Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  “Let's go find some grub.” Manta brings together all the fingertips of one hand and points to his mouth several times with the joined fingertips. Then he rubs his belly. Then he points at Panakian. That should be enough, he thinks. It's possible that he's incapable of saying, “You're an asshole and when we finish this job I'm going to beat you so hard your own mother won't even recognize you” using just his hands, but if there's one thing Manta is an expert in it's the Universal Sign Language for food. “Both of us. Come on. You're coming with me. And no funny stuff. At the first sign of anything funny, I bring you back here and break your leg. As far as I know, you don't need two legs to paint that eyesore.”

  Manta pushes Panakian out of the warehouse and locks its metal shutter and stares at Panakian in the middle of the parking lot. He opens his jacket to show Panakian a pistol and waits for Panakian to nod. Then he pushes him to the sidewalk.

  The fresh winter air on the street fills Manta with optimism and a generic will to live. Next to him, Panakian shivers and his teeth chatter. They walk a couple of blocks and go into one of those supermarkets bathed in a fluorescent glow from above that makes you think of the light paradise must be bathed in. Manta grabs a plastic basket and pushes Panakian through the aisle that leads to the canned goods section.

  “Take a good look, asshole.” Manta sticks two bags of crinkle-cut potato chips with monosodium glutamate into his shopping basket. “The wonders of capitalism. I bet you don't have places like this in the piece of shit country you come from.”

  Manta pulls on Panakian's arm and pushes him through the aisles of the different sections of the supermarket bathed in heavenly light. For a moment, and without really knowing why, the idea comes into his head that the supermarket light from above is the opposite of the black of the painting's black sky. Next to the crinkle-cut chips he puts six cans of beer into his basket, and a package of boiled ham slices, bread with six kinds of seeds, blue cheese, green olives stuffed with anchovies, a family-size bottle of Coca-Cola, Oreo cookies, a bag of freshly made muffins and, after some hesitation, a precooked roast chicken wrapped in some sort of very taut plastic second skin. The plastic basket threatens to overflow. In the canned goods section, Manta turns and looks at Panakian with an expression of theatrical adoration and a can of cockles in his hand.

  “Look at this, loser.” He brings the can of cockles less than two inches from Panakian's face. “Cockles. The best invention in the history of mankind. I take my hat off to the fucking genius who thought up taking these guys out of the sea and sticking them in a can.”

  Panakian looks at the can of cockles and then looks at Manta. Manta gives him another push toward an even better-lit section of the store, where an employee dressed in white is serving cuts of meat and imported cheeses. Manta gets in line and points to a spot on the floor for Panakian to stay there.

  “You stay still, right here,” he says. “Where I can see you.”

  Standing in the line for the deli section, with his overflowing basket in one hand and the other hand in his pocket, Manta decides that in the end there's no reason why this has to be a bad day. He has a couple of comics left in the warehouse to reread and, besides, one of them is an issue from a limited-edition series that Marvel devoted to Wolverine. Manta's favorite superhero of all time. Sometimes, when he reads comics in bed while his wife is chatting with one of the neighbor ladies or borrowing a cup of sugar or watching TV in the upstairs neighbor's apartment, Manta imagines that he has an unbreakable skeleton and a miraculous capacity to cure his own wounds through mutant tissue regeneration. Not to mention the retractable and completely unbreakable claws. Claws that sink into Saudade's stomach, or into the stomach of any of the male neighbors in the building. Now he sighs in the supermarket line. The image is so beautiful it often dazzles him.

  The line advances quickly until the tiny old woman in front of Manta gets to the head of it. The old woman speaks very softly and her wrinkled finger trembles so much when she points to the products on display that the employee has to stick half of his body out above the counter. Manta starts to get impatient. In his opinion, the glut of senior citizens is one of contemporary society's biggest problems. To the point of jeopardizing the system of social benefits for taxpayers. He doesn't even want to imagine what it must be like to pay taxes. The old woman shakes her head every time the employee shows her a different hunk of meat and looks around her with a disoriented expression. It seems to Manta that she is crying a little bit. The people behind Manta in the line seem to have spontaneously divided themselves into those who feel sorry for the old woman and those who find her irritating. After a minute of confused glances and indecisive pointing with her wrinkled finger, Manta puts the basket down on the floor and punches the counter.

