L E I N F A
S S O N S I L U R E
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L I V E R
Z
A R A N D I
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There are hard & easy universes. This is neither Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches
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Contents
Symptom Ballard Hunger Quicksand Mario Subscription Ducks
4-6 7 8 9 10 11 12
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Symptom
I followed an elderly man for eighteen weeks. I look like a Polish man or that I’ve been out in the cold too long. People assume that I am a turnip picker because the tips of my fingers are purple.
* The elderly man is 90. He had curvature of the spine and wore all tweed. I used to enter his apartment when he wasn’t there. It was too big for one man. His wife used to live with him but she died. He purposefully gained weight in order to be the size of two people. He wanted to fill the space she once filled.
*
The walls in his apartment are busy. He hung up all these commemorative plates and family photographs. All the people in the photographs looked the same. I even went into his fridge and checked what food he was eating. Garlic, tomato paste, mustard, halved peppers on the side shelves, a hollowed-out roast chicken in the main part. I questioned the food associated with loneliness and thought it was probably similar to the food associated with contentment.
*
Sometimes I called his house. I’d pretend to be a salesman. “Hello, sir. Would you be interested in our new vacuum cleaner? If you say yes, you can get a discount.”
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“No,” he said. “I don’t know carpets.” He put the phone down and I struggled to understand what he had said.
*
I grew more confident. I approached the old man in the street. “Help you with those bags, old timer?” “You’re a nice boy,” he said. “What you got in here? Bag’s like a work out.” He said nothing. Not like he was going to open up to me there and then. But we walked all the way back to his house. I tried sniffing at him, trying to get a smell from him but I couldn’t. We walked up to his apartment. He said come in so I went in. I put the kettle on. He didn’t notice how I moved through his apartment with ease. I knew it well. My body had adapted, you could say. Fitted to the walls and floors and furniture. Ergonomics. “So tell me about yourself, old man,” I said. “I’ll cook you up some food.” He said I didn’t have to but I said to him, look, I need this. Being a good Samaritan. I cooked up what I could from the ingredients he had. He sat there and ate what I gave him. I watched him swallowing. He swallowed the same way a duck swallows, tilting his head back and letting the food just fall down his pipe. “Same time tomorrow,” I said. “Yes,” he said. I was glad, if only to witness him swallowing again.
*
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We went through his family photograph book. I saw what his wife looked like. A tear formed in his eye and I went to say something. But when you’re that age, the tear duct is a liar. Perhaps it was a symptom of something, just not sadness.
*
I even helped him put his slippers on. We watched television together. We watched the news. A gunman in the north of England had killed 14 people. “Bad news,” I said. “I saw something about 15 people getting shot somewhere in America,” he said, as if America was the winner.
*
“You got kids?” “No,” he said. “I have dead sperm.” “Adopt?” “My wife was allergic to sperm,” he said.
*
“What’s your story?” He asked me this with that inquisitive face he had. I stared at a mole on the side of his face and talked to that instead. “I’ve been away for a long time,” I told him. “I was meant to go home and see my family.”
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“What’s stopping you?” “Things.”
*
I was the one who found him dead. He died of old age. I was tempted to perform an autopsy on him. But I didn’t. Sometimes I just want to know everything but you have to tell yourself no, hold back. Some things are best left unknown.
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Ballard
Ballard left the city to live a life in the wilderness. He wrote a letter to his wife and two children in which he vowed never to return to the life of the city or speak to people again. He wrote the letter by dim candlelight. The city was quiet that evening. He could hear the scratch of the pen against the paper. In the distance, one could hear an ambiguous wail, an open mouth of man or beast in pain. He left his wife sleeping in their bed. He kissed her head. He went to see his children for the last time and kissed them both on their heads too. He was sad but driven by some inward force. He roamed the house and touched the furniture. He held his armchair and recorded its touch in his head. He slid his hand across the marble mantelpiece above the fireplace; his hands, upon inspection, were covered in a light film of dust, the skin of himself, the skin of his family. He wished he could package this dust and take it with him. Before he left the house, he checked his bags. He had packed clothes for every season, a grooming kit, a rifle, bullets, hunting knife, medical provisions, tinned food and binoculars. As he exited the house, he closed the door to but did not lock it. Upon leaving, he entertained thoughts of his family being assaulted in the dead of night by a faceless assailant. He thought of his bloodline being ended there in the house he had left. He left the house bearing ill feelings towards the ones he loved.
