Machines
The discrepancy in how people shift their purchases around in time is too great for a machine not to register it as an error and flash, on its tiny screen, a big, red message blinking like a Christmas tree: “WARNING, IDIOT! ANOTHER IDIOT!”
Some people, like me for example, are incapable of patiently waiting a few seconds for this miracle of technology to send the scanned chip of my payment card into space, asking—probably God—whether I am indeed me. Then, once it receives a confirming reply, it pulls virtual money from my virtual account, which itself contains an even more virtual savings sub-account.
They can’t wait those few seconds. They get agitated and start pressing all the buttons at once as if that might change anything. Of course, this causes total chaos: the machine goes crazy, the whole station begins to hum and flash as if it’s about to explode. I start to notice the looks hanging over me—pity from those who have once been in a similar situation, and contempt from those to whom such accidents never happen. People like them walk through this civilized world like an ox through a field. Without unnecessary maneuvering.
Naturally, an employee has to step in to shut down the raging invention. And not just any shop assistant, but some poor soul knighted into management. I can hear him from afar apologizing to the crowd scattering in fear. He emerges from behind a curtain of curious onlookers and drills his gaze into me. I can only imagine what curses are ringing in his ears. He takes my apologetic smile for mockery. With a sour face, he approaches the station, inserts a key, turns it—the machine falls silent.
Naturally, it takes an eternity. The whole store goes quiet, staring, waiting impatiently for what will happen next. I apologize to everyone around me like a skipping record.
Time slowly returns to its rhythm, the manager fades back into nothingness, the people disperse. The sweat on my body begins to cool. I drift back into life to the accompaniment of a printed receipt.
Strangers and Horses
I’m sitting on a bus heading to the parking lot from which I’ll walk to the banks of the Dunajec (River), board a wooden raft, and float down the river—and suddenly someone farts.
As Carlin used to say, in tight and public spaces one should release a preliminary fart, giving fellow travelers a chance to acclimate to the type of stench and a preview of what awaits them in the near future. Good manners demand it. A person then knows what to expect and comes to terms with the consequences of the test fart. In this case, unfortunately, it was the main event right away.
Zakopane (City) corrects my romantic memories of the place at every step. Either I’ve grown old, or the town has transformed from a folklore-filled mountain haven into a tourist manufactory. I’d guess that 80 percent of the goods sold here sail straight from China (Country). Walking down Krupówki (Street), I feel like a rabbit hopping through a ravine full of vultures waiting for it to collapse from exhaustion.
For some of my compatriots, “please” sounds like a dog’s growl. For others, it sounds like “And what exactly do you want here, sir?” Every taxi driver ostentatiously scans me from head to toe before quoting a price—low enough for me to get in, high enough for me not to feel too insulted.
The last time I was in Zakopane was fifteen years ago, and I didn’t see any Arabs. Today they make up about ten percent of the visitors. Why that is, I don’t know, and I’m not going to google-research it. I observed a few situations between them and Poles.
The pool attendant shot out like a missile when two Arab men stepped onto the pool deck in their shoes—as if he’d been waiting for it. Possibly he keeps a scoreboard.
The woman at the aquapark ticket window made it very clear what she thought of a pair of loudly chatting Arabs disturbing her work. I half expected her to pull a Kalashnikov from under the counter. With us, however, she was like Mother Teresa—perhaps trying to balance her account with God.
A drunk at the bar loudly shared what he thought of the “ragheads,” so loudly that the hotel manager had to intervene. The hall was filled with Arabs, and although they probably didn’t understand what he was saying, I felt they could guess.
One construction worker helped a group of Arab women lift a wheelchair—with their mother in it—from the street up onto the sidewalk. They looked frightened and quickly hurried away.
One highlander told another, who was driving a horse carriage from Morskie Oko, that he could haul those “Magyars” himself, because he wasn’t going to.
On the carriage ride down from Morskie Oko (a lake), I heard a woman express, in a short outburst, great indignation about using horses for such hard labor. She was probably an acolyte of PETA. Two women sitting next to me then had a brief exchange summarizing their freshly acquired experience. The first, a bit louder than appropriate, in a shrill tone of irritation at her disturbed peace, said that if she felt so sorry for the horse, she should hitch herself up instead. After several squeals of laughter from the other passengers—squeals of approval, and you could feel the solidarity and festive mood in the air—the second woman decided to fill the gap of silence and suspense with a statement combining gravity and almost encyclopedic knowledge on the subject. She enlightened all of us—clearly unaware souls—that if WE didn’t ride, someone else would.
To this day, I’m still recovering from hearing that groundbreaking thought.
Suspended In-Between
Always those hideous mugs. They greet me from behind glass. Dull eyes. Animal instinct: run or wait, wait or attack. They speed along the highway across half of Europe, returning from campsites. Sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil and a thermos. They’ll come back to work after vacation and complain a little over coffee. The Germans this, the French that. Expensive. Cheap. Hot. Cold. Everything in the trunk carefully calculated. Quality somehow proportional to price. Car fridge. Double walls ensuring good thermal insulation. They stand in a shopping mall thinking—should we get the one with the electric display? Is it worth it? Hmmm.
Electric lamp, folding chairs, a table—also foldable. They sit and think. Music in the background, my generation, not my parents’ generation anymore. They wouldn’t have dared play music at a campsite.
