by Simon Kinch
TWENTY-FOUR
I found a sports store and bought the cheapest pair of Nikes they had. At 7am the next day, I got up, threaded the laces and jogged down to the river. I sat on a short wall near the cambered bridge and waited. The sun rose, finally bringing colour to the previously dimly lit riverside. I continued waiting, until further down the bank, I saw the man with greying curls appear. As he got closer, I began stretching my calves from where I sat. Just after he passed me, I got up and began running in the same direction.
We ran south. It wasn’t hard to keep to his pace. I watched him plant each foot and synchronised my steps. My Nikes, originally white, quickly became discoloured from the yellowy dust they kicked up. I kept a good twenty metres behind him, knowing I could speed up if he made a turn.
Just after the bridge to Triana, we left the riverbank and ran alongside the road. A long boulevard, lined with palm trees, stretched out endlessly in front of us. The road was nearly empty, the odd bus passing. The buildings became grander and I noticed several embassy signs on gates. We finally reached a cafe on a junction, where a waiter was hauling out plastic tables and chairs. I stopped, placing my hands on my hips, and breathed heavily. The man with greying curls continued. The waiter set four chairs around the table he had just pulled over and looked at me. I looked directly back at him. We stood for a moment, looking at each other. Not a single car passed. He then went to take another table from inside the cafe. I turned around and began running back up the boulevard of embassies. I didn’t look back, but couldn’t shake the feeling that the waiter had stopped what he was doing again to watch me run off.
I drank two cups of coffee at the small cafe that looked out across the river. A shirtless old man sat on one of the jetties on the other side of the river, fishing. The water was a bluey-green. It was hard to imagine any fish surviving below the surface. The old man looked a little drunk. The sun was out and I could feel it warming every fine hair along my collar.
I continued to flick through the Benjamin essays. Chapters seemed to stop abruptly; whole sections appeared to be missing. A guy and a girl sat two tables away. He had jet-black, curly hair and a whiskery moustache; she wore a beautiful summer dress. She laughed at whatever he said and he smiled heartily when she did. I really couldn’t tell if they were romantically involved or not and, without knowing why, this made me happy.
The pages were almost disintegrating in my hands. Benjamin moved on to the flâneur. His flâneur wanders and strolls round 19th-century Paris, a disconnected observer. Benjamin paints him as a distinct member of Parisian street life. He is on its fringes, camouflaged within the crowd. To him, the streets are a theatre, with an ever-more complex cast and plot. The flâneur is the only observing audience member of this play. Maybe there are other flâneurs, at different vantage points, but what they witness would be a completely different work. As the characters of his theatre present themselves only randomly, in flashes, the flâneur is our only possible protagonist, both sociologist and anthropologist, alienated and immersed in his city. He places himself in a different cafe chair, or in a different arcade, and the theatre revolves around him.
Two short, squat ladies took a table in front of me. They sat there waiting, even though there was no table service. They seemed to be bickering about this, about whether to get up and order at the bar. I became annoyed that they had broken my train of thought, but eventually one of them got up. I read on. Benjamin continued on the topic of his flâneur.
‘The man flatters himself that, on seeing a passerby swept along by the crowd, he has accurately classified him, seen straight through to the innermost recesses of his soul – all on the basis of external appearance.’
Without knowing why, I thought back to the man with the caramel-coloured suitcase in the guesthouse. I thought back to how I had looked at him, and he had looked at me, with a gaze that had looked straight into me. A couple of moments had been enough and he had returned to his business. I tried to remember what he had returned to. Did he return to paying his board, counting out notes and coins, or had he simply seen enough? Was that one look at me enough for him to assess me, to know me?
There was a chance he was still in the city. I imagined him looking into shop windows, or strolling up the Alameda, sitting at the cafe terraces, his ambivalent observation.
The shirtless man on the jetty had caught something and was reeling it in. The two old ladies still hadn’t been served, but had stopped bickering about this. I collected up the pages of the Benjamin, patted my shirt pocket to check my bank card was there, and left.
I crossed the river and walked along the opposite bank. The shirtless man had cast his line again. Some way down the bank, I took a turn away from the river, into Triana. The sun didn’t bake these narrower streets in the way it hit the riverbanks. I reached the guesthouse I had stayed at weeks before and leant up against the wall on the opposite side of the street. I could just see through the window of the front door, into the dimly lit lobby. The guesthouse owner was there, behind the desk, speaking to someone on the other side. There was a man opposite her, although I couldn’t make out who, as he had his back to me. Come forward, I begged silently, come forward into the light. He didn’t. Instead, he turned and headed out of sight, towards the stairs leading to the guesthouse rooms. I could just make out the guesthouse owner taking out her large book and noting something down.
TWENTY-FIVE
As mundane as it is, I don’t dislike my main duty, of keying in figures, as much as you’d think. It takes focus and concentration; it leaves no room for thoughts or worries, only a constant stream of numbers. Fifteen dollars. Seventy-two. One hundred and sixty-eight dollars forty-five. One hundred and thirty. One hundred and thirty. Twelve dollars petty cash. This can go on all afternoon, meaning I only have to return to my life, and all it entails, once I leave this safety net of digits and figures at the end of the day.
