I watch her tighten her headscarf—pink today, elegant as always—and slip away into the afternoon crowd. The streets are thick with people now, and it’s getting dark. Quitting time for the owners of the world. I clutch the leather case to my chest.
People bustle all around me in the little square I’ve wandered into, and everyone seems to be laughing—groups of friends at café tables and old ladies with little dogs and an ice-cream seller who’s doing an excellent business despite the cold. Suddenly, there’s a riot of church bells, not just from one church, but from all of them, all over the city, as if a royal wedding were concluding, or a war had ended.
And so it had. Look how easily all this had come to me. Lawyers. Paperwork. A passport. A new identity. A hearing before someone called a registrar. That’s all it had taken. No blood. No bodies. No rat poison. Look how civilized I am now. Me, in a suit. With clean hands.
Now I’m on a little bridge, crossing the river, the tolling of the bells still going strong. You won. You won, Gwendolyn Bloom. You brilliant, lucky, brutal bitch, you won.
Twenty-Two
How true my aim had been, how steady my trigger finger. And when the bullet landed precisely in the center of the target, how cleanly it had cut all the way through a thousand years of bureaucratic history designed, or so I thought, to prevent precisely the thing I’d just pulled off. The system is corrupt. The system is functioning as intended.
I am the most sober I’ve ever been, the most clearheaded, yet I feel delirious. I can’t help it if the response in my brain and heart and bowels is chemical in nature. I’m just flesh and squirting adrenal glands and electricity leaping between neurons. The endorphins and adrenaline are very nearly toxic, and they cause me to tremble and veer unsteadily in my steps. This is happiness, as happy as happy gets.
But with happiness comes the fear of it being snatched away. So I am also cautious and once again paranoid. Even though this is Zurich, one does not simply walk around with the 500K nearly undisguised. So I stumble into a shop, buy a big baggy sweater and a cheap tourist’s fanny pack to wear under it. As the shop clerk rings me up, I panic that I don’t have any small bills. But she doesn’t flinch when I hand her a 1,000-franc note.
In a café, I order a cappuccino to go even though the last thing I need is caffeine, then head to the bathroom to change and to enjoy a moment of privacy. God bless Europe for its sense of bathroom architecture, with walls and doors between stalls that go all the way to the top and bottom. I open the leather envelope from Kolb and pull the packets of francs out to inspect them. It’s not that I don’t trust Hindemith & Cie’s ability to count, it’s just that I want to have the pleasure, too.
The 1,000-franc notes are maybe seven inches long and three inches wide—elegantly slender, with gradations of purple and blue, stripes of pastel green and yellow, spots of pretty pink and tomato red. Tausend Franken, it says, the hard German standing notably apart from the Milli Francs, Mille Francs, Mille Franchi, also printed on each bill—these sounding almost like a mantra when you say them together.
Terrance would laugh at me, or, less cruelly, just be disappointed. Fetishizing money this way is a rookie move. But he’s not here, so I’ll do what I like. My mind flashes to my dad: I need to tell him, share this with him. A kind of joy comes over me, an exponential form of skipping home with a good report card in hand. I fumble with my phone, taking three tries to unlock it, and five to log in to the account I use for communicating with him. Still nothing since the message I’d left him from the truck stop in Spain. My thumbs skitter clumsily as I type the e-mail: At destnation. Everthing great. Got it!!!!!!!! Contact me asap pls. I DID IT!!
Such a stupid, childish way to write it. I almost consider deleting the message and starting over, but no—he should see a sliver of it, the immediacy of the joy filling me like a balloon. I save it before I can change my mind.
On the way out, I leave the cappuccino sitting on the counter and race toward the tram, the strap of the fanny pack pulling heavily at my skin under my sweater with every step. When I arrive at Lego Village, Sabiha is out front, smoking a cigarette—something else she’s taken up. She crushes it out when she sees me approach, like I’m her mother.
“Judita, you are okay?” she says, worry on her face.
“Yes. Fine.”
“You look distressed.”
I shake my head, then motion for her to follow me around to the back and into the garden we use for bathing, the only semiprivate place I can think of.
“Judita, you’re scaring me,” Sabiha says as she wipes a place clean on a rusted metal bench and sits.
I sit beside her. “There’s something I want to give you. But first, you must promise me that you’ll use it for yourself, only yourself, you understand?”
“I cannot promise anything until I know.”
I’d expected her to give in immediately. The last thing I want is for the gift to be squandered by Peggo and the others. But it’s her gift, her decision, her life. I pull a bundle of francs from the fanny pack, place it in her hand.
She looks at me, eyes horrified. “Judita…”
“It’s one hundred thousand francs.” My fingers wrap around hers, closing them around the money. “It’s not stolen. It’s mine. And now it’s yours. A gift.”
“No.” She shakes her head softly, then emphatically. “No.”
“You can do whatever you want. Go wherever you want.”
“I want to be here.”
“Then be here, just do it because you want to.”
She shoves the money back at me, and it falls onto the ground, landing in a spotty patch of weeds and mud.
“I’m not your project, Judita.”
