by Mark Winkler
Copyright © 2015 by Mark Winkler
First published under the title Wasted by Kwela Books, Cape Town, 2015
First US edition published in 2018 by
Soho Press
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Winkler, Mark.
My name is Nathan Lucius / Mark Winkler.
Other titles: Wasted
ISBN 978-1-61695-882-4
eISBN 978-1-61695-883-1
International paperback edition ISBN 978-1-61695-925-8
International eISBN 978-1-61695-926-5
1. Assisted suicide—Fiction. 2. Euthanasia—Fiction. I. Title
PR9369.4.W56 W37 2017 823’.92—dc23 2017011307
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my Michelle
After
My name
My name is Nathan Lucius. I sleep with the light on.
I buy old photographs of people I don’t know. I give them names and arrange them into a family tree on my wall. This means I can have a new family whenever I want.
I’m happiest when each day is exactly like the one before.
I like to run. I hate the beach.
When Mrs. du Toit next door masturbates I can hear her coming behind my wall of photographs. I’ve never seen her husband. Maybe that’s why she does it all the time. Sometimes the sound inspires me to the same. I think of her even though she is over forty.
I work at a daily newspaper where I sell advertising space. It’s a job.
I like to drink. I like to watch TV.
I had a girlfriend a while ago. One day I told her that I’d rather wank than have sex with her, so she left.
My name is Nathan Lucius. I am thirty-one years old. I live in a flat in Pansyshell Park. I have no pets.
Often the news in the morning
Often the news in the morning edition doesn’t get much past page twelve. After that it’s business and sport. Sometimes you’ll find that page twelve is already in the business supplement. There are seven billion people on the planet. It worries me that the journos can only find enough stories to fill twelve pages. What a boring species we must be.
There are more ads than stories anyway. It’s like the journos are there only to fill the gaps between the commercial stuff. Maybe it’s enough to put them off writing past page twelve, the knowledge that you’re just writing around ads for cars or margarine. It must be disheartening.
In the three years I’ve been here it’s become harder and harder to sell ad space even though the spaces have got smaller. You measure the spaces in centimetres up and by columns across. I’ve always struggled to understand that. It’s like measuring something in so many cubits high by so many wombats wide. My boss, Sonia, blames the bad sales on the internet. She blames most things on the internet. Child porn, global warming, the wrong election results. Sonia has been here far longer than I have. She tells me that in the old days it was piss-easy to sell a double-page spread. Those are her words. Sometimes she speaks like a sailor. Double pages used to cost as much as a small house back then. Advertisers would buy them all the time. Now we have to “add value” by “bundling” sales in the print edition with online sales. It’s a carrot to get advertisers to spend money. We sell fewer double-page spreads than ever. Everyone is reading the news on their phones or their tablets or whatever. The bosses say we have to keep the print edition going. I don’t know why. Me, I’d just call it a day.
In summer Sonia wears no bra and cotton tops that don’t hide her long nipples. She has a great wild bush of blonde hair and little blue Renée Zellweger eyes. Before Renée got a new face, I mean.
She tells me, frequently, that her commission was so good back in the day that she didn’t know what to do with her money. So she started taking drugs and ended up in rehab. The paper paid for it all. When she was straight she was very good at her job. She had to take a salary cut to pay them back. She says this was a good thing. It meant that she had less cash to blow on drugs. She tells me this mostly when we go to Eric’s Bar. Clearly rehab didn’t cover drinking. She tells me that the drugs are never further away than the tips of her fingers. All she has to do is reach out. Like reaching to scratch an itch that itches all the time. Counselling other people helps, she says. She sees herself in their eyes at every session. Sonia is pretty and sweet-looking. Most girls want big cow eyes. Sonia’s little eyes suit her. The drug thing scares me and so do the long nipples.
