Chapter 8

BARDO NOIR

The vertiginous balloonist could have given me any instructions at all and I would have gone there, even if it had been across a minefield. I would not have noticed anyway, because the darkness was swallowing more and more of the view.

As I walked, crossing ditches and cutting between rubbish bins, I reasoned with myself, as if harmony could be summoned through alchemical logic. I did not need to be in what had been, I thought. Not for a single second did the past exist in my present, except as a construction within me. Where else could it take place? It was not exactly possible to recreate the scenes, the house I had lived in back home, the people who inhabited it. I could not change my actions no matter how much I wanted to. Besides, there was only one person left who knew what I had done, how I had sinned, and if I chose to forget? Had it then happened? If so: where, when? One day my own guilt would be as current as the Babylonians’ debt notes in cuneiform.