Watchman, what of the night?

    During the flight which took me far from the island, the thought of my lack
of criminal talent which I bluntly discovered long ago on the playground, on the
way to school, which returned to me sadly during the promenades most suitable to
such acts, in deserted suburban areas where I would come across someone upon
whom I could enact my revenge, and whom I later identified while flipping vainly
through the pages of a mystery novel, in made-up crime and the fiction of the
perfect crime, this thought, less painfully though more mournfully if I
presented it not as an object of my own impotence but as the inexistence of that
perfection to which I had aspired, this thought which had not returned for quite
a long while, struck anew at my spirit with a more piteous force than ever.  

     This absence of disposition, I saw confirmed when looking at the
obituaries, in one of the newspapers distributed after the flight by the
stewardesses, where the frivolity with which one would habitually read these
notices became so numbing, so cold in the continual hopelessness of loved-ones
in view of the name of a being who wished for death, for the brutality of
disappearance leaving nothing behind. My incapacity to avenge myself of offences
received, my repugnance to pursue my vindication appeared to me as something
less regrettable, as if murder brought me no special pleasure. And at the same
time, it seemed sad to me that murder would not be the incredible act that I had
hoped but simply another of this banality, of death. 

    This absence of vocation, I saw confirmed again while passing through
customs upon debarking the plane. An array of uniformed police looked on as they
paraded past, the pathetic caravan of tired, drowsy travellers. "Pig, I don't
think you're that threatening, my cold heart isn't that scared of you. I am,
nevertheless, here in line at customs, oh yes, it's with coolness, with boredom
and not with the instinctive trepidation of one with intense guilt, that my eyes
notice the line which separates your sweaty red face from your frail body. If I
ever wanted to believe myself criminal, I know now that I am not. Maybe in a new
part of my life, a drier one to start, detective novels and video games would
inspire me to no longer be intimidated by the commerce of men. But those days
where I might have been capable of cutting throats will never return."

    But sometimes when all seems lost a revelation arrives which can transform
us.

    The official at passport control took a while to flip through the pages of
mine, to stare at me, to compare me --  to my portrait? To my signature? Do I
still only look like myself?

    The official at baggage search made me unpack my bag. No, I have not brought
back any of those objects known as souvenirs, those Lilliputian articles that
look like they have been compiled by a demented lexicographer and where common
and rare terms abut, pronouns and proper nouns that name and rename them in
mispronounced stuttering. These acropolises, these faux-marble minarets, charms
with a ferocious beast on one side and an erudite motto on the other,
pucca-shell necklaces: so many inert signs of uniform commerce. Medals,
citations illustrating modern conquests with eternally precious things, rugs,
masks, idols, kites, authentic fragments, but scattered, muted, holding
unlearned litanies, to gods become deaf, and that we sacrifice to our
superstitions of rarity and beauty. 


    The outskirts of a city one leaves, a city to which one returns:
interchanges, warehouses, parking lots, bars, aborted green spaces in vacant
lots. Indifferent spaces, elsewhere, everywhere in this kingdom of universal
similarity, without irony nor nostalgia. One day, someone found out that the
form of a city changes faster than the mortal heart. Since then, those similar
evacuated the heart of the city, doomed to peripheral proliferation, exerting
themselves upon shapelessness. In the city to which one returns, time seems to
stagnate, and our heart is more mortally wounded than ever. 

    I went up the stairs, counting each step. Keys searching for the lock, at a
push the door resisted. By an automatic act whose imprint I thought had been
deleted from my neurons, I stretched out my arm until I touched the electric
switch. Vain memory: it came back to me only to cancel its subscription. The
drawn blinds let in an obscure sliver of daylight, only revealing greys and
blacks, planes and volumes. Under my feet, around my feet were the light
rectangles of mail slid under the door after such extended absence.

    Hand brushing against the walls, I groped my way to the mantlepiece, to the
copper candlestick upon it -- yellow as I remember it but now, in the glow of my
proffered flame, grey-green. The forms? those in the half-light, my memory and
the light all agree... But not the colours, muted under a thick layer of dust. 

    From where came all this dust which deposited itself upon the abandoned
surfaces during my absence, bereft of the contact of human hands, the caress of
body and clothes polishing them day after day? In these closed-off rooms,
sheltered from all light, where did all this dust come from? Each tiny crack
calls it in from outside. Inside, matter imperceptibly decomposes scattering its
substance: grain by grain plaster becomes dust, paintings evaporate, fabric
unravels, wood disintegrates. All this erosion mixes together and deposes itself
in a uniform shroud, burying the dead spiders in their still-palpitating webs,
knocking the flies on their backs, so dry and so light that the slightest
current of air displaced by my body sends them flying one last time, swirling
them about until they drop to the floor. 

    On the table, the traces of a meal, blurred by the sedimentation of dust,
like miniaturized aerial views ruins of an ancient city, slowly destroyed by the
advancing desert, the earth's obstinance reabsorbing all that deigns to emerge.
A sugar bowl, a spoon, a coffee cup inside of which rests the liquid and
evaporated sugar of condensed darkness; a tarnished silver coffee-maker; dry,
stale bread, hard as a log, rock or marble; a cup where the cigarette buts have
hardened into yellowed bones sticking up out of a mound of ash.

