Story for performance #805
webcast from London at 07:43PM, 03 Sep 07

His features looked strangely familiar, but his confident and abrupt manner betrayed the fact that he did not really belong to our kind. His words came out of him with force, like shots of air. His statuesque eyes seemed always focused on something else or elsewhere, even when leaning over me to closely gaze at my face.

He tortured me for ages. So studious and innovative were his application of the latest methods and tools, he made me think of those guys with degrees. But it made no sense to me that he would for example keep me awake for days just for the sake of experiment, without asking me to confess to anything. I kept remembering and admitting to every little misdeed I ever did—as a little boy I killed 135 flies in one summer’s day; I broke the heart of a great woman; I might be selfish—until he forced a piece of cloth into my mouth and silenced all my confessions and screams.

The cloth made me choke every time I tried to cry for help. After a few such attempts, when I had to swallow my vomit, even the weakest thought of me screaming or pronouncing a word became suffocating. So I stopped trying, and then even of thinking of trying. Instead, I began to develop ways of preventing myself from expressing my urges and hopes, till my body became like a sealed, mass grave where unsaid words now slowly rotted away.

He was pleased with this outcome. I saw it in his eyes. It was at the same time, during this short but eloquent exchange of looks, that he noticed a difference in my eyes.

‘There is now something almost religious in your suffering’ he said, and smiled. His face, not used to expressing itself in such a way, got distorted as if in pain. I looked away, terrified to realise that he was beginning to see through me, to know me too well. How else could he know that in my attempt to cast my thoughts on what was furthest away from this, I discovered God? Did he also know that in my prayer, which had silently and miraculously formed itself in my head, I was asking that in the end there was some purpose to all this anguish and pain?

Some time later, which could have been a day or a month, I was still obsessively repeating my prayer and didn’t hear the creaking of the boards, the sound of his steps as he crept from behind. Without any explanation or warning, he forced my mouth open by sticking his fingers into my cheeks, and pulled out the wet cloth from inside. He then untied the ropes around my wrists and ankles and retreated toward the nearest shadow.

The moment when the ropes first cut through my flesh was so distant in time that my body couldn’t remember itself without them any longer. Having become exposed to freedom it had not felt for years, it began to jerk itself backward and forward, uncontrollably. The long drowned cry, which all of a sudden was free to come out, was already on its way up when I remembered…but it was too late. Somewhere between my guts and my throat, the cry got transformed into green liquid that now started to gush out of my mouth and nostrils.

I lay like this on the floor, my body in spasms of pain, when he came out of his shadow and, pointing with his hand at the green puddle next to my head said ‘I wanted you to see for yourself what a cry for help looked like’.

He said it almost gently, and, with something akin to sadness in his eyes, he went down on his knees to wipe my sweaty forehead with his cold palm, and to place a light kiss on it. He then stood up and simply walked away, out through the door of my prison, which for the first time he left wide-open.

From down where I lay, I observed him receding in the distance. With each step he made, my body calmed down a bit more, my senses opened up to new sensations. By the time he became a little speck on the horizon, I started noticing the poplars dance in the breeze, the clouds feathering the blue sky, the smells of the long forgotten times when my mother brewed remedies for my first childhood illnesses—thyme, camomile, mint, dried quince…

I smiled a feeble smile that was also part of the experiment. But this is something that I would gather much, much later.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Almir Koldzic.