Complication

by Isaac Adamson

  The football story was bullshit, but whatever really happened had spooked Paul. He spent Christmas break and most of the month that followed hanging out in his room acting sullen and withdrawn. In the Christmas pictures from that year, Paul is mostly absent but where present, his leg cast gleams an overexposed, ghostly white. He wouldn’t let anybody sign it, kept a sock stretched over the thing at all times. But when he got the cast sawed off and the halved plaster was lying in the garbage can at the hospital, I saw he’d written something on it. Magic markered in plain block letters were the words:

  The abyss also gazes into you.

  I imagined him lying down in bed, hands clasped behind his head, cast foot propped on pillows, meditating on the phrase in between staring at the ceiling listening to his headphones or watching River’s Edge, a film he was obsessed with that year. I didn’t understand what these words meant to him, didn’t know how to bring something like that up to my little brother. In a college philosophy course two years later, I came across the quote in a unit on Nietzsche. It’s a safe bet my brother wasn’t reading Nietzsche. Where he saw the quote, what it meant to him, and how he really broke his leg, are just a few of the hundreds of things I’d never know.

  We contain multitudes, went some other quote.

  We are each one of us a gathering of strangers.

  Somehow I managed to land on the street beneath Bob Hannah’s apartment without breaking any bones of my own. I’d escaped with only a sprained ankle, nothing too bad, but I knew I’d be limping for a couple days when I got back to the States.

  Because that was the plan. Go straight to the airport, get on the next available plane. Given that two of the last four people I’d spoken to were now either dead or comatose, I liked my odds better picking through the contents of the accordion folder back in the Windy City. If there was anything useful, I could always come back, make inquiries through the proper channels. I was done playing sleuth.

  The plan had one problem, though. My passport was still back in the safe at the Hotel Dalibor. I had just enough cash for a cab and caught one near Můstek station. When we reached the hotel, I paid the cabbie but told him to wait, that I’d be right out. He nodded and smiled in kind of a blank way, and I hadn’t even made it to the hotel entrance before he sped off. I limped through the lobby toward the front desk to ask the clerk to call me another cab, but he was busy checking in some visibly irritated couple laden with enough suitcases to stage a small-scale invasion, so I just headed for the elevator.

  Its interior had too many mirrors, and none of them had kind things to say. I forgot which floor I was on for about four seconds then remembered and punched the number three button. The doors had nearly closed when a hand knifed inside. The doors whisked opened again, instantly filling the cab with the smell of alcohol and cigarettes. The new occupant didn’t bother hitting any buttons but just slumped against the back wall of the elevator. I shuffled sideways to make room and looked down at my shoes. My dad’s shoes, that is. No wait—Bob Hannah’s shoes. It was difficult to remember whose shoes I was in at any given moment.

  “Who was he?” said the person next me.

  Vera’s mouth was slanted, her eyes half closed and glistening. Her cheeks were flush, and her head visibly wobbled as she leaned against the mirrored back wall, awaiting my answer. She must have been in the hotel bar, sitting where she could monitor the entrance.

  “Who was who?” I said.

  “You followed me. You got into car with a man. Who was he?”

  “Nobody you want to know.”

  That is if she didn’t know him already. I watched the numbers light up above the doors. They stopped on three, the elevator opened, and I stepped out. Vera lurched after me down the hall. The ankle was going to be worse than I’d thought. Halfway down the hall she started yelling.

  “You lied to me!”

  “People are trying to sleep,” I mumbled.

  “You promised!” She latched onto my shoulder, taking a fistful of my jacket, trying to spin me around and ripping the fabric in the process. It didn’t take much—what with diving in canal, going through a windshield, getting pelted with rain, and serving as a girdle, it had been a tough night for Dad’s last black suit. Vera lowered her voice. “You said you would speak to no one. You promised me.”

  “That was before certain facts came to light.”

  “Oh? Just what is it you think you know?”

