integration of the individual within a societal construct that runs on the idea of commonness, is what, in this essay, leads to Sloterdijks proposal of a “Verwunderungsübung” [an exercise in astonishment] against the stream that flows through social and political sciences. 

In philosophy, as well as outside of the womb of academia, the cynicism that we are all, to varying degrees, infused with, cuts in two opposite directions: cynicism is both the ad (a very Sartrean) nauseam doubting of all there is, to an almost crippling extent, as well as the stigmatising of those we consider to be “gullible”, based solely on the degree of cynicism we have attained ourselves. We are almost expected, on different levels, to both doubt everything, and to already know everything, a state that can, surely, only be reached through pretence. 

************

In the end, it inevitably boils down to cynicism. Cynicism sucks, but it compellingly knocks on your door every time something knocks you down, and after a while it seems like the only reasonable option. It just strikes you as so obvious and irresistible you almost can’t wait for the cynicism to kick in in its full-fledged form and devastate all hope and delicacy (which you associate with weakness at this point anyway) in its way. You’re still in the trial period of the cynicism package you finally succumbed and subscribed to the last time your heart got broken by something ugly. You’re not quite there yet, not bone dry and indestructible, you still occasionally shed a tear or feel your stomach crawl with flying bugs or contract with nerves or hope or love, and you’re impatient, you want to turn into the ice queen you were promised you’d be, this rewarding status you will attain once life has hit you hard enough and chipped away sufficient amounts of your soul. You just have to toughen up and wear the crown one day, you just have to. Even this is a hope, you realise, and you take it back and shut your mouth. 

And then one day this girl dies and you go to her house and you go through her things. She killed herself with something easy, pills from what you gather, and after it hit her parents that she was gone they got scared and wanted her things out of their house and out of their lives. They’re staying at a hotel until her traces are removed and her room is turned into a blank slate that can be redecorated into anything they want, anything that will keep them busy enough to forget. You and a few others volunteered to help and so you go through her drawers and you find a notebook filled with her writing, apparently dating from just before her death. You sit down and start reading until someone tells you to get up and keep working, so you slip the notebook in your back pocket, you won’t sell this yet. After a while, the room is clean and you go your separate ways; with a bench under you, you start reading the pages and you read her pain, her broken heart, her loneliness, her disbelief. You understand most of it, though her handwriting gets complex and hard to read whenever her hand starts shaking too much, and you’re pretty sure that smudge above the word “coping” is a tear. The scribblings in the little leather notebook stop abruptly after a while and you’re left feeling an emptiness in your stomach that doesn’t surprise you even though you had lunch just an hour ago because nothing surprises you much these days. You understand. Her pain was there, stronger and more all-encompassing than she was prepared for, and she felt the logical progression from being left by someone who was everything lay in leaving everything else that was left to leave. Her life, the world. Her pain was there, too much of it, and now she’s gone and for all you know the pain is too. But you’re not sure of that. The pain is right there in the little leather notebook, unused otherwise but for a few pages of Spanish vocabulary. 

Your friend has a gallery, so you photocopy the pages, you transcribe some excerpts to increase their legibility, you resize, you crop, you frame. On opening night, the spotlights are tasteful and the people shuffle through the room, bubbly wine in hand from which they sip as they read, in constant gliding motion, never coming to a full stop no matter how compelling the reading. You gave them real pain, so simple and futile in its commonness, they’re drinking it up with the bubbly wine because it’s real and it has a sad backstory to prove it. “It’s so sad, really, these kids, how seriously they take things…” says a woman. She’s tall, think, gangly, she tries so hard to stay young. You pace through the room, some people smile at you, some pat you on the back and say “very touching, very moving”. They smile and you bare all your teeth for them. You feel naked when you smile. You go into the back and adjust a spotlight that was crooked. The black ink jumps out at the room and the words on the page come to life again. “Love the concept”, says one busy voice to another as they’re rushing by. You gave them the pain they hate to feel, the pain they find ridiculous, and you provided them with an opportunity to walk away from it. Later tonight, they all will, and, after a glass of celebratory wine, so will you. 

