Work Text:
Zero-Degree Survivor
The Shape of Sound
Cold has a sound. Like an old air conditioner compressor failing to restart inside my skull. Hum. Hum.
The intervals grow longer, until total silence, but the tremor of the impending start hangs forever in the depths of the brainstem. Hum.
I sit on the sofa and listen to it.
The ceiling is indeed too low.
Not physical distance — the suffocation of it pressing downward, like the bed of a glacier.
I sit here, sofa springs digging into my spine, and suddenly remember something I learned as a child: ancient creatures remain intact under ice sheets.
What about me? If I froze right now, what rings would they see when they cut me open?
Hum.
The sound starts at the lower edge of the occipital bone.
Then crawls down the cervical vertebrae, one by one, like a frozen spider weaving a web inside my spinal canal.
With each strand, the muscles tighten one more degree.
By now my shoulders should be as hard as permafrost rock.
But no one sees that. They only look at the coat.
Brown winter coat, beige pants, green sweater, green scarf.
Layer after layer. That's how they wrap shrouds, too — layer after layer.
Except shrouds are meant to preserve the last bit of warmth, while I am trying to keep the cold inside from leaking out and scaring people.
The cold does leak. I know.
Sometimes when I walk across a room, I see the condensation on a water glass suddenly accelerate downward.
That's the low temperature I leaked as I passed by. A negligible thermodynamic disturbance.
If someone comes within thirty centimeters, they'll unconsciously hug their arms.
It's not psychological. It's real.
My cold has a radiation radius.
But no one comes within thirty centimeters.
Let me describe this coat.
The wool fibers are mottled with salt corrosion, map-like — the residue of evaporated sweat, proof that my body once tried in vain to warm itself.
How ridiculous: a person who is always cold, and still sweats.
The dampness under my arms is a paradise for fungi. They bloom on my frozen wasteland, drawing a territory more complex than my palm lines with their hyphae.
Every time I lift my arm, I smell that sweet, rotten stench. Life can only exist on me in this form: rotting, parasitic, lightless.
Lining shreds push out through the seams, like my exposed nerve endings.
There's a patch on the left elbow, crooked stitches, sewn by myself.
The thread is dark green, an ugly contrast with the original brown.
My hands shook badly when I sewed it. The needle pricked my fingertip three times.
I watched the beads of blood appear, then solidify into dark red hemispheres on my cold skin.
I licked them off. The blood was warm. The only warm thing.
The right shoulder has stains — maybe oil, maybe dried rain.
They form a kind of blurry nebula, edges bleeding into pale yellow.
I often stare at it, imagining it's a star chart marking some warm galaxy I'll never reach.
The inside of the collar is the most worn.
The wool fibers have been rubbed repeatedly by my chin and the moisture of my breath, hardening into stiff lumps.
They must be coated with my skin flakes, the salt of my saliva, and the remnants of words — those broken, frost-covered words.
I, I want to say...
Words frost over on my tongue. When they come out, they're shattered ice crystals.
S-sometimes I feel like it's not me speaking, but the cold vibrating my vocal cords.
Every syllable has to thaw in my chest, then refreeze as it passes through my throat, and by the time it reaches my lips it's already ice shards.
Whoever listens thinks I'm trembling. I am trembling.
But the trembling isn't fear — it's thermodynamics. The inevitable loss of energy as it moves from high entropy to low entropy.
My existence itself is a thermodynamic paradox.
You said to look at the eyes.
Fine.
But first let me tell you: the eyes are windows to hell, not to the soul.
My soul burned out long ago.
Maybe the ashes are still floating somewhere, but the fire is gone.
Once the fire is gone, all that's left is cold.
Narrow pupils? You said.
Yes. Like a cat's.
But not a cat's softness — something harder. Like holes under ice. Light passes through and does not reflect; it is absorbed.
Absorbed forever.
Do you know why?
Not because the light is too strong.
Outside, the sun is burning the world, but my pupils don't contract because of that.
They are narrow because the cold squeezes from inside.
The fat, muscle, nerves behind my eyeballs — all contracting, pulling the iris toward the center.
An inward collapse. A miniature event horizon.
Look long enough, and you'll see the black is not pure black.
It's deep blue. Sick blue.
Like the lips of a drowned person. Like the edges of frostbitten gangrene.
Blue so dark it's black, black so deep it's blue. Blue is the color of cold.
In the spectrum of fire, there is no blue except for that illusory outer ring of the flame's core.
I am that ring of flame — but the flame itself is absent.
Sometimes when I look in the mirror (I rarely look), I see tiny specks in my eyes.
Like the coordinates of erased stars in a photograph of the night sky, leaving empty holes.
Those dark spots move, very slowly, like deep-sea fish drifting in invisible currents.
Is that my thoughts? Or just the shadows of retinal vasospasms?
