Since forever, when they sleep, they pace their breathing with the beat of a bubble of their drool. First the bubble inflates into the mouth and licks the palate and then it blows the other way out of the lips with exhalation. If they sleep deep enough and breathe deep enough out of the life of day and night time and tune into sometime else the spit one day maybe or one night spreads to the chin and the nose and eyes and then all of the head and the body are fully covered inside a big bubble, face deactivated under the thick veil of water. Breathing slow and deep below the time of faces veils them in anonymity, then nobody could tell anymore who they where, who was who, what body was what, or if a body was sick — all bodies bloated and leaking and smelling of kiss but maybe they were just hiding or out asleep

How far removed anybody was from death was then a question without an answer, death must have happened somewhere along the line. Ok so when they’re out asleep they’re sick or at least dead and their face doesn’t work anymore but their body still does, fully present forever preserved in this thick plasma even if nobody knows. The question is not if someone died but who now dare say that they did, who dare say “dead” and point his finger at one faceless cold wet body and expect any body to give a fuck

Not having one face and being dead is no indication of an end or even a break then and time keeps dribbling slow and deep to the beat of breathing for nothing. The question is not who now dare say that they died but what form of persistence has made “dead” a pointless word to throw at somebody when nobody has faces anymore … sorry many questions: who’s babies will be the great men of tomorrow, who’s faceless babies’ bodies will be rocked by the computers of tomorrow or whichever machines came after to make sure they don’t wake up from their deep sleep and burst the bubble that preserves their bodies and they keep thriving … who has the better chance now that it’s not so much about faces anymore or being sick or being dead or not — being birthed shouldn’t matter either because if death is not an end birth is not a beginning so forget babies, it must be another sort of offspring, of thriving, another form of persistence

If that body is dead it will float anyway and they’re off in a bubble so they float even harder — drop saliva or plasma in the water and you’ll just be contributing to the flood. It just adds to the inevitable dampening of everything that ruins some things and others not so much at all, it’s like rain on your wedding day sorry. That must be a new form of autonomy in some way … that what’s supposed to kill you doesn’t because you were already it? the same thing? Not autonomy in the sense of when people had faces and names and it mattered if you didn’t but in some other way now that none of that matters anymore and latent potentials find strange shapes to blow themselves into in multitudinous aggregate bubbles now that dormant and sticky and sunken was a good thing

Legend has it … “To one body in particular and its mask of drool — it was very dead this one — the people put a needle and thread through its bubble. To keep it from bursting, first they put a piece of tape on the area under the nose, and then the needle went in through the piece of tape and right into one of the nostrils. The thread went through all of the body and came out again through the other nostril. And then it came out through the piece of tape again and the process went on and on in coils until the cadaver in its mask of drool and threads looked like a big cocoon. The loose ends of wet thread coming out of it were very sensitive to electromagnetic waves and to currents and helped it feel around and roll around the labyrinth that it now lived in. That particular one did fine.”

Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo.