EXCERPT: Davos (4)

Franco thought of what kind of wordless performance he could present to his interlocutors. A dance? Was that goat trying to tell him something with her gush of urine? It produced such a tender sense of vulnerability and empathy in Franco. Isn’t that what is needed? All of these words and reasons did nothing. It was like a water balloon exploding, not linear at all. Maybe that was the trick. Multiple stories all at once. Here it is my friends, everything you need to know, all at once. No, not know. Feeling, not reason, is what is needed, a dance, a gush, an opera in which everyone sang their song on stage at the same time, cacophonous and opaque, but communicating nonetheless, but feeling and empathy, and not knowledge, not reason or argument, flows and fluency. Don’t they see the florid and fruiting fig tree? Franco thought, don’t they see it, and feel it? This is what they need. The noisy fig tree that speaks nothing at all yet says everything.

Now Franco found himself amid the trees, beautiful and terrifying in their number and anonymity. They soared above him and blotted out the light, and trapped the moisture, like big wicks that sucked the water from the earth and the air, storing it in their cells, thousands and millions of cells, in their pulp and in their bark, cells in every twig and stem and leaf. Franco was thirsty and had already drained the measly two bottles of water that he had brought with him. He felt the lightness of dehydration that was thrilling and worrisome at the same time. So different he was from a tree, who could just suck moisture from the air. Maybe he could also, and the moist air felt good on his sweaty skin, but he could still feel the dryness inside of him. His legs felt skinny, as if they weighed hardly anything at all, and again he had the feeling that as he walked he was not really moving forward, but was just pushing off in space, floating, without ever gaining traction that would make forward movement possible. Or he was moving forward, but there was no way of telling, since everything that surrounded him seemed the same, the lack of differentiation in the landscape yielding space without dimension or direction. It was a trick of the trees, and of the oblique road whose slope was not a slope, but exhausting nonetheless. Franco’s thirst was gone, and hunger was a distant memory. He knew then that he was in trouble.