In/Half

by Jasmin B. Frelih

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Chin up.’

  He smashed himself with his fist. Shards of mirror fell into the sink. Blood spurted from his knuckles. As he watched it mix with the water, he saw his face multiplied in the jagged frames through the glaze of false light. He wiped himself off with the towel and clenched his teeth. He marched out. She was right where he’d left her. At the bare kitchen table. Irritated skin around her eyes and lips parted into a staged cramp of emptiness. How could he have been so blind?

  ‘Mojca, tell me, why didn’t you ever show up for an audition?’

  She didn’t respond. This role is made for her. The audience is firmly on her side.

  He grabbed her by the chin and pulled her face to him.

  ‘Where is he?’

  She swallowed her saliva, rolled her eyes, shook and woke up. A sigh in the first row.

  ‘Where is what?’ she asked lazily, her mouth barely moving. They won’t hear you up in the balcony, Mojca, louder.

  ‘Where is my child? Where’s the blood? What have you done with the blood?’

  Her eyes narrowed as she gradually imbued the questions with meaning. Then they opened wide as she drew a sharp breath. Then she shrieked and kept shrieking. Evan lay his hand over her mouth, felt the moist, hot breath, she grabbed him, she sank her nails into his skin, freed her mouth and shrieked. A standing ovation.

  Evan ran into the kitchen, opened the door of the cupboard under the sink, hauled out the bin and shook the contents out all over the floor. He kicked the rubbish around. Mojca shrieked. Then he ran into the bathroom again and took out the laundry basket. He dumped it out in front of her, over the table, she screamed, he threw the towels, socks, underwear at her. ‘What did you do with it?’ She caught her breath and shrieked in an even higher note. He ran out of the flat, down the stairs, the screaming following him through the doors, to the rubbish bin, and he started to tear at the plastic bags, digging for evidence that might restore at least a bit of his dignity. Passers-by avoided him. He gave up and sat down on the pile of rubbish. The shrieking coming through the window stopped. He looked up.

  Mojca opened the window and put a foot on the ledge. Now it was his turn to scream. He stood up and ran back into the flat. He jerked her away from the window, threw her to the ground and pressed down on her with all his weight. She sobbed, whimpered quietly, the applause continued, flowers flew onto the stage, ladies fainted. ‘What did you do with it?’ he whispered in her ear. ‘In the pancakes,’ she said, and shut her eyes. Her body went limp. Evan got up. He closed the window. He went over to the front door. He closed it. Then to the bathroom. He looked through the toilet seat. He spat. He flushed. He swore. He flushed.

  ‘Get out,’ he said, and flushed. ‘Get out.’ The waters drained away.

  The suck of emptiness. He was waiting for the cistern to fill. Get lost. Chin up. The show’s over. Bravo. Wonderful. Marvellous. He flushed again and stared into the vortex of water.

  That night he lost a tooth.

  That hurts!

  ‘Koito!’ he screamed.

  Koito’s mouth had clamped shut and was holding him tight. He pressed his thumb into her neck and tried to push her away. A hot pain cut into his groin. He’d never felt anything like it. It tore right up into his ribs. He couldn’t make it stop. He waved his arms and hit her on the neck, in vain. The mechanical sound grew louder, little cogs were creaking in her jaw, her mouth was closing tighter and he was trapped inside. The vision of a fox gnawing off its leg put him into a total panic. He started punching her, wildly, but that did nothing to stop the progression of those jaws. He grabbed the coffee cup and smashed it against her. The scalding liquid poured over her head and ran between his legs. He screamed. He tried to force the pain out through his throat. It was in no hurry to depart.

  But he had succeeded. Koito crashed. Her hair frizzled, smoke rose from her head and the skin on her face slid downwards. Her eyes turned grey. Her grip eased. He had to wait for it to ease before he could escape and run to the bathroom to let the cold water take him in. Blisters surfaced. Swearing, he banged his head against the side of the cabinet. If he’d known how everything would turn out, he’d have ended it all years ago.

