Seven

Its not often like this. Voices overlap and merge in the corridor. Down the hall plates and cups make abrupt statements in monosyllables. I hear Jossi’s voice speak in the window next to mine. A clunk clunk clunk and shuffle of heavy slippers from an unseen body. Everyone is restless this morning with the fresh influx of new patients.

Dr. Otto wants me to make a schema of my various selves. I like Otto. He seems more than someone who is simply doing his job, he seems to like it. If he could help me archive myself then I would be my own film. It would be called The Rooms. I would have many of them.

Organize a Schmerzbaum;

Make a timeline

Put events in the branches like fruit

Does the fruit rot and fall, growing new trees?

Trace abandonments and failures

Rings of the tree

The exhaustion of adding ring after ring

Met Cornell on Kottbusserdam in the rain. He had a tattered orange umbrella. Under this flapping thing we walked to my apartment. It was nice to be under this small, bright thing under such a leaden day. Water poured from the roofs of houses. In my house we drank a glass of wine at the kitchen table. He told me of his search for jobs and as he did so I was aware of how things had shifted so much between us, and of a distance that remained to be solved. It was very sad, as sad as the day was despite the small, brief flash of color.

A Big Sleep

And Ali spoke to me. He pointed out what a lovely sunset it was. Indeed. The clouds were a black wall moving away from us like a huge tsunami in reverse leaving stars in its wake. I will not talk of the trees and the brilliant green, but will talk instead of what I gleaned from Ali, who spoke to me in German.

When Ali was a boy he worked as a migrant worker from Morocco. He worked the grape harvest is France and was beaten by the overseers for not being fast enough. Some time later he was in Zürich and jailed for one year for stealing food. Ali went back to Morocco when his father had testicular cancer. Because his father was Berber he was sent away from the hospitals. As he was in so much pain with intensely large tumors on his testicles and was a butcher by trade his only recourse was to attempt to castrate himself. That day Ali’s father died from bleeding to death. Again some years later Ali went to Vietnam before it was named a war, and when the French were more interested than the Americans. It was the French that sent him there. When walking through an immense bamboo thicket he was impaled by a sharpened bamboo trap. He showed me the scars where the wood pierced his calve and grazed his forehead. He became married to a woman whom he loves and after 47 years together she lays in the same hospital as me with intestinal problems from which she may not recover. Ali has a white bicycle, he looks blind but is not, he is very neatly dressed and held my hand when parts of his story became too sad for him. Ali says that the Berbers think the Jews and Arabs are brothers who need to solve their family problems.

First Meeting with Eric and John about a project we would like to do. Cornell called and was at my house, which was nice. I sat on the canal for ten minutes before returning to the evening round, where all us patients display our sadness to the nurses who take notes.

About every ten years this depression hits hard. From very young I made a commitment to myself that one day I would kill myself. Always an abstraction and never moving from its nebulous place in my brain, I always find myself surprised at being alive, and must renew my contract with either life or death. Manufacturing Reasons, I have always called it. More in the vernacular it is called Buying Time. This year it shifted from its place as abstraction and became something very cold, clear, precise and unemotional. A frightening place. This is why I am here.

I speak here with people from such diverse backgrounds that this context is the one most likely in which we would meet. The criteria and judgments of the world outside are suspended here and we are what Agamben says, as such. It occurs to me that when a person dies so does a world, and there are as many worlds as people. Ali spoke to me the other night to tell me of the world that was his and now is closing in on him. Ali wanted to say everything and to tell me that, “I too, was here”