After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  English translation copyright © 2021 by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg

  First English-language edition published by Riverhead 2021

  Originally published in Denmark as Efter Solen by Forlaget Basilisk, Copenhagen, in 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Jonas Eika

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  Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Eika, Jonas, 1991– author. | Hellberg, Sherilyn Nicolette, translator.

  Title: After the sun / Jonas Eika ; translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg.

  Other titles: Efter solen. English

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2021. | Originally published in Danish as Efter Solen by Basilisk in 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020042277 (print) | LCCN 2020042278 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593329108 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593329115 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Eika, Jonas, 1991– —Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PT8177.15.I43 E3813 2021 (print) | LCC PT8177.15.I43 (ebook) | DDC 839.813/8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042277

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042278

  International edition ISBN: 9780593420188

  Cover design: Lauren Peters-Collaer

  Cover art: Dorian Legret

  Book design by Lucia Bernard, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  Alvin

  Bad Mexican Dog

  Rachel, Nevada

  Me, Rory and Aurora

  Bad Mexican Dog

  ALVIN

  I arrived in Copenhagen sweaty and halfway out of myself after an extremely fictional flight. Frankly, I would use that word for any air travel, but on this trip I had, shortly after takeoff, fallen into a light feverish daze in which I relived a series of flights I had taken earlier in my life. First, there was the trip home from Nepal with my ex-wife, then-girlfriend, our first trip together, when we, maybe out of boredom, curled up in our seats and took turns miming various sexual scenarios that the other person had to guess and sketch on a piece of paper, which we cut into pieces and reassembled into new situations to mime again, so that the game could continue for eternities. In my daze was also my departure from Copenhagen six years later, after she became pregnant around the same time that she had been cheating on me with a colleague, and I was so panicked and grieved by my jealousy—which seemed just as impossible to live with if the baby was mine as if it wasn’t—that I packed my things, went to the airport and said Málaga to the man behind the counter, for some reason I said Málaga. Additionally, I relived a flight home from a work trip a few years later, during which I was unable to work, to say a word to anyone, because I was completely paralyzed by what I had seen from my window during takeoff: Past the gates, overlooking the runway, there was an observation deck where kids of all ages stood with their parents watching the planes take off. At one corner, a woman stood with her back to the railing—long, dark hair in the frozen sun—looking at a man running toward her, across the deck, and as we flew past he fell to the ground as if shot by a gun. I couldn’t hear the gunshot, if one had even been fired, and the plane continued into the clouds with me sitting stiff in my seat for the rest of the flight, doubting what I had seen. What was uncomfortable, feverish, about the stupor in which I reexperienced these flights, was how it slid across the surface of sleep as if over a low-pressure area, into a zone in which I was vaguely aware of the original flight, the one I was on now, which for that reason was hidden somewhere underneath or behind: the cabin hidden behind, the food cart, my fellow passengers and the clouds outside the window hidden behind these past, recalled and also in that sense extremely fictional flights. I felt a hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes to a single-faced flight attendant. Everyone else had already left the plane. The cabin was quiet and empty. On the way out, I looked at the windows and the carpet, the overhead luggage compartments and emergency-exit signs, and I ran my fingers along the thick stitches in the leather seats. At passport control, I passed quickly through the entrance for EU citizens. I took the metro to Kongens Nytorv and hurried to the bank’s headquarters to make it in time for my meeting with the system administrator that afternoon. As I turned the corner, I smelled something moldy and burnt, a mix of fire and vegetable rot, and when I saw the red-and-white police tape, I started walking faster. The building had collapsed and tall piles of marble, steel, pale wood and office furniture lay dispersed among other unidentifiable materials. Beneath the scraps I could make out the edge of a pit, places where the earth slanted steeply into itself in the way that lips sometimes slant into the mouths of old people. Three or four servers protruded between the floorboards