You asked about bloodshot veins.
There are none. Blood vessels need warmth to dilate.
My capillaries are all constricted to their limits. Blood flows as slowly as an underground river beneath permafrost.
If you cut my conjunctiva, the blood that comes out would probably be blue too.
But the surface of my eyeball is moist.
Strange, isn't it? So cold, yet still producing tears.
Transparent fluid forms a film over the cornea, then thickens because of the low temperature.
When I blink, there's a slight resistance, like stirring syrup that's just beginning to freeze.
This fluid film is my last interface with the world.
Light passing through it refracts, but brings no warmth.
Images are distorted, cooled, and only then reach my retina.
The world I see is always filtered through a layer of frost.
Now you're looking into my eyes.
What are you looking for? A glint of humanity? Fear? Lies?
All I can give you is this: deep blue void, and within the void, a deeper hole. That's all.
If energy is conserved, where does the heat I lose go?
I've thought about this for a long time.
On the nights I wandered the streets, on the creaking beds of cheap motels, on this sofa that's too soft.
Heat cannot disappear. It must transform into other forms, or transfer elsewhere.
So maybe, somewhere, a stranger is burning up for no reason.
Maybe on the other side of the city, there's a woman whose cheeks are always flushed, whose palms always sweat.
She sees doctors, gets tests — everything normal.
But she's hot, from the inside out. A little furnace burning in her chest.
She pushes open windows, strips off layers, wears only a thin shirt in winter.
Others shiver, but she steams.
That's my temperature.
Or maybe it's more dispersed: thousands of people each have an extra 0.001°C, imperceptible.
My cold diluted into the entire human heat pool, like a drop of ink into the ocean.
But that's too kind a thought.
More likely, the heat isn't transferred at all — it's annihilated.
A thermodynamic violation inside my body. Negative entropy. Impossible, unless...
Unless I am not a closed system.
Unless something is drawing heat from me and sending it to another dimension, another place ruled by different laws.
My body is a leak. A crack. Heat drains through me into the void.
I am the crack.
That would explain why I'm always cold.
Not a lack of heat — a continuous loss.
Like an invisible straw stuck into my marrow, sucking without pause.
I eat — heat from food.
I breathe — heat from oxidation.
My heart beats — heat from friction.
None of it keeps up with the loss.
Never.
Sometimes I imagine: what if that straw were suddenly pulled out?
Would all the accumulated heat explode at once?
Would I burst like an overheated engine?
Or am I already so used to low entropy that warmth would become poison?
I don't know. I only know that now, at this moment, the cold has a shape.
Like fiberglass splinters lodged in my joints.
I've counted: twelve in each shoulder, eight in each elbow, twenty in each wrist (ten per wrist), the hip joints — too deep to count, but I can feel them there, grinding against the bone with every rotation.
And the sounds? Besides the hum inside my skull, there are others.
When my knees bend and straighten, a fine crackling, like stepping on thin ice shells.
When my spine flexes forward, the intervertebral discs groan like wet wood being wrung.
Even when I breathe, the connections between ribs and sternum produce an almost inaudible squeak, like an old house contracting in the cold.
Taste? Cold has a taste.
Like the air inside a freezer that hasn't been opened for years — a mix of metal, plastic, stagnant air.
Like the air just before snow melts. Like the deepest concrete wall of an underground parking garage.
All of this constitutes my sensory reality.
And you — you warm ones — what does your world feel like?
Joints that move in silent lubrication? Breath without friction? Air that's a neutral, odorless background?
I can't imagine.
Like a colorblind person unable to imagine red, a deaf person unable to imagine C major.
Hands.
You said to look at the hands.
Fine. Let me curl my fingers first.
See? The knuckles are white — not skin-white, but the waxy pallor of ischemia.
The nails... not very pretty.
I tear them. I dig the nail of one hand into the edge of another nail bed, find that tiny gap, then pry upward.
At first only a little separation, then with steady, even force, the whole nail peels off.
There's a faint tearing sound, like ripping high-quality paper.
It hurts, but that pain is clean, distinct.
Not like the cold — the cold is blurry, diffuse, a suffocating pressure without an edge.
Pain has boundaries. Pain is specific.
Pain proves the nerves still work, proves this body can still react.
When the blood comes out, it's dark red, thick.
Because it's already cooled under the skin for some time, by the time it reaches the surface it's close to my body temperature — my body temperature.
It clots quickly, forming a fragile scab along the nail bed.
The scab is dark brown, like rust.
I lick the wound.
The taste of blood: iron, salt, and something more hidden — the taste of life itself. Raw, violent, the taste of something determined to continue no matter what.
Does my blood taste the same as everyone else's?
Or has it already changed chemically because of the chronic cold?
Now you see the bare fingertips.
Exposed nail beds, pink, sensitive as newborn skin.
