Found Life

by Linor Goralik

  YOU KNEW, YOU KNEW

  Then there was a commercial. There were two guys with chainsaws, one maybe half-naked (or wearing a light-colored t-shirt, unclear). They spoke with deliberately “cruel” voices, rough ones, you know, “Oh-ho, grrr!” That is, only one was talking, and the other just agreed: he would say, “Uh huh,” or “Haaa!” The first guy would bark, “And now we’re back!” And the second one would say, “Oh yeah!” Then the first one would bark, “If you’re watching TV, you love our show!” And the second one would go “Bzzzz!” with the saw. Then the first one would bark, “And if you don’t love our show, why are you watching TV? Is someone forcing you to?”

  At this he began to laugh and laughed hysterically, for a long time, there were even tears pouring out of his eyes, and he began to cough. Then they came back, kicked him in the stomach a couple of times, someone bashed him hard on the back with the butt of a gun, but he kept on laughing, he just couldn’t stop. They gagged him and turned the little portable TV so he couldn’t see it. The commercial ended and the news came on again.

  USEFUL

  “That was crappy,” he said.

  “No,” his mom answered, “it wasn’t crappy, don’t you ever say words like that to me, how dare you? It wasn’t ‘crappy,’ it was useful. You did a useful thing.”

  He kicked the sofa and began furiously rubbing and slobbering on his finger, which was covered in purple marker stains. She slapped his hand lightly.

  “You asked me to draw you a dog, I drew you a dog, I thought you wanted me to draw you a dog,” he said tearfully.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I asked you to draw me a dog, I needed a sign, you drew a very good dog, and I wrote, ‘No dogs allowed,’ and now it’s a useful dog.”

  SNAFU

  “Do you love me?” she asked, trying to arrange her heels more comfortably on the balled-up blanket.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That’s just fine,” she said. “Just fine. Just don’t go worrying about it now.”

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  “Please, just talk to me,” she said, but he didn’t even turn around, he had already been sitting there like that for twenty minutes, in his dress uniform and shoes; a stain from the melting snow was spreading out on the light, thick-pile rug, the gray end of a graveyard pine needle sticking out from under his sole.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “darling, lovey, just talk to me. Let me do something for you, please. Let me get you something to eat.”

  She tried to put a hand on his shoulder, on his cold, unpleasant epaulet. He didn’t even move.

  “Darling, please,” she said, not knowing where to put her hand. “What happened? Please.”

  “I killed a squirrel,” he said tersely. She didn’t understand and asked him to say it again.

  “I killed a squirrel,” he said. “We did a farewell volley, and I shot a squirrel. I didn’t know, but then I got into the car and started driving and almost ran over something right in the parking lot. I managed to brake and it was a shot squirrel.”

  She tried to settle her hand in the air above his head, then stuck it under her arm, then said:

  “Sweetie … but a volley—that’s not just one person, not just you, right?”

  “No, not just me,” he said drily. “That’s what I’m thinking about now.”

  SHH-SHH-SHH

  “Please,” she said in a brittle, plasticky voice. “Please, take the knife away,” and immediately the trembling tip touched her neck, she choked in terror, wanted to spring back, but there was a wall there, and she tried to press herself into the wall.

  For a few seconds they stood there like that, him trying not to look at her, eyes darting around the unfamiliar kitchen—and she thought, suddenly, that that’s how you look for a hiding place.

  “Please,” she said, trying not to move her throat, “I’ll do anything you …”

  And he screamed:

  “Strip!”

  She began to fumble at her collar with stiff fingers, deathly afraid of hitting the shaking knife at her throat. She managed to find the zipper tab, began to draw it downward, got approximately to the middle of her belly and released it limply.

  Then he started crying. At first he just gave a little high-pitched howl, then tried to hide behind the elbow of the arm clutching the knife, then doubled over and began sobbing. She scooped him up into a bundle and crumpled down to the floor with him in her arms, her side leaning uncomfortably into the wall, sitting him down in her lap—he was skinny, light, maybe, she thought, he’s older than he looks, he might be twelve or even thirteen. He pushed his wet face into her collarbone, and she began to mutter that it was OK, it’s OK, it’s OK, no one will ever find out, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. The terribly uncomfortable pose made her back hurt, there was a draft from the broken window, and they sat like that until it got too cold.

