Epitaph
« Can one smoke under the sea? » I look at him.
« Why this question? » He seems a little surprised, takes the cigarette out of his mouth and asks, searching for a possible cause.
« Well… That is because… I don’t know. Maybe because I see you smoking. » I get slightly stressed up, feeling like a theft being caught under the bright daylight. I start to look at something else and search to justify the apparent absurdity. The impulse that drove my action has absolutely vanished, leaving some vacuum behind that cannot be recalled. Now, it has become a total ignorance. All that I am aware of now is the undulating blue emitted by the slowly spinning ball hang on the decaying wooden ceiling.
« Emm… Not really, I think. » He flicks his cigarette several times before he takes one drag. Then he tries to explain, « Because of the physical rule, right? The cigarette cannot be lit in the water. »
The rationality always triumphs. His response sounds reasonable indeed.
« Then it should be… » I feel somehow embarrassed. A silence follows and stretches itself from the space between. A buffer zone between two dying patients scorning each other.
He takes another drag, then puts his cigarette on the ashtray, and sits up straight.
« But… you know… maybe you should ask the outlaws about this. They know how to go around the rules… » He notices the growing discomfort.
« Hmm… You think so? »
« There is always a way isn’t it? Since you insist on it… »
« Hmm… »
The cigarette on the ashtray emanates a heavy smell of soaked wood. İt is the reminiscence of some lost place. Verschollen, schleierhaft. A tress was blown down into the sea. It drifts aloof, leaving nothing but a dreadful emptiness behind where it used to fill up. The consecutive wakes left by its drifting cadaver rend the room into a darker blue. I hear the rhythmic sound of waves. The space itself is soaked, infiltrated by distant echoes arising from under the water. There, the expanding monotony forever reigns.
« The best way is to prove it by ourselves, don’t you agree? » I suggest.
« Hmm? » He does not appear to be much disturbed by the change, but seems intrigued.
He takes his cigarette case out. It emanates a weak smell. An unnamed stream flows slowly among the primitive mountains, forgotten long in the steady flow of time. It drizzles without ceasing, or strengthening, or relenting, which makes the velvety mosses always in a moist emerald green. The colour quietly and constantly oozes out from an odd dream in the past, in which I wandered in an orchard without any fruit tree. The omnipresent undulating green is like twisting serpents that are overflowing from the worshiped chalice, scattering, fizzing and screaming on the ground, writhing and coitioning with each other. The scene is not less appealing than the rumours claiming that the most eldritch creature hibernating in his silent palace deep down is in the same colour of this vegetative ocean too.
« One is not supposed to be able to speak and breath under the water. »
« Well, if he does not think over the consequences of drowning. You can become anything if you forget everything. Like a growing foetus in the womb. »
« Pff… » he abandons searching the coherence between the sentences. He pulls out one cigarette, hesitates a while, then ignites it without any trouble.
« Then so it is. How do you feel? » He seems no surprised but more relieved, waiting for me to act.
« May I? »
He acquiesces.
I don’t feel the warmth or the coldness. The absence of temperature. It won’t burn or frostbite anything. Soon, I lose the tactile feeling of it. I just know that I am holding a cigarette burning under the sea, but this awareness doesn’t refer to any valid existence. I know it is there, but I don’t know what it is. It is the emptiness itself. The illusive feeling of an amputated arm on a sunless winter day. The auditory illusion of your long deceased mother consoling you when you are afflicted again by the recurrent nightmare.
« It must be the emptiness that keeps it like this, isn’t it? »
He waves his hand. « Not my work. But let it be. » He pulls out another cigarette, puts it in his mouth and ignites it.
« Won’t you mind staying longer? » I am waiting for an approval.
« You still get time. So shall I. »
I take a long drag on my cigarette, followed by him. The smouldering cigarettes let out a shimmering red. And now, the dark red takes up all the space in my sight. The dark red of a chronic mischief. Something neither avoidable or negligible leaves a sting in a pumping heart. The sun is dying, imperceptibly slowly, and it has reached the final phase.
« The Ever Lasting Crepuscule. » He emphasises the first syllable of each word. This could be his favorite play.
« Do you think the sky could suffer from anaemia? » I sit down, letting my sight roam all over the fading skyline in distance, waiting for the patient to take his final breath. « It is bleeding out. »
He shrugs.
« Or it could be the process of recovery. » He sits down, and lays back onto the ground. Some unnameable herbs pitifully scatter on the barren sandy soil. They should be all gone before the death of the sun, due to the lack of heat. « You see, it is like a bleeding wound that is recovering unimaginably slowly. In the end there will be an empty night sky, in the ebony colour same as a scab. »
« No. It is horrible. Nothing would really recover. »
« Well… » He seems amused, then he turns his head to me. « No everyone wants to sail the Ship of Theseus. Yet indeed, you can say that the trembles between day and night do not exist. There are just another day and another night… »
« Which means the child born at the very midday can only see that the sun is permanently going down, down until the inevitable finality, until everything falls to the deepest ground, until no the transitory light can never been seen again, no one you know will greet you in the morning and the emptiness grabs all. » My hands holding my cigaret trembles, I guess I have just get a bit emotional.
