SubStance

I. Black Corridor

The tin can rolled across the grimy tiles of the hallway. Dondog barely grazed it, with his left foot, I think, yet there it rolled. The thick cover of darkness made it impossible to know if it was a can of beer or of Coke. Empty, light, the tin cylinder followed its noisy course then stopped, no doubt because it had come up against heavier, grimier trash.

The floor slanted. Like everywhere in the City, the masons who added blocks of housing on top of existing ones had little regard for horizontality. They were of the mind that the cement would hold and, what's more, the walls would sink and undo any effort at getting it right. The hallway therefore had the look of a sordid and shabbily dug trench. It reeked of fish guts and frying oil, grungy humidity; it smelled of the hovel of beggars or Untermenschen; it stank of rat piss, of decomposition, the rotten old age of nearly all things. Thirty steps further, beyond a half-open gate, a stairwell led to a higher floor: the fifth. Maybe the fifth. After going down so many narrow passageways that forced him back a few meters lower, or oblique half-stories that led from one building to another, Dondog had lost his bearings. He could no longer say where in the City he was, at what distance from its outskirts, at what elevation, and he was advancing, at that moment, in an alley located around a fourth floor. Beyond the chain link fence's quadrangles, the stairs reflected a low mawkish light. There had to be a fluorescent tube a little further that was trying to shine a light on the space.

When the metal's sound had exhausted all of its echoes, Dondog took two more careful steps then stood still. [End Page 97]

Not knowing, first of all, what to focus on, he imagined the can had stumbled upon a chicken sternum or some leftover rice, and some cockroaches were examining this strange object, on the alert, their antennas all agog, then they stopped moving too.

All was relatively calm.

After the roaches, four names came to Dondog's mind.

Jessie Loo.

Tonny Bronx.

Gulmuz Korsakov.

Eliane Hotchkiss.

He murmured them very softly, as his memory needed his mouth to function. Then he pushed out a sigh.

In the depths of the structure, we heard the motors of the pumps pulling toward the reservoirs on the roof the water that came from the well. The vibration was constant.

On top of that were grafted the yammering from a soap opera on TV, and sounds and voices from a few radios.

The residents of the City did not belong to a singular ethnicity, evidently. Dondog listened closely, his ear accustomed for decades to the internationalist lingua franca of the camps, and he recognized the mix of idioms that only fully developed behind the barbed wire, and which he had had his entire life to learn. And yet, he could not identify with certainty the slightest phrase. Everything was deformed, as happens in the depths of a bad dream, or when we try to understand, for example, belabored Mongolian spoken by an American, or mutilated Teochow spoken by a German, or even worse.

One floor below, someone hammering two nails into a plank then coming back to tranquility.

Sweat poured abundantly under Dondog's clothing. He had not changed since leaving the camp and his construction vest was too hot. He felt drops running down his cheeks, down his thighs, around his eyes, under his arms. In the foul-smelling obscurity, he remained still. It was as if he no longer wanted to move until he died.

The names had surged on his tongue, but he did not pronounce them. Eliane Hotchkiss. For her, for that one, there needed to be verification, he thought.

A partly crushed cockroach struggled then under Dondog's heel, the right heel, it seems to me. It struggled half-heartedly. No one noticed and, in the end, like us, it began losing interest in its future...