When they touch something, there's an exaggerated reaction, like a tooth stripped of enamel touching cold water.
They don't look very good, I know.
But at least they're real.
No adornment, no disguise — just tissue in its rawest state, exposed to air.
Fungi don't grow here. Too exposed, too barren.
Fungi like damp folds, dark corners.
Fingertips are solitary rocks on a wasteland — nothing can take hold.
You asked about the nail dirt?
There's none. The dirt went away with the nails.
But if you look closely at the edges of the nail beds, there are lines, like cracks in a dry riverbed.
Those are the micro-topographies formed by my skin contracting under low temperature.
Deep in these lines, maybe there's dirt — not real dirt, but a dirt-like mixture of skin flakes, clothing fibers, city dust.
How long have I wandered?
Since before the high-temperature disaster, before society still functioned, before people dared to go out during the day.
I walk the streets like a mobile shadow.
When the sun shines on me, my skin reddens, hurts, blisters — I burn just like anyone else.
But the pain of burning is on the surface. The flesh underneath is still cold.
Paradox? Surface boiling, core frozen.
Like an ice ball thrown into a fire: the outer layer melts and vaporizes, but the inner core remains solid, at negative temperature.
The backs of my hands are scarred with sun damage.
Old and new layered together, pigmentation forming irregular patches.
On the blue undertone, these brown patches look like islands on a map — brief marks left by warmth, soon to be drowned again by the cold sea of my body.
Now you're looking at my hands.
What are you thinking? That they look like a dead person's hands? A drowned person's?
Maybe.
But dead people don't tremble.
And my hands, even at rest, have a microscopic tremor — muscle fibers contracting and releasing in sequence to generate heat, a doomed attempt at insulation.
About six hundred tremors per minute. Too high a frequency to see, but if you held my wrist, you'd feel that constant fine vibration.
Like an engine idling.
Like something inside trying to start, but never able to ignite.
- Fading Developer
You took a photo of me.
The first one.
You said "smile," but my facial muscles at this low temperature have lost the ability to make complex expressions.
All I can do is twitch the corners of my mouth slightly, but that looks more like a spasm than a smile.
So I kept my usual face: lips pressed in a straight line, eyes looking at some empty point behind the camera.
When the flash went off, the world disappeared.
All colors, shapes, depth — all collapsed into that single too-bright point of light.
My retina recorded this small explosion, and for the next few minutes, a dark purple afterimage lingered in the center of my vision — the ghost of light.
You held the Polaroid, waiting for it to develop.
We watched the blank whiteness, watched the colors slowly emerge from chaos.
First blurry patches, then gradually clearer.
I saw brown (the coat), beige (the pants), green (the scarf and sweater).
Only at the end — the face.
That face...
That face was blue.
Not a healthy blue — the blue of overdeveloped film.
The shadows were blue-black, the highlights bluish-gray.
The eyes were two darker holes, no reflection, no light.
The lips were purple-blue, tightly shut.
Was that blue silhouette on the photographic paper really me?
But when I look in the mirror (when I can bear to look), I see normal skin tone — maybe pale, but still within the human spectrum of white.
Why does the photo show this blue? Is it the light? A chemical deviation in the film?
Or did the camera capture a truth invisible to the naked eye?
I reached out to touch the photo.
You handed it to me.
The paper was still a little warm — residual heat from the developing chemical reaction.
That warmth stung my fingertips. The sting of relative warmth. Like frostbitten hands suddenly plunged into warm water.
I held the edge of the photo and looked at the blue version of myself.
He looked very far away. Far in the sense of existential distance.
Like an object seen under thick ice — shape distinguishable, but unreachable.
Like a projection from another dimension.
At the moment the shutter clicked, did the light hesitate for a microsecond as it passed through me?
Did the photons, striking my coat, my skin, my eyeballs before bouncing back into the lens, sense something wrong?
Did they record my low temperature?
Those photons are now fixed in silver halide crystals, forever carrying the memory of touching me.
A photograph proves existence, but it also highlights how thin that existence is.
Two-dimensional. No temperature, no weight, no cold radiation that never stops.
Just an image. A symbol. A visual record of "the man in the coat."
But the record is already distorted. The blue tint pushes me away from the human category, toward the realm of unnatural pathology.
I turned the photo over.
Blank.
No words, no date, no label saying "who is this."
Just a photo without context, without narrative.
If someone digs this up a hundred years from now, how will they interpret it?
A man wearing too many clothes, indoors, expression hollow.
Will they imagine my story?
Or skip straight to the next, more interesting image?
"C-can I keep it?" I asked. My voice more broken than usual.
You nodded.
I put it in the inside pocket of my coat, against my chest.
That's the closest place to my heart. If I had any residual warmth, it should radiate from there.
But I know the photo won't get warmer. It will only slowly absorb my cold, until the paper itself becomes brittle and fragile.