When I feel like a beer and Sonia can’t make it I go to Eric’s Bar on my own. I’ve got to know Eric quite well over the years. He is an enormous mountain of a man. Sometimes when he is tired at the end of the evening he gets a waiter to reach for the drinks in the fridge under the counter. His accent is thick and German. He once wrestled for Germany in the Olympics. He was a Greco-Roman specialist and fought in the 74–84 kg category. He didn’t win anything. That was a long time ago. Then life took over, he says. I suppose that life might add up by way of an extra hundred and fifty kilograms. Some people accumulate things. Even me. I accumulate photographs and money I can’t spend. Eric accumulates flesh.
If it’s quiet he’ll draw with a pencil on a large white pad while we chat. The stuff he draws comes from his head. He’ll draw kitschy Bavarian alpine scenes if he’s feeling uninspired. It’s actually the same scene each time. With the same mountain and the same trees and the same small-windowed house. The roof looks too big for it. Like it’s trying to push the house into the ground.
Or else he’ll draw wizards or witches who look like they’ll hex you right off the page. Demons that threaten to drag you into the paper with them. I tell him he could be famous. He shrugs me off. He gives his witches and wizards to drinking dads to give to their kids. Long ago he pinned one of his alpine scenes to the edge of a shelf. It’s gone yellow over time and the corners have curled up. I keep meaning to ask him why he doesn’t replace it with a new one. He must have hundreds by now.
“Where is that?” I once asked him as he began another. As usual he’d started with an outline of the mountain. He shrugged and put his pad away.
Sometimes Sonia’s boyfriend comes up from the newsroom to visit her. His name is Dino and he’s a reporter. He has no problem with filling the spaces between ads. He is proud of the fact that he does only hard news. Crime, violence, corruption. No kittens in trees or hundredth birthdays. He is bilingual and we all know that he writes for the local Afrikaans daily on the side. It’s our competition and he’s not supposed to. Dino is tall and wiry. He runs marathons and climbs rocks and cycles up mountains. He doesn’t drink. Sometimes he’ll join us at Eric’s and have an orange juice. Once some old greybeard took his face out of his whisky glass and tried to give Dino a hard time about the juice. Dino stared at him without blinking. The greybeard shut up and turned away. If I’m busy with Sonia and Dino appears I’ll find a reason to go back to my desk. He takes over the chair I’ve been sitting on and kind of lies on it. He splays his legs and puts his hands behind his head and generally inhabits the whole of Sonia’s cubicle. I don’t know how she can breathe with him in there. Even from my desk I can hear him bragging about a story he’s just broken. How he’s had to dodge a drug lord’s bullets. How he’s been getting death threats since writing about some politician or other. How he has some pet policemen in key positions who always slip him the good stories first. Today he’s on about a body found in the Liesbeek
River with a crossbow bolt through the chest. I suppose it’s all very exciting if you’re a certain kind of person. I’d like to sew his mouth shut with a curved needle and catgut.
I wait for Sonia in Eric’s bar on Thursday after work. A woman comes in and sits on a stool near me. She is tall and wears a short skirt that is dark green and shiny. Her sunglasses are pushed up to keep her hair back. She orders a drink and lights a cigarette and then lights another and another and then orders a second drink and lights a cigarette. Three cigarettes per drink seems to be the going rate. She keeps looking at me as if she is trying to catch my eye. Something in her face tells me she has a smile waiting. I’m sure it would launch itself if I looked at her properly. I manage a glance at her crow’s feet and the heavy mascara and the vertical wrinkle above her nose. I don’t look her in the eye. There are a lot of people in the bar. I wish she would look at one of them instead. Her hands are older than her face. Her long legs are a bit lumpy at the thighs. I know this because she keeps crossing and uncrossing them on the bar stool. Her skirt rides up higher. I try hard not to look. The harder I try the more she does it. I haven’t showered for three days.
