{"id":39845,"date":"2022-01-13T15:05:20","date_gmt":"2022-01-13T14:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/?page_id=39845"},"modified":"2022-01-13T15:28:46","modified_gmt":"2022-01-13T14:28:46","slug":"sample-translation-the-light-years","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/foreignrights\/authors\/jens-meijen\/jens-meijen-the-light-years\/sample-translation-the-light-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Sample translation – The Light Years<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jens Meijen – The Light Years<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[pp. 19\u201321]<\/strong><\/p>\n

The doorbell rings. I pick up the intercom and ask who it is. Silence. I go downstairs to check, my flipflops slapping against every step. In the vestibule of the apartment building, right before the mailboxes, there\u2019s a pitch-black box. There is a HANDLE WITH CARE sticker on the top and, next to it, a National Postal Service label\u2014one of Amazon\u2019s many subsidiaries. No sender details. I pick it up\u2014not heavy, but unwieldy\u2014and carry it upstairs. Something seems to be sloshing around inside it with every step, like a flat stone in water. You\u2019re waiting in the doorway. I go inside and put the box down on the table. We both stand there looking at it for a moment.<\/p>\n

\u2018Open it,\u2019 you say. I don\u2019t move. \u2018What, you think it\u2019s a bomb or something?\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not impossible, actually, although I imagine there are better, cheaper and more efficient ways to get rid of us, if someone wanted to do that. You lift the lid off. The pungent tang of fish fills the room. Inside the box is a plastic tub with some water in it containing a large, fat hermit crab. His shell is grayish brown and all scratched up, his legs a dull orange. The animal regards us with beady eyes mounted on two skinny stalks, makes a clicking noise, blows a saliva bubble from what is probably his mouth. The creature seems ancient, but maybe it\u2019s just dried out. \u2018This must be some kind of joke,\u2019 I say quietly. We text our friends to ask who pulled this stunt. Dimitri sends back the video for a song called \u201cCrab Rave\u201d that features an entire army of crabs dancing to the music. Our friends think we\u2019re joking. They have no idea what we\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n

\u2018What should we do with it?\u2019 you ask.<\/p>\n

\u2018Cook it,\u2019 I grin, and you roll your eyes. We look over at the hermit crab. We think he\u2019s looking at us, too. Hard to tell.<\/p>\n

\u2018We have to get him a tank,\u2019 you say.<\/p>\n

\u2018Yeah, like in those seafood restaurants,\u2019 I say. \u2018A tank for this guy must be pretty expensive. And what do they even eat?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018We can\u2019t just leave him like this.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019ve already used up almost all of our water allowance. All those plants of yours are constantly thirsty\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

You cross your arms. \u2018They don\u2019t need that much. We\u2019ll just pay extra. Or I\u2019ll drink a little less.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018You should take him for a walk every now and then,\u2019 I say to tease you. \u2018We\u2019ll have to buy a collar for him.\u2019 I look at the creature. I couldn\u2019t kill him. Take a hammer and drive a metal pin through his body. No.<\/p>\n

I go to the pet store. Or, to be precise, the specialty animal supply store, but the sign was too small, so it ended up being the pet store. It\u2019s not far from our apartment. A while back, the previous owner slipped and hit his head on the edge of the counter. We could hear the sirens from our living room. The kind of sirens that herald disaster, that put a peach pit in your stomach. Maybe people can unconsciously tell how serious an accident is from the doppler effect: when the ambulance drives by faster, the siren sounds different.<\/p>\n

At any rate, the owner\u2019s skull was crushed. Lots of blood, apparently, and his daughter found him but couldn\u2019t remember the emergency number, the way you sometimes forget things when you\u2019re in a panic. He bled to death in her arms, or maybe in one arm; she was using the other to hold the phone up to her ear. I walk over to the store in my flipflops and basketball gear that\u2019s at least ten years old\u2014I\u2019ve reached the age where you start trying not to care about what you\u2019re wearing, like tourists or old people, because your desire for convenience begins to eclipse your vanity.<\/p>\n

Out on the street the sun bounces off the hastily whitewashed buildings and the empty store windows with naked mannequins and discount percentages on the glass. Others have been covered with black plastic or have mattresses propped up in front of them. The heat is stifling. You can feel your mouth and windpipe getting hot as you breathe.<\/p>\n

