I decided to go to bed, but not before killing a huge fly sitting on the corner of the wall next to my bed and night table.
On my night table stood a pink desk lamp, two empty cans of Dr. Pepper, two bottles of water, a box with medication and Hemingway’s thick paperback ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ which I had almost finished reading.
“Your blood on my Hemingway is too much honour for you fly’
The fat insect was looking at me provocatively.
The wall continued on to a useless space with a hidden sink. The sink wasn’t visible because of a large quilt which hung to dry next to a couple of T-shirts on orange rope cords fastened across the empty space. It was my only quilt, so I was lying on a naked matrass. I didn’t care.
The fly was sitting motionless and he looked stuffed. The question came to mind how he had managed to enter my room, together with the question what other wandering food sources moved through my room during my sleep.
He was now clearly looking for a fight. He kept looking at me and was now busy licking his front legs like a cat cleaning his paws.
I turned onto my left side. To the left of my bed was an old green couch that used to belong to my parents and which was now torn in several places. The yellow insides were forcing itself out through the green leather. Usually the tears where covered by a blue fabric cover, but the cover was currently hanging from the armrest.
The couch functioned primarily as a seat for myself, despite that it was a double seat, and simultaneously functioned as storage for clothes, notes, keys, towels and my laptop which I often took to bed with me, but for which I didn’t have room on my night table.
‘The damn insect must die’, I thought, and for lack of something better I grabbed an old stained towel. I turned around towards the fly who seemed to have guessed my next move and started zigzagging aggressively above my head. He frightened me for a second when he attempted to crawl underneath my covers in what was probably a failed attempt at my reproductive organs. ‘You sure are a courageous fly’ I thought, and I waited for him to land exhausted on my wall so I could hit him.
I despised these moments. I never did like ending the life of the living, and I still found it a horrible experience. Eventhough it was nothing close to the killing of a human being, a human being isn’t oftenly crushed underneath a book, shoe or in this case towel. Being crushed to death is a rather horrific way to die if you ask me, and perhaps a little overkill.
‘Oké, here goes fly’, with a well timed strike the towel landed on him.
‘The poor thing never saw it coming’, I hoped. Without inspecting the towel I threw it on the floor next to the bed and drawer, between two dirty socks. ‘I really need to clean up my room again’. I decided to read some more and when my eyes got tired I put the book down on the table and turned off the light from the pink lamp, ‘one chapter left…’ was my last thought.
I awoke with a throbbing headache and the immediate sense that I had overslept again. One quick glance on my cell Phone confirmed this thought, it was already half past noon. It didn’t surprise me a bit, I was more than used to waking up halfway during the day, but I Always felt guilty and dissapointed, having started the day on a wrong footing. It was like the feeling you got when missing an early bus before an important meeting, and instead of arriving for the meeting thirty minutes early able to gently wake up with a cup of coffee, you find yourself rushing into the meeting instead. It wasn’t too late, half of the day still lay open, but haste had to be made if I didn’t want the rest to go to waste.
My day had started and I immediately knew that it wouldn’t be productive. I started my regular routine and turned on my TV. Next I took the laptop from my couch and I checked if some people where online – after all it was half past noon – and looked if anything exciting had happened while the rest of the country had started the day and I was still asleep.
‘Hey monkey’, it was Anna. I hadn’t seen her since her return from Syria on a friday a week earlier and I hadn’t heard from her since. ‘Hey’ was all I could say in return, I was waiting for a conversation, but nothing came. I stared sleepily at the blank line. ‘Busy?’ I typed. It took a while before she answered, ‘No, I am only preoccupied’. ‘Oké…’, ‘I don’t know what to buy for my dad’s birthday…’ ‘It’s his birthday?’, ‘Yes, on sunday’. ‘Difficult…’, I answered, and offline she went. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’, I thought, but I couldn’t get worked up about it. Then a text message, ‘Pffff… the weather sucks ánd the internet doesn’t work! What a great day this is…’ I couldn’t agree less.
I turned around and looked behind the sheets hanging in front of my window. Anna was right, it was yet another miserable day. They’d promised the weather would clear up in the afternoon, but the streets were still dreary, the pavement and brick walls dark with wetness, the road shiny from rain that had recently fallen and above the roofs endless grey clouds, formless stains without end. ‘Just my luck’, I thought. ‘Well, I guess if you feel like October, it might just as well look like October’, but it was July and the weather had been like this for days on a row.