and whiteboards; funny, I thought, since the floors had just been elevated in expectation of rising sea levels. A police officer told me that the cause of the accident was unknown, but most likely—given the blackout and aftershock that had awakened most of the street—some kind of explosion in the power supply lines had opened the pit that the building was now sunken into. It had happened late in the night, no one was hurt. His eyes wandered as he spoke, as if he were keeping an eye out for something behind me. Behind his head hung a thick swarm of insects, coloring the sky black above the wreckage. I called my contact at the bank and was sent straight to voice mail, walked to the nearest café and took a seat at the high table facing the window. I was eating a bowl of chili when the door opened and cold air hit the left side of my face. A person came over and sat next to me. I looked up from my chili at his reflection in the windowpane: young man, mid-twenties, short dark hair parted to one side, tall forehead, round rimless glasses. I could see the street through him, but then again his skin was also pale in an airy way. “Hey, you,” he said, and ordered what I was having. The smell of café burger filled the room when the kitchen door opened, and turned into sweat on the back of my neck. “Where are you from?” the guy suddenly asked. “Um . . . here, actually,” I said, looking down at myself, “but I’ve been living abroad for a while now. What gave me away?” “Your clothes, your suitcase, your glasses,” he said. “Everything, just your appearance, really. You’re not from here.” “Have I seen you somewhere before?” I said, and regretted it immediately, tried to explain that I didn’t mean him, but his reflection in the glass, the way I was both seeing and seeing through him. He smelled like eucalyptus and some other kind of aromatic. A big group left the café, and then it was empty like the plane had been empty when I was awakened by the flight attendant, except that now the waiter was gone too and it was quiet in the kitchen. “I’m going for a cigarette,” the guy said, getting up. “Do you have an extra?” I said, even though I didn’t smoke. He grabbed his coat from the rack and said yeah and I realized that he probably just wanted some air—so damn quiet in that café—and that he
probably preferred to go alone. “Nice with some smoke out here in the cold,” I said. He nodded and looked at me, his face blue-white in the frozen sun. I looked at our legs in the window and took out my phone to search for a place to stay. I was supposed to be staying in the bank’s guest apartment, that is, in one of the rooms that now lay in pieces, spread among other rooms. “Where are you sleeping tonight?” he asked. I was going to say “at a friend’s,” but that could get awkward if he asked me the address, and I couldn’t remember the name of a single hotel. “I’m not sure yet.” “You can crash with me. Everything is booked because of that summit meeting.” Neutral gaze, his blank eyes like metal bolts in the cold air. I looked at my phone. “You don’t need to check. I’m telling you the truth.” He lived in an attic studio off Bredgade. The room had no molding or stucco, its lines as sharp as the lines of his face when the light was dimmed. It shone from a floor lamp pointed upward, so that the ceiling was covered by a disc sun with two eyes in the middle from the filaments. There was a shower cubicle, a steel sink, a refrigerator and a hot plate, a full-size bed, two chairs and a trestle desk. The window was small, the cracks around it filled with sealant a shade whiter than the yellowish walls. The narrow sides of the room were bare of furniture, but one of the walls was blanketed by a spangled sheet of packaging: empty candy and chip bags, cereal boxes, paper and plastic wrappers from lollipops, chewing gum, jerky and soda bottles, all from brands unfamiliar to me, as if they had been collected in a parallel universe, where every product was slightly different from the corresponding one in our world, so that you could recognize something as, for example, a chocolate bar, but at the same time find that word an inadequate denomination, because you were encountering the object for the very first time, and it was glowing, the wall was glowing with colors I had never seen before. “Souvenirs,” said Alvin, because that was his name, and threw his coat on the back of a chair. I did the same. Alvin sat down on the bed and pulled off his shoes, and I did the same. “Nice and warm in here,” he said as he removed his socks—sweet heavy smell of winter feet—and laid them on the radiator. The room was about two hundred square feet, and so sparsely furnished that you couldn’t help but register every movement. I looked up and noticed a small metallic bottle with white waves down its body and a soft plastic straw, sewn into the fabric that held all of the wrappers together in a mottled thicket against the wall. This dull and characterless object, whose purpose was to contain and be emptied of a liquid called POCARI SWEAT, shone before my eyes with a brilliance that was wildly inciting. I blinked