On the store counter there\u2019s a flyer for \u2018haCOWna matata,\u2019 a workshop where people can learn how to massage their cows, though it\u2019s unclear to me whether that\u2019s supposed to make the meat more tender or if it\u2019s for the animal\u2019s benefit\u2014of course it could be both. The girl behind the counter greets me, and I wonder whether she is the owner\u2019s daughter, and whether she sees her father\u2019s blood again, every day at work, cradles him in her arms again. Of course that\u2019s needlessly dramatic of me. I ask for a tank for a hermit crab, and I expected her to laugh, because who would keep a hermit crab as a pet\u2014you can\u2019t even cuddle them, not really, though I suppose you could decorate their shell with waterproof markers and glitter\u2014but she doesn\u2019t even meet my eyes. She stares straight ahead, her gaze settling on my basketball jersey. She takes me to the right aisle, points at a few tanks and asks me how much room I have. \u2018We\u2019ll make room,\u2019 I say. I can\u2019t stop thinking about it, the pulverized skull in her hands, how she may have accidentally pushed her fingers into his brain. Softer than jello after the fall against the counter. His prefrontal cortex reduced to a bubbling deepwater lake. The ridges that housed his memories becoming craters in the shape of her fingertips.<\/p>\n

The girl says there are a lot of different options, and there are a number of things I need to take into consideration, such as exposure to daylight, temperature and noise, and I nod as she lists them. Maybe it would be better to take the crab to a shelter after all\u2014are there shelters for these creatures? She stops talking and looks straight into my eyes for a moment\u2014hers are grape-green, and I think I\u2019m seeing a sadness in them that probably isn\u2019t even there, that I\u2019m projecting into her eyes because I believe I know what happened here. Her fingers sinking into the ravine in his cranium, the smashed bone sliding aside. What I imagine that sounds like, a bubbling or gurgling noise. I suppress a shiver.<\/p>\n

The grape girl has stopped talking. \u2018Yeah, sounds good,\u2019 I say, but I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the right response, because she looks doubtful. I point at a large glass tank and say, \u2018This one, I guess?\u2019 and she starts telling me about delivery times, because this is just a display model. How urgent is it, she asks, and I say, \u2018Very,\u2019 and explain the situation. Scenarios pertaining to the near future are largely generated by the prefrontal cortex of the brain; the gurgling noise coming from the deepwater lake of the man\u2019s smashed skull, then, was the extinguishing of all the plans he still had\u2014from the shipment of apricot clownfish that he was still expecting to the seaside vacation with his family.<\/p>\n

The girl explains that they will do their best to deliver as quickly as possible and that they\u2019re happy to take the crab off my hands as soon as they have room in one of their own tanks, that they\u2019re short-staffed right now, and I nod; I\u2019m about to say something else, but I get distracted because I can already picture the hermit crab in the tank, in his palace of glass, surrounded by large sea shells, those fake fossils, and air bubbles rising up from the sand, and then there are his little eyes, he\u2019s barely moving, he might as well be chained down\u2014he\u2019s just sitting there, motionless. It might seem sad, but he wouldn\u2019t be any better off in the wild, I realize, because he would have long been fished out of the sea to become some child\u2019s plaything, tossed around in the air, or a teenager would rip him out of his shell to humiliate him, or a fisherman would kill him to eat his meat and sell his precious shell in a curiosity shop. Maybe we could become friends, the crab and me. Although of course we never know with animals whether they are with us for our personalities\u2014a horrendously narcissistic notion\u2014or because we\u2019re the ones who feed them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[pp. 48\u201352]<\/strong><\/p>\n

We stand still in the hallway, looking up. \u2018It\u2019s coming from the air duct,\u2019 you whisper. I recognize the tapping. Of course. He must have crawled up to the roof and into the air duct by pushing the grate aside, or maybe the grate wasn\u2019t on there right. It doesn\u2019t really matter how the crab ended up there. We go into our apartment. I go up to the roof and put a plate of food and a bowl of water near the place where he probably crawled into the air duct. Maybe he\u2019ll come out soon, or maybe he prefers sitting in the dark by himself. That\u2019s the trouble with animals: you never know what it is they want.<\/p>\n

The winters here have become greener and greener with the years; the summers turned yellow, then orange, then red, unbearable. It started with little things. Suddenly we could go outside without a coat in December and swim in the sea in February. Then we started getting mosquitos all year round and we barely heard birdsong anymore\u2014no flocks of pigeons in the town square, no seagulls circling the tower cranes. Then we saw busloads full of people beginning to move away from here as the local public transit became increasingly sparse: the town buses went from running every fifteen minutes to every hour to once a day to hardly ever.<\/p>\n

