The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  “Cacciucco,” Lofty said.

  “Red mullet. A bit of sole. Clams.”

  “I can’t cope with fancy fish,” Geetha said.

  Elaine told her she was making a mistake. “You’re a great cook, and you’re going to turn into a kipper if you eat any more.”

  Geetha opened her purse and picked out the usual amount.

  “She used to run the best Indian restaurant in Argyle Street,” Elaine said when the lady walked off with her bag. “I feel sorry for her.”

  There was too much history, Lofty thought. He was OK working at the Fish Plaice, but it wasn’t his trade. He’d served his time as a joiner. He liked Elaine, that was all, and building sites were a nightmare. The main thing he cared about was European cities. He saved up all his spare cash so that he could fly off to these places, the emptier the better. At work, he hardly spoke. He knew about mussels and whelks, how long to cook a John Dory, and he got nice looks over the iceboxes. Elaine called him Angel Eyes. The market did poultry as well as fish, and he could sell squabs as fast as he could sell an octopus, so she had no complaints. Some things he said, his work mates didn’t get. The day before the lockdown, he combed his blond hair into a quiff and wrote an ad for a boyfriend. Elaine was excited about the ad, but he told her it was no big deal, just a dating profile. “You’re nice-looking, Lofty,” she said to him during the break, “and tall. You should’ve stuck in at school. That way you wouldn’t be renting rooms and paying these extortionate rents.”

  “You took all the houses. All the prospects.” Elaine was standing under a sign that said “Want Fresher Fish? Buy a Boat.”

  “What you on about?”

  “You seniors,” Lofty said. “And now we’re stuck.”

  “I’ll seniors you,” she said, before adding something about his mother. “An educated woman like that. How’d you get to be so spoiled?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Totally spoiled. We’ve had two ‘once in a generation’ crises in a dozen years. Spoiled rotten.”

  The pet shop closed the next morning. The guy never sold anything anyway: The animals were just his pals. But he said he’d watched Newsnight and everybody was going into quarantine, so, against the rules, he released his canaries on Glasgow Green. “Oh, my God,” Lofty said, “are you tipping your goldfish into the Clyde?” Next door to Pet Emporium, the Empire Bar hung on until lunchtime, then closed. By the end of the week, the street was deserted and nothing was happening on Grindr. The flat Lofty rented looked down on the Green, and it was strange for him to see that nobody was outside the courthouse. The smoke from the Polmadie furnace had stopped dead.

  He didn’t like calling his mother. Half the time she’d just talk about the past or go on about money. “You’re addicted to being awkward,” she said to him that afternoon. “Nothing’s ever your fault.”

  “What?”

  “It must be such a comfort.”

  “My life is a result of your decisions.”

  “Oh, get a grip. You’re twenty-seven years old.”

  “I didn’t want to be a joiner. I didn’t think I’d stay at the market.”

  “You’re always late to the party,” she said. “Why not throw your own party? Why not fill it with people you care about and show some commitment?”

  “Because you drank all the Champagne,” he said.

  He didn’t call her for another 10 days, and when he did a nurse answered. She said that his mother couldn’t come to the phone, that things were pretty bad, and later that day they took her in an ambulance to the Royal Infirmary. It ended very quickly after that. There was nothing he could do, and then it was too late to do anything. A doctor had called his older brother in London, who then rang Lofty, but he wouldn’t pick up. Daniel had been nothing to him for years—Dan was away. Dan was out of it.

  They had a spat when their father died in 2015. Lofty accused his brother of stealing a briefcase from their parents’ flat. “That’s the maddest accusation I’ve ever heard,” Dan texted him at the time, but Lofty just ignored it. Then Dan ranted and raved to their mother, before blocking him, which made Lofty feel victorious. It was obvious Dan was guilty and out of control, not only about the theft but about everything. Dan had always acted as if his family was a total drain on his concentration. The one time Lofty went to see him, they nearly had a fight in the middle of Notting Hill Gate. After drinking at a private club, Dan started shouting in the street about Lofty being “toxic and self-righteous, unreachably angry.” Whatever. Lofty spat on the ground right next to him.

