CHAPTER 3

I cannot sleep.  The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, dark, flat stone.

Whenever the disc of the full moon begins to shrink and its right-hand side starts to wither—like a face approaching old age, in which one cheek becomes hollow and wrinkled before the other—that is the time at night I am overtaken by a dark restlessness. I am not asleep, I am not awake, and real life mingles with what I have read or seen on TV, like a river flowing into a salty sea.
 
I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept coming back to me in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:
 

A crow flew to a stone which looked like a piece of liver, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow discovered that it was a stone and not a piece of liver, it flew away to seek food elsewhere.

Like the crow that left the stone, so do we abandon Siddhartha Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our appreciation of his simplicity.

The image of the stone that looked like a piece of liver multiplied in my mind to become a dried-up riverbed.


I am walking along, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust. I rack my brains, but I still have no idea what to do with them. Then I find black ones with patches of sulfurous yellow, like the petrified attempts of a child to form crude, blotched salamanders.

I want to throw these pebbles, far away from me, but they keep falling out of my hand, and I cannot force them from my sight.

All the stones that ever played a role in my life push up out of the earth around me.

Some are struggling clumsily to work their way up through the sand to the light, like huge, slate-colored crabs when the tide comes in, as if they were doing their utmost to catch my eye, to tell me things of infinite importance. Others, exhausted, fall back weakly into their holes and abandon all hope of ever being able to deliver their message.


Sighing, I again notice the moonlight lying on the humped cover at the bottom of the bed like a dark, flat stone.

The stone seems familiar. It hides somewhere in the debris of my memory and looks like a piece of liver. A church. The stone was in a church.

I tried to block the stone from my mind by imagining the end of the rainwater pipe reaching the ground outside my window, bent at an obtuse angle, its rim eaten away by rust.

I tried to force that pipe image into my mind to calm my thoughts and put them back to sleep.

No luck.

Again and again, again and again, persistent, tireless as a wind chime blown by the wind, an obstinate voice inside me kept insisting, “That is not the stone you remember. That is not the stone that looks like a piece of liver.”

There was no escape from the voice nor from the fuzzy memory of a stone in a church.

I explained to the voice that it was all beside the point. The voice went silent for a little while, but started up again, imperceptibly at first, with its insistence.

“Yes, it is beside the point, but it’s still not the stone that looks like a piece of liver, the stone you remember.”

I was slowly filled with an uncomfortable sense of my own lack of control of my own mind.

I’m not certain what happened after that. Perhaps I merely gave up all resistance. All I know is that my body was lying asleep in bed and my senses were no longer attached to it.

“Who am I now that I am asleep,” asked my mind?

But then I remembered that, being asleep, I no longer controlled my mouth with which I could respond; and I was afraid that the voice would start up again with its endless interrogation about the stone and the piece of liver. I no longer wish to remember the stone nor the church.


My room grew bright then faded to grey and I found myself standing in a gloomy courtyard, and through the reddish arch of a gateway opposite, across the narrow, filthy street, I could see a shady second-hand furniture dealer leaning against his shop-front which had all kinds of worthless items sitting round the open doorway.

The shop did add a bit of color to an otherwise bland street, but I was neither curious nor surprised at seeing it. I had been living in this neighborhood for a long time now and accepted it as normal, though truthfully, it was not.

I made my way up the worn steps to my apartment.

Then I heard footsteps going up the higher flights ahead of me, and when I reached my door I saw that it was Rosina, the seventeen-year-old redhead girl belonging to the shop owner I had seen earlier, Frankie Wasser.

She stood with her back against the banisters, arching her body lasciviously forcing me to rub against her to pass. She had her hands curled around the iron rail for support and I could see the pale gleam of her bare arms in the murky light.

I avoided making eye contact.

Her teasing smile and waxy, rocking-horse face disgusted me. She had white, bloated flesh. I found her red eyelashes as repulsive as those of rabbits.

I unlocked my door and closed it behind me.

Rosina was part of a red-haired tribe which was repulsive in its physical characteristics. The men had long, skinny necks with protuberant Adam’s apples. Everything about them was freckled, and they spent their whole life fighting an unending, losing battle against their sex drive.

It was not at all clear to me how I had come to assume Rosina and the shop keeper were in any way related. I have never seen her anywhere near the old man, nor even noticed them calling out to each other.

However, she was usually in our courtyard or hanging around the dark corners and passages of our apartment building.

I wanted to drag my thoughts away from Rosina, so I looked out my open window. I could see Frankie Wasser, standing outside his shop. He was leaning against the wall of the arched opening, clipping his fingernails.  As if he had felt my eyes on him, he suddenly turned his face up towards me, a horrible, expressionless face, with its round, fish eyes and gaping harelip. He seemed to me like a human spider that could sense the slightest touch on its web, however unconcerned it pretends to be.
 
How did he support himself? I had no idea. The same dead, worthless objects sat around the arched entrance to his shop, day after day, year in, year out. I could have drawn them with my eyes shut: the side table missing a drawer, the picture painted on yellowing paper of a strange arrangement of soldiers; and in front, a row of round iron bar stools standing close to each other so that no one can enter his shop.

