The Physics of Sorrow (19 page)

And what do we know about White Nose Syndrome? White Nose Syndrome in bats. We haven’t even heard? No one counts dead bats. Look, if they were pigs or cows, everybody’d be worried. In 2006, ninety percent of the bat population in the caves around New York and San Francisco suddenly and somewhat inexplicably died . . . They stopped eating and hung comatose before finally flying out of the caves and falling to the ground outside with white noses . . . Small flying mice with white noses, miniature dead Batmans. I add this information to the box as well, it may turn out to be important.

I gather for the sake of the one who is to come. For the post-apocalyptic reader, if we may agree to call him that. It’s not a bad idea to have a basic archive from the previous era. Today’s newspapers will then be historical chronicles. Which is a good future for them. And a fitting testimonial to an epoch quickly yellowing and fading in its final days.

The newspaper is dated June 4, 2022. The headline is written in fat letters across the top: Strange Epidemic of Amnesia. And as a subtitle, in a smaller font: Colony Collapse Disorder in humans? The article reads more or less as follows:

          
Rules and habits established over centuries are ceasing to work. We are seeing ever more cases in which people leave their homes in the
morning to go to work, yet are in no state to find their way home in the evening.

              
C. S. (39) had a normal morning, just like thousands of others before it. Toast, eggs and bacon, the big mug of coffee, joking around with the kids, kisses at the door, promises of the traditional family Monopoly game that evening . . . That evening, however, he didn’t come home. He never even reached his office. They found him by chance on the other side of the city, lost, his pant legs rolled up boyishly, walking down the street and kicking stones aimlessly. He didn’t remember having a wife and kids. He didn’t know his address. He claimed to be twelve.

              
Even more inexplicable is the story of D. P. (33), a single mother, who, like every day, brought her kids to kindergarten. She dropped them off, kissed them, and promised to pick them up early that afternoon. A half-hour before the appointed time, the kids were already standing by the fence, dressed and ready to go, but their mother was late. The other parents started arriving. Finally only the two children and the teachers were left. It started getting dark, but no one came. They called the mother, but she didn’t answer her phone. The kids had to spend the night at the kindergarten. They found the mother three days later in a distant northern city. She was acting bizarre, according to the authorities, she resisted arrest, scratched one police officer’s face and taunted him with insults that had been popular twenty years ago, but which no one used anymore. This last detail is important, since to the question of how old she was, the woman, who was past 30, replied that she was in seventh grade. To the question of what she was doing in that city, she replied that she was on a class field trip. Of course, she couldn’t recall her kids or family. The newspaper’s own investigation revealed that the middle school where the mother had gone really had taken a field trip to that city twenty-nine years earlier.

              
They forcibly returned the woman to her city and took her home, expecting that the familiar surroundings would immediately bring
back her memory. She acted as if she were in some stranger’s home. She didn’t touch anything. She asked where the bathroom was. She didn’t recognize any of the clothes in her closet. When brought face-to-face with her own children, the psychologists could not detect any sign of recognition.

              
For now there is no clear explanation for what is happening. Scholars are working on several parallel hypotheses. One of the most intriguing suggests that this is a case of sudden reactivation of past events for inexplicable reasons and the opening of personal parallel time corridors. A powerful invasion of the past. They suspect it may be due to misuse of “regression therapy” which has become fashionable recently and which is being practiced illicitly by an ever-growing number of self-declared therapists.

S
IGNS

More than 2,000 dead blackbirds fall from the sky over a small town in Arkansas on January 1, 2011. The reasons for these mysterious deaths are unknown. The report is from January 3.

Over the following days, reports of mysterious bird deaths start rolling in from various parts of the world—Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Hypotheses include a bird plague, secret experiments with chemical weapons by the American military and so on. The man who announced that he would uncover the truth, a former U.S. army general, is found dead in a garbage truck. More and more people believe that the dead birds falling from the sky are a clear sign of the Apocalypse.

And on the coast of England, 40,000 dead crabs are discovered.

V.

THE GREEN BOX

T
HE
E
AR OF THE
L
ABYRINTH

It hadn’t happened to me in a long time . . . I was looking through newspapers from 2010 and I ran across a short report, probably forgotten and buried by the incoming news from the following day. But for me it turned out to be one of those exceptional events that launched me back into that forgotten “embedding” . . . Something I haven’t experienced in years.

          
BULL LEAPS INTO CROWD, INJURING 40

          
AT A BULLFIGHT, THE ANIMAL IS KILLED.

          
Thursday, August 19, 2010, Tafalla

          
Forty people were injured in an unusual incident in Spain. The accident took place during a bullfight. The bull, which had just been led into the arena, looked around, then swiftly leapt over the barrier and began attacking the crowd. The unfortunate incident occurred in the city of Tafalla. The panic-stricken spectators tried to run away, but were hampered by the amphitheater seating. The infuriated animal lunged at various groups of terrified spectators. The toreador tried to hold the bull back by pulling its tail. It took a whole fifteen minutes to get the situation under control. In the end, they were forced to shoot the bull.

An amphitheater, of course, is a labyrinth. One of the most commonly found circular labyrinths, made of concentric circles intersected by transverse corridors. The bull lifted its gaze and recognized the Labyrinth—the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, the Minotaur. And since animals have no sense of time (just as children do not), the Bull saw his ancestral home and recognized the Minotaur within himself. He remembered all the days and nights . . . no, wait, that’s human language, there were no days there, he recalled only that endless night, a sum of all the nights in the world. Once again, he remembered the only two faces he had ever known. His mother’s face, as she held him in her lap. The most beautiful face he had ever seen. The face he had come closest to. And the second face—that of his killer. Also beautiful. Human faces.