and felt suddenly exhausted, like after a long illness. “I think I’ll take a nap—if that’s okay with you?” “Make yourself at home,” Alvin said. I awoke from a nightmare in which I was being slapped by a floating hand—the rest of the body above the elbow disappeared into white fog or smoke—to the sound of Alvin in the shower. The curtain clung to his scrawny legs, itty-bitty, bulging chicken legs. As long as he’s not expecting anything in return, I thought to myself, before realizing that he was doing just as he would if I weren’t there. It had a calming effect on me, like someone sprawled on a bed saying “I’m not afraid of you,” and so I didn’t need to be afraid of him either. It smelled like eucalyptus. Alvin was quiet, only audible in the sound of water hitting his body and falling to the floor in splashes. Trying to be polite, I rolled onto my other side and was playing possum when he stepped out of the shower, and I waited another ten minutes before yawning and saying, “Nice with a little nap.” “Take a shower. If you want,” he said, and I did. Afterward, Alvin smoking at the desk with his back to me, I got dressed with the intention of taking a walk, but then realized it was three o’clock in the morning. Still no word from the bank. Alvin offered me a cigarette. I sat on the chair next to him and smoked. The program running on his computer resembled the internal operating system that I was here to help the bank install. When a company of that size purchased that kind of software, they also had to pay for someone to implement it, in which capacity I was to travel from Málaga to Copenhagen six times, this being the fourth. In fact, I appreciated traveling for work, even though it filled me with a sense of randomness, a suspicion that the buildings and the people and the vehicles around me could just as easily be some other ones. It was so random that I had gone to Málaga, and that there was, in Málaga, a company that specialized in the development of operating systems many companies in the Scandinavian finance sector found to be sublimely compatible with their internal organizational structures, such that I, who spoke Danish and could also get by in Swedish and Norwegian, was hired as a software consultant, despite the fact that I lacked any actual experience in the field. It was as if the contingency of all of the circumstances that sent me to Copenhagen or Bergen or Uppsala so thoroughly saturated my experience of those cities that it felt like I wasn’t really there. Sometimes, my entire working life felt like one big coincidence, or like the inevitability of a network of connections that belonged not to me but to the market, the market of Internal Operating Systems. Alvin clicked between tabs listing various amounts, some of them substantial, some staggering, connected to ID numbers that referred to other numbers, and the screen glowed silver on his forehead. “Stocks,” I said, “is that how you make a living? Actually, I install operating systems for investment banking firms sometimes, but I could never imagine myself . . .” “Derivatives,” Alvin said. “I don’t speculate about the future, I trade it.” “Bonds?” I asked. “Well, let’s start with the farmer,” he sighed, and told me about derivatives, those mechanisms which I now accept as a precondition for the economy, but which at that point made my brain press against my skull and my nose bleed. The farmer—who made an agreement with a buyer to sell his next harvest at a predetermined price at a specified date in the future—was the original example of a derivatives trader. By doing so, he was able to insure himself against market fluctuations and unpredictable weather. Conversely, the buyer could earn a profit if the value of the crops exceeded the predetermined price. Prior to 1970, derivatives trading was largely illegal, seen as a kind of gambling, but by this point, in the year I met Alvin, derivative capital grossly exceeded the capital that came from the production and sale of goods and services, including stocks. For derivatives no longer referred only to the future value of a sack of flour or a ton of rice, but to anything: the price indexes of raw materials, interest rate differentials, exchange rates, credit scores of entire corporations and nations, obviously all in the future. And they were cross-linked and interwoven and resold in large bundles, “future on future,” Alvin said, handing me a paper towel. “Forget about the forces of the free market, my friend. Commodity prices no longer refer to any value, past or present—they’re just ghosts from the future.” In the morning, when the window was fogged up and Alvin had fallen asleep with the computer on his stomach, I knew that he had told the truth. After half an hour, we had switched places, so that I could do the clicking while he told me what to click on. I don’t know whether it was the friction of the mouse, its smooth, slightly greasy surface, or the amounts being transferred, disappearing and reappearing, inseparable from their ID numbers and in time with my clicking—or the fact that we were actually having a nice time