BEFORE THE ACCIDENT, I DREAMED EVEN LESS
Lolli EditionsJune 2021Selected by Barbara Epler
A remarkable debut: three highly atmospheric and super-saturated stories feature characters yearning, striving and coming apart at the seams: emotions are let loose, and roll off independently like potatoes when their burlap sack moulders away. There is at once a weight and a phosphorescent brightness too (like Dickens’ description of Marley’s ghost shining in the dark like a rotten lobster). Sevastopol is compulsively, palpably engaging and strange in the best sense. Emilio Fraia, a master of the subjects of love and loss, has a knack for levering things into the reader sideways, and shockingly fast: it’s like getting a splinter, but much, much more enjoyable. — Barbara Epler
Given a choice, I’d never revisit all this. But it happened again today. Watching your video, I was hurled right back into the middle of it. That’s why I’m writing you now. Things haven’t been easy lately. What happened, when I think about it, feels something like a bandage, something I’m tired of wrapping and unwrapping, as carefully as possible. But it’s never enough. I know it’s 2018, but I feel like I’ve lived all these years without actually having lived at all. Like I just woke up one day, bedraggled and over the hill, and someone came up to me and said: “Good morning, Lena, welcome to 2038.” Or, doubting my sanity, asked: “Do you dream often, Lena?” And I’d reply: “Very little.” Five years ago, before the accident, I dreamed even less. But Gino liked hearing about my dreams.
Some nights he would sit me down in front of the camera and ask me to tell him about a dream, any dream you can remember. I’d usually tell him the same thing, that I don’t typically dream, or rather, that I never remember my dreams. Gino would push and, while I tried to think of something to say so I wouldn’t disappoint him, he’d ask me questions about my life, my past, my parents, friends, guys I’d slept with.
One time, Gino came over to my house and showed me one of those videos. It was my voice playing over images he’d shot. Mountains, glaciers, winds across a deserted landscape. I was talking about mundane things, stories from my life, but the way he’d edited it gave the impression that what was being narrated was, in fact, a dream. The truth is, people get bored hearing about other people’s dreams, nobody has the patience for that. That’s why I don’t like to talk about my dreams.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. But your video, the video I watched today, was a little like that. It made me think of Gino, of his experiments with the camera, of me sitting there for ages, rambling on and on. There was something similar about the rhythm, or maybe the tone. But I know it’s just another impression, because everything about it was different, too. When I entered that room today, the film was already playing. I couldn’t tell if it was at the start or halfway through. The image on the screen, a body on a stretcher – my body, in this case – instantly drew me in. It was a body in the middle of a green room that smelled of urine and medicine. I watched myself lying there, thousands of miles from home, and as much as I wanted to and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t move.
I don’t remember anything about what happened earlier, the rescue itself, though I was awake a lot of the time. I only know what they told me afterwards, and that I was lucky because I’d been in a section that the helicopters could still reach, which is unusual, search and rescue is always difficult, and every year dozens of people die on the mountain.
The doctor slinked around the gurney like a reptile. He was thin, with something that looked like a wound, a cut on his upper lip. There was a coldness about him, he seemed important. He told my companions that my condition was still touch-and-go and that I would need another operation. They talked over one another, trying to make sense of the situation, sometimes arguing like I wasn’t there anymore.
I returned to São Paulo on a red-eye, an evacuation involving both the Brazilian and Nepalese governments, all arranged thanks to the influence of my sponsors at the time. Once I landed, I underwent another surgery and then another, and at the end of it all, I felt like months had passed. My body heavy, in a deep sleep: months, but maybe it had been hours, minutes, years?
This is one of those cases where we have no choice, someone told me, at some point, with his hand on mine – we have no choice but to do what has to be done, do you understand? Then I thought I saw Gino, his face, hovering over mine. ◉
The title and structure of Fraia’s book is taken from a short story collection by Leo Tolstoy. As a soldier during the Crimean War, Tolstoy witnessed the Siege of Sevastopol and based The Sevastopol Sketches (1855) around his experiences of the time.