I am talking to Eric and watching her out of the corner of my eye when she gives a little grunt and jerks up off her stool and slides to the floor. She hasn’t been here long enough to be that entirely drunk. It must be something else. I go over to her and shake her around a bit. She doesn’t respond. I put my ear to her mouth. It sounds like she isn’t breathing. I put my forefinger to her wrist. I can’t feel a pulse. I kneel and pump down with both hands on her chest. I can’t remember the ratio. I pump a few more times. I put my mouth over hers and hold her nose closed and blow down her throat. I do it again and again. Then I slip my tongue into her mouth. I don’t know why. She tastes of cigarettes and some sweet drink. The weirdness of pumping away at some strange woman’s chest and then putting my mouth over hers makes me break a sweat. I pump. I put my mouth over hers and blow. I taste her cigarettes and her drink again. I promise myself that I will shower after my run in the morning.
Eric must have called the ambulance. Paramedics stand over me. I’m kneeling next to the woman and gasp for breath. I can smell my sweat. I feel I deserve a break. Other people from the bar stand around. They haven’t done anything. As if looking concerned will wrench her back into the land of the living. I have the woman’s lipstick all over my face. I try to wipe it away with my wrist. I think she is breathing again because her eyelids flicker like she is having a bad dream. A paramedic looks at me sideways. He takes my hand off her boob. I hadn’t even realised it was there. It’s only then that I feel her breast in my palm. They put her on a gurney and wheel her out. I go with them to make sure they don’t drop her or something on the way. After all that I feel like she’s mine. Just a little bit mine. They manage to get her into the ambulance okay.
The ambulance goes screaming into the dark and I go back inside to finish my drink. Everyone starts clapping when I walk in. Next thing Eric is lining up all the drinks everyone has bought me. I look around for Sonia. She hasn’t pitched. I’m happy to spend the evening with my new friends. My last memory of the evening is actually in the morning when I wake up late for work. I open my eyes and wonder if the ambulance siren has implanted itself in my brain in the form of pure agony. I put my clothes on which are mostly yesterday’s. I remember that I’ve forgotten to shower.
Sonia calls me
Sonia calls me into her office. It’s not really an office at all. It’s a cubicle a little bigger than mine. My coffee slops onto her desk when I put the mug down. She looks at this and scowls. She takes a breath.
“Two things,” she says. Her nipples are angry. “One, we cannot be late for work. Ever. No matter what. It’s a tough job, Nathan. When you’re late, you make a bad impression. You hurt your sales. You piss your clients off if they’re wanting a new this and an extension on that or a discount on the other and you’re not here. By ten o’clock, they’re frantic. They pull their bookings and also their money. We’re not the only paper trying to appeal to a particular demographic. I say particular because these are the ones going digital right now. Tablets and smartphones. They read the news on the crapper without going outside to fetch the paper first. They’re not renewing their subscriptions. And guess what? You don’t make your targets, I get it in the neck. Worse for you, there are a million graduates working at Micky Dee’s right now who would kill for your seat. Got it?”
I sip my coffee. It wants to make me vomit. Sonia’s nipples are giving me a hard-on at the same time. Hangovers always make me horny. I don’t understand why. It’s simply how it is. The nipples are like cocktail viennas. I wonder if they’ll tear holes through Sonia’s T-shirt. I want to bite them.
“And two, personal hygiene,” she carries on. “Nathan, you smell. Of booze and feet and bum. Just about always. Take a fucking shower from time to time, for the love of God. There are twenty people on this floor. They have to work right next to you and you smell like a whole locker room on your own. Jesus.”
I lift an arm and bury my nose in the pit. I can’t help myself. I sniff. It’s not pleasant. Sometimes I don’t argue with Sonia. Sometimes she’s right. After all these years, I’ve perfected my contrite face. I have a laughing face that I put on when everyone is laughing. I have a serious face for meetings and things. I have a library of other faces that I put on at appropriate moments. Or maybe it’s a wardrobe. Or a closet. Whatever you call that place where you keep your faces.