I took it out again at night.
In the dim light, the blue was even more pronounced.
The whole face nearly disappeared into shadow, leaving only the two black dots of the eyes.
I looked at those eyes — the eyes in the photo — and suddenly realized:
I can never know what I look like to others.
The me in the mirror is reversed left and right.
The me in the photo is desaturated and flattened.
The me described by others is filtered through language and subjective interpretation.
The real me is unknowable — like the interior of an event horizon, no information can ever escape the external observer.
I am just a phenomenon.
A cold phenomenon, wearing a coat, occasionally speaking, sitting on a sofa.
A phenomenon doesn't need an essence.
VII. The Temperature of a Black Hole
You said I mentioned the universe.
Yes. I think about the universe often.
Not the romantic starry sky, not the magnificent nebulae — the essence of the universe: void. Overwhelming, nearly total void.
Hundreds of millions of light-years of nothingness between galaxies.
Nothingness between stars, too.
Even inside an atom, between the nucleus and the electrons — a proportionally staggering nothingness.
We are all tiny condensations in the void, accidental gatherings of matter briefly resisting entropy.
And me — I feel like I can barely hold even that condensation together anymore.
Gravity pulls all my heat toward an invisible center... the skin is the event horizon. From the outside I look whole, but inside there's already nothing.
The event horizon is the boundary of information.
An external observer can never see the final moment of an object falling into a black hole, because the light emitted from that point can never escape.
Where is my event horizon?
The surface of my skin? Or the outer edge of that coat?
When someone approaches, the information they receive is already my past state.
My real-time internal state is always delayed, always unable to transmit completely.
We are all trapped by the speed of light on our own causal islands. But my island is especially cold.
When I observe others, I notice they exchange body heat.
Not a metaphor — physical fact.
Two hands shake. Heat flows from the warmer hand to the cooler until equilibrium.
Hugging is more efficient: larger contact area, closer distance, both conduction and radiation working at once.
When they separate, each has taken a little of the other's temperature away.
Like photons passing between stars.
Photons born in a stellar core, taking tens of thousands of years of random walks to reach the surface, then shooting into the void.
Some are absorbed by other stars, some reflected by planets, most travel forever in the void, gradually red-shifting, cooling.
And I don't even radiate.
I don't emit light.
No infrared (or if I do, it's very weak).
I am an absorber, not an emitter.
Light falls on me — most is absorbed, a little reflected — but the reflected light has already lost its vitality, pale and cold.
Sometimes I wonder: if the universe had consciousness, what would it think of me?
A local anomaly near absolute zero? A thermodynamic depression? A pocket of negative energy?
Maybe on a larger scale, my existence gets smoothed out by the statistical average.
Just like when you measure the temperature of air in a room, you don't notice one molecule moving particularly slowly.
I'm just that slow molecule. Macroscopically irrelevant.
But that doesn't comfort me.
Because microscopically, I bear it all.
Every second, every cell, every molecule experiences this cold.
This isn't philosophical speculation. It's physiological fact.
Are my mitochondria still producing ATP? Are my enzymes still working at optimal temperatures? Are my neurotransmitters still transmitting properly across synapses?
Probably all disrupted.
I'm just running on inertia — like a satellite that has fallen out of orbit. Still moving, but energy already exhausted, coasting along a trajectory destined to decay.
When they hug each other, I watch.
Not with envy — with confusion.
How do they do it? How do they allow another heat source so close?
How do they endure the uncertainty of heat loss or gain?
How do they build that trust — that the other won't suck away all their warmth, or burn them with too much?
For me, any temperature change is a threat.
Heat flows in — my body panics. The system doesn't know how to handle this input.
Heat flows out — that's just the daily state, but accelerated outflow brings me closer to that critical point: losing the minimum energy needed to maintain basic metabolism.
So I wrap my coat tighter.
Stay isolated. Maintain the illusion of a closed thermodynamic system.
Even though in reality, I am an open wound, heat draining from me continuously to some place I don't know.
VIII. Examination: Teeth
Teeth.
You said.
I open my mouth. Very slowly, because my jaw joints are stiff.
Separating the upper and lower jaws requires overcoming muscle resistance, plus the increased viscosity of connective tissue at low temperature.
A faint "click," like thin ice breaking.
Look.
The teeth are white. Too white.
Not a healthy pearl white — the white of old bones, the white of over-bleached linen.
The gums are pale purple, not healthy pink.
Poor circulation. Lack of oxygen.
I bite my lip. Often.
I need that sharp, local pain to anchor my consciousness.
When the cold becomes too uniform, too diffuse, consciousness begins to spread — like ink dropped into water, edges blurring, eventually dissipating.
Pain redraws the boundaries: this is body, this is not-body; this is inside, this is outside.
Bite the inside of my lower lip. That's the softest part, the easiest to bleed.
