LITMIR.BIZ

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      Still adrenalised, I hefted the sack of dry food from the larder, fetched a fork (the obvious drawer, obviously), raked the lumpy brown treats into the bowls, and sprinkled the biscuit bits over the portions. The cats were already tucking in as this finishing garnish was applied.

      With the recent feline acrobatics still on my mind, I wandered over to the scene of the feat. The floor glowed in golden perfection – it was clearly necessary for the stunt. On a whim, I walked to the front door and kicked off my shoes. Toeing the floor, its silken finish betrayed only the tiniest natural imperfections of grain and warp; it felt almost frictionless.

      The decision was made by some over-ambitious subcommittee in the lower portions of my brain and failed to pass through the proper scrutiny procedures before the action it outlined was already under way. I braced, devoted the slightest of moments to a complex calculation of forces in motion, and launched myself down the corridor. After four and a half paces at the maximum acceleration I could muster, I braked, laid my stockinged feet flat on the wood and locked into a slide to the far wall.

      Some twenty or thirty minutes later, the pain in my left knee and big toe had – aided I believe by a broad-ranging swear-word monologue – subsided from crippling agony to merely irksome.

      By the time I had recovered from my pratfall and unpacked my bags it was early evening. The light had yet to die in the sky but the sun was low. I made a sandwich with some cheese and salami from the fridge and opened the bottle of wine that Oskar had left for me. I ate on the sofa with the TV on BBC News 24. The rhythm and jangle of rolling global news is an odd comfort, but the flat was filled with British accents and familiar branding. The repetition of bulletins and headlines was soothingly metronomic, a lullaby more than an alert. Rolling snooze.

      I don’t know how long I slept on the sofa, or the exact time I woke, but it was night in the city outside and the room was washed with the Lucozade orange of sodium street lighting. Travel and unfamiliar places can be exhausting, and I was more tired than I had realised. One of the cats was standing on the sofa next to me, regarding me with a quizzical air.

      ‘Meow?’ it said, tilting its head to one side.

      ‘Yeah,’ I said, rising slowly to my feet and stretching. ‘You want to go out. Time for bed.’ Several joints complained as I twisted to free my watch hand from its awkward position. I was neither sitting nor lying; just sort of slumped. I must have dozed off. Struggling to my feet, I scooped the puss off the sofa and walked it over to the front door where its partner was waiting like a partygoer holding a taxi for a friend. They needed no encouragement to disappear into the night.

      DAY TWO

      There is a moment between sleeping and waking where one is free. Consciousness has returned, but awareness has yet to rip away the thin screen between the waker and his surroundings, his reality. You float free of context, in no place – not sleeping, not fully awake, not at the mercy of the unknowns of the subconscious, and not yet exposed to the dull knowns of care and routine. It is at this point, between two worlds, that I think I am happiest.

      For a second, I was disoriented, uncertain of my location. I was surrounded by white, a bubble in an ocean of milk. Then, the details began to resolve. I remembered that I was in Oskar’s flat, under his white ceiling, under the peaks and troughs of his white duvet, on his white sheets and pillows.

      The regime in Iran tortures with white. Its jailers dress a prisoner in white clothes and place him in a featureless white isolation cell, filled with white light. Food – white food – is served on white paper plates, brought in by guards all in white, wearing white masks. This becomes unbearable for the prisoner, an almost-total deprivation of the senses. Snow blindness. A disconnection from the limbs, from scale and perspective – freedom from context as hell, not bliss.

      It was a perverse torment for an Islamic country. I had heard that, under Islam, perfection is the preserve of the Divine. Striving for perfection is sinful pride. Imperfections are deliberately introduced in artworks as a gesture of humility. In each of those fabulous abstract Islamic decorative patterns, there is a piously deliberate mistake, a flawed iteration.

      How those prisoners must crave that imperfection. A mark on the wall, a shadowed crevice, a stained ceiling tile. Apparently it is enough to unhinge the mind – enough to make one do anything to escape that featureless room.

      ‘Why do they dislike me?’

      ‘Oh, Oskar, they …’

      I wanted to say: Oskar, they don’t really dislike you, they just don’t really like you, you’re not like them, and you’re not an easy person to like. I didn’t say that.

      ‘… What sort of question is that?’ I said at last. ‘They’re not out to get you.’

      ‘I just do not understand the stealing of the vodka,’ Oskar said, gesturing at the bottle he had brought with him, which was now heavily depleted. We had been drinking for hours, and my guest was showing worrying signs of being a maudlin drunk.

      ‘You should know better than keeping it in a shared fridge,’ I said.

      ‘It is the only way to keep it chilled,’ Oskar said. He looked almost comically morose, like Droopy the Dog, summoning up hitherto unsuspected jowls.

      ‘I don’t know, mix it with Coke or something.’

      Oskar wrinkled his nose. His lip kinked in disdain. ‘I prefer it neat.’

      I sighed. ‘It’s a shared kitchen. You have to compromise. Live and let live.’

      ‘But they do not “live and let live”, they leave a mess, they leave the dirty plates …’

      ‘They’re students,’ I said wearily. ‘So are you, so am I. Relax.’

      Oskar frowned. ‘And this is relaxing?’

      Fogged by vodka, it took me a moment to register that he had asked a question. ‘What?’

      ‘This,’ he said with a languid gesture around my room. ‘This is relaxing?’ I tried to see what he was indicating and failed. ‘Well, it’s relaxing to have a drink with a friend …’ I said. Oskar was unnerving me. I remembered that this was the first time I had seen him drunk. He was an unknown quantity.

      ‘No, no, no,’ Oskar said. His voice rose and he became energetic, rising from his chair, pacing the floor. ‘This! Your room! The way you live! This chaos!’

      This took me by surprise. In another frame of mind I might have been offended, but instead I simply found myself surveying the room again, trying to see through Oskar’s eyes. The open bottle of vodka stood on my desk, or rather stood on the small canton of desktop not lurking beneath a thick carapace of books, papers and assorted detritus. Bookmarks bristled like tattered standards from forgotten wars, or the books themselves lay prostrate, open, held in the middle of a thought that could never be retrieved. Paper was scattered everywhere, but little of it had been fully used. Instead, each sheet bore just a couple of discarded sentences, or an arcane note, its meaning lost. Tired biros lay like pick-a-sticks. A plate, scattered with crumbs and waxy traces of peanut butter, lay atop one heap. A Frisbee lay at the bottom of another, and I had a vague recollection that it had served as an ashtray before being covered in notes. Another impromptu ashtray, formerly the lid of a jar of gherkins, now spilled cigarette butts behind the desk, into the lair of a medusa of extension cords. Above it all, my angle-poise shone cyclopically like the fire brigade floodlights at a midnight motorway catastrophe. The rest of the room displayed variations of the disarray of the desk in clothes, books, posters, bedding and the worthless paraphernalia that early adulthood attracts – dancing Coke bottles, inflatable guitars, purloined pint glasses, incense holders, broken CD cases, novelty bottle openers, a crippled cafetière.

      I shrugged. ‘I know it’s untidy …’

      ‘It is not just the room,’ Oskar said. ‘A room is not just a room. A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence. Either conscious’ – and he dropped dramatically

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