TE23 Double Feature

The Lamentations of Zeno

Ilija Trojanow

very foundation of life. They don’t give a damn, just like most of us, they won’t rest until they’ve consumed polluted squandered destroyed everything. I left the following morning. In the next valley over, the surviving ice surfaces had been shrouded with white burlap, under which an emaciated glacier was emitting its death rattle. I felt like a doctor in a hospice. We called it “swimming”— swimming in the river of ice. When we dared drop into the moulins, the glacier mills, to use them as chutes, trusting ourselves to the twists and coils as if the glacier were obliged to protect us as we slid on the seat of our pants through pipes of the purest blue. It was dangerous, moderately dangerous, we had checked to see where and how we would emerge, even if we occasionally miscalculated the acceleration and came shooting out of the shaft like a cannonball while it thundered underneath, so that even the person who was brushing the pain off his pants had to laugh at the glacier’s acoustic commentary. Yes we 28

gathered our share of bruises, but we really got to know the glacier, we stuck our nose in every crevasse, we even believed we could hear the icy creature sliding into the valley on a layer of its own water, and we were amazed at the multihued splendor within what seemed to be a monochrome universe. We opened our eyes (and not just under the polarizing microscope) to its delicate spectrum, the colors in the flatland seemed garish by contrast. Where the ice was as hard as alabaster we found blue caves which we decided to enter right then and there, afraid we might not be able to find them again when we returned. Afterwards we went our separate ways, some hurried back to the city, others retreated to the valley, in the end I was the only one who chose to shuttle between glacier and university, on solitary days I abandoned myself to the tranquility of the ice, the clang of the water, I became a stone pressing on the ice and leaving my own imprint, and one time I was surprised to feel the urge to pray inside one of the icy 29