“Hello, hello,” Mr. Lucas said. “This is Mr. Frankfurt speaking. I would like to have some information about the Memorial Service.” Mr. Lucas was calling with a fake name so there would be no document of him making this call. He had always disliked it when there were documents about him.
“Yes,” Mr. Lucas said. “Could you tell me how many meters the Queen will be standing from the Survivor Area, and if there will be guards between the survivors and the Queen?” He rolled out the map he was going to take to the Memorial Service and drew circles and lines on it. “And where exactly will the Queen be standing? I’ve heard she will be standing under the monument, but will she be on a stage of some sort or on the ground?”
If she was more than fifty meters away he would bring his binoculars, and if she was not on a stage he might even consider making his shoes a little higher.
“Hello?” Mr. Lucas said in the telephone. The person on the other side of the line was taking a very long time to reply.
When he finally got a reply it was from a different, more serious voice.
“Why do you need this information?” the voice said. “I need your address and postal code.”
“It is just Mr. Frankfurt,” Mr. Lucas said, “calling out of personal interest. Never mind. Thank you,” and he hung up again. He drew a large red cross on his map in the place where the Queen was going to be. He folded the map and placed it in his bag for the next day, and also put his binoculars in there, and his Swiss Army knife just in case. Tomorrow he was going to listen to the hypnosis tape one more time and then take the bus at ten A.M.
EXCUSE ME
“Ah!” Rus said. “Stop it!”
He put down Ming Rong Heng’s file on his desk and looked up at the air vent. It was almost like there was an animal walking through the ventilation pipes, right above Rus’s head. The sounds kept interrupting his work flow, and it had distracted him so that he had missed a zero in the check sum, causing all the subsequent numbers in the file to turn out wrong. Around Rus, his colleagues exchanged glances.
Rus shook his head. “I can’t work like this,” he said to the others. “How can you work with this noise?”
His colleagues were bent over their papers again, typing in numbers on their keyboards as if they hadn’t heard what he said.
Rus leaned over his desk toward Fokuhama, who sat across from him.
“Fokuhama,” he said, touching his arm.
With a sigh, Fokuhama looked up from his papers.
“What is that noise in the air vent?” Rus asked. “I keep hearing something in there. What can we do about it?”
Fokuhama rolled his chair back a bit. “Excuse me. Can I point out that the personal distance as recommended in the guidelines is seventy centimeters. And non-work-related matters cannot be discussed during work hours. Thank you.”
Rus looked at Fokuhama, who raised his eyebrows and tapped on the small pile of files in the inbox on his desk. “Thank you,” he said again.
“You’re welcome,” Rus said.
He rolled his chair back to his desk. The white grating of the air vent stared back at him.
Then the phone on Rus’s desk rang. It rang a few times until Rus realized he should pick it up. “Desk number thirty-four,” he said in the phone.
“Hi, it’s me,” a voice said in Rus’s ear.
“Who?” Rus said. He looked up at the ceiling. He was sure he saw a white shape move past the grating.
“It’s me,” the voice said, “your sweetie.”
“My what?” Rus said, squinting at the ceiling. “Who?”
“Me! It’s me!” the voice said, loud and angry now.
Rus lowered his head suddenly and looked startled at the telephone. “Mama?”
“No, it’s Wanda,” Wanda shouted in the telephone. “I wanted to know if you were reaching your target today. Are you working right now?”
“Oh, Wanda,” Rus said. “No, there is a sound here and none of my colleagues seem to hear it. There it is again. Do you hear it?”
He held the telephone up as the scraping sound came from the air vent again.
“Rus,” Wanda’s voice shouted softly from the telephone. “What are you doing? Are you reaching your target today?”
“Got to go,” Rus said. It was three o’clock. He pressed the button with the picture of the red telephone on the telephone and walked to the kitchen in the corner of the office, where his coworkers had gathered for the coffee break.
“The hairs in the sink! He just leaves them there for me to clean up.” Rus’s female colleagues were chatting by the sink. Fokuhama was pouring their coffees.
“I know,” another woman said, “don’t you just want to kill him?”
“I know,” the other woman said, and another woman also said, “I know.”
Rus recognized this situation from Wanda’s TV show.
He joined in the conversation: “Yes, sometimes Wanda bites her nails and it makes a horrible sound.”
“Ah,” one of the women said.
“Speaking of sounds,” Rus said, “I would like to ask about that awful sound coming from the air vent. Does anyone know what that sound is and when it is going to be fixed? It really takes me out of my concentration and I have a hundred files left.”
The women did not say anything. They stirred their coffees. Fokuhama coughed loudly.
“Sometimes I hear something hard scratch the iron, something like claws,” Rus continued. “I think there could be a bird in there. I used to have a bird that lived in the drainpipe when I still lived on Low Street, before the debt collectors auctioned everything.”
“Ah,” one of the women said. The others looked away.
“I find it very hard to work like this,” Rus repeated. “When will someone do something about it?”
Nobody said anything. Fokuhama coughed again.