Now his killer (likely a distant relative of Theseus) was standing down in the arena, in the center of the labyrinth. It wasn’t the fact that the scene would repeat itself and he would once again experience the softness and vulnerability of his body, that sacred softness and vulnerability that only proved his essential humanity, no, it wasn’t that that caused him to do what he did. There was something else. The sudden realization that if his killer was standing before him, then his mother’s face must be somewhere nearby as well. Up there in the audience. Those two faces went together. The scene repeats itself. The labyrinth twists and turns back not only space. Time has coiled up, swallowed its own tail and if something can happen, can be changed, now is the moment.

I turn my back on the killer, clench all my muscles, and clear the barrier. Like a lost child, I see my mother in the crowd and race toward her, nothing can stop me now. If only I could press my face against hers again. If only I could snuggle up to her. I’m three. And I’m looking for my mother. Some other people are screaming and falling at my feet, but they’re not my mother. I’ll recognize her. I just hope I don’t miss her, that she hasn’t already left. Just a little
farther, just a little farther. Now there’s one who looks like her, but it’s not her. What about that one? No. No. The howl that escapes from the cave of my throat is terrifying. The only word that in all languages—those of humans, animals and monsters—is one and the same:

Moooooooooom . . .

The labyrinth of the amphitheater catches that cry, ricochets it between the walls of its corridors, diverts it toward the dead-ends, cuts it off, and sends it back slightly distorted to the labyrinth of the human ear like an endless

Mooooooooo . . .

And there’s the switch. The tiniest of switches. The labyrinth has turned that short “o” into a long “ooh.” If man had only known that it was the same word, that very same “Mooooom” . . . the history of the world and history of the death (I wouldn’t be surprised if they turned out to be one and the same story) would be different.

A terrified creature is looking for its mother. Human or animal—the word is the same.

But the myth is repeatable and the death of the Minotaur has to happen again. Before finding his mother, before snuggling up in her lap, before returning to her womb, that most primordial, soft, and pulsating of caves. Because that would already be another (unacceptable) myth.

Death catches up with him right when he seems to have caught sight of a familiar shoulder and locks of hair hurrying away. It’s the first time they kill him that way. From a distance. Without a sword or a spear. Without seeing his killer’s face.

W
ITHOUT A
F
ACE

Without seeing his killer’s face. If a
General History of Murder
exists, which includes not only historical events, but also murders in mythology, as well as in all legends, rumors, and novels, it would be clear what a warm and human act it is—to be face-to-face with the one who will kill you. Cruel, yes, but cruel on a human scale. Death comes from another person, with a specific body, hand, face. A face we can only appreciate today, when murder has become dehumanized, if we allow ourselves to borrow that notion. This is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps dating back several centuries to the invention of gunpowder, a trifling span of time.

Even language has not yet gotten used to this. We say “in the face of death,” but this is already a phrase from a bygone era. Death has lost its face and therein lies the new horror. There is no face.

Several random examples. Achilles killed Hector and that was an epos, it was history, a dance between the killer and the victim. A ritual, in which the victim has the right to his moves, his gestures, and his lines. (Now that’s why a Homer of modern gunfire is impossible.) Even when Lycomedes tricked Theseus and was about to push him off a cliff on the island of Scyros near Euboea, there was again the touch of a human hand, presence.

What happened afterward? Here we’re not even talking about the slaughterhouse of war. Kennedy is riding in his limo, he smiles, makes a painful grimace, slumps down. That pantomime of death, which we’ve watched stamped on film, says it all. Achilles has become invisible. Theseus, yet another mythical serial killer, is hidden in the crowd and shoots from there. You don’t have time to get ready, to mentally say farewell to a few people, to make bequests, to leave behind your final words, to make smart remarks, to zing your killer with a cutting line, to fix your hair. The full-stop of the bullet, which arrives before the first word of the sentence. An anonymous piece of lead from an unknown perpetrator. There is
something deeply unjust about that. Something that radically goes against every nature.

No animal would do that.

N
O
A
NIMAL
W
OULD
D
O
T
HAT

The animal in me. So here’s the new moral law—side by side with “the starry sky above me.” The basic question, the litmus test, the divider between good and evil—could what I’ve thought up be done by an animal? Step inside the skin of your favorite animal and find out. If it wouldn’t do it, then you shouldn’t do it, either, or you’ll be committing a mortal sin. A sin against nature. All sins have already been committed. But at least the boundary of the natural remains.

Theseus was a matador. “Matador” means killer, borrowed from Latin. Every butcher in the slaughterhouse shares in Theseus’s sin.

I add this ordinance, which is actually quite relevant, to the box:

          
ORDINANCE No. 20/2002

          
For reducing to a minimum animals’ suffering during slaughter

          
CHAPTER 1
: Animal Stress and Pain

          
Scientific research has shown that warm-blooded animals (this includes livestock) feel pain and the emotion of fear . . . Fear and pain are very strong causes of stress in livestock and stress affects the quality of meat obtained from this livestock. (
Of course, everything is done for the quality of the meat. Less suffering means better taste.
)

              
Animals will also shy at moving things, as well as darkness and they may refuse to enter a dark place . . . (
I’m sure of that, I know this from firsthand experience.
)