  TALK AGAIN SOON

  He waved, waved again—lifting himself up on his tiptoes, smiling wide; then, unable to resist, he took a couple of steps forward, jumped up to make himself more visible, blew a playful kiss, shouted, “Call me!” Then again, louder, “Call me!” And just in case, he mimed with his finger in the air: circle, circle, pressed his fist to his ear, nodded, waved again, said, “Sorry!” to the irritated guy with the taped-up TV box struggling to pass him, first on the left, then on the right; he finally pulled his wayward coat sleeve straight, turned all the way around, and quickly rolled his small, neat suitcase along the platform. At one time he’d felt ashamed of these little pantomimes, but by now he didn’t give a damn, because afterward he really would feel like someone had seen him off, waved to him for a long time, would definitely call tomorrow, and that he shouldn’t forget to bring home a present.

  BAD OMEN

  He muted the TV and started listening to the ceiling again. Then he couldn’t take it anymore, got up from the bed, threw the remote down on the nightstand and began to fumble around the rug with his feet, searching for his slippers. The acoustics in this little basement-cum-teeny apartment (he had been renting it for a month now for mere pennies, that is, for two-thirds of his earnings) were in general a divine punishment, but now the problem wasn’t just the noise. Instead, it was that he had never heard that unseen child simply walking; no, it was always running—rapidly and seemingly barefoot, that is, loudly banging on the floor with bare heels. And he was curious about another, even stranger thing: he never heard the sound of grownups walking up there. Just the pounding of little heels.

  He went out into the common hallway, where a vile, pale halogen light turned on right away, and went up to the first floor. He had been listening to the ceiling for a month now, and that child (a girl—for some reason he was sure it was a girl) had come alive in his head: she was plump, five years old, with thick, waist-length chestnut hair, wearing a little red dress, barefoot, running around up there, running around very fast, living … alone? (some dim kitchen table, bottles … water in the bottles). With a paralyzed grownup? With a paralyzed grownup whose requests she hastens to fulfill at a brisk pace (the smell of illness)? In the end, he wanted … well, it was unclear what he wanted—just to see, dammit, it was such a stupid riddle.

  He jabbed at the doorbell with his finger, very briefly, and right away he could hear a boisterous barefoot stamping behind the door, it swung open—and he was looking down at a small, barely waist-high man with an awkward little body and an unnaturally large head: a dandyish little track suit, a nearly finished cigarette. He managed to say that he had come to borrow some salt, he had a cold, and going to the store would … He didn’t have time to finish: the little man ran down the hall very quickly, and, grabbing the coat rack with a miniscule paw, gave himself the momentum to make a carefully calculated arc, and shouted into the kitchen: “Sugarpie! The neighbor wants some salt!” At once a large-headed woman with a short haircut, slightly taller than her husband, came flying out of the kitchen. Her heels pounded the floorboards rhythmically, she cau
ght her breath and, smiling, handed him salt in a fancy glass jar decorated with a river landscape in relief—he had always marveled at that type of salt in the supermarket, unable to imagine who would actually buy it, since it cost literally fifty times more than the regular kind.

  He muttered thanks and so on and, like a fool, salt in hand, went back downstairs to his apartment. Down in his lair, he put out his palm and tilted the salt shaker, and extremely fine salt suddenly poured from under the silvery lid in a hasty stream. He was so surprised that he jerked his hand away, shaking the salt convulsively off onto the floor, then carefully wiped his palm on his pants, and then, for some reason, went and stamped his foot on the spilled salt, trying to lift his knee high, as though dealing with an ant or a darting cockroach crunching drily underfoot.

  ARE YOU CRYING?

  Later, when they had already transferred her to death row, he was asked:

  “Why did you allow your wife to socialize with this woman?”

