The Physics of Sorrow

IV. TIME BOMB (TO BE OPENED AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD)

THE AGING OF AN EMPATH

Once I could be in everything, be everything. Now, in the ineptness of my mature years, I wanted to gather up everything, as a small compensation for that which I had lost.

The aging of an empath is a strange and painful process. The corridors toward others and their stories, which once were open, now turn out to be walled up. House arrest in your own body.

Earlier, I would at times feel the need to shut myself up in the dark, letting nothing awaken the empathy, to just sit like that in the healing darkness of the nothingness. To keep myself from scattering, to stop the influxes of other people’s sorrows and stories.

The only thing I want now is to remember a few days with that physical intensity of childhood, when I lived out everyone else’s story as my own. What was the diagnosis again — radical empathetic-somatic syndrome. I no longer embed, I only have memories of such embeddings — but what memories! They soar like meteorites in the dark. Sometimes I am (again) the Minotaur, other times Laika the dog, I leave a woman during wartime, I see my nine-month-old father and am happy, they abandon my three-year-old self at a mill at the turn of the century, they kill me as a bull a century later in a bullfight in T.

When I sensed that this ability was starting to fade, that I was undergoing de-empathization, as my doctor might jokingly put it, I resorted to this pale substitute — collecting. I felt an urgent need to horde, to organize things into boxes and notebooks, into lists and enumerations. To preserve things with words. The empty space left behind by one obsession can always be taken up by another. Before, I could inhabit all the bodies in the world, now I’m happy if I manage to move from room to room within the house of my own body. I stay the longest (did I mention this already?) in the children’s bedroom.

Who am I. A forty-four-year-old man, in a basement with thick cement walls, a former bomb shelter. I say I’m forty-four, but add to that the age of my grandfather, who was born in 1913, also add that of my father, born at the end of the second Great War, of Juliet in front of the movie theater, of the escape artist Gaustine, add the ages of yet more people, whom I’ve inhabited for longer or shorter stretches, two cats, a dog, a few slugs, two dinosaurs — their skeletons are in the Berlin Museum of Natural Sciences. Add to all that the incalculable age of one Minotaur, who has never left the home that is my body.

Sometimes I am forty-four, sometimes ninety-one, sometimes in the labyrinth of a cave or a basement, in the night of time, sometimes in the darkness of a womb, as of yet unborn.

Most often, I am ten.

I wonder whether I’ll die as all those things at once? I’ll become totally extinct, he told them, I’ll become totally extinct. like in that kiddie song about dinosaurs, where do I know it from?

FIRST AID KIT FOR AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD

And here’s the first notebook with instructions, begun in the late ’70s, when it became definitively clear that World War III was inevitable — and the end of the world along with it.

I open up to the first page, written in a difficult-to-decipher hand.

Human beings like hugs. If you happen to meet some surviving human being, open your upper appendages up wide and gently squeeze him. For best results, keep your arms like that as long as you can.

(This is followed by a hand-drawn diagram of people hugging.)

This will calm the human being down a lot. He might even start crying with a clear liquid coming from his eyes. Human beings love to cry. It’s no big deal, it can’t kill you. It’s more dangerous if a red liquid starts trickling out of somewhere, it’s stickier, because of the erythrocytes, I think. You have to stop it immediately or it could result in death. Death is.

I had stopped there. Not because I couldn’t explain death. I was already twelve and knew what death is, I could have copied the definition from my biology textbook — the cessation of all the vital functions of an organism is called. But who knows whether the language of those who would find the notebook had developed according to the same logic, whether their words followed that logic and whether they even used language in the first place? Did the ones who would come know what “red” is, for example? Maybe they would use some other word for red, say “blue.” Or “tomato.” Or “ktrnt.” Or maybe they wouldn’t have any words for colors at all:

a) because eyes will have long-since become vestigial organs, they will use far more advanced senses.

b) they won’t read letters, that’ll be a bygone stage, they will be illiterate, which in their case might actually be some kind of supra-literacy.

In any case, I added down at the bottom:

If you find this, you’d best come looking for me, I’ll explain everything in real life (if I’m still alive). You can find me in the basement at the school (the entrance is under the stairway) or in the bomb shelter under the Tobacco Factory, which is three blocks from here.

I signed it, too. Then I decided that wasn’t enough, so I wrote out my full name and a short description of myself. Bluish-green eyes, more greenish in the summer, light hair, tall, with a straight nose, no visible identification marks. Just like in my grandfather’s passport. However, that “no visible identification marks” wouldn’t have helped much in recognizing me, so I added: high forehead with superciliary protuberances (I had heard that from the school doctor during a check-up) and a mole on the left side under my lower lip. I knew that people who hadn’t met in a long time recognized each other by their moles. I also added, which now seems wise to me, that in the year 2000, I would be a thirty-three-year-old man. And since human beings live an average of seventy-five years — and men even a bit less than that — that after 2050 I most likely won’t be able to be of any assistance. But until then I’ll be at their disposal. Then I signed it once again.

