The Taiga Syndrome

This form of writing wasn't about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.

In fairy tales, the wolf is always ferocious. Astute and agile, the wolf always figures out how to get its way. … The Wolf, in other words, always wins.

Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity

Failures weigh people down. Writing reports of all the cases I was unable to solve, however, had helped me to tell stories, or at least get them down on paper, as they say. Whether I was obeying or taming language is not important.... Sometimes failures push us to open the door of a run-down old house, to clean the dust off the unused furniture and find a drawer where an old typewriter hides. Failures force us to reflect, and reflection, with any luck, may lead us to a coastal city and a pile of blank pages.

I remember the images from my dream. I remember it was in my dream that I saw the small hand, its shadow on the wooden wall. A hand as small as the head of a pin. How many angels were dancing, deranged, on the tip of its nail? A hand that could have easily passed for the corpse of a mosquito or flea: a hand with five fingers, even tinier.

Sometimes it is good to remember that we all live, after all, on one planet.

Failures force us to reflect, and reflection, with any luck, may lead us to a coastal city and a pile of blank pages. Failures drink coffee in the morning and keenly observe the afternoon light, and, when possible, go to sleep early.

Failures drink coffee in the morning and keenly observe the afternoon light, and, when possible, go to sleep early.

Places where sex is sold are the same everywhere. They always have a viewing window or something similar: a bar, a walkway, a stage where you can see bodies and, if permitted, feel them. It has to be a space that facilitates the circulation of these bodies, so that they can be appraised, touched, negotiated. And it must have an area in which to complete---once agreed upon, once contracted---sexual intercourse. The noise of people or glasses or music always helps. Smoke. Something unspeakable in the air.

...in the same way, just like being in love, being out of love also ends one day.

The woman. I did carry a few of her images in my head, for example the recurrent image of the forest, the word 'coniferous,' the word 'boreal.' The word 'footpath.' All together, they constituted something like a mantra, or the sentimental beads of a rosary. When nothing else seemed to make sense, sense was hidden in irrefutable words: a sliver or the space for a sliver.

I remember the movement of jaws, constant and dreadful. Opening and closing. Chewing. Swallowing. I remember how the voracity of my own chewing made me close my eyes. Sometimes pleasure is like that. Above all, I remember the sound of lips, gnawing and talking at the same time, and the grease shining on those lips. And how my food slid down my esophagus, slowly, before falling into the cruel mechanism of my stomach. All those liquids. All that acid. I remember the noise of gold chains around forearms and wrists. How the metal sparkled at that time of day. What time? What day?

Something tilted. So, she had somehow managed to create the forest and the paths of the forest that she'd imagined in the pages of her journal? She didn't seem like a strong-willed woman, but possibly she was. She didn't have the bold or brash attitude of those who manage to transform desires into reality, but if it's true that journals are full of desires, then this woman before me, leaning on the hard thighs of the man with whom she had fled, right after she had stopped breathlessly, without knowing what to do, on a dance floor, had turned those desires into a reality. Her desires. I was facing someone--I told myself several times, just to remember what was so obvious that it could become transparent and pass unperceived--who had managed to transform the world, at least what was around her, into the world of her desires. A trembling image, something that gleams. What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest?

The man was right: The woman seemed determined to be found. Like Hansel or Gretel, or both, she had sprinkled crumbs of words in every telegraph and post office they passed through. As they progressed, the cities shrank and the transportation became more rudimentary. Airplanes. Trains. Ferries. Barges. Rowboats. Kayaks. She gave the impression of being unable to stop. As if she were falling; it was the same with the messages, as if they were falling. In truth, what she seemed to want was for someone to catch her, to wrestle her down, like in rugby.