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Hunger
The thin man did not make enough wages to sustain his life in any meaningful way. In the same way a human puts food into their mouth, chews, swallows and devours food, the air of the city consumed the thin man little by little. For fear of anything happening – a fall or perhaps a social encounter that raised the heartbeat – the thin man confined himself to his chair most evenings. From the chair, he saw the city down below. It was a city in its infancy. Flaws were being ironed out. The inhabitants were testing limits, boundaries were pushed and sin was apparent everywhere, the windows steamed up and hidden from his view. Food was scarce in his apartment. Often he would lick the tips of his fingers and dab the breadcrumbs off his plate one by one to make them last longer. To keep warm during winter, he would have to wrap his feet in torn bed sheets. He would pace the apartment to keep the blood flowing in his veins. One evening, he happened to notice a woman in the apartment across the road. The mould lining his windowpane obscured his view of her. He found a cloth and wiped it clean. The sky was dark and so was his apartment in order to save money on electricity. By candlelight he watched her walk in and out of view. His chest raised and rattled, his ribcage shrink-wrapped by skin. She was a beautiful woman in a rugged way. From a distance, he could not quite make her details out. Was she brown or blue eyed? Were her hands big or small? How many toes did she have? He invented it for her. He wished her to be full blooded. He imagined holding her hands and feeling their warmth against his cold.
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Her legs, too, were strong and muscular. This is what he wanted to believe. But all he could make out, from distance, was her hair scraped back into a bun, her eyes downcast and cheeks ruddy, her posture in a permanent downward pose, a supplicant, but a supplicant to whom? Did she live alone? Was there somebody else in that space that loved her? Or perhaps hated her? That, perhaps, gave her orders? The thin man loved her, from a distance. Over time, he spoke at the window, to her. He wondered if she could hear him. He wondered if she was doing the exact same thing. After a few weeks, the thin man realised that maybe she was a woman or maybe she was new mould, delicately placed in his line of view.
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Quicksand
Thirty days later and she was still stuck in the quicksand. She held onto the branch of a tree, which saved her from sinking completely, but did not have enough purchase upon the branch to escape. She imagined herself as having longer arms, but sunk lower, thus putting herself in the same position as she was now. She imagined herself as a man and this, too, gleaned no further solutions.
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Mario It’s a time trial on Mario Kart. Mario is driving around the track, chasing his ghost. The kart crashes because of a banana and Mario spins around. And then the mind shifts from Mario to Princess Diana. The kart changes from a kart into a Mercedes Benz 208. And the track changes from a hyperactive mushroom kingdom into a twolane carriageway on the Place de l’Alma. Everything darkens. And the Mercedes Benz 208 drives into a pillar at 65mph. The car ghosts over and becomes opaque. Then another Mercedes Benz 208 with another Princess Diana in it crashes into the same pillar at a slightly different angle. The process is repeated until nearly twenty ghosted time-trial Mercedes Benz 208’s are porcupined around the same pillar. Twenty groups of three corpses are in the Mercedes. There are no photographers in the dream. The road is empty, save for the Mercedes, respawned over and over again, the catastrophe playing out repeatedly in silence for an audience of none.
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Subscription
My wife found the email. We shared an email account and had a folder each. The email was asking me if I’d like to subscribe to ‘cum eaters’. She asked me what it was and why I was searching for cum eaters. I told her it wasn’t me. The same thing happened the week after. This time it was asking if I’d like to renew my subscription to ‘A Black Man Is Fucking My Daughter.’ There was a picture of a long, brown penis in the headline image and the title was printed in red writing on the penis. Again, she thought all this pornography had died down. But a few weeks later, I got the email to confirm my username ‘bignuts’ for a local cream pie meet up for over 40’s widows. My wife left me and it was then that I decided to email the correct people and thank them for their help and suggestions.
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Ducks The old woman sat by an old pond. The pond was man made. The ducks were not man made. She had a loaf of bread and a bread knife.
She removed the wooden board from her clutch bag and places it upon her legs. She started cutting the bread. She had weak wrists and they shook as she sawed through the bread.
The ducks were her best friends. Their eyes looked like raisins. She loved this. She sometimes exposed herself to the ducks to see if there would be a reaction.
A young man came by. He had a large smile. And he wore a trench coat. He said hello and the old woman said hello too.
She told him she was there to feed the ducks. She fed the ducks every day. She had been doing this for fifty years.
She said: the ducks had been disappearing. Not turning up. The young man moved in closer and slapped the old woman around the head.
He said: look around you. She did. The city was empty. A bird flew across the sky at just the right time, as if directed by a director, as if ‘to emphasize the loneliness’.
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The young man said: this is it. Don’t complain about disappearances. You were lucky to have these ducks in the first place.
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