He places (I can see him clearly in my memory) the notebook with the instructions in a round metal Singer tin, the most valuable thing he owns. It’s from “before the Ninth,” as his grandfather liked to say. Always, when someone wants to say that something is really old, they say it is from “before the Ninth”—i.e. before September 9, 1944, the date of the communist coup in Bulgaria. It sounds like “before Christ.” And the strangest part of all is that his grandma and grandpa are also from before the Ninth, it’s downright unbelievable. The tin has some strange letters on it, with a big red S on the lid and gold decorations winding around it. Years later, on all of my travels I would recognize in the details of houses and pictures from the turn of the century that Secession style, which, thanks to that tin, had been part of my childhood. A tin for thread and fabric samples given as a free gift along with the sewing machine.

The Singer sewing machine itself had disappeared “after the Ninth” for some strange reason. That was another dark and muddled thing. What existed before the Ninth disappeared after the Ninth. Yet that tin for thread and fabric samples remained, it had somehow managed to smuggle itself from one system into the other, so he could keep all of his treasures in it. The metal was sturdy enough to survive one end of the world, that’s why he put his notebook with instructions inside as well. Just in case, however, he put the Singer tin in a larger, round halvah tin. True, it didn’t look nearly as nice, it was even a little rusty, but it would nevertheless be safer that way, with doubled armor. Besides, who would think to swipe an old halvah tin? Then he tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook, smeared it with a tube of half-dried-up Rila glue and stuck it on top of the halvah label. Then very slowly, in capital letters, he wrote out: “To Be Opened after the End of the World!”

Although he couldn’t explain why, he knew that the end of the world was not the end. After that, something would have to survive, to start all over again.

He had read in an encyclopedia that the most important discoveries in human history were fire and the wheel. That’s why the first thing he put in the tin was a box of matches. After some hesitation, he added his favorite toy car. First, they would figure out what a wheel was and how it worked, then they would produce a real car, following the prototype. The matches and the little red car formed the basis of this kit for surviving apocalypses. Then he added a bottle of iodine, a bandage, half a package of aspirin and that “Vietnamese wonder gel” with its fearsome ingredient “tiger balm,” whose sharp, pungent scent cured everything — from colds to mosquito bites. A first-aid kit for after the end of the world. That would do for a start.

I race into the bomb shelter of the third person singular, I send another into the minefields of the past. I was that same person, who was once in first person, and now I’m afraid to ask whether he’s still alive. Are they still alive, all those we’ve been?

DOUBLE PREPAREDNESS

1980. On the one hand, there was the apocalypse, the flood, the end of the world according to John and his grandmother. On the other hand, that toothy (and armed to the teeth) Jimmy Carter was lurking, with his cowboy hat, riding a Pershing missile, as he was drawn in his father’s newspaper. At school, the slide projector was constantly showing shots of that atomic mushroom cloud and he already carefully skirted any mushroom that happened to sprout up in the garden, as if it might explode under his sandals.

The two apocalypses — his grandmother’s and the school’s official one — didn’t coincide precisely, which only made matters worse. It clearly was a question of two different ends of the world, as if one weren’t enough. And a person had to be ready for each of them if he wanted to survive.

The preventative measures were also different. His grandma stopped slaughtering chickens, leaving that sin to weigh on his grandfather’s soul. According to her, a person had to constantly repent and avoid sins of any kind. To reduce his load, for some time he ceased his experiments with ants and tried not to hate so much that revolting creature Stefka, who sat in the desk behind him, who never missed a chance to make fun of him for blushing. He couldn’t think of any other sins.

Defense against nuclear and chemical weapons was more complicated. You needed to put on your gas mask in no time flat. “In no time flat”—his Basic Military Training teacher’s favorite phrase. Then immediately add your cloak, rubber gloves, rubber boots, and hightail it to the nearest bomb shelter. Or if the bomb shelter is too far away, fall flat on your face in the direction opposite the nuclear blast, and don’t look at the mushroom cloud so as not to ruin your eyes. He knew everything, just as the rest of his classmates did, about the chemical weapons sarin, soman, mustard gas, and the havoc they wreaked. They had become experts on poison gases, chemical and biological weapons, atomic and neutron bombs, Pershing and cruise missiles.

So there wouldn’t be any surprises, he practiced for both scenarios. Whatever happens, put on your gas mask and start praying. During one of the drills, he tried to say a prayer with his gas mask on his head, but only a quiet rumbling could be heard through the hose, while the eyepieces of the tight rubber mask fogged up.

“What are you babbling to yourself about, greenhorn?” His military training teacher barked at him — he was a major, wore a uniform, and they were all afraid of him. “When you prattle on, you only use up your oxygen more quickly.”

Whoever managed to put on his gas mask in the allotted time — how many seconds was it? — would survive. Whoever didn’t, like Zhivka the Gimp, whose left arm was deformed, would be toast.

During recess, he would sit by himself at his desk, calculating whether his mother and father would make the cut-off. If they didn’t, why should he bother trying to survive? As for his grandma and grandpa, they didn’t stand a chance, they were so slow. His grandma would first have to put on her glasses, she never knew where they were, then she’d have to find the bag with the gas mask, call to his grandpa, who was surely out somewhere with the cows. That definitely added up to more seconds than were allotted.

SIDE CORRIDOR

A person wearing a gas mask resembles a Minotaur.

DEATH IS A CHERRY TREE THAT RIPENS WITHOUT US

Nothing will be destroyed by the bomb. The houses will remain intact, the school will remain intact, the streets and trees will still be there, and the cherry tree in the yard will ripen, only we won’t be there. That’s what they told us today in school about the aftermath of the neutron bomb.

