Summer House with Swimming Pool

I see and hear things all day long. Things you need to get off your mind at night. The fungal growths. The bleeding warts. The folds of skin between which things have gotten much, much too warm. The three-hundred-pound woman you have to examine in a place you hoped you’d never have to go again.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been invited to a Shakespeare. I’d already seen about ten of his plays. A version of The Taming of the Shrew in which all the male roles were played by women, The Merchant of Venice with the actors in diapers and the actresses wearing garbage bags for dresses and shopping bags on their heads, Hamlet with an all-Down-syndrome cast, wind machines, and a (dead) goose that was decapitated onstage, King Lear with Zimbabwean orphans and ex-junkies, Romeo and Juliet in the never-completed tunnel of a subway line, with concentration camp photos projected on the sewage-streaked walls. A Macbeth in which all the female roles were played by naked men – the only clothing they were was a thong btween their buttocks, and they had handcuffs and weights hanging from their nipples – and performed to a soundtrack consisting of artillery barrages, Radiohead tunes, and poems by Radovan Karadzic. Besides the fact that you didn’t dare to look at how the handcuffs and weights were attached to (or through) the nipples, the problem once again was a matter of how slowly the time passed. I can remember delays at airports that must have lasted half a day, easily, but which were over ten times as quickly as any of those plays.

I often wondered later on whether things would have turned out differently if the Latvian girl had remained on her feet.
***
There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.
***
That evening, the rest of our lives began. Let me say right now that I’m not a big fan of melodrama. I also have a natural aversion to dramatic statements. The rest of our lives… I’d heard people say that often enough. People who had lost someone or something. Who’d had something happen to them that you wouldn’t wish on anyway – something you would never get over. Still, it had always sounded fake to me. It’s only when it happens to you that you know it’s not fake. There is simply no better description for it than “the rest of your life.” Everything gets heavier. Especially time. Something happens to time. It doesn’t really stand still, but there’s no denying that it slows down.