  “Goddamn it, ma'am.” He lowers his head to speak very close to the old woman's face. The old woman looks at him in terror. “Don't you have an Ecuadorian to do your fucking shopping? And what about the rest of us? We don't have all night, you know?” He turns toward the employee dressed in corporate white and points at him with an enormous threatening finger. “You, give her a fucking steak and send her on her way, goddamn it.”

  There is a moment of silence. The trembling of the old woman's finger has spread to her entire arm and a good part of her mouth. Manta straightens up with his hands on his hips and looks at the place where Panakian is. Or better put, where Panakian is not. Because Panakian is not in the exact place where Manta told him he had to wait until he finished shopping. In fact, Panakian does not appear to be in the Deli Section. Manta starts running down the closest aisle. His speed and the poor visibility at the supermarket aisle intersections cause him to crash into several customers. Three intersections later, Manta makes out the distant figure of Panakian running toward the exit with a bottle of whiskey under his arm.

  “Motherfucker,” says Manta, and starts running toward the exit.

  Once he's out in the street, Manta stops on the sidewalk. There is no trace of Panakian in either direction. Panakian's running out on him awakens staggering waves of emotional stress in Manta. That feeling of stress has definitely been Manta's cross to bear, his whole life. Like when he puts up with Saudade's digs. Like when he put up with the teasing at school, how people laughed at him and called him The Thing. The same emotional stress that, according to his psychologist, has kept him from achieving satisfactory levels of personal growth and has held him back, trapped in a painful crossroads of anxiety and violence. In the words of his therapist.

  Manta takes the pistol from the holster beneath his jacket, cocks it and starts aiming in every direction. Screams are heard on the street. Some passersby walking along the facing sidewalk throw themselves to the ground.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 24

  Tics

  It gives Hannah Linus a particularly comforting feeling when the gallery offices empty out. In general she has always felt comforted by any kind of empty corporate spaces. They give her a feeling of power, sweet and calm, mixed with a certain very subtly tragic atmosphere. And that's why she's now eating alone in her office in the deserted office area, while the gallery office staff is out, like every day, on their lunch break. With her shoes tossed any which way beneath her desk and her feet up on top. Listening to music in her portable MP3 player and chewing the strictly vegetarian salad from the plastic container she holds in her hands.

  None of that stupid chitchat from her local employees, she says to herself as she chews. Letting her gaze wander in that way that anyone eating by themselves, anywhere in the world, lets their gaze wander. Not sitting uncomfortably at a table in a cafeteria that smells of grease, surrounded by the smoke of half a dozen cigarettes. No putting up with the way her female employees laugh absurdly at her male employees' jokes. To hell with all of them, thinks Hannah Linus as she stabs a cherry tomato with her fork and brings it to her mouth.

  The cherry tomato remains suspended a couple of inches from her open mouth. It remains suspende
d in the middle of its trajectory from its plastic container to Hannah Linus's mouth because of something that she has just seen. Something that's approaching the reinforced glass door of her office with furious strides. Through the deserted office area. A young woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that's a knockoff of a well-known sports brand. Hannah Linus pulls out first one earbud and then the other and stares with her brow furrowed as the woman furiously enters her office and bolts the door from inside. The woman's ponytail is an obviously erroneous stylistic choice, considering the structural features of her face.

  The two women stare at each other in silence. The most characteristic facial feature of the furious woman that has just come in is a nervous tic that makes her wrinkle her forehead compulsively at regular intervals. As if approximately every half second she was surprised at something.

  “First of all,” says Hannah, moving the container of salad to one side and placing the plastic fork next to it. “I don't know who you think you are coming into my office unannounced. And second of all, I demand you unbolt that door.” She examines the woman from head to toe. “Are you the cleaning lady? This office was already cleaned this morning.”