  I shook her off, kept moving down the hall.

  “He is a policeman, isn’t he?”

  “Used to be,” I said. “Not any more.”

  “I’ve seen him. At the Black Rabbit. Ježíš Maria, I knew he was a policeman.”

  “That a criminal thing, knowing how to make cops?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve had some scrapes with the law, no?”

  “Scrapes? What did your policeman tell you?”

  “Does it really matter at this point?” We reached my room. I shifted the accordion folder and Unbound under my arm as I dug through my pockets to find my key card.

  “What did he say?”

  “That you were involved in a drug ring.”

  “A drug ring? My God, no. Just some stupid friends when I was young. It’s absurd to call this a drug ring. What else did he say?”

  I slipped the key card into the slot and the door clicked opened and I went inside. Part of me wanted to slam the door in Vera’s face. Paul had been dead for five years, and I’d done just fine with his death being an accident. Done fine without the Black Rabbit or the Rudolf Complication or the Right Hand of God or Martinko Klingáč. I had Vera to thank for all of them, and I’d have done just fine without her, too.

  She followed me inside as I groped around for the light, my hand skittering moth-like over the wall. Vera moved past me and emerged on the other side of the room, pushing aside the curtain, bringing in the moonlight, the murky sonata of water cascading over the rooftops, streaming through rain pipes, spilling onto the streets. Maybe she was checking to see if I had been followed by the cops. Maybe it was a signal to someone below.

  Come up in ten minutes.

  Bring an empty cake box.

  She stood silhouetted at the window, so thin she was nearly an abstract shape. I found the wall switch and threw it on and Vera winced against the light like it had insulted her. It hadn’t. She’d look good under a floodlamp or inside a sensory deprivation chamber, which just irritated me more. I made my way to the metal safe containing my passport and valuables. I couldn’t remember the combination.

  “You want to know about this . . . this drug ring?”

  “Not especially.” 12 left . . . 07 right?

  “When I was at the university, my boyfriend brought some ecstasy from the Netherlands. Five or six of us were going to go camping in Frymburk. Just hang out by the lake all weekend, have a good time.”

  09 left, 27 right . . . 71 left? Nope. Denied. I’d always used birthdates for setting combination codes—mine, Paul’s, my father’s—but with Vera nattering on, I couldn’t keep the numbers lined up in my head.

  “But it started raining just before we left. They said it was supposed to rain all week, and we decided let’s stay in the city. So five of us, we went to a club instead.”

  “You don’t have much luck with rain, do you?”

  She gave me a wounded look. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. What happened at the club?”

  “My boyfriend at this time, Josef was his name, he was high. We were all high, but he was really out of his head. And he decided wouldn’t it be funny to sell some of the pills? Let’s pretend we are drug dealers! A joke, you know. A game. It was funny then, I can’t say why.”

  “Maybe because you were on drugs?”

  “Could be,” she said. “So he sold ecstasy to some kid in the bathroom. And then the second person he tried to sell it to was a policeman. End of drug ring.” Vera finished her story with a one-note laugh. “God, Josef was a
n idiot.”

  I don’t know which numbers did it but the safe popped opened. Absurd. A joke. The same kind of language she’d used describing my brother’s watch theft scheme, and yet she’d gone along with that, too. I didn’t know if she was lying to me or just herself, or if she really was the perpetual passive victim-accomplice she came across as. I didn’t care anymore. Everything in my wallet looked to be in order. All my dad’s credit cards were there, along with two hundred dollars American and about two-thousand Czech crowns. I shoved all of it, passport, wallet, Rudolf’s Curiosities exhibit booklet, and Prague Unbound, into the accordion folder now doubling as my suitcase.

  I heard a dry click and spun to the sound. Vera held a lit cigarette in one hand and a gunmetal lighter in the other. She’d opened the window and was blowing smoke out into the night as the curtains flowed around her, her body entirely still, a statue of itself.

