Ольга Токарчук - Flights

On the bedside table there was a light blue pack of condoms. Right by the bed there was a Bible and the Teachings of the Buddha. Unfortunately, the plug for my electric kettle didn’t fit into the socket – so I would have to do without tea. Although perhaps it was coffee I should be drinking at this hour? My body was in no state to interpret the numbers on the clock built into the radio on the bedside table, although it would appear that numerals are international, despite being known as Arabic. Was the yellow glow out the window the onset of dawn, or was it a dusk that had already largely condensed into night? It was hard to determine whether this part of the world – over which the sun was about to appear or else had just vanished – was the East or the West. I concentrated on counting up the hours I’d spent on the plane, employing as an aid an image I’d once seen on the internet of a globe with a nocturnal bar that moves from east to west like a giant mouth that systematically devours the world.

The square in front of the hotel was deserted, just stray dogs skirmishing around its closed stalls. I finally decided it must be the middle of the night, and without tea or a bath I went to bed. Although on my time, on the time I was carting around on my mobile phone, it was early afternoon. So I could not naively count on drifting off to sleep.

What you do is get under the covers and turn on the TV – volume down, let it grumble, flicker, whine. You hold the remote out like a weapon, and you take shots at the very centre of the screen. Each shot kills one channel, but then another follows directly on its heels. My game this time, though, was to pursue the night, to choose only those channels that were broadcast from places where it was currently dark. To picture the globe and the dark scar running down its gentle curvature, evidence of some past attack – disfigurement after an audacious operation to separate light and dark, those conjoined twins.

Night never ends. Its dominion always spans some section of the world. And you can keep up with it with your remote, look exclusively for stations that fall within the shadowy purview of that dark, concave hand that upholds the earth, and in this way you can continue westwards country by country, hour by hour. You will encounter an interesting phenomenon if you do.

The first shot I fired at the smooth, mindless forehead of the television produced Channel 348, the Holy God Channel. Here I beheld a crucifixion scene – some movie from the sixties. The Virgin Mary had perfectly plucked eyebrows. Mary Magdalene must have had a corset on underneath her peasant dress, which was a dingy blue – you could tell it was a black and white movie that had been inexpertly coloured later on. Her massive breasts, cone-shaped, protruding absurdly; her tiny waist. As the unattractive soldiers cackled and divided the outer garments, the filmmakers interspersed images of every cataclysm imaginable, footage that appeared to have been ripped right out of nature programmes and inserted here without alteration. Now there were clouds gathering at an accelerated rate, lightning bolts, sky, funnel pointing down at the ground, whirlwind, finger of God – which would next sketch a series of flourishes on the earth’s surface. Now furious waves pounding a shore, some sailboats, some cheap-looking dummies blown to pieces by that riled water. Volcanoes erupting, a fiery ejaculation that might well have inseminated the sky – but it was a non-starter; the lava slid inertly down the volcanoes’ sides. Thus was ecstasy unignited, demoted to plain old nocturnal emission.

Enough. I took another shot. Channel 350, Blue Line TV. A woman masturbating, her fingertips disappearing between her slim thighs. The woman was talking to someone in Italian, speaking into a microphone that was clipped to her ear and reminiscent of a long thin tongue licking each of those Italian words right off her lips, every si , si , and prego .

354, Sex Satellite 1: this time it was two girls masturbating, both bored – they must have been finishing up their shift, unable to hide their tiredness. One of them ran the camera that recorded them with her own remote control, so in that sense they were entirely self-sufficient. Every so often a kind of grimace would surface on their faces, as though they suddenly remembered what they were doing – eyes closed, mouth half-open – but it would evaporate again in a flash, and tiredness and distraction would set in in its place. No one was calling them, despite what I presumed were alluring words in Arabic at the bottom of the screen.

And suddenly Cyrillic – I’d taken another shot at the screen – Genesis in Cyrillic. The words that scrolled along the bottom of the screen were no doubt illustrious ones, illustrated in fact by images of mountains, of the sea, of clouds, plants, and animals. On 358 they were showing the best scenes by an apparent pornographic sensation whose name was Rocco. I paused here for a moment, noting a drop of sweat on his brow. As he executed his pelvic thrusts into anonymous buttocks, the porn star put one hand on his hip, and you might have mistaken him for someone concentrating on the practice of some samba move, or salsa move: one-two, one-two.

On 288, Oman TV, they were reading verses from the Koran. So I supposed, anyway. A lovely and utterly unintelligible pattern of Arabic script floated placidly across the screen. It made me want to reach out and catch them first, hold them a while before trying to decipher their meaning. Tease out those intricate flourishes, pull them out into a simple, soothing line.

Another shot and there was a black minister and an audience eagerly rejoining hallelujahs.

Night, then, quieted the raucous and aggressive news and weather and film channels, setting to one side the daytime ruckus of the world, bringing in instead the relief of the simple coordinate system of sex and religion. The body and the divine. Physiology and theology.

Each of the wrappers from the pads I’d picked up at the pharmacy had entertaining little facts on them:

The word ‘lethologica’ describes the state of being unable to recall the word you’re looking for.

Ropography is a painting term for the attention the artist pays to trifles and details.

Rhyparography is the painting of decaying and disgusting things.

Scissors were invented by Leonardo da Vinci.

In the bathroom, where I unwrapped the entire box of these pads with their curious teachings, it hit me like a revelation that this was yet another part of the project of the great encyclopaedia now coming into being, the encyclopaedia that would encompass all things. So I went back to the pharmacy and scoured the shelves in search of the name of this strange company that had determined to unite necessity with usefulness. For what sense could it ever possibly make to wrap pads in paper that had flowers and strawberries on it? Paper was created to be the bearer of ideas. Paper packaging is wasteful and should be banned. But if you really do have to package something, then you ought to only be able to do it in novels and poems, and always in such a way that what is contained and what contains it have some connection.

Starting at the age of thirty, humans begin to slowly shrink.

Each year more people are killed by kicks from donkeys than by plane crashes.

If you wind up at the bottom of a well, you’ll be able to see the stars even during the day.

Did you know that your birthday is shared by nine million people around the world?

The shortest war in history was waged between Zanzibar and England in 1896, lasting thirty-eight minutes.

If the earth’s axis were tilted just one degree more, the planet would be uninhabitable, because the regions around the equator would be too hot and the poles too cold.