together; Alvin heated up a can of curry soup and bought more cigarettes, and at some point we laughed a lot because I had accidentally bought the rights to buy a massive batch of chickens, millions of them, from a farm in Jerusalem a few months from now—in any case, I felt at home in derivatives trading, as if it had been waiting for me, and I for it. We brought the computer into bed with us and continued trading on Alvin’s stomach. He told me—in a neutral voice and with his eyes on the screen, as he said everything else—that his parents were dead, but that he had inherited some money, which he had grown large enough in stocks to enter the world of derivatives trading, where you never actually buy the asset in question, but always resell the agreement before the closing date. He mumbled something about a guardian and about “trading without attachments” and fell asleep. I l
ay beside him in the pale light of the day outside, joyful and tense, like when my mother was on maternity leave with my little brother and let me watch him whenever she took her morning shower. Propped up on one elbow, my face a few inches from his, I held my breath to listen to his, afraid it would stop if I was inattentive for a second, and overjoyed every time it repeated. I had arranged his stuffed animals paw-to-paw in a circle around us, so they would be ready for him if he were to wake up. I couldn’t sleep, but that was okay, I didn’t mind lying in bed, watching Alvin’s face twitch, the contours of a dream quivering under his eyelids. Thin skin covered his eyeballs in a way that laid them bare, which made me think that maybe we all sleep with a distant awareness of being watched. At one point, he rolled over and swung his leg over my crotch, and I got a completely unexpected erection. I swear I wasn’t sexually aroused or having any fantasies about Alvin—he was beautiful only in a cold, statuesque way—my penis rose merely as a kind of reflex, irrespective of what was behind the contact or could be linked to it. We woke up after noon and went out to get something to eat. On the way, we smoked a cigarette, and the feeling of rust returned to my throat like a memory. The cars on Store Kongensgade idled in traffic, their exhaust calm and white, the faces of cyclists frozen. Roadwork was under way as usual, and Alvin disappeared for a few seconds in the steam rising from the manholes. At the café, he ordered five Secretary’s Brunch platters with orange juice and asked to have them brought out together. For ten minutes, he considered each plate one by one as if he were trying to uncover all the sides of the meat and cheese, yogurt and eggs. There was an attentiveness in his gaze that could turn to skepticism, even resentment. Every two minutes, he decisively pushed away another of the brunch platters until he was finally left with one, which he ate without deigning to look at the others. “You better get used to it,” he said, and explained that it was the only way he could get full. It wasn’t so much a matter of being able to choose, or of throwing something away; the idea of surplus didn’t interest him. But the thought that there were a hundred brunch platters just like his was unbearable, which was why he ordered five, always five, of everything. That way he could pretend to limit the offering in order to reject the four least real, “to isolate the actual brunch from the imitations,” he said. I thought it was ridiculous. Alvin took out his phone and showed me pictures of him at various shiny plastic tables, with fast-food meals in front of him. He was sickly pale in the way that people tend to be in pictures from the nineties. “This is me at KFC when the first one opened in Denmark . . . Me at the first Burger King, did you know they proposed a Whopper–Big Mac mash-up, in the name of world peace? . . . Here I am at Subway . . . Domino’s . . . The Bagel Company when they opened their first shop on Gothersgade in ’94. I swear, tasting these things for the first time was completely . . . how should I say, unique. Like I was tasting exactly them and only them. I always take pictures the first time.” The pictures had clearly been taken by someone else. It made me weirdly sad to imagine Alvin walking up to the counter and asking to have his picture taken, and the employee, out of politeness and because there weren’t any other customers at that time of day, following him to his table to do so. Alvin looked so alone and happy in all the pictures. When we went up to the counter to pay, my card was declined, the one I usually used when I traveled to Denmark for work or to visit my younger brother. I often wondered whether my ex-wife still lived here, how it would feel to run into her again now that my jealousy, which had entirely blocked my longing for her the first few months in Málaga, had disappeared. That was the worst thing about her infidelity: how the anger and powerlessness and all the other jilted feelings ended up dissolving my memory of her into a cloud of pornographic images, and when they finally left me, it was as if she had died. While Alvin took care of the bill, I