Nothingness
Chapter 1
Mimi looked out the window. The lights were on, she could see through the green unfolding leaves of spring gray figures moving behind glass windows on the opposite side of the road. Figures. Moving. Sitting down. And disappearing into the shadows of the sofa, shining lights of the evening television flickering above their black silhouetted heads. People.
Mimi looked down at her watch. It was almost … 7pm. Time to make dinner. But Kira had already made dinner for her, there was no need. She rubbed her body against the couch (the color was a faded pink, like the faded pink of the flowers peeking through the window above her copper-colored hair head) and looked into the deepening twilight of the dimly lit street. People, windows, shadows, light dancing from the television screens, muffled voices, a dog's cry somewhere in someone's backyard: the repressed carnivals of a suburban evening.
Mimi had been living here … how many years? It seemed too many to count. Since she had entered into partnership with (or married, whichever, she realized she couldn't care less) with Kira they had lived in that little house on Butler Close where the greenery from the gardens threatened to fill the midnight air with a budding foliage fragrance so strong, so sweet and so fresh. The fragrance would penetrate your nostrils like an invisible jungle and the scent from the flowers would overwhelm your eyelids and cascade into your lap. A wonderful close. Very quiet.
That's what Kira had said. "A wonderful close". That's why she chose it. Kira loved flowers. She loved green things, she liked leaves and she was fond of gardening. Kira wanted to live with Mimi in a quiet, green neighborhood where you wouldn't be bothered by noisy cars or bothersome motorcyclists or gangs of midnight-roaming teenagers. Butler Close was a nice neighborhood, and that's why Kira had chosen it. Kira stood in the kitchen, slicing potatoes and throwing them gently (her movements were gentle, from her bows to her hugs to her jumps) into the simmering pot, so gently indeed it seemed her hands were performing yoga movements. Kira wanted to make this a special evening for Mimi, like always. She wanted every evening with Mimi to be special. The potato pieces thudded and bubbled in the copper-colored soup (copper, the color of Mimi's hair, Kira thought) and grew soft and disappeared under the liquid.
Mimi rubbed her eyes. Tomorrow was a Saturday which meant she could stay at home all day. Kira had said she wanted to go shopping in the afternoon, so maybe Mimi would go with her. Mimi was tired. She worked at an office (she called it "the office" because that's what it was, just an office, like a small concrete-colored room where ten pairs of ears and eyes darted to and fro and up and down and sideways like ten seesaws and trembled whenever a window was opened, letting in the afternoon zephyr) and Kira worked in an office too, for –what was it? Mimi sometimes could not remember- yes, a construction company. But did it matter? Whether Kira worked at a construction company or not? No. Whether she worked for a car company, a construction company, an airline company, or for a university, it did not matter in the slightest. What Kira did was no concern of hers. She did not care. She just couldn't care.
Kira poured soup into a bowl. She sniffed it like a cat. Was it warm enough, was it spicy enough, was it juicy enough? She wanted everything to be perfect for Mimi, so she dipped a spoon into the soup and tasted some. It was … tasteless. Like those afternoons that pass you by on a motorcycle on a November afternoon, rumbling quietly through the autumn leaves and vanishing without trace into the shadowed ear of the gentleman in the gray suit getting onto Bus 32 on Brasenrose Avenue.
Mimi shifted her legs. Her stomach rumbled. She whispered, "amera-esperantis-onos-manis" into the feathery (furry was the right word but Mimi always associated Mick, their cat, with birds ever since seeing him carry a dead bird in his mouth and dash across the yard happily, as though newly engaged to that dead bird) ear of her Cat, curled on her lap. The Cat. That's what Kira and Mimi called him. But his real name was Mick. But did it matter whether it was The Cat or Mick? It did not matter. It just mattered that he was a mammal weighing 19 kilos with white-brown striped fur with male genitals with green eyes with almost no sexual appetite and loved carrying dead birds between his teeth. Sometimes Mick would try to guess what the dead bird's last thoughts were. Was it, "Oh God, help me", or, "Death!" or simply "Oh…" Mick was a great observer. He looked at birds, the way they flew, the way they mated, the way they died. He killed them and buried them and prayed over their dead bodies, gently putting the soil above them, hoping they'd have a comfortable life after death. The minerals inside their bodies would decompose and become part of the rich soil of the garden and become part of the cicadas growing in the backyard and would release oxygen dioxide into the atmosphere. Mick was clever. He enjoyed looking at the fence, how its color changed gradually from brown to light brown to concrete gray and how the spots where nails had been nailed into them would start rotting and attracting small insects. Mick liked red. Red. The color red.
