Se lever, faire sa toilette et puis attendre quelque
variété imprévue de cafard ou d’effroi.
—Cioran

The exploits of Spain’s so-called ‘sexy army’ (ejército sexy) in the former Caribbean colony of Gauloise are unknown to the immense majority of human beings—to all in fact except A., who wrote this new chapter in military and colonial history shortly before waking one morning. While the substance of these undertakings was only sketchily evoked and rapidly disposed with by the dream machine, he nevertheless had the opportunity to briefly visit the island in question, most notably the embarcadero (he distinctly remembered the word on awakening), where he was instructed to take a ticket for the port of Churchill while being insistently and shamelessly caressed by a pneumatic brunette sporting diaphanous silver tunic, wedge-heeled gladiator sandals and Bella Darvi make-up.

Rubbing his eyes in animated-cartoon disbelief, he awoke, arose and somnambulistically headed for the kitchen in his black NO WORK TEAM T-shirt. There he prepared himself a coffee in his faithful old one-cup Bialetti, the egotistical little utensil packed tight with the full-flavoured oomph of Bonka Moca blend. While the coffee started to percolate through he took out a new pack of Glad garbage bags and enacted that banal but nevertheless extraordinary ritual in which the plastic or cardboard wrapper containing the garbage bags is, after being torn open to extract the bags, subsequently placed within one of these bags where it assumes its new status as the first piece of garbage, the container thus becoming the contained and the contained the container, this topological inversion calling to mind, by the perverse simplicity of its underlying form, the Moebius strip or the Klein bottle. The temptation to methodically record and catalogue similar paradoxical phenomena has occasionally visited A. but just as soon departed, although not so long ago he had the opportunity to talk to a productivity specialist from Geneva who had been employed to time workers in a watch factory using a stop-watch produced by the workers being timed.

As no-one was watching, he emptied his bowels squatting astride the toilet, on his haunches, a primitive but pleasurable posture that had, he recalled, been held responsible for a disproportionate number of strokes on the Indian subcontinent, the squatting-induced rise in blood pressure being the main triggering factor. Gloriously void as a result and without any detectable cerebral damage, he continued to feel upbeat as he showered, but soon succumbed to the sudden melancholy provoked by a free sample of Hugo Boss eau de toilette that he splashed on after shaving. (‘Your fragrance. Your rules.’ was the idiotic slogan underwriting the product.) No concrete images or memories were evoked, but as he breathed in its aromatic essence—‘bergamot and pineapple with notes of lavender, juniper and geranium’, according to the package blurb—he was aware that something had suddenly teetered or tottered and, like a see-saw whose equilibrium abruptly shifts from one side of the wooden plank to the other when the tipping point is reached, was on the verge of rushing rapidly downhill. Despite its brash promise of individualism, the fragrance evidently had its own rules—it wasn’t called Boss for nothing—and where he would normally be relishing the prospect of another day fanning out ahead of him in space and time with its myriad pleats and folds full of ripe possibility, its lattice-work of duty and desire, all he could discern now was a glum inventory of shipwrecked prospects, a street map on which every thoroughfare turned out to be a blind cul-de-sac.

(Although A.’s olfactory discrimination was scant, he was nevertheless excessively susceptible to certain smells. Gardenia, for example, provoked within him an almost illicit euphoria, an exhilaration that led him to regard it as he would a flask of ether, something he might furtively and recklessly sniff from time to time but could not abuse without succumbing to the law of diminishing returns. In this case, the images and recollections arrived in profusion: he saw the silver tinsel tree of an antipodean Christmas, festooned with blinking lights and emerging from a pile of brightly wrapped presents; he recalled the early-morning calm of a harbourside swimming pool at “king” tide, the level of the water almost flush with the top of the pylons that delimited the pool’s area; he felt the thrill of the wind against his face as he dashed downhill on his red 27-inch Speedwell bicycle with the racing handlebars and the three-speed hub gears…In short, the floodgates of memory opened and he was briefly issued a return ticket to the green paradise of childhood love.)

Still naked, A. splashed his face with cold water and even soaped it mildly to exorcize all trace of Hugo Boss. Then he went back to the bedroom, pulled on a pair of grey jersey Nike track-pants, teamed them nonchalantly with a navy-blue Public Body T-shirt that read ¥ € $ in large white characters, then padded barefoot to his study to begin working.

Infinitesimal dream-shards still revolved in what can only be called the windmills of his mind. As he summoned them up and prepared to weave them into what he was about to write, his concentration was disturbed by the dull drilling of the workmen dismantling a dividing wall in the next-door apartment. As the drilling became louder he reached for his box of French wax earplugs (Boules Quiès), removed two from their protective cotton-wool shrouds and moulded each of them within the ear canal, inserting them firmly and shaping them. There was something unseemly about having two lumps of wax buried in your ears, but A. soon overcame his repulsion, autistically isolated now from the uproar in a little bubble of his own devising.

In the guise of regaining his composure, A.—like any self-respecting writer—procrastinated here and there before finally setting pen to paper. First he trimmed his fingernails—his dextrous left pruned his maladroit right and then vice-versa—and carefully arranged the clippings from each hand in a neat little quincunx where they embraced their miniature reflections on the shiny black surface of the table like so many sickle moons mirrored in a lake. Then he tidied up the desktop of his iMac, dragging the European Constitution to the trash along with several images depicting Miss Anna Fubuka elaborately trussed up with thick rope and lying naked and blasée amidst the snows of Mount Fujiyama.

Here the picture fades slowly to black before the iris opens wide again to reveal A. ritually lighting a stick of incense (Esteban’s Encens Japonais Note Marine 2) and uncapping his vintage Waterman 515. Now he begins writing:

The exploits of Spain’s so-called “sexy army” (ejército sexy) in the former Caribbean colony of Gauloise are unknown to the immense majority of human beings—to all in fact except me…

Burning discreetly beside him as he writes, the incense dispatches lazy volutes of smoke into the mid-morning air and one thing leads to another beneath the scurrying gold nib. As the Florida blue ink colonizes the page with curious fluency, time evaporates, space dissolves, and soon he’s not sure whether he’s Arthur or Martha.