Bird-Eyes by Madelyn Arnold

Author:Madelyn Arnold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

Then there’s this shower which leaks all over the floor in here. It makes a big pool, even when you tuck the curtain in all around you. What you do is, you bring two coat-hangers in here with you and straighten them out. You can find coat-hangers if you look around. Turn on the shower but leave the curtain open and the spray directed at the floor; flood the stone floor. Now you have to do this in daylight because you have to be able to see what you are doing when you turn the lights out. You turn off the wall lights, over the lavatory, by pulling on the chaincord. There’s a chair in here for you to drape your clothes on. Stand on this chair and unscrew the lightbulb; toss it in the sink.

Hook the end of one hanger in the metal cuff of the light where the bulb screws in; mash one end of the other one into the middle part of the cuff where the base of the bulb touches when the bulb is screwed all the way in. Keep the two hangers apart, don’t let them touch. Stand down on the floor in the water, holding your wires by the free ends. Put one wire in one hand, put the end of the other wire in your mouth and pull the light cord—(fash …).

If this doesn’t work, please don’t anybody tell me.

Think of that sudden flash. … What if it fails you … No, think of the flash and the blankness, isn’t that peace? I think that might be a great freedom, you break out of this and like a great butterfly … Or of course, exactly not that. What if it is that you do go on, but you go on knowing nothing directly, nothing by sense. No memories (that’s freeing). Alone, abandoned with yourself (nobody here …). And you spread out, are sucked out into nothing until there is none of you, even the question. Cold, my god it must be cold there: no sense of warmth, or no sense, period. Sucked out, vast and entirely ignorant, utterly abandoned with yourself, sucked out into nothing.

Is that likely? I have always wondered if the secret of religion is that it’s all a lie and that every person knows this; knows that when the power’s cut, the lights go out forever: that it’s nothing. I really wish I had religion; it must be so easy to just let everything go if you think that the I goes right on thinking—except it doesn’t and you know that in your heart if you’ve ever seen a person or even an animal die; power’s gone and the lights go out, goodbye. You know this, and then you know nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

And think of that flash. And you really don’t want it to fail.

Weeks of pain. Weeks of restraint. Years of Them.

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