Being-without

He was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling. His hands, like those of a dead man, were wrapped around his stomach. On his right side he had a large, crooked scar. He had told several girls that it was from appendicitis surgery. It wasn’t. A spring breeze was coming from the window, and it was quiet, as if the hands on the clock had decapitated time. Except that a red, almost purple ray was beaming from the window. It extended across the room and struck the wall, where it ran down the plaster and dissolved into the dark before it could drip onto the gently heaving chest.

A curtain used to cover the window, but one time the old man from the floor above had a coughing fit, and the curtain, unable to withstand the frantic shaking, had fallen down. He had never bothered to replace it.

So the ray penetrated his room every evening when the powerful floodlights were lit at a nearby construction site. One of them, for some reason, decided to cling onto a modest window in the house where he really didn’t want to live. It’s not that he specifically didn’t want to live in this dilapidated apartment with its leaking pipes, but just… he didn’t want to live. Here. On Earth. He did not want to walk, breathe, see, talk, feel. In fact, he didn’t want to do lot of other things, too. Why not? He didn’t know the answer. Well, he just… he just didn’t want to.

The young man did not suffer from depression, never had liked the existentialists, and was not picking at the pieces of a broken heart. He was not a recluse or a poet. He was nothing at all. He existed as an ordinary human unit, but even that was too much. Biology demanded of him to eat, to move, to release energy, and something quite mysterious even made his eyes linger on pretty girls. But every action eventually became meaningless by its repetition: after eating one had to eat again, after sleeping one had to get under the blanket again, and even more often one had to lock oneself in the bathroom, even though he lived alone. But there was one constant that pleased him: in the evenings he could lie down on the couch, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the purplish ray.

He expected it to sit on his chest, gently comb through his hair, and whisper a few affectionate words into his ear. Lately he had even started to talk to the ray as it sticked out of the murky window, like a thick rope thrown into the room from a passing boat. He wanted to grab it, pull himself up, and climb over to the ship that would take him to a special place where he could sleep until the end of time. There would be no ambrosia there. In fact, there would be nothing there. And it would be beautiful. It would be… He was somehow annoyed by the word “be”, he didn’t want to “be”. He didn’t want anything to happen after death. He just didn’t want to.

So he often raised his hand and caressed the red beam with slow, rhythmic movements, as if he were playing the guitar. The ray stretched out its back, purred like a cat, and broke down into black shadows playing on the wall. His hand danced in the crimson glow, and the boy smiled unabashedly. The boy? This was an important question: was he a boy or a man? He didn’t know what other synonyms he could use to denote his existence. He couldn’t call himself a man, because if he could, the whole situation would make no sense. A man has understandable duties — love, war, money— and he had no desire at all for any of these things.

At times he would go outside. With his friends he was still cheerful and friendly, like a will-o’-the-wisp. They continued to invite him: to cafes, picnics, the cinema, various adventures. Some of them drank, some had been to war and those drank the hardest, but they never talked about how blue the snow was in the mountains. There were some who lived dangerous lives, they hunted, they stabbed, some even killed. There was even one who shook hands with a famous poet and thanked him for his poetry. There were also plenty of well-read friends who would certainly understand why he felt like a will-o’-the-wisp and immediately take some kind of action. But they all were; they shamelessly carried their flesh into a world that was already choking on action: millions of sexual acts, hundreds of thousands of births, rivers of words, piss, love. All the things that had pores, hair, skin… it all just was. It climbed into his nostrils and clogged his throat, which is why he entrusted his fingers only to the ethereal ray — he didn’t want anyone else touching them.

One day on the bus, he saw a young woman reading a cheap edition of “Nausea”. It had a greenish, vomit-like cover. He recognized the book from afar and rebuked himself for such meaningless knowledge. After a couple of stops, the reader closed the book and walked to the door, where he was hanging from the rail. The girl mechanically asked:

“Are you getting out?”

He shrugged and smiled:

“Why wouldn’t I?”

The girl looked at him strangely, even though she should have understood.

The construction site had grown a little taller, and now the ray, like an oblique Mongolian epicanthus, was angling down on his face. It was red, as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper. The cheeky beam of photons spread across his face like a hot pancake, like the red pupil of a traffic light. He liked to lie there and think of such comparisons. The ray reminded him of Pontius Pilatus and Brezhnev. He also remembered O’Henry’s beautiful story “The Last Leaf” and immediately decided:

“When the ray goes out, I will kill myself immediately.”

After that, he didn’t stall for time and began to wander through dark places. He walked close to dangerous-looking groups of people, climbed onto broken-down trains, and almost fell through the ice on a lake, ready to put on a dress and become Ophelia. He saved up some money and traveled all the way to the next city, but there, too, nothing flared up inside him. It was only when he returned home and lay down on the couch that he was relieved to see the familiar red canopy descend again.

The ray would expand to a spot, refracted in its strange reverie, or concentrate in a red dot, like a bindi on the forehead of an Indian woman. But more often, like a silly bull, it rested its red horn against the wall near the ceiling. Like an invisible red crossbar on which housewives dried laundry. The man watched for a long time as the snowflakes danced in a cherry waltz, and then he got dressed and went outside.

He walked over to the construction site and began to read the billboard. On it, a cheerful construction worker announced that the building would be finished in a year and a half. The information was a little shocking, and he involuntarily looked up into the annoyingly blue night. Outside, the ray was formless, total, spilling freely into the cold air and scorching the darkness like a scarlet poppy. The red Communist star did not think of fading, but throbbed like a heart.

He returned home, bewildered, and did not lock the door behind him. He could wait no longer. He didn’t want to cause anyone any more trouble, so he carefully packed his few belongings ahead of time. The apartment was cleaned and washed. Only the fallen curtain was left, drooping like a torn sail after a storm.

The young man sat down on the couch. He stared intently at the heating pipe at first, and then remembered the riser in the bathtub. He took one last look at the ray, curving like an elbow. It occurred to him that when the apartment was empty, the beam would still pierce the room like a rapier blow. Or maybe just then it would finally go out. Maybe the ray shines only because he still lives in the house. Only because he, the fluttering moth, thinks of it all the time. Surely he, like a twin, was inextricably linked to the ray, and when he is gone, and he will be gone very soon, the red light will thin out at once.

And it was no longer the ray penetrating the room, but the room reaching out into the outside with a pink umbilical cord. It was no longer the spotlight hitting the eye, but a glowing velvet flower growing out of a chest. The man felt himself flowing into that beam. And it turned out that he, even lying on the couch, served as a beacon to someone, a reference point, striking somewhere, into the night, racing with the stars. And the ray, coming out of his room, reflected off the construction site, off the rooftops, and bounced into the sky, among the shiny diamond crumbs. And there, in space, the intrepid captains of the sky must have used it for navigation.

He had to hurry now. He got up, went to the window, took the curtain, and began to tear at it. He tied a strong rope from the rags and made a noose at the end of it. It was time to go to the bathroom, but the young man, wanting to test the strength of his creation, threw it up for some reason. The former curtain soared into the air, gently touched the ceiling, and instead of falling down, stuck on top of the ray. His eyes did not deceive him: the rope was thrown across the weightless beam, and the noose dangled invitingly right above his head. He tugged forcefully at the cloth, then even hung on it, swinging like a pendulum. The rope didn’t even think of tearing, and the ray, like a steel pipe, easily supported the man’s weight. Without doubting his rightness, he quickly tied a secure knot on the beam.

“Just don’t go out”, he thought and went looking for a chair.