Mercury and Fever
Being sick while the world marches in flames
Fever, fever, sweat, and more sweat; the whole world has turned into a huge, glowing metal plate. Everything is pulsating, encompassing, leaving me cast adrift amidst a flow of unceasing lava. The horror of the world washes over in shards and leaves me prostrate amidst a pool of ash, messy limbs, children's screams, and sweat. There is nothing worthy of the attention of a painfully feverish mind. Everything coexists in red simultaneity.
Nothing is permanent here except sweat and lava. Images and sorrows dance, bombs go off, the world can’t catch its breath and doesn’t want to.
The morning was no better, though at least my mind was clearer. I fear that night will soon come again, and all those demons and monsters of our time, of our historical situation, will possess me once again. So clear, so distinct were all the sufferings to which every living thing in our sick longitude and latitude was subjected.
I even dreamed of stones screaming in pain, unable to flee before the oncoming tanks. Sand prayed to the wind to carry it somewhere, heal it, drive away its siblings and grant them peace. Machines were descending from all directions, positioning themselves at precisely planned firing points by the commanders, in stages that promised destruction to everyone and everything.
No chill could heal even the depths of the ocean.
Sweat, sweat, sweat, and the ceiling poured down towards the bed in the garb of an American bomber with an Israeli flag screaming “Nakba, Nakba.” It’s all they can promise. Not just them, but the whole structure of power and exploitation they embody. A universal refugee is what those men succumbing to their obsession with dominance produce. Each one of them is a killer before even getting to power. A killer who kills himself first. A tyrant who is his own slave. Oppressed, crushed, and even killed, he wants only one thing — to oppress, to crush, and to kill. To bring flames where summer used to rejoice. And there is nothing there, nothing but anguish, suffering, misery, and more flames, more terror, more death.
Ibuprofen, metamizole, paracetamol, sweat, and more sweat. Waking up, falling asleep again. The temperature in the afternoon hit 38 degrees, but the mercury had long since left the thermometer and spilled out into our bodies. Amid all the bodies. It was as if it had always been that way, аs if life had been organized around mercury. Mercury arteries, mercury brains, mercury juices are all over the trees, the wildflowers, dripping persuasively from the pointed blades of sedges. Birds vomit mercury while butterflies flutter it with their clumsy, scorched wings in an attempt to ignite the air.
Mercury and sweat and death and stench, bodies starving from beneath the ruins and death again on top of them amidst the heat and amidst the mercurial rocks, testifying that summer no longer recognizes a calendar. Summer is beyond summer. Summer is the death of the living and the promise of death even in the afterlife. The new war we have waged against ourselves.
I woke up swimming in sweat. I changed and poured myself a glass of water. From the other room, I heard my companion and the little one learning to read. She slurred slowly, echoing her mother, “The woman went into the store and said, ‘Good afternoon’ and then ordered mussels.”
It seems the woman didn’t know that the store was long gone, that it too had become an ember on which dancing dragons, clawing at huge clam shells, scraped molten mercury.
Maybe it’s cooler there? Maybe the coolness isn’t an illusion? Maybe if I lie down some more, my temperature will return to normal again.
I decided to light a cigarette first to see if my lungs still recognized the smoke as something foreign or if they had turned to smoke themselves. The water was hot, the smoke was hot, the air was hot.
Nakba, my brain repeated, suddenly disappearing into redness.
Endless caves shuddered beneath the onslaught of embers. At any moment, the lava would seep into them too, fill them, promise them immortality in its dry womb. A couple of mosquitoes buzzed fearfully above the spreading death, and from the depths of the cave came a terrifying screech.
A doctor, all covered in blood, holding a child’s foot with his fingers squashed in his hand, waved shakily at the lava and admonished her that there were no terrorists there. But the lava, deaf and dumb, stumbled toward him.
Everything blurred, everything was, once again, expanded mercury.
Redness.
The blood of life, fire, a world turned.
The fever was omnipresent.