— Notebook with instructions, 1980

Only now do I realize how precise that description is. The street is still there, the trees are still there, look, there’s the cherry tree, except we’re dead. Nothing is left of me, the erstwhile savior of the world. So that means somebody nevertheless dropped the neutron bomb. The absence of my grandmother, my grandfather, my father, my mother, and of that boy, about whom it’s difficult for me to speak in the first person, only serves to confirm this.

No one has yet thought up a gas mask and bomb shelter that protects against time.

TIME SHELTER

The day after the Apocalypse, there won’t be any newspapers. How ironic. The most significant event in the history of the world will go unreported.

But it’s still beforehand. And I need to hurry. to finish my work.

A woman from Iran, sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery. Just don’t do it in front of my son, the woman says, having managed to give an interview to a European newspaper. A girl from Afghanistan on the cover of Time with her ears and nose cut off. The photo is shocking, a big black hole gapes where her nose should be.

A huge fire near Moscow, the suffocating smoke blankets the city, the number of victims rises every day. Floods in Europe. A deluge in Pakistan.

I copy down the newspaper headlines. The dates say August 2010. I’ve read similar news in the Old Testament and in some of the medieval chronicles. It would be interesting to make a journal out of newspaper headlines only. Flood. Fire. Cut off. I carefully fold the newspaper in half, then once again, then once again, until it is as small as a napkin and all that can be read of the words are. od. fi. off. I stuff it into a box labeled “Fragile.” I’m trying to keep a precise catalogue of everything. For the time when “now” will be “back then,” as we wrote in our school yearbooks, liberally doused with the tears of our youth, which didn’t cost a thing. Good thing that the basement is big, an old bomb shelter, and despite all the stuff I’ve gathered up over the years, there’s still free space to be found. I insisted on that when buying the place. A nice, big cellar, a whole underground apartment, with two hallways, walls that form niches and secret passageways. I quizzed the owner at length about the thickness of the walls, the year the place was built, any past flooding, and so on. He was quite surprised. He must’ve regretted not raising the price a bit. Are you planning on living down here? No, I replied. And the next day I moved the most basic necessities for living into the basement. I spend most of my time down here. I feel at home. I mostly use the floor above as an alibi. If you put some effort into appearing normal, you can save yourself a lot of time, during which you can be what you want to be in peace.

In recent days the newspapers have reported that they’ve found the diaries of Dr. Mengele, who lived to a ripe old age in Latin America. Written between 1960 and 1975 in ordinary spiral-bound notebooks. Full of notes about the weather, short poems and philosophical musings, biographical details. An alibi for life itself, with all of its innocent details.

JANUARY 1

I’m not a hermit, I have a television downstairs (I only watch the evening news), I subscribe to thirty-odd newspapers and magazines, so I’m certainly no hermit. I still need to follow the world closely, I’m gathering signs.

I read Aristotle’s Poetics and listen to some surviving vinyl record. It’s January 1 of the final year, according to some calendar. It’s too quiet, even for the afternoon of such a day. There aren’t the usual calls, texted greetings. I turn off my phone, to have an alibi for that silence.

In the newspapers I processed a while back, it said that “unfriend” was the word of the year for 2009. It feels like that’s all I’ve been doing these past ten years. Over time, friends have been disappearing in different ways. Some suddenly, as if they had never existed. Others gradually, awkwardly, apologetically. They stop calling. At first you don’t get it. Then you start checking to see whether your phone battery has died. A sharp absence at five in the afternoon. At first it lasts around an hour, then it gets shorter. But it never disappears. Just like with the cigarettes you quit smoking years ago, but which you keep dreaming about.

In the dying light of the day I once again feel that inrush of obscure sorrow and fear, true savage fear, for which I have no name. I quickly put on my coat, pull on a hat with ear flaps, I could easily pass as either hip or homeless, that suits me fine, I’m invisible in any case.

If anyone wants to see what his neighborhood will look like after the end of the world, he should go outside on the afternoon of January 1. Indescribable silence. All available reserves of joy have been spent the previous evening. Dry and cold, the rock bottom has been laid bare. Metaphysical rock bottom. I’ve always wondered what is actually being celebrated — the end of one year or the beginning of another. Most likely the end. If we were celebrating the beginning, then January 1 would be the happiest day.

I stroll through the narrow, icy pathways between the apartment buildings, some empty wine bottle rolls from beneath my feet, along with the remains of explosive devices of every caliber. And not a soul outside. This is starting to look suspicious. As if someone, under the cover of New Year’s fireworks, managed to blow everyone away. They detonated that neutron bomb. I’m the only survivor, behind the thick walls of my hiding place. I can’t imagine there was anyone else cautious enough to have spent New Year’s Eve in a bomb shelter. I wonder what’s on CNN after the end of the world? I turn around to go check, and from the nothingness, two dogs and a bum jump out in front of me. The first living creatures. this year. I’m overjoyed to see them. Actually, this is their day, their New Year’s is a day later. When the previous night’s leftovers are thrown away and the dumpsters are overflowing like sad post-holiday malls.

TO BE OPENED AFTER.

An alarm clock, safety pin, toothbrush, doll, matchbox car, ladies’ hat, make-up kit, electric razor, cigarette case, pack of cigarettes, pipe, various scraps of cloth and fabric, one dollar in change, seeds for corn, tobacco, rice, beans, carrots.

