Vaclav & Lena

by Haley Tanner

  But this, this is too real. This is the same place, the same neighborhood, nothing has happened since, nothing has healed, this is still bad, and to talk about bad things is not good.

  “Mom, you don’t want to tell me what happened that night?” Vaclav says.

  “I don’t remember this night,” she says.

  “Okay, I wish you would remember,” Vaclav says, in the nicest voice possible.

  “Listen,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  “You are just thinking this because it is her birthday today, in three days you are not thinking of it anymore,” she says, and takes a big sip of water. Vaclav smiles, because this statement is an affirmation and a promise. Of course Rasia remembers.

  “Yeah. Okay,” Vaclav says. And waits, three bites. “How was work today?”

  “Och,” says Rasia. “Och.” And she shakes her head as if to say, “Today has been the most horrible day that anyone ever working in any office has ever experienced, the atrocities that I have seen you cannot imagine, but I will tell you just one short piece of my day to demonstrate to you how awful, and you will know that I am not sharing with you the very worst parts, and this is to spare you the pain that I know all too well.”

  “Barbara, you know Barbara, who is always taking this day and that day as a sick day and coming back to work the next day with a box of tissues and her hair frosted with a new permanent? She comes in today and she was supposed to do a whole pile of orders yesterday, but all day yesterday I hear her on the phone, chatting, chatting, who knows with who but probably with men from the online thing she is always talking about to find dates with Jewish men, not a bad thing, but on the Internet, everyone knows there are too many perverteds. Why a woman would want to throw herself into that pit with snakes I do not know. Anyway, she doesn’t do a single thing with this pile of orders.…” As Rasia talks and talks, Oleg falls asleep a little bit, snoring through his nose at the table, the air sneaks slowly and silently back into the room, and things seem normal, except there is a new tenderness that Vaclav and Rasia feel for each other, because she told him, although it was hard for her and she did not want to, that she still thinks of Lena, remembers her birthday, and so has promised her son that not only does she remember Lena, that she thinks of her, has thought of her that very day, and at a good time, at a right time, she will tell him.

  Also, Vaclav feels a new closeness with Rasia, because he has found out that something that is big in his heart is big in her heart too.

  AN AFTER-DINNER LIST

  …

  After dinner, Rasia and Oleg watch Russian satellite television in the TV room on the big black leather couch. Vaclav sits on the floor with his legs stretched in front of him and his school binder on his lap. He is studying for an exam in physics, but he knows already that he is solidly grounded in this subject, so he is going over the formulas he needs to know but only to fine-tune, to make sure. Vaclav has a perfect average in physics; it is his favorite subject.

  On a piece of lined paper, Vaclav tests himself, copying the formulas he has memorized for the test. As Vaclav does this work, his mind wanders, over and over again, back to Lena. Vaclav needs to go into his room, and be alone, and think of Lena, and this feels for him like a fantastic thing—like having a mystery novel you are reading and you cannot focus on any of your routine daily activities, you want only to go back to your book, want only to spend time in the world of that book and to see what happens next.

  In his room, Vaclav lies down on his bed, with all his clothes still on, on top of the covers, which Vaclav realizes feels special, as it is something he rarely does. This feels indulgent, perfect, to lie on his bed on top of the covers, and to think of Lena.

  He thinks about what she must look like. This is difficult, because he cannot really even remember what Lena looked like when he knew her.

  He thinks about what Lena sounds like, but it is difficult for him to remember Lena’s voice. He thinks that this might be because Lena rarely spoke when he knew her. He remembers her saying things, but he cannot hear her voice.

  Lena is turning seventeen today. She must be taller. Vaclav wonders whether she is a short person or a tall person; she was a short person when he knew her, much smaller than other kids their age. She might still be a short person. Vaclav wonders how she wears her hair. She might wear her hair in a ponytail, or short, or might have bangs. Vaclav realizes that she might have piercings in her nose or she might bleach her hair to be blond and then dye it pink. She might be fat or wear big, heavy boots, or she might dress in tank tops that say “princess,” and now Vaclav realizes that there are many years between them, that they might have become different types of people.

  She might be the kind of girl he would never want to talk to, a girl who listens to bad music, a girl who talks only to football players, or a girl who smokes outside during lunchtime.

  He’s tried to find her on Facebook, but the last time he checked there were 193,000 girls named Lena, and none with her last name. Once he realized that she might have a new last name he gave up; he would be looking for a girl with a first name, no last name, living anywhere.

  Lena could have a driver’s license. Lena could have a boyfriend. Lena probably speaks much better English. Lena probably has boobs. Vaclav realizes that for the last seven years he has kept Lena little, he has kept her the same age, and that now, on her seventeenth birthday, he is finally letting her grow up, and she is getting away from him. The only Lena that Vaclav has is the Lena from his memory; the real Lena is someone he does not know, someone he may not like. He feels, lying in bed, that Lena is escaping him, and he thinks, for the first time, that he may not say his good night to Lena tonight. This feels suddenly frightening and satisfying and liberating.

