View Cover
Allow me to introduce myself.
I am a man, forty-six years old. For those who may consider this description overly brief, I will add only this, since I don’t like to talk about myself: I am of average size and fat content, I travel little, preferably on foot, and I have a noisy heart. One last detail, and not the least: I am handsome, but only from the back. As if nature in a tragic moment of distraction got mixed up and confused front and back. One day when I was trying on a suit, I caught sight of myself in the three-part mirror of the store. For a moment, I didn’t recognize myself. From the back, I’m quite simply somebody, an observation that is both cheering and sad if you consider that it is impossible to live, as it were, on the wrong side, that there always comes a time when you have to turn around, and it is on such occasions that I go to pieces.
I live alone, except for two cats taken in one winter night when I was particularly cold. They walked right in and made themselves at home. I followed them in, closed the door and continued. We respect each other. They let me sleep till four in the morning, when I have to get up to feed them. They take up a lot of space in the bed, and I don’t, and in any case, I sleep on an angle. But it’s for women. I’ll come back to women. Things don’t come easy, it’s an extra you have to accept, you have no choice. They’re there with their bodies around and it’s very disturbing. Not counting the fact that you never know why they like you. Is it for your back? For your front? For your interior? Your exterior? For your upper body? Your lower body? Unless they like all of you, any old way, just as you are, without packaging. Anything is possible with them.
Or else it’s for the seed. It’s priceless these days. With the rain of deaths that’s flooding the planet, the loss of income that’s so depopulating and depressing that they have to clone the existing models, I sense a formidable reproductive frenzy among my female associates. I’m an only child and I was never taught to share. The idea of giving up a bit of myself distresses me. We spend our lives scattering ourselves. Sweat, tears, excrement, at a certain point everything deserts you and integrity is sorely tested.
***