The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  She tosses her bangs out of her eyes, exactly like Anna used to. The only thing different is the color of her hair and the fact that she’s about twenty-five years older than his daughter will ever be. “Want to go to a football game?” she asks.

  When he gets home, it’s nearly four o’clock. He enters the house through the side door, which leads directly into the dining room, and the instant he steps inside he hears their voices. They’re coming from Anna’s bedroom. He’ll never think of it as anything else.

  Rather than barging in on them, he stops to listen.

  “That’s the talk among the sophomores,” he hears Sandy say. “I’m telling you for your own good. If you keep acting like you’re not interested in anybody else, why should they be interested in you?”

  “Maybe they shouldn’t be.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. It’s like you’re doing this—”

  Richard wishes he could see the gesture she’s using to illustrate.

  “—to the rest of the world.”

  “It’s just that people act so strange here.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Like when Mrs. Maldonado calls names off the roaster—”

  “Roster,” she corrects.

  “—rooster—”

  “Not rooster. Roster. Rah-ster.”

  “Raw-stuh,” he says, sounding for all the world like he was born in South Boston. “When she calls the names off it, everyone acts like they’re waiting to learn if they’ll be sent to the gas chambers.”

  “What gas chambers?”

  “I mean they behave as if it’s a matter of life or death. And it isn’t. Why don’t they . . .”

  “Why don’t they what? Finish your thought.”

  “I don’t know how to say it in English. Mogliby poluzowac.” Apparently, he uses some body language of his own to convey the term, drawing a burst of laughter.

  “Why don’t they loosen up?” she says. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Loosen up. That’s right. American students need to loosen up.”

  “What’s the Polish word for ‘arrogant’? Or is that not a concept you have over there?”

  It seems like the right time to let them know they’re no longer alone. “Hey,” he hollers, “just so you know, I’m home.”

  There’s a moment of silence. Then the bedroom door opens, and they emerge into the dining room, where he’s rifling through the mail.

  “I was just offering Francis X a little unsolicited advice,” Sandy says.

  “Francis X?”

  “That’s how Mrs. Maldonado mispronounces ‘Franciszek,’” Franek says.

  “Yeah? I asked them to put ‘Franek’ on your student records. But maybe they had to go with the name on your passport.”

  “I prefer ‘Francis X,’” Sandy says. “It adds a touch of mystery. Like he’s been sent here to infiltrate and undermine our most cherished institutions.”

  Franek’s cheeks, Richard notices, are problematically red, about the same color as the soccer jersey he’s wearing. He knows Sandy means well, that she’s trying to help the poor kid crawl out of his shell. He also knows, because her father told him, that she recently got dumped by her boyfriend. Maybe she views his maladjusted nephew as a worthwhile distraction, even though he’s two years younger.

  “Aren’t you a football fan, Sandy?” he asks, pretending to study his PG&E bill.

  “I watch games sometimes with my dad. Why?”

  “A friend of mine and I are planning to go see UCC play a week from Saturday. It’s a pretty important intersectional contest. Wisconsin’s ranked number five nationally. I’ll be up in the press box, but if the two of you wanted to come along, you could sit with my friend and keep her company. Afterwards, maybe we’ll go out and grab a pizza or eat Chinese. Interested?”

  “Sounds fine to me,” she says. She turns to his nephew. “What about it, Francis X? Are you ready for some football?”

  It’s clear that he doesn’t want to say yes but equally clear that he doesn’t know how to say no. So he stands there with his hands in his pockets, his cheeks aflame. As if it’s being dragged out of him, he finally whispers, “Okay.”

  Richard excuses himself, carries the mail into his study, and shuts the door. It will be a while before he thinks back to the scene in the dining room and understands that for each of them, today marked the start of reengagement.