She jerks away when I grab her by the arm, so I grab her again and hold tight. “Listen to me—this isn’t charity.” I scoop up the money and press it to her chest. “All the shit the world did to you, you earned this. The world is making a deposit on what it owes.”
Sabiha takes a stumbling step backward when I let her go, but holds on to the money. She looks down at it, turns it over and over in her hands. “And before it was yours? Whose was it?”
I shrug. “Someone else’s.”
“Who?”
“Someone whose fault it is that bad things happen.”
“So why give it to me?”
I step closer, wanting to touch her, to connect the circuit between us so that she understands, but she moves back. “Because—I don’t want bad things to be my fault.”
Someone raps loudly on the corrugated metal fence, shouts that he needs to use the hose. Sabiha tucks the brick of francs under her shirt.
* * *
In the studio, I feign interest for a few minutes in a silkscreen project everyone has gathered around, building up to the announcement of my sudden departure. I mutter something about heading up to—I think I say Rotterdam, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re all cool about the transient nature of things here, accepting that sometimes people do, in fact, go to Rotterdam. I clean up the place where I slept, slip some money, not much, to Peggo for beer or paintbrushes. Everyone gets a little Tschüss—bye, casual as it gets—maybe we’ll see you around sometime, maybe not.
Sabiha watches me, and when I leave, gives me no more than a Tschüss back.
Somehow I always understood what would happen next, somehow this part was a fixture of my fantasy. On the tram, I take my phone and e-mail Terrance. A simple message, thought through verbatim ahead of time, but trying to appear casual and insouciant: I’m so sorry about BA. But things are different, I’m different. I got what I came for and would love to share it with you.
The closing is a simple G, along with the phone number to my new SIM. I have no idea if he’ll call, but I’d meant what I said: The struggle, the fighting, it’s over now. I’m different, and the old, violent Gwendolyn is locked in the past. I can finally afford for her to be.
I pull up some hotels on my phone, scrolling around for the most absurdly expe
nsive one. I settle on a spike-helmeted castle on a hillside overlooking the city called the Obelisk Grande. It takes almost an hour to get there on the tram, east past the Altstadt climbing the winding hills in what looks like a rich residential neighborhood.
I hike up the driveway with only my backpack as Mercedes and Bentleys crawl past me, conscious that I’m without not only appropriate luggage, but the matching luxury sedan to go with it. I enter the lobby ahead of a twelve-member Gulf family in flowing robes and chadors, a platoon of bellmen behind them pushing luggage carts loaded down with exquisite suitcases and steamer trunks.
Every one of the people inside is flawlessly dressed and groomed. Moving, talking mannequins, the men wrapped in shimmering wool suits, the women in bare-shouldered cocktail dresses, beads and sequins glinting. As for me—baggy sweater over a blouse, cheap suit jacket in hand—I simply stand out, and for a moment I’m frozen in fear, stupefied by my own non-belonging.
Just own it, says a voice inside me. Tell them what you want. Make them get it for you.
And so I do, addressing the clerk behind the counter with a tone commensurate with my new position. “A room, please,” I say. “Four nights.”
The woman—blond hair pulled back tightly, fine features, and just a dusting of makeup she doesn’t need—regards me with a bland smile. “The name of your reservation?”
“I don’t have one.”
The smile widens as she delivers an answer she likes. “Unfortunately, there is nothing.”
“Nothing at all.”
“Suites only. An Executive-Premier.” She gives me the price, a nightly rate that’s a month’s rent on an excellent loft in Manhattan.
“I’ll take it,” I say.
“Pardon?”
“I’ll take it. Four nights.”
Her posture stiffens and the ceremony begins. I reach for the Lila Kereti passport, then think better of it. She’s like a special outfit, or set of china—special occasions only. So Ms. Judita Perels of Uruguay produces her passport, slides it across the counter.
“And your credit card?”
I peel off a small fortune in 1,000-franc notes. “I’ll be paying cash.”
“A credit card is required as a deposit, I’m afraid…”
I shrug. “Wouldn’t you know it, I lost my purse. How much is the deposit?”
“Ten thousand francs.”
I peel off ten more bills and add them to the pile.
A bellman shows me to the suite. In the center is an enormous bed covered in a white duvet that makes it look like a slab of ice cream. Glistening parquet floors and silk carpets in pinks and blues, and bloodred curtains with modest Zurich twinkling in the distance. Instinctively, I resist touching any of the furniture, as if it should be cordoned off with a ribbon like at a museum, lest we peasants touch the Louis-Whatevers. I run my finger over a dresser anyway.
The bellman takes note. “Madame, is the room not to your liking?”
I crinkle my nose. “Just a little dusty.”
“I shall call housekeeping…”
“Don’t bother.”
I tip him a hundred for carrying a single backpack to the room and pointing out where the minibar is, then feel like a show-offy ass. But it’s going to take some time to get comfortable with this new reality, and one has to start somewhere.
When he’s gone, I leap onto the bed and bounce like a child.
* * *
Strange, but I don’t gorge myself, not in the way I’d imagined in the fantasy, asking the chef to send up a sampler of everything with a special sauce made of gold. Instead, it’s a club sandwich and a salad and a slice of carrot cake for dessert. To be clear, it’s a very good, very expensive club sandwich, but still. It all feels a little tentative, a little too unreal. Besides, all the guests for my celebration haven’t arrived yet.
