The Tent
A brief introduction: I started this story some years ago, and it has lain dormant for far too long. It is an unabashed homage to Thomas Bernhard, one of my favorite writers, whose voice has never left my head since I first read it. He is an imp, a prankster, yet deadly serious, and I consider his art to be a unique sort of mind-virus. While proudly influenced by his style, characters, and settings, I like to think my work here is more than mere imitation. My own sense of humor frames it from the outset, and weaves itself more and more into the prose as the story develops. As the narrator oscillates between paranoia and reasoning (so-called), my own desultory style takes liberties and asserts itself.
This is the first part of a two-part story (this, too, is inspired by Bernhard, by his work Correction). The second half is not yet written; however, just today, while revisiting and ‘finishing’ this first part, I have discovered how the second half will go. But for now, enjoy this first half, which I think functions fine as a standalone piece.
As I stood upon the chair with the rope around my neck, I looked out the second floor window—my elevated position affording me newfound perspective—and saw something that I had never seen before, something which deeply disturbed me, enough to shake me from my resolve. I was disturbed for two reasons. First, that any square foot of the property should be unknown to me was disturbing, for I had owned the property for eleven years. Over those years, I had walked the property daily, first to acquaint myself with it, then as a ritual to ease the anxieties which have plagued me since I was a child. The natural world has always been the only guaranteed remedy for my anxieties; no matter the geography or weather, an hour spent outdoors in nature—alone, I should add—has always served to ease my nerves. Suffice to say that, after hundreds upon hundreds of hikes, I considered myself an expert on the property, acquainted with its generalities as well as its minutest of details. I could, for example, take you to every bird’s nest on the property, and I am at least nominally familiar with every species of flora that grows on the nineteen-point-four acres. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I saw, not a hundred feet from my house, something new, something unfamiliar. Between a dense cluster of trees, in a meager clearing—although I hesitate to call it even that—was an object. Thrown into doubt as to my knowledge of the property, I was further startled to realize what it was that I was looking at. It was a tent, dark green, staked upright in the clearing between the trees, not a hundred feet from my house. My nerves were immediately thrown into bedlam upon recognizing the object as a tent. My vision grew blurry, my knees wobbled, it’s a miracle that I didn’t topple from the chair then and there, although that would have ironically served my original purpose for standing atop the chair. The discovery of a tent on my property, much less a hundred feet from my home, was even more disturbing than the doubt it cast on my knowledge of the property, for the tent implied any number of unsettling questions. Whose tent was it? It was not my tent, never in all my life had I owned a tent. Despite my love for the outdoors, my constitution was not suited to camping, and besides, why would I camp on the property, when my house was never more than an hour’s hike away? Therefore, whose tent was it? Was it long abandoned, perhaps belonging to the previous owners of the property? That could be, yet the tent appeared to be in good condition. It wasn’t torn, barely rumpled. It seemed unlikely to have sat out there for eleven years (or more) without being beaten down by the weather, by the frequent heavy rains we are subjected to in this region. So, it was unlikely that the tent was a relic. Therefore, how long had the tent been there? Had anyone lived there? Was someone living there? Were they down there right now, inside the tent? Why had they set up camp so close to the house? Why had they set up camp at all in the clearing, which was unsuitably cramped for a camp of any kind, if not to be close to my house? The tent was intentionally hidden in the clearing, which suggested that whoever had set it up was aware that they were trespassing, trying to hide. How had they found that clearing in the first place? In eleven years of surveying and hiking my own property, I had never known it was there, so completely hemmed in by the trees. How could a stranger have chanced upon it, much less known about it? Perhaps whoever set up the tent wasn’t a stranger at all, but someone familiar with the property, even more familiar than myself, another deeply disturbing thought, because, as I suggested before, I considered myself an expert on the property, perhaps the world’s foremost expert, not that such a title meant much. Even so, it was a fair assumption, considering the land had changed hands every few years for the past century. Simply by virtue of time, it was fair to assume that I, over eleven years, could have, and in fact had, become more familiar with the property than any of the previous owners, who had only owned it for three, or five, or eight years, before selling it off, disillusioned with its stubborn wildness and its remoteness. Nevertheless, someone more knowledgeable than I had staked a tent in that clearing, and could very well have been living there for years, under my very nose, practically in the shadow of my own home. What kind of person would devote their life to trespassing on someone else’s property? The most obvious answer was a transient, either dispossessed or nomadic, a conscientious objector to modernity. The nomad seemed more likely; the chances that a vagrant could have found his way to my property were more remote than the property itself, which was incredibly remote, inconveniently remote, almost ridiculously remote, a quality for which I purchased it in the first place. Therefore, considering the unlikelihood that a random unfortunate had chanced upon my property, whoever had set up the tent must have some connection to me, because to be on this property for any other reason was untenable, unbelievable, unthinkable, so I reasoned.