    I made a tour of the rooms like an archaeologist going through the untouched
chambers of a pyramid, of a mausoleum. The objects here are as those which serve
in the afterlife. 

    In the bedroom, the bed was unmade. A shirt was still strewn on the pillow.
I found a scent, evaporated, absorbed entirely by the dust, which stung my
nostrils and left a taste of iron and dirt in my mouth. In the ray of light
which squeezed itself through the badly drawn curtains my gestures stirred up a
Brownian haze. In an open closet the coat hangers hung in line, empty. 

    The light from outside descended, and my shadow flickered by the light of
the candle, more distinct, vacillating along the walls, more menacing. It
slithered along the pale drifts upon the ground, the tongues of a glacier:
letters, accumulated envelopes, sliding one over the other, the movement of a
thicker one further away repositioning an entire stratum. Calendars,
advertisements, bills, postcards. I exhumed, lost in the mass of these
communiques sent to no one, some letters addressed to names almost indiscernible
from mine, and some others with entirely distinct names. 


    Thinking of eating, I went out to the strangely deserted streets, as though
depopulated by memory, sleepwalking in search of the restaurant I used to go to
before, since it was busy and smoke-filled, and since it was so easy to lose
myself in the crowd. 

    Far behind me on the avenue, beside the sidewalk an illuminated glass
cubicle was outlined, where the day doubtlessly waits for people riding the bus.
On the bench, leaning against the transparent partition, an immobile form is
collapsed, draped entirely from head-to-foot in a coloured woolen blanket. In
the muffled folds, as I came closer, the volumes rectified: head, shoulders,
arms, legs. 

    In the background, behind the glass, a poster showed a woman with red lips
and a radiant complexion, I didn't know if this was from the book open in her
hand which she was pretending to read or the brand logo adorning the bottom left
corner of the sign which, according to the slogan encompassing her face, assured
her that she was really herself. 

    I was only a few steps away from the glass cage when the neon lights
flickered with a sharp clack. The outline of the woman vanished, the night
engulfed the immobile habited form, a faceless monk by a grave at an invisible
crypt. 

    Much further on, a store window caught my attention. A pyramid of video
screens flashed convulsively. I stopped there. At the foot of the pile of
monitors, books were placed in highly staged disorder: monumental piles of
austere volumes leaned against computer towers, their mice weaving between
fanned-out novels with pale covers. The mobile light which splashed back off the
screens, diffracted, iridised the blinding silver surfaces of little discs
suspended at various heights by invisible threads or forces, and which turned
about erratically on their edges. 

    The pyramid glimmered, kaleidoscopic: emerging from the bottom of electronic
night, the images run rippling across its surfaces, composing a moving gallery
of images, a virtual aleatory museum. The machine drew from its memory as a
digital cassette's string of 0's and 1's threaded one by one, and in the secret
darkness of its circuits it scattered them in order to recompose them pixel by
pixel into the illusion of an image. Evanescent phantoms at first, then, second
by second, they condense and re-fix themselves. For a brief instant, faces
appeared which I recognized as though I had chanced upon their portrait once in
a hall of a museum, and then still others that I could not name... The portrait
crumbled, the figure evaporated into the night, another in its deaf cycle of
darkness filtered across the screen and shot through the windowpane I stood
behind. Profiles, full-face, three-quarter views, side by side emerging and
disappearing for the enigmatic and vain commemoration of these supercilious
young people, of these elders coagulated in brilliant mourning, and these women
in momentary beauty. Portraits of unknown men, portraits of unknown women, all
of him, all of her, whose names are lost as their defeated flesh.

    As in that moment when I crossed the chalk outline, all tranquility, all
certainty disappeared. Barring that, I would have made a new attempt, feeling no
cruel implosion, the discouragement and inanity of which I was once again
convinced of that morning reared itself up as though by some spell. The exultant
horror which I felt was the exact same as that feeling of crossing into the
heart of that figure in silhouette upon the floor of the train station, now so
distant, and whose profound invocations I failed to understand. But why did the
abstract figure of someone cut-down at the foot of some filthy stairs and these
unknown people powerlessly commemorated by their portraits, so reminiscent now
and again, give me such a feeling of breathless disquiet, enough to instantly
dissociate me without reason?

    Truly, the obsession which aroused within me such horror, aroused by virtue
of its manifestation as an inevitable internal dislocation, an obsession which
emerged when, at the perception of this mortal disjunction between the form of a
body and the immediate givens of its identity went to establish the only state
of being in which we can strain to scrutinise the promise of annihilation. This
obsession had only the substance of contingent beings, it never came to me
alone, it had never manifested outside of someone's presence, from the immediate
sensation of linkage, whenever the illusion of an identity marred similarity.
Only it had the power to bare before me the fragility of flesh, of the name and
its memory, and the empire of its dissolution. 