  From where Stefan Mirecki is sitting, the views are excellent. The trees in Planty wear their fall colors, red and gold and burnt orange, and the air has that crisp quality that makes him love autumn, which is technically still one day away. Of even greater interest than the foliage are the young women who stroll past, talking on their mobiles or chatting with friends. The university is nearby, and a lot of them look like students, though those typically are not the ones he’s drawn to. They look a little too fresh, too innocent. He doesn’t mind smooth skin, he actually admires it, but there’s a certain kind of funkiness he prizes above all else, a hint of decadence. You generally don’t find it in young women who spend their days studying metaphysics or Polish prosody. You’re much more likely to discover it behind the counter of a shoe store or a chocolate shop, or waiting tables in a place like this.

  He’s been here before, though not for several years. It’s the café where his late sister met his poor brother-in-law, and he’s here to soak up some of the atmosphere that together they might have experienced. He decides to take a few photos, since he often forgets details that are purely descriptive and has never excelled at making them up.

  The chairs are unusually rickety, so he snaps a shot of one, and as soon as he examines it he notices something he missed when looking at the thing itself: about five centimeters from the floor, its front legs curve coquettishly to the outside. He checks to see if the legs on the other chairs are similar, and indeed they are. On his laptop he opens a file titled “Notes on X” and types chair-legs at Bunkier Café = women’s feet poised against bed, toes angling out. Use somewhere. He snaps two or three photos of menu pages and a photo of the weathered floorboards and another of the ceiling rafters, which look like they’re made of cast iron. He takes a photo of a waitress—a dishwater blonde a little more solid than he prefers—whose breasts, he discovered when she leaned over to place a pot of tea on an adjacent table, are full and lovely. She’s not his waitress, but he’s been watching her for some time, and no smile has graced her face. Something has made her unhappy. But what?

  She’s about twenty, maybe a little older. Three or four years out of high school. How long has she been working here? Already two years. Name: Jolanta. Grew up in the city but no place nice. Podgorze, let’s say, before they began to spiff it up. One of five children, father waited tables at Hawelka, mother was a bathroom attendant, lived in a building not far from Schindler’s factory, gray crumbling façade, somebody on the ground floor kept leaving the front door open, a good thing because often the odor of cooking—cabbage, fried cutlets—merged with the smell of vomit, sickening scent that robbed you of your appetite, the old man in the flat below theirs kept throwing up on the landing after his wife, Mrs. Grebkowska, let’s say, locked him out, she was an unpleasant old woman with peasant features, in winter she wore two or three skirts at the same time and never spoke to any of the children in the building. She sometimes growled at them and you could hear her calling her husband names—piss pot, puke kettle—and her father said stay away from her, she’s the kind of crazy that might rub off.

  She can’t see any future for herself except right here, right in this café, working eight or ten hours a day. She has a boyfriend, but it won’t last, she already knows it. He’s a student . . . a black American, let’s say, he’s from an upper-middle-class family—East Coast but not New York, somewhere in the suburbs . . . Connecticut . . . went someplace good for college but not Harvard, that’s where his parents went (same time as Obama, they knew him but considered him aloof), look up the name of a private college that’s okay no
t great, someplace not too big, studies international relations but isn’t that serious, his name is Alfred, he came here on semester abroad, joined a band, a couple of Canadians and a South African drummer . . . some kind of blues band that wouldn’t sound like blues anywhere but here . . . and he continues to hang around rather than go home, because people think he’s a rock star and he’s had his pick of various women, and she’s the latest. She’s pregnant! That’s it! Pregnant with a black child in alabaster Krakow! And then somebody kills her, and Nowakowski is summoned, forming yet another link to this mysterious café.

  His own waitress holds no interest for him. She’s a petite brunette with a well-adjusted smile affixed to her face. He catches her eye and raises a finger, signaling for another beer. Then he closes his laptop and puts his mobile away, finished with today’s research.

  The Supreme Darth Vader mask and helmet, according to the label, is constructed of “heavy injection molded ABS material, cast from the original Lucas Studios molds.” It belongs to Marek’s grandson, but he’s at school and won’t miss it unless something goes wrong.