This realization gave me great pause—still I stood upon the chair, closer to the edge now, craning vainly left and right so as to better see the tent, the chair creaking with each shift of my feet—because for more than a decade I had had no contact with the outside world, no contact with acquaintances from my professional life, that period of time which had long felt like another life, a past life, a life to which I no longer had any connection. For this reason, the idea that whoever had set up the tent was connected to me in some way was deeply disturbing. Not only did this remind me suddenly of that previous life, which crashed upon me like frothing waves of memories and personal acquaintances and professional contacts, almost knocking me from atop the chair, but this idea, of being possibly connected to whoever had set up the tent, threw me into a crisis, as I began to consider everyone I had ever met. Who from my past could possibly want to track me down out here? Moreover, who would track me down in order to secretly camp out on my property? Whoever they were, they had never made contact with me, and had remained hidden for the entirety of their time on the property. What kind of person would do such a thing, devote their time and effort to an ordeal which, at first glance, seemed patently absurd? It was impossible to say whether the person was more likely to be friend or foe, not only because I had made plenty of each in that past life, but because the behavior was so aberrant. How was I to judge whether a person who secretly trespassed on a remote property was more likely to be a friend or foe to the owner of that property? Nevertheless, my inclination was to consider them a foe, because what reason would a friend have to remain in secret all this time? A friendship withheld might as well not be a friendship at all. Unless—and here I had a real breakthrough of reasoning—the friend was keeping an eye on me, making sure I was all right, or, more alarmingly, protecting me from something.
Suddenly paranoid, I nearly lost my balance again, the chair creaked accordingly, either out of concern for my well-being or indignation at my continued hesitation. What could they, that is, whoever had set up the tent, be protecting me from? There was nothing out here, besides myself, my home, the property, some benign wildlife, and now, whoever had set up the tent. Therefore, if they were a friend, what could they possibly be protecting me from? I had lived for eleven years on the property without incident, without so much as skinning my knee. One couldn’t ask for a safer place to live, away from people, away from pollution, away from fault lines and coast lines and severe weather of any kind, away from predators and venomous vermin, in short, away from anything and everything that could pose a risk to a human being. The idea that whoever set the tent up was a friend, set on protecting me, was quickly becoming implausible. The only remaining explanation was that they were out here to protect me from myself, an explanation which struck me as highly comedic, as I stood atop the chair with the rope around my neck. Not only had they failed miserably to protect me from myself, but they had had the gall to assume that I would kill myself out here. Even if they were right about my inclinations, what kind of person would assume the worst about a so-called friend? If this person was an acquaintance from years ago, why would they have assumed that my moving out here was motivated by morbidity, by a desire for self-destruction? Wasn’t it possible that I had moved out here in order to clear my head, to reflect, to recover some of the sanity I had lost in the madhouse of that previous life, surrounded by noise and pollution and responsibilities? Wouldn’t a person want to believe the best about a friend, rather than the worst? Moreover, what kind of person would remain hidden away while their so-called friend deteriorated further and further until finally mounting a chair and placing a rope around his neck? Even if whoever had set up the tent had done so out of a concern for my well-being, they were either incredibly stupid or hopelessly misguided as to their methods. If they had really wanted to protect me from myself, they would have knocked on my door years ago and said hello, parried my suspicions by answering that they were in the area for a geological survey, or a wilderness retreat, or any number of other believable excuses for being in such a remote place. Such a so-called friend would have dismantled my unspoken hostility, invited themselves in, asked against all etiquette for a cup of coffee, and proceeded to take a seat in the living room. Such a so-called friend would have thereby done much more good than they had done all these years by camping out in the meager clearing. Even an annual pop-in, to my mounting suspicions, would have gone farther to protect me from myself than years of clandestine surveillance from a hidden tent on my property.