« Yes… Even the everlasting wind will stop. » He flicks his cigarette. The wind laughs fiercely. The ash flees away. « Soon, nothing would be carried by the hollowing wind through the deepest valley, pass by the wildest ocean, soar over the highest peak and at the end maybe spill into the uncharted sky… »
« There was originally nothing before even the existence of Eden. »
« Whatever, reasonably, the end of everything is identical. »
« Including you too? »
« No exception. »
I think I have anticipated a similar response, yet his being frank still stirs up a bizarre sentiment. A sense of loss after awakening from the wildest fever dream. A frustrating fiasco, because I forget what I plan to say and what I have said. The wilting herbs continue swaying with the howl of the wind. Are they taunting me? Are they aware of the commun fate awaiting us all? Yes. It is a fiasco. A fiasco which nullifies all, including even the attempt to mend a mistake out of nowhere, the attempt to fill up a container that is far beyond the understanding of the most clever mastermind, for they know nothing, for we know nothing. There exists a desperately created need to pretend that there is a way out, even though the possible solution could only lie in the empty epitaph of the empty movement, played by empty thralls in the empty hall aimlessly decorated with empty glory for an undefined period of imperceivable time in our laughable history. Yes. It is the absurdity. It is absolutely an incurable mindset of ridiculous nihilism, someone would think in this way inevitably. But as I said, I, don’t, know.
« You don’t want to die, do you? » He asks gently.
« It is not what I fear. »
« Hmm… » He sighs. « I wish I could help you. »
« It is not what I need. »
« …Sorry. »
« You know I would not blame anyone. It is what it is. »
« Indeed… » He takes several drags, slowly and gently. He is about to finish his cigarette. It is emitting now a unstable light, whose colour shifts to something that provokes a long-stretchted melancholic sentiment. The most primitive one, like the inexperienced disappointment when a thinking mind firstly realised that his innate need could never be satisfied by any means. Then he casts the cigarette away, letting it drift randomly away, slowly dragged down to somewhere below, and swirling one round after another. The green light flows down from the hollow socket of the weathered skull when the resurrected skeletons creep out from the long desecrated crypt under the sunless sky. We walk through the shoreline in the somber space carefully refined.
« Hey… I should go home now. »
The green light from the monolithic ancient lighthouse is flamed up again, trying to penetrate the impenetrable fog. And now you should tell me what you will see. No, no… You couldn’t. Maybe you can peek some shadows of tremendous creatures undulating extremely slowly behind the veil. Are they approaching? Or are they fleeing? Because they are disappointed? Or because they are indifferent? I don’t know. And I am sure you wouldn’t know it neither. And these questions are not supposed to be answered. I am absolutely certain about the fact as he puts his unshakable faith in the self realisation of the epitaph. I am certain that your observation cannot serve you to judge the situation. The final result will never be influenced by the number of logical choices that you, and me of course, have made. Who kills the patient suffering from any fatal disease who dies alone in his filthy stinky bed in a random freezing midnight in winter? His illness? His solitude? The unbearable odour? The falling temperature? The undesirable season? I don’t know. It is still appropriate if I attribute his fate to the sun, for he gets his dose of sun ray everyday. But it wouldn’t matter, because this patient is dead now. It is not more important than the absurdity of putting this bizarre groundless question about this patient in this paragraph, and not less important than the attempt to understand to where those gigantic shadows behind the fog are moving. He, who stays beside me, firmly believes in the epitaph, but I know, and I am sure that he knows that too, that the aftermath is likewise not affected by its realisation. We sit speechless, watching the green light spinning one around after another, until the vague shadows finally stand still. Then, we find ourselves before the decaying mausoleum.
« The last fortress that would stand still until the epitaph of the epitaph ends… » he sighs again, « or of another epitaph of another epitaph, if you would like to go on counting, although they all refer to the very same thing. The self-dissolution of the emptiness is inevitable at the last moment, after it compromises all. »
I touch the dilapidated stone column. The rigged surface feels cold first, but the next second this feeling vanishes, and I know that it is gone forever. All that remains is just a kind of certainty. Something exists and existed there, some unnameable entity, but I would never remember or discover what it is.
« How was it built? »
« Every time you have a dream, forget it the next morning and carry on, the size of this place will grow. The mausoleum is the incarnation of the forgotten. It steadily expands itself when the gap between the length of retrievable memories and the period of time that one has been living. Everything here is built up in this way. » He touches a petal in ghostly blue of a unnameable flower. The next moment it vanishes into dust. And a drop of tear runs down his face. « This should be sad for you… »
« Maybe you should stop touching those flowers. You could feel better. »
« I guess so… » He lets the wind blow it away.
« The absurdity is the final phrase before the absolute silence. A reckless euphoria… Is it what you are trying to prove? »
« I… I don’t… » It shouldn’t have meant anything. Maybe. « But would you come back after that, is it an end for you too… »
« It could… but hey… we should see each other later, I got what you mean… »
The dark sea water pours down from above.
The blue ball keeps spinning. He lays face-down on the table, possibly sleeping.
The Redder Room 