After two months of excavations in Syria, Anna had finally come back last week. I had officially ended our relationship before she left for Syria and it seemed right at the time. Though eventually those two months proved to be hell and our correspondance offered the hope of a fresh start to our relationship. How much I had missed her during those months. Last Friday I stood there waiting for her at the station of Leiden Central with a large bunch of flowers – which I would never had considered buying before -, and which I sure will never buy again. She took the flowers from me with an uncomfortable and awkward look, there was no way back. I still remember her beautiful tanned skin, I had never seen her that pretty. It proved to be a long and silent walk home. It was as clear as day, somewhere and sometime in the Syrian desert she had made up her mind to continue without me. Her tanned and freshly freckled skin was not mine to touch.
I was hoping the weather would clear so I could get out for some fresh air when I noticed from the corner of my right eye another big fly watching me. This time he was sitting on the inside of the sheet hanging in front of my window functioning as a curtain.
‘Unbelievable! You’re a resilient little animal’ I thought, when from the corner of my left eye I noticed a second fly! As I stopped watching the grey gloom passing the rooftops outside of my window and focussed on the two flies closeby I discovered a total of five fat flies cramped in the tight space between my window and the sheet hanging in front of it. I checked if the window was open, but is was shut tight.
As I turned onto my back and glanced over my room I discovered three more flies, one on the sloped ceiling, another one at the exact spot of the first fly the night before and one hidden on the inside of my pink lamp. ‘What the hell is happening, this seems like the start of a hitchcock movie’ I thought. Where did all these flies come from so suddenly? I sat frozen on my bed with the laptop on my lap. ‘Don’t panic, they’re only flies… Sure, they’re with many, but they are just flies.’
I was puzzled. That many flies occupying my room over night, how was it possible?
Then I remembered an incident two weeks earlier which I had since forgotten. I had noticed black crumbs falling from two tiny holes in my ceiling. My white IKEA table was directly underneath and completely covered with black heaps. I initially feared the crumbs were the result of spider activity inside my ceiling, as I had an irrational fear of spiders, but when it eventually stopped raining crumbs I forgot about it.
My heart skipped a beat.
‘My God! Not spiders, but flies! The whole ceiling must be infested with fly larvae and if there are fly larvae there must be something rotten as well!’ I remembered how I had swept the black crumbs off my IKEA table onto the carpet and I now feared I had spread fly eggs onto my floor.
I took a look at the black fly who was sitting at the exact spot of yesterdays fly. He seemed to be looking straight at me and was also going through the ritual of licking his front legs, only this time it seemed more sinister, as if he was checking out his prey and already licking his fingers at the prospect of eating me alive. I decided to check Wikipedia and search for information about flies to calm myself. I used to do the same if I had a strange cough or a weird spot on my skin, being the hypochondriac I am.
‘Flies were insects… they lay larvae… [a picture of the house fly]… ‘Ok, so they’re only house flies, that’s a relief, I don’t have shit in my room!’.
‘In mythology, flies were sometimes associated with death and decay.’
I considered the irony. ‘My room had Always represented the chaos in my head’. I thought. ‘Now the decay is finally setting in and I am falling apart’.
I continued reading on Wikipedia: ‘Flies are seen in many cultures as a plague preceding the apocalypse.’ ‘Ofcourse,’ I thought, ‘Bleeding gums, blood in my sink and now flies and larvae, the end is nigh’.
I closed my laptop, threw it on the couch and stood up. I walked to the white IKEA table which still had a few black crumbs on it, next to two dirty dishes with remains of last weeks pizza’s, the empty packaging of a salad meal, an empty can of yoghurt and a cheap plastic bag from the market with inside a bunch of brown bananas which might have started rotting already, I didn’t dare to watch. Endless attempts to eat enough fruit as a student had ended in such disasters, I should just keep to drinking juice. On closer inspection the black crumbs from the ceiling did not appear to be a life form. I walked to the curtain and window, and as I opened the window the first five flies dissapeared. I closed the window, brushed my teeth and put on my clothes.
I grabbed my backpack and emptied it of the bottle of Absinth, spoon and Sugar cubes. I put the bottle on a shelf in my bookcase. I took my Hemingway, my notebook, a pen and some beermats I had scribbled on days ago in a pub and put them in the backpack. I put on my olive green army jacket, one of the few authentic relics from my service days and was ready for another day of senselessly roaming the city.
‘All is better than my room’ I thought. ‘I do need to clean it up sometime , though’.
I locked my room behind me, walked down the stairs, stepped outside and closed the outer door. It had started to rain again. I decided to walk to the market, it was already three o’clock in the afternoon and I hadn’t eaten yet. ‘All is better than my room’ I thought again, ‘Damn, forgotten to throw away those rotten bananas again, I really need to clean my room, everything is better than my room’.
(10-07-2008)