My mind begins to wander, however, when Robert asks me to check documents for discrepancies, to seek out the errors in the accounts. The errors are so few and far between, so difficult to notice, that it is easy to lose focus. This morning, he has tasked me with checking off a client’s invoices against receipts received. He feels we are two hundred dollars out. I set to work, matching dates to invoice numbers. Everything is matching up, nothing seems awry. The longer I search for the discrepancy, the less likely it seems I will find it. I have to convince myself it exists, otherwise surely Robert wouldn’t have asked me to look for it.
Laura has her hair up. As my hope of finding Robert’s discrepancy dwindles, I find myself glancing past the computer monitor and Edith’s pot plant more and more often. Laura returns a few glances and even shoots me a couple of smiles. At some point around mid-morning, she collects a pile of documents and heads off to a meeting.
I look back at my computer screen. Something doesn’t feel right. I feel overwhelmed, but god knows by what.
I go up to Robert and ask if I can get out for ten minutes, as I need some air. Robert swivels in his chair, looks at his watch and sighs. ‘Granville, we can’t have everybody leaving when they want to.’ He looks at me and asks me if everything is okay. I say everything is fine and get back to work.
At one o’clock, Laura comes and stands by my desk.
‘Coming out for lunch, Granville?’
We return to the same coffee shop. Laura tells me about her meeting, but I can’t think of much to say. I still haven’t shrugged that feeling of being overwhelmed, but I think it better not to mention this. I don’t normally take sugar in my coffee, but I feel a little anxious, so decide to add a sachet just to have something to do with my hands. Laura is talking about her tuition and asking how she’ll ever be able to pay it back, but I am distracted by a woman in wide-frame sunglasses sitting at the next table, accompanied by her kindergarten-aged daughter. The young girl has a pile of the coffee shop’s serviettes, drawing on them in thick felt-tip pen. E
very time she wants a new pen, she shouts at her mother, demanding a new colour. Her mother hands each to her brusquely, before returning her attention to her glossy magazine. A cellphone starts buzzing from their direction. The mother huffs as she puts down her magazine, sets out an enormous handbag on the table and begins rummaging through it, looking for the ringing cellphone. The young girl shouts for another colour. The mother glares at her from behind her sunglasses and continues rummaging. In the end, she misses the call. The young girl yells the colour again.
I turn back to Laura and, as I look at her, I try to imagine her with the enormous handbag, the wide-rimmed sunglasses, the pack of felt-tip pens. Of course, she doesn’t realise I am doing this, but purely by chance, she sends me a tiny smile as I study her. And just from this, I feel enough at ease to put down the sachet of sugar I’ve been fidgeting with and smile back.
TWENTY-SIX
I arrived at Señora Rosales’ office five minutes late, to find her waiting at the door. She wasn’t at all annoyed and, instead, took my hand briefly and led us down to the cafe on the corner. Once inside, she ordered breakfast for both of us, by then knowing my order as if it were her own. I noticed the bar girl smile as she spoke to Señora Rosales, who then returned to our table and set down her diary and a pile of emails she had printed out for me to reply to.
Over breakfast, I brought up the guesthouse owner. Señora Rosales told me that she knew her well enough, but only through business. ‘I sometimes send clients to her if I am overbooked,’ she told me. I asked her if she had ever sent a moustached man with a caramel-coloured suitcase to the guesthouse. She looked at me for a moment, gauging my seriousness. ‘How would I remember, Granville?’
I returned to my breakfast. Señora Rosales wore two large wooden bracelets on one wrist, which clanked together each time she lifted and then set down her cup of coffee. As she ate, she occasionally adjusted her dress so it continued to cover the tops of her knees.
After breakfast, we went back to her office and worked from there. Señora Rosales left a couple of answerphone messages for clients and I typed up an email for her. Around mid-morning, I asked if I could get out for ten minutes, as I needed some air. Having left the office, I ambled down a couple of streets and then sat down on a doorstep for a few minutes, watching sparrows scrap over some crumbs. When I got back to the office, Señora Rosales wanted to know if everything was okay. I said everything was fine and got back to work.
Later that day I took a seat outside a small bar at the far end of the Alameda, drinking my beers slowly to stretch out the handful of coins I had on me. I smoked and read the loose pages of the Benjamin texts. As the afternoon went on, the bar began to fill, with customers spilling out onto the terrace where I sat. The bargirl turned some music on. The chatter and laughter became so loud I could no longer think. I was hungry, and was just about to leave, when a man in his thirties, already drunk and with a beer-belly squeezed into a tight-fitting Ramones T-shirt, asked me for a light. Hearing my reply, he immediately switched into a drunken, broken English and pulled up a chair at my table without asking.
He asked me where I was from and what I did. A little irritated that he was still clutching my lighter, I kept my answers short. As the bargirl walked past, he reached out and touched her thigh, to stop her. She shot him a dirty look, but he managed to order us each a beer and then offered me a cigarette. I took back my lighter and, having gained a smoke and a beer, felt a little more relaxed. I asked his name. Miguel, he replied, patting his chest.