  Drops fell from him as he moved to the cabinet and opened it in reluctant anticipation. It was empty. Koito had completely disabled him. The trace of drops then led to the console, where he pressed the button for first aid. There were many icons to choose from. Knife, stomach, a toilet, mercury, fire. He pressed fire. He’d been burned. He saw the airplane ticket on the counter. What? He collected his crumpled jeans from the floor and searched through the pockets. A business card. Lefkas. mAk. He felt a pleasant excitement that almost smothered the burning. The doors opened. He grabbed a green tube and a few pieces of gauze. The ointment smelt of urine and when he spread it over his penis he felt a chill. Koito had slid down from the bed to the floor with the hollow sound of an overturned vase falling onto a carpet without breaking. He allowed himself a lengthy smirk.

  Taxis in Edo are like black, flattened hearses. You flag them down with a feverish shaking of your body under a wet sky which, in thick drops, lends rhythm to the metal and plays longwinded salon jazz inside people’s heads. Evan had a bag of ice in his underwear. He showed the business card to the drivers, they looked him right in the face, are you joking?, and when they realized he was serious they angrily slammed the door in his face and drove off. Evan screamed after them that he would pay double, triple, what was the problem? When the fourth one drove off he went to the reception desk and showed the business card to the guy behind the table. The smile on his face looked like the irreparable results of surgery gone wrong. Perhaps he took it off at the end of his shift, hung it up with his tie on a hook and was allowed to go home grumpy. It must be hard to speak through such a smile. Nevertheless you could see how the wrinkles around his eyes sank immediately when he realized what Evan wanted to know.

  ‘Mr Z—, I would not recommend going there, really, I just wouldn’t. Firstly, speaking on behalf of the Kéki chain, because we care for our guests. Secondly, speaking personally, there’s nothing there for you.’

  Evan reflected for a moment. By whatever means. It wasn’t his decision to make.

  ‘Well, thank you, both you and your chain, for your concern, but I have to go there, today, right this minute, and in any case I am going to go there’ – he waited for the non-verbal response – ‘so I am absolving you of all professional and moral responsibility and asking you once more to tell me how I can most easily do what it is I want to do.’

  The receptionist could not quite understand, though he could see that Evan wasn’t going to give up.

  ‘Do you even know where you’re going?’

  ‘I know.’

  Evan did not know.

  ‘All right,’ said the young man and allowed his zeal to wane, ‘you’ll have to take the underground. The entrance is across the street. I’ll write the directions on the business card. You’re going to need personal identification and a gas mask.’

  ‘A gas mask?’ exclaimed Evan.

  ‘If you don’t have one you can buy one at the entrance to that sector. It costs forty asias. You can also rent one. The deposit is also forty asias. I would recommend wearing more robust clothing.’

  Evan wanted to conceal his ignorance, not to let his surprise show. People always follow up lies with a confident look. In any case his shirt was soaked through. ‘Robust clothing’? What was that supposed to mean? He waited for the receptionist to write down the underground lines and stations, then snatched the card, thanked him heartily and strode back into the lift.

  Koito’s leg was bent 180 degrees at the knee and her big toe was clacking against the floor. Why the hell did she even need nails? He watched her with slight discomfort as he changed clothes. She reminded him of a stormy morning, a crow’s nest. Had the cleaning lady been in yet? He dragged her to the bed and covered her with a sheet. He picked up the newspaper fr
om the floor and mulled over whether to take it with him. He glanced at the first page and threw it against the wall. The windows were darkened. The lights turned off by themselves when he left.

  Dressed in a black anorak and hardy corduroy trousers he headed back out into the rain, encouraged by the receptionist’s raised thumb. He caught a drop on his tongue and grimaced at the taste of chlorine. Artificial rain. Once he’d had a pool. He loved to swim. One birthday, his present was a dead pigeon. He scooped it out with the net, drained the water and left the pool empty.

  He went down the stairs into the underground. The walls of black brick coated with varnish reflected the light of the halogen tubes. There weren’t many people. A few businessmen in shoddy shoes, some merchants, weighed down by piles of wet goods, and three widows. No children. The benches were dirty, no one sat on them. Evan leant against the wall and looked at the people’s backs. He was painting handprints on their shoulder blades, like in those caves in Argentina, and he felt grateful he wasn’t a murderer. Called by the void.

