Nightshift in the garden of Eden

Most days I´m an early riser. I wake up earlier than everybody else. If the sun is out, I will just lay in bed a little longer, gazing at those rays of light.

It was different over there. The night shift starts after the sun has set. Still, I woke up early, staring at the changing colors of the ceiling, from terra cotta to absolute dark.

I wake earlier than everybody else, but I´m not a good riser. I always have a hard time making myself leave the bed, and yet, I´m too restless to just keep laying there.

The tip of my nose is always cold when I wake up in the morning. It´s not different when I have to get out of bed to start the night shift: the tip of my nose is cold.

The house is covered in silence. I make coffee and its fragrance fills the kitchen. It soon attracts a few other colleagues. On certain days I want to be free from interactions with humans. You can never expect too much from people.

I get cold easily. Makes me question sometimes if I am human, and not only because my body demonstrates problems with storing heat.

I feel like a failure since I came here. I´m sure that´s just my persona talking. Or maybe it´s ego or downright arrogance. There are different gradations of personhood. 

I´m messing around on an upper level with things that make no sense on a deeper level. I think I still have the ability to record emotional facts. Even sensual. I can construct a convincing surface of what life feels like as opposed to what it is supposed to feel like. But I´m unable to do that here... here, I don´t believe in anything anymore.

There´s a scent of understanding you come away with; this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood and processed. Maybe I didn´t finish the thinking because I can´t judge anything here.

Time to go to work.

I´m driving in the dark; looking for a family. They never wanted to leave and after a few days, they didn´t want to stay. Now they´re lost. I find them eventually. I ask her why they ran. Why didn´t they get in touch with me? She answered that she didn´t remember why they had made that decision.

- “We are not cowards.” She said. “We have a debt to pay, a duty to our country.”

I knew this was a place of exile before I came. A place of banishment; a forsaken place. All I could offer was the idea of shelter in places where they did not belong.

They asked me where I came from: trying to make polite conversation, so the silence didn’t get too loud. I never spoke of the places where I live.

- “We live in fear.” She told me. “A pit, a chasm. My brother was shot and killed and refused a burial.” She cried.

I don´t know what to say and stare at the mold and the peeling paint of the walls: a light hospital green, ages ago.

She shows me the place where her brother has been shot. When I asked questions too loudly, she told me to keep my voice down. I wanted to mark the place. Erect something, anything…

She dreams of an island at night, a place of escape. A place trapped by water, where land was not expected. They never felt home anywhere anymore. Or safe. She held on to the island of her dreamlike it was a promise with a beautiful name.

In the morning the sky greets with dark gloom. The apartment they had been promised was not yet available

- “They hoped we changed our minds.” She whispers.

I rent an overpriced room in a hotel and stayed with them.

She tells me their new house is haunted. They were unhappy. The electricity only came on between 6 in the evening till midnight. Running water was only available for two hours. I went looking for a plumbing engineer, paid him too much money to make the water run. There are words that have no equivalent in English…

They all stayed in one small room. I tried to get the children to sleep early. They didn´t realize yet that they were writing history with their bodies.

They could never get rest in the room, because of the ghosts. The mother, the father, the two-year-old, the five-month-old. No rest for anybody.

The children were pulled awake by invisible hands. A ghostly figure was sighted. It turned out to be me. Restless is a condition of ghostliness; a street ghost haunting the alleys for the dead.

So many died from sickness and hopelessness and broken hearts and death itself. 

An older woman grabs me by my keffiyeh:

- “They die in fours, “she tells me, “Eat with me! I´ll be dead soon.”

She longed for company, even if it was from a ghost hunting the night for the departed.

I drag the dead ones out of demolished and destroyed homes. Bring them to a hole that has been dug, deep into the earth. The grave extends more than 100 meters. 

I stand there for a moment. Parents, siblings: death in fours. They rest quietly now, free from interactions with humans.

Sometimes people throw rocks at me, and other things. After a while, they consciously decided not to wonder about my presence. They simply couldn´t be bothered with a wandering ghost amongst the barely living.

Sometimes a young woman comes to sit with me. Lots of people are holed up in cardboard shacks.

- “They are animals.” I cry.

- “Humans are animals.” The young woman says. She has a point. 

There are cats. Their hairs stand up on end and they yowl at me. I try to steer clear of cats.

