↑Anthronaut delightedly used that old vernacular in telling me that he nearly shat his pants when he read ↵when hell is full for the first time. That was exactly the anticipated effect, my intention as author. ↑KerLeone was delighted by the story as well and even ↑linked to it from his weblog—an honest thanks for that, it’s an honour to get a link from such a widely read blog like ↑mosaikum. But KerLeone’s blog-entry on my story is kind of a spoiler—at least within the German-speaking world. “Kind” of a spoiler because it doesn’t reveal information from within the story, but information from beyond the story, which I told him face-to-face. KerLeone wrote: “Zephyrin’s encounter with a drunkard …”

The empirical truth—in this context: roughly what you would have observed if you had been present and an eye-witness—is that, when I stepped back and said aloud “Fuck me sideways” (in fact a German equivalent), the man finally woke up. He indeed was stone-drunk, couldn’t tell me who he was, but had a vague idea of where he lived. And he knew that he had to take the last tram. The latter arrived just in time and I placed him inside. The tramdriver had to take care of him, as he can not leave people sitting inside the car when he drives it back to the depot. So, that was my way out.

All right, it was a living drunkard and not a dead corpse I encountered. But that is not the point. The point is my internal state of mind in the very moment when the man slowly slid to the side, apparently lifeless, and during the moments right after that. Deep down inside me I suddenly felt the presence of death. Just as I had felt it before several times. I have seen dead people before, and I have seen people die before. Now I felt exactly the same. The presence of death. But death as something that can be present is an abstract idea, a concept, an imagination. What is irritating us is rather the absence of a human mind while the human body still is present.

This very irritation I wanted to mediate by my little story. To accomplish this task I decided to use a subterfuge which is close kin to Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s decisive criterium for fiction being fantastic literature, which he described in his “The fantastic: A structural approach to a literary genre” (↵1973 [1970]).
 

Todorov’s literary theory is quite controversial—see e.g. ↵Stanislav Lem‘s take on it: “Todorov’s fantastic theory of literature” (↵1974)—but I embrace his core idea of the fantastic, leaving the reader uncertain if he read about something supernatural or not. In horror fiction it has been an established strategy already for a long time, to build up and perpetuate suspense by not telling what is knocking on the door. If it is never told, but we shit our pants nevertheless, then I guess the particular piece of horror fiction borders on Todorov’s definition of the fantastic. In his excellent “On Writing” Stephen King takes up the cudgels for telling what is knocking on the door, for opening the door and letting the uncanny pass the threshold. Mr. King’s body of work is ample proof for that strategy working as well—I especially admire vast parts of his short fiction … and of course his two non-fiction books “Danse Macabre” (↵1993 [1981]) and “On Writing”. But telling that I “only” had encountered a drunkard could not have done justice to my subjective perception of the situation.

My entry wasn’t meant as a piece of horror fiction or even the fantastic, I just wanted to uphold the uncertainty about wether I had found a dead man or not. Let the reader hang in limbo, I thought. Let particular information stay absent. Hopefully this will evoke irritation. And hopefully this irritation comes close to my irritation when I felt the presence of death, the absence of a human mind.