The first two weeks were charming, despite everything. I spent most of my time outdoors.
Initially I had wanted to complete the act abroad, far from family and familiarity. I had booked a stay at a different hotel, a premium spa and wellness centre, hundreds of kilometres away from where I eventually settled, but the travel agent had left me no choice: “Ma’am, either we change the destination, or we refund the deposit. The refund exchange rate will match the purchase rate.” I knew I was risking a run-in, but the purchase rate would yield a paltry amount. Everyone was descending on P. that season—the middle classes looking for novelty, the property owners with money from the nineties, now dispossessed of their prestige, and members of what used to be—before the decline—the Workers’ Holiday Fund. Those who could not go elsewhere—went there.
With the money I’d paid at the travel agent’s, I could have flown to Bulgaria for a week—but that wasn’t far away, and a week wouldn’t have been long enough to get my bearings. I was after a special hiatus. So I agreed to change the plan. I would need at least a month to live up to the moment where I was ready to swallow the vialful of my stockpiled medicine, chasing it with good-quality vodka. A month composed of fatty, nutritious days. Was it not well deserved? Had I not worked for it? I did hesitate if I should do such a thing to the staff—someone would have to find me, clean up the mess, call the ambulance and the police—but there was no other way. There were no good clinics to be found in this country, meanwhile black market trips abroad were too expensive, and pleading with a loved one would just be fatal egoism. My loved one was ready to do anything for me, and now, since I’d removed her from my short-lived future, it’s possible she was spending the sad summer a few kilometres away from this proposed substitute paradise.
Everywhere in the world, hotel staff are strangers. It was unlikely for them to be suspected of complicity, and I was planning to mitigate the shock they were bound to experience with a suitable, discreet arrangement of the scene, in which I would indeed be a body, but seemingly not the perpetrator. I was also considering going down to the beach. Point one in the brochure: a seaside view. There was also the woodland variant—in a leafy den. Although this sounds like macabre autocannibalism—as I would quickly become, no doubt, a snack for the various insects, worms, birds, mammals and who knows what else—it was best not to imagine it. Turning myself into nourishing humus did not seem to me an alluring solution; the conversation on posthumanism would not apply to my body, thank you. I’ll leave the clean-up of my remnants to the others, I thought, and I would, of course, see to their relatively aesthetic presentation. But yes—there was always the chance that death would evade the staging and make a mess.
On arrival at the substitute destination, I tossed between the variants. I was past the stage of reading tips in the corners of the internet. I walked on the beach every morning, along the forest track in the afternoons, investigating the logistical potential of my surroundings. She would’ve helped me—she was very good at planning. To myself, I seemed healthy, immune, fit—as if the results sent from the lab in a password-protected file had pertained to somebody else. Someone must have mixed them up. The repeat test confirmed the first, but still it was difficult to acknowledge the fact it contained a description of some invisible part of me. Be that as it may, I had made the decision much earlier, taking on the worst variant—a logout.
In September, the beach gave rise to an unsettlingly beautiful spectacle of death. Its harbingers were the individual jellyfish lying on the wet sand. They shimmered among the little shells and seaweed fragments. Powerless, unadapted. It was no big deal—I was used to tossing the white gelatin, pushed by the taller of waves, into the life-giving water. On this occasion, the specimens I encountered would then lie flat, unrevived by the Baltic Sea. They looked like a disease of the sand: blisters of various sizes with a scarlet eruption in the middle. I took a photograph with my phone. The jellyfish formed a long rug, and I thought: yes, scarlet fever, I believe there exists such a skin disease, so why not a sand disease—everything is a disease nowadays—and I went to the hotel to get the camera. I wanted to have clear photos. On the computer screen, the little dead bodies, ignored by the terns and the seagulls, looked most beautiful. I had no doubts: they were little bodies. No artist would be able to so irregularly, and yet so logically, command the texture, the granulation, the mass. In the close-ups, the sand infection resembled human bellies and backs infested with non-healing ulcers. The moon jellyfish, I read on the internet, die towards the end of summer. The location of their mass aggregation, a graveyard in the making, is determined by the currents and the tides. The sea doesn’t want the dead—it deals similarly with creatures of all species. It gets rid of them, although sometimes we say it returns them. Herrings, walruses, ship passengers, sailors, salmon, mussels. There’s something unfair about it—the sea pushes out organisms incapable of life without water, as it does the ones who cannot breathe a sigh of relief within it.