Mimi checked her watch again. It was 7.30pm. No, 7:33. She was a woman. She was 169 centimeters tall. She was not a vegetarian. She liked reading Schopenhauer. She was gay – or not gay, or whatever. Did it matter? Mimi had copper-colored hair and her eyelids were white and her oval-shaped face was inhabited by large green eyes (myopic so her physiognomy was always covered by large brown glasses which somehow brought out her complexion more), small pink lips, arching brown eyebrows and high cheek-bones. Mimi had ears which stuck out on either side. Kira liked licking them. But Mimi preferred using those ears to listen to the hum of the trains as they rushed pass or rumbled busily on Saturday evenings. The trains. Where did they go, to where were they running? Mimi pinched her ears and her ears became soft and pink and the shadows inside them deepened and she groaned quietly. 5 years.
5 years since she had married Kira. Kira had seen Mimi at a party – full of dark dancing shadows, stomping feet, waving arms, blue thighs, guffawing jaws, lips, eyes, teeth, chattering hands, pink arms around orange waists and silvery knuckles around pints of beer. Kira had seen a glint of copper in the dark gray mass of the evening bar. Or pub. Or club. Or dark box with blue shadows flitting inside it. Or a puppet-show with puppets in it, swaying to and fro for god-knows what. Like a small box with fleas mating in it. And Kira had whisked Mimi off her feet and put her in a troika and ordered the troika to fly away into the eastern skies and they had flown through the stars and the galaxies and the Milky Way and the branches of tall trees. Kira had put her arms around Mimi (Mimi's shoulders were hunched, as if she had been created out of the slopes of mountains and the little caves on her shoulder caps were valleys) and started singing the Swanee River. Kira liked things like that. Old songs. Garshwin songs. Then she started singing an old folksong her grandmother had taught her. A song which required a shrill voice, a high voice, a croaky voice, which threaded its way through the skies. Kira had said, "amonis-onos-minis-cuckoo-mas-lotos". She didn't know the words or what they meant. She knew they were words with syllables in them and were made up of consonants and non-consonant sounds. She was tired. She wanted to sleep. She loved Mimi. She loved the stars. She loved the boughs of the trees. She loved the Cat and the concrete (so faded and hard, she thought) on which he tread.
5 years. Mimi yawned. Too long. Too long to be married. Too long to be sinking into a sofa and staring out the window and whistling at the dusk and searching for the quiet moon which crawled furtively through the evening sky. The moon was a princess, Mimi thought. She was a princess that had lost her cohort and had to crawl, like a beggar, through the sky everyday looking for her servants that had deserted her after the French Revolution. The moon was a duchess. The moon was a duchess made homeless, walking across the sky every night in ragged white clothes, looking for her servants and calling out to them. Her servants would appear, one by one, in the dark skies – the stars – and laugh at her and scoff and scratch their chins and scream and dare her to chase after them. The moon would lose weight every month from the stress. Then she would be reborn the next month and become fat as a newborn babe. Then the process would repeat. She would grow thin, become nothing more than a slimmer of shining silver, and almost disappear.
Mimi looked up. She thought she heard Kira's voice calling her name. Her name. M-i-m-i. MIMI. IMIM. Kira had called her "impimim", or "imp". That was a long time ago, when they had first met. Kira liked writing letters. She had written two per week to Mimi and every one of them had the headline, "To my Imp Mimi" or "Dear Imp-iMim" or "Dear Mimi-the-Imp" or "Dear ImIm". Wordplay. Giggles. Touches. Burning gazes. Mimi looked up.
"Let's eat" Kira said. She looked tired but happy. After setting the bowls on the table she came over to the sofa and sat down behind Mimi and Mick and put her right arm around Mimi's shoulder, snuggling her head into the back of Mimi's neck. Kira groaned. Sweet groaning. She edged closer to Mimi, trying to put her belly up against her waist …
Mimi shifted.
"Okay". She said.
Mimi lifted Mick up, dangled him in mid-air for a while (yes, for fifty seconds Mick actually felt like he was flying, floating in the living room air, suspended like a slaughtered pig up in the air gazing at the clothe-covered table, the yellow walls, the emerald vase on the oval-shaped table) and after some moments of meditations set him down on the rug. Kira laughed. She was a great laugher. She laughed when she was with Mimi, her pink lips expanding like a bud and threatening to become wider than her jaws. Her laughs melted into the air like butter into hot toast. She loved Mimi.
Mimi groaned. "Okay let's eat then".
She stood up quickly and walked to the table. Kira followed her with her eyes, her pupils taking in every movement of Mimi's footsteps, her gestures, her arms (swinging so naturally on either side of her torso), her shoulders, her feet, her legs.
Kira followed. They sat down at the table. Mimi dug her spoon into the scarlet soup and fished out a green cabbage that seemed to greet her with an expression of melancholic optimism. "Oh, hello Eater, you are about to Eat me! Eat me if you will, I care not – but remember to chew me and munch me down and remember my face will you; I am a sentimental cabbage".
Mimi swallowed. Kira watched her.
Mimi had white skin. So white, indeed, it seemed to shimmer under the glow of the bulb hanging above them. Kira sighed, raising her eyes up to the yellow bulb and letting her eyes sink into the dusty air swimming underneath the bulb. The dusty universe was reflected in her blue eyes. The dust formed, parted, formed again, then parted three ways, then swam down then jolted upward. A dusty dream.