What could hold a collection of such uncollectable things?

A suitcase, most likely. But who could be the owner of such a suitcase? The ladies’ hat suggests a woman, the pipe and the electric razor a gentleman, even though that’s no longer certain. Or the suitcase belongs to a little girl because of the doll, or perhaps a little boy because of the cars and all the odds and ends little boys tend to collect.

The list continues.

Novels, articles from Encyclopaedia Britannica, pictures by Picasso and Otto Dix, Time, Vogue, Saturday Evening Post, Women’s Home Companion, and other magazines and newspapers from the late summer of 1938. All of that on microfiche. The Bible in hardcopy. Short letters from Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. The “Our Father” in 300 languages (!) and two standard English dictionaries.

A museum’s repository? A writer’s den?

To be continued.

A fifteen-minute film reel containing: a sound film with a speech by Roosevelt apropos of the season (the year is still 1938); a panoramic flight over New York; the hero of the most recent Olympic games, Jesse Owens; the May Day parade on Red Square in Moscow; shots from the undeclared war between Japan and China; a fashion show in Miami, Florida, from April; two girls in full-length bathing costumes, gentlemen in afternoon attire. And a diagram showing the location of the capsule, with the precise latitude and longitude with respect to the equator and Greenwich.

A time capsule, yes. With the world’s whole worrisome-cheerful schizophrenia, caught at a specific moment — on the eve of war, to boot.

That whole world was buried fifty feet underground on September 23, 1938, in perhaps the most famous capsule, designed by the engineers at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company for the World’s Fair in New York. To be opened after 5,000 years. But exactly one year later, that world would be buried again (literally). This time without a ritual, without a capsule, and without a diagram showing the location.

At first, the engineers officially dubbed it the “Time Bomb,” and it really did look like a bomb or a shell, with its elongated 228-centimeter body and rounded tip. Then they decided that was bad luck, so they changed the name, at least officially, but the fuse had already been set off.

In 1945 they wanted to open the capsule. Out of nostalgia for the lost, pre-war world? No. They wanted to add the most magnificent invention: a diagram of the atomic bomb. Then they decided against it. But twenty years later they couldn’t help themselves and buried a second capsule in the same place, where, alongside information about the atom bomb and several newer weapons, they added a Beatles record, birth control pills, and a credit card.

(Time bomb, 1938)

VOYAGER

The attempts to preserve time continue. The year is 1977. With the Voyager space shuttle, the strategy changes — the capsule can be buried in outer space. Until now, the direction had been down deep in the ground, now it’s up deep in the sky. As far away as possible from earth, that dangerous place.

The golden plate contains a photograph of a five-centimeter-long fetus, a nursing mother, an astronaut in outer space (very similar to the fetus), a house, a supermarket, silhouettes of a man and a woman (the woman is pregnant and the baby is visible). But the best part are the sounds — the sound of rain, wind, a chimpanzee, a kiss, frogs, a crying baby being soothed, a tractor, a galloping horse, conversation around a campfire.

The shuttle is American, it was launched in the heat of the Cold War (such linguistic irony). We knew about Voyager only because there, on the golden plate, was a Bulgarian folk song. However, it also contained a greeting from the American president (we didn’t know about that), that very same toothy Jimmy Carter, whom one neighbor woman of ours wanted to hack to bits with a cleaver like a chicken. So, in any case, now Jimmy Carter and that Bulgarian folk song were wandering amid the stars together. We were proud that our song of all things had been chosen. We later found out that it wasn’t alone in the cosmos, but cheek-by-jowl with Azerbaijani bagpipes and a Georgian choir from the USSR, Aboriginal songs, Senegalese drums, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. And we were slightly disappointed by this. Who knows why, but we imagined that all the aliens, when they stepped out in the evening onto their chilly celestial porches, liked best of all to play that Bulgarian folk song about a fierce rebel on their record players. (Small nations love being fierce.) I didn’t understand any of the heavily dialectal lyrics of that song and was seriously worried about how the aliens would be able to understand it.

I hope they still haven’t understood it, otherwise we’ll lose them for good. Or maybe they gave it a listen and that’s why they’re late in coming. In short, Delyo, the hero of the song, threatens that if the Turks force two of his aunts to convert to Islam, he’ll storm the village and many a mother’ll bawl / an’ many a young bride’ll howl / even the lil’ baby in the belly’ll cry out.

That baby in its mother’s womb, flying on the same disc with Delyo, better watch out.

OTHER CAPSULES, OTHER TESTAMENTS

The year is still 1977. The place is the city of Pleven.

“In the foundation of the Pleven Memorial Panorama, in the floor of the lobby, a capsule with a message has been buried. It will be opened in exactly one hundred years, when all of us will be living under communism,” the chairman of the State Council, Comrade Todor Zhivkov announced during the placement of the capsule.

“Well, we won’t all be living under communism,” my father says and switches off the TV, “that guy thinks he’s gonna live forever.” I imagine how one hundred years from now, the new man, Homo communisticus, opens up the capsule and reads the instructions from his forefather, the now-fossilized Homo socialisticus.

And what was written inside? Slogans like “a firm right hand. the benefits of communism. to each according to his needs. ” and other mumbo-jumbo, as we said back then.

