Free Bad Light by Carlos Castán Page B

the number of worlds contained within the world, of how far and yet at the same time how close they are to one another, at once distant and huddled together. The combination of the tranquilizers and my afternoon stroll sometimes brings about a sort of reconciliation with the world that emerges in the form of a longing, a veritable thirst, for simple and gentle things. I think I’ve made a mess of almost everything in my life. In having gone too far, for instance, in the desire to fill my time, my head, my rooms, every wall, every shelf, spurred on by a strange
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that in reality makes no sense. In short, I believe my past is overstuffed with things, and this is bad news as far as fear is concerned, for anxiety, by its very nature, is something that always returns, and because monsters rarely emerge from empty wells. Perhaps we set too much store by the urge, so symptomatic of the times we live in, to hoard experiences, a sort of Diogenes syndrome more of memories than of objects, and the trick to striking a certain degree of inner balance, if such a thing is possible without becoming a total cretin, may lie in blending in with the nothingness that surrounds us rather than rising up in rebellion and wishing to make of it a sort of giant, faceless foe against which to dig trenches and moats as if we ourselves were anything other than nothingness, as if we could ever truly amount to anything more than what remains, always what remains, what little remains, the almost nothing that remains after having traveled down a thousand roads, after having loved, after having lived between the devil and the deep blue sea, pinned against the sky and the rocks. As if we were anything other than skin that grows old, leaving a pile of ash and cold dregs sealed inside, next to our bones.
    Our high school physics professor once told us that if an atom were the size of the Burgos cathedral, then its nucleus would be a pin on the floor, and its electrons, tiny specks of dust hovering beneath the domes. The rest would be empty. With this in mind, given that the world is made up of atoms, one might have said that everything was nothing. We ourselves were nothing. Though it might seem that objects bounce off one another, this is a simple matter of equilibriums and force fields, atomic orbitals, the hurly-burly of magnets in disarray. Any real contact is out of the question. Say, for the sake of argument, that I’m in love with a woman; what I actually love is a peculiar arrangement of nothing, a peculiar arrangement of nothing that bears her name, the form nothingness adopts in her, the way in which her millions of empty cathedrals interlock. I might think that I take her by the hand or caress her skin, but this can never be anything more than a sly trick played by a limited, sick perception. Truth be told, it is a game played only by air that is not even air. No matter how hard I clutch her to me, what I hold in my arms, what I fear losing, what is killing me, is a whole heap of nothing.
    On these strolls, I sit down for long rests on benches and take everything in very slowly—the people, the light, the evening itself. I buy bread for dinner, cigarettes, coffee, and anything that can be cooked in a pan, a minute on each side. Often, on the slightest pretext, I enter the Chinese dollar store two streets up from my apartment. On the closed-circuit TV, they keep an eye on me to make sure I’m not shoplifting. The store is run by this bleary guy who spends his whole time there, Sundays included, with the radio turned on and a handful of comics at his side. For a moment, I feel I could be happy behind the counter of that store, that I could hang around there for hours on end, my head empty of thoughts. I’d like to hang out there, with the young Chinese woman minding the shop while snuggled up to the electric heater, sometimes sewing or watching cartoons on a tiny TV set. I’d love to stay there all day long. If ever I made a big sale,