Teeth press into tissue — first resistance, then breakthrough, then warm fluid gushes out. Iron taste. Life taste.
In my mouth, blood is warm.
Relatively warm.
Compared to my oral mucosa, at least the blood is liquid, still flowing.
It washes over my teeth, seeps into the gaps, briefly simulates a state of being alive — only living creatures have warm fluid in their mouths.
But soon the blood cools.
Because the temperature inside my mouth is lower than normal.
Maybe 34 degrees? 33?
I've never measured, but I know it's below standard.
After ten seconds or so in my mouth, the blood becomes viscous, as cold as the rest of me.
Then I swallow it. The cold blood slides down my esophagus, leaving a cold trail.
You asked about abnormalities.
What counts as abnormal in this world?
Flawless white teeth might be a sign of a visitor.
But are my teeth white because they're devitalized? Because the pulp under the enamel has necrotized?
Or something more fundamental — my entire existence in a process of bleaching?
My tongue presses against the roof of my mouth.
The roof of my mouth is cold too.
Fine texture, like the cracking pattern of frozen ground.
The salivary glands still work, but the secretion is sparse and sticky.
I need to swallow often — not because I'm thirsty, but because if I don't, saliva will accumulate at the back of my throat and semi-solidify into a gel.
I close my mouth.
When the upper and lower jaws rejoin, the teeth clack together with a crisp sound.
Like two ice cubes colliding.
I don't know what other people's teeth sound like when they meet — probably duller, muffled, because of the cushioning of the periodontal membrane and normal water content.
My teeth sound like porcelain.
Fragile, over-fired porcelain.
- Fungal Ecology
Underarm.
You said that word.
I... need a moment.
This movement means raising my arm, exposing that area, letting someone see the part I least want to show.
Not because of shame — shame requires enough self-awareness, and my self has frozen too brittle — but because... that is the most honest part.
The fungi live there.
They are the most honest colonizers.
They don't deceive, don't pretend. They just grow.
They need moisture and warmth, and my underarm can't provide warmth, only moisture — because my sweat glands still futilely try to regulate a temperature that cannot be regulated.
So the fungi grow very slowly, very sickly.
White patches, like tundra lichen on snow.
Not fluffy mycelial clusters — a membrane-like growth pressed tight to the skin.
Sometimes it itches, but the itch feels distant, like a touch through thick clothing.
I raise my right arm.
Slowly. The shoulder joint emits a continuous fine crackling, like crushing a handful of dried leaves.
Fabric rubs against skin. The inside of the coat is probably already coated with spores, but I never wash this coat — washing wouldn't change anything, the fungi would just recolonize, and I'd be exposed to even greater cold in the meantime.
The armpit is exposed to air.
The moving air carries away some moisture, brings an instant of coolness.
But when that coolness meets my internal cold, there's no temperature gradient, no heat exchange — just two colds placed side by side.
Look.
White. Pale yellow.
The skin is wrinkled from prolonged dampness, with excessive texture — like paper that's been soaked and then dried.
Pores are prominent. Each hair follicle has a fine ring of pigmentation.
The vellus hairs are fragile from fungal metabolites, break easily.
This is not a healthy ecosystem.
A healthy ecosystem has diversity: bacteria, fungi, viruses, reaching a balance through competition.
Here there are only fungi, because only fungi can survive this low temperature and persistent moisture.
They have no competitors, no predators. They just expand their territory slowly, patiently.
I lower my arm.
The fabric touches skin again, absorbing the tiny bit of moisture that condensed during the exposure.
The fungi are covered, returned to their dark kingdom, continuing their silent metabolism.
You know?
Sometimes I wish the fungi would cover my whole body.
All my skin, forming a biological shell.
Then I wouldn't be human anymore — I'd be a symbiote. A new life form.
The fungi would break down my dead skin, maybe secrete some metabolites that would alter my thermoregulation.
Maybe I'd become warm. Or at least, different.
But the fungi only grow in the underarms.
Only in those folds, those dark damp corners.
They refuse to colonize the wider territory, refuse to give me a total transformation.
They are content with the present, with this local, restricted existence.
Like me.
I am also content with this sofa, this room, this semi-existence.
Change is too frightening.
Because change means heat flow. Means entropy increase. Means things might get worse — colder — or, unimaginably, warmer.
But warmth might be a more thorough death: a system adapted to cold, suddenly heated, might collapse. Like an Antarctic ice shelf disintegrating in a warm current.
So I sit.
The fungi grow.
Each in our own niche, slowly, patiently waiting for some end.
- The Mercy of a Bullet
A gun muzzle is closer to me than an embrace.
That's not a metaphor.
Geometrically, a muzzle can approach my skin infinitely — while an embrace always has thickness: the thickness of clothes, of bodies, of psychological safety distance.
