Thanatographies, p.1
Thanatographies, page 1
THANA TOGRA PHIES
THANA TOGRA PHIES
Yanara Friedland
TUSCALOOSA
Copyright © 2026 by Yanara Friedland
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
FC2 is an imprint of the University of Alabama Press
Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press
Book Design: Publications Unit, Department of English, Illinois State University; Director: Steve Halle, Production Assistant: Alexandria King
Cover image: Joanna Rajkowska
Cover design: Matthew Revert
Typefaces: Adobe Jenson Pro (text) and Filson Pro (titles)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-217-8
E-ISBN: 978-1-57366-920-7
CONTENTS
Room
Night
Medusas
Burials
Notes
Acknowledgments
Thanatography
1. an account or story of a person’s death experience.
2. a treatise on death, its symptoms, or the changes it brings.
—Collins Dictionary
I’ll worship animals in the night, I’ll lay violent hands on the holiest icons, I’ll clutch at all lies, I’ll grow bestial in my dreams and will allow myself to be slaughtered like a beast.
—Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (tr. Philip Boehm)
ROOM
IN THE WHITE ROOM THE WHITE BED, its white bedsheets, the curtains white and white the sun, a digging dream evaporates. It is spring. Suspicions fill the air already filled with the return of blossoms. Cadavers etch the ground. The apartment is quiet. It must be late in the morning. Words line up without purpose. Light grazes the walls, and a pile of clothes creates a pyre on the floor. I move through the small room toward the door, which is closed. I begin to make my way toward the door to exit the room, its sleep-crested whiteness. But the door is locked, and after some jerking of the door handle, I wake up to a scene of myself locked in a white room with white walls. I remember the windows that open to the balcony, where in a few days workers will build a scaffold through which I can make my exit. It is a future exit not yet available to me. I can see the key through the keyhole. Whoever locked the door has left the key in the lock, visible enough to plan my escape around. The moment comes to a screeching halt.
There must be other stories that begin like this, but this is not a story. A silver tray is stacked below the dresser with its wide mirrors. It is spring. There is a balcony and white walls. A key in the lock, a silver tray, clothes in a pile. I say this word out loud: traitor. It’s a bleak word. Despair has very little imagination. I will wither in a room, four days after arriving in the city that gives me a sensation of both dread and inviolate pleasure. For a moment I hold my breath as if that may unlock another exit. I clench my hand into a fist, call out softly, then in a hoarse whimper, to the other parts of the apartment. I have never howled before, and these sounds remind me of moaning cows ready to be emptied. Eloquence means nothing when locked in a room. I grab a hairpin with which I try to loosen the key, then slide a piece of paper under the door, but unlike in Erich Kästner’s description, the gap between door and floor is narrower than the key, and if the key drops, it will remain on the ground, on the other side of the door. I give up on that scheme and wait, and though I am quiet now, I am also clearly howling.
I am used to waiting, first for the words then for the sentence, for what wants to be written, what cannot be written, what has already been written, for someone to disrupt the quiet hours of writing and call me back to life. Attend life now! And because the apartment is so high up, I cannot observe the street or the courtyard, instead I must be with the birds and their twigs, the sky, and its clouds. A car pulls into a parking spot. Dead hairs all over the mattress. I begin to talk again. This time the whispers are a quiet conversation. You could say I am talking to myself but that is not quite it. I have my work cut out for me in this lingering, staring pose.
In the mirror the face changes from moment to moment. Right side. Left side. Fortune. Misfortune. Twitch. Sorrow. The face changes through time and has already, since I woke, shifted toward its completion and ultimate disintegration. A painted image of two chickens staring at each other hangs on the wall next to the door. Having an inner life is most likely offensive. When I arrived four days ago, activists had glued themselves to the street and caused a traffic jam. The taxi driver got out and lit a cigarette. We sped along the route that I took a year ago, before leaving the city, where certain memories have grown up and died. I begin to rummage, like a raccoon, through the trash. The chickens glare in disappointed, red-rimmed faces. The inner life knows it’s being sought out and, conveniently, has nothing to say. I have noticed that audiences everywhere grow solemn and reverent at a speaker’s cold, impossible truth.
The room is a perfect place to speak from. I sense a desire for someone to take a good look at my soul. I imagine hordes of people out there in merry togetherness and my own condition an anomaly. The more I think about it, the less likely it seems. We have all been demoted. The birds in red skies. I float around in thought and then recognize that the thought is a small root, part of a planetarium, a voracious consciousness. The mirage of the thought drapes itself over the head, then unravels and falls to the ground. It takes courage to make a decision. To wear this rather than that. It takes courage to decide how to tell the story and to give up the long arm of despondency, which embraces the geese as they land and shit on the grass each day. Gums are tingly. I can feel a cold sore forming on my lip.
I try not to get distracted by good-taste writers with their stylish European abodes, their love of cooking, and their quirky sense of dress. They are locked in too. Their houses will be taken back by crawling roots. Writing, of course, is a substitute for the life I cannot live; I am, in fact, unable to live, Patricia Highsmith admitted, and then murdered. Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones, wading into the river. I search for books that know this quality of feet dragging through fast-running, deadly water.
