TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Rodrigo Fresán

sleep better alone).

And, in the end, there you lie, thinking of being born and of multiplying yourself and (Exit King, king-sized bed) and of dying, already almost outside of space and time; like Lear on that bed in the twilight of midday after dining in the morning. It’s no coincidence that the majority of people, when asked how they would like to die, answer: “In my sleep.” In bed. A living death like the last and oh so lucid dream. A final dose of Dimethyltryptamine (note the participle phonetically equivalent to “trip” in the middle of the name) stored in the pineal gland, provoking that ultimate vertigo of “your whole life passing before your eyes in a matter of seconds” or of “opening the third eye” to a view of the Great Beyond. A summary of publications without ( to be continued . . .) maybe dreaming that you die and never waking up to say, “It was all just a dream.” If the orgasm is le petite mort , then death is the eternal sleep, the rest in peace, the end of the war. That devout “If I die before I wake . . .” that many take for a fearful prayer is, in truth, an expression of desire: that death be sleep and los sueños muerte son and a last-night goodnight. † Death. Death—the act of putting into practice all that theory, memorized throughout a whole life of waiting around for that final exam—that lasts barely a second. Death like a dark punch- line to a blackly humorous and sad joke. Death like an unfinished assignmentthatalwaysgetsturned inandalwaysreceivesapassing grade. Death like an easy final exam. Impossible to give thewrong answer to the question. The question is “What is going to happen to me?” and the answer is “Precisely this.” And on to something else and next in line. And yet, it is so easy to fail the lesson of how 194