XIV

gymnastics 'И'

The hapless fleece had been free, or bereft, of dreams and nightmares for a long time. On a white sort of morning, he sat at a small wooden table, resting his head on one of his hands and looking out of a window, where there was a field covered in snow. The field was all white and very flat. He imagined many hapless fleeces hopping around on it and wondered what the snow would look like afterwards. Then he was made afraid by the thought of all those rampaging hapless fleeces, jumping about and ruining the snow. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that he would forever be a greased cherub, wiping his pink face in his gray rags. But sometimes his arms and legs and mouth would do different things, like many people were trying to use them instead of the hapless fleece himself. These musings distressed the hapless fleece so thoroughly that he stood up from the table with an abrupt jolt that knocked his chair over and began to wretch. He reached into his mouth and down his throat, feeling around inside his guts with his fingers and pulled out a dream, or a memory that had been collected by a small group of people. It lay sopping damply on the table in a ball, he unfolded it and read it:

“Some year came, and they rolled into the world with piteous squeals and grimaces. In years that bounced by like shiny baubles, they dried their tears and then let them drip out again; for some time they sucked milk, then they let soft food dribble down their throats or their faces, giggling and clapping, or choking and weeping. Their food became solid and they ate it with their left and right hands until they picked up little plastic utensils. They tottered around and piddled in sandboxes, making cooing noises. They rolled around on tricycles, becoming brave, innocently warlike, wooping and hooting. They were very good and uncomprehending friends. They smiled at each other, feeling vaguely curious about what the other was. They poked at frogs and believed certain places to be haunted or inhabited by foul spirits. They were wee seraphim made of sand; sometimes they stared at each other from under blonde bangs, one had straight hair and the other curly.
In later years, their hair shriveled until it became coarse brown and they experienced the wash of guilt, shame, and envy. They felt these experiences and wanted to itch their bodies all over or jump in deep water to make those things go away. They remembered joy, sorrow and terror too, but those had always been there. They thought about certain things, like when they stood in department stores with their mothers and looked at many different pairs of pants, wondering how to decide which would be bought. They sat in classrooms of public schools for years, walked in hallways with colored walls featuring patterns and later they walked in hallways that were painted a tepid green. The chairs that they sat on became larger and less brightly colored until they were iron gray chairs that an adult could sit in. They sprouted vicious acne and looked at girls who absentmindedly clicked pens on the front of their teeth, girls who had bright hair and dressed in bright colors. They wondered what those girls were like and tried to make the girls understand them or reveal their smiles. In the winters and summers they neared the girls, who looked healthy in winter coats and bathing suits, but bristled or grew disgusted when approached. Of course, they were disappointed when their efforts did not succeed, but each time they suffered a failure, would stand in the wake of defeat silently and smile shakily at each other. Behind these smiles loomed something that was droning and purple.
Soon they became frustrated with new things and things that didn’t want them, they raged in traditional confusion and lashed out at the things scattered around them with feeble motions; they were seen stalking around with their faces pointed down. Later, they went to universities, because they understood that that one should do that. They understood that at university they could drink alcohol and hang lewd posters in their dormitories; that they wouldn’t have to be themselves anymore because they would meet many new people that had never known them before. And then later, after they got their degrees they would get a job and a house. Of course, they were sad to leave each other, but they did. At their universities they made great efforts towards certain things and thought that it was great to be in a large city. At night they could often be seen throwing up in bushes by themselves.
Separated, they individually developed interests and decided individually that they were individuals whose individuality must be known to the world. They decided that being themselves, with their own souls, that no other person had known or could comprehend, that contained such riches of feelings and thoughts, they could not simply live and die without one day standing upon pedestals, adorned with wreaths. They deafened themselves with their own squeals, oinks, and braying. They could have used their voices in song, strove to create new noises, scribbled on papers, passionately wielded brushes and pens, searched for chemical reactions with different vials, examined the sustainability of certain foodstuffs, searched through endless series of numbers in equations; the specifics are of small importance.
They pursued the hermetic isolation of ascetics, sought the illumination rumored to drift in with prolonged solitude. But they remained unrewarded; they regurgitated their prophecies with words that lopsidedly hobbled through the air a short distance before wheezing and dropping to the floor, where they lay like piles of sawdust. Dully understanding that they themselves had fallen short of their expectations, they made claims such as, “I have suffered for the truth”, “My talent has gone unrecognized and the world is unjust”, and “I have been ruined by those who are jealous of me”. They stood in front of mirrors and held their fists up in the air, they had said, “I will persist! I will triumph!”
