Stains on Hands. First Version.

I’m developing a project for a moment called “Berlin.” I present a part of it here—something that I wrote a couple of weeks ago, a draft for a video. I’m interested in how ones appreciation of experience constantly shifts. Sometimes it seems as though when recalling some mundane event, one doesn’t encounter the main subject, but only some branch, and to that extent, experience seems like more of an infinite network of branches than any single tree.



Original Text

Having merely stepped out of the building, he got the feeling that he’d forgotten about something, but he decided to ignore it, letting everything fall to pieces some other time. He tripped on the stairs and slammed on his hands on the floor. The maneuver was not so convincing, neither for himself nor for the neighbors who were walking up the stairs. They gazed at him strangely but didn’t offer any help to him. Anyway, he cursed out loud to give a sense to the whole scene. He wondered, with the proper intonation, “why do all these things happen to me?” and he imagined how many times he asked the same to himself. As an answer, his head resounded with an important echo, like drums (On the inside wall of the brain, the balconies are packed with women almost crying; good). He felt that it was the answer that he really deserved, and this erased the frustration of not having tripped with greater stupidity.
Getting up, he glanced at the palms of his hands which throbbed with pain and numbness. This time it was real. Red stains like maps appeared and disappeared sliding like liquid in a plastic bag. He scared himself because in those marks he saw no map or liquid in a bag, just faces.
He returned home, hoping that the phenomenon wouldn’t disappear. I’m someone special, I’m something special. He just wanted to get into the bathroom and look at his palms on the reflection in the mirror, to feel them that the incidents were registered or to try to identify some of the faces seen on the mirror. Anyway, he wanted to go to the bathroom with his marks because he knew that this is the place where the most dangerous accidents happened.

The mirror was dirty and the light of the room was weak. The plain situation of the sink extinguished his haste. Slowly he rinsed his hands, switching from warm to cold water knowing that nothing would erase the marks. It was only then that he came to realize what it was that had happened. This wasn’t the first time. And of course, he knew well that it was nothing more than blood beneath the skin, reaction of muscles and such, but an authentic and direct question was build again: who were those people screaming in his hands?

01.01.2008