"I heard that sleeping on the floor is good for your posture," my friend reassures me after finding out that I have stopped sleeping in my bed. We are sitting in a crowded chicken broth restaurant at one in the morning—a rather unexpected hour for people to crave soup, especially in June.
"I guess," I answer, mentally tracking the path of a dull pain that circulates through my jaw and neck down to my shoulders like a heavy, viscous liquid. My back feels alright though. I haven’t slept in my bed for three months. I can’t go back: I don’t belong there anymore.
At first, I thought I knew exactly when it had happened, the date and even the approximate time of day, but the more I think about it, the less certain I become. Maybe the process started with my birth but revealed itself only now—like a genetic disease that emerges with age. But I decided to count from the day the cage appeared in the house. I talk about it as if it was something that happened accidentally, outside of my control, but that’s not true: I brought it into my life myself, with my own hands. I paid for it with money I could have easily spent on something less depressing.
The cage. It was ample, probably too big, spacious enough to comfortably shelter a mid-sized bear. The decision with regards to size had been made by my guilt rather than my common sense; or maybe it was my intuition that had sensed that this exercise in oppression could take an unexpected turn. I brought it here to protect my house from my dog—a petite creature that resembles an undernourished baby coyote—who had started gnawing the walls.
I was supposed to do "crate training," which meant placing my dog in the cage and convincing myself that she enjoyed the safety of being incarcerated. To my surprise, not only did my dog fall for it, but my cat also quickly succumbed to the dangerous allure of this tool of dominance and restraint, preferring the bars to open spaces. It made me sick. Uncompromisingly geometric and hostile, the crate was unassailable proof of the existence of an inner cop secretly inhabiting my body and corrupting my soul. I thought that the only decent solution to this problem would be to do away with the cage and accompany my dog in eating the plaster. But the decision I made was different.
The next night, I grabbed two pillows and a blue velvet blanket from my bed—the very first house purchase I made when I moved to Mexico City. As I threw my bedroom a parting glance, like a sailor gazing at his sweetheart before departing indefinitely to sea, I noticed a borrowed book about Mayan cosmology that had been aging on my bedside table for several months, untouched. I took it with me too. The cage already smelled like my dog. She might have puked on the blankets that covered the metallic base. Even from the inside, the crate felt spacious, even bigger than it appeared from the outside. Its uncompromising rectangularity made my body feel different, but I couldn’t tell exactly how. I placed the pillows against the cage bars and opened the book.
It started with the premise that the Tzeltal and Tzotzil people from the south of Mexico pay a lot of attention to corporal culture and have a complex system of etiquette. They even have rules for how people should walk: “treading the ground gently, as if afraid to disturb the earth.” I imagined their feet, sandaled in light brown leather, planting softly on moss-covered rocks as they descended the mountain, the fog making it seem like they were floating — unavailable to gravity.
The force of gravity inside the cage felt stronger, perhaps because I was closer to the ground. Having lost its privileged position of being above things, my body was now compelled to reckon with the surroundings that suddenly dictated its reality. The imposed horizontality of the cage made the body heavy and submissive: it was lulled into a nestled oblivion of non-movement, becoming serene and indifferent. It was almost like lying on the bare ground, feeling how the soil beneath pulsated in a perpetual struggle for survival between bacteria, nematodes, fungi, predatory mites, and potworms— mutualistic situationships of decomposition. There is a lot of darkness in such relationships, but there is also warmth and symbiotic care.
The organisms dwelling in the netherworld of the house were dusty shadows of things that were once alive. The families of dust bunnies crowding the corners were formed of clumps of fur that had refused digestion, returning from inside of the cat warped into a more solid shape. Bouncing around like tumbleweeds, they absorbed crumbs of dog food, bitten human nails, hair pulled out by a trichotillomaniac hand, and other dead organic elements, becoming power structures. They were no longer afraid of revealing their existence since I was observing them from the cage and posed no danger. They moved around gently, occasionally stumbling upon a lost sock or a broken pet toy and gathering around it to decide its fate. But they had trouble agreeing on anything and just moved away, abandoning things. They were nihilists.
