Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Rachel got off at Lawrence, drowsy and barely conscious. She said she would see him tomorrow, and tomorrow seemed so distant to Pronek that he wanted to weep. He watched her descending the stairs and vanishing—he was already pining for her, the argon-neon lights making his face red.

  When he unlocked the door of his studio, everything was in its place: the coffee mug that said KISS ME, I’M IRISH he had whimsically bought in a thrift shop still on the verge of the table; the map of the world still taped to the wall; the clock shaped like a pumpkin, which someone had left in the laundry room, still ticking; a pair of brown shoes turning away from each other in disgust; the washed plate in the rack leaning over the sink, as if wanting to see its own reflection—everything was precisely as he had left it. The amazing thing was, he thought, that when he wasn’t there, nobody was there—the space he occupied was empty when he was elsewhere. But the smell was different—he could sense a pungent, plastic scent, wholly unfamiliar to him. He moved, sniffing, stepping carefully on the tips of his toes, not turning on the light, ready for an attack, like a wolf returning to his violated den, his body tense and cocked, his eyes scorched with fatigue. He pussyfooted into his bedroom—his shirt stretched on the mattress as if playing dead. He went back to the kitchen, touched the bottom of the empty sink (a cockroach slipping into the hole), headlights flickering on the walls. He dropped to his knees and smelled the carpet in the middle of the room and under the radiator, but he couldn’t locate the source. He imagined someone sneaking into his place and browsing crassly and impatiently through everything in this little museum of his life: a green toy chopper he had stolen from someone’s porch; a tin windup frog; a frame with a picture of his parents, raising glasses, drunk; a puny wooden bowl full of marbles; a piece of wooden board with nails in it resembling the outline of the Great Bear. He imagined the intruder trying on his clothes, buttoning up his shirts. What would the intruder think of him, Pronek wondered, of his life? He moved on to the bathroom, where there was a new shower curtain the landlord had put in, exuding a sharp, chemical odor, shimmering in the dark.

  DEATH IN VENICE

  Pronek woke up with a vague, flabby erection and an itchy feeling that his life was happening to someone else. He sat at the table drinking coffee from the Irish mug, watching the people at the El stop waiting: a woman reading a book on a bench; a teenage boy twitching his head, following an obscure rhythm; a man with a straw hat and a sallow face, bending forward as if the morning were a sack of cement; a teenage girl with a palm of hair on top of her head and concentric gold chains on her chest. They stood far apart, not looking at one another. The sun glittered on the rails. This moment, Pronek thought, would not be remembered by anybody but him, and one day it would vanish from his memory too.

  William stood at Pronek’s door in his dancing-teddy-bears underwear, his head huge, his face armored with acne. His phone was disconnected, and he needed to use the phone, he said, to respond to a singles ad.

  William was from Portland and had come to Chicago to break into the improv comedy business, but was currently delivering pizzas and working in a moving company, his hands bruised every time Pronek saw him. After a small-talk session in the elevator, whereby William detected foreignness in Pronek’s curt responses, he had knocked at Pronek’s door and wanted to pick up Pronek’s accent for his improv routine. He had asked Pronek the standard questions (When and whence he came to the US?), then tried to imitate him, improvising a situation in which he was a foreign taxi driver. Pronek had listened to him and his morbidly unfunny performance that included idiotic grimaces and an accent that to Pronek sounded Irish. He felt his chest hollowing with fear and sorrow, while William kept laughing at his own lamentable jokes.

  Pronek let him in and stood leaning against the kitchen counter, while William called the dating service. Pronek could see the sink cockroach emerging from the hole, then cautiously scurrying toward the stove, but he didn’t move.

  “Hi, my name is William. Uhmm, I like Pulp Fiction and Asian cuisine and David Sedaris.”

  He stuck his head into the bathroom, stretching the phone cord to the end, slowly pulling the phone off the table.

  “There is nothing I want more than to give you a foot massage by the fireplace, sipping a foreign beer, singing my favorite song, which is, uhmm, ‘Yesterday.’ It would go like this . . . Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away . . .”

