Death is close, says W. Death has set out to find us, all of us. And this will be a death of a kind we cannot anticipate. A meteor-strike, the flaming sky, the stars falling from the heavens … We have no idea of what is to come, he says.
What idea could we have? How could we anticipate our annihilation? Death will be everywhere, W. says. The earth a flaming ball. Why does no one understand? He understands, though, insofar as he can understand. He gets it, and that makes him feel very alone.
It's the opposite of cosmogony, W. says. It's the return of the pell-mell, of chaos, of the tohu vavohu, he says, quoting Genesis. Of course, I should know a great deal about that, with my flat, W. says. I should know everything about it, with the damp spreading across my wall.
It's like fate, I've told him, the damp. The water streams down the wall. It weeps. And then my flat's tilting sideways. It's pitching into the earth. If you look at the skirting, I've told him, you'll see how far they are above the floorboards, which are sinking, along with the joists beneath them. Sinking and leaving a great gap between themselves and the skirting, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.
I think it's smiling at me, the flat, I tell W. I think it's beginning to laugh at me.
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