  He answered:

  “Because she made my wife happy.”

  SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT

  That girl on the show had said: “Those men from the military just came, told us about my dad, and drove off. I was crying, my mom wasn’t. I crawled under the bed and just cried, and cried, and cried.” He kept thinking about that all week, he thought that it must be very nice—to lie under the bed and cry. On Sunday, that’s exactly what he did: he got under the bed and lay there, among old smells, slicks of thin colorless sand, and little clouds of cat fur, imagining that his dad went off to war and got killed. He wasn’t able to start crying, but he found a marker under the bed and used its ­dried-out tip to draw in the dust first himself, and then the cat; then he scribbled out the cat. If the cat had perished, he could have cried, but the cat had just run away to Africa, so he had to crawl out from under the bed with nothing to show for it.

  IT’S NOT WORKING

  They made it, finally, to the fourth floor of goddamn Children’s World with its goddamn enormous staircases and goddamn broken elevator; though Lyosha would gallop up two steps at a time and then run down to him, then gallop up again; meanwhile he dragged his body up on wobbly legs, getting visibly out of breath, and again swore to himself to quit smoking as soon as he survived Lyosha’s birthday.

  “Hold on, Lyosha,” he said. “Hold on.” And tried to catch his breath.

  Lyosha immediately started looking all around, examining the stupid souvenir trash in the kiosks right near the staircase, saw a plate painted with what were supposed to be scenes from the Battle of Poltava, happily gaped his mouth open and shrieked:

  “Whoa, lookit the plate!”

  “Lyosha,” he said, “what’s the big ‘whoa’? Everything’s a ‘whoa.’ That train was a ‘whoa,’ the staircase was a ‘whoa,’ and now the plate is ‘whoa.’ What’s the ‘whoa’?”

  The boy looked at him askance, like he sensed that he had blurted out something stupid, and said, now more quietly:

  “Just—whoa. I see that it’s whoa.”

  Then, still holding on to his side, he looked closely at this red-haired stranger boy who now lived with him in the same house, buried his nose in his wife’s belly after school, had secrets of his own, probably some memory of a recent life with a totally different man, and certain expectations, probably; like big expectations, like whoa, of this new life that he and Marina had pulled him into—and said:

  “You know, Lyosha, I’m just a total dumbass.” The red-haired boy even covered his mouth with his hand in surprise, then asked, comically spreading his arms:

  “How come?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “I’m just a dumbass—that’s all.”

  EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE GREAT

  While he was washing his hands and the nurse was saying what had to be said, she, half-lying, half-sitting in that humiliating spread-eagled position, was examining an old poster on the wall: a man in a white coat and round glasses, a perfect old doctor in a perfect fifties world, holding a pack of cigarettes out to the viewer, a long-gone brand; a jaunty white inscription on a red background pledged that “Your own personal doctor recommends these cigarettes!” She had even managed to distract herself, but then he came back, gloves on now, arms raised, and the nurse rolled up the little cart with the instruments spread out on it, and again she felt nauseous, and she said—just to say something—in a voice that leapt up idiotically:

  “That’s a clever piece of décor,” she even tried to smile, and he also smiled, carefully palpating something down there (but still without the instruments, still without them; she already couldn’t feel anything, the shot was working, but he hadn’t taken anything off the cart yet—or maybe she hadn’t noticed? Maybe they have a special skill for picking things up so she doesn’t notice?), and said, lifting a hand for the nurse to obligingly give him something unbearably curved:

  “That’s my grandpa. We’ve been doctors for four generations. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  THE FLYING RIDGE OF CLOUDS IS THINNING

  “Don’t get mad,” she said, “but this just won’t work.”

  He chewed on his lip and looked at her seriously, beautifully, and she felt another burst of tenderness toward him, and also a burst of despair.

  “I didn’t think we were working on anything here,” he said, and she, who had heard this phrase (or something like it) probably eight hundred times, smiled and said:

  “Well, what do you know.”

  They started to walk along the cloud, and he kept chewing on his lips and making as if to scoop something up with his arms, gather it into a pile and then maybe arrange it in the correct order, but of course, nothing could be arranged.