  William sang in a feeble, flat voice, occasionally reaching the hoarse pitch of a tubercular baritone. The bathroom echoed the awful sounds and Pronek imagined the person listening to this hapless message, cringing. He remembered when he used to sing this song and was suddenly retroactively ashamed—he recalled himself with a guitar, strumming, trying to express the deep emotions contained in the song, and his skin crawled at the horror of his own stupidity, at the times when he thought that “Yesterday” was anything but a sappy song, at the times when he was someone else.

  “Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be, there’s a shadow hanging over me . . .” sang William, pulling up the edge of his boxers to scratch his thigh and revealing a pimple clearly evolving toward a boil. The phone slid off the table and crashed on the floor.

  Rachel canvassed on the other side of the street. He could see her going up to the porch and ringing the bell, then looking around at the mailbox stuffed with magazines, at the lawns with wooden ducks and marble frogs and plastic angels and sprinkles, aluminum spiders with long green tails. He watched her head moving left and right as she spoke to the people who opened the door. Occasionally, she smiled and waved at him, walking between houses, the light diffused by yellow leaves softening the pallor of her face.

  Pronek stood in front of a closed door, procrastinating, and when he rang the bell he prayed to the gods of corporate employment that nobody be home. He tried to talk about the dolphins to the people who opened the door, but they stared at him with dim contempt and no interest whatever. Door after door was slammed in his face and anger accumulated in his stomach. He kicked a neon-green plastic bucket and it banged against the picket fence.

  “Come on in,” the woman said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  She was short and frail, a humongous scarf coiled around her neck. Pronek stepped into the house, reluctantly, particles of something crackling under his shoes. The screen door banged him in the back, as if hurrying him inside.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked Pronek. The house had a humid noodly smell. A fat little Buddha sat on a bookshelf, grinning, next to a hedgehog of incense sticks. There was a mirror above the mantelpiece and Pronek stared at himself for a moment.

  “No, thank you,” Pronek said.

  “But I made the won-ton soup you like,” she said, “and some fried chicken too.”

  Won-ton soup was Pronek’s favorite, and fried chicken too.

  “Thank you,” he said, his stomach suddenly empty.

  “Johnny and Grace might join us,” the woman said. “I might need you to go and get some sprouts.”

  Let me suggest that if Pronek were a building with an elevator sliding up and down the chute between his brain and his stomach, at that particular moment the elevator would have dropped a hundred floors, pulled down by horrendous gravity, and it would have slammed into the ground, collapsing whoever was in that elevator into a painful, mushy pile.

  “And you could have called me to say you would be late,” the woman said. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head admonishingly.

  “I am not,” Pronek said, his throat tight, “who you think I am.”

  “Oh, I know you better than anyone,” the woman said, waved her hand toward him and frowned benevolently.

  A jungle of lush plants was arrayed on the windowsills. A calendar with a picture of a street in Saigon and things written in an impenetrable alphabet hung on the wall, smiley faces in some date boxes. The woman’s skin was dark and she had a wide, cheeky face, framed by thick black hair. She might be Vietnamese, Pronek thought, but who a
m I?

  “I am with Greenpeace,” he said to the woman, and exhibited as evidence his clipboard with a green-and-blue-planet leaflet. The year on the calendar was 1975, Pronek realized.

  She laughed heartily, clapping her hands, applauding his performance.

  “You always make me laugh,” she said, and touched her stomach, as if laughing hurt her.

  “Ma’am,” Pronek tried again, but had no will to push it further, as he could not remember how he got here, how he had become what he was. He sat down into an embracing armchair facing an extinguished TV. There was a pair of man’s slippers, blue and soft, carefully aligned next to the armchair, within his reach. He closed his eyes, hoping that the woman would vanish when he opened them. But she was still there. What would happen, Pronek thought, if he simply took off his shoes and put the slippers on his feet, swollen from walking? If he had some of that won-ton soup? Who would get hurt? Pronek saw himself trudging to the kitchen in his slippers, taking his seat and eating his soup, the woman gently rubbing his back. Why couldn’t he be more than one person? Why was he stuck in the middle of himself, hungry and tired?

  “Ma’am,” he said, still hesitant, whispering, his words teetering on the edge of silence. “I am very sorry, but I am not somebody you know.”