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Here are the pages you took from the notebook and hung on the wall for all to see:

Strangely enough, I never thought I’d have to get over you. I’ve thought about it, what it would be like, but whenever I did it was so abstract, almost an exercise in conjuring up feelings that I could let go as soon as reality, namely the fact that you really were there, kicked back in. Now you’re gone for good, no hope as to your return, no more sitting on my floor holding me and telling me you love me and that we’re worth the trouble… it’s as hopeless as if you were dead, but it’s worse because you’re not. Your feelings for me won’t return and stay for good, yet the million ghosts of you I’ve gathered swarm around me each of them carrying an absurd speck of hope like a disease. 

If you were dead, I’d stop hoping. If you were dead, you wouldn’t be able to go on, to forget me little by little, to fall in love with someone else, someone better, someone who will end up destroying your promise (“if it doesn’t work with you, I don’t want it to work with anyone”) once and for all. It’d be easier. I wouldn’t have to live with the knowledge that you are fine without me. That you don’t look back or miss me, when everything about me used to be saturated with you. You meant much, much more to me than I realised. And now I’m abandoned without a clue as to how to go on. 

Writing helps. Gives the whole thing  momentary abstraction. The words only stand for the pain. But at the same time, I feel how desperate the situation is. I’ll never be able to write about a broken heart in a way that feels real. And everyone has had their heart broken anyway, who cares. Everyone is alone with their pains.

The mere idea that you will be fine and I won’t, that you will get over me, that you already are, that you will fall in love with someone who means to you what you mean to me… it sickens me to a point where I feel so helpless and disgusted that I just want the world to shut down and start again at a point where things were still good. Where there still was an “us”. I keep thinking I met you too early. Or at the wrong time, anyway, under the wrong circumstances. That, had all this been right, I’d have meant to you what you mean to me, and you’d still love me with all your being. And then, I start hoping that you’ll come back, realise that you do love me and never leave me again. 

But all I can do is rid myself of this hope. You won’t come back. There is no going back from the curse of friendship, from the loss of feelings or love. I’ll never be to you what you were to me. I think it’s this unfairness that kills me. No matter how much I suffer, no matter how I feel now, you’ll be fine, better off, you’ll heal & forget me quickly, unaware and uncaring. So all I can do, really, is let myself forget about you – about the love of my life. 

Another night of despair and it keeps growing. I’m afraid I might associate my bed, my own bed, with this pain. This fear of having lost what was most precious to be. And of having lost it irrevocably because there is no merciful power that will make him love me the way I love him. And the more I think about it, the more painful this realisation becomes. I won’t ever mean to him what he means to me. Someone else will, I suppose. 

And my feelings won’t seem to fade. And how could they? Some part of me probably still treasures them. The love of my life, at 20? I so yearn to explain those feelings to him. To have him, if only for an instant, feel what I feel for him. Understand what he’s done to me and what he’s wasting, throwing away. I am angry at so much unfairness and… I’d say cruelty if I believed such a force actually has a hand in things. 

I’m afraid. Of the future. Of my coping with having lost him, of him being fine and me devastated. Of the loneliness and the dark days, of never finding anyone to bond with, of never being able to sleep again. Of destroying myself with this pining. Of wasting my youth. Of never loving like this again. Of loving like this (again). Of being hurt. I cannot think straight. I still think of him so often and with every passing hour he probably thinks less and less about me. And there’s nothing I can do to stop this decay. 

