by Mariana Leky
The optician gave me a quick look, cleared his throat, and then spoke softly as if hoping that the sound of the rain would cover his voice.
“You talked about blows from a stick,” the optician said. “I’ve read that you are also struck when your thoughts are straying during meditation. In my case, it’s the thoughts that pummel me. And I’m made up of much more than sixty-five percent thoughts.”
The optician told Frederik all about the voices that jostled him and made him stagger, that taunted him about everything he hadn’t done because of them. He told how he had tried to cope with the voices using inspirational quotes on postcards and Buddhism, and that he had tried to pass himself off as the sky and as a river before them. Frederik said nothing. His head rested against the window; the streetlights blurred in the downpour and formed trails of light.
“You must think I’m crazy,” the optician said. “I’m sure you think I urgently need a doctor.”
He wiped the windshield with his sleeve.
“I’ve already seen a doctor. He gave me an electroencephalography.”
The optician looked over at Frederik, at the silent gladiolas.
“I’m sure you think I should go to a doctor who doesn’t use machines or instruments. I’m sure you think I should see a psychologist. But I don’t want to see a psychologist,” he said, and blinked. We had almost arrived. “Psychologists creak and send their patients out into the world. I don’t want that. I’m too old for the world.”
You’re as old as the world, I thought on the back seat.
“I’ve never told anyone all this,” the optician said to the windshield wipers, to the rain, to the cellophane, to Frederik. “I hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable.”
He stopped in front of my building and Frederik finally spoke. “Are we there already?” he asked.
* * *
“Come in for a bit,” Frederik said at my front door. The optician looked at me. I nodded.
“But only for a minute,” he said.
In my apartment the optician walked around the opened fold-out bed and took the framed carnival photograph from the wall.
“There we all are,” he said. “I think I look good as a flower bed.”
Frederik lingered in the doorway.
“That bookshelf is impossible,” he said before disappearing into the kitchen.
“What’s wrong with the bookshelf?” the optician asked in a whisper.
“He says it’s crooked,” I replied.
The optician took a step back and looked at the bookshelf for a long time.
“It’s true, now that you mention it.”
“Could you both come here for a second?” Frederik called from the kitchen.
He was sitting on one of my chairs and pointed at the other. My father’s otorhinolaryngological instruments were spread out on the table.
“What do you have in mind?” the optician asked.
Frederik said, “Please take a seat.”
The optician gave me a questioning look. I shrugged, and the optician sat down. Frederik was wearing my father’s head mirror. My father’s head was bigger than Frederik’s because he had hair, so Frederik had to hold the mirror with one hand. With the other he picked up the silver nasal speculum. The optician looked at Frederik.
“I’m going to examine the voices,” Frederik said.
“Please,” the optician objected, “that’s not even possible.”
“Yes, it is. It’s a new method. From Japan.”
The optician looked at Frederik as if he were the one who urgently needed a psychologist.
“Please look straight ahead and keep still,” Frederik said. He leaned forward and looked into the optician’s ear with the speculum.
“That’s actually an instrument for the nose,” I pointed out.
Frederik glanced up at me; the mirror sat just above his eyebrows. “Not in Japan,” he said before immersing himself in the optician’s left ear.
Alaska came in and sniffed at the case that held the rest of the instruments. He looked happy; perhaps it smelled of my father.
“And?” the optician asked after a while.
“I can see them very clearly,” Frederik said.
The optician held very still. He suddenly remembered visiting a doctor in the neighboring village when he was five years old. He’d had the chicken pox. He was covered with red pustules and had a high fever and chills. The fever gave him bad dreams, day and night, and so the optician cried a lot, even after he had been awake for a long time.
He had been afraid of going to the doctor. Afraid the doctor would tell him, “Stop your crying,” afraid of the cold stethoscope. But the doctor had said in a very friendly voice, “Please have a seat, my spotted young man,” and rubbed his hands to warm them and breathed on the stethoscope so it wouldn’t be too cold. He’d explained to the optician that with the syrup and the ointment he was going to give him, countless tiny boxing champions were going to slip inside him. They were too small to be seen with the human eye, but they were very strong and were only invented to knock out the chicken pox. The optician immediately felt better because of the invisible boxing champions inside him, fighting on his side to smash the fever and the dreams, too.
Naturally the optician didn’t believe for a second that Frederik could see the voices. But the child the optician once was believed it happily.
* * *
“Really?” the optician asked. “You can see them?”
“Clear as day. There are at least three of them. They really are … they’re really very ugly.”
“They are, aren’t they?” the optician said, and smiled at Frederik.
“Please hold still,” Frederik said, and the optician quickly straightened his head.
“Very ugly,” Frederik repeated. “And it looks like you caught them a very long time ago.”
“That’s true,” the optician said, “that’s very true.”
Frederik adjusted the head mirror and clamped the speculum between his teeth. He grabbed his chair leg with his free hand and scooted to the other side of the optician.
