My Executioner

He wants to strangle me —he is after me.
I can feel it.
I hear him breathing in, breathing out. Right at the nape of my neck.
I turn around.
Sometimes I cannot turn, what they call fear.
Far away, a badly tuned guitar is playing.
I hear it.
I know all of these ugly notes, right inside my head.
I try to listen,
Sometimes I cannot listen, what they call deafness.
At times like these, no one listens to anyone anyway.
He wants to shoot me.
To press the red-hot barrel against my forehead,
to pull the trigger.
An act from which there is no return.
Perhaps he is not brave enough, not brave enough to shoot me.
He wants to hang me.
In the infinitely numbered room
of an infinitely roomed hotel,
he wants to kick away that stool.
To kick it away endlessly.
And thus to become a murderer endlessly.
He is staring right at my jugular, I know it.
Staring straight at it.
In his hand, right in his palm, there is a pen.
He is gripping it with all his strength, I know.
His eyes are about to burst from their sockets.
Now his eyes are on the door.
The door is shut.
I saw this scene in my dream last night.
A flood, a storm, an endless earthquake.
My blood was flowing dark purple.
I was falling from the top of a skyscraper,
there was an endless mist. An endless cloud. Black.
No, there will be no sleep.
My dream is over. Reality stands before me. My executioner.
Before me.
He will drive that pen into my throat, I know it.
That black ink will mingle with my blood
and cover the whole room, I know it.
A little girl will make marbling art from it, I know it.
At the traditional exhibition of some school or other, a headmaster will watch.
No! A black cat is falling from the ceiling.
Perhaps this is the end of the universe.
The end indeed, what they call apocalypse.
The cat walks calmly between us and goes on its way.
I want to shout after it.
Come on! Come and save me.
Yet I do not shout, and it does not hear.
Laws do not reach this place.
Even suicide is permitted.
He wants me to kill myself, I believe.
Not once, but a thousand and one times.
Not once, but a thousand and one times.
Perhaps then his eyes will sink back into their sockets.
I will not resist anymore.
He is waiting for me to blink.
If I close my eyes for a millisecond,
everything will be over.
Do I see such courage in myself?
There is no punishment for it in the sight of God.
If I recite the shahada, must I recite it a thousand and one times?
The time has come.
He is exactly before me now.
All the veins in his arm,
green,
blue,
purple,
black—
I can see them all.
Every one of those veins will split, his skeleton will emerge from his gray skin.
Blood will gush out, almost certainly,
there is a bitter warmth.
He walks so slowly, as if he were over a hundred years old.
Now he is behind me. I blink.
No pen, no gun, no rope…
He freezes, astonished, unable to understand.
He creaks and creaks like a rusted robot.
His body no longer works.
He does not have much time left, I can feel it.
He simply remains there.
In fear and panic, I spring up and run.
It is a dark corridor, its walls filled with portraits
staring straight ahead,
yet staring directly into my eyes.
All of them,
their eyes
bloody.
I am at the end of the corridor.
There is a mirror before me. Now I can no longer flee.
In the mirror: a frail, ugly, exhausted man.
My executioner.