  “Close that fucking window.”

  My tone jolted her. My tone jolted me.

  “I thought because of the smoke—”

  “I’ve got a thing about open windows.”

  “Alright, fine. Fine. Ježíš Maria.”

  “This room is no smoking anyway.”

  “So call your policeman. Have me arrested.”

  “Five years later your tracks are all covered, huh?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know where you live, Vera. I saw your house. It’s a nice house with a nice car in a nice garage. Nice big yard for kids to play in. That’s an awful lot of nice for someone whose last job was as a part-time art gallery worker five years ago.”

  “That’s what this about? My house?”

  “Will you please close the window?”

  “You don’t know what you think you know.”

  “I’m an uncle. I know that.”

  That stopped her. I stomped across the room, pain emanating in waves from my ankle, and I must have looked crazy because she recoiled as I neared, moving off to one side, eyes not leaving mine for a second. I slammed the window shut and did the latch. As I moved away, she buried her face in her hands and started shaking her head and mumbling something over and over in Czech. Or maybe it was Klingon.

  “His name is Lee,” she finally said.

  I turned around.

  “My son. He’s four years old and his name is Lee.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “His middle name. His first name is Tomáš, after my grandfather. They call him Tomášek, or Tomík. Means like little Tomáš. But his middle name is for your father. Most Czech children don’t have middle names, you know.”

  No, I didn’t know. Ever since I got here, people thought I knew what I didn’t know.

  “But Paul once said if he had a child he would name it Lee,” she continued. “And now Tomáš doesn’t want to be called Tomáš because already there are already two other Tomáš’ in his class. So we call him Lee. I was six weeks pregnant when Paul died. He didn’t know. He never knew.”

  I couldn’t muster a response. I went to the bathroom to grab my shaving kit and Vera trailed behind me. I realized I hadn’t brought any shaving kit and bent over the sink and splashed water on my face. My wet face in the mirror a cruel caricature.

  “Why are you so angry?” said Vera.

  “I’m not angry.”

  “I’m the one who should be angry.”

  “So be angry. I’m going home.”

  “To America? It’s nearly two in the morning. No planes will be leaving now. I don’t even think the airport will be opened.”

  “Of course it’s open. It’s an airport.”

  “There’s blood on your shirt.”

  There was. And looking down, more than I would’ve thought.

  “What happened?” Vera said. “What is going on?”

  I pushed past her, went into the main room to grab my things. I glanced at the painting on wall, The Unmerciful Geometry of Zugzwang 1938, with the grumpy old pipe smoker and his arrogant young chess opponent and all the faceless patrons in the smoky café and all at once pictured myself in an airport security line. Unshaven, disheveled, and baggy-eyed, a cut by my right ear and a rip in my suit jacket. Dried blood on my collar and shirtsleeves. Pants torn. I fast-forwarded to the part where I had to remove my shoes—whoever’s shoes—and the security guy sees I’m wearing no socks. Sees the soles of my feet covered in a suspiciously reddish substance. Notices I have no carry-on luggage, save for a dog-eared book embedded with glass, and a giant folio with a black hand scribbled on its side. I had a better chance of being crowned King of Wallachia than I had getting on an airplane.

  But that didn’t mean I was going to stick around and wait for Soros to show up. And as long as Vera was with me, well, there was one less person out there plotting how to kill me or frame me for killing someone else. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, the saying went. I envied its originator for being able to tell the difference.

  “We’re leaving,” I said.

  “Leaving? To where?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re not safe here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell to me what is happening.”

  “I’ll tell you inside a cab.”

  She weighed this for a long time. Hers wasn’t what you’d call an expressive face, but it moved through a number of frustrated variations only to arrive right where it had started the very first time I’d seen her, when I’d spotted her across the room at the Black Rabbit, looking beautiful and exhausted and resigned to the notion that whatever happened next could be no worse than what had already occurred. She was gazing into something also gazing into her, and each was waiting for the other one to blink.

