this blemish was like a flash-shadow left after a photograph has been taken, a blob imprinted on the back of my eyes and nowhere else. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, in which a murderer is driven mad by the imagined audible beating of the heart of his victim, concealed under the floorboards of his room. But I was no murderer, I thought, and it would take a lot more than a tiny mark on the floor to drive me insane.
DAY THREE
I was lying in Oskar’s bed, not even slightly awake, when I realised that my surroundings had performed an unhappy transfiguration in the night. The bed now seemed to be of unlimited size. At first I feared that I had shrunk, but that theory did not stand up to close examination. The white duvet was as thick as it had been when I went to sleep, all the stitching and weave of the cotton was the correct scale, but the mattress and its coverings no longer had a visible end in any direction. Everywhere I looked, it stretched out to an invisible vanishing point, a white cotton horizon against a plaster-white sky. Sky, or ceiling? It was impossible to tell, and the answer did not seem to be important. Beneath me, I imagined a fathomless underworld of dusty springs. Above was the irrelevant nothing.
Slow panic. To crawl or walk out onto that trackless desert of duvet, or over the treacherous footings of boggy pillow-down, would mean losing my way, succumbing to snow blindness, and ultimately (in the boxer shorts and T-shirt I slept in) death from exposure. To worm my way under the duvet at first seemed a better plan; not so exposed to cold, at the very least. But a duvet that sizemust weigh thousands, millions, of tonnes, I feared, whatever its tog count. To crawl too far underneath it would be death – I would suffocate in the dark before the first mile was up.
It really was unfortunate. My immediate surroundings, in their proper place in the world and at sensible proportions, could not be more comfortable – I was simply in a bed. But as this bed had grown to encompass the whole world, it had become a deathtrap as alien and unforgiving as an Arctic waste or Asiatic desert. Any place, I realised, no matter how temporarily comfortable or inviting, is only rendered habitable by the promise of other places beyond it.
For want of anything else to do, I turned over. The horizon, a greyness that was really only a fresh, distant, horizontal quality of whiteness, swung into view. A tiny pang of seasickness came and went. Seasickness without the hint of an ocean; not so much as a drop of water. How long could one survive without water? Not that I could measure time – I did not believe that this ash-white dome above me varied its appearance according to night and day. I would have to conserve and ‘recycle’ my own fluids, I thought. The idea of drinking my own urine did not appeal. And I had no way of...decanting it. Would I be reduced to using a cupped hand, or somehow...
aiming
? The mechanics of the whole operation were not at all pleasing. Afterwards, I would have to move to a new place on the frontier, no doubt about it. I was not going to lie in the damp patch. Certain death in a prosaic wilderness was one thing, lounging around in my own waste was quite another. Fortunately,and this was the one bright spot that I could see: there was no shortage of identical spots to move to.
Incredible – I could not have been in this new situation for more than ten minutes, and already I was figuring out the practicalities of pissing all over myself. And right on cue, the question of fluids arose, and a mild complaint issued from the fleshy lower part of my abdomen. It was unmistakable, and it would only become more urgent. And there was something else wrong. A darkness was advancing in the distance beyond my feet. Maybe I had been wrong about the days and nights here, and this was dusk. But it was not dusk or gathering bad weather. It was spreading below the horizon, just a
DAY THREE
I was lying in Oskar’s bed, not even slightly awake, when I realised that my surroundings had performed an unhappy transfiguration in the night. The bed now seemed to be of unlimited size. At first I feared that I had shrunk, but that theory did not stand up to close examination. The white duvet was as thick as it had been when I went to sleep, all the stitching and weave of the cotton was the correct scale, but the mattress and its coverings no longer had a visible end in any direction. Everywhere I looked, it stretched out to an invisible vanishing point, a white cotton horizon against a plaster-white sky. Sky, or ceiling? It was impossible to tell, and the answer did not seem to be important. Beneath me, I imagined a fathomless underworld of dusty springs. Above was the irrelevant nothing.
Slow panic. To crawl or walk out onto that trackless desert of duvet, or over the treacherous footings of boggy pillow-down, would mean losing my way, succumbing to snow blindness, and ultimately (in the boxer shorts and T-shirt I slept in) death from exposure. To worm my way under the duvet at first seemed a better plan; not so exposed to cold, at the very least. But a duvet that sizemust weigh thousands, millions, of tonnes, I feared, whatever its tog count. To crawl too far underneath it would be death – I would suffocate in the dark before the first mile was up.
It really was unfortunate. My immediate surroundings, in their proper place in the world and at sensible proportions, could not be more comfortable – I was simply in a bed. But as this bed had grown to encompass the whole world, it had become a deathtrap as alien and unforgiving as an Arctic waste or Asiatic desert. Any place, I realised, no matter how temporarily comfortable or inviting, is only rendered habitable by the promise of other places beyond it.
For want of anything else to do, I turned over. The horizon, a greyness that was really only a fresh, distant, horizontal quality of whiteness, swung into view. A tiny pang of seasickness came and went. Seasickness without the hint of an ocean; not so much as a drop of water. How long could one survive without water? Not that I could measure time – I did not believe that this ash-white dome above me varied its appearance according to night and day. I would have to conserve and ‘recycle’ my own fluids, I thought. The idea of drinking my own urine did not appeal. And I had no way of...decanting it. Would I be reduced to using a cupped hand, or somehow...
aiming
? The mechanics of the whole operation were not at all pleasing. Afterwards, I would have to move to a new place on the frontier, no doubt about it. I was not going to lie in the damp patch. Certain death in a prosaic wilderness was one thing, lounging around in my own waste was quite another. Fortunately,and this was the one bright spot that I could see: there was no shortage of identical spots to move to.
Incredible – I could not have been in this new situation for more than ten minutes, and already I was figuring out the practicalities of pissing all over myself. And right on cue, the question of fluids arose, and a mild complaint issued from the fleshy lower part of my abdomen. It was unmistakable, and it would only become more urgent. And there was something else wrong. A darkness was advancing in the distance beyond my feet. Maybe I had been wrong about the days and nights here, and this was dusk. But it was not dusk or gathering bad weather. It was spreading below the horizon, just a
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