“Eventually, we’ll all go extinct like the jellyfish,” said the bartender with whom I’d struck up conversation.
He should’ve chatted away, but he brushed me off with that maxim of his and went out the back. A fancy hotel. There was no time for chit-chat—not from him or anyone else—but I felt the need to interest someone in the fate of the jellyfish. I posted a picture with the hashtag #doomsday. Five likes and one comment: “Come visit my profile, I take nature pics”. A week later, the jellyfish seeped into the sand—lying here and there were their desiccated scraps. They no longer resembled anything of what they used to be. Just like that, remains of organisms decomposing in the open.
And what if I got washed up in some unfrequented place? The birds wouldn’t turn their noses up at my body. They take care of all corpses—I’d seen a young wild boar, mangled, on the beach. The birds eat their fallen kin. In the summer, my remains could be found by some child. A woman cleaning the beach. A man enjoying a beachside, morning beer—no, no—I had to be certain that no such thing would happen.
I knew I’d be close by, but I didn’t intend letting myself be found. I fancied myself putting a silver-framed photograph of Małgorzata on the bedside table, and gathering the strength, bit by bit, to swallow the medication carefully placed among the blouses. Well, all right—Małgorzata and I didn’t like euphemising. We’d been honest, and in the name of maintaining the rules, I had said goodbye firmly. To be frank: I’d left for my own comfort, not out of love. And I’d had good role models—I knew women who’d rented hotel rooms for one final night. Just as there were homes for trysts, there were homes for final goodbyes—not declared as such, for safety. Who knows, maybe the history of suicide homes was longer than the history of brothels? If I’d felt like it, I could’ve written an article belabouring the advantages of a happy ending over those of fulfilled love. I’d thereby take part in pursuing a new approach to the history and the customs of mankind. Here’s a dilemma expanding on the undecidable problem of the chicken and the egg: Since everyone must die, and at the same time, everyone has more than one chance at love (assuming that its forms, although historically variable, can be drawn out), and yet a portion of humanity has not experienced either . . . There you go. Moreover, endings tend to be quite unhappy. Even so, I won’t make a statement on the matter, leaving you with this dilemma as an exercise in thinking differently. Thinking in general. Simply switch yourselves on.
The gelatinous strip between the water and the land came to act as a buffer: it boxed me off from the ethanol-barbiturate cocktail. I regarded the death of the jellyfish—their defencelessness, immeasurable plenitude and beauty—as a prophecy of the postponement of my own waning. I drew an illogical conclusion from the words of the bartender, who was currently the boss of the hotel’s sorting facilities: since we’re running on extra time, I don’t need to poison myself just yet. I’ll wait for the others with my cancer. Who knew what would come of it, with the hospitals so far away?
Ever since I was a child, I dreamt about becoming a “woman inventor”, although I was gradually realising I most definitely preferred the Polish feminine form, wynalazczyni—“an inventoress”. I’d identified with Maria Skłodowska-Curie and Copernicus, taking part in school quizzes dedicated to their lives and achievements. Skłodowska-Curie was similar to the heroines of classic Polish novels, her feminine core consisting of boundless sacrifice—for science, for teaching, for the idea. She’d led the way. Whereas Copernicus, at first glance ambiguously gendered, “was a woman”, as the 1984 sci-fi comedy Sexmission proclaimed. The feminist joke didn’t take us by surprise. Depicted in a long robe and with long hair, the astronomer (and Catholic canon!) would encourage us to shake the world at its foundations regardless of clothing and hairstyle. My difficulties in getting to grips with chemistry at school closed off my path in the field of natural sciences. So I took an interest in language itself, in concepts and narratives, resulting in cultural studies with a soft lean towards philosophy. I now make notes from within, putting my medical records on hold.
