Yok

by Tim Davys

  The first blow was a dull smack, followed by his mom’s scream. The second blow was another smack, and the third, fourth, and fifth blows were also followed by her screams. Then she was no longer screaming, and at last Vincent opened the door and ran out into the kitchen. Mom was lying by the stove. Dad was standing in front of her, kicking. He turned around when Vincent came in, but then continued kicking. To Dad he was nobody. Air.

  Vincent screamed. He screamed and screamed, but Dad wasn’t concerned with him. Mom didn’t hear a thing. Only when the ambulance personnel broke down the door did Vincent stop screaming, and the emergency medical technicians had to shove Dad aside to be able to carry Mom away. Vincent remained sitting on the floor in the kitchen, crying. Dad stepped over him to go into the bedroom and lie down.

  Mom never came back. Dad never talked about her again. Vincent never found out what happened.

  In his haze he is lying on the bed in his blue pajamas, and the emptiness in his heart is so great it engulfs the whole house and his whole life and all of Mollisan Town.

  It was the stench that woke Vincent. The cold, hard stone floor was incredibly uncomfortable. How could he have fallen asleep there? He must have fainted. It happened sometimes. Pills and vodka were an unpredictable combination. Sometimes it worked out, other times not. The nausea made his stomach turn inside out and he opened his eyes.

  He did not know where he was. There had been a time of innocence when he woke up and felt compelled to remember. Experience had freed him from that kind of need for control. Judging by the ceiling height, he was in a garage or a factory. Some kind of industrial space, like always. Carefully he twisted his head. He was not alone. How many were there? Ten, twenty? He didn’t know, and he didn’t worry about it.

  He got up on his elbows. The stench was overwhelming, and when he looked down at his pants he discovered that someone had vomited on him. It could have been him, but he doubted that. He seldom vomited. A yellow green slush had run down over his legs and into the gap over his socks. Into the fabric and stuffing. It was disgusting. It would take days with a heavy, soaking leg to be rid of the smell.

  Closest to him was a rat who was usually present at the Donation Dates. Vincent tried to shake life into him, but did not succeed. After a while Vincent got up, feeling unsteady. Outside it was dark, and he realized it was night and not morning, as he had thought. How long had he been lying there? He studiously avoided looking at the other stuffed animals on the floor. He had seen it before, this sea of quietly weeping, shaking, or still-unconscious stuffed animals that slowly realized they were maimed for life; it was a scene he could not get used to. He crouched down, shaking the rat again.

  “Where the hell are we?” he asked.

  “Lanceheim,” answered the rat. “On the outskirts of Nowhere.”

  Vincent nodded. He went through the space in the opposite direction, away from the scattered stuffed-animal bodies on the floor. His arms and stomach hurt. He found a door and stepped out into the cold night. The air was a release. Against the dark sky the dense crowns of the treetops were outlined, and he realized that the industrial space was on the border to the forest, presumably in the northwest corner of the district where the food industries were located. He started walking south. Soon his eyes got used to the darkness, and he saw the outlines of factories and their massive chimneys.

  Even though he had left Donation Dates before, in flight without fleeing, more times in the past year than he cared to count, something different was happening tonight. It was a line out of Armesto’s Exposure that Vincent suddenly remembered, for the first time in a very long while:

  Your reality exists in the eyes of others, while in the others’ eyes there is only desire.

  When he came up to the barrier gates that he could crouch under (happy not to have to climb over a fence), he could barely breathe. Anxiety had closed up his throat.

  He was alive. But the only reason he was able to make his way through days and nights—as if life were an obstacle course—was that he refused to see himself. He had rid himself of the reality that Armesto talked about. In Vincent’s life, there were no “others.” He was 26 years, 215 days, and about 20 hours old, and had not achieved anything at all. If it hadn’t been for his artistic talent he never would have gotten a diploma from elementary school. After school he used his talent to fill exactly fifty canvases with oil paint, paint over them with white and fill them again. The exhibition nauseated him; everything seemed to be a game he tired of before he was even through playing it. The portfolio that was the result of the work and that he sent to the Art Academy was the same he sent to the College of Architecture. He had been accepted in both places and chose Architecture. It was an occupation, anyway. But the college proved to be full of pretentious strivers he divided into two categories: the visionaries and the mathematicians, and he did not belong in either group. He stopped going to lectures. He stopped going to exams. He lost interest, just as he lost interest in life. There was no meaning, anyone could see that, so there was no meaning in discussing meaninglessness.

  He walked south, away from the forest, without recognizing where he was. Lanceheim had never attracted him; the district was the city’s most anonymous, filled with stuffed animals who lived their lives in forbearance and longing. Sooner or later Vincent would get to a bus stop, and because all the bus lines passed the Star, he could transfer there. The street he was walking on was barely a street, only half paved, the warehouses and factories sporadic, but farther ahead he saw an area of town houses.

  It was to this exact point here that life had taken him: to a deserted street in north Lanceheim after a day, or twenty-four hours, in an abandoned industrial space, with pain and degradation and drugs, so that everyone could anesthetize themselves and do what had to be done. This was his life, with a stranger’s vomit penetrating the cotton at his shins and anxiety like a lump in his throat. With an emotional life that only came to life from extremes or chemicals.