After the first few heatwaves the drivers taped off all the windows with aluminum foil. They left a small strip of the front window exposed; they taped off their cabins on the inside. To buy a ticket you had to scan your fingerprint on a small device. I still rode the bus back then. The air conditioning sounded like the sea and the wind at the same time. In the dark the other passengers were like black rocks on the shoreline and the bus creaked and swayed like a wooden ship. You could see the list of bus stops on the LED screens, which still gave off a little light, but apart from that you were riding blind.<\/p>\n

After a while the screens went dark too, and the buses couldn\u2019t make it up the hills anymore because their air conditioning had to work too hard. Around the same time cracks started appearing in the roads and we were hit with strict water rationing; we started seeing a big storm every spring, monsoon-like rains in the fall, winters without snow and then even without real cold. Most of the streetlights stopped working ages ago. It\u2019s been years since anyone used their attic for anything other than storage. Now we do everything on foot or on what\u2019s left of the train service; we scurry around after dark, fearful and nocturnal. A crew used to go around handing out bottled water to old people in the summer, but when after a while no one answered the door anymore, they\u2019d cross that house off their list and move on. Either the people had left or they\u2019d become maggot food. A little later on, when the streets remained empty, other teams would show up and break down the doors of the houses where no one had answered on the last three visits to see if anyone was still there.<\/p>\n

You did that work too for a while. You saw them in your dreams every night, white bodies, like store mannequins, their cheeks dried up into a crispy husk that you could stick your fingers straight through. Like newspaper. They looked at you with big fish eyes. \u2018They know,\u2019 you\u2019d say when you came home, \u2018they know what happened. All the old residents. That they got left behind by their families when they headed north.\u2019 You saw snakes writhing inside their bodies, between their ribs, hundreds of white snakes with their little forked tongues. You didn\u2019t want to do that work anymore so they had you work the phones instead, out of the community center: endless lists of phone numbers, names and ages. Most of the people who still answered the phone were little old ladies. They talked about people you didn\u2019t know\u2014Ren\u00e9 from the bakery, Lisette from the corner\u2014who\u2019d probably left years ago.<\/p>\n

Sometimes you still hear the dial tone when it\u2019s quiet and you\u2019ll hum along (beeeep\u2026beeeep\u2026); sometimes you hear the busy signal (beeeeeeeep). Most people have already migrated north\u2014to Sweden, Norway and Finland\u2014but more still will follow. The richest have moved to Iceland and Greenland; sometimes we\u2019ll post videos on the group chat that are making the rounds online of lush, verdant landscapes over on the islands, newly planted forests, jungles even, with brightly colored parrots, waterfalls that produce permanent rainbows and fat, sickly sweet flowers. Artificially irrigated and shot through with manmade rivers, dikes and dams. Ultimately only the poorest will be left here, back home. Many of those who\u2019ve stayed have recurring fever dreams about a white desert.
\n<\/strong>
\nAll night long the crab taps against the pipes inside the air duct. It\u2019s like he\u2019s trying to tell me something, but I don\u2019t know what. I try to write some copy for an app that allows its users to hire regular people to complete simple tasks, like recording video messages or watering their plants. Meanwhile, you watch something on Netflix, a show about a wealthy family in Greenland\u2014Pioneers: International Heroes. <\/em>A few times I even hear his legs tapping against the porcelain of the toilet bowl. Maybe he can also travel through the plumbing. Sometimes he comes scuttling past in the corridor but each time, when I get to the door, he\u2019s gone. He could come crashing down from the ceiling any moment, I\u2019m sure of it. He\u2019s impossible to find and yet everywhere at the same time. We\u2019re not even sure anymore if it really is a hermit crab\u2014after all, as far as I know they don\u2019t have teleportation skills.<\/p>\n

