In/Half

by Jasmin B. Frelih

  The man in silk returned to the car a decade older, and yet more like a living human being than when he went out. It seemed that he only now realized that he wasn’t alone in the back of the car. With a curt nod of the head he greeted his fellow passengers – somebody with a bag over his head and a lame woman beside him – and planted a hand on the driver’s shoulder.

  ‘You, just drive me home, ok? I’m not flying anywhere today.’

  A smile returned to the driver’s face, he turned and joyously tore the bag off the head of the man in the middle.

  ‘Did you hear? We’re going home!’

  The face, lit up by the soft motorway lights which deepened his hollow cheeks in the play of shadows, slowly pondered the meaning of that sentence. With each second his smile narrowed – the hole in the bottom row of his teeth disappeared – until instead of a mouth there was only a thin pale line.

  ‘Home?’ he asked.

  The driver, him, stared at him in restrained expectation, like a boy waiting for a magician’s final trick, and answered the question with an enthusiastic nod. The man who was now holding the bag in his lap and had started to squeeze it clearly did not share his enthusiasm.

  ‘But…but,’ he turned his head from side to side, as if expecting support from his fellow passengers, before rushing forwards and grabbing the driver’s sleeves.

  ‘But she’s still there, trapped, I didn’t want… I didn’t mean to, but…but, we have to help her. How are we going to help her?’

  The driver laughed and Guadalupe started to doubt whether it was really him. His face was changing, but not in the way it had been changing before, when they were sitting in the room and he suddenly became someone else. Now the transformation seemed to be going in the opposite direction, as if he’d settled into the skin of the stranger, taken on his face, his body – and she had to admit it really seemed like a living, fleshy body – and was now struggling from within for mastery over its appearance. If, just a moment before, his face was completely the way she remembered it, now a shadow had dropped over that face and shortened his nose or bleached his eyes, and he had to strain his jaw for his nose to return, for his eyes to turn dark brown again. He hadn’t made it yet. Not entirely.

  ‘Don’t worry, Evan. Don’t you worry about a thing. Everything’s taken care of, I’ve thought of everything.’

  ‘So we’re going to help her?’

  Guadalupe caught sight of a flame blazing in an eye.

  ‘We already have. She doesn’t need your help. Everything is fine.’

  ‘So I can go home? Go home for real?’

  ‘We’re going home.’

  The man whose head was formerly bagged – his name was Evan, she had learnt – had flopped back into his seat, exhaled loudly and was grinning again. He looked at Guadalupe.

  ‘She’s gone, you know? She is not going to be home. But I’ll manage, even at home, without her. You know you look a little like her? I loved her so much. Don’t you worry.’

  He squeezed her thigh encouragingly a little above the knee and turned to the other side. The driver – him? – turned back to the steering wheel with a persistent smile on his face, on that unsteady, shifting, fluid face, and drove off.

  ‘What’s up, man? How are you?’ Evan asked the man who was sitting next to him.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, I’m good,’ he answered in a sturdy bass which exuded weariness. ‘I just wanted to…’

  His voice died away and Guadalupe imagined how he would turn to the window and watch the white posts passing by at the side of the road, each one bearing an unexpressed thought, an unfulfilled desire, a stifled cry. Who are these people and what was she doing here with them?

  ‘What did you want?’ Evan poked him. The face – she didn’t see, she only knew – turned to him again and allowed itself an open, relieved smile before answering.

  ‘Yeah, you know, I wanted…the kid…’

  Now a moment of hesitation, almost confusion, flashed over the face. Two vertical incisions in the forehead above the nose remained there even after the gaze cleared.

  ‘Nothing, well, I just wanted to visit the kid.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Evan in an inquisitive tone. ‘And how old is he now? Where is he? Travelling? Is he already done with his studies?’

  The man swept away the flood of questions with a wave of the hand and a meek smile.

  ‘Leave it. How old? Oh, he’s old. His own man. He’s old enough for me to leave him alone. I think that’s best for him. No?’

