Nightbreak, Daybreak
An excerpt from hearsay
“Science fiction tells stories about events that never happened and never will,” writes author and literary critic Dietmar Dath in his book Niegeschichte (Never Story). Indeed, speculative literature reflects the hopes, fears and wishes that exist at the time it was created and extends them into the future. But today in the year 2026, how do we fantasise about possible futures when current and impending crises give us little to look forward to beyond catastrophic doom? The author Tim Holland belongs to a young generation of science-fiction writers who are intrigued by this question. He sees his writing as “speculative possibility research”, as a search for stories that are perhaps less obvious in our current contemplation about futures.
In Tim Holland’s long poem “Nightbreak, Daybreak”, the lyrical narrator finds himself in a dire and uncertain situation. As if in a fever dream, he tries to make sense of the ever-present and ever-growing crises that seem to constantly usher forth from his mobile device. “Nightbreak, Daybreak” was commissioned by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and appears for the first time in the third issue of fünf zu eins in response to the question: “What does art know that we don’t?”
1.
I was cold.
It was dark.
I lay awake.
I was weak.
I waited.
Alone I lay, humiliated.
I lay and counted light.
That’s to say it was so dark I wondered where in darkness lay the night. And what came after?
I lay awake, waited patiently.
I waited wildly almost.
I was not photographed. There was no picture of me of how I lay.
I lay nonetheless.
I ordered number 28, ate a fortune cookie. I read: Tomorrow will be your lucky day.
And images came to me. Of fire and flood and death, small and large.
2.
I scrolled. Many things happened, many things touched me.
I touched the touchscreen and nothing else.
I was tired, scrolled, whimpered softly, counted the scars I’d get if I dare moved.
I didn’t move. I avoided work and everything else.
I scrolled and scrolled and wanted it to end. But even that didn’t work.
The videos from my phone were relentless, reifying within me and I became terrifying underneath the eiderdown.
I worried.
I tried to sort myself.
But worry put me out of sorts.1
Something blew in from outside.
Dust bunnies appeared, plump with pollen and elm seeds, in my browser the city of Ulm, then the Ulmer Munster, then Ulrich, Ulrike, Ultima ratio, ultimately to topple perhaps, yes, the tower of the Ulmer Munster wasn’t the tallest anymore. Particles and pixels whizzed around me, buzzing in my head, and outside the real window, real black-headed and Caspian gulls circled—key ki-ki key-rey—kreeeyyy—kreyyey-kreyy-rey. With the birds rose the flurry—actually elm seeds—that spun, spun, like a ballerina spins in a music box, almost floating, the only burden: the spinning. The gulls proclaimed the dry island that would become Berlin, then blew away on the next squall.
3.
I lay and saw how it was all spreading and growing and gathering, more and more, emptiness was filling up, everything was full and too much to do and nowhere a break, not a hint of happiness, with nothing standing still, seething and I’d long stopped searching, washing it all into my phone.
I saw the torture that never ended, and how everything lives, and received ads for pro- and prebiotic digestives, saw the incessant countdown of atomic and cuckoo clocks, and how everything’s faster, saw tracks of blood in the Internet, it was always today and I was always a witness, everywhere I saw wrangles, quibbles, squabbles, violence, war and me. I saw all manners of dictatorships. Sunday was the Day of the Dead, Monday was the Day of the Dead, Tuesday was the Day of Dead and so on.
I saw how it blazed, saw the San Bernardino Mountains burning, Porto Alegre, Krasnoyarsk. Then burning islands, Bougainville, Maui, Rhodos, Sumatra, Manaus, the Cerrado savannah, burning coasts, burning mountains. And in Centralia, Pennsylvania, burning below for what could be another 200 years. Then Jüterbog.
Tiny flames devoured their way through the bone-dry layer of needles. Flickering tongues licked at stalks, grass, wood sorrel, thyme moss, heather, then into the junipers, blueberries and far into the crowns, trees like flaming torches, fire-scorned.
How the flames united! How they then tethered me to the burning woods! And the flames planted fire seedlings in the front yards of Luckenwalde, how the fire blossomed!
I caught it, became feverish, smouldered, then sweltered, something was brewing, my thoughts: clouds of smoke in Sakha, Sibiria. In heated delirium, I misplaced myself. Sudden explosions. Munitions in the ground. And my insides licking. I had caught fire, burned. I lay aglow. Crackling in my limbs. A root fire in my nerve tracts. I did not move. Was I enjoying the fire?