These objects never increased or decreased in number, and whenever the occasional passerby stopped and asked the price of something, Wasser seemed to become angry. The two parts of his harelip curled up as he spewed out a torrent of incomprehensible words in an irritated, gurgling, stuttering bass, so that the potential buyer lost all interest and walked away.

Suddenly, Wasser’s gaze turned to my neighboring apartment.  What could he find to look at there? I was certain the apartment was empty.

Then I heard a sound, someone entered that apartment next door. Through the thin wall I could hear a male and a female voice talking to each other. But it would have been impossible for the dealer to have heard that from down below.

Someone moved outside my door, and I guessed it must be Rosina, still standing out there, hot with expectation that I might take her into my bed.

And below, on the half-landing, Louis, the pockmarked adolescent, would be waiting to see if I would open my door; even here in my room I could feel his hatred and jealousy. He was afraid to come any closer because Rosina might see him. He had become obsessed with her moistness, yet his feelings mostly took the form of rage fed by the bleak, gloomy atmosphere of this building.

Louis and his twin brother Jerome were a year younger than Rosina but far younger mentally. I could scarcely remember their father, a baker who specialized in communion wafers.  Now they were looked after by an old woman, meaning that she provided them with lodgings; for that they had to hand over whatever they managed to beg or steal. I heard her job was laying out corpses at the morgue.

I often used to see Louis, Jerome and Rosina playing together innocently in the yard when they were children.

Those times were long since gone.

Louis often spent the whole day chasing after the red-haired girl. If he couldn’t find her anywhere he would creep to my door and wait, a scowl on his face, in hopes she would pass by. At such times, as I sit at my work, I could imagine him lurking outside in the corridor, listening with his head bent forward on his gaunt neck certain that Rosita was with me.

Sometimes the silence would be broken by an outburst of noise: Jerome, who is deaf and dumb, and whose head is permanently filled with a crazed lust for Rosina, roamed the house like a wild animal, and the howling he could emit, half out of his mind with jealousy and suspicion, was so eerie that it would make me involuntarily shudder. He was looking for the pair of them. He always assumed they were together somewhere, and he rushed about in a frenzy, goaded on by the idea that he must be at his brother's heels to make sure there is nothing going on with Rosina that doesn’t include him.

It was precisely this unceasing torment of the deaf-mute which, I suspect, kept provoking Rosina into carrying on with his brother. Whenever she became bored, Louis always thought up some new piece of nastiness to arouse her lust. For example, they would let Jerome catch them sprawled naked on the bed, and then, when he was sufficiently beside himself with fury, slyly lure him into dark corridors where they had set up vicious traps, rusty barrel-hoops that shot up when he stepped on them or rakes with the points sticking up to trip him, bloodying his hands and knees.

From time to time, Rosina would think up some devilish trick of her own. All at once she would change her behavior towards Jerome, acting as if she had suddenly taken a liking to him. With the smile that was permanently fixed on her face, she touched the poor deaf-mute in ways that drove him almost insane with arousal.

Once I saw him standing in front of her in the courtyard, and she held so tightly to his crotch and licked her lips so insistently, that I thought he would cum at any moment. The sweat was pouring down his face with the superhuman effort it required of him to grasp the meaning of her message which was deliberately hurried, deliberately unclear.

He spent the whole of the following day in a fever of expectation of a rendezvous on the steps of a half-ruined house farther along the narrow alley behind the building. Rosita would never show up.

My mind shifted again to the apartment next door, a cheerful woman’s singing came through the wall. Singing in this building? There was no one living anywhere in the neighborhood capable of such happiness.

Then it came back to me that a few days ago Zac, my puppeteer friend, had told me that some young man had rented the next door studio apartment from him, at a high rent, clearly to be able to meet up with his illicit lover undisturbed.

Again happy singing, stirring vague images in my mind.

But then the singing stopped.  I heard a piercing scream from the room next door. Startled, I listened to what was going on. The door to the room rattled violently and the next moment my unlocked door opened and a woman rushed in, her hair undone, her face as white as a sheet, wearing only a blanket flung round her bare shoulders.

"Mr. Bobuck, hide me, for Christ’s sake, hide me!"

Before I could answer, my door flew open a second time and immediately slammed closed. For just a flash, the face of Frankie Wasser was visible, frowning as though wearing some Halloween mask.

The woman waited a bit, apologized and slipped back out of my room.
 


A round patch of light appeared before me, and by the light of the moon I recognized the foot of my bed. 

Oh right, I remembered.  I am asleep.

The woman had called me "Mr. Bobuck." The name stood in golden letters before my memory. Long ago I was sitting at a table in Starbucks and noticed, as I was about to leave,  an iPhone laying face down.  Picking it up, I saw a name and email address in the "If Found" app, "Charles Bobuck."  I put the phone in my pocket, but somehow I have never gotten around to returning it. Instead I use it as my own phone. I look at his photos so often that I often think I know the people. 

Then, without warning, that awful voice returned, the voice which kept insisting I must remember the stone, the stone that looked like a piece of liver.

Quickly, I blocked that voice with a vision of Rosina’s sharp profile in my mind with its sickly sweet grin and red eyelashes. That confused the voice, which immediately subsided.

Ah, Rosina’s face! It was stronger than that voice and its mindless obsession with the stone that is not liver.