  Vincent Hare stopped.

  Did he want to be there?

  Had he chosen this?

  In a way he had, he thought bitterly and started walking again. He no longer remembered when he first learned to close off, to enclose himself in his own universe where Dad, the teachers, and his classmates were not admitted. There he set his own goals. He created an autonomous world, where he could decide for himself how life would be lived. If the lesson was to page fifty, he could just as well decide that he would read to page one hundred, or not read at all. Instead of being drawn into the capricious hierarchy of social relationships, he learned to be comfortable with solitude. He created his own rules; that was his survival strategy. Only he, and no one else, could know when he was competent and when he was inadequate. The strategy held up until his teens. He was socially wise enough to appear “normal,” but he felt he didn’t belong. In every situation he could observe himself from the outside.

  Enough now, thought Vincent.

  Misanthrope or not, he had to start taking himself seriously. The sand was running like a landslide through the hourglass; it was high time.

  Vincent walked—no, he marched in the darkness down the empty street, mechanically and without lowering his gaze. He had experienced this moment before, or others very much like it, and yet something was changed. Here, where no one could see him and reality felt so distant, he decided that this time it was for real. The gray notebook was at home, but he knew what he would write:

  1. Meaning of Life: It’s not about the present.

  2. Knowledge Account: It’s not the drop that makes the goblet overflow, it happens when you tip the glass. You have to take yourself seriously, however hard that may be. Must do it now.

  3. Bank Account: A certain hope of replenishment soon.

  Jack Dingo’s Comments

  Do I remember Vincent Hare? I remember him well. He was different.

  You know, I’ve alway
s needed help. I mean, unqualified help. A certain kind of stuffed animal who does what I tell them to. Everything has a price. And if they hung around with me, I paid them well. Then they last a couple of years but eventually want too much money. For booze or drugs. Then it’s time to dump them, and get new ones.

  I would pick up animals on El Torado. I still do. Why change something that works? Late at night at a bar where the liquor is siphoned from the still in the basement it’s easy to see who’s up to the job and who isn’t. That was where I picked up Vincent Hare. He was the perfect age, not yet twenty, no one knew him, and he had no family. Those are the kind I look for. The kind no one will miss.

  The only thing that made me uncertain—I remember this because we laughed about it later—was how much he wanted me to find him. It was written all over him. The way he dressed, the way he talked. He was one of those who wanted. What did they want? They wanted to be discovered, I guess. They longed to get away, and they were prepared to do anything at all to escape their sad, confined lives. Or almost anything at all. Hare wanted, and more than anyone I’d seen.

  I did my usual routine. I offered him a couple hundred if he met me the next evening and helped out. He said yes right away. That was no surprise. He actually said yes to everything, even the bad stuff; I assume that was a principle of his?

  When did I notice he was different? Right away. It was nothing special that happened, mostly a sense, but it couldn’t be missed. I had nothing to complain about. He did what I said and learned fast. Many stuffed animals whom I picked out were none too bright, which was usually an asset. Hare was smart. I realized that right away. I was younger at that time, and stupider, and for that reason I liked having someone smart around. When you talked you got a little something in exchange. But in terms of the job itself, it wasn’t better. And pretty soon I knew that Vincent Hare was too smart to sit in a car with me or stand watching for cops outside the hospital spare parts warehouse.

  But he wasn’t one of us. Which us? Us. It was impossible to imagine Hare going in and out of King’s Cross. It was impossible to imagine Hare getting hooked on drugs, and carrying on just to be able to buy more dope. It was impossible to imagine Hare getting stuck in everyday life, because it was impossible to imagine Hare getting stuck at all. That was the whole deal. In contrast to all the others, with few exceptions, Hare was always on his way. Forward. He radiated impatience, and in a way that made you understand he would never get there. Do you understand? Others, you saw it in their eyes, would be content in the end. But never Hare. That’s why he never fit in with me. He was passing through; I knew that from the start. He was no small-time crook. He was too smart for his own good.

  Vincent is dreaming. That he is boarding the train to Hillevie. Walking along a narrow corridor. Finds an empty compartment. The train steams and chugs, whistles and snorts. A dull rumble drowns out the sound of everything he does. He opens the compartment door. Sits down on the seat by the window.

  Outside, the platform is deserted. He stares at a bench half covered with graffiti. Next to the bench is a trash barrel. Next to the trash barrel a ticket machine. He didn’t buy his ticket there; he had it mailed to him at home.

  There are no other trains at the station. No stuffed animals are moving on the platforms. As the train begins to move, he experiences a strong discomfort. He stares out the window. He senses that the train is standing still while the world is starting to move. Faster and faster, buildings and streets flicker past. He tries to focus his gaze on individual objects. He sees a mint green facade with four windows, a reddish advertising sign for toothpaste, and suddenly, at an intersection, in the middle of a crosswalk, he sees his father. He has just raised one arm, and stares at the train. Is he waving? Vincent stares back. Behind his father the world swishes past. Then his father, too, disappears from his field of vision.