  “Don’t worry about it so much,” the woman said, softly, moving closer to him, a touch away. “The soup is getting cold.”

  Rachel unlocked the door, and a large cat tried to push its way through, only to be pushed back by her foot.

  “This is the cat,” she said.

  “What is her name?” Pronek asked.

  “I call him the cat. He’s Maxwell’s cat. He calls him Zora.”

  “Who is Maxwell?”

  “My roommate.”

  “Oh.”

  Rachel turned on the light and locked the door behind her. The Cat sniffed Pronek’s shoes, then looked up at him. “Zora,” he said, “means very early morning in my language.”

  The walls were painted turquoise with a thick red line going wall to wall along the middle. The Cat leapt on the sofa and crawled under a cushion.

  “Well, he’s no early morning. Maxwell spoils him beyond words.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “Maxwell is beautiful,” she said. “Unfortunately, he’s gay.”

  “Oh.”

  Rachel then dimmed the lights. Pronek slumped onto the sofa and felt fatigue dropping to his pelvis and his thighs.

  “Maxwell’s a musician, plays the trumpet. Has a jazz band with his boyfriend Aaron. He thinks he’s the hip-hop Miles.”

  “Who is the hip-hop Miles?”

  “You know, Miles Davis, the hip-hop version.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a black-and-white photo of a man crossing the street, slouched, one of his feet about to land on the ground, as if he were stepping on a spider. Rachel sat next to Pronek, put her hand on his thigh, and said:

  “Would you like something? To drink?”

  Her eyebrows were converging toward each other, the gossamer glistened on the convex slope above her nose, her eyeballs glossy—he imagined touching them with the tip of his tongue and thought: Blago.

  “No.”

  “Well, I would. A man can use some whiskey after a hard day’s work.”

  “Okay, give me one whiskey.”

  It was while Rachel was in the kitchen—glasses clinking, water running, indeterminate noises ebbing—that he imagined himself imagining himself in this room, dimly lit, waiting for a woman who could only know what he told her in his sloppy English and distorting accent. He saw clearly that who he thought he was and who she thought he was were two different persons. He imagined himself doubled, the two of them sitting next to each other on the damn sofa. The Cat was suddenly across the table, nestling in the armchair, panning from Pronek to his twin and back. Rachel appeared out of the dark hall with two glasses and said: “Let’s go to my room.” Pronek slowly got up, pushing himself with his fists off the sofa.

  I wait for a moment, then lurch forward, scaring the Cat. I follow him to Rachel’s bedroom, and slip in before they shut the door.

  They sit on the bed, Rachel backlit with the bedside lamp, Pronek’s back to me, as I soundlessly deposit myself at her desk in a dark corner, breathing in through my mouth and out through my nose, barely, inaudibly.

  They sip the whiskey, in desirous silence, probably looking into each other’s eyes. Rachel kisses his mouth, then pulls back, waiting for his move. Pronek gulps his whiskey then leans toward her and grabs her pate, pushing her face toward him. In his other hand, the glass is slowly leaning on his knee, until the diluted whiskey starts dripping on the floor.

  They slowly stretch on the bed, their feet still on the floor. Oh, I’ve seen it many times before, the foreplay. I know the disbelief, the doubt as he’s peeling off layer upon layer of her clothes, as she unbuttons his shirt. I look at the things on her desk: a message from one Daren, a Ciccione Youth CD; an application for an ESL teaching position. There are contact copies with small photos of an empty picture frame; of a light post broken in half, like a pencil; of an anonymous suburban porch; of Pronek looking out of the picture, the American flag limp above his head. There is a thick stack of papers with notes scribbled on them in handwriting leaning down, like wheat in the wind. I read them:

  They swallowed cheeseburgers like pills. Yet they were sad.

  My violence is a dream.

  Rachel is taking off her shoes, having some trouble untying them, giggling.

  Jozef had a blues band back home. He is a good man, but there are bubbles coming up from the creature at his bottom.

  Fall arrived August 28, around noon. Suddenly the light was soft, the sun rays were coming at you with their heads bowed, chaffing their cheeks against your sides like a purring cat.

