A Strange, Strange Waking Up
Trap
It wasn't easy to drive through that narrow, winding street and finally park. But I scarcely get out of the car when I can see that I will not be able to go back. That it is neither possible to turn around nor to back out without damaging my car or crashing into the others. I am gripped by panic. So what now?! I am standing helplessly by my car when it starts to occur to me that, in fact, it's just a dream. That I don't have to drive out of here at all, at some point I'll just wake up! Only as I am waking up the anxiety about what will happen to my car returns. If I leave it here in my dream, I will not, after all, be able to find it back home in its parking space when I wake up! But if I just leave it here, how can I get it back!? And so I'm wedged into that narrow street between sleeping and waking, and I have no way to escape.
***
Waiting
A great clap of sound, perhaps a shot or explosion, is being readied. Maybe in a moment, maybe in a while. Or maybe sometime later yet? We press our palms tightly to our ears and wait for it to come. But in the meantime … in the meantime … nothing happens. The moment of uncertainty stretches out and intensifies, becomes unbearable. Perhaps we should lower our hands from our ears and stop waiting? Or perhaps the bang will sound precisely at that moment that we uncover our ears?
***
Cemetery
"My grandmother lived there somewhere." I am showing my son the long apartment building on the right. But it's a very different place now, all renovated and weatherized. I no longer recognize which of the entrances or apartments I would go into and see my grandmother. And it's also strangely abandoned, gray, there's no one to be seen or heard anywhere. There's no light in the windows and no one enters or exits. There is a large cemetery immediately in front of the apartment building, but the graves are no longer visible under the carpet of tall grass. It looks more like a lawn that hasn't been mowed for a long time. I walk among the mounds covering the former tombstones and try to find my grandmother's grave – it was here somewhere, but which of them is it? The inscriptions are somewhere deep under a layer of sod. Moreover, it's already getting dark, and I see that my son has set off on a distant road, hidden by an avenue of trees, on his way back home. I fear that he'll get hit by a car in the dark and I want to call out to him or wave, but he's distant, too distant. I'm left here alone in the ever-deepening dusk.
***
A Message
I shouldn't have opened the text message, but it's too late now. I have been infected. All it took was a quick look at the strange jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols and there was a short-circuit of the mind and a change in behavior. It is a virus spreading from technology to humans, from the display to the eye, from the operating system directly into the synapses of the brain. I feel a quietly growing madness and hopelessness that there isn't a way back. The very consciousness that realizes that this is so tormenting.
***
Illness
Maybe it's not an illness, but it worries me. Sometimes I find a long, thin fiber growing somewhere or the other out of my body. I want to just pull it out, but – like an unravelling spool of thread – it only draws out further. Sometimes I manage to remove or break off a part of the fiber, but the rest remains, and when I try to tear it all out, it hurts. How do I get rid of it? And is it something alien to me, or is it a part of me, something that I should get used to?
***
A Crowd
A strange, strange waking up. Surrounding me a circle of human figures, but those faces! Features blurred as if doubled, the expression vague, absent and the empty eyes fixed somewhere else, but not on me. Do they see me at all? Are they here because of me, or did I find myself among them by chance? They do not react to me at all, but at the same time it is as though I were at the center of their unperceiving attention. The circle that they form around me oppresses me, making me think that maybe I should finally get up. But when I realize that each of them has a hand on me or is touching me with their fingers, as if to hold me back, I startle with a violent jerk and that wakes me up again. Hopefully for real.
Author Bio
Vít Erban has appeared in The Cafe Irreal in Issue 3 (February 2000) and Issue 6 (August 2001), and translations of his texts have been published in the anthologies The Irreal Reader and The Return of Kral Majales: Prague's International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010. He is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Theology of the University of South Bohemia in Czechia, where he specializes in anthropology.