  The speed is unfathomable. The world outside is reduced to diffuse streaks of color that glide past. He can barely make anything out. Then he feels how the train is taking off from the ground. As if he were sitting in a rocket. The rails follow along up into the sky through the clouds. The speed is extraterrestrial. Moments of calm fill him but prove transient: The insight is sudden. The train tracks cannot be pulled through the sky. Trains can’t fly. But he is flying, faster and faster, and Vincent knows that soon he is going to crash.

  The architectural firm of Bombardelli & Partners had a grandiose reception area with two modern lounge suites on either side of an oval reception counter constructed so it appeared to hover a few inches above the ground. The colors in the lobby were unexpected: turquoise, mint green, and marine blue. Along with a faint aroma of lily of the valley (which the firm’s brand manager added to the scouring powder the cleaning company used on the floors), the room created a reassuring atmosphere.

  “Vincent Hare?”

  Vincent stood up.

  “Please follow me.”

  Vincent followed the fly into the large conference room, where they sat down at the end of a long table.

  “Well, Vincent,” said the fly, leafing through his papers. “And how old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven years, 3 days, 12 hours, and 40 minutes.”

  The fly looked up from his notepad with surprise, but since Hare looked like this was a normal answer, he decided simply to continue.

  “And you live in Yok?”

  “In Mindie, at Calle de Serrano, 25.”

  “You went to architecture school with Gavin Zebra?”

  Zebra had started working at Bombardelli & Partners five years earlier, right after the College of Architecture.

  “That was a few years ago. It was Gavin who suggested I should contact you. He said something about a job as an assistant project manager.”

  Vincent was wearing a tight, bright red cashmere sweater with a pair of wide, white pants and loafers. He had also put on a pair of glasses, whose thick black frames were so conspicuous no one would believe there was window glass in them. Judging by his appearance he was already working at an advertising agency or an architect’s office.

  “Tell me a little about yourself,” asked the fly, who worked for Horse Svensson, one of Bombardelli’s two partners.

  All Vincent had prepared was to show up at the right time and the right place in good-looking clothes. The rest was improvisation.

  But to move ahead in life, to even barely make his way, he had decided to break with Dingo and become a part of tax-paying society. He had to break free from his own life bubble. The only one he could think of to call was Gavin Zebra, and now here he was. It was easy to laugh and say to hell with this ridiculous role-playing and realize that a normal life was not for him. But he remembered the sharp smell of soap that still lingered a week after he had washed off the vomit from the Donation Date, and smiled again.

  This was his first job interview, yet he thought he found the right tone. He was arrogant, but not toward the interviewer. He called attention to his deficiencies in order to brag about his strengths. After the interview on his way down in the elevator a tortoise was standing next to him, looking desperate.

  “Did you apply for the job, too?” asked Vincent.

  Diego Tortoise nodded.

  “Me, too. Sorry about that. If I’d known you were going to apply, of course I wouldn’t have come here and swiped it right in front of your nose.” Vincent laughed, the tortoise looked even more nervous, and Vincent got a bad conscience.

  “We need a reward,” said the self-confident Vincent. “The first and last job interview in my life. This has to be celebrated.”

  The tortoise, in a gray suit, with a serious expression and apparently no sense of humor, shook his head, but Vincent would not take no for an answer.

  “We’ll swing by Clerk’s first,” he said. “We’re in the neighborhood, aren’t we?”

  “But I don’t think . . .”

  The elevator d
oors opened, and Vincent had already run ahead.

  They sat at the bar at Clerk’s, where many of the great contemporary thinkers and artists had, according to the newspapers, fallen asleep with their forehead on the wood. Diego Tortoise was surprised by how small the place was, in relation to how often he had read about it. Vincent Hare ordered two colorful pineapple drinks with festive umbrellas even though it was midafternoon, and while Tortoise pretended to sip the alcohol, Vincent told about various ways of lacing pineapple drinks. Tortoise expressed polite interest.

  It was soon revealed that Tortoise, like Vincent, had grown up in Mindie. They had even gone to the same school, but because they were four years apart, their paths had never crossed. Besides, Tortoise had a feeling they would not have gotten along very well if they had met.

  Vincent ordered another round of pineapple drinks. Tortoise took the opportunity to ask for a glass of water.

  Diego Tortoise liked school; mathematics was easy for him and he loved history. Vincent drank and listened with half an ear. Then he pulled himself together, recalled his intentions, and told about his own time in school, which he imagined was the normal thing to do in a situation like this. He lied about athletic achievements and depicted himself as the epicenter of the school balls.

  “Vodka with ice,” Vincent Hare ordered, without being concerned that Tortoise had barely touched the first round of pineapple drinks.

  Continuing studies had not been a given, neither for Tortoise nor for Vincent. In their neighborhood, cubs seldom continued past high school; families in Yok didn’t need more expenses. But Diego Tortoise’s father had once dreamed of becoming a civil engineer, and encouraged his son to apply to Lanceheim Technical College. Vincent Hare admitted to Tortoise that he was no mathematician, and that he had flunked math in his final exams.

  “Maybe I could have passed,” he said, “but it was so deadly boring.”

  Tortoise did not know how to acknowledge such a statement.