“I’m going to look into your right ear now,” he said. “Ah, now I see them from behind.”
The optician looked straight ahead at the tiles over my sink with great concentration.
“Some people give their voices names,” Frederik said, “but that hasn’t helped me.”
The optician spun around and stared at him. “You have them, too?”
“Of course. Now please look straight ahead again.”
“Is there anything that can be done for it?” the optician asked without moving.
“To be honest, no. These voices will probably stay.” Frederik tapped the optician’s ear with the nasal speculum. “Where are they supposed to go? They don’t have anyone besides you. And they never learned how to do anything other than harangue you.”
The head mirror slipped over Frederik’s eyes. He pushed it to the back of his head. “And stop reading to them. No postcards and no Buddhism. They’re so old, they know it all already.”
He put the speculum on the kitchen table and looked at the optician. The optician picked up the speculum and examined it for a long time.
“Amazing what you can do with modern technology,” he said, smiling.
* * *
The optician drove home. There, he dropped facedown on his bed, the bed that was just the right size for one person, feeling at least as heavy as the heart of a blue whale, as heavy as something that seems anatomically impossible. I’ve got to tell Selma that it’s possible to be that solid and that heavy, he thought before falling asleep, in case she doesn’t know.
* * *
Naturally the optician’s inner voices were not going to leave him in peace just because someone claimed to have seen them. It wasn’t that easy, but it did gradually become less difficult.
The optician stopped reading to the voices. He stopped pretending he was a river or the sky, which had never been hard to dispro
ve in any case. He no longer professed anything. He never said anything to them at all anymore. In time the voices’ hiss softened to a lisp, their wails turned to whines. The optician didn’t lose the voices, but over time the voices lost the optician. When they said something, which they continued to do often, they spoke more and more into the void, as if to a broken answering machine.
BIOLUMINESCENCE
“I haven’t talked this much for a very long time,” Frederik said. We sat on the windowsill, looking at my sofa and my bed, where Frederik and I were separately not sleeping. Between us was a bowl of peanuts that Frederik had already emptied and filled again.
“I’d really like to stay longer, but I have to go back tomorrow,” Frederik said.
I looked at him, and he could probably see clearly that I thought this was terrible.
“Is that bad?” he asked.
I thought of the authenticity valued in Buddhism and how I had forbidden it to everyone. It had still found its way, and it hadn’t been so bad. Authenticity, I thought, come on, Luisa, one, two, three.
“No,” I said. Dammit, I thought. “No, it’s not bad.”
A book that had been stuck at an angle on top of the others on the bookshelf fell to the floor. An Outline of Psychoanalysis. My father had given it to me.
“Around you, things are often falling,” Frederik remarked.
I looked at him from the corner of my eye, the way you look at someone you love far more than you’re prepared to admit. He looked tired. I was wide awake but pretended I had to yawn.
“It’s very late,” I said. “I’m going to go brush my teeth.”
“Do that,” Frederik said, and I went to brush my teeth. Then I came back and sat next to him.
“I’m going to go brush my teeth, too, then,” he said.
“Yes, do that,” I said, and went into the kitchen, where Alaska had already curled up on his blanket under the table. I stuck his evening pill in a ball of liverwurst, put it in front of him, went back, and sat down next to Frederik.
“What’s wrong with him, actually?” he asked.
“Hyperthyroidism and osteoporosis,” I said.
I thought about what else to do.
“I’m going to give Selma a quick call to ask if it’s still raining so hard.”
“Yes, do that,” Frederik said.
How can anyone be so beautiful? I wondered, and I thought about the importance of nonaction in Buddhism.
“You know, what I’m doing this whole time is not kissing you,” I said, standing up quickly to go to the telephone. Frederik grabbed my wrist.
“I can’t anymore,” he said, putting his hand on the back of my neck and pulling my face toward him. “This has got to end at some point.”
And so it began. Frederik kissed me and I kissed Frederik as if we’d been invented precisely for this.
Frederik pulled his robe over his head like a sweater that was much too long and then he started unbuttoning Selma’s dress.
He undid the buttons with intense concentration, as if future generations could learn valuable lessons from this method of unbuttoning. It took an enormously long time, as if Frederik were unbuttoning the entire stretch between Germany and Japan, and this gave the blank my mind was drawing time to settle down comfortably next to us. Because of the blank, I thought of how I’d never stood quite so naked as I would soon stand before Frederik as soon as he’d unbuttoned the entire stretch. I also thought about how I’d always made sure that my nakedness was unlit and covered with a blanket, for good reason, I thought, but luckily I also thought about how things can disappear when you acknowledge them.
“I’m not half as beautiful as you are,” I said.
Frederik had undone the last button. The button at the very bottom of Selma’s dress. He stood up and slipped the dress from my shoulders.
“You’re three times as beautiful,” he said, then lifted me up and laid me on the bed. My blank stayed where it was on the windowsill.
And everything Frederik then did, he did with as much assurance as if he’d already studied a map of my body for years, as if that map were hanging on Frederik’s wall in Japan, as if he had stood before it and memorized all the routes.
