Rats Fever

„...Na, na, na, na was a son of a preacher man...“

She was defiant from the start. Like a cactus in the desert, that only bends slightly in the wind. She was strong in her anger and with all of her unbearable quirks. 

The first days of her blindness we spent in the local woods. At that time she still seemed kind of positive. But then it began, with spending hours and hours in front of the mirror, pressing her nose against the lukewarm glass. "I cannot see myself anymore. I don't know who I am anymore."

When she entered the street, it felt like she was running against the stream, in unknown directions, in a world that is made for people who can see - a constant reminder of everything that she had lost.

It happened last January during a ski vacation. She, who saw herself as a professional in every way, came off the track when driving down the slope and threatened to hit against a tree. But then she pulled sharply into a left turn and rolled over herself for a while, without any kind of orientation. In the midst of this artless pirouette, she stabbed the left ski pole, into her right eye and full of panic, she pulled on it so heavily, that she tore out her own eyeball.

The one-eyed life didn't bother her that much, she got used to it fairly quickly. But a few months after the healing process, her left eye began to itch incessantly. Nothing seemed to cure it and no doctor knew what to do. And one day, in the onset of mental derangement, she could not stop scratching anymore, and eventually spooned out her left eye as well.

So after the woods came the downward spiral - in shape of a constant miserable brat. It wasn't possible to comfort her, if anything, all pitying gestures, ended up, in even more contemptuous howling. She lost herself and all the words. Until it began to wriggle out of her, while sitting in inconvenient postures, late at night, like a lamenting choir. She never felt like reading, with these signs as letters; the dots and the dashes, athwart, arched and dented, just made her very tired, all the time. And the madness never ended. Her new spleen was it to tap her fingers with a rolling pin.

Me: Who gave you this rolling pin?

She: What on earth is a rolling pin? These things are not called rolling pin!

Me: Of course, those are rolling pins!

She: Oh God, I'm going dumb, I'm going dumb, I'm going dumb!

Then she collapsed and cranked herself like a manic weasel on the floor. She screamed and raged so loud that the neighbors could hear it.

And later, an old Hitchcock movie was playing on TV and she was sitting with crossed legs, in the middle, of the bed, picking feathers from her pillow. "Could you turn that down please. I hear everything twice."

During spring she refused to sleep. She no longer knows how to do it, with no real eyes in her head. She preferred to build tall towers, from old books, all night. At the suggestion that one could read to her, she burst out into awful laughter. "You could read The Reader to me." The sound of her laughter remained in the walls, even after dawn.

She was standing on the highest rooftop of the city and the cool wind was massaging the scalp of her head. Everything was in an unsuspecting state of sleep, while her, with violet blue ballerina decorated feet, were wandering, towards the very brim of the balustrade. A Terrier was barking from somewhere in the distance. She leaned against the railing and faced the endless abyss.

She: I could jump.

Me: Don't do it.

She: But I could.

Then she started: "Maybe I acted kind of childish the whole time, I mean with all the tragedy s**t and stuff... but you know, it's not so easy for outsiders to understand. And actually I do not really care about not seeing anymore. I've been perfectly able to see twenty years of my life, it's all inside of me. It doesn't bother me at all. But there is something else, something, that is way more worse than not to see. There are rats, two, three and sometimes four or five. They crawl over my legs, bite my toes, crawl up over my stomach and even up to my face. It is so unbearable. I can feel them the whole time. Their pressure on me, their bellies, the paws with the corneal claws and their naked tails. It's all so realistic. I just can't ignore them. It's like they are really there. And if they are not there, I can hear them, lurking in their cage, like in Orwell's book, in room 101. They come after me. Eating my flesh. And sometimes it's so intense. Like there is this really big one and its lying on me and suffocating me and I can even feel the slimy sex of this beast. It's like, I'm in prison and I can never escape."

Me: There is always an escape.

She: But not this time, this time it's too much.

Me: There are no rats, I do not see a single rat on you.

She: But what else is it then?