THE NARRATOR INVENTS ANOTHER NARRATOR by Sharmila Cohen
The closest I can get to the space between life and not-life is sleep memories.
Last night, I slept about walking down a hallway with doors painted on either side. I was just ethereal enough to nearly pass through them; just corporeal enough to keep getting stuck before I could see what was on the other side. I spent eternities like this: lodged firmly within the frames of paintings of doors, then fighting my way back out again. It always went the same way, regardless of how many methods I tried—never glimpsing the beyond, abruptly tumbling backwards to where I began.
As I approached the end, I felt a wave crashing over me and chasing itself back down to the opposite end of the corridor. An elder’s voice echoed through the space: Time is an ocean that no boat can traverse. And it made me so angry to be guided by such a heavy-handed metaphor. With each new wave, I grew more and more deeply submerged, and if I held my head beneath the surface, I could hear the watery voices of a chorus of youths singing: We are all adrift on the sea of time, but we always float on our backs and stare directly into the sun. My eyes burned and expanded into two black holes. All that time I was drowning in rushed through them and into the darkness like waste through sewer tunnels.
I was again in an empty hallway, but this time it led from myself back to myself. I walked in circles until a new narrator showed up and wrote a door for me to exit. Thank you for this gentle yet effective means of egress, I said to the new narrator as I privately plotted my doppelganger’s demise. This was when I wrote the first editor into existence. But the narrator was too cocky to be pushed back into the tunnel by just one. So I wrote more and more editors, carefully adding trap doors, lest one of them try to become the protagonist. The editors all became fast friends. There were so many of them all making small talk at the same time that it created a wall of sound. I tried to cut through the noise with a knife, but everyone knows that doesn’t work. So I huddled down low, covered my ears, and watched the noise rise up to the ceiling and dissipate. In that moment, I could finally be alone again—and what a relief.
Then, the immediate disappointment of waking up. It was time for work, so I headed into the office and began reviewing my files. As I sifted through the various maps of my universe, I found that a small community of editors had popped up in a remote beach town: wondrously beautiful, but isolated because the neighboring villages had all cleared out overnight. Either my universe was deteriorating, or it had simply sprung a leak.
Sharmila Cohen is an award-winning writer and translator. Her work has been featured in publications such as BOMB, Harpers, LitHub and Epiphany. In 2021, her English translation of The High-Rise Diver (Die Hochhausspringerin) by Julia von Lucadou was published by World Editions. She also co-founded Telephone Books, an interdisciplinary press dedicated to experimental translation. Originally from New York, Cohen moved to Berlin in 2011 as a Fulbright Scholar to complete a creative literary project.