Finally, I had to admit that it was no longer plausible that whoever had set up the tent was a friend, and I returned again to my intuition that they were an enemy. Immediately I felt a sense of relief, that is, a sense of being on the right track, that whoever had set up the tent was a foe, secretly trespassing on my property for a nefarious purpose. It answered satisfactorily many questions arising from the situation, for example, why they had remained hidden from me. It made no sense for a friend to hide, yet an enemy had any number of reasons for hiding. The most obvious, of course, were the legal reasons, although a friend was just as subject to trespassing laws as an enemy; however, once discovered, a friend was less likely to suffer prosecution for trespassing than an enemy. Moreover, while a person devoted to camping out on a friend’s property must fundamentally be concerned about the friend, an enemy could have any number of motives for such a scheme. Here my head reeled with the possibilities, my vision temporarily blotted out by a headrush, and I considered for the first time removing the rope from around my neck and stepping down from the chair, in order to collect my thoughts, but I realized that this would mean losing sight of the tent, and that was out of the question. It was of utmost importance that I focus on the tent itself while I considered its ramifications, and this I did, once my vision returned. Now, an enemy could have any number of motives for trespassing, but this was no mere trespassing, but a premeditated trespassing, an organized and exhaustive trespassing. This ruled out any pranksters, who could achieve their mischievous aims in a day (or night), and it also ruled out any would-be murderers, who could achieve their aims in an hour, bursting into my home and bludgeoning me to death, or strangling, or stabbing, or shooting, etcetera. It took no time at all to kill a man, and thus, someone set on my destruction seemed unlikely to have set up the tent. Even in the event that they were a meticulous killer, set on stalking me like prey, the fact that I was still very much alive undermined the credibility of this theory. No, it was clear to me then that whoever set up the tent was not set on my destruction, although this was not as much of a relief as one may think. Not only had I been resolved to destruction only moments before, but the ruling out of the intruder as would-be murderer opened up even more disturbing possibilities.
Assuming that the tent had been there for some time, whoever set it up had had a long con in mind, a scheme requiring patience, endurance, secrecy, and surveillance. They were in it for the long haul, so to speak, which suggested a much more resolved, ingenious adversary. Potential candidates began to creep into my mind, like silhouettes upon a wall. The first was a journalist, perhaps spurned in years past, denied what would have been a career-changing interview, and turned thereby into a resentful enemy set upon destroying my reputation and legacy. It should be noted that, despite abandoning it without warning, I had left that previous life and the world-at-large with plenty to occupy it in my absence, more than enough books and essays to render my actual presence in society unnecessary, and indeed, obsolete. No doubt this hypothetical spurned journalist was set on smearing my name with a career-defining exposé on my true, scandalous reasons for abandoning society. For this purpose, they had set up shop on my property, surveilling me for any and all evidence of scandalous behavior; and this explained their extended presence, because, unfortunately for them, I was up to nothing at all. My life consisted of the most mundane routines, common to any given retired person of my station and temperament: a late rise, a cup of coffee, a perfunctory breakfast, a walk in the woods, and hours upon hours of stagnant soul searching and regret-mongering. Despite my disturbed state of mind, a smile spread across my face, as I imagined the frustrated would-be mudslinger spending day after miserable day spying on me from the meager clearing, perhaps even following me through the woods, clumsily no doubt, not nearly as accustomed as myself to the surprisingly rugged terrain of the property, only to come up empty-handed again and again, wasting away inside the increasingly pungent tent. I saw him (it was a he, unquestionably, as only a man would commit himself to such petty revenge), peering through each and every window of the first floor, spending hours tracking me through the house with bated breath, waiting for me to betray lecherous and/or occult habits. Likely he had circled the house multiple times, with his nose to the ground, searching for evidence of a hidden basement, but there was no basement, not even a measly cellar, just like there were no satanic rites or lecherous behaviors to discover whatsoever. I was and am a disillusioned old man, with nothing to hide, and while I make no claims of a balanced or healthy temperament, my idiosyncrasies were well-documented before I left the world, as much a part of my legacy as the letters and literature. So, if whoever had set up the tent was a begrudged person set on revenge, I could rest easy, because I had nothing to hide, except, of course, everything, in a general sense.