  The woman holds Hannah Linus's gaze. Hannah discovers that it is difficult to concentrate on what she wants to say, because of the woman's nervous tic, which makes her appear constantly surprised about everything.

  “You're Anna, right?” says the woman with the sportswear and the nervous facial tic finally.

  “Hannah,” answers Hannah. “Hannah Linus.”

  “Go to hell,” says the woman.

  “What?” Hannah seems perplexed.

  “I said go to hell.” The woman remains leaning on the bolted reinforced glass door, staring into Hannah's face with a furious expression that her tics contradict approximately every half second with random infiltrations of surprise. “Nobody tells me how to talk. Much less some bitch from England.”

  “I'm Swedish…,” Hannah starts to say, but she stops when she sees the woman with the tics take her back off of the door and start walking toward her desk. Her gaze rests for a fraction of a second on the intercom on her desk that can put her in touch, through a simple sequence of button pushing, with the gallery's security guard. She is beginning to suspect she could be in a potentially dangerous situation. “Hold on. How did you get in here?”

  The woman stops on the other side of the desk and sends deceptive facial messages of surprise while her mouth twists in an expression of disgust. She leans her body over the desk and rests her palms on its surface. Her rhythmically convulsive facial features could be found attractive by someone attracted to features that convey permanent dissatisfaction mixed with potentially explosive fury. The locks of hair that escape from her ponytail and fall over her face give her a certain air of matricidal heroine in a Greek tragedy.

  “I'm Saudade's wife,” says the woman.

  Hannah Linus lifts a hand to her mouth and begins to chew on a cuticle while inside her the feeling that she could indeed be in a potentially dangerous situation grows. The door that connects the gallery with the office area is not locked, and the woman must have gotten in when the guard was distracted. Her hand tries to surreptitiously approach the intercom on her desk, but before she has a chance to reach it the woman grabs the device with both hands and pulls on it with all her strength, trying to rip it from its network of different colored wires. She doesn't manage it on the first try, or the second, and the woman continues wrestling with the intercom in her hands. Pulling furiously and fruitlessly on the network of wires. Hannah Linus looks past the woman. Past the office's reinforced glass wall. Toward the security guard who has just become aware of the situation that is going on and is now running through the empty gallery toward the reinforced glass door.

  “I don't deny this is a delicate situation.” Hannah Linus looks at the security guard. He has just arrived at the door and is now struggling with the door handle, not yet realizing that it's bolted from inside. “This is all very unpleasant.”

  The woman with the nervous tic opens her eyes very wide in a gesture that paradoxically does not emphasize the elements of compulsive surprise already present on her facial landscape.

  “You're a whore,” she says. “If you ever see my husband again I'll kill you.”

  She pauses and seems to realize that she's still holding up Hannah Linus's desk intercom. She looks at it for a moment as if someone had just put it in her hand as an annoying joke and she places it back on the desk.

  Hannah closes her eyes and raises her hands the way people raise their hands when asking for a moment to think. The security guard's struggle with the door is now clearly audible as the glass door beats against its metal support structure, causing a weak vibration of the other glass walls. The woman continues to lean slightly over the desk and observes Hannah Linus with an expression in which surprise seems to have completely disappeared in favor of rage. A rage that's present in all of her features as small seismic tremors.

  “I'm not going to see your husband again.” Hannah makes small pacifying movements with her hands. “I swear. Step back a bit. This is making me quite nervous.”

  The security guard has stopped struggling with the door and is now talking on his walkie-talkie while making a series of hand gestures in Hannah's direction through the glass door of her office. The security guard's gestures seem to be both asking her to wait a few seconds and assuring her that everything is going to be resolved in a satisfactory fashion. The woman in sportswear with the nervous tic and not very flattering styling that was probably created without the help of a professional stylist takes a step back. Her mouth still gathered in an irritated expression.

  “I'll kill you.” The woman backs up slowly toward the door and stops to point at Hannah with her index finger and thumb extended upward. With that universal threat usually known as the Finger Pistol. “You understand?”