But they did not persist or triumph, they sat alone in their respective cities, which had grown gloomy and sinister, and despaired in the snow and in the heat. After some years, they grew wilted and so quiet; their vision became coated by a permanent film of grayness. At first they lay on their beds cocooned in wispy threads of boredom, with their defeat flapping in far corners of their minds like ragged ships wrecked beyond salvation. Time passed until their isolation blossomed into the terror of the forsaken, and bruised knots began to appear under their flesh, the skin throbbing purple above the knots. In anguished horror, they rushed to places where people were to be found and implored the people to help them, but their appearance and smell caused the people alarm, and the people shook off their pleading hands, kicking them and insulting them.
Did they think about death? Of course, but in many cases those musings remain nothing but thoughts; so they only moaned and crawled on their bellies through desolate landscapes, leaving green trails behind them. On parts of their bodies, mangy fur glistened; fur that stuck together and was colored like sap in some places, elsewhere it was hard and black. On other parts of their flesh, scales formed; scales that were of yellow and brown. They grew tails and their eyes pruned into tiny pieces of filth. They crawled around during the day and made choking noises at night. They crawled into a mound of trash and burrowed tunnels. One day their tunnels met and they found each other in recognition. They embraced and then kissed each other with their beaks, and sucked the soft and shining white parts of each other’s bodies, feeling the edges of their scales rubbing together and their hair mixing together, they groaned and excreted thick fluids onto each other. They crawled around each other and crawled into each other, laughing frothily and bubbling spit. They slithered around and ate nameless soft objects that they found in the stomach of the trash. They quickly became blind; their nostrils became identical to their eyes, and forgot what they were and what the weather was like. In terrible rainstorms they could be seen sitting quietly on the top of the trash heap, with their spines bristling and their feathers shivering in the rain, their features a blankness of confusion. In terrible snowstorms little mounds of filthy snow, brown and piss yellow, could be seen on top of the trash heap.
From time to time people would come to the trash heap, vagrants or gaggles of children. The people would go around the trash heap picking things off of it or playing games, but never bothering to think that anything might be underneath the trash.
They talked to each other at night when they were rubbing and licking each other. Following their embraces, thick stringy fluids would come off of their bodies and they would collect it in buckets. They stored the buckets of their fluids in a chamber of the trash heap and named it after their hearts and themselves. When the sun was rising they would lie by the buckets, resting their heads against them and caressing them with their padded paws. At night they left the trash heap with some of their buckets and crawled around on the streets, hearing everything, hearing movement bounce off of surfaces. They splashed their fluids on sleeping people’s bodies and faces, as well as the peoples’ things. They sailed enormous distances and drenched sprawling lands with their fluids. They roved around and found their own holiness with each other and their fluid. When they dropped the liquid onto somebody or something, it looked to them at if the thing first turned brown and sticky like a rotting fruit, then crystallized into sap, yellowing and hard, then melted into something wonderful and bright so that they had to shield their eyes. And everything seemed very bright to them, in spite of their blindness. For many nights they spread their sluice over different things and returned to their trash heap to rejoice, to rub their tongues over each other.
But some year came, much in the same manner as the others. It was then that time brought with it the gift of stagnancy, the gift given before death. They began to feel very tired. Soon they stopped spreading the fluid, it congealed and reeked like burning flesh in its buckets until it was eaten by dust and mold and dried up. They squatted in the depths of the trash heap and watched their left and right hands. They lay on their backs with their mouths hanging open; sometimes underneath heaps of trash and sometimes on top of it, depending on the trash heap’s shifts in movement that came with wind or rain. The sky would float by in its different colors. Crusts began to form around their mouths and their eyes had vanished entirely.
They were lying on some flank of the trash heap’s body like this when one day, one of the vagabonds came into the trash heap to look for pieces of metal that he could sell. The vagabond pawed through some pieces of things, dissatisfied, he ascended to the top of the heap in search of more valuable material. From the summit, the vagabond looked around at the yellowing dry heaps of fluttering trash, and somewhere near the bottom, in an obscure corner, saw them. They were lying side by side, propped up by clusters of rubbish and smeared things. The vagabond bristled with fear and dropped the things he had been holding and fled clumsily down the walls of the pile and away from the trash heap.”