  CHAPTER 12

  I nstead of a cab we took Vera’s car, a BMW model maybe eight years old that she’d parked in the three-car lot opposite the Hotel Dalibor. There was a child’s safety seat in the back, and when she turned on the ignition, some high-pitched cartoon voice started singing in Czech to a John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt melody. Vera turned off the stereo and took out her phone as she maneuvered the car out of the lot.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m calling to say I won’t be back tonight.”

  “Calling who?”

  “You must relax.”

  “Don’t tell anyone where we’re going.”

  “Relax. I’ll tell them what I tell them.”

  “I’m relaxed. Where are we going anyway?”

  “You said not to say.” A cutting smile. I didn’t like it, but what was I going to do? I couldn’t check into another hotel, not without using a credit card, which meant Soros and his former friends on the force or his newer friends in the Martinko Klingáč fan club would be able to track me down. I could’ve asked Vera to get a room, but they knew her, too. As she spoke in hushed tones to what must have been an answering machine, I tried to think what I would’ve done in similar circumstances in Chicago. Go to that twenty-four-hour Korean restaurant on Lawrence? Just drive up and down Milwaukee Avenue all night until I ran out of gas? It was a moot point. I wasn’t in Chicago, and I wasn’t in charge of what happened next. Ever since I walked into the Black Rabbit, I really never had been.

  One of the hard parts about being in a foreign country is losing your cultural signifiers. Back home, a woman talks a certain way, wears a certain kind of clothes, and you can more or less gauge the type of job she might have, her education level, who she votes for, what TV shows she probably likes. With Vera, I had no idea. What did it mean that she drove a BMW? What did it mean that she’d gone to Charles University, that she’d been busted trying to sell ecstasy in a club, that she smoked Marlboro Reds, or that she spoke English as well as she did? What did it mean that, as far as I could tell, she had no job? What did it mean that she lived in Ořechovka? She had money—that much seemed obvious—but was it old money, new money, earned money, stolen money? What did it mean she’d had a child with my brother out
of wedlock? Was this frowned upon here, or was it commonplace, no big deal? If she was American, I could have sized her up and answered all these questions without even having to consciously think about it. And maybe my answers would have been wrong, based on stereotypes and assumptions, all those snap judgments you’re not supposed to make by the book’s cover, but at least it would’ve been a start.

  She finished her call, speaking a few phrases in Czech that could have meant anything, and then hung up with a look of relief. Outside the window the fabric of the night lay densely woven over the tiny streets, the empty churches, the torpid river and low stone bridges stitched across it. As Vera drove southward, the adrenaline left my body and my muscles lost their tension and I felt myself drifting.

  Next thing I knew we were parked on a street canopied by trees growing on an adjacent grassy embankment. We were on the other side of the river now, the west side, perhaps only thirty yards from the water’s edge.

  “Wake up, wake up,” Vera monotoned.

  She got out of the car and slammed the door. I followed her. We walked past a blazing Erotic World porn shop that was better lit than most of the films they sold, then stopped at a door around the corner. I watched Vera’s pale hands as she flipped through her keys. Fingers so thin a paper cut might hit bone. She opened the door and we ascended a dingy stairwell, vanishing in the gloom and reemerging onto a carpeted third-story hallway. She was now several yards ahead of me, jostling another key inside another lock. I found myself studying the back of her neck, her spine like a string of pearls stretched taut under her skin.

  Then I saw the man in a black suit at the far end of the hall advancing with halting strides. When he saw I’d noticed him he stopped walking. For several moments we stood motionless regarding each other, and I felt a rising panic as I blinked against the light, trying to focus on his face. The man blinked too, and all at once I realized I was staring into a mirror, one mounted in a frame at the hall’s end, placed above a little table with a vase and a few fake flowers. Couldn’t blame me for thinking the guy suspect. Just look at the miserable bastard.