Yok

by Tim Davys

  Over the weekend there were several times I thought I would give myself away in front of my brothers and reveal my secret, but I can thank alcohol that it didn’t happen: On Friday and Saturday Rasmus and Leopold got drunk and disappeared out in the city to find females to hug, and on Saturday and Sunday the hangover made them sluggish and irritable so they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. My life continued on the surface exactly as usual: I scrubbed floors, did laundry, and prepared food. I took the opportunity to scrape and paint the window moldings on the top floor—which I should have done years ago—and I filled out and sent in all the forms, for myself as well as for Rasmus and Leopold, that the social service authorities required every month. But the whole time I was rehearsing the invented news items in my head, so that even if physically I was doing what I should, I was absent in every thought and moment and if either of my brothers had spoken to me, I probably would have started to ramble on about how a church is being built in postmodern style in north Tourquai, or that a (made-up) hostage drama was playing out at the Concert House on Pfaffendorfer Tor in Lanceheim.

  I swear that when I went to bed on Sunday evening I was empty inside, exhausted from the mental overdrive I’d been in since Friday, and at the same time on tenterhooks from nervousness about the next day. Although I was so tired I felt ill, I didn’t fall asleep until it was basically time to wake up again, so you may question whether I gave myself the best possible chance before the test that awaited me.

  I betray myself, again and again, daily and hourly, I hate myself, I despise myself, I loathe myself, and all these feelings make my steps so heavy I don’t have any oomph left. I’m finished. I’m nobody. What does integrity look like? Is it about standing by your thoughts, or standing by your actions, or standing up for yourself, and is it possible to distinguish one from the other: Shouldn’t my thoughts lead to actions that add up to who I am? Can I call an insight that remains an intellectual seed an insight, even if it never develops into anything more than a fantasy, a stupid and childish and irresponsible and romantic idea that hovers freely by itself and has nothing to do with my identity? The sum of my fantasies is not me, the sum of my dreams is a taunt that makes me doubt, and only cynicism can raise me up from my anxiety, while the sum of my actions is just as pathetic as the spineless stuffed animal who every day is stuck in deadlock that inhibits and holds him back, and that must be the way I want it to be, on a deeply unconscious level, but this is impossible to understand rationally, because I am ashamed to my stuffing about my helplessness, and all the beatings I get from my brothers are exactly what I’m worth, all the work they force me to do is only a small repayment that has to happen daily so that I can put up with the quivering, evasive stuffed animal that is me. Integrity, I ask myself again: What does it look like? It strikes me that this very question is one that someone like me can never answer, because if I could, I never would have needed to ask it.

  They ask me to begin, but it’s as if the voice is coming from nowhere, that I’m hearing it through a filter that makes it impossible to place, the same fog that keeps the world at a distance, that makes reality diffuse. I look down at my short claws on the table before me and I think that it’s not my toes they’re attached to, not my toes that are moving, even though I’ve chosen to move them. It’s as if I’ve taken some kind of drug that isolates me from experiences, from feelings—physical as well as mental—and they are asking me to begin. At first I don’t feel my tongue moving in my mouth and after a while it feels much too tangible, it’s moving out of sync with the words.

  Just a few minutes ago I was quivering with nervousness; every movement, every sound made me jump, on tenterhooks, the slightest vibration transmitted through the floor and up into the chair I was sitting in, waiting for my name to be called, the smells from the stuffed animals sitting alongside, the colors of their clothes, I registered everything with an acuity that I’d never experienced before, and no matter how much water I drank my mouth and throat dried up again the next moment. I didn’t rehearse my speech because I was much too nervous to remember so many sentences in a row, and then they called out my name and I got up and went straight into this fog.