I check my e-mail again, hoping for a reply from either Terrance or my dad, but my inbox in empty. So I take a bath, wrap myself in a white robe that’s thick as a fur coat, and open the minibar, selecting the predictable choice: a bottle of champagne. It’s a full-sized one, 750 milliliters of the thing the French do best.
Out on the balcony, the pop of the cork is like a gunshot. My skin puckers in the cold from my feet to my head as I pour myself a glass and sit in the elegant wicker chair. When the glass is empty, I fill it again and drink that, too, wondering if this is what I’d been so greedy for the entire time.
Certainly I couldn’t dream up anything better. This is it, the perfection of the human condition, the point beyond which no more progress can be made. Should this night, this moment, happen again tomorrow, and for however many tomorrows I have left, it will not be better, just more.
But who am I kidding. Should this happen again tomorrow, well, that will be nice. But if it happens again the tomorrow after that, that will be a surprise. And so what? I pull on strands of memory from history classes, wondering if there’ve been kings or queens who only ruled for a single night. Surely there must have been. And what is it mountain climbers do when they reach the peak of Everest? Do they live there? Set up home? No. They take a look around, are proud of themselves, then go back to their lives selling insurance. It’s only the Sherpas like Naz who get to experience it again and again.
Anyway, wouldn’t it be a pity if all this grew boring?
My phone purrs in the pocket of the robe. It’s a number I don’t recognize, but the caller ID says Netherlands.
I answer tentatively, holding the phone a little away from my ear as if something might reach out and grab me. “Ja?” I say. Yes?
A crackling pause, and in the background, the sound of a train station announcement chime. “Is this—hey, it’s me,” says Terrance.
I slide lower in the chair. “Hey,” I say back.
Another pause. “I got your e-mail,” he says. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you—you’re good?”
“Very.”
“That’s good,” he says. “It’s good you’re good.”
I laugh a little, then he joins in.
“You’re in—where?” I say.
“Amsterdam. For now.” In the background, a conversation and people singing.
“Look, I’m…” we both say together.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“No, you go ahead,” he says.
“I’m sorry. That’s what I was going to say.” I tighten the robe, take a sip of the champagne. “About how I acted. But that’s over now. Really.”
“You did what you had to.”
“But, Terrance, I did it. It’s mine. It’s—official. My dad and I, we don’t have to worry.”
“Well,” he says. “Then you got what you wanted.”
“Not quite.”
Another long pause, an announcer calling out the train to Paris. “We shouldn’t be talking like this,” he says.
“Probably not.” I close my eyes. “Can you come?”
“You’re in—you met with her, the one I mentioned?”
“Yes. She was amazing.”
I hear him breathing into the phone. Then he answers, “I’ll be there tomorrow.”
* * *
I wait for him at a coffee shop across the street from the train station. Despite the clouds hanging over Zurich like skeins of filthy cotton, my body feels like I’ve spent the day in the sun. Here, says his text. Which is all it needs to stay.
When he appears a few minutes later—head low, shoulders tense—I have to stop myself from running out to him.
A cool “hey” from him.
“Hey back,” from me.
But I see his face and shoulders relax, can hear something like happiness in his breathing as he slides into the chair next to mine. He takes my hand under the table, and I lean my head on his shoulder. Once again, too much to say, the intervening time a collection of events strange and not quite believable. But he’ll believe them. That’s the thing about Terrance.
“It’s we
ird, traveling under someone else’s name,” he says.
“That’s right. It’s sexy Andre now,” I say. “Any trouble?”
“None. It’s just, uncomfortable.”
“How was Amsterdam? Get stoned?”
“No.”
The waiter comes, and Terrance orders two cappuccinos and two croissants. When the waiter goes, I put my head back on his shoulder. He smells like travel, like trains, and the cologne of the man who sat next to him. And now he’s here.
I tell him about staying with Sabiha, then remember I never mentioned her, so I tell him about meeting Sabiha. Then I tell him about Peggo and Lego Village, how weird it all was.
“It was like a—dream,” I say.
“Is Peggo a nickname?”
“I don’t know. It’s just Peggo,” I say. “And he couldn’t remember my name. Kept calling me Judas.”
The coffee and breakfast arrive and it’s his turn to play back his time in between Buenos Aires and here. Amsterdam. Helsinki before that. Amazing photographs, he says. Can’t wait to see them, I say. When we finish with the cappuccinos, I tell him about Naz and Lila Kereti.
“Who’s that?” he says.
So I open my new passport.
Terrance looks away, and whatever relief and happiness was there a minute ago vanishes. “You did this? On your own?”
I nod, then shake my head. “Kind of on my own. Partly. Look, I’m done, Terrance. I am. No more shit. Just me. Just trying to be as normal as I can.”
“I see that,” he says. “I’m glad.”
I press my lips to his cheek. “So come to the hotel with me.”
* * *
Terrance stands at the window, one arm against the glass, weight shifted to one leg. He’s the person a room like this was meant to have in it.
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