  The silent train arrived on its magnetic tracks, spilling green light. It made the faces look contagious. The lights inside were colourless. He sat beside a black-haired girl in a school uniform. She was holding a compact mirror and slowly, thoughtfully, applying make-up. Nobody looked at anyone. The art of avoiding eye contact. He consulted the map on the business card. Easy as can be. He caught the smell of carbide. It was coming from the girl’s hair. His eyes lingered over her, she didn’t react. With her skirt hiked high above her knees, she looked like a dead bat. He cleared his throat. She inched away from him.

  At the next station the car filled up completely. He had to draw his legs in and push them to the side. He was able to put the back of his hand against her thigh. The mirror followed her chin upwards. The people were sweaty. The odour from their bodies transformed the air into a pink fog. Disinfectant bags were hanging empty from the ceiling. Public claustrophobia. When you squeeze people into a small space, they aren’t disgusted by the touching; they rub entire swathes of flesh against one another. If you pressed up against a stranger like that out in the open, everyone would find it strange.

  He laid his palm over her knee. She didn’t look at him. She closed her compact, stood up and fought her way through the throng to the exit, where she fixed her skirt. She was wearing striped black-and-white stockings. She was not at all attractive. A grey-haired gentleman sat down beside Evan and dug an elbow into his side.

  ‘Is that you?’ he asked. His hand lay pressed against his body. He raised it to his face and out popped his index finger. Evan followed the finger. He was looking at an advertising panel just below the ceiling. FILLING, in screeching letters. A face with a wide-open mouth. Revolting wrinkle canyons. Hair that looked dirty, thousands of tiny cuts and clogged pores, tired, wincing eyes. When had he become so ugly? He couldn’t hold anything against Mundo, he’d tried as best he could with the lighting. But his face was radiating decay. He still liked his irises though. Those don’t get old. He nodded.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  Evan ruminated. He ran a hand over his face. His cheeks were swollen, his jaw ached. In the gap between his teeth there was a gluey mixture of gums and anxiety.

  ‘I fell.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I just fell.’

  His fellow passenger inhaled and nodded. A whispering ran through the car. The faces of teenagers and adults were whizzing between him and the advertisement, hiding behind outstretched palms, giggling. An artist on the underground, what kind of a terrible joke is this? When he bent his head and counted shoes, separating them by income, by activity, by sex, the whisperers gained courage. When he looked up again, the crowd’s eyes were penetrating him.

  ‘That’s not me,’ he said unobtrusively and shook his head. The eyeballs didn’t move, so he raised his voice. ‘That’s not me. You’ve mistaken me for someone else. Would that guy take the underground?’ He’d sown confusion, a pinch of doubt. ‘I’d love to be him, believe me. Better than being me, that’s for sure.’ He had just about convinced them when the guy sitting next to him poked him again.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ ‘I didn’t,’ he replied. The gentleman took another breath and coolly raised his eyebrows. Somebody grabbed Evan by the shoulder. He shook him off. He did it again. ‘Really, you’re wrong.’ They were not wrong. They approached. A forest of bodies. He raised a lip and almost growled, ‘Leave me alone.’ They were shocked.

  ‘And where’s your sponsor?’ someone asked.

  ‘In prison.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And the replacement?’

  ‘She crashed.’

  ‘Oh.’

  That cooled them down, made them take a step back. A foreigner without a sponsor could be dangerous. They turned back to their individual burdens. Evan remembered he had a mobile. He searched his pockets. Had he taken it with him? He couldn’t remember. But it was there. The body is always on the lookout for contact. The battery was almost dead. No signal underground. Thirty-seven missed calls. Oksana I. B., Oksana I. B., Oksana I. B., Oksana I. B., Oksana I. B., Oksana I. B.,…He turned the phone off, put it back, took it out again, slid his finger over its plastic form, threw it onto the floor and stamped on it with his heel. Durable thing. He raised his foot and hammered it down on the phone. It shattered and the frightened people took a step back. He felt better. The red light flashed for the next stop. He got up. A fellow passenger took him by the elbow and from his sedentary position looked at him with mournful eyes.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re getting off here?’