  Evan looked at the street and turned down the corners of his lips.

  ‘Oh, for sure, for sure,’ he said with the voice of someone who knows what he’s talking about. ‘Nothing became of me until they left me alone. But really alone, metaphysically alone. In fact they didn’t leave me alone until I left myself completely alone, without them. Do you know what I mean? They had to leave me so alone that I didn’t even have a reason to think that they maybe had not left me alone, and I could no longer imagine that, although they were leaving me alone, they in fact did not want to leave me alone, and probably still wanted to do something with me other than leave me alone. Only when you leave yourself alone do they really leave you alone. Do you get what I’m trying to say? And only then can you to their place for lunch, as if nothing happened. Until…’

  The driver laughed. He was chasing the passengers’ faces in the rear-view mirror. More than once he winked at Guadalupe. She found it very warm and everything seemed very important, but not so important that she needed to pay complete attention, attempt to follow every little bit and bother herself with every little detail, it’s just how it was, everything was simply worthy of being there with her, beside her, together, important just because it was there, independent of other things, and she found all of this beautiful. Even the clouds disappeared. The night suddenly turned that shade of coldish blue where the stars seem so close, and your focus is drawn to the edge of the universe, which perhaps isn’t even as large as you imagine it to be on cloudy days. If you could just reach out your hand…

  ‘What about him? What do you think he’s been doing these past years?’ Evan asked. He gently kicked the seat in front of him and sighed. His voice bore a hint of accusation–as if he felt he had a right to know more and resented knowing so little.

  ‘How should I know? An eternity went by without us hearing from him. Nothing. As if we didn’t exist.’

  Evan leant forwards again and grabbed the driver by the shoulder.

  ‘Well, spill it. We want to know everything.’

  Even Guadalupe became a part of the curiosity that lay thickly about the passengers in the back seat. What had he been doing all those years, with her? Was he even there? Did he somehow manage to slip away somewhere? Had he found a way out from time-stop and no-space? Did Father know what he was doing and is that why he left him with her? Was that her test? Her path to independence? Were these questions which she had been asking herself with unimaginable rapidity and which served her only as a long row of bottomless wells over which she was jumping, without ever sensing a single drop of water – water! Water! What was it with the water – were these questions even her own? She seemed separated from her purpose. And although she now felt light, impossibly light and free and liberated, had she perhaps let the world down? Would people now imagine things the wrong way?

  The driver cleared his throat.

  ‘I didn’t make it, back then. I thought I would. But I didn’t. I lost. I believed in things I shouldn’t have believed in and arrived at the end before I could conclude anything. I was powerless there. I wasn’t able to change anything, so I could only wait for my name to be uttered one last time. I must say I was sure you would think of me more often.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said the man in silk, ‘you disappeared without a trace. The last time we saw each other, you said you were leaving, but I didn’t know that meant we wouldn’t hear a single word from you for a quarter of a century. The longing to see you again slowly faded
… I don’t know why, and I don’t know what it was that replaced it. The bitterness that grows from insult, or the forgetting that comes from missing someone for too long. Either way, each of us, all of us, went our own way.’

  Evan was slowly nodding beside him, his expression no longer one of untroubled joy, but a deliberate mask placed over decades of regret.

  ‘Each into the strings of slip-ups people short on sense call lives,’ he added cautiously.

  ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying make any accusations,’ continued the driver. ‘I’m just saying. With each mention of my name, with each thought that flew towards me, and with each minute that I, albeit with a strange face and uncertain intentions, spent in your dreams, I received the charge of energy that I needed to arrive here, at this point where we are now, so that I could finally take hold of what I wanted to to take hold of, alive. It took longer than I thought it would. But I completely understand. The times weren’t so favourable to you. Why waste them on reminiscence?’

  ‘And now?’ asked Evan.

