In/Half

by Jasmin B. Frelih

  ‘Hello, Mister! Did you know that precisely at this time war is raging on the African continent between the natives and the forces of HADE?’

  The soldier is standing right in front of him. His colleagues are seated on the edge of the pavement, eyeing the arses of women walking by as if they were watching a tennis match with many, many balls. The soldier’s face is tanned and unshaven. He doesn’t look violent. Anwar’s shoulders relax a bit, but the question unnerves him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself.’ He offers Anwar a hand. When Anwar shakes the pinkish and fleshy hand, it feels devoid of strength. ‘My name is Musculus, my friends call me Mus, and together with my colleagues I would like to raise public awareness of this needless, unjust and entirely bloody conflict in which those who are least guilty suffer the most and to which an end must be put as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’m Anwar. Pleased to meet you, but, hold on, if I understand correctly, aren’t you a soldier?’

  The young man smiles.

  ‘The uniform is more of a costume. People take us more seriously then. But don’t misunderstand me, it’s real. I was there. In Africa. Over there, for the first time things became a little clearer to me. I heard of UIGOPWTSOALSSV – before I’d thought that it was all Nippusa, and…’

  Anwar interrupts him.

  ‘Wait, I don’t understand, you came from Africa?’ The young man nods, Anwar continues, ‘…and there’s a war there?’ The young man nods. ‘And HADE is the aggressor?’

  The young man nods a third time, and Anwar frowns. He knows nothing about it. Nippusa? What the hell?

  ‘Do you think I’m a fool?’ he asks the young man, and Mus takes a fat envelope from a bag around his waist and waves it under his nose.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Information.’

  Anwar, horrified, stares at the charts, satellite images, reports on victims, planned troop movements on fronts that the young man’s licked fingers flip through too quickly for him to really take in. His lips tremble. ‘But I thought,’ he says. ‘They told me,’ he says. The soldier stares curiously at him. ‘I fucked up.’ He’s back in the chair.

  ‘Hey, you know what I’ve realized? I’m not afraid to die.’

  ‘I’ve died at least five times already.’

  ‘I mean, I am afraid of the idea that I’ll no longer exist, of course I am, but usually people are worried that they’re going to die like, I don’t know, next week or in an hour, and if I told them they still had twenty-five years left, they wouldn’t worry about it until then.’

  ‘Five or six times. Seven times?’

  ‘Although I really don’t care when it happens, and if I were afraid of anything it would be of the fact that it will really happen, you get it?’

  ‘Or was it eight times? Wait…’

  ‘But, and this brings me to what I basically wanted to say right from the start, the whole problem is that it doesn’t matter when I’m going to die because I’m still going to be faced with the same problem, that final second.’

  ‘Three times it was him who killed me. Or was it four?’

  ‘And I’d understand the desire to put death off as far as possible, if it meant that its nature would somehow change, that it would become milder, greyer, that the transition would be less noticeable. But that’s not how it is, right?’

  ‘Once I fell off a roof, once a lorry ran me over. Or did it? What was it again with that lorry?’

  ‘Or if all this at least meant that in some way I would change, that my awareness of things would expand and that, over time, my consciousness would begin, on a purely physical level, like a measuring device, all on its own, to understand more and more about the nothingness that is in store for it. But of course that’s not true either.’

  ‘Once I committed suicide. Once, only once. That’s for certain. What a waste of time.’

  ‘Because, if you ask me, I have been, as a conscious entity, exactly the same at least since the age of five. Give or take a year. And if character counts when it comes to death, then I can confirm that I have had a completely formed character ever since my twelfth birthday, the one everyone forgot about. I’m never going to change.’

  ‘Six or seven times, eight at the most. It’s worse than they say.’

  ‘So why should I be afraid of it? If you ask me, I’ve been dead for ages.’

  Marjorie and her young lover have found themselves swept up and have realized that they are enjoying each other’s company even when there are no throbbing sensations between their legs. Love invents itself anew every time, which makes it so hard to believe that it’s always been around. Hip to hip, they saunter among the people, their tongues revealing their minds. As long as they can feel, they don’t have to listen to each other.

  When they see Anwar, surrounded by figures in uniform, they point at him, laugh, and approach.

  ‘Hey Anwar,’ they both say at the same time, which rather spooks those gathered around, ‘have you seen Zoia anywhere?’

  Is he a fool or is he deliberately misleading? That’s all I wanted to ask him. Waiting in ambush before his tower, in the crowd before his appearances, always on the lookout for where he is, with whom, when, why, how. A few times I almost caught him alone, but some circumstance or other always got in the way. If he wasn’t escaping me through a stitch in time and space, it was I who lacked the breath or courage or simply the will to follow through. Already back then I knew each of us has two people inside them. The one who wants, and the one who doesn’t. The drive of existence and the drive of death, although you never know exactly on which side of desire they lie. If it were unequivocally revealed to me that he’s foolish, that he really did unfold everything precisely up to that point, but didn’t manage to look further, I would be terribly disappointed. Enchantment requires a degree of humility and the wizard’s sole imperative is never to reveal his tricks. But…now that he’s here, before me, my tongue is again swelling up with that devilish question, without regard for the aesthetic components of the relationship, for respect, for kindness, for reserve, and although, to be honest, it’s already pretty much all the same to me, one way or the other, I’d still like to jab this straight into his ear: there’s something violent in all these theories. But mercy holds me back. The guy’s old, and it’s simply adorable to see how the world, after all his years of blabbering and verbiage, still manages to catch him by surprise.

