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thoughts turn toward you, they’ve already possessed you. Saying no is an insult, because you would be taking away what they’ve already laid claim to.
    Like the hand snaking up my T-shirt, they need me to lift my skin so they can feel my organs, or even stop my heart from beating. Their urges won’t be constrained. Soon there’ll be nothing left to take but they’ll keep going anyway.
    But why should I let them?

    Out of distress. Out of mystery. Confirming angrily, belligerently, hopelessly, what they’re all thinking, over there, outside.
    Being. Becoming. Not disappearing in your eyes. Escaping the straitjacket of passivity, of idleness, of failure, of ashen gazes, of leaden days, of sharpened hours, of shadowy lives, of faraway deaths, of gravelly failures, of lingering, of nakedness, of ugliness, of mockery, of laughter, of tears, of moments, of eternity, of shortness, of heaviness, of night, of day, of afternoons, of dawns, of faded Madonnas, of vanished temptresses.
    None of that is you.
    Escaping all that, evading the hunters, the followers, eschewing the path, eluding the dogs, exchanging forms, executing moltings and metaphors and metamorphoses, educing a silvery trail redolent of females and the night’s folds, examining the underbrush leading all the way to the depths of myths and exiting anew, skin scoured and with a bloody step out of your lives, being, becoming, not disappearing.
    You are not from here, you tell yourself. You repeat that until everything ends.

CLÉLIO
    Midnight burns. Noon burns. Every hour burns. Can’t keep myself from burning. Have to break something. I’m standing on the building roof, singing at the top of my voice, I sing blues then rap then rock then séga, but the clouds silence my voice, don’t care, another song rises to my throat every time, krapo kriye , I’m a toad, I yell into the dawn and yell into the dusk and my voice is hoarse from yelling, standing on the roof, I know I’m yelling until I’m strong enough to jump and because the song’s saying the mother sleeps with her eyes open and the mother is the father’s slave and the father is the boss’s slave and the mother therefore is the slave of another slave and it’s worse than everything, how can anyone fight for the slave of another slave?
    What about me, what am I? I know I’m not a slave, even if a man and a woman among my ancestors were chained up and saw me through the eons separating us, and told me: You will be free. I’m no slave, but maybe everyone else around me is. Putting one foot in front of the other, crossing a threshold, turning their back on things, that’s something they can’t do. They made their own chains, so they think they’re free.
    And where would they go if they wanted to move on? To the end of the island, which is the end of the world. We can’t leave it. We can’t escape it unless we fly. We can’t free ourselves unless we die. I’ll free all my friends before freeing myself.
    You, Carlo, you chose to leave before us all. You say you’re in France, you say it’s your voice I’m hearing on the phone, but that’s not true. I know it. That’s not your voice. It’s someone fake, tryingto pronounce those r s but we never say them here. It’s someone fake, pretending to be French but you’re Mauritian through and through. It’s someone fake, yapping about his bottle-green Renault Clio but I know you only like Japanese cars, you swore they were the best cars in the world. It’s someone fake who won’t answer my questions even though you promised me nothing would drive us apart and you would take me wherever you went.
    No, this betrayal has made you someone else. You’re not Carlo. I’m taking a knife and carving my leg with your name, Carlo. Now my blood’s spelling out your name, you’re in me and you are me. There’s two of us. The