Yok

by Tim Davys

  As the Evening Weather settled over the city, Mike Chimpanzee was still in his taxi, and he didn’t want to go home. He was neither hungry nor tired. The thought of the genie waiting in the antique store nauseated him. The taxi had been driving in circles around Yok, and the ominous tone in his head refused to go away. At first he thought it was the tires of the car, but then he recognized it. A sign, he thought.

  But he didn’t know how he should interpret it.

  At last he asked the taxi driver to drive to Scheherazade on sludge green Cle de la Bola, a crooked stone’s throw from the antique shop on indigo blue Calle Gran Via, and ten minutes later he entered the restaurant with an imposing taxi receipt in his wallet. The genie was visible as Mike got out of the taxi, but disappeared just as quickly again when he opened the door to Scheherazade. The storm had abated, and night had officially arrived in Mollisan Town.

  There were an unusually large number of stuffed animals in the restaurant, and Mike had to elbow his way to the bar. Since his breakthrough he was accustomed to always being noticed, but inside Scheherazade only rarely did anyone bother him. It was more likely that females at the bar pretended not to even know who he was, when they asked for a light or a little passion for their fading lives.

  Tom-Tom Crow saw him at a distance, set out a large beer and changed the music to Nikki Lee and the Suspects. The grating electric guitars fell like a curtain behind the swaggering fortune-hunters drinking red wine in the bar. The cigarette smoke was like a haze over a battlefield. Tom-Tom had no time to give the rock star any further attention because other—paying—customers were making demands.

  Mike managed to commandeer a bar stool, and sipped his beer. He recognized many, but knew no one. He was grateful for that, because inspiration was unexpectedly flowing. He picked up his black notebook and leafed quickly through it. The notes were written and arranged based on a flow of associations that was hard to re-create. Introverted song lyrics were juxtaposed with simple diary entries. Shopping lists, pasted-in receipts and dry-cleaning tickets for clothes he never had the money to pick up. Here and there addresses and telephone numbers without names, or names without addresses and telephone numbers. When there was no room, he wrote over things he’d written earlier. On other pages the blankness itself was the point. At last he found an unused page, and quickly wrote a whole verse without raising his pen:

  Down South Avenue, as darkness starts to fall

  in a car your Mama gave you when you turned twenty-one

  You’re the king of the bar, and you buy drinks for all

  and later take home someone who’ll have to leave at dawn

  Scheherazade faded in the cigarette haze. Mike no longer heard Nikki Lee’s scratchy, desperate voice, he was so absorbed by his verse making. The minutes flew past, the beer mug was emptied once and then twice, and soon there was another verse in place in the black notebook:

  This life you want to live is getting too intense

  planning is believing you know the way to go

  but a little spark becomes a fire, a little thorn becomes a tear

  freedom’s letting go, say the ones who know.

  He closed the notebook and nodded. This wasn’t bad. This might be the verse to the song about freedom.

  He looked around; the restaurant was quickly emptying out. Sam Gazelle came out of the kitchen, and only now noticed the chimpanzee.

  “Mike!”

  The gazelle dried his wet hooves on an apron where the food stains told the whole story: A little more than a year ago Sam, along with his friend Tom-Tom Crow, had taken over the restaurant on sludge green Cle de la Bola in Yok. It was no shopping street, but it had its charm. Across from the restaurant were the ruins of an apartment building from the fifties. Dark green, blossoming clematis had buried the razed exterior walls under billowing greenery, and when the Afternoon Rain fell and the sun was turning homeward, thousands of leaves glittered like stars in the night sky.

  Rumor had it that an elderly widow had willed the place to Sam at a point in his life when more than ever he needed a roof over his head. So he moved in, with his chemicals and herbs, and realized after a few weeks that he needed help. The unusually large stuffed animal Tom-Tom Crow was not hard to convince. Together they painted the walls of the restaurant turquoise. The dark wooden tables and bar remained, while the crow set about sewing new white covers for all the chairs; on some he embroidered skulls with little red sequins. Besides the bar and the five window booths, there were a total of eight tables with room for thirty guests. They christened their restaurant Scheherazade.