This capsule-mania turned out to be catching. Everyone was racing to bury messages for the future. Our school’s turn eventually came around. The capsule resembled a big glass test tube. I had the feeling I’d seen it in the chemistry lab. In front of the whole school, the principal read our message to the future Pioneer, who would live under communism, and then stuffed it inside. Then they added three drawings and three essays by students. There had been an essay contest on the topic: “How do I see myself in the year 2000?” In short, we saw ourselves as communists let loose in the cosmos. Communism had conquered the globe and was already being exported to nearby planets. We drew cosmonauts in their spacesuits with red stars on them, tethered to the mother ship with something like an umbilical cord or a rope and with a bouquet of daisies in one hand. Or make that poppies. Poppies were more fitting, since they had “sprung from the blood of fallen heroes.” Later I would find out that poppies would always come in handy for other, more intoxicating uses as well.

They put those kinds of things in that capsule back then, and the Pioneer coordinator even suggested stuffing in the school flag as well, but the test tube turned out to be too small.

For the essay contest “How do I see myself in the year 2000?” held before the burial of the capsule, I wrote only a single sentence: “I don’t see myself, because in the year 2000, the world will end. This is a fact.” I can’t say why I did it. I was immediately called before the Pioneer coordinator, who labeled it a “provocation.” The main question was who had been telling me these “facts.” Which only strengthened my suspicion that everybody knew what was going to happen, but they were keeping it under wraps as a state secret. I was old enough to know not to rat my grandma out. I lied, telling them I’d heard it from some fat Polish woman at the seaside. I purposely said “fat,” so as to express my attitude toward this provocateur. Poles weren’t like us, they lolled topless on the beach and sold Nivea hand cream on the sly. Let them go look for her.

It goes without saying that my early warning did not make it into the test tube.

In the meantime, I redoubled my efforts to fill my own capsule. In absolute secrecy, in step with the spirit of the times, as they said back then. In step with the spirit of the. Jesus, where did that come from? Remembering is never innocent, phrases from that time come back to me. There’s suddenly a bad taste in my mouth. In step with the spirit of the times. In step with the spirit. I’ll repeat it a few more times to make it meaningless.

BOX NUMBER 73

And one more “time capsule,” one of the official ones. An ordinary paper envelope with red capital letters: “To be opened when he becomes a Komsomol member.” Under socialism, they were given to every child right at birth. I have placed this fragile paper capsule in box number 73 and, contrary to the instructions, the envelope is only now being opened. Inside, the following was typed out:

Dear Young Man,

There are moments in a person’s life that are never forgotten. Today, with trembling hands you untie the knot of your scarlet Pioneer’s neckerchief, replacing it with a red Komsomol membership booklet. This is a symbol of the great trust the Party and our heroic and hardworking people have in you.

Be decent and daring in word and deed! Dedicate the drive of your youth and the wisdom of your mature years to that which is dearest to all generations — the Homeland!

Yet another stellar example of socialist-speak. I now see that it is a mouthful: Be decent and daring in word and deed! Dedicate the drive. What are all those Ds, why make the tongue scoot along on its ass? I wonder whether those suit-wearing fates handed my mother the envelope when she was still in the delivery room? While she was still in shock and didn’t know which way was up, she was given diapers, a pot to boil bottles in, and a representative from the Regional Committee of the Communist Party came and handed her the letter. Don’t worry about the kid, we’ve already preordained his fate, first he’ll become a young Pioneer, then he’ll put on his Pioneer’s neckerchief, then he’ll replace it with his Komsomol booklet, it’s all written here. Set. In. Stone.

I was first thinking to toss out the envelope, but then decided to put it back in its place, in box number 73. There need to be such things inside, too.

I think I need to reinforce the box with added protection against such radioactive waste from the past. But what if only this capsule survives? What if it’s discovered and a cult grows up around it? I shouldn’t have gone there. I can see it ever so clearly.

FUTURE NUMBER 73

Many years after the apocalypse, life springs up again and after several millennia man makes a reappearance. These new post-apocalyptites develop more or less the same as earlier people did, not counting a few insignificant deviations (mutations), for example, the fact that they are incapable of abstract thought. Clearly, nature or God learned a lesson from the previous, less-than-smashingly successful experiment and has made some healthy adjustments.

Suddenly, the New Ones accidentally stumble across a buried but miraculously intact capsule with messages from before the apocalypse. The event is indescribable. Finally, some trace of their forefathers. But it is the most idiotic and laughable message imaginable (but they don’t realize this). Some testament to their descendants, which should be opened 200 years later. Part of it has been worn away, but individual phrases have survived. They decipher it carefully. And devotedly, as stone tablets are read.

We must heed this testament and change our lives accordingly, that’s how it is everywhere. Only one person resisted. On the contrary, he kept saying, we should do the exact opposite of what is written on the stone tablets if we want to avoid the fate that befell our forefathers. But no one listened to him. The Testament was circulated far and wide and every word was interpreted as specific instructions for action.

Every cliché (and a cliché is nothing more than an abstraction that has swallowed its own tail) becomes dangerous when it is made literal. Three empty, meaningless phrases from the distant twentieth century turned the life of a heretofore united and happy society, in which abstractions did not exist, upside down:. Prepared and trained for the sea of life. The socialist family — the basic cell of our society. To spill your blood for the homeland.