“Can I roll with you?” I was about to ask, but as soon as I opened my mouth it was inundated with gravity that felt like hot sand and squeaked between my teeth. Then it was hard to breathe, impossible to breathe, unnecessary to breathe; and the cage shrunk to the size of my body, or the body grew to the size of the cage, and became unpleasantly heated from inside as if somebody had left the stove on. “Who is cooking?” I asked, but nobody was cooking. I knew that, and they knew that I knew. There were no secrets between us.
But I stuck my hand inside anyway, only to find continued fragments of other bodies—the spiritualized parts, belonging to the other side: those that continue to grow after death and are seen as separable, capable of drifting autonomously. There were beaks, fangs, claws, hooves, feathers, horns, and bones swirling around slowly in the heat. I extended my hand further to grab them, but my hand was no longer mine. I had no hands. Soon I forgot what a hand was. My memory had nowhere to be stored because my head was also gone. But the temperature was perfect. I could still feel it with some abstract, archaic senses that were spread around the space and shared among other species by means of a sensory mycelium. Whatever was left of me succumbed to a leaden inertia, a soothing state of non-being.
It was already morning when I opened my eyes. My mind was transparent and spiritual—like after a night of heavy drinking. Every muscle was sore and swollen, as if my body had been hastily thrown together overnight, leaving no time to adjust. The pillow was wet from my drooling, and I could feel particles of filth from the dog's blanket on my teeth. The pets were sitting outside the cage, observing me. It was strange to see them so calm together.
The horizontal utopia of interspecies co-living hadn't turned out as I'd planned. In places devoid of freedom, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor — that’s what they say. My idea was to dismantle the spatial hierarchies that existed within the house due to my historical privilege of occupying the prime resting spots. But instead of being abolished, the hierarchies reversed. Now, the animals treated me with no respect or consideration — as if they were members of a rich family talking down to a crackhead uncle. “He could have had it all, look what he did to himself!” They judged me harshly for spending the night inside the cage, considering me deranged, incapable of coherent thought or of making decisions, either for them or for myself. They took the initiative. They wouldn’t let me on the bed or sofa, hissing and barking menacingly every time I got close to the cushions. The floor became my habitat. To be honest, it didn’t faze me. Since that night, I developed an irresistible addiction to gravity. Being in the cage felt like returning to the cradle, but instead of the caring faces of my parents watching me from above, I saw the muzzles of my dog and cat examining me from behind the bars. I didn't mind getting marginalized in my own house. I no longer minded anything.
Before the cage, I was merely a tourist to the floor realm, occasionally unrolling my yoga mat for daily chaturangas, or curling into the fetal position during moments of overwhelming despair while laboring on soulless copywriting tasks. I knew the margins of the house only superficially and wasn’t aware of how different the life below was from the life above. Now, the horizontal ideology transformed my home into the empire of light from Magritte’s paintings, boldly delineating where one world ended and another began. The more time I spent inside the crate, attentively listening to the whispers of the dystopian netherland, the less I wanted to be anywhere else. It was my friend who disturbed my peace, insisting that I return the Mayan cosmology book I had finished during my first week in the cage. I was slightly irritated by her assertiveness; I always have trouble reclaiming borrowed books, mainly because I rarely remember who borrowed them.
It’s night, and we are eating chicken broth. She is the first person I have seen in three months. My urge to share my metaphysical adventures with her is strong, but I’m unsure whether I should act on it. If she asks me questions—even just one—I’ll tell her everything. I’ll lay bare the obscene details of my new life with no shame or hesitation. I just need her to ask.
Suddenly, people in the restaurant start moving erratically. Someone screams for help and starts to call an ambulance. We turn our heads and see a woman who has fallen unconscious at a nearby table, her face buried in her bowl of unfinished soup. The broth drips down her hair, leaving streaks of wet fat on her silk shirt. The waiter struggles to lift her head, which seems as heavy as if it were made of basalt. He manages to remove her face from the soup; its gentle green color stands out vividly against the pale pink of her shirt. She looks so unbothered and tranquil, totally possessed by gravity. It makes me envious.
1 a.m. is such a strange time to be eating chicken broth. Especially in June.
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