Fighting

One noon, just as the weather was about to turn fair, I opened the window on the second floor and extended a bamboo pole all the way down to the clothesline on the first, trying to hook a T-shirt and pull it up. I wanted to put it on and head out the door. But it came crawling up instead—quickly, impossibly quickly, like a shrunken piece of clothing I couldn’t shrug off. Just as I was about to get hold of the shirt, it slid along the notches of the pole and reached the narrow gap between my fingers (relying solely on its own smooth, self-contained liquidity), and finally bored its way into the center of my palm—fully unfurled, fully naked, not in the least dry, not in the least shy. The shirt meanwhile fell back down to the first floor.

I had to turn my palm upward to look at it. The lump was green with a hint of yellow, white yet nearly transparent, constantly shifting toward some unripe degree of translucency. This cycle of expansion and contraction in its color was the rhythm of its breathing. It kept breathing, spreading out and wrinkling back in, performing a monotonous motion again and again. I believed it was sucking nutrients from the top layer of my palm while excreting at the same time. My palm felt astringent; if I tasted it I would know it was like a lagoon—but better not. One could already judge the rising salinity by its color.

It wrestled with my palm in a deadlock, even though my hand had never wanted to host it or wrestle with it. On the contrary, I very much wanted to get rid of it, but couldn’t exert any force. My strength wasn’t entirely drained yet, but how does one apply force to such a being? My palm couldn’t crush it—it was too fragmented, too viscous, like the tears of adolescence. And its gelatinous matter possessed a density slicker than skin, and also a liquidity: it could scatter at any moment and regroup again. Such guerrilla tactics came to it as naturally as breathing, as naturally as hide-and-seek. It was in fact a “they”: endless molecules meant endless hiding places, endless demands and exits. And so it licked with bottomless greed; they sucked nutrients shamelessly, almost like a jelly gaining bulk as it swims. All the bacteria belonged to them.

Later I tried opening my hand completely, stretching it into a repellent arc wide enough to shake it off, and I flicked my hand (as though chopping vegetables), attempting to make it understand that the tense thing deep in my mind was a restless desert, not a dumpster, not a pool—there was no place for it here. But it was useless. Because of its diligent extraction, the one growing thirsty was me; I grew more and more slack, almost losing courage. Especially when I realized it had created enough folds and creases on my palm to give its appendages hooks and purchase, the palm began to remain permanently open, upturned. Its victory was sticky and secure. Its mobility depended solely on when it grew bored of my weakness and began searching for another place to parasitize.