by Greg Baxter
Between my induction meeting and the lunch, I took a walk. The director of marketing wanted me to tour around the place and meet some of the staff, find out what they did and why they did it, but I wanted to call my father and the embassy in Berlin. I apologized and assured her it was quite important that I make a telephone call to the US, and promised to meet everyone at the restaurant. Outside, the day was still cold, still windy, still overcast. I thought it might rain, but I don’t believe—when I try to remember—that it did. Or if it did, it must have been very light rain. I walked much farther than I expected to walk. I walked out the doors of the building where the aerospace firm was and pulled my phone out, but I didn’t make the call. I put the phone back in my pocket and walked up toward Covent Garden, then a little bit farther, winding around, looking in shop windows, looking into cafés and businesses. I hadn’t consciously intended to walk to Bedford Square when I started out. I just kept making turns that led me in its direction. I just kept considering and rejecting, for no real reason, all the quiet spots I came across, all the spots from which I could have made a phone call. Bedford Square is a place I’ve always had a strange attraction to, and I’m sure that at some point during my walk a voice inside my head said, Well, I guess we’re heading to Bedford Square again. I hadn’t been there for a year or so, ever since the last time I met a woman I was seeing.
The park in Bedford Square is off-limits to nonresidents, but there are a few benches just outside the black wrought-iron fence that surrounds the park. The woman I had an affair with mysteriously had a key—I think it was because she worked for the British Museum. I sat for a moment on one of those benches, but it was so cold that I got up and began to pace around the park very slowly. The square was, as it always is, exceptionally quiet. The trees are immense, and even though the park was wintery and the trees had no leaves, the branches scattered way up high and dominated the view of the sky. I stared for a while, right up at them. It’s still strange, to me, after all the times I’ve visited, to find such a pleasant and untrampled section of London less than a few blocks from Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, which can feel, at certain times of day, like hell on earth. You can find quiet squares all over Bloomsbury. Places nobody knows about, or places too dull to visit. Bedford Square was one of the first places where I sat down and thought, I’m in London, and for that reason it acquired a sacred status in my thoughts. As I paced, slowly, around the outside of the park, I took the phone out, went over what I might say to my father, then called. It rang about five times. My father usually picks up immediately. Suddenly I remembered the time difference. It was six in the morning there. I hung up. A moment later my phone was ringing. It was my father calling me back. I didn’t answer. I could not think of a way to tell him. I’d need another couple of hours. I stopped pacing, because now I felt really foolish for not having stayed with the marketing director and toured the office with her. I stood very still and thought about hurrying back. But I had been walking for a while, and it actually wasn’t long until lunch began. I could head to the restaurant, get there a few minutes early, have a drink. I watched a gray Mercedes take a very, very long time to park in a space that was probably too small for it. A man stepped out. I could not see his face, but he had silver hair. He examined his parking job, decided he did not approve, and got back in to do it again. I walked to a different corner of the park, so I would not have to watch. I called the number I’d been given for the woman in the US embassy in Berlin. Trish answered. She was professional but warm, and asked how I was coping. Well, I said, it’s a shock, though I haven’t seen her in years, we spoke less than I’d have liked. Trish said, It’s difficult to keep in touch when you live in different countries. I said, I never went to Berlin to see her, I should have. Trish didn’t respond, and I said, Listen, sorry, in the shock of everything I forgot to ask the policewoman how Miriam died. Trish said, Are you asking me to tell you now?
I suppose, I said, if you know.
Trish told me what the police had told her, that she died of malnourishment, that she had starved. Trish said this matter-of-factly, without any weakness in her voice. Oh, I said. Trish said, Did you know she was having difficulties? No, I said, I didn’t. But that was not the truth.
On my father’s first day in Berlin—which was my second day—we hung around near our hotel. Miriam had lived in a cheap little apartment in a Turkish neighborhood, overrun, nowadays, by non-Turks. We stayed in a different part of town, which was thoroughly gentrified and full of boutique clothes and coffee shops. We got a feel for our surroundings. My father was jetlagged, so he took an hour-long nap. I sent the marketing director at the aerospace firm an e-mail saying a family member had died and I would be out of contact for a day or two—I was not to begin work until the beginning of the next week anyway. I sent a few more e-mails to other people saying I’d be out of touch, but I gave no explanation. I set up an auto-reply on my e-mail. My father and I walked around and looked at stores, we even went to see a part of the Berlin Wall. It was cold, and my father was freezing. I let him wear my coat and we bought him a funny, colorful, striped winter hat and some big black ski gloves. Trish met us for a late lunch. I asked her not to say anything to my father about identifying the body—and I asked her to trust that I knew what was best for him. I assumed this would be their only meeting. I had no idea how important Trish would become to my father during the trip. They made a deep and instantaneous connection. She told him he was good to come all this way. He confessed his dream to have a family that belonged somewhere. That dream was ruined now, he said. I could see what my father was doing. I should have never let Trish meet him. My father became a little bit emotional, and Trish put her hand on his arm, and he put his other hand on her hand. I said, Dad, you’re exhausted.
