Permagel

by Eva Baltasar

On the outside, I’m softer than I might seem, as good as a pastry, a warm thing of varnished wax as alluring as an opening line. Every cell reproduces itself, independent of me, and in doing so reproduces me, fashioning me into a proper entity.

Working with my cells, I am forced to adapt to them, to be like them, a small, anonymous goldfish inside this lovely glass enclosure. Beautifully decorative. Some restaurants place these sorts of fish on top of every table, inside tiny fishbowls. They’re decorative, for sure. Soothing. They’re very much alive, and yet some people use their homes as ashtrays. The poor little creatures perish, poisoned by the toxic chemicals in cigarette butts. But that’s all they are, right? Ornaments. Frivolous lives.

Now I wonder whether I’ll open my eyes—or rather, if they’ll be opened. Mine won’t be just any fall. As in it won’t be accidental. There will be an intention, an intended resolve, a pre-written command. When the time comes, all I’ll have to do is execute it. Eyes are pioneers; they probe the world and then the body responds. What sense is there in preparing the body for death seconds before it arrives? Like love, death catches the body. So let it be caught unawares.

Liters and liters of milk, and I was all white inside, coated with skins of milk inside, which clung like gooey, wet sheets to my walls and to the underside of my skin. Mom’s tanks of milk wiped me out, they made me less human, even less of a girl.

I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home. Temporary—like any home, in fact, or like a body. I’m not on medication. Chemicals are bridles that restrict you and slow you to a harmless pace. Chemicals mean early salvation; they ward off sin, or maybe they just teach us to label as sinful the exercise of freedom attained in times of peace—before death, of course.

Self-medication is a permanent temporary solution, like the low-watt bulb hanging in the hall. Twenty years with a dimly lit hall—how little it takes to become used to seeing so little.

I used to think it was normal—when you’re a kid, your home life determines what’s normal. And this normalcy shapes you. You grow up sheltered inside its patterns and take on its body, as does your brain, keen and malleable as clay.

After a while, you’ll find that the edge gives you room to live, vertical as ever, brushing up against the void. Not only can you live on it, but there are even different ways of growing there. If surviving is what it’s all about, maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely. Now, on this edge, I feel alive, more alive than ever.

They’re a pack of thieves.

The world unloads its toxicity into my core daily and assimilates me with its infiltration. But I can’t allow it, I won’t let myself partake. Lousy medication. Red and yellow pills lure me like flowers, a nectar for a bad life, a nourishing concoction. Who am I to refuse? My sister claims she is happy. Happy! That word had been gathering moss by the time I was born.

Healthy things kill you much more slowly. They begin by convincing you of their love and making you bow to their withering intensity.

This reckless imposition of childhood can only be a side effect of medication. To enter life, you have to be as soft as stuffing, every new child swaddled from head to toe in the silk of fear—a castrating mother by nature, an unconditional cheerleader. The power of fear is in the sum of every small dream reduced to dust. Let’s snort it, then—looks like that’s the only way left to live. To conceal nudity by shutting it away in the shower, and peace at last. God bless sedation.

I sense the distantly booming mass, vibrations that could be insects and yet aren’t, because insects are more elegantly metallic.

My body is a parabola hungering for fear. The heart is large and conquers the mind.

Deep roots support moments of courage such as this one. Still, the train is endless. There is too much steel for too long and maybe the body deserves a chance to speak after all—that thing about last words. Maybe I should keep my name, maybe I should die a conventional death with easily identifiable spoils and nice remains. The truth is, I never pictured myself caring about these sorts of details. I find myself caught up in a surprising metaphysics. If I were a believer, I might believe someone wanted me to reconsider things. How does it go again? “Thank God I’m an atheist.”

I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to bash in my skull with the phone. A terrible idea—phones are partial to murder by tumor, to long-distance deaths.

Funny how sometimes the most wretched crimes are the easiest ones to carry off.

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you belong entirely to someone else, having to hear that you’re key to their happiness or unhappiness, reduced to a Lego block.

Real artists don’t deal in the past. They make, in the Platonic sense of to create. People who don’t know any better, like me, are the ones who end up stirring the great cauldron of history.

Doubt: the first chink in the permafrost. “Of course,” she said. “Listen to us. Don’t we always want what’s best for you? Does anyone know you better than we do? You’re too young to have any idea what you should or shouldn’t do.” I gave in out of exhaustion, but also out of irrational fear. Fear, domineering mother.

twenty-three, it’s too late for everything. Not until our forties do we realize there’s still time. Maybe not for everything, but at least for everything that matters.

The pleasure I felt in sinking my waking hours into the lives of other people—full and perfect lives, bookended by two dates worthy of celebration—was indescribable. Spending my days like that was the best I could aspire to, the closest I could get to neither coming to an end nor arriving at a beginning.

What I wanted was to live effortlessly, like a little worm-eaten branch that floats downstream with no ambition other than to drift along, bowing to every change in direction and embracing its weathering.

Whoever came across my body would instead find two, innards in a knot like a snake nest. No, that wouldn’t do at all.

Doubt: the rift through which the world’s heat slips in, a brazen violation of the permafrost.