  ‘Now I’ll see whether I made it. Whether the seam holds. All in all, it’s very selfish. Even over there things haven’t changed significantly. I still toyed with the destinies of others and led them around my way. Please excuse me. I wouldn’t have put you through all of this if I didn’t think you were helping me out.’

  ‘Helping you out how?’ asked the person by the window.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ said the driver softly, his head pushed towards the windshield and his face turned upwards, as if he wanted to get something from the sky to give them in place of silence. Guadalupe knew there was nothing up there – but neither did she stop staring.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Evan. The man in the back next to him exhaled loudly through his nose. The driver, gazing at the sky, spoke as if repeating a phrase he’d learnt by heart years ago, his thoughts entirely somewhere else.

  ‘What compels me to live?’ he asked. ‘That’s all I was asking myself back then, when I got on that plane obsessed with the idea, the only one I had left, that I wanted to live alone. A one-way ticket out, to anywhere, to the edge of the world. I worshipped it like a god. In my head there were immensities of conifers growing, cold dew on the meadows grazed by horses, and it shook me, drowning in the phantasms of the creek, how it deafeningly licks ancient rocks that are there for no purpose whatsoever. Self-sufficient. The crackling fire at night and naked solitude on the open skin of another being. Peace. And I know it’s a classic romantic idea, and I know that I wasn’t the first who wanted to escape all this accumulation of flesh, in favour of things that leave you alone, but back then it seemed truly important to me. A matter of life and death. If I hadn’t been able to flee…’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Evan repeated.

  ‘What don’t you understand?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Just what the hell did we do to you that was so bad?’ snapped the man in silk. ‘Are you going to say that we didn’t know how to accept what you are or what you wanted to be? Are you going to accuse us of not knowing how to leave you alone?’

  ‘Let me finish. I’m not the same person. I was not spared insight. Please.’ He waited for the silence to thicken into consent, and continued.

  ‘I ran away from mirrors. I ran away from a culture that was constantly repeating a model of be what you are, even as it snatched away the exclusive right to how you could play out and perform your identity. Be what you are, and we will say what that is. Do you get it? And nobody got away from it. You couldn’t get away. You could play the freedom card and they’d take you for a madman. You could hold on to your soul and be seen as a weakling. You could deny culture, deny the judgement of others, deny the power of the gaze, and nowhere, in no one’s, not even in one’s own heart, did this sound like an act of courage, more like common weakness. That crazy paradox of those times, when the decision for complete personal autonomy in society took away all the levers that would let you make choices of your own.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you wanted to be so independent,’ said Evan, quietly. ‘Wasn’t there anyone you loved?’

  The man beside him exhaled through his nose. ‘That is a matter of ruined responsibility. A being who has created himself in the image of those around him suddenly finds himself in a position where those images no longer correspond to him. Instead of actively setting to work in his surroundings and leading them, to the best of his abilities, in the direction he believes is right, he prefers to run away. I get you. Don’t think I don’t. But that problem is the luxury of people who can afford it. Ask what slaves in the clutches of traffickers think about absolute personal autonomy, or what little boys in the middle of minefields think about it. Don’t hold it against me if I can’t empathize with you.’

  The driver laughed bitterly.

  ‘I know, I know. I hope someday you’ll find time to think about everything you just said, since either way nothing panned out for me. Does anything ever really pan out for anyone? And I don’t need your empathy. I don’t need anything anymore, now. Nothing can be changed anymore. After everything that happened… I have no other choice. This is what I have to call being left alone.’

  The passengers remained silent.

  Guadalupe screamed. She bent at the waist and her head dropped between her knees, she twitched violently a few more times, as if someone was beating her on the back, and then regained composure. Evan stared at her, amazed. He turned to the driver and the other passenger to see how they’d reacted to this strange performance, and then, after realizing they hadn’t reacted at all, opted for an independent venture. He gently patted her. Guadalupe didn’t feel the touch of his hand. She had left for the altar. When Evan held his hand in front of him and stroked the first and middle fingers with the thumb, he felt dampness. He stretched out the arm and looked at it under the light. It was dark in colour.