Kira felt her warm hands touch the tablecloth and she led her eyeballs down, taking in the green of the tablecloth, the yellow of the walls, the copper of Mimi's hair, the pink of Mimi's blouse, the white of her skin, the silver of the spoon she held gingerly in her hand. Kira was left handed but she did everything with her right, because she always did that. She liked to do things the way she didn't want to do them. If she felt like sleeping she stayed awake, if she felt like cycling she'd walk, if she wanted to draw she'd go for a swim. If she wanted to kiss Mimi she'd go alone to the balcony, if she wanted to go to the bathroom she'd tiptoe to Mimi's room and sit on her lap. If she loved the eighty-year-old senile man living opposite them she'd love Mimi. Kira didn't understand. Did she love Mimi, or not? Sometimes she felt like she loved Mimi only because she didn't. She would go running when she wanted to walk, she'd walk when she wanted to run. She would lie down with Mimi when she wanted to go out, she'd go out when she wanted to lie down with Mimi. Mimi. Imim. The words resounded in her ears and penetrated her forehead and streamed down her spine. Mimi. The name sent a shiver down her spine. A shiver, like a vibrating movement of the atoms in her body which were created out of the proteins in a mineral-filled rock found on a planet in a distant galaxy many millenniums ago. And opposite her sat Mimi, her skin probably made out of the waist-jacket worn by Charles Dickens, her blouse made out of Alexander the Great's corpse. Goodbye to all that. And silence.
Mimi raised her eyes. "It's good", she whispered, as though it were a secret incantation. Kira nodded.
"I'm going shopping tomorrow, let's go together?" she asked hopefully.
Mimi swayed her head to the right and cast her eyes out at the darkening shadows in the room, especially at the dark corner where the edge of the piano cut an even darker shade. Mimi loved to look at the piano but she never played it because she felt that playing it would make it less valuable, the way after you make love to someone that someone doesn't seem so special anymore. Her mother had taught her to play. But that was years ago. Mimi remembered her mother's slender fingers touching the keys, and suddenly the sounds of Bach's Prelude would be skimming the surface of the curtains in the room and her mother's lovely breasts would be moving up and down, her golden hair rising and heaving and … and the notes would stop and halt and move again and tentatively skim across the floor and the high notes would move down and the low notes move up.
Mimi looked at the piano. The piano. How many people had played on it? Was it in tune still? Or did a devil come in every evening to screw all the keys out of tune half a tone? Did a clown play it in a circus in southern Russia almost a century ago?
"Huh?" she said, looking at the nape of Kira's neck. She felt her eyes were too tired to climb up further up to that face, gardened and fresh and somehow tense and beautiful.
"I'm going shopping, care to join?"
Kira finished eating and poured wine into her mug (which had accommodated up to then Earl Grey which was of course not grey but Brown). "I'm going to that new supermarket that opened last week, I want to check out some stuff and I want to eat the roof of the supermarket it's made out of plastic and hydrogen".
"Plastic is not made out of hydrogen", Mimi hissed.
"I know", Kira rejoined, "It's made out of lazy atoms. I said the roof is made out of plastic and hydrogen. It's very ugly."
The evening was growing darker and the birds had stopped chirping and the sky was darkening and the temperature was singing in a husky voice in low tunes and Mimi had put her body down on the sofa while Kira let her hands swim inside the sink where the dishes, with bits of saliva and meat hanging onto them did a mundane waltz.
Kira wanted to sing. But she wanted to go to the supermarket first and she wanted to ride the tram to it and watch the ears of the man standing in front of her flip this way and that. She wanted to investigate the ear of the man, with its cleavages cut so distinctly and sharply as if done on purpose. And the cleavage would deepen and the darkness inside it lift and grow lighter and the pink-ness appear and the skin would be blue. And the hand would rise and fall and suddenly move upward to grab the handle dangling from the ceiling and the knuckles turn purple and show millions of red creases. Creases. Millions. Shades. And darkness.
Kira stood up. She was standing up but this time she pulled her torso, shaped like a horse, up toward the cupboard and her nose moved forward and she waved her hands inside the sink again. Darkness. The water, warm, soft.
"Are you going shopping or not?"
It was more of a statement than a question. Kira could have asked anything, like "Are you going to swim or not", "Are you going to live or not", "Are you going to X or not". "To be, or not to be, that is the question". X is X and not Y but X can become Y or X can refuse to become Y or Y can be Just Y or it can become X or Y can choose to not become X or it can be XY. Or YX. Or Y can choose to be Y = X and vice versa. Period. To be.
The world was a constant flow of transformations, the couch transforming into Mimi's body and the wall transforming into Kira's jaw and the sink swallowing Kira's hands and devouring it or the clock melting into the vase or the front steps becoming the vegetation and the sky becoming the roof and Mick becoming the soil and the dead bird becoming the stone. Kira liked picking up stones. Or picking stones up. And throwing them up. Upward. Mimi watched the stone swirl up and land in the cracks in the pavement. A million years.