“All is remote—nowhere does the circle close.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. J. B. Leishman
“He believed the rest of the world was limping—and that made him dance for joy.”
—Frank Wedekind, Lulu, tr. Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond-Pablé
The future cannot be remembered due to entropy. But you can remember your old self when you wake up in the morning to the ancient sunlight trickling into your room from behind your curtains. The memory of your old self announces its presence the moment you open your eyes and the fog in your brain clears—that ugly, beautiful, frail, exhausted creature. You occupy a special moment in the history of the earth, perhaps in the Cambrian as a prosaic life form, whose eyes have just developed. Your vision is persistently blurry, moody, and erratic—suggesting that it embraces other meanings and points in time, past and future. You perceive that as a threat with every fibre of your being. You could be 500 million years old or 397 million or 439 million. Your age saunters on and on like a reptile.
You ought to give that voice from the far side just the right home in your mind. It’s a man, woman, and animal all in one. It’s old, young, and child—yes, your daughter. She’s calling out to you. You’ve got to get up, get dressed, drop her off at school, and then head to work. You rub your burning eyes. You hit the sack late last night; you’d polished off an entire bottle of wine even though you had no intention of doing so. You binged on YouTube videos, as usual: practical jokes, scary pranks, morning routines, evening routines, reality feuds, minimalist and maximalist lives, hoarders, people living in trailers . . . in open eucalypt forests. Then meditation videos. Your husband doesn’t get how you can do housework while meditation videos play in the background. “You can’t wash dishes and meditate at the same time.” Of course, you can.
You put on a meditation clip and slip into the shirt and pants you’d laid out the night before. You walk over to your daughter’s room and immediately notice dozens of shades of blue everywhere—blue walls danced upon by a burning blue nightlight and by blue daylight oozing through blue curtains. Your daughter wants to wear her blue tutu. You try and convince her not to because it’s in the laundry hamper. “Put on your shorts with the rockets on them, or your blue cat dress.” That friend of yours who runs a boutique had told you that the same tutu was all the rage in the world of girls’ kidswear. She happens to be the same friend you texted after you and your husband decided to separate: “Come over, I’m utterly devastated.” She declined because, as she put it, “My lights are on but no one’s home.” You saved that text, and still read it from time to time when you need to smile. You turn to your daughter. “Your tutu is in the laundry basket, so you can’t wear it.” She keeps pleading with you. You aren’t in the mood to deal with her. You’ve got a sore neck. You let her throw a temper tantrum and mosey off to do your make-up. You end up changing your mind. You hear your daughter head into your bedroom, put an LP on, and begin dancing. You glare at yourself in the mirror. Your eyes are encircled with veins and potholes—you reach for your make-up. The feeling of attending some religious ritual. Make-up sets recovered from Ancient Egyptian tombs. Kohl, ochre, malachite. Did all ancient Egyptian women do make-up? Was there an age limit? The photos of Jeanne Louise Calment celebrating her one hundred twenty-first birthday back in 1996. Make-up and an old woman make for an interesting combo. You run into one on the street every once in a blue moon. An old woman covered in make-up. But Calment’s face was make-up-less in those photos—still, her eyes and skin were forty shades of pink like a newborn rabbit. Her skin. Wasn’t she a smoker? You could use a smoke right now. They say that people’s eyes shrivel up as they age. No, your eyelids droop, making your eyes look like raisins. Eyes speak volumes and trap photons. They’re hungry hunters, no photon can escape them, not even one. They can even see single specks of light, or so your husband once said, to which you replied: “When will you move out?” You two have decided to separate—so why isn’t he moving out? Or why aren’t you? Why can’t one of you leave, what are you still doing here?
You paint your lips coral pink, then walk back over to your daughter’s room. You find her in her blue tutu—she dug it out of the hamper. She did the same thing last night after the two of you sat in your bed and read a book together about leaving your pets to your clones to look after, feed, play with, and love, so you can go off and do other things. Nothing else happens in the book. “Your tutu’s filthy, it needs to get washed.” “No, mum!” “There’s no way in hell you’re going to school like that.” “But why, Mum?” “’Cause we don’t go to school with dirty clothes.” She adds Mum to the end of every sentence. A living being who’ll most probably outlive you. Statistics show that 80% of children outlive their parents. Kids remain behind like prayers, curses, and frivolous objects on this eternal rainstorm of a world. Apparently in some Aboriginal tribes, mothers used to imagine their children as curses that they bequeathed on the planet, back in the old days, when mankind and the world were not considered one and the same thing. Or maybe children would imagine their mothers as cast curses that they hoped would take effect on earth—this, when mankind and the world bore no relationship to one another whatsoever. No, apparently Inuit mothers used to grieve when their children were born. No, mothers would imagine themselves as self-cast curses. What have statistics got to say about what percentage of old women grieve? Would they have lived as long as they did, shedding tears here and there for this person and the other? Quite possibly, their lifespans are nothing but one long tear. You didn’t weep when your husband found the love of his life, or when the two of you decided to call it quits. That said, people are apparently supposed to grieve over breakups; they’re supposed to be experienced like death, and be grieved over properly, or else they can cripple you for life.