This afterthought snapped my smile like a twig. In my paranoiac grandeur I had neglected the more likely bent of this hypothetical journalist. They weren’t an enemy at all, but rather a desperate, hungry professional, hellbent on breaking a story about the retired writer. Certainly, if scandal were uprooted, they would thank the stars, but it was not the only angle they were interested in. The rascal was hungry for any and every detail about my life out here, and it was in order to collect these details that they had set up the tent, camping out on the property for who knows how long, collecting a damning dossier of details from which to construct a career-defining piece on my life in self-imposed exile. The thought of this ambitious character was far more disturbing than that of the spurned journalist, and served to immediately displace the latter from my mind. The hunger for success is quite possibly the most sustainable motivation for a person, even more so than revenge, and this meant that the ambitious journalist would be less likely to give up than their begrudged doppelganger. Moreover, they were unlikely to be discouraged by a lack of discoveries, since anything and everything was ripe for their project. The mudslinger was essentially digging for gold where it did not exist, whereas the gossipmonger was content with dirt and clay, and this meant that each and every action I took (or did not take) out here could be used against me. No longer could I take solace in not having anything sordid to hide, because for this journalist, my very exile was something to hide, a sort of admission of guilt, which they had taken it upon themself to expose. They could be any sex at all, as the hunger for success festers equally in everyone. Unfortunately, the now mutable sex of the journalist did nothing to ease my anxieties, and I sought to rule out the likelihood of this latest hypothetical trespasser.
If there were such an individual, interested in writing an article about my exile, would they not have first attempted to contact me, to conduct an interview and write the article in the conventional manner? It seemed absurd that anyone’s first course of action would be to secretly camp out on my property and spy on me in order to gather the necessary material for an article. Of course, no such person had ever contacted me, not in my eleven years on the remote property, although it is true that I did not have a telephone, or indeed, a mailbox. I did, however, have a front door, and again, just as it seemed unlikely that whoever set up the tent was a friend who had never thought to knock on my front door to say hello, it now seemed as equally unlikely that a journalist set on writing a story about me would have camped out on my property without first having knocked on my door and asked for an interview. Then again, it could be that my reputation had preceded me; in that previous life, I had maintained a notoriously rigid stance on interviews, conducting only a handful in thirty years. That could easily explain the absolute lack of contact I had received in my eleven years on the property, and could also explain why a journalist wouldn’t bother to knock on my front door. They had figured (rightly, almost certainly) that I remained hostile to interviews, and decided that their best course of action was to set up camp and observe me, remaining hidden so as not to disrupt the ordinary state of affairs, like an anthropologist taking notes on an exotic culture. The only catch was that, as a specimen of humanity, my habits were so mundane as to border on the maddening, even for me, more so for an observer, and more so yet for any eventual reader. While a hypothetical journalist might initially be titillated by the novelty of trespassing and surveilling a mark such as myself, their excitement would rapidly erode. For instance, what kind of person could watch an old man brew a cup of coffee, taste it, pour it down the drain, then brew another, following the exact same procedure, two to nine times, before getting it right, every morning, week after week? Granted, such a sight may be interesting the first, or second, or even third time, but watching this ritual unfold ad infinitum would bore even the most pedantic voyeur. The same could be said of all my routines. Even my walks, which provided the sole source of day-to-day variety, were destined to repeat themselves over the course of a month, not only due to the limits of the property, but on account of my diminishing health, which kept me on the well-worn trails and prevented me from trailblazing through the woods as I did years ago.
