Dressing gown and stupor
He had just thrown up what he had eaten. It wasn’t a case of hunger, but he wanted something. So, he set about eating food to shell, raw, pre-cooked, dried or soft because of bad preservation. Nobody is denied food, he said to himself. He used sarcasm when he was at breaking point.
He wrote poems. Only he and his neighbour liked them; the neighbour came every so often to knock at the door to “hear them read by the author”, in his own words. He was a thin and kind man, with a hollowed-out face and yellowed teeth, but he wasn’t of sound mind. He must have had some kind of illness, because of that wailing that pierced the walls to reach his room when he was already in bed. One evening he started wailing like a sick cat, so stridently that Mike got up and, moved above all by a desperate desire to sleep, knocked on his door in his underwear. At the sound of the door, the wailing stopped like a solitary candle and the neighbour greeted him in a dressing gown, with red eyes. His expression had none of the embarrassed stupor that Mike expected to see and he asked him to come in as if there was nothing wrong, as if he had just woken up from a nightmare that was not his own.