  Sam Gazelle went up to the bar and gave Mike a hug, whereupon Mike as usual felt uncomfortable. The poor chimpanzee could not defend himself against the gazelle. He had always attracted homosexual stuffed animals; perhaps it was his confusion that was enticing? Mike Chimpanzee pulled his shirt higher up on his hairy chest; Sam took a slender, hand-rolled cigarette out of his breast pocket.

  “Not the best quality,” he commented, handing it over.

  “I’ve got my own,” Mike said, taking one of the genie’s joints out of his breast pocket.

  “You do? Did you get an advance?” Sam asked.

  Chimpanzee not bumming drugs off the gazelle was a minor sensation.

  “You might call it luck,” Mike answered hesitantly.

  Sam took off the apron and set it over the back of the bar stool. Under it he had on a white ruffled shirt unbuttoned down to the belt line; the buckle depicted a withering rose. He had dark blue kohl around his large, round eyes, and he smelled of a perfume that Mike recognized but could not place. The limits of vanity, Gazelle maintained, were at repairing the broken-off right horn on his forehead. The stump of horn had become his trademark.

  Mike’s impulse had been to tell Sam and Tom-Tom about the annoying genie who had invaded his life, but now that felt impossible. The story was too ridiculous, and too unbelievable.

  Crow set out two glasses of white wine, and Sam and Mike toasted in silence. Apart from a python who had curled up and fallen asleep in one of the booths, the restaurant was now empty. Nikki Lee’s distinct voice was still coming out of the speakers, accompanied by a careful brush that caressed the cymbals.

  “Be my guest, dears,” said Tom-Tom. “My goodness, damn, what a night!”

  “We’re talking record-breaking, darling,” Gazelle agreed.

  Scheherazade, under its new owners, got off to a slow start, but because there were few customers, the crow and gazelle could practice their new roles as headwaiter and chef in peace and quiet. Soon they surprised themselves by managing to prepare and serve food from a solid menu; besides, the inexperienced restaurateurs paid the suppliers’ bills with such regularity that the supplies didn’t stop.

  Now the crow disappeared into the kitchen to do the final cleanup before they could go home. Sam sat down at the bar next to Mike. They could glimpse themselves behind the forest of liquor bottles of various sizes and colors on the glass shelves in front of the bar mirror. Mike thought he looked lost. And the next moment the tone in his head was back.

  “Oh dear,” said Gazelle. “Did something just happen?”

  “No worries,” said Mike, trying to cheer himself up. “A dip. Already on the way up again. Maybe low blood sugar?”

  “It has been better for a while, right?” Sam asked, sipping his wine.

  Mike hated feeling like a mental case. True, Gazelle had become somewhat of a therapist during the past months, but that didn’t give him carte blanche to console. The ape shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s this damn neighborhood,” he said. “It’s suffocating. It’s like a closed room, an ecosystem under a big glass dome. Whichever direction I run, I hit my head against the wall. And if you don’t want to sit still? It drives you crazy, thinking like that.”

  “You shouldn’t think that way, darling,” Sam suggested. “
It sounds corny when I say it, everything sounds corny when I say it; I’m that sort of gazelle. But it’s more profound than you think. Choose what to think about. And think about something else.”

  The gazelle searched in his pants pocket and found a green pill, which he put in his mouth. He was full of chemicals, smoked tobacco, herbs, and powders, and seldom knew exactly what he was taking; he combined colors and forms in ways he hoped were balancing. Where alcohol was concerned he was very limited, however; a glass of white wine on special occasions, nothing else, which mainly had to do with his fear of gaining weight.

  “You’ve had it too easy, darling,” Gazelle said, as he placed a consoling hoof on the ape’s shoulder.

  “That’s good,” Mike said. “I’ll remember that next time I’m considering drowning myself.”

  “How old are you, Mike?” asked Sam, now less sympathetic. “Twenty? Twenty-one? Doesn’t matter, you’re too young to be bitter, honey, and to be honest you sound a little ridiculous when you want to be disillusioned. You know that I love you, but this has to be said.”