As my reasoning gained momentum, I felt a triumph rising within me, and finally realized how to defeat the hypothetical journalist. If whoever had set up the tent was someone looking for a story, they never would have lasted more than a month, on account of the monotonous nature of my routine in exile. Either they would have given up, realizing there was no story to be had, or they would have gathered all the details they needed within a week, perhaps even a day, and headed back to civilization. The tent was thus a testament to their work ethic (in case one, insufficient) and their resolve (in case two, unnecessary). In either case, the tent was surely vacant, and its good condition was due to the fact that it was protected from the elements and had barely been used, before being abandoned.
At last, the hypothetical journalist could be dispelled from my mind; however, immediately behind them was another, similar snoop, this one clad in the nondescript clothes of an FBI agent. To believe in this character required an even more conspiratorial mindset―no great leap given my agitated state―which, once adopted, required that I entertain this latest character’s legitimacy. In many ways, a hypothetical government spy would operate similarly to the journalist, laying low in order to observe and collect information. If the government had decided to spy on me, my circumstances would have necessitated such a method, due to my remote location and my late rejection of modern technology. Without phones to tap or internet to hack, what other option did the government have to spy on me, besides dispatching an agent to the field, that is, to the woods, of my property? The more dubious question was why the FBI would want to spy on me in the first place. To my knowledge, I had never rubbed shoulders with foreign powers, or involved myself much with politics in general, although plenty of my work was subtly or overtly sympathetic to communism. I had certainly never spoken well of the government, in fiction or in person, but so what? Miraculously, the first amendment still stood, insofar as I was aware. This caveat gave me pause, for I had ceased to pay attention to the outside world since retiring to the wilderness. I shuddered to think what could have happened in eleven years, three elections, to the increasingly volatile country I belonged to. It could easily have become a fascist state, a state seized by nationalistic, quasi-religious conservative fervor, a McCarthyism for the 21st century. If so, there was no doubt the government would have it out for me, seeing as my entire oeuvre was built upon a hodgepodge of atheism, skepticism, liberalism, socialism, nihilism―all the isms sure to flag me as a dissident and possible domestic terrorist. Of course, I was and am approaching seventy years of age, but that meant nothing to these people, these hypothetical powers-that-be, barely capable of rational thought in the first place, set on keeping tabs on every possible instigator and suppressing them, if necessary. Suddenly, it seemed incredibly possible that whoever had set up the tent was employed by the government, with the sole purpose of keeping tabs on me. The fact that I had yet to feel their influence did not reassure me. A literal spy would have no qualms about camping out for years on end; for all I knew, whoever had set up the tent was accustomed to exactly that, and had been called in for their expertise in prolonged surveillance. A trained survivalist no doubt, this character would have no trouble living in that tent indefinitely, a fact which neutralized, to my horror, a rhetorical trump card I had been holding, namely, how anyone could survive for an extended period out here in that tent, without access to amenities or food. The journalist would have had to pack enough supplies for their entire stay, but a veteran survivalist could easily find what they needed on the property, between the wildlife and the many species of edible flora. Not to mention, if it came to it, the agent could easily sneak into my house to procure whatever they needed, whereas a journalist was unlikely to have the skill set necessary to gain access to my home, without exposing themself. The more I thought about it, the more sense this character began to make, the more real the survivalist spy became. It explained so many things, quite logically, for example, how whoever set up the tent had discovered the meager clearing. Previously, I had failed to imagine someone who could know the property better than I, yet who was more likely to discover something I had missed than a survivalist, perhaps even trained guerrilla fighter?