  They ask me to start, and I start, I let the words run out of my mouth without understanding what I’m saying, I hardly hear my voice, I stare right in front of me because there somewhere I think I see a camera lens staring back, but I’m still unsure, I stare and talk and talk and stare and nothing seems to happen, no one reacts to anything I’m saying, and deep down in my closed-off brain panic is sneaking around looking for a door. What if what I’m saying isn’t coherent, what if it’s just nonsense, what if I’m not looking into the camera, and once my brain has started to formulate these questions there are more and more: What if my jacket split, what if I have milk on my chin, what if I stutter?

  They ask me to start, and I don’t know how or why I know that I’m finished, but when I’m finished I get up right when the words come to an end and leave the room. I run out of there, and when I feel someone take hold of my shoulder I tear myself loose, a button in my jacket comes unfastened, and when I get home several hours later I discover it’s gone, the button must have fallen off.

  Back home on Monday afternoon on my honey yellow Carrer de Carrera, I can’t say I regret it, for even if the experience of having lost all control feels horrible, deep inside the discomfort a little kernel of joy is hiding. It’s strange how it works, and I can’t explain it better than that, even though it was horrible and I landed in a black hole of terror and performance anxiety, I’m longing to go back, and I know that I take with me a memory, a blurred memory, of a great moment in life.

  It’s almost as if I’m not afraid when I step into the hall and carefully call to my brothers who aren’t home, thank goodness, and I go to make dinner as usual and wonder what the polecat will say tomorrow at work and whether it’s over now, if I’ll be forced to look for something new.

  On the bus on Tuesday nothing has happened yet, even though I woke up and thought that now something has to happen, something else, now the brothers have uncovered me, now the polecat has uncovered me, I’ve been talking in my sleep. I ought to throw away the jacket, to remove evidence, and my plan was to slip it into a half-full Dumpster that I’ve seen on my way from the bus stop to the brewery, and which day after day is filled with trash and rubbish from stuffed animals who come during the night and (probably just like me) dump some kind of evidence. But I can’t do it; there’s too much care and struggle behind every seam in my blue-striped jacket, it carries the memory of My Great Experience, so even if it does sound a little pathetic I’ve hidden it in the storeroom in the cellar, wadded it up so it looks like all the other worn-out linens we have down there.

  I go into the dressing room, clock in, pull on my overalls, fiddle with the padlock, go out into the brewery, down into the cellar, and shovel chips. At lunch I go up and get my lunchbox, then back down to the cellar again where I eat two liver-sausage sandwiches (just like I always do, but today I forgot the cucumber, which is a trifle but completely exposes my inner chaos), and as I’m sitting on the bus on the way home—I have to stop and buy groceries and then this evening go out into the forest to hunt for wood—I’m still the only one who notices that I’m no longer the same.

  But these days Rasmus isn’t really Rasmus and Leopold isn’t really Leopold, because all three of us are filled up with ourselves in a way that makes us even less attentive to each other than usual, which in my case is a blessing. For the first time in their lives my brothers are also fixated on the postal service and the letter carrier, a moose whose massive horns make the little postal service cap even sillier, and I am no longer entrusted with picking up the junk mail we usually get.

  When I came home after my experience in the TV studio, Leopold—or Rasmus—had already thrown the day’s mail (a wrinkled advertising flyer from Monomart) on the living room table and, probably in a fury, left the h
ouse, and today when I open the door both brothers are at home, which is unusual. I feel the atmosphere strike me in the hallway, dark and threatening, and I hear by the way my brothers are impatiently moving in the living room that I have to lie low, that this is serious now. I sneak up the stairs without the third, sixth, or twelfth step betraying me; it’s a matter of millimeters, but if you know where to place your foot you can remain silent.

  I hide on the top floor for half an hour, but then I have to go down and start making dinner, and I make myself as light as I can and go down again, without them hearing me even though the sixth step creaks faintly, and sneak into the kitchen. The letter carrier hasn’t arrived; he isn’t coming at all today, it’s the sort of thing I know because I’m used to taking care of the mail, and I can only fantasize about my brothers’ reaction when they realize they’ve been waiting for no reason. In the usual arrangement I prepare myself for them to take their anger out on me, we all need outlets and the least I can do is to help out. In return my brothers see to it that the house stays ours, because I don’t know if I could live without the house on Carrer de Carrera.

