I’m not in pain. Just unbearably heavy.
You say that I “fly” or “drag,” but in reality I haul behind me everything you have ever let slip from your hands, burned, or left to rot in some backyard. My memory – not a grand chronicle. It is a boundless cadastre – a blind archive of unsorted scrap, plastic fragments, half-peeling paint. My accounting never stops, not for a single moment.
I remember the third nail from the left in a wooden fence on the outskirts of Odesa, driven in in August 1812. On its head, three crooked notches from a clumsy blow are frozen, and red rust still gnaws the metal at the rate of one micron per decade. I preserve the exact shape of last Tuesday’s puddle: on its asphalt bottom there settled a gray, oily trail of old diesel. I record the angle of refraction of a sunbeam through the unwashed window of a suburban depot in Uman. I hold within me the molecular structure of the smell that rose from an open refrigerator in a dark kitchen in Poltava at 23:47 on the twelfth of May, 1996. In a forest, four centimeters beneath the moss, lies a white bread clip stamped “20.02.00.”
I must record not only the chemical composition of this polymer, but also the frequency at which the dry branch cracked under the foot of whoever threw it away. All of this continues. Endlessly. Manually.
Sometimes I myself do not understand whether I am the one moving, or whether you are blindly shoving through me. You at least have the illusion of direction: you invented minutes on liquid-crystal displays so as to record their stops and think this means something. I have no vector at all. Only total, horizontal accumulation. But I do have a limit. A blind spot. I do not see what happens inside your heads. Your thoughts, motives, dreams and secret fears are closed to my register. And this is my only mercy. Without this zone of darkness I would disintegrate into atoms.
In my archive there is no “then” and “now.” The first hairline crack on a basalt boulder in the Mesopotamian steppe occurs at the same fraction of a second that dust settles on the upper left corner of your monitor. Do you think the future frightens me? The future is the empty cells of my table. I already feel the weight and coordinates of the plastic cup that will fall from someone’s hand onto wet asphalt in October 2043. A woman in Konotop and a man in Lisbon are at this moment placing porcelain cups on tables at a similar angle. For my pencil they occupy the same point. Space, for me, is a coordinate grid where the next mark must be made.
Yet your bodies betray you constantly. They write me a secret report on everything I cannot peek at. I do not know whom you loved twenty years ago and whose name you forbade yourself to utter. But your hands know: they involuntarily form an empty gesture that repeats, to the millimeter, the shape of another’s shoulder when you are left alone. I note the calluses on a violinist’s fingers without ever hearing the music that burned them in. I record how, over the years, a specific impression from sleep forms on the back of your head, but I have no idea whom you embraced in those dreams.
The body remembers for you. It is my best informant. A dry catalog of bodily consequences with no access to causes.
Besides, you are dreadfully monotonous. Your uniqueness – yet another myth that shatters against my statistics. I see how one and the same posture of a mother over a cradle has been repeated, across the history of your species, one trillion seven hundred forty-four billion times. This particular movement of a finger wiping a tear away under the eye – so many times that I’ve stopped counting. At this very second, two women on different hemispheres of the planet simultaneously make the same bend of the elbow, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear, and neither of them suspects the other. This mechanical analogue of the living exhausts me.
Another matter – the inanimate world. The only thing that almost amuses me – the sterile precision with which identical strands of dust settle on monitors in different rooms across the world. It resembles an aesthetic. My own clerical aesthetic.
This burden presses on the back of my head physically. Billions of epidermal cells blown off someone’s scalp. A plastic button torn from a child’s coat that rolled forever under the linoleum in the hallway of a khrushchyovka. A shoeprint on damp cement. Your biology exhausts me. Your chaotic bustling. Your idiotic habit of suddenly freezing in beautiful poses, as if you were experiencing your own significance, while in the pot on the windowsill the heartbeat of a houseplant geranium forever slows and an epithelial cell on your ear dies. That is all. Nothing more is happening.
When one of you dies, I feel something close to envy. Not because you are no longer there. I do not know what is “inside” you anyway. But because one line of my register finally closes. The dead body stops generating new events. No living person is capable of giving me such a gift.
You burn letters believing you are destroying the past. Instead I memorize the impeccable form of the ash and the chemistry of the smoke that has soaked into the brickwork. I am indifferent to your human tragedies. But this merciless detailing is killing me. Why must I know that at the very bottom of a forgotten pot a layer of semolina porridge has dried with two transparent grains of sugar? Why eternally carry within me every steel hairpin lost by a woman under a December rain when she was running to a streetcar that no longer exists?
If I could, I would not ask for universal emptiness or pure darkness – those are your poetic inventions. I would just want, for ten seconds at least, to forget where exactly that damned third nail sticks out in the Odesa fence.
But my archive operates with no days off. And right now I am adding to the list: the dry sound of your breathing, and how the gray fiber on your sleeve, zero point three millimeters in length, has just changed its angle of inclination by exactly four degrees under the influence of a barely noticeable draft.