  “Your life is a joke, Dan. All this cash. You make me sick.” Their mother later told Lofty she’d heard about the argument. He knew that she and his brother agreed: It was Lofty who had the problem. They were “on the same page,” or into the same books. They used words like “dysfunctional.” People had “issues.” After the thing with the briefcase, his mother sent him a book in the post called How to Be Free of Yourself. Lofty never worked out if she took him seriously about the theft. She never brought it up, not once. He felt detached in a whole new way and was tearful as he left his flat, banging the door. He carried the toolbox down the stairs and thought of it as doing weights.

  It would take an hour to get to her place. In the Saltmarket, all the shutters were down. The virus was like a revolution in the brain, like a brand-new argument. A man was slumped outside the Old Ship Bank pub with his head between his knees. Lofty passed the solicitors’ office and looked up at No. 175. His father had been obsessed with tales of their Irish ancestors—including a few young footballers who were among the first to play for Glasgow Celtic, Molly Brogan, who sold flowers at St. Enoch’s, the prizefighters, the shebeeners, and the first Alexander Brogan, a part-time chemist who poisoned his wife. They’d all lived there, “the five Alexanders.” The first came from Derry in 1848 and went straight from the ship to the Parish Relief. Lofty stood back in the middle of the road. It said “1887” at the top of the crow-stepped gable, and he realized the building must’ve replaced an older one. The Brogans: up there with their Papist utensils and their strong views about how to survive.

  He crossed the river and went up Victoria Road. He noticed the post office was still open. He looked at his watch. The removal guy said they would do it quickly and maintain social distancing and be out of the flat by two o’clock. How did people keep their distance while carrying a three-piece suite? He changed hands; the toolbox was heavy. He reached the park and suddenly felt he should sit down on a bench. After taking out his phone, he swiped for a bit. “No, no, nope,” he said. “Not with that face.” He went onto Instagram and posted a selfie with the trees behind him. Within minutes, Elaine had “liked” it and posted a comment, two thumbs and a love heart.

  He blocked her, then lit a cigarette, then deleted his account. A policeman got out of a van and walked over to a group of schoolgirls sitting on the grass. “What’s your plans?” he heard the officer saying.

  “Just sitting,” one of them said.

  “It’s time to move on, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s right! It’s not your grass!” Lofty shouted. He stood up and the officer looked at him and the girls giggled.

  “Are you OK, sir?” the policeman asked.

  He walked away with the heavy toolbox. It was the only thing his father had left him, the toolbox and the stuff inside.

  There were ferns in her front garden. The key was under a brick. He unlocked the storm doors and saw the hall was pretty empty, except for an unplugged telephone in the corner and personal things here and there, framed certificates in boxes. It was a small flat, perfectly proportioned, with tiled fireplaces in the living room and both bedrooms. There was a shadow on the carpets where the beds had been; the sofa was gone, plus the dining table, the TV, all her side tables, rugs, and lamps. He wasn’t keeping any of it. He’d told the guys to take it all away and do what they liked with it. In the corner of the kitchen, he found a wooden stool he remembered from childhood that his mother painted wit
h blue gloss. He opened the toolbox and took out a hacksaw, pausing to replace the blade. He cut up the stool and then he found some newspaper. He lit a fire in the living room. At one point he had three fires going—one in each room. He started emptying the bags. He would let one fire die down while building another, using a shovel to scoop the hot ashes into a bucket he’d found in the backcourt. Late in the evening, he found bottles from her departed drinks trolley and drank Pernod by the neck. He put the other bottles out. In one of the bags in the hall he found a long dripping string of rosary beads. God knows how many buckets he took outside, but there was a heap of ashes cooling in the backcourt. It must have been midnight when he put a coil of TV cables into the living room fire, an old telephone directory, and then he opened the last of the black bin bags and found it—the briefcase.