Not understanding what was going on, Rus looked about him. The situation reminded him of what happened when his mother made him approach the other kids in his street for his birthday party. His knees were shaking a bit.
Then the noise began again. It was audible all the way over in the coffee corner.
“Does anyone know anything about that sound?” Rus asked again. “Could you please answer my question?”
Finally, Fokuhama turned around toward Rus. “I think the coffee break is over.”
ASHRAF IN THE PARKING LOT
Ashraf was carrying the boxes to the van. He had once seen a documentary about tribes in the jungle that had to catch their food every day. They ate monkeys.
“The monkeys are becoming rare, and there are more and more cases of native tribes reporting to the city borders,” the voice-over had said, “asking to take part in modernity.”
Ashraf wondered why he was never thankful, like the man in the police station said he should be. He thought about the people in poor countries, the hours they worked, the low wages they got, so he could live here working only fifty hours a week and own a television and a washing machine.
It must have been nice to live in a time when they did not know yet that communism didn’t work, he thought, as he waited for Richie to finish his coffee and get in the van.
THE SECONDS
The secretary lay on her back on the tiles of the bathroom. The frozen faces of her parents were looking at her from their picture frames on the white wall. The room was silent except for the loud and continuing ticking of the clock. The secretary registered every minute. Like the views from a train window the seconds passed her by, approaching her fast and inescapable from the distance, but when they were finally there she could not hold on to them because they were already gone.
The secretary curled up her knees to her chin. She thought about what she had said to Fokuhama, about something sitting inside of her, waiting to come out. Inside of her was nothing, she knew now. She was empty like the apartment around her, and nothing would happen there unless she made it.
She looked up at her parents’ pictures. Her fa
ther looked down on her, posing with his visitor face. “How are you, darling?” his eyes seemed to say. “Good?” Her mother was smiling, immobile and inaccessible in her frame.
The secretary thought of all the plans she’d had, all her dreams: images of someone whose face would light up as she entered the room, a ring in a box, a group of people saying how charming she was.
It was all the same dream: one person who would choose her, one person who would be the proof that she was somebody. That she too had the right to exist.
She closed her eyes again. The clock ticked loudly in her ear. She counted the seconds. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.
THE BOSS’S SON
The Queen guided the boss’s son to the middle of the room. “Stay here,” she said. Then she turned around and walked out of the chamber into the corridors of the palace. After a few minutes she came back.
“Well?” she said.
“I was still there,” the boss’s son said. “I am pretty sure I did not disappear.”
“Pretty sure?” the Queen said. “Or completely sure?”
“Completely,” the boss’s son said. “Completely sure.”
“You’re just saying that,” the Queen said, squinting her eyes. “I’d say that too if I were my own make-believe. I’d say exactly that.”
With one sweep she threw the crown she was supposed to wear at the Memorial Service in the corner and sat down on the floor. The boss’s son had never seen her look so sad. He did not know what to say and looked down at his bandaged feet.
“If I am the only one who is real,” the Queen said, “then I am all alone. Do you understand that?”
BARRY’S PARTY
“So you work at Overall?” a woman with a cigarette asked Rus at the party. “How do you like it?”
Rus had finished the last of the two hundred files at eight thirty that day, his shoulders up so high that his shoulder pads covered his ears. When he got home at nine, longing to have dinner with Wanda and to tell her about the problem with the sound in the office and how strange his colleagues had acted about it, Wanda was waiting for him by the door with her coat on. They were going to a housewarming party. She looked very nervous and her face was powdered browner than usual.
“Yes, I work at the Overall Company,” Rus replied to the woman at the party. “There is a terrible sound coming from the air vent. It distracts me from my work.”
That was how he had been making conversation at Barry and Vera’s housewarming party and how he had chased most people who tried to talk to him away. When they did not go away Rus had a hard time concentrating on their replies, and this got him so nervous he could not hear them at all anymore, and he would hear nothing but that scraping sound in his head.
All Rus wanted was to go home with Wanda and tell her about his problem at work, but Wanda was in another corner of the room and she did not want to go home. People were talking to her, talking into her, pressing their thumbs in her arms, and she looked very much unlike how he knew her; she looked small and she kept her head bent a lot. But when he walked over to her she said: “Go and mingle, I’m having fun.”
Rus went out to the balcony. If I live to be eighty, he thought, I have fifty-five years to go. Making random calculations like this, he stared at the backyard of the neighbors below, and the cold wind made his nose tingle. The sun had already gone down and the clouds around the moon were blue and yellow.
Barry also stepped out on the balcony, to smoke. The tip of his cigarette lit up red and they stood there silently while he smoked. Barry looked a bit like the photo in the shopping district, Rus noticed. His jaws were broad and he was wearing a button-down shirt under his jacket.