  After more than fifteen minutes, as the kitchen fills with the aroma of boiling cabbage heads and I’ve set the table as nicely as I’m able, a tremendous crash is heard from out in the living room, and I look down into the kettle and hope that it appears as if the cabbages aren’t going to cook completely if I don’t watch over them carefully. The next moment the door to the kitchen is thrown open, and Rasmus comes in, sees that I’ve set the table, takes hold of the tablecloth I’ve laid down and pulls it out, whereupon plates and glasses and the vase with a tulip falls to the floor, the sound of porcelain breaking against stone jangles in my ears, and he screams at me to pick it up.

  But nothing else happens, and only a minute or two later both Leopold and Rasmus have left me alone in the house with the broken dishes and, as it turns out, a smashed coffee table out in the living room. I assume they’re on the hunt for liquor, they intend to drink away the disappointment and frustration at still not having heard anything from Now! or Good Morning Mollisan Town.

  I gather up the shards of porcelain from the floor, get the smallest pieces with the vacuum cleaner, fail to glue the vase together again (it was already glued together twice), and take the bedclothes out of the TV stand—sheets and pillowcase that are always going to remind me of my own great experience of New Mornings because the jacket in the cellar means that now I only have one pillow—and make the bed on the sofa; it’s crucial to be asleep before my brothers are back. The smashed coffee table has helped me: It will serve as wood for two, three days, and so I don’t need to go out to the forest this evening.

  Wednesday passes and Thursday passes and I become myself again, it’s impossible to retain the feeling that everything is different when nothing is changed, when neither the rats nor the polecat ask a single question; I didn’t clock in last Monday and I didn’t clock out and I have no explanations, but no one asks why; I don’t see a glimpse of the polecat during these days so I don’t know who would comment on my absence.

  Going to work, changing, and shoveling chips and at the end of the month having money put into the bank account is a system that works. I’ve never felt that I should question it, but who actually judges that what I do, I do better than anyone else? Sometimes months go by without me seeing the polecat, and when I think about it I realize that it’s that way now, it’s been months since I saw him, maybe he’s not even still working here.

  At home it’s the same thing, everything goes on as usual with the exception of my brothers’ fixation on the mail and the letter carrier, the poor moose who I believe got a visit last night when my brothers’ frustration was uncontrollable and they had to talk with him (if I understand it right, they got him to promise to come by every day whether or not he has any mail for us).

  It’s impossible to feel different when the memory of what happened becomes vague, so distant and unclear that I remember details from my cubdom with greater clarity; I recall dreams better, and the memory of my beloved mom (whom I almost hardly saw and whom I idolize in my dreams so that I’m almost ashamed when I wake up) is more real than those moments before the TV camera. And I think that in only a week, in a few weeks, the program-host tryouts will be yet another piece of evidence that fatalism is my inheritance and my salvation, and that dreams and fantasies are not only vain, they’re dangerous, because when they are crushed the life that remains is a little bit less valuable. Don’t ask me why this is so, but it is.

  On Friday there was more going on than on Wednesday and Thursday, but, you might say, nothing that hadn’t happened before. At work I was pulled into a card game, it’s during lunch and against my will, but the rats down by the ovens take hold of me and force me to sit with them, one of them is sick to his stomach and they’re missing one player and they know that I can, so . . .

  “I don’t have any cash.

  “But I’m not going to . . .

  “A little while, then?”

  I don’t win. You can call me lots of things, but I’m not stupid—not like that, sitting with the rats during lunch and winning a card game would be stupid—so I play carelessly, just good enough, so that no one gets angry or happy and I can get up and leave when the lunch hour is over without anyone recalling that I was even there. But I’m afraid the whole time, though I’m usually not, I feel the heat from the ovens and I’m aware of the fire burning in there, and the memory of the rat that burned up last week haunts me. I carry that image with me in my daydreams, and it takes the whole afternoon for my pulse to calm down.

