The human condition (Jakob)

He’s 38 years old (or 266 in dog years) and he looks every excruciating minute of it. He’s skeletal, but more than just physically – emotionally he’s nothing but a collection of dried bones. His eyes sit on the surface of his face like the eyes of a fish that you just caught with stinking bait in a remote, ice cold Hungarian lake. Desperate, anxious eyes sitting on a face, taut with the transparent skin of despair and defeat.

While you talk he holds out his hands and turns them palms up and then palms down. He seems surprised that they are empty. All this work, how could my hands be empty? He creaks like an old door, “The future doesn’t exist and the past doesn’t exist, and I’m beginning to think, that the present doesn’t really exist either.”

You imagine him dissecting live rats by candlelight. He’s the last of his kind and he’s already extinct.