The sunlight is blinding. I stand for a moment feeling the brightness through my tightly closed eyelids. The light feels cold, even though it comes from the sun. Maybe the sun is just too far away. Maybe it´s warmer inside the earth.

I brush the dirt off my clothes and return to the office. It´s completely filled with people.

Another young woman makes me tea. I never drink tea! I give it away as soon as she has her back turned.

Not many people look me in the eye. I need to use a toilet, but it turns out to be just too small a stall.

I find more people on the emergency stairs. They lean against the wall. They´re not speaking.

The guns sound more dangerous today; and very close.

Someone wants to jump off the roof. I saw him jumping, I saw him falling, falling, falling ever further. He was laughing. I was late. I didn´t laugh. I couldn’t cry.

I go back to the office. More tea: lukewarm. I give it away again.

It´s only afternoon. I´m so tired. I want to lie down in the office, or the hall, or wherever. I want a blanket and sink into Morpheus' arms.

My whole body is cold. A tremor of energy shudders through the air and flings me against a wall. I could never in a million years, have imagined that it would be like this.

Outside hate rages. Everyone caught in sight gets shot with guns or jacked with sticks or spades, even sprinkled with acid or poison.

People no longer seem sure what they hate. They let me stay on because they need me. I walk cautiously and very slowly through the frigid ripples of attention.

A young woman will bring me tea again. I will give it away again.

Day after day, more people keep coming. Their voices muffled. I hear someone somewhere. Or at least I think I do.

The dim red light of the setting sun streams through the glass of the office´s broken windows. The sunset has expanded until it fills the sky. Raging black waves rippling through the air. The walls of buildings are cloaked in twilight. It´s hard to make out their edges.

Pieces of white paper float in the air. People never turn to look back. They might die tonight and not come back in the morning. I might die tonight and not come back in the morning. Or I might simply leave. No! I cannot…

The night is young, but the darkness still feels fairly light. A man behind me gradually begins to shrink. He dangles for a while. He doesn´t resist or shout. He just quietly slips into death. Almost as if he had been wanting this. Void of spirit to live. He shrugs. It does take power, even to die. His eyes widen and he stares at me: a street ghost, haunting another alley.

It´s all so unreal. I begin to feel hopeless. People who don´t die eat away at themselves.

- “I´m scared, Madam.” A voice whispers to me. “Scared of it all.” He dropped to the ground. His body gave the space around him a wide look. Eventually, he grew cold and stiff. I grew cold. Nobody cried. They no longer cry when they´re sad or angry. Death is simply a fact of life. No sobs, no wailing. People are hollow now. They no longer have the strength to come tumbling. They just sit there, perfectly motionless.

I go around all night. I feel exhausted. I walk soundlessly along the black strip of asphalt. When I come to a house, I open a trap door and wriggle inside. She waits for me there. Her voice is gentle tonight. She asks me if I want a bit of rice in a bit of tea. Something at least… then she remains still; perfectly still.

After a while she breaks the silence: “I have a few crackers too.”

We don´t talk about my work. She makes me speak of other things, of supermarkets and flash sales. Of pharmacies and puppies.

Then we listen to voices in the night. gentle voices, scary voices. We have no idea what any of it means.

- “What´s your favorite food?” she asks.

I can´t answer with alacrity.

A cat comes up to me. A calico with tea-colored stripes.

- “Once my father killed a cat to eat,” she says, “It wasn´t very good.”

All night long, cries and sighs come from outside. At dawn a woman gave birth. The child died soon after it was born. She didn´t cry when she learned the baby passed. Death is a fact of life here.

Some people strangled their children. They did cry. And howl.

Most children are born at dawn. Two other babies were born. A boy. The other a girl. They were very small; so very small.

The sun sets again. The tip of my nose is cold. I have a hard time making myself leave the bed. I make coffee. The fragrance fills the kitchen…

I start making my rounds. The people look very listless; as if they´re dead. They aren´t dead. They are perfectly motionless.

-“Don´t die!” I beg.

-„Not today!“ I pray.

-„ Wait. Please wait! We will go back. One day, we will go back!”

-“Don´t die! Not today“

For a fleeting moment, their faces, otherwise dead, light up.

None of them – none – was ever able to go back before they died.