I had no map of Frederik’s body. I didn’t know where to start and fluttered my hand over his chest and stomach.
Frederik took hold of my hands and said, “You don’t need to do a thing.” He took my shoulders and pressed my upper body onto the mattress.
“Frederik?” I whispered when he was far below, concentrating on topology with his mouth and hand, which didn’t need to look for the way.
“Yes?” he murmured, as if I were knocking inopportunely on his door when he was in the middle of a revolutionary invention.
“Your … your precision is incredible.”
Frederik looked up at me.
“Isn’t that the sort of thing one says about electric razors?”
He smiled at me. His eyes were no longer cyan blue or turquoise, but almost black. I remembered what the optician told me about pupils when I was a child: that darkness or joy makes them dilate.
Frederik came back up and laid his head at my throat and his hand on my breast, under which my heart hammered like someone outside not being let in. My heart doesn’t have anything in common with the heart of a blue whale, I thought.
“Why are you so calm?” I asked.
Frederik kissed me and said, “I’m so calm because you’re so nervous.”
He stroked my neck with the back of his hand.
“I did tell you that you didn’t need to do anything,” he whispered.
“But I’m not doing anything.”
“Yes, you are. You’ve been thinking the whole time.”
I turned my head toward him. My mouth touched his forehead.
“You’re not thinking at all?”
“No,” Frederik murmured into my throat, and laid his hand on the hollow between my ribs and my hip, “not right now. I probably will tomorrow.” He laid the flat of his hand below my navel, and that was the end of my not doing anything. I wrapped my arms around him. “I’ll do a lot of thinking tomorrow,” he whispered, pushing my legs apart with his, “but not right now, Luisa.”
I’d already stopped listening.
* * *
Around three in the morning I woke up. Frederik lay asleep next to me, on his stomach with his face turned toward me, his arms folded under his head. I watched him for a while, then stroked his rough elbow with my finger.
“Remember all this well,” I said softly to myself and to the blank far away on the windowsill.
I sat up on the edge of the bed. At first I thought the rain had leaked in during the night, but the puddle in the middle of the room was just Frederik’s robe.
My comforter was on the floor. It had slipped off the bed a long time ago. I pulled it up like a very old fisherman hauling in a net. It took a while. My arms were ninety percent water. I was enfeebled by love.
* * *
While I was hauling in the comforter, the heavy optician slept facedown on his bed, not moving once over the course of the night. At the same time, Elsbeth and Palm slept sitting upright on Elsbeth’s sofa. Elsbeth had fallen asleep first and then started awake. “I’m sorry, Palm, but you make me so tired with all those Bible passages and explications.”
Palm had smiled at her and said, “But that’s no problem at all, my dear Elsbeth.” Elsbeth had fallen asleep again and Palm continued his explication until he, too, nodded off. At the same time, Marlies was not sleeping. She stood at the window, eating peas from the can. She stood right in front of the window, something she could only do at night because no one came by to bother her then. She shoveled the peas in reluctantly because her body had shyly reminded her that once again she’d eaten nothing all day. The juice from the peas ran down her chin and she wiped her mouth. At the same time, my father was standing in front of a telephone booth in Moscow. He checked the wristwatch that was set to Central European tim
e and hung up the receiver. At the same time, my mother, lying next to Alberto in the apartment over the ice-cream parlor, had the hiccups. A few hours earlier, Alberto had asked my mother if she wanted to move in with him and she had laughed longer and louder than she had for an eternity, as if moving in together were the funniest joke in the world. Alberto, rightly, was offended.
“Fine,” he said, “now pull yourself together.”
But my mother couldn’t stop laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “it has nothing to do with you.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “But it’s hilarious, I don’t know why, either.”
She tried to fall asleep, but the hiccups continued, and whenever she thought of the words “move in together,” she burst out laughing again, until Alberto said, “I’ve had it. I’m sleeping on the sofa.”
At the same time, Selma lay in bed under her flowered quilt and luckily only nearly dreamed of an okapi. At the very last moment, she realized it was just a misshapen cow standing next to her in the twilight in the Uhlheck.
ANIMALS CAN SENSE THESE THINGS
I slept until late morning and woke up to the sound of the doorbell. Frederik had disappeared. Only his robe and his suitcase were still here. I stumbled to the door still half asleep and answered the intercom.
“Please come down and help me carry something,” Frederik said.
Because I had no bathrobe, I pulled on Frederik’s robe and ran down the stairs. He stood at the entrance, surrounded by six boxes.
“You look like a burnt gingerbread man,” he said.
“And you look perfectly normal,” I said, because Frederik was wearing jeans and a sweater, like an ordinary person.
I pointed at the boxes. “What’s all this?”
“The crooked bookshelf has to go,” he said. “I bought you a new one.”
We carried the boxes into the lobby and up the stairs, Frederik behind me.
“How did you get them all here?” I asked.
Frederik stopped.