On the second day, my father and I decided to go to Miriam’s apartment—we would meet the landlady to see about her things, and it was agreed that Trish would come along. I woke around ten. Though I didn’t know it, my father had been up since six, and he had walked to a department store in Alexanderplatz and got himself a proper winter coat. I woke, showered, came downstairs, and had my breakfast at a nice café right next door to our hotel. It was an ice-cold, sunny morning. I was just about to get up and go check on him when he arrived, at the window, looking like a man lost in the Arctic. Because we suspected we’d be leaving in a day or two, my father laughed about how much he had spent on something he would never ever wear again. I should have bought it in a bigger size, he said, so you could take it back to London. I said, You can’t wear a coat like that in London.
An hour after that, having met up with Trish, we walked over the threshold of Miriam’s apartment, one by one, gravely, with our hats in our hands, into the cramped, cluttered, and distressing space where she died. My father was the first to go in, then me, then Trish, then the landlady. The landlady, who was from Denmark, stood just inside the door, observing us. The walls were faintly yellow. The windows were cloudy. They were so cloudy that they were just overbright images of glare. There were two rooms connected through an open archway, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. The main room contained a dining table, a couch, and a couple of pieces of furniture. The bathroom was cluttered and neglected. It had been examined by the health authorities. My father stopped and stood still. He crossed his arms. Trish came and stood beside him. I kept going, toward the archway to the second room, which contained books and boxes and clutter. There was a space where, obviously, a small bed had been. There was also a large wardrobe full of clothes. The whole apartment, weirdly, smelled of rust. And also quite sour. The heat was on, and the place was warm. I said, There’s a lot of stuff here. My father was sitting at the kitchen table. He didn’t look up. I guess he didn’t care about the stuff, or what we were going to do with the things she left behind, and I felt a little embarrassment for having spoken the first sentence in Miriam’s apartment, a sentence that nobody cared about. The landlady moved from the doorway, and, perhaps because she felt
the need to do something useful, turned the taps on, as though she was checking them. I felt like sitting, too, but I didn’t want to sit at the table, because my father seemed to command all the grief in that part of the room, and I didn’t dare sit on the couch, because I did not know where she had died, and, just in case she had not died in bed, I did not want to sit where she had died. After a few minutes of complete silence, my father looked up at the landlady—having arisen out of the depths of the memory of his life, and his memories of Miriam as a girl, out of his wishes that she were not dead, and out of the commonplace shame of not knowing her well enough as an adult—and said, Who found her?
The landlady said, I did, and some repairmen, we found her in the bed.
How long had she been dead? he asked.
Not long, she said.
My father leaned back and looked at the table. I sat down on the couch. It was an old green couch that was very soft, and if it had been a little less dusty and if it had smelled a little cleaner, it would have been a fine piece of furniture. It could easily be fine again, with a little attention. In fact, a lot of her stuff seemed quite nice. It took a couple of visits to realize just how nice and how valuable some of the furniture might be, but even then, on that first visit, I was struck by the fact that although the apartment was cramped and cluttered and dusty and foul-smelling, Miriam had, at one time, taken care to live among objects that were worth something. Perhaps the apartment became, in the end—I remind myself that speculation doesn’t help, but I can never stop myself—a forgery, perhaps she gradually awoke, or even suddenly awoke, to the realization that happiness was permanently out of reach, that her suffering—or whatever constituted her suffering—was permanently coiled around the roots of her determination to reject suffering.