“Where were you last night?” I ask. “We had an appointment.” I’m going from contrite to sulky. It’s not working. Sonia looks at me strangely. The viennas deflate and disappear. She sits back. Her hands move about like she’s trying to draw me a picture in the air. She stops and her hands drop to her lap. “Christ, Nathan,” she says.
“Thanks for coming, then,” I say. “Hope you enjoyed the party.”
Sonia starts waving her hands around again. “You can be such a, such a, such an absolute arsehole,” she says. “Have you even checked your emails yet?”
“Sorry. I was late,” I remind her.
She lifts her coffee mug. It’s black with a dead smiling yellow Nirvana face on it. I once read somewhere that black ceramics are bad for you. That the glaze they use gives you cancer or something. I suppose you can get cancer from just about anything these days. Shampoo, polony, new car interiors. Sonia sips from her cancerous mug. She makes a gross face. “Three more things, Nathan. One: last night I left exactly seven seconds after you tried to stick your tongue down my throat. Two: your Sleeping Beauty is dead. Either you didn’t pull off the Prince Charming thing, or she died on the way to hospital. Who cares, either way? Three: I’m trying to help you here so that I don’t have to fire your arse. Get with the fucking programme. There’s only so much I can do.”
The news that the woman has died makes me feel weirder than I did when I was thumping on her chest. Weirder even than when I slipped my tongue in. She died and then I thought I’d made her alive with my Boy Scout first-aid. With all the technology of the twenty-first century plugged into her she died again. For good. Or maybe she’d just stayed as dead as she was in the first place. The twitching eyelids a last bit of electricity. Like a chicken with its head cut off. She was probably dead when I stuck my tongue in her mouth.
I don’t dislike women. I just don’t like what they can do to me. What they could do to me. Even when what they’re doing is precisely nothing. So I like them, mostly. I like that my boss is a woman. I like that we’re friends. I don’t like that she could fire me. I like that Mrs. du Toit from next door is a woman. I like that she sounds like one.
I liked the taste of the dead lady who may or may not have been properly dead.
Still, women are different to men. They expect things. Like how was I supposed to remember after forty-eight free drinks that Sonia had been at Eric’s. That I’d tried to get off with her.
So anyway. Friday creeps to a close. My hangover is just about gone. I know how to make what’s left of it disappear. I go to Sonia’s cubicle to see if she wants a drink at Eric’s. Her laptop is missing from its plastic stand and her desk is all squared up. The space between the three-and-a-half walls of grey fabric smells like her. Like stationery and old lunch and new perfume. Something makes me want to sniff the seat of her chair. I don’t.
I go to Eric’s anyway. When I get there I don’t want to go in. It’s too full of hairy men and overweight women. Through the window I can see that the men are talking too much and saying too little. The women show too much and talk even more. I can see that Eric is too busy to chat. He is sweating. I hope he never has a heart attack while I’m visiting. I don’t feel like fighting my way to the bar for a chance not to chat to Eric. The thought of Eric having a heart attack makes up my mind. My mouth over his and the thumping on the blubber. The sweat on his top lip. I might just make Madge’s before she closes, so I start jogging. My head starts to pound again, in time with my footfalls now. I turn around and walk back up St. George’s Mall.
Madge is at her shop, about to lock up for the night.
“Hi Madge,” I say. She looks at me and shoots the bolt on the security gate. She threads the shackle of an enormous lock through the loop and snaps it shut.
“Na-than!” she sings and flings her arms open. The sleeves of her hippie Indian dress flap like thin wings. She wears her usual headband. It ties up a bundle of fake hair. I know it’s fake because sometimes when I visit her she closes the shop and removes it so that she can scratch at the few wisps left on her scalp. Madge has cancer and will be dead soon. She plans to be Madge until the last, she’s told me. If that takes wigs and lipstick then there it is. She puckers her bright red lips as I come closer. The wrinkles draw the eye to the brilliant cloaca of her mouth. I dodge it at the last moment and kiss her on the cheek. She has a big silver bauble on a chain around her neck. It presses into my sternum as she hugs. She is stronger than she looks.