Was someone else hurt?
I lay and saw that no one mutinied.
But also that water was rising,
and rising and rising,
so that Tuvalu and soon Spiekeroog too.
Indeed,
everything I saw and read, oh how my heart,
that my little heart swelled, throbbed, threatened and overflowed,
that little heart of mine,
a compulsive museum of horrors,
a true junkyard for this world.
I lay.
I did not move. I saw no reason to.
Shadows laid down beside me.
I ate a fortune cookie. I read: The world may be your oyster, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get its pearl.
Was that anger?
4.
I was afraid.
I was afraid of what was and what would come.
And my fear grew like dragon fruit: fast.
Well,
I ached with fear.
I didn’t go to the doctor.2
I stayed down and rabbit-holed.
I scrolled and scrolled and saw mating hares, near Kreuznach in the Palatinate, and vile grass (meaning witch’s grass or strangler’s grass) grazing steppe zebras in southwest Kenya. The abovementioned and others—like the Black-tailed prairie dog, actually a gopher, its tail not all that achromatic, named for its barking call by the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804, the largest population living in North America—would flee in face of danger.
I sensed it: I too was the prey of today. I lay aflutter, almost spoiling for adventure in my misery and sensed in me a talent to flee.
I ate a fortune cookie. I read: You’ll never forget this journey.
I transformed myself, this magic trick was new to me.
My eyes began to wander, drifted so far apart they blinked flighty beastlike from both sides of my head (no blind spot, all the better for all-round sight).
Did I whimper?
I heard nothing, then strained so much that my left earlet started growing, first the auricle, then the ear canal—ohh, it only hurt a little—the fragile bones fracturing, branching off, growing five times their size so that I could point and swivel a full-grown hare ear.
A waft came through the tipped window.
And as the mouse I thought I was at that moment, I ran away.
I fled.
Well, naturally, just in my head.3
Tears streamed down my face—or was it sweat?—my eyes burned.
I ran.
I raced.
Threw punches.
My eyes grew hot.
I smacked my forehead. I pulled my pants pockets inside out. It was raining ashes. What kind of plague was this? My brain was doing what it wanted, nothing made sense. I didn’t know where to go. Within me rose a great, weepy lamentation.
Honestly, I thought about moving out, moving away, travelling with someone, with brush-eared Eurasian lynxes through the Harz Mountains. But the next free timeslot at the Resident Registration Office was in three months.
I lay, now drenched in sweat, and saw how the sun was etching its way through the clouds.
I scrolled and scrolled until the feed got snarled.
Something was new.
Loading.
…
5.
The moon rolled across the sky.
I wasn’t doing well. Haze hung in the room.4
All the pictures were gone and I was still afraid.
I lay in an inner night of holies, heard what was coming.
I heard Terje Dragseth say: Something that makes sound is more than sound.
I was flippant.
The Norn Skuld who was responsible for what shall be, fate and future augured: You simply haven’t slept enough!
I lay, my brain asked me to. And I heard my mother say: The future lies before you.
I grumbled. I always bumbled, never reaching it.
I heard an Aymara say (48, La Paz, Bolivia): If you’re looking for the future, you must look to your back.
Fortune cookie crumbs pricked my spine.
I felt like bawling.
I heard William Gibson say: The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.
The future is a step ahead of us, like we and our shadows in tow. Who said that?
My shadow was silent as the grave, leaning against the wall some distance away.
I swear, the tears better not.
I heard Elon Musk say: The future of humanity is multiplanetary.
But I had no other choice, I stayed planetary and thus stayed there.
It grew warm.
It was shimmering outside: morning blue, morning pink, then it was morning.
A hooded crow was sitting on the sill.
There was a closeness.
Then it was gone.
Translated by Rob Brambeer
Footnotes
- 1 ) Though I knew: Worry was one letter away from sorry. But what should I feel sorry about first? ↩
- 2 ) I didn’t know: what did fear prove? Where was it only doing what it could? ↩
- 3 ) I was cold. It was dark. I lay awake. I was weak etc. ↩
- 4 ) … like a wish that doesn’t heal, that remains a wound, never to become a wonder. ↩
