At Night

And I am lying in bed. The pillow presses down part of my left eye but with the other I can see quite clearly that everything has swung over.       A laughing matter? The frogs are lying dirtydirtydirty dead. If the plate were to fall from the cord, it might well land on my face--hold it, it would fall the other way of course! So a laughing matter anyway? Mammarosa thinks it is. Mammarosa calls it `boundless imagination'.       `What a truly boundless imagination that child has.' Mammarosa bought the frog wallpaper.       When you see everything topsy-turvy, you first grow cross-eyed and then blind, they say. Your eyes sear up. Your pupils start to vibrate very oddly, you get dizzy and nauseous, sometimes it makes you throw up. But it does happen painlessly, they say. It can also be an infection. For instance that at school you drank from the mug from which everyone drinks, the mug by the drinking fountain. Or that you ran through the gym on your bare feet while it houses all manner of vermin, invisible bacteria left there by dirtydirtyfilthy six-graders. Or fleas which manage to enter your head. When someone with bacteria feet walks across the mats and you go somersaulting on those mats, then the bacteria can clot into your scalp, and these bacteria beget fleas again. Once these fleas eat into your brains, you are for it: you start to do ridiculous things, you rant and rave at people, you get attacks, you slay your mother.       The door handle goes up. Mammarosa.       Mammarosa walks across the rug but walks across the ceiling. Her face is a fish head. I know that she is smiling at me, but her mouth is disfigured: her upper teeth are now her lower teeth and vice versa. Her lips curl down, very silly--does she have a harelip? The frogs start to move.       No, I am not asleep yet.       If I am thinking of something. If I want an aspirin to make me sleep. Fish head. Am I ill am I nervous am I angry? Mammarosa's lips gasp for breath, there is some spittle on her upper lip, until her tongue--a snake! a snake!--removes it.       Do fish have lips?       No, I am not thinking of anything.       Are you sure? -noooh, quite sure! Or maybe I am. Mammarosa, I think the frog wallpaper is a bit childish really.       The lips momentarily close. She covers me up. She folds my clothes. She straightens something, a plane or whatever. We will talk about that some other time, when there is more chance to talk, alright?       Suddenly in her got-out-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed voice.       Bye, sleep tight.       Bye.       Bye, sweetheart.       Bye.       Not until now do I notice that the lamp is hanging above her head, that her lips curl up. That she is beautiful, Mammarosa.       Byebye.       The frogs are ugly. I spotlight them one by one with my flashlight. (Actually flashlights are useless. When you shine them into your mouth so that your cheeks turn a very funny red, you don't scare a soul anymore. Everyone already knows the trick, even Mammarosa's friend.) glar. If you accidentally doze off and the flashlight is aimed at your face, your eye sockets scorch away within one hour. First cross-eyed and then blind. In the morning you are dizzy, you think you have woken up in the middle of the night, you cannot see a thing, until you are startled by the cold metal in your hand. Everything topsy-turvy.       A watch that has green fluorescent hands at night, will give you cancer. Scraping out a plastic butter dish will give you cancer. Read it in Elsevier's Weekly--found in the library between the children's magazines.       Murmur of voices downstairs. Mammarosa talking to her friend. The television is on. When I alternately close my left and right eye, the lamp one time does and the other does not in front of the door handle. Pulling up your lower lip, for as long as it touches your nose, for as long until it hurts. Turning on your stomach, the covers over you, and putting your hands between your legs, hugging your pecker until your hand starts to tingle, called going to sleep that is. Sometimes I am a girl.       Don't lie down on your stomach with your hands between your legs: when you fall asleep and your hands tingle, you run a chance that the blood will congeal. The following morning there is nothing left of your hand: it has become a dish cloth, a benumbed, pale and limp rag.       For instance me never looking at the cars in the display case. I try not to let the flashlight shine on the cars, though I know that nice sparks of light bounce back from the bumpers at times, making it look as if they really have their lights on. The cars are motionless when I look at them at night, so ugly motionless. And when I am lying on my left side and all my things slowly but surely turn, the cars get even uglier--they become grinning, helpless and yet dangerous beetles, which let their legs stick to the book shelves--can beetles walk up a wall? Can they, like flies and spiders, stroll along a ceiling?       Don't try to pick up a beetle from the street: these insects have very strange, invisible stings from which poisonous substances are ejected, as soon as they feel threatened. These substances are invisible to people, and you mostly don't feel them on your skin either. But it is very dangerous, it is. You get local blood poisoning, your finger tips start to discolor slightly--you can hardly see it, but it is insidious. After that discoloration, the skin of your fingertips shrivel up. And your nails crumble away. The blood poisoning sees to it that you start to act very nervous, you begin to think all type of things, you think for instance that someone wants to hit you or something.       I am not a boy. All boys constantly pick up beetles and other insects from the ground despite the risk and some boys will squash one of those beetles to a pulp, right between their fingers. Yet they do not get hemophilia. I do not pick up beetles. I see them among my cars and on my books. They vary from big to small--quite pretty. And also unpleasant.       Cars are nice when they can drive.       An upside-down car doesn't drive.       