The sea wasn’t far away. They immediately turned it into an Academy, where they began training the young and the old. The teacher would swim out in front, with the students around him in shoals, with their frail, knowledge-hungry bodies, flailing their arms and legs. The more frail and sickly among them quietly sank, falling back and left behind. The survivors felt at home in the water, their backs grew enormous, they knew everything about life in the sea. What erudite athleticism, what academic muscle. the non-drowned poets sang. On land they started to feel like beached whales. And life gradually returned to the sea. (What an evolutionary step backward.)

After that, true to the second line of the Testament, they filled the sea with wooden cells. Every newly married couple received one as a wedding present and lounged in it of their own free will.

Three times a year they celebrated the Day of the Great Bloodletting, on which they injured themselves, so as to offer up spilled blood to the Homeland. And since they had no idea or instructions as to what it was, they simply gathered up the blood in a huge container, which they soon dubbed accordingly: “Homeland.”

There is no other surviving evidence of this civilization.

CARRIERS

A few years ago I decided to back-up my archive due to security concerns. I put the most important information on a disk, then hid the disk in a small box made of gopher wood, sealed with pitch on the inside and outside. I followed the Old Testament instructions, even though Noah’s arks have gone through quite a few changes thanks to new technologies. The original was three hundred cubits long and fifty wide, with a height of thirty cubits, divided into three stories. Now it’s a single disk.

At first, I was considering some fireproof box, but I decided it would be best to follow the description in that book. Pitched gopher wood keeps the water out and always floats to the surface, unlike a metal lockbox. The Book has thought of everything.

Of course, I don’t count on disks alone. They’re unreliable and if the least little thing goes wrong, the whole thing is shot. The more advanced the technology, the more irreparable the damages are. I read somewhere that paper, especially acid-free paper, turns out to be a far more reliable information carrier than any digital device. Its manufacturers say it’ll last up to 1,000 years. That’s surely more than we can say for this world. For this reason, I continue to rely on my boxes full of clippings and old-fashioned notebooks. Just in case the world turns analogue again. The likelihood is not at all negligible.

Since other capsules depicted the world like a postcard — kind, pretty, dancing, endlessly inventing various trinkets — the capsule in my basement had to contain the signs and warnings, the unwritten stories, such as “The History of Boredom in the 1980s,” or “A Brief History of the Ephemeral,” or “An Introduction to the Provincial Sorrow of Late Socialism,” “A Catalogue of the Signs We Never Noticed,” “An Incomplete List of Fears During 2010,” or the stories of Mad Juliet, Malamko, Chingachook, the anti-historical person, my grandfather, the abandoned boy, the stories of all those coming of the void and going into the void, nameless, ephemeral, left out of the frame, the eternally silent ones, a General History of That Which Never Happened.

If something is enduring and monumental, what is the point of putting it in a capsule? Only that which is mortal, perishable, and fragile should be preserved, that which is sniffling and lighting matchsticks in the dark. Now that’s what will be in all the boxes in the basement of this book.

NOAH COMPLEX

I imagine a book containing every kind and genre. From monologue through Socratic dialogue to epos in hexameter, from fairytales through treatises to lists. From high antiquity to slaughterhouse instructions. Everything can be gathered up and transported in such a book.

Let him write, write, write, let him be recorded and preserved, let him be like Noah’s ark, there shall be every beast, large and small, clean and unclean, thou shalt take from every kind and every story. I’m not so interested in the clean genres. The novel is no Aryan, as Gaustine always said.

Let me write, write, write, let me record and preserve, let me be like Noah’s ark, not me, but this book. Only the book is eternal, only its covers shall rise above the waves, only the beasts inside, between its pages swarming with life, will survive. And when they see the new land, they will go forth and multiply.

And what is written shall be made flesh and blood and shall be brought to life in all its perfection. And “the lion” shall become a lion, “the horse” will whinny like a horse, “the crow” will fly from the page with an ugly croak. And the Minotaur will come out into the light of day.

NEW REALISM

I hadn’t left the Underworld for a long time, so recently I decided to take a bit of a stroll. I waited for evening to fall, at this time of year it’s almost dark by five in the afternoon. That makes my transition from the basement easier. Unfortunately the Christmas lights were already up and the darkness had retreated into the corners. I chose the darker streets, breathing in the cold air, and found myself in front of a gallery I used to enjoy going into. The gallery was still open, I had caught the last few days of an exhibit showing “The New Realism.” There were no visitors at that hour, so I decided to go in.

I peered into the small glass containers, stuffed full of wine corks, useless odds-and-ends, into the traces of worn-away posters by Raymond Hains, Arman’s long ribbons of paint, squeezed out of the tubes and stretched out like colorful snakes taxidermied in glass. I stood for a long time in front of the remains of a dinner by Daniel Spoerri, glued to the table and hung on the wall like three-dimensional pictures — a frying pan with dried grease, a table for two with two empty coffee cups, the grounds still in the bottom, two glasses and an empty bottle of Martini from the 1970s, a burned-down candle, only wax left in the holder, a crumpled napkin. Someone was here and has left. A conversation has taken place, something was said, something was left unsaid, they sat for a long time, the candle was burning, they were enjoying themselves, they got up and left. Did they have sex in the other room? Was the coffee before or after that? If you look even closer, you’ll probably see lipstick on one of the glasses. From forty years ago.

Those people are most likely gone now. Only the coffee grounds remain. The new realism — new Noah’s arks from the already-old twentieth century.

