This Nothing's Place by Pasquale Verdicchio

Author:Pasquale Verdicchio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2013-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

FINAL DEATH

I am wearing your watch. A gold-coloured Wittnauer similar to the one I had years ago in stainless steel. Mine was a present from you for my twentieth birthday. Mine was destroyed by salt water while diving in Mexico. Yours has been sitting unused in your sock drawer for about fifteen years, since your heart valve replacement. Somehow that watch became too heavy, its ticking seemed to compete with the mechanical sounds that emanated from your chest. That valve became your time-piece. Often when you sleep, it is the only sound in the room.

I am wearing your watch. I have taken it out of your drawer and placed it around my wrist. I can feel its heaviness. I can hardly read the name plate without glasses. It reads Wittnauer Electronic. The hands are still. You probably took it off the last time the battery died and laid it to rest among your socks. The crystal is scratched, gouged in spots, most likely the result of an encounter with a door-frame or a wall as you worked. That was the usual fate of your watches. Smashed around as you carted things here and there. The band is an ugly shade of gold. It has stretched somewhat but still fits snuggly on my wrist.

When I look at the watch I see your arm, not mine. The watch is forever inscribed with the image of your arm and your body. The gold colour contrasts with the brightness of a white shirt-sleeve rolled up to just below the elbow. The muscles of your forearm are clearly at work beneath the skin and the veins that supply them are thick blue ducts of life. One day, after a mystery damaged your heart, you put away your watch and slowed down. Time became softer and, over the years, you became frail.

Time has almost run out. A few days ago the doctor gave you hours to live. Since then you have reemerged again and again in moments of clarity from troubling moments of confusion and weakness. The time it takes you to suck water up with a straw is endless. Your tongue seems to be going to pieces from the dryness. Your language is drying up along with it. English, Italian and Neapolitan are still separate in your responses. Your dreams, a possible way to work out the final detail of your being here, reach back to the distant past. Dreams allow you the movement and time that your body can no longer manage.

I have been watching you for days. The ups and downs, the apparent awakenings that promise what cannot be. I have been watching you as I watched you a year or so ago.You won your fight with cancer, yet you looked more dead to me then than now when the threshold is near. I spent those endless nights with you then, attempting to calm your anxieties and your pain. This time it seems that attempts to allay your fears are a useless struggle that only worsens the situation.

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