FINAL UCHRONIA SQUARE 22

The crack in the ceiling had evolved during the night like a bureaucratic tumor that finally decides to manifest itself in all its grotesque glory. It was no longer a simple fissure in the cracked plaster: it was an inverted mouth, swollen, wet and sarcastic, a celestial and notarial vulva breathing with the deliberate slowness of a chief auditor who enjoys making the taxpayer wait while reviewing for the umpteenth time a file that is already condemned.

From its irregular, red, slightly inflamed edges, with small purplish veins pulsing to the rhythm of the Pontifical Stock Exchange, there escaped a thick, whitish, warm and slightly opalescent fluid: the literal ejaculation of the Sorrowful One, the orgasm produced by the system itself when it contemplates, with almost erotic delight, its infinite, glorious and irremediable inoperability. Each drop fell with weight, temperature and ontological meaning. Plop… plop… plop. When it struck David Levinsky’s sweaty, scab-covered chest, it produced a slight chemical hiss, as if pontifical ink were branding his flesh with a red-hot seal. The smell it gave off was dense, sticky, almost chewable: a putrid symphony of paper archived for decades in unventilated basements, the cold sweat of notaries who had not fucked in years, rancid semen from thousands of previous servants, melted sealing wax, old printer ink and a sickly sweet background of rotten strawberry gummies that someone had crushed against the floor in a failed act of faith. That stench penetrated to the bottom of his lungs, thick as contaminated molasses, and gave him such a brutal and painful erection that the titanium cage bit his glans viciously, producing a hot, sharp and strangely addictive pain that climbed his spine like an execution order signed in blood. David Levinsky lay completely naked on the stained parquet, his legs open at an indecent and obscene angle, his anus dilated, deep red, throbbing and still oozing viscous, whitish and slightly yellowish remnants from the previous night’s session.

The smell rising from his crotch was overwhelming, almost solid: acidic sweat from hours of anguish and self-flagellation, dried semen crusted in his pubic hair and the folds of his skin, sticky remains of crushed strawberry gummies mixed with bodily fluids, and the earthy, fecal, intimate, deeply animal and repulsively erotic stench of his unwashed rectum after almost three days. He breathed that smell like a terminal addict, inhaling it greedily, knowing with absolute clarity that it was the exact aroma of his own ontological liquidation, the official perfume of a man who no longer exists except as a file in the process of final closure. The brown envelope fell directly onto his sticky, trembling belly. The paper was warm, slightly viscous, almost alive, as if the crack had birthed it with slow, bureaucratic pleasure. He opened it with fingers that already smelled intensely of his own anus, dried semen and existential ...