It was in the air. They all had a premonition of apocalypse in the late ’60s and ’70s, these new realists. Sometime around then, Christo started wrapping the world. As if getting ready to leave. Everything has to be packed up. We gather up our luggage, we take off. From the little wrapped rocking horse (his saddest work, in my opinion), to the bridge at Point Neuf. Come onnn, we’re moving ouuut. They’re going to knock down the house.

MEMORIES OF MOVES

I’ve known it ever since my childhood, because of our frequent moves from apartment to apartment, that strange feeling when objects are removed from everyday use, the chair is no longer a chair, the table is not a table, the bed has been taken apart. The dresser is nothing but drawers and wooden shelves. The books are stuffed into white plastic bags stamped “crystallized sea salt,” as if they were fish needing to be salted. I wonder if it will sting afterward when I page through them.

You stand amid all that chaos, mooning about, you don’t know where to turn, the adults don’t either, they’re stressed out, waiting for the truck and smoking. Then everything is loaded up, but all of you are still fussing around, you don’t want to shut the door, your mother goes to check for the twentieth time to make sure you haven’t accidentally forgotten anything, your father has wandered off somewhere in the yard to water the two cherry trees and the rose bush, because who knows whether the new tenant will take care of them at all. I hug one of the cats, the other is hiding somewhere.

Farewell.

A new apartment.

New farewells.

The moves of my student years.

Moving out after divorce.

Moving to other countries.

Coming back.

A new apartment.

A whole life can be told as a catalogue of moves.

THE MOTHER CAPSULE

After that exhibit, I go back home to my boxes and bags.

At every moment (including this one), somebody is burying a time capsule somewhere. The trend peaked in 1999. Then there was a certain drop in interest. The apocalypse of 2000 didn’t come about. People were disappointed, which is understandable after all that waiting. In the meantime, Facebook cropped up, a new time capsule. Now you’re a half-human/half-avatar, a strange sort of Minotaur, no a Min-avatar. I got distracted there, that’s what Facebook does, it distracts.

What I wanted to say was that of the tens of thousands of capsules being buried in the ground annually, over ninety percent will be lost forever. The people who have buried them forget, die, move. A mother-capsule needs to be created, which would contain the coordinates of all the capsules buried around the world. And so that its coordinates wouldn’t be forgotten, a special person needs to be hired whose only job is just that — to remember them.

BUNDLE AND BOTTLE

The unlikeliest things can turn out to be time capsules. The largest is surely the city of Pompeii, which was preserved under ash. I prefer the smaller ones, myself. Like the bottle of brandy my grandfather set aside the day I was born. That bottle must be forty-four years old now. If I find it and open it, I’ll have distilled the whole of 1968, at least for southeastern Bulgaria. The number of sunny days that summer, the early autumn rains, the humidity in the air, the quality of the soil, the vine diseases, the year’s whole history written inside a glass bottle.

Or that bundle of clothes my grandma kept for “the end.” A kerchief, an apron, a cherry-red vest, wool socks for winter, or pantyhose — in case it’s summer — a pair of patent-leather shoes. A bundle to be opened on the day of her death. Even though she would open it every other day, to make sure moths hadn’t chewed holes in the clothes or simply to look at them. That’s a way of getting used to the idea of death, too. Once a month, she would put them on. She would replace her old black kerchief with the new one with its big, dark-red roses, her everyday brown woolen vest with the unworn red one, which had been given to her for some birthday. She would look at herself in the narrow rectangular mirror, bemoaning how pretty she had been back in the day, what a slender waist she had had. How can I show up there like this, she would cry. Only death awakened her vanity. More people were waiting for her there than here.

. AND HEXAMETER

The unlikeliest things can turn out to be. Hexameter, for example. If something is said in hexameter, then historically and practically speaking, it has an infinite expiration date. The whole of the Trojan War is preserved in the capsule of hexameter. If that story had been stuffed into any other form whatsoever, it would have given out, gone sour, gotten torn up, crumbled. Hexameter turned out to be the longest-lasting material.

Hesiod, in his Works and Days, has left behind a true survival kit with instructions. If something happens to the world and people come who don’t know anything, thanks to this book they will learn which month is good for sowing, which for plowing, when a boar or a bellowing bullock or a hardworking donkey should be castrated.

It also includes these favorite instructions:

One should not urinate facing the sun while standing erect, but

One should remember always to do it at sunset and sunrise.

Nor should you piss on the path or next to the path when out walking;

Nor should you do it when naked; nighttime belongs to the blessed.

For everything, there should be a good book giving instructions. I add it to the box, too.

BEES AND BATS

At the end of every year I open up the boxes, carefully look through all the publications from January to December, sometimes that is precisely what fills up my days until New Year’s Eve, and I set aside only the most important things that need to be preserved.

I have my own system for sorting.

Often, the most important bits of news turn up on the pages of thin, irregular periodicals printed on cheap paper, such as Modern Beekeeper, Gardening Time, Houseplant Diseases, Taking Care of a Small Farm, Bull and Cow: Newspaper for the Novice Farmer, Home Veterinarian, All About Cats, and so on.