Miguel asked me if I knew Chuck Berry, rolling the Rs in Berry so much the name seemed unfamiliar. I nodded, swigging back my beer. He proceeded to utter some riffs, semi-tunefully, using his cigarette as an imaginary pick in between drawing on it. He moved onto a Hendrix riff. When he asked me if I knew the songs, I said yes, but only as that was the easier answer.
I gathered my things and left Miguel at his table. I wandered down the Alameda, where by then tables were filling with people drinking in the sun. I took the street with the trellised bar, but didn’t give it more than a glance as I passed its tables.
I descended the steps that led down to the river and walked along the bank. Some runners passed me, their faces bloated and swollen red with sweat in the heat. Others let pet dogs run ahead of them, off their leads. The water shimmered, the reeds remained motionless in the thick air. My shirt felt heavy. For each passerby, I wondered why they were out that day and could think of no better reason than the lure of the vivid blue sky that hung serene above the city.
TWENTY-SEVEN
One lunchtime, with the sun out, we ordered our coffees in corrugated paper take-away cups and took them to the park. The birds were chirping and I definitely felt happy, I’m sure. As we walked round, Laura twice brushed her hand against mine. The first time it happened, I looked down at both our hands, worried I may have stepped too close. The second time, I caught her glance and looked deep into her eyes, before she fluttered her eyelids and looked away again.
We made one lap of the park and then headed for the exit. Just before the gate, she slowed down her walk. I slowed down and stopped, then turned to look at her. Laura leant towards me and, with her hand resting lightly on my upper arm, placed a kiss on my lips. She let her hand linger on my coat sleeve a little longer, before we both turned to face ahead and began walking back.
On this walk back to our office, I felt the same tingle of excitement as I would have done as a teenager. The excitement of liking someone again, of believing that they really wanted to know you, but without knowing what to say to them. Only now, a few years older, I found that giddiness uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that I should feel even a touch intoxicated by this faux connection. We took the elevator up to our floor in awkward silence. When we headed to our separate desks, I made sure I gave her a smile, which she returned. I then sat down and began to concentrate on my work, without looking past my computer screen, or past the pot plant on Edith’s desk.
Later that night, I searched for Alyson’s name on the internet. There were several results I knew weren’t her – an Alyson Jennings in Australia, then an outdoor activities instructor in Maine. I found one reference to her name on an agency website in Chicago. It consisted only of a contact name and number, with no photo, so I couldn’t be sure it was her. I kept scrolling down, but there was no more information. Without really knowing why, I jotted the number down on a scrap of paper, before switching the computer off.
TWENTY-EIGHT
A morning has passed, of which I remember nothing, other than flitting between my desk and my bed, sitting and lying, and it is only when the thought of my life slipping through my fingers – slipping away while I do nothing but stare at the ceiling – crosses my mind that I leave the studio and run to the street.
To travel and to see the world is to validate oneself, one’s existence. He who travels needs no sense of purpose, as purpose is presented to him every step of the way, by each journey, by each new experience. That airline ticket or that rail pass is direction – direction itself – as well as being an excuse for not having any in your own life. But you must never stay too long, or that direction fades. To find yourself settled is to find yourself asked those same questions as before. Having escaped where you left, that new life has direction, but what you can never escape is what drove you away.
And it is only today, as I shuffle as quickly as I can through the streets of the city, keeping out of the way of passersby as much as I try to keep out of the sun, that I really think back to Madison. Really think back: not just let a memory flicker, then push it immediately from my mind as soon as it starts to bud. It is only today that I really picture the desk I should be sat at, the office where I should be, the life I should be building. Of working hard and, if not that, working and saving. And it is now that I realise that by blocking every thought I’ve had of Alyson these last couple of months, I have never wondered where she is and what she m
ight be doing. And when I ask myself this, I realise I no longer have any notion of what one might achieve in four months, of where one can get to, and I have no idea how far she has got in those months since I last saw her. I have lived without planning or thinking. I have sat and watched, from cafes and park benches, and even in the little work I do for Señora Rosales, it is as if I have been employed as little more than a passive observer, an audience member to her business, given a place to sit and look over whatever she puts in front of me.
And as I dash though the narrow, crowded streets of the city, I become increasingly overwhelmed. The people are too many. It is not only this, though: with every person, with every glance I catch, I am hit by their ‘doing’: not what they are doing, or if they are even aware of it, but the very fact they are going about their lives unhindered; it is simply that when I catch their glance, I am met by some meaning to life. Men dressed in suits, their jackets flung over their shoulders due to the heat, marching steadily to their next meeting. Teenagers, gawping through shop windows then collapsing onto each other in fits of laughter that I will never understand. Mothers stopping strollers as they bump into friends, before both women lean over to coo over the children inside. And whether this meaning is actually there behind their eyes, or whether it is something I have assigned by myself, is not important. The only thing I feel is the void inside myself where something should be and it makes my eyes well with tears. It is one thing to see every man and woman, obliviously carrying their own meaning, going about their lives, but it is quite another that even when that meaning is there in front of me, head-on, it fails to resonate with me.