Yet another writer going to Vienna to trace Freud’s footsteps. The friend who asks all the wrong questions or the friend who asks none. The teacher who steals material from her students. An old acquaintance pretending we never lost touch. The weird cliquey groups that form around charisma, like insects around an intoxicating flower. When anger is rife and ready to be plucked, there is nothing that can assuage it, for anger opens its mouth and the room fills with the scent of rotting flesh. It is apt to call a devouring plant a Venus flytrap. The female sex devours, inward pulling, toward an opening that previously was unknown to exist. In climax, it pulls away from the world, optimally into itself. The room is empty, and I keep shaping thoughts to fill its menacing tranquility. I would like to read without destroying anything. I would like to love without destroying you. This might be a moment, who knows how long it will last, of necessary preparation. Unsought. Unsuspected. But first I need to do what humans do quietly upon waking. I use the silver tray, for it is better than the corner of the room.
Below the city brews with sound. I imagine bodies flying across streets, death, and more death, then bicycles and well-dressed cosmopolitans marching down the pavement. A truck delivering water bottles to wealthy artists on the top floor. Tick tick tick. A door slams shut, and the cackle of sound briefly goes mute. The plug of the city might have been pulled by a child hitting a streetlight.
I have always asked for a quiet room with a view to the courtyard, mornings to myself. But it is the locked door that changes the room. It changes my desire for the room. A crow caws in the distance. A dull sound of footsteps on the stairs, a creaking of another door farther down. Restlessness, like a rolling table, slithers across the wooden floorboards and bangs into corners. Life moves uninhibited in its living. The footsteps disappear.
On my second day in the apartment, I had noticed my inclination to clean as soon as I entered. I noticed that the person who lived there, and who had sublet the place to me, kept a busy sense of order, one that befalls you out of nowhere and surrounds each sneeze and yawn. I did not know the person, but corresponded with her a few times before moving in. Like everyone else, she checked her phone regularly and responded usually within a few hours after I had written. She sent me photographs and instructions, and the pantry almost full upon arrival. She had encouraged eating from it in her note, but also said to not eat everything. She hoped she could return to a not entirely empty pantry.
I had already cleaned the apartment twice since my arrival, although it was not visibly dirty. In fact, it was so clean that I noticed my fingerprints on everything. I took photographs of each room to make sure I would remember where items stood and to rearrange the apartment back to its original state before leaving. Besides cleaning, I also had the strong urge to try out makeup and shower gels left behind by the woman who sublet the apartment. I also tried on a pair of brown boots I found in the closet and then her Dior sunglasses, which looked odd on my face. I did not sleep well in her bed, even though she had a perfectly comfortable mattress and high-end linen and a thick and heavy down blanket that covers you like a coffin. When I arrived, I had called everyone I knew in the city and had now seen everyone I knew at least once. I was ready to begin whatever I was here to do. Enough time had passed to revisit the book I never completed. I had announced it would write itself toward completion and become a book. Now that I am locked up, I can, in fact, begin.
It is worse to be locked in than to be locked out. It is worse not to sleep than to sleep too much. It is worse not to write than to write all the time. I make a list. I write a letter in my head. I count the pauses between the crow caws. I try to remember what my unfinished book is about. I want to lie down in my favorite park and feel the breeze pass through the oak trees. I wish I had a cigarette, then I wish I had a lighter. I worry that this worrying will kill me, a sudden collapse of vital organs mid-thought, mid-worry. I think about the enemies in my life who all, at one point, professed their love for me. To enter any kind of knowing, the space must be cleared out. All distractions and ornaments of satisfaction removed. I begin to chew on my nails, an old habit from childhood I reverted to when unable to change my circumstances. I move the nail of my thumb through the soft part of the bitten-off one to create more nail to bite off. Out of nowhere, I feel hints of relief, even ecstasy, like letting yourself drift out to sea. Ready to let go and be washed up into death, into life.
The sun has come out, and I close my eyes, absorbing the gentle warming light. The sun and I are serious yet playful. Nothing is serious until you understand yourself as an explicit target. It is you, after all, I am looking for. The sun plays on my face, and a shadow comes too. I feel I could fall asleep while facing the sun. I could fall asleep holding my head upright. If I stay locked in for days, maybe I could finish my book, write it, then pause and fall asleep in the gaze of the sun.
I put the silver tray out on the balcony and cover it with an old newspaper. The stench will alarm a neighbor at some point, though no one seems to be alive. All windows are closed. I feel too embarrassed, too polite to scream from my shit-covered balcony. My life is changing right at this very moment. It has already changed, and the sun engulfs my body. I am experiencing withdrawal symptoms from not looking at my phone. It is hard to know what one looks like with eyes closed, but I can feel the asymmetry of my face, the shape of my chin, its dents, and the frown moving up my forehead. Circles of fire ringlets form in my cornea. A persistent cough enters from nowhere, as if someone is choking to death. I listen to the rattling cough that pushes through the walls, which seems like a very odd way to separate humans, who lie head-to-head with a wall between them, dreaming each other’s dreams, and still feeling all alone in a place. I start to count the moles on my left arm. My fingers smell of burnt firewood. The cough coughs itself through time. I sit in this room and receive these flurried images, thoughts bitching their way through the walls, all uninvited guests blowing their smoke into the room.