  He sat cross-legged and opened it, the fire leaping beside him and bouncing shadows around the room. “Who, Me?” it said on a leaflet, the first of many inside the briefcase from Alcoholics Anonymous. He read each one and slugged the Pernod. He found a series of postcards from Oban—the old man’s solo holiday destination—and in each one he went on about the weather before he signed off, “with love.” Lofty worried he might be like him but enjoyed the way the postcards turned the flame green. In a zipped compartment he found letters and birth certificates going back years, and a school photograph with different writing on the back: “Alexander and Daniel, St. Ninians, 1989.” He looked at his brother’s face and knew for a certainty that he’d never see him again.

  He took a Stanley knife and cut the soft leather into strips. The smell of it burning gave a whole new feel to his mother’s front room. Eventually there was nothing much left, the wooden frames had all crackled away, and he’d twisted the screws out of the walls with pliers and tossed them into the bucket. Eventually, in the middle of the night, he took a scraper and removed layers of wallpaper. The last layer before the plaster was pink with white flowers, and he threw bunches of it into the fire. He decided he would wait for all the ashes in the backcourt to become cold, and then he’d put a load of them into the empty toolbox, go to the post office in the morning, and post it to Daniel’s London address. It was the least he could do. About 4:00 a.m. he could hear birds chirping loudly in the street.

  He took out his father’s favorite chisel. It had a faded stamp on the metal part—“J. Tyzackand Son, Sheffield, 1879.” He put it in the fire and then walked to the living room window. It didn’t matter that the steel would be left over. He felt he had done his best. There was music outside. The lights in people’s flats seemed bright at that hour, and he wondered if everyone was up. Here and there, remains had gone from houses or care homes without funerals or anything. “I wonder if she knew,” he said. Then he placed his hands on the cold glass and thought of Malmo in the spring.

  n that old tale by Poe, they locked out the commoners and locked in the plague, the uninvited guest to their costume ball. Their mistake is a lesson for the reader only, since the highborn fools in the story all die. I’ve read the tale, taken the lesson. And yet, here I am in a walled castle and with a small group of people I might describe, if pressed, as dissolute snobs.

  This was an accident. I got here well before refrigerated trucks idled outside the municipal morgue, down the road. When I arrived in this country, life remained fairly normal. The virus was not close. I “felt sorry” for the people of Wuhan and continued with my own plans, as an author doing frivolous author-y things, like visiting a castle where I’d been invited for a week’s stay, alongside people whose sole commonality was to pretend these kinds of bizarre sinecures are normal. I’d brought young Alex, who inspires wrestling matches among dowagers competing to have him at their brunch. His beauty is of a dissident, orphaned hue. Or darker. He looks, in fact, a lot like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but I promise he has bombed nothing except a few social occasions to which he arrived unfashionably late.

  We were waiting it out, this mess that no person on Earth will escape. At first, to cozen our own distress, Alex and I treated our castlemates as bad objects of amusement. We poked fun at the Charlemagne biographer and the pajama-like “house master’s” robe he wore to dinner, his obsession with the Duke of Wellington, with dueling, with all manner of what Alex summarized as post-Napoleonic torpor. We derided the journalist who believed anyone left of center was on Putin’s payroll, this mythic payroll, so insidious we almost wondered if we were on it ourselves. And we laughed at the Norwegian author for the fact that he was, we were told, the most important author in Scandinavia, and yet, unlike all other Scandinavians, this extremely important and famous man didn’t speak even a single word of English. He gathered with the rest of us but contributed only an air of dazed elsewhereness, seemingly unconcerned with the arch Anglo-banter that ricocheted around him. We never laughed at his wife, who translated for him, as some women do even for men who speak the language. She shared none of her own thoughts, this handsome woman with an indeterminate European accent, and instead sat on the terrace, smoking and silently watching the rest of us cheapen the air with our opinions.

