The night sweats are getting worse. He sometimes wakes up at ungodly hours so slick with the wet of his worries that he changes the sheets, showers, and towels himself before returning to bed. Yet the weather is frigid out. He knows this better than most because he lets the night in through his permanently opened window - November's blustery mess of upturned wheelie bins, trees that whip and jerk like helpless puppets roped to drunk malignant forces, and the dismal horizontal scrabbling of litter. And still he wakes up pumping sweat. Worried.
Sometimes he goes to the bathroom to see if mopping his forehead with a damp towel will help him settle. He grips the sink because the cold porcelain is comforting to feel - tap it three times and breathe deeply each time. Try to let a little of the night's badness go with each breath. Start at the stomach, not the lungs. It's down there, in the stomach, something with arms of anxiety; no, tentacles; thrashing tentacles. An anxiety octopus.
The light in the bathroom isn't great, he thinks. It's too dim and it makes the immediate world feel uncomfortably incomplete. There is a dreary tapering off around the edges of things. Is this what going blind feels like?
Downstairs, a TV remains on, silent, unwatched. The programmes are finished and Aertel is on, blinking unread news into the empty room.
He doesn't feel one hundred percent real. He needs to touch cold stuff to become real. Like the sink, but it's not enough, so he takes off his socks and heads downstairs, through the weak light of teletext - his shadow now an odd and guilty looking thing on the living room blind. He passes through the kitchen, opens the back door and steps out into the night, feeling all the time with his feet. Freezing wet concrete underfoot, now grass, now soft cold clumps of decayed leaves oozing between his toes. The washing line makes a dull zithery sound in the wind. A wet towel flaps.
When he was very young he went through a phase of worrying himself physically sick. He used to imagine death on the way, as dreadful and tangible as it must only be to children, the mad and the gravely ill. Dreams of giant unstoppable clock hands moving forward and crushing his parents under their weight; a rabid white-eyed donkey pulling a rusty trap around the block at night; a disembodied green face in the window.
He used to go out to the garden then, too, for fresh air to beat the nausea. But once he got caught short and puked on the patio. This made him afraid. He'd have to explain himself and his strange worries in the morning. But dawn brought magpies, and he watched through the kitchen window with utter fascination as they ate every last rotten lump of his supper.
Now he walks further, across the garden and through a gap in the hedge that leads to the football pitch behind - sensing all the while with his feet. The pitch is a bowl of darkness, surrounded on three sides by semi-detached houses, and on the fourth by the rearing black surprise of a huge leylandii hedge. It's a sad space now, at this time, at this hinge between the past and an uncertain future. He walks to the middle of the pitch, stands still, then lies down to think. Or not think. To just be. There aren't any stars, only a faint orange glow that clings to low clouds that hurry over a monastic town asleep on its sad secrets. Across that ancient town the clouds fly, and into the beyond, out over the ghost housing estates and into the dark.
MP3: Gas-
zauberberg 3