Sometimes those five lines from the “Strange News from around the World” column can turn out to be important, especially when they’re describing the strange behavior of several colonies of bees in some remote North American town. The bees flew out of the hives in the morning and never came back. Now that’s what I call a sign and a revelation, even though nobody noticed it at the time. People don’t make the effort to read signs. They chalked up the bees’ mysterious disappearance to the Varroa destructor, the Varroa mite to be precise, also called the “vampire worm,” a tiny red tick that sinks its little hooks into the bee’s body. I wrote a letter to the newspaper, explaining that this was something else entirely, that this was only the beginning, I even quoted Einstein, people are impressed when they hear Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

They weren’t impressed.

It seems to me that the year was 2004, the winter of 2004, yes. A whole two years had to pass before people figured out that this wasn’t some one-off case and that something strange was happening to all the bees around the world. Only in 2006 would those few lines from my beekeeping newspaper become front-page headlines in the New York Times, the Guardian and so on. And only then would they dub this strange disappearance of the most responsible and disciplined part of our holy family here on earth “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD). Hives are being deserted. One of the most domestic of creatures has lost its ability to find its way home, it gets lost and dies. Remember that diagnosis. Colony Collapse Disorder. The disintegration of the apian family. If this is happening to them, what is left for man and his unstable family? There’s more apocalypse in that than in all the other hocus-pocus. The bees are the first sign. The buzzing angels of the apocalypse. We’re expecting the trumpets of Jericho, but the only thing that can be heard is bzzzz. bzzzz. bzzzz. growing quieter and fading away. That’s the signal. Don’t you hear it? Just take out your iPod earbuds for a minute.

And what do we know about White Nose Syndrome? White Nose Syndrome in bats. We haven’t even heard? No one counts dead bats. Look, if they were pigs or cows, everybody’d be worried. In 2006, ninety percent of the bat population in the caves around New York and San Francisco suddenly and somewhat inexplicably died. They stopped eating and hung comatose before finally flying out of the caves and falling to the ground outside with white noses. Small flying mice with white noses, miniature dead Batmans. I add this information to the box as well, it may turn out to be important.

I gather for the sake of the one who is to come. For the post-apocalyptic reader, if we may agree to call him that. It’s not a bad idea to have a basic archive from the previous era. Today’s newspapers will then be historical chronicles. Which is a good future for them. And a fitting testimonial to an epoch quickly yellowing and fading in its final days.

The newspaper is dated June 4, 2022. The headline is written in fat letters across the top: Strange Epidemic of Amnesia. And as a subtitle, in a smaller font: Colony Collapse Disorder in humans? The article reads more or less as follows:

Rules and habits established over centuries are ceasing to work. We are seeing ever more cases in which people leave their homes in the morning to go to work, yet are in no state to find their way home in the evening.

C. S. (39) had a normal morning, just like thousands of others before it. Toast, eggs and bacon, the big mug of coffee, joking around with the kids, kisses at the door, promises of the traditional family Monopoly game that evening. That evening, however, he didn’t come home. He never even reached his office. They found him by chance on the other side of the city, lost, his pant legs rolled up boyishly, walking down the street and kicking stones aimlessly. He didn’t remember having a wife and kids. He didn’t know his address. He claimed to be twelve.

Even more inexplicable is the story of D. P. (33), a single mother, who, like every day, brought her kids to kindergarten. She dropped them off, kissed them, and promised to pick them up early that afternoon. A half-hour before the appointed time, the kids were already standing by the fence, dressed and ready to go, but their mother was late. The other parents started arriving. Finally only the two children and the teachers were left. It started getting dark, but no one came. They called the mother, but she didn’t answer her phone. The kids had to spend the night at the kindergarten. They found the mother three days later in a distant northern city. She was acting bizarre, according to the authorities, she resisted arrest, scratched one police officer’s face and taunted him with insults that had been popular twenty years ago, but which no one used anymore. This last detail is important, since to the question of how old she was, the woman, who was past 30, replied that she was in seventh grade. To the question of what she was doing in that city, she replied that she was on a class field trip. Of course, she couldn’t recall her kids or family. The newspaper’s own investigation revealed that the middle school where the mother had gone really had taken a field trip to that city twenty-nine years earlier.

They forcibly returned the woman to her city and took her home, expecting that the familiar surroundings would immediately bring back her memory. She acted as if she were in some stranger’s home. She didn’t touch anything. She asked where the bathroom was. She didn’t recognize any of the clothes in her closet. When brought face-to-face with her own children, the psychologists could not detect any sign of recognition.

For now there is no clear explanation for what is happening. Scholars are working on several parallel hypotheses. One of the most intriguing suggests that this is a case of sudden reactivation of past events for inexplicable reasons and the opening of personal parallel time corridors. A powerful invasion of the past. They suspect it may be due to misuse of “regression therapy” which has become fashionable recently and which is being practiced illicitly by an ever-growing number of self-declared therapists.

SIGNS

More than 2,000 dead blackbirds fall from the sky over a small town in Arkansas on January 1, 2011. The reasons for these mysterious deaths are unknown. The report is from January 3.

Over the following days, reports of mysterious bird deaths start rolling in from various parts of the world — Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Hypotheses include a bird plague, secret experiments with chemical weapons by the American military and so on. The man who announced that he would uncover the truth, a former U.S. army general, is found dead in a garbage truck. More and more people believe that the dead birds falling from the sky are a clear sign of the Apocalypse.

And on the coast of England, 40,000 dead crabs are discovered.