  Eventually, it’s bound to. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But it’s coming. An article ran in Gazeta Krakowska last week. Titled “‘Cleaners’ Harass Residents but Developers Deny Knowledge,” it detailed the actions of “hooligans” who were driving mostly poor and often elderly residents from their apartments in recently sold buildings. As long as the tenants had a lease and were paying their rent, the article said, they couldn’t legally be forced out, though those who stayed impeded developers’ plans to renovate the properties and turn them into luxury condos. The piece ended by quoting an official in the police department who urged anyone with knowledge of such activities to immediately contact the authorities.

  “How am I supposed to get this goddamn thing on?” he asks.

  They’re crouching in the attic of the building on Smolensk. The retired professor has refused to leave, and they’ve been told to get him out by the end of the week, or else. Neither of them is certain what or else might mean. Marek thinks they could lose their jobs, which Bogdan takes as a given. A more momentous question is what the professor might lose, since he would not appear to have much left beyond himself.

  “You’ve got to detach the helmet from the mask,” Marek says, pulling it free. “See? There’s Velcro on both sides.”

  Bogdan dons the mask, and then Marek helps him with the helmet.

  “It’s pinching my fucking ears.”

  “Sorry.”

  His partner adjusts it, then squirms backward as far as the sloping ceiling will allow and studies the results. His lips start to twitch, like he’s trying to suppress laughter.

  “If you snicker at me,” Bogdan says, “you can climb your ass out there instead.” Marek’s got the world’s worst case of acrophobia. He can get dizzy looking out the window.

  “Sorry. It’s just . . . it’s just . . .”

  “I’m warning you.”

  “. . . it’s just that you really look like you come from the Dark Side.”

  Bogdan reaches for the handle on the roof hatch. “That’s because I do.”

  The afternoon is not that warm, but it’s sunny, and he expects the tiles to be hot. He’s wearing gloves, and he’s got on a harness they rigged up, with a long, heavy-duty nylon rope like mountain climbers use to tackle Everest. They’ve anchored the other end of it to the kitchen radiator in the flat below. The bottle Fabian gave them is stowed in a pouch secured to his harness.

  He’s been on top of buildings before, but they weren’t that tall, and they all had flat roofs. This one slopes steeply. He thought he was prepared for the sight he’d confront when he got up here, but he was wrong. From his sitting position beside the yawning hatch, he can see all the way to the Vistula and even beyond. The scale of everything has been dramatically reduced. The Grunwald Bridge looks like something from an Erector Set. The houses are Lilliputian, the people about as big as good-sized roaches.

  He holds his place, transfixed. It occurs to him that this is not a bad vantage point from which to observe the world. It affords a perspective that’s unavailable when you’re down there in it, rushing along to work, hoping to resuscitate your business, rejuvenate your marriage, retain your dignity. From up here, no one is invested with any dignity to lose. “This is quite a view,” he says.

  “Please, Bogdan. Let’s get this over with. Knowing you’re up there’s making me light-headed.”

  He doesn’t answer. With no terrible sense of concern, he wonders what will happen to the rope if he slips and begins to slide toward the eaves. The tiles around the hatch opening are rough and jagged, and it’s not impossible that they might fray or even cut his lifeline. If he falls, it won’t solve the professor’s problems but would at least spell the end of his own.

  “Come on, Bogdan. Let’s put this behind us.”

  The vent pipe is farther away than he thought, a good three meters to the right of where he’s sitting and a bit higher. The best way to access it, he decides, is from the ridge.

  He plants his foot in the gully between a couple of tiles, then begins to move backward, a few centimeters at a time, Marek paying out rope, which he keeps between his legs. Finally, his hand feels the flat surface at the top. Twisting his torso to the left, he throws his right leg over the ridge.

  It’s broader than he anticipated: about a meter wide, coated in tar and pigeon shit. On hands and knees, he creeps toward a point directly above the vent pipe. When he gets there, he lowers himself onto his stomach. He reaches down with his left hand, groping, but he can’t feel anything except air.