I soon find myself wishing the kids would never grow up. All I want is to be a lifelong au pair, and I have curious impulses, like the urge to withhold their food. Frail children physically remain children for longer, though some abuse has also been known to accelerate emotional maturity. My chances of success are slim, but it’s worth a shot. I spend hours daydreaming about accidents that involve the staircase, and about the possibility of one of the siblings becoming paralyzed. Maybe the girl.

I can’t get my mind off fine arts, the soul of the dead matter in which I received my degree. This realization gives way to a series of symptoms: a stabbing pang in the chest; difficulty eating and drinking; another kind of pain that is slippery rather than stabbing and radiates from its epicenter in my uterus to every extremity of my body like a weighty, ravenous sorrow. It dawns on me that this must be like the pain that follows an abortion, the residual sadness of a life unlived, clinging clawlike to life.

Studying has always been a powerful distraction, like being temporarily stranded at a gas station. After all, moments like these are moments of death lost to themselves. The journey later resumes, and life converges with it, concentrated in isolated capsules of movement.

I lose weight without trying.

Sisters lead identical lives until one of them grows up, and then the other begins to do things in secret—above all, meeting new people to fill the hole her sister has left.

It’s true: This icy firmness stores a world that is habitable, yet dormant.

People like me.

I don’t understand why you didn’t do this earlier. And to think you wasted the best years of your life loafing around this God-given Earth without ever doing much at all. Your teachers always said so. They were already saying so in primary school—she’s full of promise, your daughter. It looked like you weren’t amounting to anything, and I nearly went and complained. But look, you’ve finally found your focus. And your-dad-and-I are so proud, we’re just so proud of you.”

As far as my current occupation goes, I think Mom is pleased—pleased that she has, at long last, put me in a box. Her eldest girl had come out slippery as an eel, but she’s finally “found her focus.” Honestly, if this is what focus means, I’m going to need some industrial-strength drugs to keep my head quiet and still in its cage.

I fucking love women’s hands. Delicate skin pulled thin like a membrane of constellations, tapered fingers, and the almost lyrical movement of joints.

It would be tough on the coroner. I’m scared. My fear has thoughts, possessive thoughts that will have to be eliminated.

A blow to the self-esteem leaves a deep but non-lethal wound, a black hole that can suck up scraps of death and memory.

I have something I need to say: I am not a sincere person. No, I’m someone who lies. I’ve been lying for as long as I can remember. All the time, every day, and almost without thinking—it’s practically second nature to me. I lie so often I sometimes suspect I’m pathological. The truth is it has such a small effect on my day-to-day that I don’t see why I should do anything about it. On that point, I’ve just arrived at the conclusion that I lie to make life easier for myself.

Lies are the ancient logs over which my life glides; I just have to grab the ones in the back and put them in front again without stopping. Deep down, I’m a slave to myself. But the day will come when I can’t take it anymore, and on that day the slave will die, not the other woman but the one everybody knows, the one who isn’t me and yet seems openly to live my life. She is a heart in chains. Hearts are born in chains. It’s a mistake to follow your heart while believing in your freedom, because freedom is the domain of lies.

(I wonder now why there are such extremes of existential finitude to which death can’t even aspire. Death requires solitude to exert power, but love and solitude are mutually exclusive relations. I’ll have to rethink my own death, then, later on.)

Every part of her was a cry for life. While my life was a cry for death.

What I’m trying to say is: Being with a woman is like sticking your head out of the tunnel and discovering that you’ve actually dug through those last few meters.”

As you gaze at green mallards and their single-parent families, you let go. It’s so painless at the end of the day. And there’s so much beauty, born again in your own face, permeating the friendly halves of other people. Your senses are honed. You rediscover the sun, whose light shines all around you and falls over exteriors like geometric shapes at rest. I don’t see how this state of being can be normal. If it were, I might not be so shocked by everyone’s eagerness to go on living day after day. But nothing can possibly be so long-lasting. The future awaits, a deer stopped on a country road. There’s no doubt in my mind that an animal stopped on a road is suicidal.

And I renewed myself in that image, of my French piano-playing lover. But every second I died. And it was a very dignified, respectable way to go.

A work of art isn’t only the end result—it’s art in time, art in real time, in action, as simple and impulsive as a drawing by a child. But there’s a sophisticated concern below the surface, an interest in process—life’s immensity concentrated in that process.

That she would die first, I had no doubt, but most of all, that her desire for death had hardened within her into a formative whole. I was also convinced that she would die a more elegant death. Someone inside her was burnishing every single thing she did, every measured word she said—but who? Catalan phrases strutted out of her throat wrapped in French-accented mink, but with a lowly, port-like fragrance that I attributed to her Marseilles roots and which drove me wild. In her mouth, Catalan sounded the way it should sound as a perfect language. Any word that I said immediately afterward was a faded daisy in comparison, a silly little flower.

A childlike gemstone of immeasurable worth.

Fatal accident, a stunning pair of words. Porphyry believed that an accident was something which became present, then absent without destroying its subject. A fatal accident could therefore be contradictory.

Untouchable but loved, of course. Loved from the very first moment, with her pierced little ears and her name. Names are our first possession and they’re as painful, if not more, than a piercing.

Sex distances me from death, though it doesn’t bring me closer to life. What, then? For what? Having thought it over for a few minutes, I arrive at the conclusion that sex keeps me present and safe in a space both uncertain and comforting.