The hypothetical agent’s case was becoming ironclad, their silhouette in my mind becoming clearer; however, there still remained the question of why me, a question I had thus far answered only provisionally. Even if I had been deemed a dissident by a fascistic government, my circumstances should have ruled me out as a political liability. Had I not forsaken phone access, internet access, indeed, access of any kind, to the outside world? In a way, I was already dead to the world, having ceased to exist eleven years ago, when I abandoned that previous life, along with all its relationships and connections. What manner of political subterfuge could I possibly be cooking up out here, two hours from the nearest ramshackle village? Try as I might to find one, the crucial question of ‘why me’ had no reasonable answer. Therefore, there was no reason to think that the tent had been set up by a surveillance agent of the FBI. I was a person of no consequence, and such people do not get spied upon by the government, even if they were once a literary instigator, persona non grata.
Thus, another hypothetical intruder was dispatched, already dissipated in my mind, yet still I stood upon the chair with the rope around my neck. The scene outside the window had not changed, though it was impossible to gauge how much time had passed since I saw the tent. Calmly yet impatiently, as one awaiting the doctor’s return in a sterile room, I waited in anticipation for another possible suspect to occur to me, eager as I was for a new hypothetical adversary. Briefly, the image of a private investigator occurred to me, a near-exact amalgam of the journalist and the government spy. Ostensibly, any interested party could hire a private investigator to camp out on my property, with any number of intentions, all ultimately similar to those of either the journalist or the powers-that-be. With a lash of self-chastisement, I cursed myself for my intellectual laziness. I was but variating on a theme, the core of which I had already denounced. No, whoever had set up the tent was no mere information gatherer, that much was clear, yet why else would a person secretly camp out on my property?
Inspiration struck, then, as it often does on the brink of failure, as a distant yet approaching idea rescued me from intellectual limbo. Whoever had set up the tent would possess one quality above all, a quality necessary to the task, regardless of motive or competency. That quality was patience, that which cannot be learned, cannot be brute-forced, cannot be outmaneuvered or faked. Whoever had set up and lived in the tent must possess an olympic patience, not only to have endured the close quarters and tedium of the meager clearing, but to have endured me as their mark and company, an old man slow to do anything, slow to rise, slow to start the day, a slow eater and a slow walker. Even before my old age, I was known for my torpor, stupefying many an eager fan and coquettish bon vivant with my glacial conversation and demeanor. Whoever had set up the tent was not there by accident, and thus likely familiar with every facet of my reputation, including my torpor, yet this had not dissuaded them in their mission. Therefore, they must be someone of unbreakable, extraordinary patience. My mind hinged on this point, and, with a somersault, answered itself with a rhetorical question which reduced me to trembling. Who was more patient than death himself, that arbiter of inevitability, loitering in the blind spot of our life until the crucial moment when he steps forward to inform us that our time is up? Without a glimmer of malice, death waits sixty, seventy, eighty years, content to hide between the lines until stamping the final period upon life’s story. Don’t misunderstand me, I was certainly not imagining that the literal grim reaper had set up the tent in the clearing, although that thought provided a delightful, momentary farce: Death as a humble trespasser in my own backyard, living off the land like an outdoorsman, calmly awaiting the day when he would, for the first and last time, approach the house of his ignorant host and inform him of his imminent, incontestable expiration. Even more delightful was the irony that I had only seen Death’s tent from the threshold of suicide. Perhaps Death was pulling his hair out just now, wondering what the hell I was doing up here, poised on the edge of the chair with the rope around my neck, some number of minutes past my expiration date. The premise could easily support an absurd play, perhaps even a short story, but was insufficient for my purpose, that of theoretically hammering out the motive and identity of whoever had set up the tent, with my most trusted tool: cold hard reasoning, simple logic.