A muzzle can touch my temple directly, my chest directly, my palate directly.
Thermal conductivity of metal: about 16.5 W/(m·K).
When a lead core pierces my chest, will the instantaneous heat loss make me feel "change"?
I calculated.
Bullet speed ~300 m/s, diameter 9 mm, mass 8 grams.
Assume all kinetic energy converts to heat, and half is absorbed by my body — the temperature rise would be... never mind. The number doesn't matter.
What matters is that instant.
The instant metal tears through skin, muscle, bone.
In that instant, there is violent frictional heat. The bullet's surface might reach hundreds of degrees.
But that heat exists only in a micron-thick layer around the bullet, for microseconds.
Negligible effect on my overall temperature.
But maybe, along the bullet's path, local tissue would experience momentary burning.
And then the cold — the cold of blood loss, the cold of shock, the cold of death.
But that would be a new kind of cold.
Not the eternal background radiation of my current cold — a cold with an origin, a process, an end.
A narrative cold.
I long for narrative.
My life has none.
Only a state: cold.
No cause, no development, no climax — only the monotonous, endless cold.
Like a song with only one note, prolonged infinitely.
Death at least provides structure: cause (bullet), process (dying), ending (silence).
But death has its own horror.
They say freezing to death is the most peaceful death.
Body temperature drops gradually, consciousness fades gradually, you fall asleep in a hallucination. No agony, no struggle — just extinguishing.
What I fear is precisely that peace.
Because I am already too close to that state.
If I freeze to death, it would merely be a continuation of my current state — quantitative accumulation reaching a qualitative threshold.
No turning point. No epiphany. Only more of the same.
Burning to death?
Surface burning, core frozen.
That would be an interesting contradiction: skin charred black, deep tissues still intact from the cold.
In the end, I might be a corpse burned on the outside and frozen on the inside.
Two extreme temperatures coexisting on my body, like a postmodern artwork.
But the sun won't burn me to death.
Not because I'm not afraid of heat — because I would avoid it.
Instinct would drive me to seek shadow, just as I now hide indoors.
Even when longing for an end, instinct persists in survival.
How ironic: a person who wants to die, and yet their body still struggles to live.
So when you pulled out the gun, I felt both expectation and fear.
Expectation of the possibility of an end.
Fear that the end might bring — not pain, but the possibility that even the end might not be thorough.
What if the bullet doesn't kill me?
What if I survive, with new wounds, lower body temperature, deeper despair?
When the metal touched my forehead, I felt its temperature.
Room temperature. Higher than my skin temperature.
That warmth stung, like a mild burn.
I almost flinched — not from fear of death, but from fear of that little bit of warmth.
Warm metal. Warm bullet. Passing through my cold skull — what would it take away? What would it leave behind?
"Shoot," I said.
My voice steady, no tremor.
Because when the truly important moment arrives, all the fine tremors stop.
Like the center of a blizzard — it is the calmest place.
You looked at me.
I looked at your eyes looking at me.
In that gaze, I realized: you were looking for a reason to pull the trigger.
Not a game-rules reason, not a visitor-characteristic reason — a human reason. Compassion.
But compassion requires empathy, and empathy requires shared experience.
How could you empathize with a cold you've never experienced?
How could you understand this void seeping from the marrow?
So in the end, you lowered the gun.
Not because you were certain I was human — but because you couldn't be certain I wasn't.
In uncertainty, killing becomes difficult.
That's the human moral dilemma. A dilemma I have long transcended.
For me, kill or not kill — both are just different thermodynamic paths.
Shoot: energy release, structural destruction, entropy increases sharply.
Don't shoot: energy continues to leak slowly, structure decays slowly, entropy increases slowly.
The end is heat death for both.
Only the timescale differs.
- The Cocoon of Clothing (Revisited)
Late at night.
The others are asleep, or pretending to sleep.
I sit on the sofa, holding the same posture.
My joints have locked into a certain angle. Moving them again will require more force, possibly tearing tissue.
So I stay still.
The coat wraps me.
It is no longer just fabric — it is an extension of my body.
Between the wool fibers and my skin, a symbiosis has formed. My sweat and skin flakes seep into the fibers; the fibers' dyes and chemical treatments seep into my skin.
We are slowly fusing.
I think of cicada larvae.
Living underground for years, wrapped in a cocoon of soil and their own secretions.
Finally they break out, molt, and become flying adults.
But my underground period has been too long. My cocoon is too thick. I may have missed the moment for transformation.
Or maybe I'm not a cicada at all.
Something else. Something without an adult stage. Larvae forever, until death.
I touch the cuff of my coat.
The edge is worn into a fringe. Fine wool fibers hang like tired tentacles.
I wrap my fingers around them, feel their roughness and fragility.
They will soon break off, fall away, become part of the room's dust.
Then the coat will be thinner, more worn.