  ‘Mr Ž—?’

  The old man wakes up from his reveries. His hand goes over his face, twice over his beard, forehead, cheek, up and down, he pinches the tip of his nose with his thumb and fore-finger and the hand runs in an outward arc.

  ‘Who is this who, as it were, knows how to pronounce my name?’

  Zoja smiles.

  ‘Hello. I’m Zoja.’

  The old man doesn’t waste time with astonishment but, instantly, bows his head.

  ‘So you are the one who, as it were, brought all this dynamo together?’

  Their fingertips, knuckles, nails, tiny tissues of muscles and ligaments touch. Zoja nods, he still makes her want to laugh. The man steadies his gaze.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m just too old. Am I really so old that I can’t do it any more, that it doesn’t, as it were, add up, but at some point I have to admit, as it were, confess, that I don’t understand what’s going on here. These people are…’ He falls silent and scans the cracks in the horizon. ‘These people aren’t really human. They have a lack. The lack that they have is, as it were, that they lack a lack. You can see it right away. But how? I don’t understand.’

  He looks past me. I can observe vanity exhibiting itself for an instant, as clearly formed as a natural phenomenon. But it wanes. It existed on borrowed energy and returned that energy immediately. I’m too old to constantly demand the gaze, the gazes of strangers. Inflation of attention. Deflation of peace. And whatever I may think, or used to think, the entire history of that story that existed only on m
y side, literally far beyond his ears, beyond his horizons, nevertheless led to that unavoidable point where you can no longer avoid difference and where you have to admit things. Most easily with a question. How? How has your world become so different that my way of looking can no longer be broken down into symptom, relation and value? A human has to eat. Cattle grazes. On grass or on meaning. The calories of meaning decompose the expression of interest and the world suddenly turns strange.

  ‘Did you ever smoke, Mr Ž—?’

  ‘Tobacco? Never.’

  ‘Drink? Gamble? Play games on the computer?’

  The old man straightens up, his diaphragm inflates his abdomen, his eyebrows wave.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘No drugs?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘So you’ve never been dependent?’

  She has set a trap for him and he falls into it with the force of inertia.

  ‘Never,’ he says and his eyes immediately narrow in suspicion. He senses the danger of a misunderstanding, so he continues, ‘I have never been addicted. Dependent, as it were, like every person is. Maybe a little more. I have diabetes.’

  His sibilants and fricatives fly through the air on tiny white droplets of saliva. They attract someone’s attention. Zoja steps closer, into the contour of his heat; the minor ingredients of his body, his odour, warmth, the rustling of his clothes stealthily make themselves noticed.

  ‘Words tell us so much,’ she says. ‘Addicted. Dependent. You add something to yourself, or you depend on something. You really don’t have to add tobacco to yourself, but you have to hang somewhere. Nobody floats. We depend on time, on space, on air, on water… Have you read my poetry?’

  ‘I have not yet had the chance,’ he says sagely. His mind is preoccupied. He knows that her sentences are sending messages beyond what they say, but what? His body is tiring, fading.

  ‘When the rumours spread around Paris about what we were doing with Car-Cut, the transitional power’s authorities placed me under house arrest. They were too late. Three huge men, straight out of the Foreign Legion, stood in front of my door, night and day, and waved pistols at anyone who tried to get too close. They hammered boards over the windows and took everything that wasn’t nailed down out of the flat. I laughed in the face of the little official with the Clouseau moustache who came to threaten me every night. I laughed in his face. He said they were going to starve me out, but I told him, wonderful, then I can go on a hunger strike without any temptations. For an entire year I lived exclusively on the water that lazily dripped from the rusty pipe in the bathroom. I was bound to that pipe. It was my only contact with the outside world. A line of communication that informed me that the water cycle was still going, that the sun was still shining and that the rain was still falling. That was enough for me. Entirely enough. My skin turned pale, my teeth fell out, I got scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, rickets, by degrees my body decayed into simpler forms, but my mind remained fit and fresh and I did not die. After a year, when they’d run out of options, they started with the torture. I don’t know how they accounted for my perseverance. They changed the guards outside my door, that I do know, maybe they suspected they were bringing me food. They weren’t. And when they placed me on a board, covered my face with a cloth and poured water over me, I was not afraid. My lungs were convinced I was drowning, but my contact with them was no longer so carnal that they might convince me too. True, I did not have gills, but in my brain the awareness grew that breathing is more than the mere exchange of gases. Maybe I was right. They wanted something. For me to tell them something, probably where the others were, and what, and how, but…I said nothing. They didn’t stop. They tried everything they could. Before the new structures came, which no longer understood our conflict and forgot about the guards outside my door – they didn’t pay them their wages, evidently, so they stopped coming – by then my back was already a canyon of rivers of electricity. Everything is light, electromagnetic. Matter is energy. In extreme moments that serves a person well indeed.’