  Evan retracted his hand then forcefully nudged a woman who was standing in his way. They cracked their knuckles and gritted their teeth in judgement. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t answer the man. The doors opened and he rushed out. No one else got off. That was good.

  The pale lights in the corridor were blinking with epileptic pulses of electricity in a long, rhythmless line, giving the impression of a sequence of quickly moving spaces that would crush anyone who remained in the vacuum of darkness. There was a slight twist in the corridor, the end was not visible. Every few seconds a light in the distance revealed the outline of a sitting figure, its back leaning against the wall. Evan gathered his courage. The ice in his underwear was already melting. He waited for the light and looked between his legs to see whether a dark stain of moistness had started to show. It looked dry. The bag hadn’t leaked.

  His steps produced no echo. The collective buzzing of gases sounded like television snow. The birth of the universe. Even in man-made shafts the nature of all things resonates. He was getting close to the figure on the floor. He could more clearly make out his outlines in the pulses of light. Was that a violin he was holding? An old vagabond, mentally pulverized, comes during the day to play an old-continent solo into the fragmented darkness, far away from people. He dug around in his pocket for some change.

  ‘Play me a few cents’ worth!’ he called out. The figure did not move.

  He paused, looked down, ok, took a step. Maybe he’s sleeping? Is he dead? Why isn’t he playing? Evan wanted some music, so he whistled. The whistling travelled down the corridor like a line of wool. Crackling with static. The shadows followed it.

  The broad hat like those worn by gauchos on the southern steppes, over a black coat with mould creeping down the sleeves, and the tips of cracked boots. In his lap, a miserable guitar with a broken string that formed a curl of steel at the neck. Evan stood and listened for the lungs to make a sound. Not even the slightest of movements. The coldness between his legs felt like encroaching fear. With each pulse of light he expected the hat to rise and reveal a face of rusted metal, or for the coat to grab him by the leg with pointed compass-toes. He placed a hand over the chest. Stillness. He had to admit he was enjoying this adrenaline game. But he soon tired. This pile of clothes showed no life, not even an appalling one. He reached into his pants and pulled out the transparent bag now filled with icy wat
er. He tossed it onto the guitar.

  The guitar collapsed into dust, the lap sunk, the hat rolled off and spat out a grey skull that bounced along the tiled floor with the sound of high heels clacking. The light went out. Evan shrieked and ran.

  There was no one at the exit. A narrow staircase led Evan up to a platform where he stopped for a moment to marvel at the emptiness. Light entered the space from cloudy windows way up under the ceiling. Thick patches of dust were converging into tiny civilizations, cobwebs divided the ceiling into fractals, the door of the kiosk lay bent on the floor, granting a glimpse of its innards. All around lay colourful oily puddles that smacked of petrol rainbows. The platform had been abandoned for long stretches of eternity. Evan had no time to wonder. It seemed opportune that desire had led him to such a place.

  He trudged into the dust. All the exits were closed tight. Beside them were rickety stands full of long rows of gas masks. He took one and looked at it. The snout of a cow and the eyes of a squid. He had a burning sensation and his jaw creaked with pain when he blew the dust off the mask. He ran his hands along the edges of one of the exits. No gaps. His sense of restlessness abated when he spied the console. He wiped it down and stared into the shimmering red light, the tiny eye of the machine. He put the mask over his head. He pressed hard on the button.

  When the air pressure had equalized, the tentacles of incoming wind spun the cob-webbed dust into giant drills. The fog from outside crept onto the floor like a tongue. He stepped out. He didn’t know whether the rusty orange tones were caused by daylight or by the glass filter in the mask. The tops of the tower blocks vanished in curtains of smog, and then there were the broken-windowed façades, broken streetlamps, scattered letterboxes, motionless, silent and calm. Evan struggled to read the numbers on the faded signs. The path guided him in among the buildings. He looked back and tried to remember where he had turned so he wouldn’t get lost. A loaf of bread would come in handy. There were no birds.