did nathan just saay "darkness overcomes me"?!

The Heat, the Darkness, the Heat

I have lain in my bed for fourteen days. With pneumonia. I swear to myself that the sloshing around inside my chest cavity that I am convinced that I feel is purely psychosomatic. I look to E., who is sitting on the black leather chair in the corner.

"I know I'm dying," I say. Her gaze does not move from straight ahead, and her eyelids don't flutter from their position, halfway covering her eyes. Between strands of damp hair, I can see her forehead gleaming red.

Later, in the night time, I look out the window and, above the expanse of bricks and windowsills, I catch a glimpse of the sky. From this angle, on my bed, I can just barely make out the dense hazy fog that drenches everything with blackness, and behind it, a faint glow where I imagine the moon is shining strongly. I close my eyes and then I open them again, and then I close them again and keep them sealed shut. I try to imagine that I live somewhere between the top of this great cloud and the bottom, somewhere in which black fog extends around me in every direction, and where no matter how hard I flail and claw at the air, I can never get anywhere.

Early in the next afternoon, E. walks in to the room, the top half of her white skirt sticking in the heat to her thighs. As she hands me a tray, made neatly with small plates, she scratches the back of her neck with her other hand. I pick up a bit of cool rice with two chopsticks from the plate on the lower left, and I try to ignore the pain in my chest as E. crosses her arms and watches me chew it.

The Darkness, the Heat, the Darkness

Darkness overcomes me, and the heat settles softly in thin layers like disembodied kitten paws. When did this happen, this transformation from light to dark? Was I sleeping?

No. That doesn't make sense, the light of dreams is a dull, artificial luminescence, the cold flicker of underpowered fluorescent bulbs along a dingy white hallway. This tranformation from light-- this light was no light of dreams! What I've just left was the penetrating radiance of the... sun? Or maybe it was a tanning bed. EIther way, I should have been wearing a blindfold.

But it doesn't matter now. My eyes are no longer worth protecting, because I'm lying in the kind of darkness where I'm quite sure, on a rational level, that I'll never see anything again.

And with the darkness, that stifling, inescapable heat! Now pressing down like a column of kitten paws, stacked forty meters high in a silo. It occurs to me that this is my first time in a silo, although I hadn't hitherto noticed the absence of this experience in my life, however illuminating. I decide to relax for a while out here on the blazing prairie, resting my eyes without bothering to close them.

The Heat of the City

I lie on the black and white tiles of the kitchen floor on my side so that my right cheek is halfway between a black tile and a white tile. My right eye is forced closed by the pressure from the floor on that side of my face, but my left eye looks outwards, towards the refrigerator. It is open slightly, and the scant modest cool air is wafting from the open vegetable drawer right onto my head. Once in a while a bead of sweat drips from my hair onto my nose or into my eye or onto the floor, and my left eye darts upwards, landing and focusing on the half-empty pint of heavy cream that sits in solidarity on the top shelf of the refrigerator.

E. walks up behind me. I can tell it's her because she and I are the only ones home. Her footsteps stop inches from my head, and I watch above me as her torso bends over towards the refrigerator.

"We're out of food," she says, looking straight down at my head. Then she yawns, leans back up, and walks away.