After that whole official and regimented period of his day, with all its bureaucratic anxieties and impatient indignities, crippled by sweat, like a fly that had managed to withdraw its body from a sticky trap, he would return home. Inking footprints of dust through the door, his arrival, his first domiciliary cycle of breath, instead of acting as a laxative, would only introduce a more relaxed, sharpened realm of anxiety.
The theatrics had their timetable mannered in such a way that they would begin right after he had finished taking his solitary dinner, within the confinements of his mute apartment, and lay on his bed, in the form of a star, like a patient ready for an operation.
The other characters within the house, standing upright behind the curtains, sheathing their slender, hollow bodies, hiding behind the furniture, totally mute, would now begin their cockroachy affairs, the creaking mischiefs that were so essential to their nightly production. A cascade of worries would pour upon him, crawling into his cars and nostrils. Did I turn the gas off? What about the light switches? I ought to check them once again. And so he would come under a genuinely obsessive-compulsive hypnosis. Running his fingers over the switches, double-checking if the doors of the fridge were indeed fully closed. Opening the bathroom door and tightening the taps. Making sure the gas was ALL THE WAY off. A menial trance of double checking and triple checking would fold his being into a blanket. The scattered laundry, a sweater here, on the bridge of the ottoman, some pants on the corner of the bed, mounds of dirty clothes atop the basket. His eyes would fray slowly, his vision focusing on the corners of the room, that three walled demon, tormenting his sense of depth as he lay still, surrendering to his bodily functions. But it would all burst on his face, like a dark winter’s morning, asking him, pleading him to check if the door of the fridge was fully closed or not. Perhaps the light above the sink escaped his attention and remained on. The curtain was not draped correctly, it was asymmetric and one corner even lay on the sofa instead of hanging flat! Was the gas off? All the way? The knob turned to the highest degree? Was he sure of it? Maybe he ought to sweep the dead cockroaches who lay upside down on the floor now instead of waiting for dawn. The fidgety, finicky, autoerotic placements of the furniture, all contributed to that villainous expansion, that tumorous growth within him throughout the night. That domestic pandemonium would slowly cripple him into various persuasions of psychotic ailments. So frightened would he grow sometimes that he would wrap his sweaty body with the bedsheet in a single rolling motion. from one end of the bed to the other. Place whatever pillows he could grab onto, whether plump and soft or rough and scratchy, he would block his face with them. Remaining in this woolen stupor, eventually emerging from the embrace of this soft foliage, panting with sweat, eyeballs magnified, he would quickly look here and there to check for visitors. After calmness would settle, he would take to studying intently the printed geometries on his bed cover. Within the vicinities of the amber lamp, he would start walking in those geometric paths, slowly seeing different colors of the design as having motherly or fatherly qualities. "This part here is my mother,' he would think to himself. 'And that my father.' From the vines of family to the bones of entities, he would discover a lot within the designs. Assigning different relations and tones to so and so part of the pattern, all of it would feel extremely intimate and familial. The warmth of a happy family sharing a straw bed on a cold winters night within the melodies of a warm fire, such were the feelings granted to him by his imaginative designations and sensations. He would caress the bed sheet in poignant awe. And chewing on the strings of his pyjamas, he would slip into a sound slumber.
