Who
is invisible enough
to see you,
- Paul Celan
‘Elle est encore jeune, uh?’
The question suddenly opened up a hatred towards roads and grey buildings and what it is to be alone. Some could see it immediately, like her.
Vesh I were outside a supermarket counting the last of our small coins. He had the idea to buy gallons and gallons of water so as to not run out on the trip back west. It would mean finding a trailer to drag behind us to carry everything else we’d collected since making the trip up together from the south. It would mean walking the whole way back.
'Soon they’ll be no nothing left’, he said, grasping for his throat.
He had not noticed the woman speaking to me. All he could think of was the desert.
I had my shirt off, under the sun. I wanted my heart to roast and become coffee. I wanted it to burst in the face of the security guard patrolling the supermarket complex. I yearned for it to leave my chest and return only when full and ripe again, to break open with the nectar of accepted madness and tangible tenderness.
The woman pointed at the girl behind her.
'She’s still young’, she repeated in coarse French. 'She’s still pretty and we’ll pay 10,000’. Thoughts stuck to my forehead like wet cement. I couldn’t get anything out but for the roads, the things, the stack of tiny silver pieces in front of us and the cars all thick grey smog licked and large.
French often gets clogged somewhere in my lungs as if replacing blood with strong cheese, water with wine. It was the first time I’d spoken it for a couple of weeks and it wouldn’t breathe, nothing made sense.
'Hmmm’, I slur.
'And we can keep recycle any water we consume’, Vesh tells me, excitedly.
'She’ll be a wonderful fit for it’, the woman counters, prodding my ribs.
'For what?'
Was I “it”?
I shuffled on the spot and began to sweat. No matter what, I am caught off guard. Here of all places. But it’s her eyes that have me hanging. They cut at my skin everywhere they touch, stripping me bare to the guts.
She prods me by the spaces between my ribs one by one.
'Parfait, parfait,’ she murmurs.
'Quoi?’
Kidneys. She wants a kidney.
I can already feel one leaving, in her hands already, rocking back and forth. Pulsating.
I could barely move. I keep having huge energy disappearances. Stolen by words and eyes and the big gaps in between what people say and what they do. What I mean and how I act.
In her cupboard wobbles dozens of jarred kidneys. Only the best will do. But there’s always one more. Her sister must have the perfect fit. They jiggle there in the night, glistening.
I begin to run. At least I got legs. Visions of empty organs.
'20,000!’, she yells. And so do the beeping cars, rolling over the roofs, heart thumping, still there, still working.
'30,000, 40,000!’ she gasps. But I have always been fast. Vesh remains with the stacks of coins and the woman runs too and I can tell she is used to this kind of chase. I do not know if I can last.
But I do.
And at night the kidneys come for me jumping into bed, the squidge of their tread carrying 40,000 francs in sealed checks. The largest, in a suit, sits on my chest bowing. You learn to sleep through almost everything.
Vesh was correct. It’s all due to the water. We lead two camels across the Swiss border. But they will not allow them on the island but I must be here. I must be now.
My heart has become my kidneys.
Image - graffiti in Brick Lane, London by Otto Schade : Rock, Paper, Scissors.
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