dispossessed
sitting on the sofa afterwards in the middle of the night, he felt a sudden craving for sweets. luckily there was some candy and he had to be held from eating the whole box on his own.
“hey, leave some for me!”
it had been even less satisfying than in the past, and he wondered whether he might have been here for the last time. in the distance the cathedral was shining like a lighthouse, pulling him away, making him admitting to himself what he (and we) already knew : that he did not want to be here. even though he didn’t know if he would ever find another body that his body would find acceptable. there was no predicting. it was simply a totally arbitrary choice.
the minutes passed while he was looking outside almost motionlessly, counting the planes that were floating in the night-sky weightlessly. one every three minutes. across the entire horizon. without sound. beautiful. he pretended to take part in the one-way conversation, even though he did not try too hard, and gave occasional, short answers. seldom more than “yes”, “no” or “oh really?!”
when a particularly objectionable video clip splashed onto the screen, something made him jump up and he walked into the bathroom, leaving the bad music and the irritating company behind for a moment. bringing his face up against the light after washing it, he saw himself in the mirror and he remembered the words with which he had been greeted earlier that night:
“you look tired and old!”
very charming.
“that’s probably because i am!” he had hurled back angrily. “and besides no one forces you to see me. nobody’s putting a gun to your head!”
this outburst had surprised him and he had realized that he had just deliberately misinterpreted genuine concern for an offense. maybe because he was irritated by genuine concerns. he had seen the hurt in the large brown eyes that had looked at him quite confused, and he understood that he had put it there. again.
“are you okay?”
“yes!” he called back through the locked bathroom door without turning his eyes from the sorry face in the mirror. his hair was a mess. ‘the worst home-dye job in the world’ he had overheard someone commenting on it, and he had to smile. strangely, his own reflection simultaneously soothed and bewildered him, and he tried to pin down a random thought that was fluttering through his mind like a moth caught in his room, too stupid to find its way out of the widely opened windows : he thought that his favorite mode was the third person figural narrator. he wished he could be one. disappearing behind the central character, not responsible for his actions and yet connected to him, lending a voice, adding a tone.
and then - out of the blue - a familiar fear took him by the ankles and pulled away his legs. he lost balance, tried to get a hold of the shower curtain displaying a caravan of penguins and almost hit his head on the hard edge of the tub.
“are you sure you’re okay?”
“yes, i just slipped on … something.”
the fear now filled the entire room, dripping in big, viscous drops from the tiles. the penguins smiled mockingly. “fucking drugs!” he cursed the same time as he realized that he didn’t do any drugs. this only scared the shit out of him even more. “it’s real, then…” he tried to recall a passage he had read earlier that day, a truly utopian idea that, if he could only claim it for his life, would expunge this fucking fear of the future forever. but he couldn’t remember.
but we can:
Well, what had he come here to do? To do physics. To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it. The rights of an Odonian and of a human being. (Le Guin : The Dispossessed. 277)