They talk a little, sit a little. The hi-hat marks the rhythm on the off-beat. Oh yes, they’re sunbathing. Sitting—they’re sunbathing. Scrambled eggs fried on a camping stove slowly digest in their stomachs.
A mistake. I thought they were sunbathing, but that was earlier, when I was lying on my stomach. When I changed position, their position updated in my mind as well. Now the position is passionate. My gaze met theirs—half-smiles, five seconds of polite examination of one another, and without any great revelations, the examination ends.
After a moment, no longer looking out of courteous fear of further contact sinking into the abyss of discomfort, I sensed some commotion in their little fort—brief laughter, a few comments read aloud from a phone, maybe even a joke.
And only now does that wonderful state arrive. As if we know each other but we don’t. We can hear each other, but to start a conversation one would have to raise their voice slightly. So we remain suspended in between. And time ticks more slowly.
Alvinella pompejana
Lying in bed, I hear the wind outside swaying the branches. It does so with a grace unlike anything human.
A white-gray shark glides beneath one of the coral-encrusted, amphitheater-like rocks. Moonlight reflects off the predator’s powerful fin, alerting nearby creatures.
A pentagonal screw detaches from a satellite orbiting the Earth. The flow of data remains unchanged.
A starving rat darts between the confessional and a shrine in an old church, heading for the pantry.
A few hundred steps below the summit of Annapurna, a lone climber sinks into a drift of snow, for a moment thinking it’s a cave.
Alvinella pompejana basks in the Pacific’s underwater saunas, utterly indifferent to wars and famine. Unlike me, it keeps a cool head exactly where it should.
An African vulture dies in its nest on a rotting tree. Soon it will become what it fed on all its life.
A group of teenagers has slipped through a fence into an abandoned mannequin factory in Wyoming. For the next few hours, they will have a good time.
An old village headman in a settlement forgotten by Moscow steps outside, heading for the latrine. He curses his son in his thoughts for not clearing the snow from the road, then grabs a shovel.
Twelve gorillas living in a Congolese jungle have chosen their leader. Let us hope he fulfills his resolutions properly.
A young couple declares their love on a bridge clogged with padlocks. As one of the rare few, they will spend half a century together—that is, 26,298,000 minutes.
Scribbles…
Here you will find some short rambles. They are translated from my native language, might be off a bit.
Will
I’m walking down the main street of my housing estate. It’s a safe neighborhood, filled with the middle class and the partially displaced working class. A so-called up-and-coming area. In twenty years they’ll push me out too; in forty there’ll be nothing here but high-rises and Starbucks.
I’m dressed in the typical middle-class uniform, nodding toward outdoor style. Though the last time I actually did anything outdoors was about a year ago. Functional clothes, then. It’s raining—so, functional clothes.
Enclosed in my small, portable, waterproof house, I walk along with my completely unaware one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who is also quite thoroughly sealed off from the external elements, traveling in her stroller.
I’m walking and suddenly—because things usually happen suddenly—I hear a barking dog. No, not a barking dog, but a death metal vocalist. Vocalizing through an open window. Or maybe someone’s being assaulted. Hard to say. But one thing I can say for sure—when I hear sounds like that, a readiness system switches on in my brain, preparing me to flee as quickly as possible in case of danger. Old mechanisms at work. If the Eastern understanding of reincarnation has any basis in reality, in a previous life I was a deer.
Continuing on, my head now full of adrenaline, I see the hairdressers stepping out of their salon, curious about the peculiar noises—noises that were downright insane. They’ve come outside, like me, to locate the source. The situation quickly feels serious, so I stop—like a reincarnated deer on a highway—and observe.
A man crosses the street. Asian, around fifty. Black jacket with a hood. He walks, turning around every few steps as if someone were chasing him. I think to myself—maybe the dog is chasing him. Or the death metal vocalist.
He crosses the road and is about five meters from me and the stroller with my daughter. And suddenly—because things happen suddenly—he turns around once more and, with a scream that sounds like a tortured dog fused with a violated death metal singer, shouts:
“Santa Claus, listen to me when I’m talking to you!”
I’m shocked that he was the source of the sound and brace myself, ready to cross to the other side of the street.
“Santa Claus, listen to me when I’m talking to you!” he screeches again, turning over his shoulder.
“I’ll throw you out of my will…”
Distance
The Sun is entering a period of increased activity that will last several years. It will produce solar storms. Our GPS systems will glitch, and sometimes the power will go out. Not such a terrible devil after all.
But the Sun could also switch off. Supposedly we have four billion years—but what if we have twenty days? The entire achievement of humanity could simply vanish in a fraction of a second. Nothing would remain—at least from our perspective. No kayaking trips, no strawberry ice cream, no political debates, no hypermarket discounts.
For a moment, it gives me a much-needed sense of distance. I stop worrying about the sugar content in a candy bar, a capital letter in the middle of a word, or a trace of mud on my right shoe. Only for a short while, of course. Soon the circus in my brain returns, with doubled force.
When the Sun is behaving itself and I need a similar jolt, I think about Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, drifting some 23 trillion kilometers away from us. That is a sufficiently vast distance for earthly matters to lose their importance and to lighten a mind intoxicated by the overload of thoughts.