Every Body Knows
The problem with evil is that most of it doesn’t show symptoms until it’s too late — every body is but a ticking time bomb.
I imagine that the man coming towards me on the platform is carrying an ulcer on his liver. Hidden under his clothes and his body which holds so many secrets from him and yet, unmistakably, it’s there; his doctor will tell him in two and a half weeks.
But right now the man is clueless and on his way to work, with his briefcase and the ulcer, or coming back from that place he tells his wife is his office, even though there’s not a single desk there but only a bed and his not so single secretary in it instead of on the phone. This highly unoriginal venture has been going on for a little longer than the knot in his intestines has had time to grow, but of course that kind of chronometry is lost on him.
He doesn’t have the heart to tell her — the wife — because hers is arrhythmic and he’s afraid of what it will do to their tempo, but at the same time he’s never felt this light: He believes that deception is easier than regret and that real suffering doesn’t always start with a curse, but rather with the knowledge of it (ask Oedipus). And so they all stay in the dark, them fucking with the lights out, his wife tending the empty bed at night and the little lump in his abdomen, surrounded by nothing but organs and gloom. What is knowledge, anyways.
We have every theoretical insight into the biological clockwork of a crab, we can measure their weight exactly to sell them by the dozen and we remember how when we were kids we used to collect them on the beach, carrying them home like crustacean trophies — their empty shells felt so light on our shoulders — , but then you get cancer and suddenly everything’s so heavy you forget how to breathe. Won’t the things we don’t know always outweigh those we know?
For example: The man on the platform knows how to set up a cost-benefit calculation and how to apply for a visa, he can list all the capitals of Europe and recite the beginning of his favourite poem (The Panther by Rilke), he’s aware of making his wife suffer like a widow at war and, even though he doesn’t like to admit it, he also knows that his secretary is only sleeping with him because for once she wanted to embrace the cliché of carefully calculated lace underwear and because she found she earned it somehow, what with all the long hours. It seems like the man on the platform knows a lot of things, some even may call him smart, and yet all this knowledge will amount to approximately nothing when in roughly two weeks he’ll learn that one thing to which he’s been blind.
Instead he’s looking at a young woman in a leopard-print scarf and a long coat walking across the platform, so strikingly beautiful that even I turn around twice; she studies math or maybe media while, secretly and unknowingly, multiplying cancer cells under her skin. She has a quiet but tale-telling smile for those who want to listen and is now broadcasting it in the direction of one of her blooming peers, black hair and shiny teeth, a healthy shell with a virus inside. Every body is walking around with death on their hands and no one knows.
Someone is sitting down next to me while I sit and wait and wander around in this hospital of ignorance. The train station for the end of the line is packed and so we’re sitting very close, jacket sleeves rubbing against each other, I can smell the foul breath of my neighbour and can’t help thinking — maybe in this exact moment I’m just a few inches away from a carcinoma, separated only by some skin and muscle mass. Every body knows where they’re going, but no one knows how they’ll get there.
And so I sit and wait with them, patiently, but I wonder: Can you feel somehow if you’re growing a tumor in your stomach, does the body become heavier?
story published in the 5th volume of Otherwise Engaged Literary and Arts Journal
Photo credits: Daniel Parks (flickr) with cc by-nc 2.0 licence