  Rachel has unbuttoned Pronek’s shirt, her legs are bare, I can see her crotch and her panties. Pronek is looking down at her hands. She slides the shirt down his shoulders, then pulls up his undershirt, laughing and shaking her head. “I was cold,” Pronek says. She kisses his chest and tickles his left nipple with her tongue. Pronek gasps.

  Dog eyes crusted with dog tears.

  Pronek works on unfastening her bra, as she rakes his hair with her fingers. “It is dirty,” Pronek says. “Not yet,” Rachel says, and laughs again, leaning back just as Pronek solves the bra riddle—her breasts lunge forward.

  Outside I can hear squirrels cackling. How can I know they are not talking to me if I don’t know their language?

  Slowly and carefully, as if an unsoft touch would break everything, Pronek pulls Rachel’s panties down her thighs, over her knees, until she wiggles her feet through the loops. She is naked now, a beautiful body to look at, the light scintillating on her skin. “Let’s put a condom on,” she says.

  Everything in the supermarket has a non-negotiable name. Love will tear us apart.

  Pronek is ripping the condom wrapper, like an excited puppy, his back arched, his spine saw-toothed. “I hate condoms,” he says, and bites into the wrapper again. Rachel chortles: “If we start dating seriously you can get the washable kind and never take it off.” Pronek produces a grim laugh, the condom still unconquered. “Oh, give it to me,” Rachel says, and the condom is offered on her palm in no time. “And let me put it on.”

  Oh, what is that sound which so thrills the ear

  Down in the valley, drumming, drumming?

  Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

  The soldiers coming.

  “Can I turn off light?” Pronek says.

  “The light.”

  “What?”

  “Can I turn off the light?”

  “Turn off the light.”

  Rachel turns off the light.

  I sit in the darkness, only an occasional headlight mirage appearing on the walls and perishing fast. I listen to their sobs and pants, the tossing and turning and wrestling, the collision of flesh with flesh, a wheeze, a word: yes, bl
ago, no, slowly. I cannot help being aroused, hearing their bodies wrangling in the darkness. I have to breathe timing the intake to coincide with the noises of their passion, the hand of lust gripping my throat, my loins burning. I move and the chair screeches.

  “What is that?” Pronek says.

  “Nothing. It’s okay. Come here.”

  “I heard something.”

  “It’s nothing. Let’s fuck.”

  She starts producing a submerged squeal, which then turns into a fitful roar, while Pronek produces a sibilant, teeth-clenched sound as if someone were punching him in the chest. Then, to my relief, it is over—they come in duet.

  Silence.

  “Did you enjoy it?” Pronek says.

  “Quiet.”

  The room smells of their sweat and clothes. I can feel Pronek’s untense body and the tension slowly rebuilding itself—he is flexing his fingers, crushing an imaginary object.

  “Can I smoke?” he pleads.

  “Not here. On the deck.”

  Then there is a short knock on the door and someone bursts into the room. Pronek lurches out of bed and falls on the floor and stays down.

  “Rachel,” the man said.

  “For God’s sake, Maxwell. I am not alone. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Shit,” Maxwell said, and stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Sorry,” he said behind the closed door. “Rachel, I need a condom, I’m out.”

  “Oh, God,” Rachel said, and got out of bed.

  Pronek lay facedown on the floor, his heart beating so hard he imagined it trying to dig its way out with its little paws.

  Rachel would not hold hands—it made her feel like a little girl, she said. But they walked all around Uptown: they looked at the old houses on Beacon, imagining crazy old ladies sheltering hundreds of cats; they sneaked into the Uptown National Bank, admiring its marble counters and high-domed ceilings, fantasizing about robbing it like Bonnie and Clyde; they strolled through the park, past a homeless camp, Rachel taking pictures, past the squash-shaped Russian ladies gibbering up soft consonants. They went to Montrose Harbor and watched the waves slamming into the embankment. She liked to take photos of the back of his neck, Pronek facing the lake, the cresting waves and a few displaced clouds lingering over the thin horizon, moving toward the skyscrapers, Rachel’s camera clicking behind him, like a hiccuping clock. At dusk, they gazed at the downtown skyline twinkling in the moist mist and were hypnotized by the dotted-light snake slithering up Lake Shore Drive, cars on their way home.