But I do quite often play light on my upside-down books. Books seen upside down look exactly the same as always, except they hang on the shelves, just like all the other things. The more my head rolls off the pillow and lands on the cool, baby-white undersheet, the more my books start to hang. Then I should try lying on my back, says Mammarosa. Then I should try closing my eyes, for I am in bed to sleep, says Mammarosa's friend. Lie on my back. On my back I see the lamp, the underside of the lamp. The lamp that can fall on my head. The lamp hanging exactly above me. Actually, I like the plate on the cord better.       When something falls on your head when you are asleep, the blood pours much faster from the wounds than when you are awake. It gushes past your ears onto the sheets, and in the end you choke in your own blood. Blood Mammarosa bleeds, without pain, without real pain. Another pain. Women have a vagina. I know all about it, she has told me all about it. How it goes. It goes a filthy way. She is lovelysweetlovely in bath, but not between her legs, not the blood hole, the baby hole, the love-making hole. Mammarosa makes love to her friend and therefore that is nice--I know all about it.       And do old women have old brown blood?       Nohoho! (She laughs: Nahaheeno!) Older women do not have that blood anymore. (And she giggles a bit, mutters: boundless imagination.)       But all the others do? (Yes!) Auntie? (Yes!) Remco's mother? (Yes!) The mother of Theo Edward Stephen Fred? (Yes, darling, yes they do.) My--teacher? (Yes, also.)       And animals, do animals have that too?--I want different wallpaper.       My God, I wouldn't know offhand, no, no, I don't think so. Or would they?       At school nobody believes me. Blood is sex, they say. Blood is fucking fucking yuck yuck. When I asked the teacher if animals have it too (the grade again cried fucking fucking yuck yuck!), she asked me where I got all these tales from; said that I was not to say idiotic things. That evening Mammarosa's face was very close, like always when she whispers. She whispered things in my ear which I did not catch but it concerned going to sleep and stupid people and--again-- sleep tight.       Sleepsleep. Frog wallpaper. I like her face best when it is close to mine--so big, so broad: as if I see her in a carnival mirror, one which doesn't disfigure, one that makes me laugh due to her... due to her beauty. Mammarosa's beauty when her breath fans out over my face, when I see her eyes move, from my eyes to my forehead, from my cheeks to my chin, from my lower lip to my eyes little eyes. Sleep.       Take care that you do not fall asleep with your mother's face still swaying in your memory: dreams about fathers and mothers generally turn into nightmares and when, for instance, you dream that your mother has warts on her face and that from these warts all runs a pisslike fluid and the bells at that moment ring twelve midnight bang, then the dream will drip from your mind straight into real life. The following morning your mother is sitting at the kitchen table, sobbing and trembling, with a lot of paper tissues against her face, moist, yellow tissues, as pissgrey as the underpants of the sixth graders in the dressing rooms of the swimming pool fucking fucking yuck yuck.       But Mammarosa's face large and broad with beauty often remains with me. I want for me to get scary dreams.       My pajama seems to have fastened on my skin--everything sticks. My pecker is glued to my skin, disappears in my skin, that's how much I am sweating. Everything sticks away, everything upside down.       There you are, I've got a fever, I cannot sleep, I must get up. The wallpaper frogs are damned well lying with their feet up again--do they want to grab something?--and the lamp is a plate with a cord again.       So I've got a fever. I have to get up, honestly.       Downstairs Mammarosa and her friend are laughing. Laugh away, giggle away: the cozy creaking of my bedroom door cannot be heard. I bump into the door handle, shine the beam of the flashlight in my eyes: all sorts of rose-red little balls that dance, dance. Phew, I switch off the flashlight. All the things on the landing are known. I know what I am touching. I feel my clothes, on the never-used chair, I feel a dress of Mammarosa's--soft and cool from beauty, downstairs Mammarosa laughs, grins, sighs. They do not hear me.       How many children have ever fallen downstairs, down the stairs, boinkboinkboink?How many? Blood, definitely blood (blood is sex, sex blood) on each stair. My bare feet immediately keep sticking to the top stair, sweat, fever feet. I am pitiable, I am allowed to go downstairs--good reason, good reason. A sort of sucking sound when I lift my left foot.       Silence downstairs all at once.       What will they say when I am standing in the room, with squinting eyes and raised upper lip. Come and sit down on the sofa! What's up with you? You would like to have something to drink!--unusual congeniality.       What they say. I have never come down ordinarily, with tramping of feet and very fast. When you cannot sleep you must always steal down the stairs. With sticky-fever feet, with the sudden chill of the dried-up sweat on your back.       Did they hear me? It is quiet, still quiet. Come on, laugh, giggle. Mammarosa's laugh across the width of her face. They have not heard me, I am not being called, there is no sound of movement, I can easily keep standing here for another ten minutes or so, the lowest stair is the one of no return: yes, I am standing in the hallway now. Oh. A vague light from the living room, I can see my fantasy drawings which I hung up myself. Go and make an imaginary animal, said the teacher. How can you draw an animal with its legs sticking up in the air, she asked. Oh yes, that's true, with fantasy drawing everything is allowed, said the teacher.       Now soundlessly open the door of the living room. Clouds prick yellow light into my eyes--pain. Mammarosa and her friend are lying motionless on the sofa, dead or something?--through the slits of my eyes I see dirtyfilthygrubby bareness--cold sweat on my back: cause for laughter-- Mammarosa, not large and broad, but white and faraway, in a knot which frightens me. She puts down her head on the sofa--fish head. She does not say what's up with you, she does not say go and sit down on the sofa--I don't want to be on the sofa, the sofa on which she is lying, Mammarosa with her legs ridiculously curled up, wallpaper frog.--I know all about it. I am not a boy.       `I have scary dreams.'       Translated from the Dutch by Greta Kilburn, Amsterdam, 1996.