Moving Parts

They are in no hurry; they sit with their elbows resting on the edge of the crumb-strewn table. The woman, in blue jeans, takes a cigarette from a packet lying on the table. The man gives her a light; his biceps bulge beneath his black sweater. They talk. What can they be talking about? She laughs, looking directly into his narrowed eyes; she tilts back her head with its short red hair, blows out a cloud of smoke and taps ash into the ashtray. If she wished to act like a woman sitting at a table in a hotel dining room with a man in a black sweater, there is nothing more she would have to do. While they remain at the table they look happy; a thoroughly secure future extends before them: in the morning coffee and rolls, in the evening somersaults over the abyss, and so on for all eternity. Is this enough to make them feel confined by the circus metaphor in which their fate is enclosed? And even if so, do they have any course of action other than to take up the life that has been assigned them in this tale? Perhaps it would be better for them to remain forever at the table set for breakfast, she with a cigarette, he with coffee cup in hand, and between them on the white tablecloth, let’s say, a green apple, which somehow neither of them feels like eating. They’d sit like this endlessly, sprawling on padded chairs whose softness comes from the pink stuffing hidden under the upholstery. It isn’t difficult to imagine what hardships, mortifications, and disappointments these two would be spared. But no one wishes to remain forever in an inconsequential moment. Thoughts flee from it in reverse gear toward accomplished facts, while desires, having nothing to look for in the past, rush forward at breakneck speed. Only the second hand of a watch thrashes about in the present tense, trembling nervously. All alone, over and again it passes by the two broader hands as they turn unhurriedly in their matching orbits, evidently connected with it only mechanically. The rhythm of its feverish twitching is foreign to them. To the body though it is only too familiar — the delicate body, warm with desires, which, surging toward the future, at that very moment collapses into the past, sinking helplessly into it, enmired. And while the moment called the present still continues, its existence is felt merely as an uncontrolled turmoil of heart and mind, a chaos from which one tries to flee as far as possible. And so the dining room will soon empty and the pair finishing their breakfast will eventually vacate their chairs, abandoning green apple peelings and the crumbs scattered over the tablecloth. Are those their cups, with a mouthful of coffee left at the bottom, traveling away on a nickel-plated cart? They merely passed through their hands, amid the clatter of silverware and the murmur of voices forming the daily loop between the dishwasher and the table. The man is seen again briefly in the lobby behind the glass pane, then the woman too; in the background there are large sofas, in whose insides pink stuffing covers the unpleasant steel spirals of invisible springs and gives the leather upholstery a rounded appearance. We’ll learn that as they were drinking their coffee, their suitcases, ready for departure, were waiting by the front desk, at the crossing of ways that lead to train stations and airports — where all worlds meet and where any character is expected only to complete certain uncomplicated formalities. The last of these will be to wish a toneless good day, which must be acknowledged a moment before the final parting in a damp and dark early morning in, let’s say, November. One’s gaze has to glide over a glass jar filled with candies that no one takes. With the bill in one’s wallet, one disappears in the twinkling of an eye, not leaving behind an empty space, nor a hint of longing, nor a breath of regret. The nature of suitcases is such that they are both there and not there at the same time; the gleaming floor already shines through their substance, and it will remain in its place once the cases have gone off in the trunks of taxicabs. On the other side of the mirror-smooth slabs of synthetic stone to which mud will not cling, let us imagine at least two floors of cellars, with plumbing, central heating pipes, a series of transformers and coils of cables. And still lower a bottomless chasm, the same one in which southern seas bristling with coral reefs mortally perilous for sailing ships, and roiling with waves of unassuaged emotions, extend all the way to the lifeless northern seas sheeted with permanent ice, their frozen waves covered with hoarfrost. In the antipodes of the present world of the hotel lobby where every object stands in its place, one can expect a realm dispossessed of all order in which top is bottom and down is up. The sofas, armchairs, and tables of that other world, deprived of solid ground, fall chaotically, directly into the void of that reversed sky, into oblivion. Tablecloths slip from tables and sail through the air, crumpling and folding; plates and silverware fly every which way; tea splashes from teapots. Everything comprehensible and obvious here, in that place must appear tortuous, indecipherable, absurd. But the flooring of synthetic stone conceals the dark gulf, persistently imposing itself on the eyes; one’s gaze slides involuntarily across the reflecting surface. The pair to whom so much attention has been paid has called not one but two cabs. Each of them will now depart in a different direction. The man in the black sweater slips the hotel receipt into his wallet; in his eyes is repeated the row of lamps shining coldly over the counter. The short, simple surname the receipt is made out to may begin with the letter M. And that is the last that’s seen of them. The tale is like a hotel; characters appear and disappear.