RuKsaK

I searched the frame first, muttering mundane lumps of logic to myself. My wife must have taken the photos to Russia. All the same I tore of the back to see if they were there, but no, she must have taken them. I perched myself on the sofa again, my arse sitting on its long edge – in fact barely sitting at all, more balancing as I welcomed the comfort of the upholstery as much as did falling flat on my face and breaking it open. Each felt like equal ends of relief.
------
How long I sat like that for I don’t know. I needed to focus, meditate. I thought about my face – not how it looks, but the act of having one. The more I considered it, the more I could feel the standardly distributed skin and flesh glued to my skull. If thought about having lips, it started to feel heavy and uglier as they grew in my mind. Then if I thought about my nose it seemed to rise up and it was hard to stop nodding slowly, as though my nose was tugging my phizzog where it wanted it to go. All the bits of my face became completely independent entities, no more important than earlobes or tonsils. It was when I got to thinking about my eyes I felt saddest, and most like an animal or plant. I couldn’t help thinking how stupid they are, these biological jelly lenses, not even as smart as a cheap camera. Eyes – you can fucking have them. And, since cockroaches don’t smell, I prefer the nose – at least I can stick my finger in it.

This all took me off searching the flat for evidence of my family. To find one more photo missing, then another and another was too bizarre a notion. Reflecting on having a face kept me from that, for a while. Not until I was sure I was wearing as much average genetic pudge as all of us did I go to look.
------
Nothing.
------
I looked everywhere, places I’d never looked. Not a scrap, not a single phone number written in my wife’s elegant pen curls. Not one of the many crayon scrawls my daughter does of stretched, potato-heads and the letter ‘A’. No bill, cheque, visa, statement, letter or any of the multitude of utility driven documents existed in my wife’s name anymore.

All my daughter’s toys were there, my wife’s winter clothes too and her books – even the Russian ones, but no evidence of their names or faces - just the stuff of a girl and a woman were around. Not a sight of my wife and my daughter left.

I needed to reflect on the call – think through everything the woman had said with her diluted accent lisping confidently from some hinterland. I remembered that she said:
‘You’ve got quite an attractive collection for a single guy.’

I had to build the rest. I sat fully on the sofa this time, but still without comfort – comfort was history. I held the pen like dropping it meant the end of the world and started to transcribe the call.
------
You can find Who? - part 4 here.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Who? - part 3