The money, patiently set aside, had granted me an alternative. A room overlooking the conifer-lined footpath. Luxury. The large bed would rough me up at night—I’d crawl up to the pillows, probe the crevices with my foot, listen in to the springs’ faint moans. I finally got rid of the photographs of Małgorzata. The electronic ones would end up in an internet recycle bin, the paper ones in some tiny grave rustled up under a tree. “It’s for your own good,” I planned to say in a speech, standing over the tomb. I took the box for burial and headed into the forest. A short way off, I was stopped by the remnants of military fencing, overgrown with tall stinging nettles. I took pity on my bare legs—I turned back and came down to the beach. I placed the box next to me. “See?” I said, expecting a laugh. She would mock such magical gestures. I now showed her the little scrap of beach inaccessible to the locals and the economy class tourists. I did it in a casual, half-joking way, because I’d never be able to do it solemnly. We returned—the box and I—for dinner.
I entered a holiday rhythm, reconstructed from deep memory. I was feeling very well, suspended between meals, cut off from doctor’s appointments.
At night, I would hear the faint hum of appliances described in the brochures as the generators of clean air, healing water and stimulating waves. I’d anticipate glitches, outages, restarts. I wanted to be like a canary in the coal mine—the first to receive signs of a new threat. After all, I’d uploaded photos of the jellyfish before anybody else did. If anything were to happen to the world, I wouldn’t have to be sorry about a thing. If the hotel were to explode, my vial would disintegrate into its micro-elements, like the photos I intended to rip up, and the social media accounts I planned to scrub clean to the very last pixel. I fantasised about sending a letter off a cliff like a kite with the hope that, this way, I would simultaneously disperse and preserve the description of her dear face. Or the wind and the waves would carry the sentences a few kilometres over, to the path leading down to the beach she likes most. The words would arrange themselves in her way, giving her the last sign of my feelings. Cliché, I know, but I no longer have to be clever and refined.
The bathroom mirror was steaming up. I wiped it with my palm, warning myself against falling into cheap melodrama. You walked away and now you want to croak on Małgorzata’s knees? What a farce.
Before walking down to the beach began to pose the risk of getting cut off from the benefits of the hotel, I would run outside, trying to see through the kilometres ahead and behind me—so I’d have the time to hide in case she suddenly appeared. For weeks I didn’t go down to the shore where the jellyfish had lost their bulging roundness. I stopped documenting the state of the beach. The smells would hit me in strong waves—some artificial, from here, as well as those from the outside.
Post-COVID, my senses of taste and smell underwent blunting, displacement and finally intensification. Nothing original—many people reported similar symptoms. The coffee they used to like would trigger disgust. Vinegar smelled of citrus. The glass of water drunk in the night would reek of long-abandoned sausage. Walking along the shore, some smelled vanilla wafting over the water. Vanilla ice cream would taste like a strawberry cocktail. And what about swimming out far—leaving the comfort zone of the moon jellyfish feeding in the shallows? Death in water is laborious—it lacks the majesty seen in films. You don’t sink lower and lower to find a mermaid kingdom. The pain tears your tissues open.
“Did you know it’s quicker to die by fire?” I had asked Małgorzata at a time when departure was pure theory, a select topic of conversation.
“True. It’s easier to consider drowning than self-immolation, but when it comes to pain, water is worse.”
“So you also think that burning the witches was more humanitarian than ordeals by water?”
“So it seems.” She caressed me gently.
I now caressed her through the box with photographs, reaching a state we used to call catlike.
“Even so, it’d still be best to just fall asleep, without first losing your dignity,” she had said.
I’d taken that wish to heart. Despite everything, it was best not to die at her side.
I’ve slept through an outage and mourned the death of the beautiful jellyfish—the infection of the sand. I’ve lost strength. Everyday, I wake up at the same time, swim in the pool, and enter the empty salt cave. I lie on the upper terrace, listening to birdsong. People gather in some of the bigger rooms, now usefully repurposed. Sometimes I join one of the groups. My electronic number—a substitute for the all-inclusive wristbands of the past—works everywhere, so I don’t need not worry about getting separated from one of the groups. I’ve tried almost all of them. There’s so much going on, I don’t have time to feel sorry about the beach. The main pier is malfunctioning, in any case, and they’re not fixing it. It used to have a lit-up wall at the end, which would sequester the trail from the thicket for the comfort and the safety of the guests. Now the wall closes off the passage for good. One has to wade through, along the old fencing overgrown with brambles, or take the long way round, through the dense forest strewn with disposable tissues. They keep on coming. They’ll go on degrading faster than the bottles, but longer than the apple cores.