After my marriage ended, I moved out of the flat in Fulham Broadway. I didn’t want to live in a nice flat. I didn’t want to have nice things. My wife bought me out. She made me an insulting offer, or at least an offer that suitably reflected just how hateful we had become to each other, and I accepted, because she threatened me with a legal battle if I didn’t. I found a room in a house in Peckham Rye. The house had mildewed walls, single-glazed windows that went cloudy with condensation on cold days, rickety furniture, and a bathroom that turned to ice in winter because it had no radiator. It was just the kind of house I wanted to live in. It seemed that I had been steadily moving upward since I arrived in London, surrounding myself with ever-increasing comfort, convenience, and abundance, and when the marriage ended and I had an opportunity to observe how far up I’d come—how inflated my expectations of luxury had become, how hedonistic my perspective—I threw myself off that great height. It was actually Nunhead, not Peckham Rye, but nobody knows where Nunhead is. I had a housemate, an arts student who was always sick, and he had nothing to his name but his clothes, a TV, and a nice camera, with which he took pictures of himself, what he called studies of his illness. He showed me his photographs. He had protruding ribs. He had bony hips. And he had a large and slightly blue penis. I had to live in our kitchen, because he had turned the couch in our living room into his own personal deathbed. He was twenty-four or twenty-five. Our kitchen was nothing but a freezing and breezy little hallway with a door to some steps that led to a stinking narrow alleyway full of cats and garbage, and it never saw sunlight in winter. Meanwhile, in the living room, tissues piled up on the floor as he—I am unable to remember his name—voyaged through the depths of television. Often he lay beneath his duvet, in which he entombed himself, and, when he decided to change the channel, which was very rare, a hand with a remote control would emerge, extend, strike, and disappear. I remember long runs I used to take when I lived there. My runs began at five in the morning. I came home late in the evenings and set my clothes out in the order I would put them on. Each night I set out my running shorts and shirt and windbreaker and socks and shoes and a little winter cap that, when I ran the next morning, invariably I pulled off after one minute, no matter how cold it was. I set them on a rickety wooden chair beside my bed. My alarm went off and I sat up. I always, at this moment, felt sick and unutterably tired, but I told myself, Run, get up and run. I was seeing somebody at the time—an old friend of my ex-wife’s—and if she came over to sleep, which was rare, because she hated the place, she would groan when my alarm rang and cover her head in pillows while I tried to dress in the darkness. I was drinking. I wasn’t sleeping. It seemed to me that I was all alone, that nobody could live like I was living. I derived great energy from that, and I presume that’s how I was capable of waking myself up to run. I got dressed, brushed my teeth, stretched for five minutes, and left the house. I ran the same route every morning, to Battersea Park and back. While I ran, I could think of how alone I had made myself. I felt wondrously distant from people, even though I was living in one of the world’s great cities. I ran very fast, the fastest pace I could maintain. There were days I got home and threw up. Then I showered, dressed, typically had a bowl of cereal, and left for work.
I lived in Nunhead for one year. During that year, I underperformed at work. The people I worked with knew my marriage had ended, so they allowed me to underperform for a while without complaint. But after five or six months I started getting hauled in to discuss mistakes, missed deadlines, poor organization, and even, on a few occasions, my physical state. I had never really made mistakes before, I’d always done good work, I had always worked hard, I had always arrived early and stayed late, I wasn’t particularly friendly with any of my colleagues but I got along with them, and I wore nice suits and nice ties and had my shirts dry-cleaned, and I shaved, and so on. So I had become unrecognizable to them. I managed a few people, and they were constantly going to my boss to complain that I’d become unpredictable and unkind. Finally, they told me I had to attend a management re-training retreat in Sutton for a week. I could picture it—bullies, sexual harassers and aggressors, alcoholics, morons, sitting around listening to a man and a woman go through slide presentations and lead role-playing games and administer personality tests. I asked them to reconsider. I explained that I was nearly done. With what? they said. But I couldn’t explain. I left early that day. I guess I actually walked out without any explanation. I walked around London and realized that I would never be done with whatever was happening to me so long as I worked for those people, or for anybody. So I decided—probably unnecessarily, since surely they had made up their minds, when they saw me storm out, to fire me—to quit. I found myself excited and eager to go tell somebody about my decision. But after the marriage ended, my wife took all her friends back, and I didn’t want to talk to anybody from work, so I went home and woke my artist housemate. I told him to get up, put some clothes on, and come out for a drink. To my surprise, he came with me. That night it rained heavily, and we had to take umbrellas with us. We walked about twenty minutes to a pub that had blacked-out windows and no women. The artist and I got drunk, and I talked about my plans to start a business, to work for myself, and to work from home if I wanted—this would require me moving out. The artist took the news indifferently. We grabbed a burger and chips up the road, and ate them under umbrellas in a parking lot. I had all the buyout money left. I hadn’t spent a penny of it. I could use it to live on while I got my business started. That’s what I did. I stopped drinking, got regular sleep, found a new flat, and prepared myself, after more than a decade and a half in London, to become a new kind of success.