No, the trespasser was not Death incarnate, but rather a human parasite, or, more charitably, an opportunist, patiently awaiting the inevitable death. In short, whoever had set up the tent was waiting for me to die, and in this way, might be considered a friend of death, keeping the reaper company. To what end was this mysterious character awaiting my death? Perhaps they were set on commandeering my house and property, which, while remote—incredibly, inconveniently, sometimes disturbingly remote—were still quite valuable in their own right and appealing to a certain type of person, in this instance a shameless vagrant who would rather squat in a dead man’s home than make any effort to secure his own means. He was like a shiftless hermit crab, who, rather than seek out his own shell, was waiting for me to die so that he could scuttle into mine. The scheme would eventually require some action on his part, as my body would have to be disposed of; however, this would be no problem at all, given the acreage of the property. Moreover, were I to die, the would-be squatter would have all the time in the world to dispose of me and cover up my death, since it could be years before anyone would come asking. It was unlikely that my absence would be noticed in the ramshackle village, so seldom did I make the trip. If anything, the bank or some other bloodsucking institution would eventually realize something was amiss, when I failed to pay a newly-devised property tax, or respond to a summons for a second rate honor or ceremony, but by then I’d be a worm-eaten carcass with fungi for brains.
So, the would-be squatter really couldn’t have found a better mark than myself, a retired writer who lived in the remotest of locations—a writer with well-documented suicidal ideations, I should add—in self-imposed exile. I was not particularly wealthy, having spent much of my savings buying the property, tearing down the old house, and building a new one, but for someone with nothing, my circumstances could be enviable, at least on the surface. I then leapt forward in time, beyond my own death, to the summer day—clearly I would die in summer, that most treacherous of seasons—when the squatter would take up residence in my former home. What a surprise he was in for—and again, this character was a he, unquestionably, a hyena-faced ragamuffin with bags beneath his eyes and a disgusting, twig-strewn beard—as the weeks bled quietly into each other and became months, the clouds disemboweled by the autumn winds and the sky concretizing into an imperious slab as winter approached, the property becoming a penal colony for one, the house a prison cell, unforgiving for even one accustomed, such as myself. For anyone less prepared, that first winter could very well be a death sentence. As soon as one rose, the daylight was already gone, time marked as much by the infernal chiming of the clock as by the chattering sound of one’s own mind. Who knew what measures the naive squatter would resort to, if he had neglected to store up the appropriate foodstuffs to last the deaf, dumb, cruel winter.
I remembered then my own first winter at the property, five months that I barely survived. Caught off guard by the October snows, I had told myself that they were a fluke, a preview of what was to come, and that as soon as they relented I would set off for the village to stock up for winter—only they weren’t a fluke, they never relented, and by December I had already eaten most of my food, having told myself day after day that there was no need to ration, the snow was sure to break tomorrow. On Christmas Day, I sucked on raw oats, having lost electricity the night before, and by New Year’s, long out of firewood, I was burning furniture in the fireplace, systematically reducing my living room into a barren den. Still, I was hopeful, convinced that the worst was over, despite any reason to believe so. Without electricity, time had become an abstraction which collapsed as soon as I ceased to concentrate on it. The world beyond the frosted windows became a concept, too, rooted in memory rather than reality. The first floor, where I had taken up residence on account of the buffeting winds and rattling window panes upstairs, was entirely snowed in; silence clotted the air, as if I was buried alive, a desperate man gnawing on his last few moments of existence. Upstairs offered no relief, either, every window blighted out by an onslaught of white, all perspective erased by a blinding void, a sight not worth the calories it took to ascend the stairs. And so it went, that first winter on the property, my mind and body pared away to splinters of their former selves, as I became a husk, an animal slowly starving beside the embers of my material life—