I want to ask you what the tarot cards I drew earlier mean\u2014the cups, the man with the staff, the tower with the bolt of lightning\u2014but I don\u2019t feel like talking. You turn the TV off and say you\u2019re going to bed\u2014you\u2019re tired, so tired. I close my laptop, take a towel from the kitchen cabinet and push it up against the wide crack between the door and the floor\u2014you never know, maybe that crack will inspire the hermit crab to slough off his shell and slither in underneath the door. I don\u2019t know how nimble he might be when he\u2019s naked. Then I follow you to the bedroom.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m woken in the middle of the night by the tapping. I tiptoe to the living room without waking you. The vacant tank is sitting on the table. The towel against the door has disappeared. The crab has probably made off with it. Nothing surprises me anymore. I sneak half a glass of water so you don\u2019t have to worry about our water quota and crawl back into bed. You\u2019re making noises, dreaming something exciting. I always have the same dream twice. The first time everything is normal\u2014it might be a walk in the woods, a road trip, a pool party, someone coming over or a ride in a gunmetal-gray car. The second time it\u2019s all wrong: the walk in the woods is on Ut\u00f8ya, the road trip is a chase, the water turns into a vortex, the person coming over is a hitman, the car locks the doors and kidnaps me. I\u2019m walking in the same places, doing the same things, except different, out of joint, surveilled by malevolent forces. I never have a choice. They are riddles without solutions. And when I wake up in the morning, I\u2019m left with the nagging feeling that everything is ever-so-slightly off-kilter, that I\u2019ve been thrown into a parallel timeline and will never be able to get back. That feeling lingers all day, like a fog bank that some extraterrestrial behemoth might emerge from at any moment, or a city I\u2019ll never be able to escape. I don\u2019t know what or when or how, but something\u2019s going to happen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[pp. 180\u2013185]
\n<\/strong>
\nI pulled the helmet over my head and found myself in a kind of futuristic laboratory. Right in front of me there was another helmet hanging on the wall with bolts of lightning shooting out of it. I was surrounded by tall shelves full of jars containing embalmed creatures, some sort of alchemist\u2019s vials with colorful substances and a large metal cauldron with liquid bubbling inside it. I heard Marco\u2019s voice: \u2018You need to take that electric helmet and put it on.\u2019 I grabbed the virtual helmet\u2014the gloves made it feel like I was really holding it\u2014and pulled it over my head. Everything went white, and I woke up in a futuristic city. Cars were flying through a grayish-green sky. People were flowing in and out of buildings that were thousands of stories tall. Neon signs and luminescent plastic palm trees flickered in the streets. It was just like I was really there\u2014I couldn\u2019t tell the difference.<\/p>\n

\u2018You need to go to the TV store. Make a left,\u2019 Marco\u2019s voice said. \u2018Use the gloves to point to where you want to go.\u2019 A number of different TV shows were playing on the screens in the store window. \u2018You need to choose a game,\u2019 Marco said. The TV shows were apps that you could load to dive down into the next level of unreality. \u2018Go with the purple one on the left.\u2019 I tapped on it, and the screen went purple for a moment.
\n<\/strong>
\nThe rustling of trees, the smell of turpentine and ripe berries filled my VR balaclava. Birdsong echoed through the woods. I looked around, reached for a bush and the gloves simulated leaves, a small thorn, a cluster of berries, hyperreal. A line of text hovered in the air: \u2018Use the green powder to fertilize eggs. Use the red power to destroy other eggs.\u2019 Then fluorescent clouds appeared, in hypnotic red and green, scattered throughout the forest. At the base of some trees were eggs the size of a human baby. Marco\u2019s voice: \u2018You might be starting out here in the woods, but soon you will move on to a village where you will be trading in animal hides and raw materials, a city where you will buy and sell real estate, and ultimately a space station where you will be trading cryptocurrency. And every hour you die and play on as your own children, that\u2019s how you move down through the generations. Let me skip ahead for you.\u2019<\/p>\n

The forest changed into an urban office with a view of skyscrapers, glass giants. It smelled like Cassandra\u2019s interior. I leaned over and saw people walking around down below. Sometimes one of them would stop and wave at me. Marco\u2019s voice: \u2018The city mirrors the ups and downs of the stock market. When Elon tweeted that Tesla\u2019s stock prices were too high and the stock immediately plummeted ten percent, the algorithms that monitor the market saw Tesla\u2019s shares take a nosedive, so they went ahead and sold other shares because they were expecting a general crash, which in turn triggered other algorithms that sold other shares. A cascade effect. A blood waterfall. The whole system collapsed, all because of Elon Musk. Fire rained down from the sky in the simulation. Buildings crumbled. Panic in the streets. Lives were destroyed; men were so frightened and humiliated they jumped out of their office windows on the five hundredth floor, women wailed at the prospect of their babies going hungry.\u2019 Right now things seemed peaceful in the simulation.<\/p>\n