  Sam slid down from his tall stool and rounded the bar. He moved quickly and softly.

  “Sweetie, this is how it is,” said the gazelle, rooting in the drawer of the cash register, where he hid small, white tablets that made him melancholy. “You are loved by everyone. I love you, your mom loves you, hundreds of thousands of teenagers in this city worship the colorful asphalt you walk on. It’s true that you’ve spent all the money, but, darling, there’ll be more. You’re making a new record with Lancelot Lemur and you’re getting married to the love of your life. You’re, like, not believable as suicidal.”

  Tom-Tom came out of the kitchen, so Mike avoided answering.

  “Now damn it, all that’s left is to go home,” the crow called out.

  He and Gazelle lived in the apartment above the restaurant.

  “Do you want to spend the night at our place, Mike?” he asked. “I can toast bread for breakfast.”

  Mike weighed the invitation. In the one scale was avoiding the genie, in the other Gazelle’s intolerable snoring.

  “Thanks,” he answered at last. “But I think I’ll toddle off home. Another time?”

  Crow laughed happily and patted him hard on the back. It was the bird’s way of showing his appreciation.

  “Do I owe you anything?” Chimpanzee asked.

  “An answer,” said Sam. “But we can deal with that later.”

  Mike nodded. He had already lost focus, forgotten the crow and the gazelle, and instead was back at the verses he’d written. As he stepped out onto the sidewalk he completed the chorus in his head:

  But do you believe what they’re saying?

  (Every thought has an end)

  Do you believe what they’re saying?

  (Every life its outer limit)

  Do you believe what they’re saying?

  (There’s no way out again)

  Do you believe what they’re saying?

  (Do you know how it feels?)

  ’Cause freedom is / freedom is / freedom isn’t here.

  5.

  Did you hear what Mike said?” Mr. Rozenblatt laughed out loud. “He suggested sole!”

  Mrs. Rozenblatt, dressed for the day in a small pillbox hat, chimed in with strained but grandiose laughter, whereupon even Ilja Crocodile giggled and Mike himself smiled a little, even as his heart ached.

  Mike Chimpanzee truly wanted Mr. Rozenblatt to like him. It might be put more elegantly, but it was just that simple. It was a wish the ape hardly dared admit to himself, and amateur psychologists could bicker about the reasons behind it. But it meant that Mike exerted himself much too hard, and fell even further down in Mr. Rozenblatt’s eyes.

  “There’s nothing wrong with sole, is there?” Cocker Spaniel defended her intended.

  This caused Mr. Rozenblatt to laugh even louder; he snorted derisively and slapped his belly.

  “No, no, I was only joking,” said Mike, trying to make himself heard. “It’s clear, darling, we can’t have sole, can we?”

  They were sitting around a pastry table at La Cueva. The legendary chef Jan-Henrik Swan sat at the end of the table, and he was the one who had just suggested fish as the main course. Over by the stoves the cooks were doing prep work for the evening; again and again Swan cast worried glances in their direction. He was having a hard time concentrating on the wedding planning and it was obvious he would prefer to end the meeting as quickly as possible.

  “No worries, Mike,” Cocker Spaniel whispered, placing a consoling paw on Chimpanzee’s shoulder. “He’s only making a fool of himself. Of course you can have sole.”

  Mike felt extremely irritated by this kindness. In her father’s eyes the fact that Cocker Spaniel intervened and tried to rescue the situation hardly strengthened Mike’s stock. But snapping at his intended in this situation would only make matters worse, so carefully he shook off her paw.

  “I was imagining an organic salmon pâté,” said Chef Swan, unaffected by the stuffed animals’ peculiar conversation, “with a whitefish roe sauce and my award-winning Brussels sprout risotto. For dessert a blueberry soufflé, resting on a bed of blackberries and raspberries, served tentatively with a young sauvignon blanc.”

  “Oh, that sounds marvelous,” said Mrs. Rozenblatt.