But enough of that! This isn’t the past and I’m not dead yet, so let me return to the hypothetical squatter, who pitched the tent in the meager clearing and is awaiting my death, with admirable and alarming patience. His motive is clear: to possess what is mine, and the logistics are not impossible. After all, if I can make it into the ramshackle village every few months for supplies, so can he. He has remained hidden because he must, and as to why me, it could merely be that I am a man with a house and property in this incredibly remote place, and I am sure they speak of me in the village from time to time, not by name of course, but as that reclusive foreigner who lives on that damned property in the middle of nowhere, who only comes into town when he absolutely must and when he does never speaks a word to any single person, as if he were better than everyone, despite his ragged clothing and bent-double shambling way of walking. Yes, it’s quite easy to imagine a group of villagers crammed into a rotting booth in the only bar in town, spinning wild yarns about the fool who lives on that damned property, barely able to throw their crude gesticulations this way and that without knocking over the empty and half-filled steins which cover every square inch of the rotting table, after all, it’s only natural to wonder about such things, and there’s little else to do in such a ramshackle village but gossip and drink so naturally the topic of the foreigner arises from time to time, especially when he hasn’t been seen in many months and people start to wonder, do you reckon he’s finally kicked the bucket up there in that monstrous house, if any winter could kill a man, it’s this winter, ain’t that the goddamn truth, and even easier to imagine than this conversation is the hypothetical squatter, drowning his last euros and sorrows in warm beer at the bartop, where he can’t help but overhear—it’s not as if those in the booth are having a hushed conversation, after all, why would they, it’s a topic which everyone in the ramshackle village has discussed at one point or another, and besides, they’re not rooting for the foreigner’s death, merely speculating it, in a perfectly harmless and natural conversation whose only function is to pass the godforsaken long winter days—mention of the foreigner who lives all alone in the middle of nowhere and could die any day, seeing as he’s getting on in years and has chosen a most inhospitable and remote place to live while also rejecting all ties of community and the outside world. Yes, it’s logical to imagine the poor sap’s ears pricking up, his beer-addled consciousness seizing onto that one phrase, do you reckon he’s finally kicked the bucket up there, his forehead unplastering itself from the sticky bartop and his crossed eyes uncrossing as he musters his remaining shred of awareness to focus on the conversation booming from the rotting booth, if any winter could kill a man, it’s this winter, and he shouts a cheers to that, or what he thinks is a cheers but is actually a garbled sputtering of nonsense and saliva, which the bartender politely ignores and which the villagers in their crammed booth hardly notice, glancing towards the poor drunk sap at the bar with equal parts disgust and pity, another goddamn foreigner sure to die any day now, why do they all feel the need to come here just to kick the bucket, can’t they die in their own country, they say, returning to their conversation with renewed passion, meanwhile the hypothetical squatter has come alive, slightly sobered by the rusted cogs in his brain grinding those two phrases together in his head, do you reckon he’s any winter could kicked the bucket kill a man this winter, over and over until he can’t ignore it, this is what he’s been waiting for, the chance of a lifetime, for once he’s had a stroke of luck in his godforsaken life and he isn’t going to waste it, he must seize this opportunity, so he stands up from the bar with all the dignity he can muster, his jaw set hard with the effort it takes not to wobble, not to falter, as he triumphantly gestures to the bartender that he wants to settle up, removing without wavering a wad of euros from his pocket with impressive grace, deciphering the bill which the bartender places in front of him, the single hardest thing he’s ever had to do in his entire life, his eyes swimming with tears, tears of joy to finally have a path forward, a chance for a house, for property, for a life, even if it is somewhere incredibly remote, inconveniently remote, somewhat ridiculously remote, although for now he’s glad for all that, as he settles the bill and gestures generously to the bartender to keep the pitiful change, because if this place wasn’t so remote there’d be no hope of that foolish man dying in his monstrous house and leaving it all to me, the hypothetical squatter thinks gratefully, nearly weeping with joy as he exits the bar, the path before him for once crystal clear, despite the tears which all those present take to be the pathetic tears of a hopeless case, soon to be found dead in a snowdrift, but which are in fact the tears of optimism and purpose.