  When I come home my brothers are there, I’ve already gotten used to that, but something is different today and when I close the door I know what it is: I’m missing the sauntering steps, the loud, agitated voices, all I hear instead is silence. I remain standing a few moments with my coat on and just listen toward the living room, but I don’t think anyone is there, and I take a few steps into the hall and try to listen upward. Even though it’s completely silent I’m sure my brothers are up in their rooms, and I think that maybe the mail has arrived earlier today, maybe their expectation has already turned to dejection, because Rasmus and Leopold are hanging their heads now, they are resigned, it’s worse than during all the years when we never heard a word from New Mornings, because then my brothers thought they had been unjustly screened out; now they’ve shown what they can do, and there’s nothing to blame.

  But there I’m wrong when I think about it, because I’m here, Erik Gecko, who wrote the news items that caused them to fail, so they can blame it on me. They’re going to blame me anyway, and when I go into the living room I see an envelope with the familiar Now! logo lying wadded up and thrown on the floor in front of the stove, and I realize it’s their results, for either both or one of them, because the silence doesn’t suggest there’s celebrating going on in this house, so I go over to pick up the envelope but just as I’m leaning down I hear steps on the stairs, and I turn around and see my big brother Leopold coming into the living room, and lightning bolts are shooting out of his eyes. I don’t have time to say or do anything, I get a blow across the ear that immediately sends me to the floor, and he takes hold of my long tail and drags me toward the cellar stairs, and I can’t say I’m surprised. He more or less heaves me down the stairs, and in order not to be kicked I voluntarily crawl into the storeroom so he only needs to slam the door, but I don’t sense that it’s going to be different this time. After hours long as years I fall into unconsciousness and I don’t come out of it for a long, long time.

  When at last the door is opened and I am pulled out, I hardly notice it, a weak tugging on my legs, I feel the steps against my body as I’m being dragged up from the cellar, my head striking the threshold into the kitchen, and they set me with my back against the wall and ask me to drink, but I don’t have strength enough to hold a glass or to put it to my mouth. So they help me, and then they
help me eat, Leopold holds me while Rasmus forces bread in between my lips, it’s unbearable but I realize I have to, it’s an instinct that makes me chew and swallow, reflexes that have nothing to do with reason.

  Slowly I come around, and my brothers are . . . I wouldn’t describe them as remorseful, but never ever have they taken care of me the way they’re doing right now, I have no emotional memory that anyone has held me like Leopold is holding me and I can see in their eyes that they want to revive me, they want me to live.

  At last all three of us are rewarded as my strength returns, slowly I’m filled with life, literally, but the fatigue that comes over me is numbing, and when it’s clear that my brothers expect me to leave for work I almost start to cry, I can’t help it, I don’t see how I’ll manage. But I pull myself together and thanks to Leopold I get on my feet, even if I stagger and sway even more than usual and it takes me almost five minutes to go from the kitchen out to the hall. Then when I’m sitting on the bus I’m so groggy I have a hard time sorting out my thoughts: recently in the storeroom, now on the bus, recently barely alive, soon at work, and every time the bus turns it makes me almost fall off my seat, every stop means that I have to parry with my hands, but at last I arrive, get off, and drag myself across the industrial area over to Carlsweis brewery, where a surprise awaits.

  In the dressing room the polecat is standing to meet me. He’s in bad shape, his short arm is hanging in a sling and he’s missing one of his ears, which seems to have been recently torn off, you can see the stuffing in the hole, but I pretend not to see either him or the hole but instead hurry over and open my locker as usual. He follows, places himself really close and speaks in a low voice, so that no one else can hear because we’re not alone in the dressing room . . .