Rus saw a bit of burning ash fall down from the cigarette. He followed the red speck with his eyes to the balcony floor. On that floor were Barry’s two feet, and on Barry’s feet were brown loafers with leather tassels where the laces should be. Rus looked at his own feet that were standing a few centimeters away from them. The shoes were exactly the same, only Rus’s shoes were older, and they were worn at the nose. Barry saw it too, and he smiled at Rus, giving him a pat on his shoulder.
Through the window Rus saw Wanda in the living room, looking over her shoulder at the balcony, and he raised his hand, but she wasn’t looking him. Wanda, in her flower-print skirt, with her round hips and short legs. The scraping sound in his head got a bit louder, and as he opened his mouth to breathe, a memory came back to him like it was real.
He was in Café Valentines and came out of the men’s room. There was Francisco in his fluffy coat, the feathers poking out of the holes in the fabric.
Francisco grabbed Rus’s shoulders. “You are my friend,” he said. He pushed his forehead against Rus’s and squeezed his shoulders. He said, “You are my friend.”
Rus felt a lump in his throat, just like he had then, and he tried to hold on to Francisco and tell him, “Don’t leave me behind. Please take me with you. Take me to the submarines. I can help. I know the wind directions, I can steer the ship. Don’t go.” But the memory was a memory and unchangeable, and Francisco disappeared from his hands.
Rus looked sideways at Barry. He blew the smoke out very slowly. It formed circles that became larger and larger. Rus looked at how nicely the smoke dissolved in the air, and he wished that the sound in the office would dissolve like that, and then he wished that his worries would dissolve like that, and lastly that he himself could dissolve like Barry’s smoke.
When you know someone’s face really well, like I know yours and you know mine now, you can’t really see that face anymore like you saw it the first time you met. All that you know about this person becomes visible in their face and forms a kind of cloud that lies over their features. When I look at you I see my own feelings for you in your face. It makes your face look softer, more perfect than it really is. I sometimes think I can see your thoughts pass by behind your eyes when you frown or when your eyes light up.
Mrs. Blue could always read Mr. Blue’s face like a book, with their life together as the pages. When she looked at him she saw his mood and his thoughts, she saw the things he was worried about, the things he found funny, and she saw all the past Mr. Blues whom she knew. The young Mr. Blue she had met in the cigarette factory, the strong one who had fought for his country, and the anxious one who had came back from the war. When he started to slip away she saw new things in his face sometimes: a strange gaze, a blank stare, panic, or an anger toward her that was never there before. He recognized her only in old photographs in the end, not as she was now at eighty-four.
But you can still love someone very well without them loving you back, I think, even when this person does not know you. You can love the expressions on someone’s face, or the way you get used to their moods. You can love someone’s movements; when you get to know their specific way of opening a can, of eating, or the way they frown when they read a book, like you do.
On the other side of the city we find Rus. He sits on a chair by the window, and he is watching Wanda as she sits on the couch, bent over an old shoebox. Her eyebrows are raised and there are lines around her mouth. Her expression is almost surprised, in a sad way. Rus does not know what that means, and it worries him. He vaguely thinks he has to chase her down the hallway and tickle her, but the sound in his head blocks out all his thoughts, and instead he watches her quietly until she gets up without looking at him, and he follows her to bed.
GRACE IN THE STORY
Vertical and horizontal lines divided the landscape around Grace into squares and rectangles. The mist had risen and hung as thick white clouds above her.
The air was different too; it tasted fresh and moist on her tongue.
In the distance, rays of light came up over the horizon, the growing light giving color to the white world. Green and red and yellow was poured into the squares and rectangles around Grace, and they became green and red and yellow fields.
A dark, broad road became visible too now, leading u
p to a collection of lights in the distance.
“A city,” Grace whispered, relieved.
YOU ARE NOTHING
The secretary had stayed up all night: twenty-four hours had gone by and she had registered every second of it. There were long shadows in the apartment; the sun was just coming up. Her muscles were shaking with cold. There was a smell of vomit in the bathroom and her legs were stiff and painful. She stood up.
“Don’t think I don’t know why you are not showing up for work anymore,” the voice of the lawyer said in her living room. He was leaving a message on her answering machine. “Don’t think I don’t know what you are trying to do. But you won’t take me down with you. Nobody at the office will ever choose your side. They don’t even remember you.”
The secretary walked into the living room. Everything was still colorless, but she felt empty and light.
“You are nobody,” the lawyer whispered, “you are an absolute nobody here.”
The secretary nodded as she walked naked through the room toward the window.
He was right.
She opened the window and let the wind blow over her face and her body. It was almost as if the wind were blowing through her. Behind her the clock still ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick. She thought of all the clocks in her life—the clock in the living room, the clock above the elevator in the office, the clock above the metro station—all ticking her time away.
If you really want to be here, she said to herself, you have to do things you remember. You have to respond to the things that happen to you. You have to be radical.
THE MEETING
Rus was in the meeting room with his coworkers. They sat around a large white table, looking at a screen that listed the agenda points. Point one: Concerning the recent takeovers. Point two: Improving intern communication. Point three: Closing early due to the Memorial Service. At point four: Anything else? Rus raised his hand.
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