Through the Keyhole

He read one or two things about pregnancy. He prepared a list of things that she shouldn’t eat or at least avoid. He stuck it in the keyhole. He noticed that she threw up almost everything that she ate. She lost weight. She cried from time to time. Then she locked herself in her room and watched hours of TV sitcoms. She wasn’t polite enough to watch it quietly or use earphones, so he heard everything through the walls. He didn’t complain. The situation was complicated.

She deleted her Facebook profile. Was she so ashamed of the situation? Was it such a catastrophe that she didn’t want her friends to see her pregnant? She died for everyone in the digital world. Funny enough, she was still alive. He was surprised that she was still out and about even though she wasn’t on any social site. He was surprised that he quite actively existed in the digital world, having long before died in the real one. Not in the literal sense. Still, to some extent.

He thought about himself as a child. He was a typical boy, a little bit mean to girls, a little bit stubborn. He was good at math and IT. And languages, so he didn’t have problems with finding a job. He didn’t enjoy his primary school, he also slept through high school, but there were certain things that made him scared even when he was a teen. He didn’t like public appearances. He didn’t like going to discos held at the school. He skipped school ceremonies taking place in the gym, he didn’t really participate in Christmas parties. He skipped the prom. He didn’t mind inviting a girl to the prom, but when he heard that missing out was actually an option, he didn’t hesitate to avoid all the fuss of buying a suit, paying for the pair and making a fool of himself during the dance. That memorable night when his classmates looked like million dollar celebrities in their suits and gowns, he played computer games and was happy that he wasn’t there in the first place. No regrets.

When he was studying he was buried in books. Maybe then he missed the symptoms. Lectures and classes were fine. He didn’t like oral exams. He didn’t like the eyes of everyone in the panel of professors cast upon him. Other than that he was fine. He got nervous sometimes. Sometimes he felt that his eye-sight deteriorated under pressure. He felt that after drinking coffee he was irritable and his senses gave him an exaggerated view of what was going on around him. He couldn’t cope with the accumulation of sounds, colors, and smells. But he never would have imagined that all this could grow to this extent.

His father had another family. His mother talking about going away. That was one-day decision. He just couldn’t stand it anymore. He had another attack on the bus. He was trembling for hours on the sofa and all the sedatives didn’t do the trick. It took him some time to prepare everything. The Logistics were demanding but not impossible. He ordered basic clothes for summer, winter, autumn, and spring. He bought a good kettle, a new set of pots and pans, a few blankets and a food mixer. He made sure that internet shopping worked in every circumstance. He placed a decent TV-set in his room and invested in a good Internet connection. He already had a job. Every money transfer was conducted online. Every contact with the co-workers was limited to e-mail communication. He was set. He was fine. That was seven years ago.

His mother noticed that something is wrong after three years. She didn’t try to do anything. According to her, it was his decision. Her decision was to isolate herself in a different prison, full of clean waters, Polish construction workers, and fiords.

And he was sure that his mother let in the room to the girl to make sure that he was still alive.

To be honest, he started reading about pregnancy quite a lot. He asked her if she cut down on alcohol, cigarettes and prescription drugs. He suggested that she shouldn’t take any drugs and she ought to arrange a meeting with the doctor. Just mild suggestions written on a piece of paper. The pieces were taken, so he hoped that she read them and accepted.

She was supposed to have mood swings, so he wasn’t surprised at her crying and moaning in one hour and laughing hysterically the next one. He wondered what would happen to her studies, as she was studying something since she still disappeared in the morning. She took her notebooks and books. She must have got money from her parents to pay the rent. She paid regularly.

He suggested that she paid less so that she could use more money for the food. Trash food was cheap. That would get her nowhere. She thanked, but she said she had enough and that his mother already suggested lowering the rent for keeping an eye on him.

‘I’m not disabled’

‘You never know.’

He sensed some humor. She must have been in a good mood at the time.

The next day she sent him another message.

‘I would actually appreciate the lowering of the rent, in case I needed new clothes.’

He understood. Pregnant women were getting really fat. His mother told him that when she was pregnant with him she gained 30 kilograms. For three years she couldn’t drop the extra weight. She had only one child. He saw her many times when she was dressing up and noticed white stretch marks all over her stomach.

He also had stretch marks. His arms, thighs, knees, and hips were covered in reddish scars from the periods of his quick growth and weight gain. Even during his first year of isolation, he gained about 10 kilograms and from that time he decided to include in his daily schedule a dose of exercises and a healthy diet.

He advised her to use some olive to make the skin more flexible.

‘You’re weird,’ she wrote on a piece of paper.

‘Aren’t we all?’

She didn’t answer. Sometimes she didn’t answer for days.

However, she spent hours in the toilet and she farted a lot. He could hear this when he was lying silently at night and tried to sleep. He remembered when he was a teenager and he gossiped with other boys about girls. And he recalled exactly that they would give their hands to be chopped off rather than to say that the pretty girls never farted or shat. Actually, they believed that they didn’t have any physiology at all. They just sat and smelled of meadows, flowers, and butterflies. So when he first saw the pictures of a girl’s vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries and learned about menstrual cycle from the biology books he was traumatized for quite a while. He didn’t want to talk to those pretty girls anymore. When he was twelve he said to one of the prettiest girls in the class that she stunk. She didn’t stink, she used some teenage flowery perfumes. It was an accusation. The fact that girls were machines with their tampons and pads and you had to pay attention to their mood, in case they had their period was beyond his teenage strength. He had to get it out. He stuck to guys for years.

Then he found some dirty magazines in his father’s drawers and from the pictures he decided that he didn’t mind all these periods and tampons. He didn’t even mind the fact that they shat as everybody else. Some of them looked amazing.

Still, she farted. And asked him to turn down the music as she had a headache. He didn’t really have a choice. When his response wasn’t instant, she cursed him with the number of the most colorfully offensive words, he would rather expect from a drunk football fan. He quickly plugged in the speakers and shut himself off.

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