  Hannah Linus rolls her executive chair a couple of inches back and picks up a pen from her desk. She holds the pen by the end opposite the point and makes a series of taps on the desk with the cap end. It is a gesture that she has been perfecting over hundreds of executive meetings. Meant to both attract the attention of whomever she is talking to as well as dramatically underscore her words.

  “Talk to your husband.” Hannah Linus looks at the woman with some sort of renewed confidence. In the background of her visual field, her administrative assistant, Raquel, is running a bunch of keys over to the place where the security guard is waiting. The security guard is now looking at Hannah Linus with a reassuring smile whose main message seems to be that the situation of imminent danger to Hannah Linus's personal safety is already in the process of being defused. “This type of situation can be solved. Contrary to what they say.”

  What happens next takes Hannah Linus by surprise. Probably because she was already anticipating an uncomplicated conclusion. So that she is unable to interpret the movement of her adversary. Nor does she manage to get out of the way when the woman comes around the desk and attacks her. Causing the chair and its occupant to fall over onto the carpeted floor. The two women are rolling around on the ground with several locks of Hannah Linus's hair tightly grasped in the other woman's hands when Raquel finally manages to open the glass door. With the fourth key that she tries in the lock.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 25

  A Momentary Lapse of Reason

  “On one hand you've got Gilmour.” Mr. Bocanegra takes a drag on his enormous cigar and looks through the windshield of his two-seater convertible Jaguar, stopping at the stoplight on the corner of Pelayo and Ramblas. “Gilmour is, basically, a numbskull. And on the other hand there's Waters. The guy who wrote Dark Side of the Moon. The Wall. Wish You Were Here. I mean, he's a genius. With one of those strange minds. His music is strange, I won't deny that. Waters is the guy that Gilmour kicked out of the group.”

  This afternoon it is not Mr. Bocanegra at the wheel of his brand-new convertible Jaguar, wh
ich now turns the corner of Pelayo and Ramblas and heads down the Ramblas. It is Aníbal Manta that's driving. With his wrist resting on the open window and his enormous hand hanging outside the vehicle. And with two pieces of cotton stuffed into the nostrils of his nose, which was broken last night by Mr. Bocanegra. After he confirmed that Raymond Panakian had escaped the headquarters of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD. A nose that in its present state no longer looks like a nose. It isn't very clear what exactly it looks like now, but it definitely bears some resemblance to a swollen, irregular meteorite that crossed the stratosphere and crashed violently into the middle of Aníbal Manta's face.

  “It's as if Watson fired Sherlock Holmes,” continues Bocanegra. Drumming with his fingers on the glove compartment to the beat of the Pink Floyd compact disc that's playing on the Jaguar's compact disc player. “As if that Indian that went around with the Lone Ranger one day just up and handed the Lone Ranger a pink slip and started trying to do everything the Lone Ranger did. Which would be absurd.” He shows his teeth in a cruel smile. “Because the Lone Ranger can only do what he does because he is the Lone Ranger.”

  The Ramblas are as congested as they are every evening. The center walkway is mostly filled with groups of British citizens singing and drinking beer from enormous plastic cups that they then throw at each other or simply let drop to the ground between heaves. The image makes one think of hordes of native British Islanders before the arrival of the Romans. There are also groups of drunk girls that stagger up the main lane of the Ramblas and seem to be celebrating something undefined. Hugging each other. Raising swaying arms to halt taxis and struggling to remain vertical.

  “It's as if one day you show up at my office and you kick me out of my own business,” says Bocanegra with a frown. He can't imagine what so many drunk girls could be celebrating. Except perhaps International Drunk Girl Day. He shrugs his shoulders. “It's as if you come to my business and throw me out and from that moment on you sit at my desk and you smoke my cigars and you decide that you are going to run my business. Not caring that I invented my business. Or that I am the best at what I do, or that in the end it's the only thing I'm good at. Because you are a numbskull and a loser and I am the guy that invented what I do. Well, that's what happened in Pink Floyd. When Gilmour the numbskull kicked out Waters the genius.” Bocanegra leans forward to turn up the volume on the compact disc player. The CD that's on is A Momentary Lapse of Reason by Pink Floyd. The song that's playing is “Learning to Fly.”