  As reality set in that we were stuck here, they became like relatives, people you didn’t choose but must love. The Charlemagne biographer’s habit of referring to Alex as Homo Juvenilis became a trend. I was working on a novel about early humans, and the biographer would quiz me nightly on my latest thoughts in regard to my Homo Primitivo, as if it were a creature I was keeping in my room. We now admired the Norwegian’s refusal of English, of Anglo-superdominance, like a monk’s rejection of intimate congress and a Luddite’s of looms. We accepted the journalist’s ritual invocation of Putin at dinner as one might an empty chair for Elijah. When the Charlemagne biographer suggested we each hold court with a story, and that it be not about the sickness, sadness, and death that had afflicted this region, and instead a happy tale, we agreed. Tonight it was the Norwegian’s turn.

  * * *

  “My story is about a man named Johan,” the Norwegian said in his language, and his wife repeated in English.

  This was after dinner, which took place in a small room with an enormous table, its low ceiling greased and blackened by chimney smoke. The Norwegian told his story in fragments, to give his wife time to translate. As she spoke his words to us, he gazed off, introspective, his triangle of puffy gray hair aiming in two directions like divergent philosophies.

  “I knew Johan through some university friends in Oslo. He had planned to move to Prague in the summer of 1993. Prague, then, attracted a certain type—people like Johan, college-educated layabouts without concrete aspirations who talked about wanting to ‘open a literary space’ or ‘start a magazine’ but mostly sat around feeling that life had little point. These types, which Johan perfectly illustrated, were moody and average-looking young men—and I should be an expert on them, as I was one myself—depressives who lacked purpose but who, in the interim of locating one, slept late and read a lot of film criticism and French theory, and brooded over unobtainable women who burned into their field of vision. In failing to capture them, these unemployed men with a lot of free time felt greatly persecuted, which they took out on the somewhat homelier females who made themselves earnestly available.”

  After translating this part, the wife and husband spoke in Norwegian to each other, as if working something out, about this story and what he would tell. We could see between them that he was the type he described, disgruntled, and with clumsy features, while the wife possessed that kind of beauty that seems like a form of cleverness, something she’s figured out that the rest of us haven’t.

  “These men who didn’t know what to do with their lives, and only loved women who brutally ignored them, suffered from a general inertia they blamed on Oslo instead of themselves. Prague, and its opening to the West, the excitement of the Velvet Revolution, of cheap rent and a bohemian scene featuring superior and more obliging women, took on promise as a solution to poor character, to failure at life. Johan had a friend who was teaching at
a film school there and invited him to come and stay. There was a going-away party that I myself attended, and then Johan took off for his new life. We were all a little begrudging. If he failed, we’d gloat. If he succeeded, maybe we, too, would move to Prague.

  “Johan arrived at that city’s airport on a cold and rainy Sunday morning. Nonresidents lined up, nothing out of the ordinary, Johan among them, excited for this new chapter, as the line inched forward to the rhythmic stamping of documents. When it was his turn to present his passport, the trouble began.

  “The immigration officer demanded to know why Johan’s passport was wrinkled, the photo water-damaged.

  “ ‘It’s still an official document,’ Johan explained to the officer, who remained as blank and steely as a military tank. ‘It’s just a bit worn because I spilled something on it a while back.’

  “At the other passport kiosks, stamps ka-junked and people sailed through, without interrogation or arguing, one after another, while Johan went in circles with the border agent.

  “Eventually he was taken to a small room with a reinforced door that was locked (he tried it), and left there for several hours. He began to understand, staring at the blank, reinforced door, that there was an iron fist under the velvet curtain, or however the expression went.

  “In the late afternoon, another man, as rude and dispassionate as the first, came in and asked him a series of questions. Johan answered and ‘tried not to be a dick,’ as he later put it. He was left in the room again. It was evening before the same man came back and told Johan he would not be admitted to the country unless a representative from the Norwegian Consulate was willing to intervene and issue him a new passport. Johan was allowed to place a call to the consulate. One phone call, they said, as if he were guilty of something. Seeing as it was Sunday, the consulate was closed.