  Vaclav tries to think about what it might mean to not say good night to Lena. He writes a list:

  NOT SAYING GOOD NIGHT TO LENA: THOUGHTS

  I have been saying good night to Lena for seven years

  This means that I should continue

  This can also mean that I should stop

  What will happen if I stop

  Maybe nothing

  Maybe Lena will die

  This last line in the list is surprising to Vaclav, because he has never wanted to admit to himself or to anyone else that he thinks Lena will die if he does not wish her good night.

  It is a silly thing to think, but Vaclav wonders if Lena actually will die if he doesn’t say good night to her. He is not sure.

  Vaclav then realizes that he will never know if saying good night to Lena has ever had any effect, because in all likelihood he will never see her again, and even if he does, he will never have proof that his good nights ever kept her safe.

  LENA IS UNKNOWABLE

  …

  Vaclav is still trying to decide what to do about the good night, and he feels that if he says good night tonight, it will mean that he has to say good night for the rest of his life, because if he decides to say it tonight, then he will never be able to stop, because stopping means he will be responsible for something bad happening to Lena. If he doesn’t say it tonight, he is taking a very great chance, but he will not say it ever again. Also, he is afraid that not saying it tonight is letting go of Lena, but he also knows from his thinking about Lena that Lena is gone from him already.

  Vaclav changes out of his clothes and into a pair of sweatpants. He folds his jeans and puts them back in his drawer, and he looks at himself in the mirror.

  He decides that he will get into bed and he will not say good night to Lena. His bed is cold, and he is aware of his body slowly warming the bed, the comforter and the pillow beneath his head.

  He wonders when it will become the first night that he has not said good night to Lena, because right now he could still say it. Will it count when he falls asleep, or will it count only when he wakes up in the morning and has not said it? He fears for a moment that he will say it by accident; just by thinking it, he will think
the good night, and that might count.

  Vaclav’s eyes go all over the walls of his room like it is a new room he has never been in before. He closes his eyes though he is not at all sleepy in this new room, where everything looks different.

  Vaclav does not say good night to Lena, but he wonders. He wonders and wonders at something that seems as unknowable to him as the edges of outer space or the face of God. No, not even the face of God, which a person might try to imagine. Lena now is as unknowable to Vaclav as the feeling of the skin on the backs of God’s knees, if God even has knees, which of course is something no one can know. Lena, to Vaclav, is an inconceivable concept. Lena is infinity. Lena is the universe expanding. Lena is the deepest part of the ocean, where no light has ever been.

  LENA IS IN A BATHROOM STALL

  …

  Lena doesn’t feel like it is her seventeenth birthday. She does have a nice happy-birthday feeling, though, a feeling like the day smells a little bit different than the other regular stale days. This day smells sunnier, brighter, sharper, lighter, but Lena doesn’t feel seventeen, doesn’t feel the way she sees her friends feel on their seventeenth birthdays. Lena is not excited about the seventeen things, the driving, being one year away from buying cigarettes, from lottery tickets, from being a guest at a live taping of the David Letterman show, from voting, from high school graduation and adulthood. The last birthday that really felt like a birthday was her ninth, and she’s been on a wild spinning carousel since then, barely holding on, and though she has memories of going around and around, of one year and another and another and another passing, she feels that she is still nine and has not caught up to where she is supposed to be.

  Today she has already received many presents, including the following:

  New journals from Em

  Gift certificates to the movies from grandparents and a Hallmark card covered in glitter

  New socks from Em

  Collection of ten “necessary” albums to improve her musical character from Em

  Bracelets from the store that sells Tibetan stuff from Olivia

  Card signed by the student council

  Birthday shirt decorated with puffy paint from Perri and Faye

  Copy of Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, old and used-looking, with an inscription, “To my very own real-life Franny, on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday,” from Em’s boyfriend, Allen

  Stack of twenty birthday cards from fictional characters, really from Em

  Box of fun art supplies, including kneaded erasers and pens with tiny points from the members of the art club

  In addition to these presents, Lena’s birthday has included much birthday festivity, balloons tied to her locker, a cake with candles at lunch, and a birthday announcement over the loudspeaker during homeroom.

  Lena does not feel like today is her birthday, because Lena does not feel like a person today. This is not a new feeling, it is a feeling that is always there, though it surfaces and subsides like her wisdom teeth. On bad days Lena finds it difficult to talk to other people. This is especially difficult when she must lead a meeting of the student council or the art club, or rally her teammates at soccer practice, but she gets through it, one minute at a time, by pretending.