  The old man looks at her, aghast. His lips are twitching slightly at the corners, as if they were waiting for the punch-line so they could laugh at the drawn-out joke, while his arms unconsciously seize up in an echo of a long-forgotten pain. Is she serious? Did this really happen to her? For years after the Cut Mr Ž—lived quite peacefully, toned down his revolutionary theories, defanged them, so that they bit less sharply at those meetings where solemnly earnest people came to exhibit their hysterical fears. His whole life he preached egalitarianism, and when it came in a moment, through a stellar outburst, he somewhat reluctantly realized that it didn’t make things any better. And what was really happening on the continent in those years? He didn’t believe the official line, of course, he deciphered it only enough to discern which way power was pointed, but to listen to the conspirators? He had always found that somewhat distasteful.

  Zoja closely monitors his response. She imagines that she can read his mind and for a moment finds herself in a strange place, full of men in uniforms who all, deadly serious, listen to the fiery speech of a man she once knew, once, a long time ago, a long time, my god, can it be that so many years have passed? So many lives? So long since I last thought of him. Not even an echo of him crept into my consciousness, although he was his friend, and then, maybe, when we were students wasting days in the joints of Ljubljana, maybe also mine? What should I think about that? The colour drains from the old guy’s face. His eyes leap about, sailing on their own.

  ‘Mr Ž—. Are you ok?’

  ‘Just…a little…a bit of rest…as it were.’

  People are swarming around them at a respectful distance, like electrons orbiting a nucleus, they rotate and exchange places when they have feasted their nerves and satisfied man’s primitive obsession with image, enough to be able to tell their friends and acquaintances that they saw her, for real, in the flesh, under a greyish-brown clump of hair the colour of dried soil, that they saw her warm eyes, her sharp nose with those asymmetrical nostrils, the thin, almost invisible lips, her calm bearing, her endless presence… Max tries to get to her, but the bodies won’t let him pass through, and Anwar, when he sees her in the distance, leads a sturdy platoon of soldiers and the freshly-in-love couple closer. The old guy near Zoja gets weak at the knees, gradually drops into a squat, and a black film descends over his eyes. He’s exhausted. The body from which he’d never yet separated himself demands attention.

  ‘Mr Ž—?’

  His arms cling to his bony shoulders and his feathery lightness surprises her. When the old man shakes and collapses she easily prevents him from falling, then gently lowers him to the ground. For a second he opens his eyes again and a quiet, hoarse request escapes his lips.

  ‘Sugar.’

  During a routine observation on 13 February 2011 at 04:34 GMT, the solar and heliosphere observatory (SoHO), a joint project of the then-European and US space agencies ESA and NASA, detected a series of unusual events on the surface of the sun. Sunspots had begun to group in abnormally large clusters that Professor Willard Hurst, the project director, described as being ‘by appearance and activity similar to cancerous formations or tumours in organic beings’. Though the reasons for such a change were not made clear (perhaps the sun had smoked too much?), experts nevertheless correctly discerned that the possibility of a solar eruption or even a coronal mass ejection had increased dramatically. Such phenomena occur when in the active regions around sunspots strong magnetic fields penetrate the photosphere, connecting the corona with the solar interior. The large amounts of electromagnetic radiation flaring from it can cause serious inconveniences on earth, especially in the spheres of communications and energy – satellites are destroyed, radio waves fall silent, electric connections are interrupted. Given the fact that nuclear superpowers could confuse the magnetic storm with an attack by an adversary, the scientists decided to present their findings at a session of the United Nations.

  It was precisely at t
his time that the Great Cacophony was nearing its zenith, which is why many of the world’s power centres spontaneously reached the conclusion that this potential solar eruption could be utilized to purge the unbridled flow of information which had already begun to make it impossible for institutionalized violence to function as it was meant to. The tremendous systems of ideolusions that ensured appropriate allocation of material and spiritual goods came under attack by radicals, global coalitions of technologically advanced people that had a very skewed sense of the greater good. The plan for the Great Cut was drawn up. Those people who lived better than the rest and wanted to continue to do so clenched their fists and hoped for the best.

  It was the cats that told him. All he has to do is keep this fact secret and the people will never doubt him. True, these people are naive, but not so naive as to believe that every entity can be made to speak if only you squeeze hard enough. Pain gives rise to speech. Ask the Soviet prisoners what the rocks in their quarry can tell you, ask the blacksmiths whether nails can sing. Ludovico also felt pain once. It hurt so much that he could have talked and talked, if only there was always someone there to listen to him. Since there wasn’t, he is now unable to explain to anyone where it was he came from and what he’s doing here. He exists only as long as he is without a cause. If he could express it, if he could just remember it, he would instantly dissipate into a layer of humid, sweet smoke. Some things you can’t get to the bottom of – and if you do, you realize that they never had any depth to begin with. It’s all very sad. Ludovico is just one big consequence. His real name is Jerry.