A hard thump. Something above me has fallen to the ground. A piece of furniture or a body? Not even a grave is an uninterrupted space. In fact, it diminishes privacy, and your body becomes a communal feasting ground. The notion that you can sleep when you are dead seems as false as the notion that work happens when you are working. Or that theft occurs the moment the burglar enters the house and takes your possessions. The sun is no longer on my face, no longer encompasses or encroaches on me. It has moved behind the house, and I will live in its shade until the door is unlocked.
The room now appears as a large open hole, a void. The void in each heart with which one is born and with which one dies, regardless of how beautiful life has been, regardless of the transformations and recognitions. The void, a room in one’s heart, with a bed and a mirror. The room, the void, a door, and a special key. The room, the void inside of the apartment with a courtyard, a street, an address, windows, a little mailbox. A place to retreat to and depart from, a place to invite guests and a lover, to dream and wake up in. A room, a void, to get ready in, put on a chiffon dress and a necklace, comb hair, let dead hair fall to the ground. A place to wait for the call, a sign from the outside, to be called outside, be ready for the outside. To check the news, return and survive the blows received, the love not received, the punishments or abandonments all over the streets, seen and seen again, unable to change them. To then be brought back to the room, the void, where one can blow out the candle, look at the clock, and close one’s eyes. Time passes outside. In here it is just void. A voided time unwitnessed and unending. Sentences from row to row piercing an imagined clock that keeps ticking, the voice again, but no one responds from the other side of the walls. I will never know why.
I crawl and lie down deep inside of the void. Could I lie and live here, in my own body, upon the boredom of floorboards? I must revel in the senses, which are mine for now. I hope to hear the key in the lock. To hurry along time. I hope for someone in this moment to step forward and knock, a double knock, a little knock back and forth. The floorboards receive me without doubt. They are hard and dirty. Fewer and fewer sounds from the outside. Time cannot be wasted, but a clock does strike. Now I remember nothing but the sound of bells. A procession of women in black negligees passing by, a fashion demonstration, the voice of someone far away saying they are booked up for the next two months. A turkey stuffed with busy hands . . .
I have started to knock on the floorboards. No one is knocking back. I knock rhythmically, a breath with each knock. I make small decisions regarding what to do next. Revenge becomes absurd in this position and to tell a story impossible.
Cut up the dandelions when they are dead. Do not pretend you like to work or lift anything heavy. Despite this confidence, even the slightest noise can make the voice fall silent. It retreats into the fleshy slime of the throat, rolls up like a snail, and only the clicking sound of the sand in my ears is audible. I am the egg in the bowl below the sink. I dance quietly between furniture. An ancestor slurps pudding in the mirror. Another fact: blossoms on the sidewalk feel like spells. The inability to do anything continues to upset me, even though I spent most of my days in pursuit of others’ agendas that I want nothing to do with.
It is to here and not further that I can think myself. The room has fully entered me, and without much self-pity I must admit that anyone who comes close will be locked in this room too. Humans are contagious. The stylish writers in their European abodes with their slanted bookshelves and overgrown cross-germinated gardens, their picturesque life in the rural areas, is what I would try to emulate had I not been locked up in here.
Everyone I have loved I still love, even if I will never see them again. The future is behind me. The future is another room to enter, right next to the room I’ve been locked up in. These final origins of myself. I can hear the garbage truck. Sirens. There is a lurking, a peeking, another glance, a furtive curve in the step. Without another human around, I sense calm terror crawl along the windowsill. The furniture has begun to sway. In this room, high out at sea, initial images build toward an inevitable emergence; the figure of longing as it begins to know itself.
I climb out on the balcony, unable to leave by door or mirror. The balcony slabs show cracks. Ruinous structures decaying within. I wait for the birds.
NIGHT
THE ANIMAL FIRST EMERGED BELOW THE SHADOW of a candelabra and then again attacking me in a dream, in the form of two snakes that could fly. It was a dream, but I was not sleeping. I flew on the wing of a large bird, below animal bones coming out of the earth. The bird swooped over an alpine village, eerie memory and idyllic mountain pastures. In the distance, ancient battlefields blasted with cow dung and cow udders turned inside out. The bird’s mouth a Prussian blue.
The blue is coming through the window now. It is night, lithic letters line the wall. Night says, in this world and through all of time some are loved more than others, some love more than others. The truth of history is that we don’t love each other enough.
I remember a jury summons. I remember the mammal bearing down. I remember the keys living their life below a heavy stone. I remember the tale of the princess feeling the pea below her mattress. I remember something I wrote . . . like a wild animal not surviving. Not surviving. I remember that I am in the realm where I realize I may be monstrous.