  Sometimes these feelings are just bothersome, like being at a party where you don’t know anyone very well, and you have to think of what to say all the time. Sometimes these days hurt a lot. Today hurts a lot. All day there have been people who want to wish her happy birthday, and she has felt all day that speaking to each of them was like rubbing a small spot on the inside of her skull that had a lingering bruise. These little conversations in the hallway all day, they were going down the wrong pipe, they were getting up her nose, they felt like landing badly on an ankle on a trampoline, over and over and over again.

  The final bell of the day rings, the end of Friday, the end of the week, and although Lena is supposed to go out for a birthday dinner with lots of friends who begged enough money from their parents to go out for sushi and to pay for her, she slips into a bathroom that is known to be a gross bathroom, a bathroom in the old hallway of the school, in the part that has not been renovated yet, a bathroom Lena and her friends usually avoid using.

  In the hallway everyone is rushing toward the weekend, toward a night that is still warm like a nighttime in summer. It is a Friday, and the weekend still seems completely expansive, like a big ocean stretching out endlessly.

  In this bathroom there are only two stalls. The handicapped stall at the back of the room is already occupied, so Lena takes the smaller stall, and she dumps her heavy backpack on the floor and sits down on the toilet. The embroidered script LENA on her backpack looks foreign and completely arbitrary. Her name, her identity, in white embroidery on a navy-blue background. How could it be as simple as script embroidered on a backpack? This is me?

  She can count four feet in the stall next to hers, and she can tell that the two girls are smoking from the smell, and from the hush that fell over them when she entered.

  Lena holds her head in her hands, looks straight down at the floor. She feels a momentary consolation at a new discovery: No matter what, there will always be bathrooms, and these will always be private places where she can go away and be safe. She tells herself that she can stay in the bathroom stall forever. Inside her head, she says, Lena, you never have to leave this stall ever. Lena has two selves. There is a self who is consoled by hearing that she never has to leave this bathroom stall, and there is a second self who did the consoling, who said, You never have to leave this stall ever. Lena decides to converse directly with self number two. Does this consoling self believe that once consoled, her first self will soon be ready to leave the bathroom? Yes. Once calmed, her first self will be ready to face the world outside the bathroom. Her second self must therefore remain separate from the first, who never wants to leave the bathroom. Then there is a third self, a Lena number three, who is able to interrogate the other two selves and draw conclusions, and then yet another, who is able to make this observation. Lena feels her many selves multiply, like looking into parallel mirrors and seeing the back of your head, surprisingly unfamiliar, spiral into infinity.

  Lena looks at a spot on the bathroom floor between her shoes. She likes this spot. This spot is ambiguous, and she feels a kinship with this spot. The spot is either dirt on the tile or part of the speckled design of the tile that was intended to hide dirt. It does not hide dirt; it makes dirt ambiguous. Is this spot dirt or a spot? The tile has not tricked Lena into thinking the floor is clean, not at all. The floor looks both dirty and ugly. Lena wonders if she will remember this spot forever. It looks to her like the most important spot she has ever seen. She marvels at the spot. She closes her eyes and tries to picture the spot. She wonders what it is about the spot that makes it so marvelous, that has attracted her eye, what has made this spot stand out among all the other spots. She thinks she might perhaps be the first person to ever notice this spot, to acknowledge this spot, to perceive of this spot in all its spotty specificity.

  Does the spot conceive of itself as a spot? No, certainly it does not. What Lena likes, she decides, is the unknowing specificity of the spot. She has the urge to write this phrase down; it seems so brilliant to her, seems to express something she has been wanting to express. The unknowing specificity of the spot. Although the phrase strikes her so cleanly between her eyes, lights up new and exciting spaces in her brain, she is not certain that she will remember it. She wonders why she does not trust her own memory at sixteen. Seventeen. She’s seventeen. She decides that she does trust her own memory. She remembers all the trigonometric functions, the difference between mitosis and meiosis, all the prepositions in the English language. Aboard, above, across, after, against, along, and so on. This is not a problem of memory. The problem is the enormous gaps between her multiplying selves. She worries that she will lose the self who has observed the spot. When she speaks again, leaves the stall (no, don’t think of it
, shhhh), she will lose this self, and with it the spot. Certainly there have been other moments like this, other spots, grander and far less grand. She can remember vaguely having thoughts about being in a moment, about connecting with specific scenery. She even has fuzzy memories of telling herself to remember. She does not, however, remember the specific spots. She decides to start remembering all the specific spots in her life, starting with this one specific spot. She decides that the spots are the keys to living a life as a complete person, not as a disjointed puzzle person made up of many different people trying to masquerade as one person. She unzips her backpack to find a piece of paper to write down this plan.

  “Lena?” One of the girls in the handicapped stall is saying her name.