But taking it off is not an option — just as breathing is not an option.
It is a necessity. My boundary. My definition.
Without this coat, who am I?
A pale, trembling person with no explanation for why I'm so cold.
With this coat, at least I have a label: the man in the coat.
Labels simplify the world.
People don't need to understand me — just recognize the label, then react accordingly: curiosity, pity, disgust, indifference.
The label is a shortcut in social interaction.
I cherish this shortcut.
It saves me from the need to explain.
Explaining is exhausting. It requires organizing language, recalling causes, constructing narratives.
And I have no narrative — only symptoms.
Symptoms don't need explanation — only presentation.
So I present: coat, tremor, stammer.
You interpret: cold, fragile, suspicious.
We complete a social exchange without touching the core.
What is the core? I don't even know myself.
XII. Examination: Ears
Ears.
You said.
I turned my head, exposing my left ear.
My ears are cold — of course, all parts are cold — but ears are especially obvious, because they protrude, because blood flow is scarce.
The edges of the auricles are pale purple, like the early stage of frostbite.
You leaned close.
Your breath hit the skin behind my ear.
Warm breath, humid, carrying the metabolic byproducts of another living being.
It should have made me feel warm — but warmth cannot penetrate my skin's surface, just as sunlight cannot melt permafrost.
What are you looking for?
Ear canal? Shape of the auricle? Any abnormal folds or growths?
The ear is one of the strangest organs.
It is a hole. An opening. One of the portals the body opens to the world.
But we rarely realize it's a hole, because it's not used for eating, breathing, excreting.
Only for receiving — sound, balance information.
All of our bodies are holes.
Mouth, nose, ears, eyes (eyes are holes for light), anus, urethra, pores.
The body is a porous, permeable boundary. Inside and outside constantly exchange matter, energy, information.
Maybe that's why people disappear so easily.
Because the body was never a stable collection to begin with — it can always disintegrate into its basic components and disperse into the environment.
Death only accelerates the process.
Do you see deep into the ear canal?
It should be very dark there.
Not because there's no light — because my tissues are dark in color, blood pooled in microvessels due to poor circulation.
If you had an otoscope, you'd see the eardrum: grayish-white, probably thicker than normal from chronic inflammation, from tissue adaptation to low temperature.
But you don't have an otoscope.
So you can only look at the surface. Auricle. Earlobe. The skin behind the ear.
That skin has fine hairs, almost invisible.
Around the follicles, sometimes there are flakes — like miniature snowflakes.
Not from dryness — from abnormal skin cell renewal. At low temperatures, the rhythm of cell apoptosis and renewal is disrupted.
I turned my head back.
My cervical spine emitted a continuous series of small cracking sounds, like tearing a long strip of Velcro.
"So?" I asked.
Though I already knew the answer. You'd say "nothing abnormal," or stay silent.
The abnormality is internal, invisible — a deviation in thermodynamic parameters, not morphology.
You didn't speak, sure enough.
The distance between us returned.
Safe distance — no heat exchange possible.
XIII. Absolute Zero
Three in the morning.
The coldest hour of the day, even in this permanently hot world.
My cold synchronizes with the world's cold — resonance.
At this hour, I feel most "correct." Most aligned with my own essence.
Absolute zero: minus 273.15 degrees Celsius.
The theoretical lower limit. The temperature at which all molecular motion stops.
Unattainable. You can only approach it infinitely.
Because to stop molecular motion, you need energy — and the act of applying energy itself causes motion.
Am I approaching it?
I don't know my exact body temperature.
Never measured it. Afraid to.
The number might be disturbing. Possibly below 35°C — that's already hypothermia range.
But I'm still conscious, can still think, can still speak.
So my system must be operating at some non-standard equilibrium.
Maybe I've developed alternative metabolic pathways.
Maybe my cells have learned to produce ATP at low temperatures, trading efficiency for low-temperature adaptation.
Maybe my enzymes have changed conformation, achieving optimal activity at lower temperatures.
Maybe my nerve conduction relies on different ion channels, different thresholds.
Evolution can happen quickly when selection pressure is strong enough.
Cold is my eternal selection pressure.
So I evolved.
Not to become better adapted to warmth — to become better adapted to cold.
I am a specialized species in a cold niche.
The only individual. The only population. On the verge of extinction — not eliminated by the environment, but trapped by my own specialization.
What if the temperature returns to normal?
What if solar activity suddenly weakens, and the world returns to its previous temperature range?
I would overheat and die.
Like an Antarctic fish placed in tropical waters — my physiology would collapse. Enzymes denature, membranes liquefy, ion gradients瓦解.
Warmth is poison to me.
So I must hope the world stays hot.
Only then does my cold make sense, have a reason to exist.
I am the reverse of this high-temperature world. Its shadow. Its negative.
Without high temperature, there is no my cold.