    At the centre of the pyramid, a screen remained obstinately darkened, but
non-uniformly. Movement. With a sudden halo of faces and an explosion of light
produced by their fusion, white in their simultaneous overexposure, I saw the
screen slip into emptiness and briefly deposit upon its surface my own face. Was
it merely a reflected scene or an image captured and encoded by a hidden camera
and which a problem of contrast had prevented from revealing? 


    I pushed the door of the restaurant. Was it so early? Was it so late? The
servers wandered about through the maze of empty tables aimlessly and it took
them some time to notice my presence and approach me. They sat me at a round
table by the window. From there I could watch the street. So said the signs
which necessitated that tonight I would expose my vocation and designate within
me the direction of my heart that had multiplied since the maître d' left to
prepare my table. I saw him set not one but two place settings: before me and
across from me, plate, glass, silverware, napkin. And like the caliph of an
oriental tale who saw his double celebrating the feast that he had been
promised, I contemplated, mute and immobile, the feeble glow of the tea-candle
which with a brief spark from his lighter he illuminated in the centre of the
table, the empty space prepared for another guest. 

    I finished eating. The knife, the fork, the napkin on the other side were
left untouched, the chair, empty along with the two glasses which no one thought
to fill. The rare passers-by in the street drew after them a shadow which
slipped into the empty space, resting there, filling the void. The fringe of an
awning which jutted out over the street, lifted, agitated by the wind, produced
there an ebb-and-flow of light and shadow. The headlights of cars going along
the ranks of parked vehicles beside the sidewalk moved this penumbra to the
light of an intermittent day.

    The bill paid, the coffee drunk, I stayed there, scrutinizing the empty
place facing me, the shadows of the street projected there, the flinching light
beat there. I noticed that the shadow took form. 

    The necessity of murder revealed itself, now that it decomposed itself
before my very eyes in three distinct instances, a fragment of which constitutes
this fiction, one person. Just one fragment of this fiction? Maybe more.
Something which does not belong in the corporeal world nor in the system of
significations being much more contingent than either of them. This obsession
which has been resuscitated within me which had seen the faceless hessian form,
the dextrous portraits as spectres of flesh or terminology, the empty place
where nothing could become embodied, it only feeds upon dissolution, within it
can only be found the principle of annihilation and its cruelty. It languishes
in the completion of novels, in the contemplation of the brutal follies of the
world, tainted by hypocritical pity, in the revelation of much talked about
crimes which stupidity constructs with fragments of intrigues and circumstance
from which it extracts interest, conserving only that which agrees with the
often corrupt, utilitarian end it assigns. 

    But that a body, its figure and its name dislocated and dissolved, now the
dull contingency of so grand an effort kept secret and repulsed far from the
edges of consciousness, finds itself exhibited, and the impersonal which for so
long seemed bounded but not exactly overflowing, overran upon receiving a small
infernal donation thrown.


    I walked at random. Rats suddenly appeared from within a pile of garbage
under an overturned garbage can, fleeing at my approach. The night was cold and
orange with the light of sodium streetlamps. At the intersection of two streets,
I stopped. On the opposite corner, diagonally from the one I was on, stood a
red-brick building with its ground-floor doors and windows walled up with grey
concrete blocks and zebra-striped with graffiti. The nommes de guerre, the
esoteric signatures overlap each other, cover each other, annul each other
there. From the first one on the top floor, in all the windows, closed and
unbroken, were identical white curtains tightened in the middle by a narrow
tieback into an hourglass shape. On either side of this strangulation, a lantern
was suspended, trembling, midway up the window. Identically decorated and
illuminated, each frame enclosed within it, identical darkness: no shadow nor
light inside. A watch without watcher. Except me, perhaps...

    Beings do not contain the shape of their name. The name written upon a tomb
in the past does not contain within its syllables the quick breath and piercing
cry made on its baptismal imposition. And yet, a name is often all that remains
for us of a being whether dead or alive. We are not at all free after
disengagement from it, we should not be satisfied, but before us we must, as a
work of art, since it is at once universal and hidden, expose it. Exposition of
that which should be most horrible to us, and which we remain carefully
habituated to conceal, the fierce impersonal, the death in dazzling instances we
have the power to present, and which postpone any of our own exertions of the
heart as we are invaded by a sovereign horror when, by chance, we expose its
true figure.

    That which we call "someone" is a certain thread between a body and a name,
a thread which produces a complex system of rules, that exposes itself by so
much of the contingence it intends to mark out, a fragile thread which a murder
must unravel in order to overtake it. Perfection may only begin at the point
where the murderer assumes a real body, a fictive name, laying their thread,
operating identically in the criminal project as in the uniqueness of legal
baptism in civil society by fixing them with a ring, the only necessary, through
a beautiful crime. The whole art of killing is then not so much to serve us
anyone that we assassinate but is as permanent frame exposes our communal
contingence and inessential identity and through this rigorously undoes our
spirit from the illusion of transcendence.

    I said that the cruel law of art is that beings die, and even we, the
assassins, exhaust all contingencies for which fall no leaves of perpetual
illusion but of the erased creator, the leaves so carefully realized in vain as
works and civil registers upon which generations have slept, dozing, without
care for the disjunction which remains awake and await them below.