  The Vader helmet isn’t helping matters. It’s hot inside the damn thing, and it’s obstructing his peripheral vision. He thinks of removing it, throwing it off the roof, but the longer he’s up here, the more likely he is to be spotted and photographed.

  He grips the back side of the ridge with his right hand and swings his left leg out over the edge. He braces his foot against a tile, reaches down a little farther than he’d like, and finally feels the vent pipe. Lying there precariously, he pulls his hand back and withdraws the bottle from the pouch.

  The principal element in many a stink bomb, butyric acid draws its name from the Greek word for “butter.” It’s present in goat milk, Parmesan cheese, and human vomit and lends the last of these its characteristic odor. Inhaling it, while decidedly unpleasant, can also cause respiratory troubles. Its presence in the air irritates the eyes and in extreme cases may result in loss of vision. They had to use it once before, about three months ago, in a building near Radio Krakow. That time, they simply drilled a hole through the floor and poured the acid into the flat below, on a weekday when the adults were at work and the kids had gone to school. A photo of the damaged ceiling appeared in the Gazeta Krakowska article. Fabian told them if they did anything that stupid again, they were on their own.

  It feels very much like they’re on their own now, like they’ve been on their own since they stepped through that gate into the pool king’s estate. “Marek?” he calls. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. What’s going on up there?”

  “Marek, you’re the best friend I ever had.”

  “Bogdan, you’re frightening me. Are you planning to throw yourself off? Jesus, Bogdan, please!”

  “No, I’m not going to jump. I’ll wait till all my bad choices do me in. Here goes the big stink.” He inhales deeply, then holds his breath.

  The acid is in a large plastic squeeze bottle. With his thumb, he manages to flip off the safety cap. He upends the bottle, reaches out and jams it into the pipe, and squeezes. Within about half a minute, it’s empty.

  This is when things begin to go wrong. No matter how hard he pulls on the bottle, he can’t get it out. They intended to plug the pipe anyway so that the odor would have no means of escape. He brought a hunk of modeling clay for that purpose. But now the bottle is stuck there, and it will have both his and Marek’s fingerprints on it, as well as
Fabian’s, should anyone figure out how the odor entered the building. And he suspects someone will. “Marek?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We have a little problem.”

  “What kind of little problem?”

  “The kind that could become bigger.”

  “Bigger how?”

  “The bottle’s stuck in the vent pipe.”

  “So leave it.”

  “Our fingerprints are all over it.” He’s no sooner said that than a gust of wind hits the roof and dislodges the bottle. It bounces two or three times, then disappears over the eaves.

  He nearly lost his grip on the ridge. He waits to see if the microburst, or whatever it was, will be followed by another, but the afternoon is again still, with scarcely a breeze. So he pulls the hunk of clay from the pouch where the bottle was and crams it into the vent pipe.

  “I’m done up here.”

  “What about the bottle?”

  “The wind blew it off.”

  “I thought I heard something hit the roof. We better try to find it when we get outside.”

  He crawls backward until he’s directly above the hatch.

  “Okay. I’m about to start down. Move away from the opening, because if I slip, I’m going to fall right in on top of you.” He swings his legs off the ridge, once more assuming a sitting position.

  Down below, on the other side of the street, in a nicely renovated Bauhaus with gingerbread trim, a woman stands watching him from an open window. She has grayish hair with just enough of a tinge to suggest it used to be red. She’s wearing a black blouse with white polka dots, and a teacup is resting on the windowsill. She must have put it there when she pulled out her mobile, which she’s holding against her ear. He can read her lips as she recites the address.

  They didn’t turn on power to the lift, and anyhow it would be too slow. They bound down the stairs two at a time. The building is already beginning to reek.

  When they reach the ground floor, he realizes he’s still wearing the Darth Vader helmet. So he rips it off, and the mask comes with it. He’s the first one through the door. He’s carrying the helmet when he steps outside.