Without ordinary people's warmth, there is no my abnormality.
This gives me a twisted sense of belonging.
I am not an outsider. I am part of the system. The dialectical part.
Thesis: warm humans.
Antithesis: cold me.
Synthesis... no synthesis.
The dialectical process is stuck, arrested in a state of contradiction.
But contradiction can persist indefinitely.
Just as perpetual motion is impossible, but a near-perpetual motion system can run a long time if friction is small enough.
I am that low-friction system. Delicately balanced between warmth and cold. Neither resolving the contradiction nor being destroyed by it.
Just existing.
Existing as a question.
XIV. The Final Examination: The Whole
Just before dawn.
You stood in the doorway, looking at me.
This was the last examination — not a specific part, but the whole: the figure sitting on the sofa, wrapped in a coat, barely moving.
Under your gaze, I felt scanned.
X-ray, thermal imaging, molecular analysis — an imaginative synthesis of all technological means.
You tried to see through the coat, through the skin, through the bones — to the core, the cause.
But the cause may not exist on the material level at all.
Maybe it's a story. A trauma. A curse. A mistake.
Maybe I turned in the wrong direction at a critical moment and could never find my way back.
Or maybe it's pure chance: one morning my thermoregulatory center broke permanently, for no reason.
If I told you, would you believe me?
If I told you what's under the coat, would you understand?
Or would you, like the others before you, step back, be afraid, and eventually ask me to leave?
So I stay silent.
I let you look — but I don't let you know.
Information is power, and I retain this final power — the power over my own essence.
You can observe the phenomenon, but you cannot touch the noumenon.
This is the last dignity I can maintain.
Your gaze moves away.
Examination complete. Conclusion: unknown. Classification: pending. Disposition: keep for now.
I win — or rather, I haven't lost.
The right to continue existing has been extended by another day.
But that is also a loss — because continuing to exist means continuing to be cold.
Contradictions everywhere.
- The Echo of the Universe
One hour before sunrise.
The quietest moment of the world.
Even the visitors seem to rest, or at least pause their activities.
I sit in the increasingly dark room (the darkness before dawn is always the deepest) and think about the universe.
I think about the end of the universe.
Heat death: all stars extinguished, all black holes evaporated, all matter decayed. The universe reaches a uniform temperature, just above absolute zero.
No gradients. No structure. No information. Only eternal, monotonous, maximal entropy.
That would be... peaceful.
No cold, because there's no warmth to contrast.
No loneliness, because there are no others.
Only homogeneous, infinite, meaningless equilibrium.
I long for that equilibrium.
But before I reach it, I must first go through this stage: local, personal low entropy.
I am an anomalous fluctuation in the universe's heat death — a statistically improbable event.
In infinite time and space, such improbable events always happen.
I just happen to be one.
No reason, no purpose — just probability.
Like a monkey randomly typing Shakespeare on a typewriter. Like air molecules suddenly all gathering in one corner of a room.
Impossible — but in a large enough sample, inevitable.
I happened.
Now I need to decide: resist the probability, or go with it?
Resistance means trying to get warm, trying to reintegrate into the mainstream distribution.
Going with it means accepting my abnormal state, waiting for the universe to slowly approach me — or for me to slowly approach the universe.
I choose to go with it.
Because resistance requires energy, and I have almost none left.
Going with it only requires existence — and I am already too good at existing.
The sofa springs have formed a permanent depression under my buttocks.
My weight, my cold, my existence — they have already left a mark on this room.
Years later, even after I'm gone, this depression may remain — like a fossil recording an unusual pressure point.
I like that thought.
Leaving a trace, even if no one can read it.
Like air bubbles in ancient ice, sealing the atmosphere of that time, waiting for some future civilization to dig it up, analyze it, try to understand that vanished world.
My depression is a message to the future: there was once such a being, it was cold, it sat here a long time, and then it...
Then it what?
I don't know.
Maybe it keeps sitting until the sofa rots.
Maybe it finally stands up, walks out the door, into the sun — pushing the contradiction of surface burning and core frozen to its extreme.
Maybe in some examination, the bullet finally fires, bringing a momentary local thermal disturbance.
I don't know.
I only know this: cold, coat, sofa, darkness before dawn.
And you — standing in the doorway, about to turn away.
"Th-thank you," I say at the last moment.
Not for the examination. Not for the tolerance. For the gaze.
To be gazed at means to be confirmed as existing — even if only as a question.
And to exist as a question is a tiny bit better than not existing.
Just a tiny bit.
But you nod and leave.
The door closes softly, leaving me in the darkening room.
My cold fills the space again, like water refilling a drained container.
The hum inside my skull resumes. The fiberglass splinters in my joints readjust. The fungi under my arms continue their slow growth.
Everything as usual.
This is my life: perpetual twilight beneath the frozen layers.
END