Hair on end

André Krüger

“A hair's breadth - a hare's breath - that's all the difference there is between people. That's the extent of the difference between civilisation and savagery.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“But you said something.”

“I was ad glibbing.”

“What?”

“Don't you agree?”

“With what?”

I sighed, felt caught in a situation again. A familiar sensation, a familiar feeling of being trapped. A familiar person in a familiar room. Familiar emotions, familiar despair.

I hate the feeling of waiting to be somewhere else or doing something other than what I am doing at any given time. When I'm not working, I'm waiting to go to work. At work, I'm thinking about going home, and waiting for the time to pass.

Surely there must be more to life than that - just waiting for something else? And what clever torture. Whoever designed it knew a thing or two about torment, that's for damn sure: to feel like that, waiting, and at the same time to experience the pearlescent anguish of feeling time slipping away; of knowing that every moment passing is a moment lost, of realising that in the waiting you are squandering away a limited supply of moments that cannot be replaced or regained ...

“That if you take a vodka bottle, say two-thirds empty, and hit it just the right way with your knuckle, it rings like a bell?”

“I thought you were talking about people?”

I sighed again. “I was. Now I'm talking about something else.”

“Oh.”

“So?”

“What?”

“Don't you agree?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I'm having a moment.” “A what?”

“A moment.”

“I don”t follow …”

“It's one of those … shining, moments. A perfect instant of time, awfully beautiful, shimmering like a trembling soap bubble, where everything is in balance. A transitory, transient, heartbeat where you're holding on to that edge, that sharpened, serrated edge of sentience. That moment when rationalism and emotion hang in perfect balance, negating the negative, prodding on the positive, holding the outside walls fast against the onslaught of entropy.”

“I see,” I said, but didn't. And thought: “What?”

How odd people are, I thought, looking at her. She swept her hair back behind her ear with a swift, practised gesture and sniffed in an abstract, matter-of-fact way.

“Just a moment,” she murmured.

I did not know whether she meant her experience, or a lull in which to recover.

Instead I said: “Oh, I know it's trite, but how fleeting is this moment between dark and oblivion, this spark of consciousness in the blackness of fuck-all, this frisson of self-awareness, this shiver of knowing in the universe of uncaring. How luminous, how singular, how entirely without use - if not for the arrogance of the self-awareness of that minuscule second of existence.”

“What? I was miles away …”

“Never mind.”

We seem always to talk like this, I thought, looking away in irritation as she picked at a fingernail. Towards each other, but with our words missing their targets. As if we are having conversations with someone other than each other. Perhaps it is because our relationship is not as good as it once was. Perhaps the passing of time, the passage worn by minutes and hours and days, weeks and months and years, spans and aeons, uncountable periods during which species evolved and went extinct, in which suns were born and died, has worn away whatever it was that we used to have in common, replacing it with nothing else. I am sure it was not always like that. I am almost sure …

I shifted in my chair and gazed at the freckles of dust swirling in the rich sunlight streaming through the kitchen window.

We sit at this table every Sunday morning, drinking coffee and talking, before we go out for the newspapers. Every Sunday, without fail …

She suppressed a yawn, then shook her head as if to clear some memory away, making space for something new and potentially more valuable.

“Didn't we used to talk more?” I wondered.

“Perhaps,” she answered, not really interested in the question or the answer. It was not that her mind was somewhere else, more that she was absent from there, from me, from all that we used to be. She was not part of the conversation.

“Don't you sometimes wonder if things could have been different?” she asked, glancing at me and the coffee cup in front of her with equal amounts of interest - or disinterest would be nearer the mark, I suppose.

“I am too preoccupied with the here and the now, the trying to understand the fleeting nature of what we apprehend at any given time. Does that differ from what it really is, I wonder?”

“I'm not sure I follow,” she answered, wrinkling her brow faintly as if hearing a noise from afar and trying to identify it, to contextualise and explain it. “Surely if we are part of the here and the now we are part of the truth? Part of that which it is we are trying to understand?”

I watched my fingers tapping idly on the polished wood of the table. Steam rose from my cup and the aroma of the coffee filled my head.

“Do you understand me?” I wondered.

“Yes,” she said, emphatically, not even pausing to draw breath.

“Really?”

“Of course. Just as you understand me.”

“I do, don't I?” I said, resplendent in an atmosphere of veracity.

How I know her, indeed. If there is one thing I am sure of, it's that. How easy it is to lie to oneself - how easy to believe if you really want to.

It's not that I thought she loved me, ever, but I thought that liking me, or tolerating me, would be enough. During foolish, daydreaming moments I had visions of her telling our grandchildren that she had grown to love me over the years. That at first she had not much liked me, but that with the passage of time she grew to understand me and love me for the person I was.

See? Foolish denial, insane self-deception - all in the name of survival …

“What are you thinking?” she asked, looking at me with penetrating, puzzled eyes that seemed to know the answer to the question, though still insisting that it be articulated, spoken out loud to make it real.

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

“Maybe. What do you think I was thinking?”

“You were thinking about me,” she replied, firmly, nodding once with a sharp downward movement of her chin.

“I do that sometimes,” I said, nodding

“What? Thinking, or thinking about me?”

“Both,” I replied, tiredly, as the universe spun on, uncaring, through the dark and the quiet of the nothing out there.



LitNet: 22 July 2004

André Krüger André Krüger has recently rehabilitated himself, after some years of complete unreason he spent in the legal profession. He suffered, during those years, from what can only be described as the obverse of a lucidum intervallum, and is much better now. His body has recently taken to surprising him with some startling aches and pains in the mornings, which he would like not to ascribe to advancing decrepitude. He has also learnt that following your heart empties your stomach.

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