Laura (Fiction)

It's not as though the world has won, I'm just giving it a head start.
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I peel my cheek off the page and squint into the light. Afternoons get sunny in this room, I forgot. In the round mirror on my desk, I search my skin for ink stains, half expecting to find my homework imprinted on my cheek. Nothing but redness, however. I get up, shake my leg, yawn. The phone rings and I answer saying yeah. “I hate when you do that,” says the cracking voice of post-nap Laura. “Do what,” I ask. “Answer the phone like that. I could be talking to anyone for five minutes.” I rub my eye with the back of my hand until it starts making smacking sounds. “Can you hear that?” I ask the receiver. “What?” “Nothing. Want to go for a walk?” “Sure.” I hang up and pick up my clothes from the floor.

She rings the doorbell with a bike between her knees, but I don’t have one so she cycles next to me, pedalling so slowly she almost loses balance a couple of times. The only time she ever cusses is at cars. When we start going uphill, she gets off and walks holding her saddle.

Our hair colour is the same, dark auburn. In school, people used to think we were related, which inevitably put us in each other’s field of attention. We ended up close and everybody said “so, they’re cousins, right?” We did presentations together and she convinced the teacher to let us have a time slot in the afternoon each time, because our hair is at its reddest in the afternoon light. Laura realises things like that. After school, we’d go to her house and pretend to work. We’d stare at the computer screen and look up beer commercials, then make fun of how happy the people depicted were, and how wholesome the setting. “So beer makes you attractive and everybody wants you?” “Yeah, it also messes with the climate, apparently. Eternal sunshine for everyone.” “It also doesn’t make you old or fat or sad.” “Seriously,” she said, “you should see my dad.”

Laura’s father is a concert violinist. In the evenings, we hear him come in from work, and Laura goes downstairs to say hi. Peaking through the railing of the stairs, I see into the dark living room where he is watching TV, the box with his violin leaning against his armchair, his slumped figure flickering in the blue light.

Laura sits on a rock, her foot rubbing against the grass. Her bike lies behind us and I keep an eye on it because she won’t. Her left knee supporting her chin, she rolls her head toward me and closes her eyes as they’re hit by the light. “I’m going to the States after this year.” “What for?” She holds a hand over her eyebrows as if the sun had just gotten brighter. “College. I want to do physics, I’m pretty sure they’re good at it. Better than here, anyway.” “Isn’t it expensive to live there?” She scratches a bug bite on her thigh, and her skin glows pink under her nail.  “Not really. I guess the most expensive thing is getting there. You can’t exactly take a train, you know.” “Aren’t you scared your plane will crash?” I ask. Laura continues picking at her bug bite and the skin around it turns red. “No”, she says.

A few years later Laura calls me and tells me her father died. I say I’m sorry though I already knew it. I ask her where she is, she’s in town, and we agree to meet. She needs someone to talk to. We meet at a café, which is odd, which we never did before, we only ever discussed cafés to make fun of people who frequent them. We hunch over cups of steaming something and poke at them with our fingers, occasionally, and Laura doesn’t talk about her father, she talks about the States instead. Her clothes have changed, she wears shirts now, not like a schoolgirl in a uniform, she wears them with ease as though she always had. The funeral was yesterday, I had a four-hour dentist appointment and my gums are still sore which is why I drink in small sips, slurping a bit, making sure I only drink when Laura’s speech falls into a pause. Her mother fainted at the funeral; Laura doesn’t tell me this, my sister did, but maybe she’s exaggerating a bit. Laura’s eyes are red and she has highlights in her hair, she looks grown up. My lower teeth scrape the polish off my thumbnail when Laura says “It was good to see you, we should keep in touch more.” I nod and we hug and then Laura has to leave, her mother needs her. She walks fast and swings around the corner, grazing the wall with her shoulder. The sun falls into my eye and I squint the corner and Laura away.

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Sometimes she laughs and says: es ist nicht so, als ob die Welt gewonnen hätte. Ich gebe ihr nur etwas Vorsprung. When she laughs, her hair jumps as if woken from a deep slumber. It is never clear whether she laughs with or at something. When asked, she replies I laugh against things, and leans back on her chair.