\u2018Wait, we can go up another level.\u2019 Suddenly I was inside a kind of fishbowl in a space station or a kind of space hotel, in a swanky loft with a view of Earth from a huge window. The smell of disinfectant. The Earth seemed to be motionless, although when I focused I could see that the clouds were moving. \u2018And here you are, a brain in a jar, trading cryptocurrency and deciding who will be injected with your cryogenically frozen DNA. You have to operate the tentacles yourself. It may seem a little abstract right now, but when you\u2019re playing the game it\u2019s very intuitive. You can also use it as a weather app.\u2019 It was as if I could grab the Earth and hold it in the palm of my hand. It looked so serene.<\/p>\n

I reached out, but the gloves simulated my fingertips hitting against the glass. They also seemed to be simulating an invisible lock, a kind of button I could push. Marco started speaking again: \u2018It really is a fun game. But you have to be careful, because before long you\u2019ll want to play all the time. The rewards are really nice. First, in the woods, you can create a comfortable life for yourself, and then you can do the same for your children and grandchildren, and so on. You want to make your own blood immortal. Pass on an empire. That\u2019s the only way to stay alive nowadays. Everyone else ends up being forgotten. If you had to choose between staying on the straight and narrow or immortality, what would you do?\u2019 I wasn\u2019t sure if I was still hearing Marco\u2019s voice, or if the game was talking to me through the liquid that my brain was suspended in.<\/p>\n

\u2018If you\u2019re not careful, it will seep into every fiber of your being. Every night I dream of hedge funds, bond certificates like cushions of blood-soaked velvet, a web of green and red sparks, a room with marble walls and diamond chandeliers, gauzy curtains billowing in the breeze and a balcony with a view of palm trees lining dazzling white beaches, and down below, fuchsias like gemstones in hedges surrounding swimming pools so blue the water looks like molten sapphires, and on a nearby table, carved out of millennia-old amber with an equally ancient insect petrified inside it, there\u2019s a carafe of wine redolent with the aroma of wild berries, and you smell rich ebony, briny oysters, walnuts and leather polish; incense, crystal-clear champagne, caviar foam, truffles, ripe mangoes, agave syrup, palm-oil baths, aloe-vera extract; you are wearing the most expensive clothes, so light you don\u2019t even feel them on your skin, like a phantom in a white gown\u2014yes, that\u2019s what I want for my children. Beauty. Happiness. Power. Freedom.\u2019 If it really was Marco talking, he\u2019d probably learned his lines by heart in advance. Or he was reading them off paper.<\/p>\n

I pressed the invisible button to open the lock of my brain bowl, but it turned out it wasn\u2019t for a lock at all: a black claw grabbed the Earth and crushed it into dust. A dull flash shot out from between the claw\u2019s fingers. All that was left then was debris floating in space. For a split second I thought that maybe this was<\/em> reality: that I was a brain in a bowl containing a body in a simulation, a body still being controlled by a crab. \u2018Um, that wasn\u2019t really supposed to happen,\u2019 Marco said, taken aback. \u2018But some people like to play an evil character.\u2019 Then Irina piped up: \u2018Don\u2019t worry, I did the same thing the first time I played. A normal<\/em> person,\u2019 she said, and I could hear her giving Marco a look, \u2018would have warned you about that.\u2019<\/p>\n

I took off the helmet and noticed I was covered in sweat. Marco took it from me. We said goodbye, agreeing to have drinks later that evening. Then Irina waddled over to the car with me. She said she couldn\u2019t give me a ride home, but Marco hadn\u2019t accompanied us outside. I told her I\u2019d take the bus, but Irina was already pushing me into the car. She pressed a kind of remote control to close the doors. Cassandra\u2019s robot voice intoned my address and started driving. Irina waved. I wiped the sweat off my brow and said, \u2018Tesla, cool down passenger.\u2019 I tried to close my eyes and not pay attention to the road.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Emma Rault<\/em><\/p>\n

This translation was made possible by PEN Catal\u00e0 and Flanders Literature<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jens Meijen – The Light Years   [pp. 19\u201321] The doorbell rings. I pick up the intercom and ask who it is. Silence. I go downstairs to check, my flipflops slapping against every step. In the vestibule of the apartment building, right before the mailboxes, there\u2019s a pitch-black box. There is a HANDLE WITH CARE…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3251,"featured_media":0,"parent":39691,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-39845","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/39845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/3251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/39845\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/39691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}