  “Let me explain,” she said. “Only you have to promise not to laugh.”

  He kept looking at her in the same sullen way, and she said:

  “So there’s this one song. My son was very upset—you know, back then. And he wanted to do something. And he asked them to play that song in the church, and said, ‘Now no matter where it plays, this song will be playing for you.”

  They turned and walked along the wind, and she drew her hand along the wind, like a child draws its mittened hand across untouched snow on a railing.

  “So,” he asked, “does it?”

  “No,” she said.

  IT’S JUST—WHAT IF

  To T.-T.

  He said that they had to talk, but it couldn’t be at his house or at hers, or at his office, or in the smoking area at her dead-end job, and in fact, they couldn’t talk anywhere where there were ears or even walls. It was almost minus-thirty, they ran to the twenty-four-hour pharmacy, and there, fondling a crinkling cellophane bag with a colorful bath toy monster inside, he told her that she shouldn’t believe anything she hears about him over the next few days, none of it.

  “No, I mean,” he said, lifting one of the monster’s stripy tentacles, “believe what you want, just promise me that if push comes to shove, you’ll let me explain everything to you myself. You’ll come and ask me, and I’ll explain everything to you myself, and then you can believe whatever you want. And if I can’t explain it, then everything’s really bad, then you can believe it.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “What’s going on?” And she pulled the bag toward herself, unable to stand the sight of those tentacles writhing in torment, the brittle crinkling sound, the white threads coming out at the seams, but he wouldn’t yield, clinging to the bag stubbornly. “Who’s going to do what to me, exactly? What is this cloak and dagger stuff? What’s the deal?”

  “They are, they are,” he said.

  “Fine,” she said and jerked the bag away again. “Fine, just tell me, for heaven’s sake, are you in any kind of danger? Are you under some kind of threat? Are you in some kind of trouble? What? Is something going to happen?”

  Here he suddenly looked at her, as though he had only just now started to play out the possibilities. Then he stuck his finger under the ripped cellophane and scratched the monster behin
d the ear.

  “No,” he said, “no, of course not. Of course nothing will happen.”

  MEDICINE

  They had already gone far enough, but he couldn’t pick a spot, every spot was somehow not right. A couple of times Patrick bounded after a mouse or a hedgehog, but it was enough to click his tongue, and the dog, emitting a plaintive, guilty noise, would heel. They had already passed through all the familiar parts of the forest. Finally, he commanded himself to stop near a rather tall pine, told the dog to sit, quickly walked eight steps away, turned, raised his rifle and shot. Afterward, rifle still in hand, he hobbled forward, moving his half-bent wobbly legs with effort, and fixed his gaze on Patrick’s belly, on his red-furred tender undercoat being tousled by the wind, and everything around seemed to him like empty, fake filth. He forced himself to shift his gaze to the muzzle—the dog’s upper lip was raised, and for the first time you could see how pale, almost white his gums were, shiny, protruding, covered in tiny, not yet evaporated bubbles of saliva, and it was because of the sight of Patrick’s gums that he crumpled and screamed. He fell to his knees and evidently began rolling around on the dry yellow pine needles, he screamed and screamed, and tears poured from him like water, the tears just gushed, and he kept screaming and screaming, bent in half, clutching his stomach with his hands, and screamed, tears spilling out of him, and even later, when he couldn’t scream at full volume anymore, he kept on crying, lying on his side, kept crying and crying. Finally, he was crying, for the first time in three weeks, for the first time since that day when he was asked to identify his wife’s body—that is, what was left of her body, scraped by the rescue team from the pancake-flattened car. He had tried very hard to cry for a whole three weeks, he was suffocating from pain, but he couldn’t do it; he deliberately recalled their honeymoon, his long-dead parents, any and all past sorrows he could summon, pinched himself hard, twisting the skin, stabbed himself with a needle, but he was unable to cry, feeling all the while that if he didn’t cry soon, something would pop in his brain, would just pop—and that’s it, he’d drop dead.