  The drops glided off it. Was that—

  ‘Stop! Stop! This girl here is bleeding!’ he cried.

  The driver briefly turned to him and the look on his face silenced Evan.

  ‘We’re not going to help her?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘If you knew, Evan, what you were asking…’

  The man in silk winced in his seat and pressed a finger to the glass.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  The driver looked up into the sky that was split by a bright light. A smile escaped him, but evaporated.

  ‘I hope it will work,’ he whispered, and then asked them. ‘Is there something you want to wish for?’

  They both shook their heads.

  The shooting star gained in strength and bit into the edge of the horizon, producing a subdued pop that reached them a few seconds later. A fiery cloud had risen ahead of them.

  ‘That’s where we’re going,’ said the driver.

  ‘There?’ asked Evan. ‘Didn’t you just say we were going home?’

  ‘Tell me, Evan, where is your home?’

  ‘Well…’ began Evan, as if he wanted to say something very obvious and then, mouth closed, turned in amazement to his fellow passenger. ‘Well, home, right? There, where we are at home. Where we were at home. Where our people are. Right? Tell him, Kras, tell him where our home is.’

  Kras’s gaze was aimed squarely at the purplish cascading mushroom of dust on the horizon and the surrounding thousands of little, momentary flashes. ‘Kras, tell him, won’t you?’

  ‘You tell him, dammit. How should I know where your home is?’

  Evan’s eyes filled with tears and his choice of words betrayed a trace of hysteria.

  ‘No. No. You know, both of you know, where home is for me, why are you making fun of me? Tell me. I don’t know. I don’t know where home is, but that,’ pointing ahead, ‘that’s certainly not where it is, I’ve never been there in my life. How could over there be home? Tell me, please, please, tell me.’

  They remained silent.

  ‘Please, tell me.’

  �
��You are nowhere at home, my dear Evan,’ said a female voice smothered by the fabric of the lap into which her lips were pressed. She straightened up. Evan was startled.

  ‘Look – it speaks! But…’

  ‘Hi, Evan. Hi, Kras.’

  ‘…you’re not the same woman!’

  ‘And you’re not the same piddly scumbag who chased after each and every skirt, except for mine. So?’

  ‘Zoja?’

  Kras turned to her and laughed, something his face wasn’t used to. It creaked.

  ‘Zoja? Shit, Zoja, it’s really you.’

  ‘How are you, boys?’

  Evan stared at her, mouth agape.

  ‘But where…how did you get here? Zoja? Is that really you? Why…?’

  ‘My eldest daughter will be utterly envious when I tell her who I met.’

  ‘Where did the one from before go? I liked her. I think we got on well.’

  ‘Did you know that they banned you back there? That you’ve been banned for twenty years? A poet, yet banned, can you imagine?’

  ‘No, seriously, can someone tell me what’s going on? Why is nowhere my home, why did you say that?’

  ‘That poetry collection you once gave me for my birthday, I showed it to her once and she held onto it like a treasure. I’m pretty sure she knows it by heart. Do you remember?’

  ‘Please, if you’d just tell me what’s go—Look!’

  Evan shouted, and pointed to the right of the motorway, where the field sank into nothingness, leaving behind a sheet of white stars.

  ‘No, you have to tell me what’s going on, right now. This is not normal.’

  ‘But aren’t you an artist?’ asked Zoja, with a smile on her lips. Kras reached over and grabbed her knee between his hands and turned to her like a divorcee towards a friend’s still sexy wife.

  ‘Tell me, I heard you had some sort of problem in Paris.’

  ‘What kind of artist? Where is home for me?’

  ‘Yes, as I understand it, they were your people. They weren’t exactly gentle.’

  ‘Forgive me. If only I’d known. I found that out later, so much later that there was no longer anybody I could call to account. But are you going to tell me now that back then you really had nothing to do with it?’