Moving Parts Read Online Free PDF

can be discerned in this image, especially if the evening newspapers suggest that the shots missed their presumed target. Accustomed to descriptions of paid murders, readers of the press will surmise the existence of a hired killer who was most probably shooting at a speeding car. The bullets are said to have found their victims at random, which ought not to surprise anyone. It’s all the same to the world who happens to be in the line of fire, one person or another; which person is which is a matter of indifference to it. In certain circumstances a knight can perish at the hands of a bishop or vice versa; but the difference between them in essence will remain unclear and doubtful, explainable only in terms of movement and direction. The latter, as everyone knows, moves diagonally across the whole board, so long as nothing stands in its way; while the former dodges, attacking the other pieces surreptitiously out of the blue. Yet it can’t be understood why one is one and the other the other, which authority decided it would be so and why; they could just as well have decreed that from now on the opposite will be the case. And since a complete reversal of roles changes nothing, it’s all the easier to comprehend that it makes no difference to the bullets either. Afterwards, staring at the corpses, the onlookers succumb to the illusion that the inertia of death is aperfect match for precisely this body lying forlornly on the sidewalk, and so in the end they walk away reassured. Violent scenes always have their complement; after the culmination of tension the crowds pour into movie theaters, stores, and cafés humming with idle conversation about pleasant trivialities. And finally there comes the moment of relaxation that everyone deserves, when the tape and the official posts are no longer needed, the shards of glass all swept away, and in the immaculate panes of glass the rider and the rearing horse beneath him rotate again as if on a merry-go-round.
    Looking behind the paragraphs for a path leading beyond what is visible, the narrator has found only confusion. Behind the paragraphs things are the same as everywhere else, only in disarray: broken glass, jumbled sounds. So let’s gaze at the raindrops striking the windowpane – now they are in the foreground. There’s no escape, and it may be necessary until further notice to move amid pieces of scenery set up ahead of time in between which not even the slightest gap can be discerned. Wherever one looks there are walls, floors, and ceilings, earth and sky. Scattered here and there is the sadness of unfulfilled desires and the sadness of desires fulfilled, each equally opaque. There’s always something that a sensitive body wants and something it doesn’t want, and it yields just as easily to euphoria as to despair. Since nothing can be done for it, at the very least it avoids protruding edges and is cautious when handling knives. The defenseless skin solicitously conceals somesecret truth: a greedy stomach, delicate intestines, a few liters of blood that can be discharged in the blink of an eye, spilling beyond recall – and above all, the incessantly beating heart, which may never know peace till it bursts. In such conditions the charming little flowers on the meadows of bedding fabrics lend the pillow an ironic quality. But the body, trustful and yearning for sleep, is unaware of this. As for the white batiste that simply cries out for lace, it only seems not to impose its own essence on bedrooms: Whiteness is at root a provocation, and lace impresses with an ephemeral innocence about which it can be said merely that sooner or later it may be soiled, and it’s easy to imagine pillows trampled by heavy boots, lying in mud, perhaps stained with blood. But the body refuses to hear anything about this. Nor does it wish to know about the blindness of bullets, nor the cold gleam of a steel barrel, nor the plump worms that live somewhere down