  “Dear Swan, you are a true artist,” said Mr. Rozenblatt.

  Cocker Spaniel smiled happily, and Ilja Crocodile struggled with her saliva production.

  “Perhaps we could replace the raspberries with cloudberries?” Mike suggested.

  The words felt like slaps; that was how the Rozenblatt family understood the comment. Terrified and furious glances were aimed at Chimpanzee. He knew what he had done; he had wagered everything on a final, desperate card; after having been reduced to an ignorant lout time after time by Mr. and Mrs. Rozenblatt, this was how he sought revenge.

  The silence was only broken by the clatter of the cooks at the stove.

  After having stared at Mike with fury and contempt, the company turned their pleading eyes to Jan-Henrik Swan.

  But the chef shrugged one wing without interest, and said, “Well, cloudberries instead . . . that might not be a bad idea.”

  And thereafter he declared the meeting over and returned to his proper element, where his colleagues were waiting.

  A few hours later Mike Chimpanzee still had a hard time letting go of Mr. Rozenblatt’s condescending attitude, but he did his best to focus on the moment and aimed his light blue gaze at the lovely deer.

  “Doll,” he said in a voice so smooth it made the Breeze outside seem pushy, “I’m always going to love you.”

  Tears were running down her cheeks. The sun settled in her lap, the weather was midday and they were sitting across from each other in one of the booths at Scheherazade.

  “Mike Chimpanzee,” she answered, “you are a swine.”

  He smiled a tired but loving smile and shook his head almost imperceptibly. He could not help it that the music playing in the background claimed all his attention for a moment, the syncopated eighth notes on the rider just as the bass line ground on in quarter notes; only Nikki Lee and the Suspects could rock like that.

  Then he again recalled the lovely deer, on whose cheeks the round roses had been sewn with a master’s hand.

  “We’re torn apart, you and me,” he said seriously. “We don’t have the ability to make ourselves whole.”

  She looked at him as if he were the last, disintegrating bite of a hamburger with too much mustard and mayonnaise.

  “You’re a cowardly, miserable wretch, Mike Chimpanzee,” she spat out.

  “That I am,” he exclaimed. “Guilty. Have I ever said anything else? I’m cowardly and I’m miserable. But a hope lives in my heart, a hope that one day you are going to understand, and forgive.”

&n
bsp; The scent of burnt almonds and marijuana drifted past the table. The chimpanzee twisted his head to hold it back a little while before it disappeared out on the street. Behind the bar stood Tom-Tom Crow, drying glasses. From the kitchen Sam Gazelle was heard trying to sing harmony to Nikki Lee. The muffled sound of the gazelle’s carving knife against the cutting board—Sam was slicing cucumber, leeks, and carrots—kept time with the beat.

  Mike was sitting parallel to the table, his feet on the bench and back against the wall, and looked her deep in the eyes. They had not known each other more than six months, but until now he had always been able to persuade her.

  Not today.

  “I’m not coming back,” she said.

  Her tears had dried, and he heard how angry she was.

  “Doll, believe me,” he said.

  “The last time you called me. And I came. But that’s not happening again.”

  “Doll, I would never—”

  “And stop calling me ‘doll,’ damn it!” she screamed.

  He held his hairy fingers up in the air in an attempt to defend himself. Scratched his ear and placed the other hand on his chest.

  “It hurts,” he stated.

  The intent was to show that his heart was bleeding, but she misunderstood him.

  “In your ear? I don’t give a damn about that,” she hissed.

  She slid quickly out of the booth and remained standing for a moment in front of the table to heighten the drama. Then she left the restaurant with furious steps. At the bar Tom-Tom Crow continued drying glasses, unconcerned. He was not the most sophisticated stuffed animal in Yok, but there was something mysterious in the crow’s small porcelain eyes that made you want to gain his sympathy. Now he mostly appeared bored. Through the open door to the street the sound of the deer’s high heels was heard as she ran down toward flax yellow Piazza di Bormio. The chimpanzee could not help noticing that her running was not in sync with the music.