You’re running late. You feed the cat before you head out the door—the sound of each morsel smacking the bowl is like hail. The cat, on the other hand, is staring out the window in a trance-like state. You call her to eat but she doesn’t respond. Your daughter bellows from the other room, “She’s old, Mum. Her hearing isn’t what it used to be.” You feel like crap every single morning because you’ll have to leave the cat home alone all day. You finally take the bowl over to the cat and plop it down in front of her. You wonder how many pets are home alone right now: cats, dogs, birds, goldfish, turtles. Clones. Someone should form a company that sells caretaker clones—they can keep our lonely pets company. They don’t age and you can stuff them in a closet until you need them. And when you do, you simply press the start button, watch them and their plastic, steel, green, frozen eyes come to life the moment the on-light flickers. Akin to the way those Cambrian creatures once did.
You and your daughter leave the apartment. Elevator, underground parking lot, car—your automatic morning dance. You flip the radio on and habitually tune into your favourite talk show. Today’s topic: reptiles. You then strike up a conversation with your daughter about reptiles as though you’re some expert. The show takes a break from the news. You immediately turn the dial to a clarinet concerto by Mozart, the program host of which has got the most pleasant of voices. Last winter you and your husband bought a CD of clarinet music together; the next thing you knew, you were hooked, but he didn’t really like Mozart—did his true love? Did she wear make-up? Did she know you? You pull in and out of your regular gas station. Your daughter’s ten minutes late for school. Whatever. Her super young, red-haired teacher—the one she usually dashes into the arms of—isn’t waiting at the door today. Your daughter slithers out of the car with a frown on her face. You perk your head up to watch her bolt into the school and disappear from view entirely. You wait for a second longer just to make sure she’s inside. Then, the next thing you know, you’re already on the road again. You arrive at the bank: a cold, grey eyesore of a building. The price of youth. Standing out front is the same old flower seller and the same bright-orange ribbon of sunlight cast along the wall. You park your car in the same old parkade next to the same old pharmacy in the same old lot. You get out and put your headphones on. You board the same old elevator and encounter the same old colleagues grinning and bidding you good morning. You neither smile nor utter a word. Instead, you bolt towards the hallway and beeline to your office.
You take your headphones and coat off and toss them and your purse on the seat beside the door. You switch your computer on, crank your chair up, tie your hair up in a ponytail, check your emails, reply to whoever’s message is urgent, and star the ones that are for later. You massage your neck and try and soothe your aching body. Don’t think of your body as something that’s supposed to suffer or that life is supposed to suck after you reach a certain age. No, in fact, it is supposed to suck, but don’t think you’ve finally come to terms with or accepted that past a certain age. Don’t let the history of humanity whisper in your ear that sucking your breath and standing up to passing time is a sign that you’re getting closer to death. Think positive. Life’s a miracle. Miraculous, magical. Focus on numbers as though money were raining before your very eyes. Punch in that alligator of a nine-to-five shift ahead awaiting you with its hungry and threatening mouth wide open, razor-sharp teeth and all. Plough through that thicket, crushing everything in your path like there’s no tomorrow. Until you return the next day, and then the day after that. Time and numbers, numbers, numbers bleed into one another. Money. Paid, unpaid, and that needs to be paid. Down payments, opex-capex, incomes. 327, 987, 1236, 0981, 87, 123, 367. Tables, diagrams, files, .ppt’s, .cvs’s, SAPs, IBM Cognos data, Mister this and Misses that. We’ll take care of the details at the next Teams meeting. Yours sincerely. Have a good day. Take care. Slap on a couple of smileys at the end. Maybe ask how they’re doing. Don’t forget to fill them in on the latest doomsday scoop from the motherland, and then wrap it up with the now more than ever need to stick together. Put your headphones back on. Mozart. Lunchtime. Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K 622: II. Adagio. Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. You exit the building. The sun cuffs you upside the head. Rub your eyes, for they are aflame. You crave a smoke but no, don’t. You quit for your daughter’s sake. You walk and arrive at the same old restaurant. You take your headphones off. You park your bum on the same old wicker outdoor chairs and hear the same old TV bellowing in the background. You order yourself the same old olive oil mezze and a glass of stale tea. You’re still craving a smoke, oh and coke, no, whiskey, or beer and a smoke. But don’t do it. You put your headphones back on. Tosca, S. 69, Act II: Vissi d’arte, Maria Callas. You get up, walk away, and arrive back at work. You head into your office, take your headphones back off, and toss your coat on that seat. You’ve got calls to make and e-mails to answer. They want you to make a statement chart of everyone’s incomes from the past five years. There that alligator and his fangs are. Vedi, le man giunte io stendo a te! You call your husband. Has he picked your daughter up from school yet? Apparently yes, and long ago at that. Why is he still at home? Why hasn’t he moved out yet? Hadn’t he found eternal, true love anyway? He wouldn’t know what love was from a hole in the ground. He and your daughter are hanging out. They’re listening to music and making supper. You’ll be home late. Time is like a giant ball of mangled elastic bands—layer upon layer of never-starting and ending knots. It’s the shroud Penelope weaves. A faithful spouse. You never took issue with fidelity. You pause for a second and take a stretch break. Your neck still aches. You stare at your reflection in the window, then out the window at the ambush that is winter in Istanbul, at the half-quivering, half-still lights on its skyscrapers sprawled out in all directions, and at the nonchalant silhouettes of people on the second, tenth, and twenty-fifth floors of each one. Oh, look at the time. You finish your work up and send off whatever it is you need to. Tosca. Partir dunque volete? Si, per sempre! Si adempia il voler vostro. E qual via scegliete? La più breve! You grab your purse, lock your office up and call it a day, board the elevator, and head down to the parkade below. You enter traffic—drive, stall, drive, stall. You arrive home. You park your car underground. You turn Carlo Bergonzi’s voice off: O dolci mani mansuete e pure. You sling your bag over your shoulder and get out of the car. You board the elevator and remember how much you miss your girl. You haven’t yet walked through the door, but you spot her from the corner of your eye. She’s got her nose buried in a book, dimly lit by the lamp on the coffee table beside her. You can smell supper—made by that husband of yours who refuses to make like a bird and flock off. You also hear music drifting out of your bedroom at low volume, either Das Rheingold or Don Giovanni. He’s not one to like Mozart. Your plan is to put your daughter to bed and then put on a movie. No, not something about some “strong woman character.” When Carlo Bergonzi died in 2014, he’d just hit 90. Old. Penelope. Shroud. Bergonzi’s father was a master Parmesan cheese maker. Your husband most likely made lasagne for dinner. Bergonzi in Ernani had some make-up on, well-drawn eyebrows, and a soft yet decisive look.
You finally walk through the door and wave at your husband. Instead of heading to the kitchen, you go straight to the living room and plop yourself on the sofa next to your daughter. You give her a giant bear hug and fondle her hair. “Have you fed the cat?” “No, not yet.” “Why not?” “She isn’t hungry.” “How can you be so sure?” “Because she isn’t.” The way she doesn’t look you in the eyes tells you she’s not sure. Her eyes remain glued to the book. She declares: “You and Dad are going to watch my dance performance as soon as I’m done reading. I’ve already picked the music out. But can we read together first?” You don’t refuse. You lean on her and glance at the title: Eternal Love. That book again—the one where we leave our pets to clones. Immortal bodies. You prop up, and your daughter this time rests her head on your lap, and the two of you read the book, for the twentieth or hundredth. At one point, you watch the orange light paint her face, upon which life, death, the past, and the future twinkle in and out of existence simultaneously like constellations. It makes you want to fall into a deep, long slumber. You understand that she’s tired. You pick her up and carry her to bed. She says, “But I didn’t get to show you my dance.” To which you reply, “Tomorrow you can.”
You put a movie on but don’t watch it. You stare off into space for two hours; your mind is elsewhere. At some point, you turn to your husband and mumble, “I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve left the task of loving to the clones. That’s why it doesn’t end.” He responds while focused on the movie: “Been reading Eternal Love again, have we?” You nod your head. “Got to be the umpteenth time now.” You don’t reply because you’ve long lost track of counting. He shuts up, too, but appears lost in thought. You gaze into his spaced-out eyes, only then to begin thinking about your own. You feel that your eyes are truly able to trap every last bit of TV light hitting his face. The fact that you’re capable of doing so many things at once truly is incredible. Life is a miracle. Cambrian. Magic. A dance show.
You’ve got to get up at six tomorrow morning.
The movie is over.
Your husband, upon heading to sleep on the couch, says, “When you leave love to the clones, it won’t be the same. It will become something else.”
He turns the dim light off.