turned around, ran to our table and shoveled some eggs and pastrami from one of his scrapped brunch platters into my mouth. Back in his room, he asked if I wanted to borrow some money to cover my expenses now that my bank account was sunk in the ground. I said no, it was more than enough that he was letting me spend the night. “It’s not a handout,” he said. “I think we can help each other. I’m planning to look at some silver tonight.” Two hours later, I had used the monstrous sum he had transferred into my Spanish bank account to purchase stocks in silver mines. Shortly after, he signed an agreement to buy a quantity of silver so large that my shares rose almost 30 percent over the course of the following day. This inspired a number of other people to invest in silver, which in turn increased the value of Alvin’s derivative, and by the time he resold it two days later, we had both earned a month’s salary, or at least what that would have been for me. During the intervening night, we had started the same process with another asset and its derivative, and so we continued for the rest of the week, each process morphing into the next and the nights merging in cigarette smoke and the light from our computer screens. There was something tender about the way he grabbed the screen with both hands, looking it in the eye, whenever a crucial deal was about to be signed, and then when it was: no celebration, only an affirmative nod. Even his slightest movements affected me, the way he moved in harmony with the room’s inventory or as an extension of it: his right foot jiggling on the leg of the desk chair, right hand resting on the mouse, forearm parallel with the edge of the table and opposite wall; the gentle, pious way he paced across the room, like when you’re carrying a bowl full of soup, which he often was, bringing it to me and sitting down to tell me more about derivatives trading. He wanted me to understand that it was an “effective art of promise and expectation.” “You need to learn to think of the commodity as existing in advance,” he said, “like when there’s something you’re looking forward to. As soon as the idea of a given product is on the market, it acts, and a sewer is constructed, a sewer that drains from the future in which the product will be sold, back in time, back to us. A sewer that you can of course only move through in one direction, against the current so to speak, but where you can also stop at every stride and sell your spot for a profit or at a loss, depending on how bright the light at the end of the tunnel is shining in our collective eyes at exactly that point in time, yeah, sorry for the death image, it doesn’t have to do with death at all, because you can, as I was saying, usually crawl out before you get to the end, through one of the more or less rusty and financially attractive hatches in the wall, or switch places with another sewer-walker, you know, make a swap, right, and the light was never really death, but the commodity, which has a life too, it can be sold too, don’t forget that.” It felt like we were lying in a tent on top of a tall and sad building. Nights flew by. “Alvin,” I might say in a cautious voice when it had been quiet for many minutes, feeling it was okay to speak to him in that way, “hey, Alvin?” “Yeah?” “Are you asleep?” “If I was, I wouldn’t be answering you, would I?” “No . . . but Alvin, you were on fire today! You demolished that municipality when you sold them that swap loan. As soon as the interest rates start to rise, and the trigger is released . . .” “My friend,” he said, “of course the money we’re making is money other people are losing. That’s just the nature of derivatives. But that doesn’t mean that we’re doing it because we want others to lose.” “But that kind of leverage is completely integrated . . .” “Yes, exactly, that’s what makes it possible for the market to even exist. It’s so obvious that it doesn’t make any sense to think about it.” I couldn’t do it myself, but I could easily imagine that it would be possible for someone with many years in the business to refrain from rejoicing in those who were necessarily losing. To edit them out of the image, by an act of will working slowly and covertly inside you, so that in the end only your own victory remains, and you’ve completely forgotten that you’ve done it, that you’ve edited them out. Where does that ability come from? How can you give it up? When the window was wet with condensation, the day flooding white through it, and Alvin had fallen asleep, I carefully closed his computer and put it on the floor.
The sound of the CPU fan ceased like someone had stopped breathing. Alvin’s face was hard and strikingly white against his dark hair. His lips pressed together in a line that slanted a little into his mouth. I was overcome by sadness, a big, gray-white feeling, and at its edge hovered a dark object that I couldn’t grasp. Occasionally, I glimpsed a corner or a fracture, but as soon as I tried to uncover more of it, it disappeared, and then when I wanted to return to my flimsy starting point, that was gone too. I wanted to cry. I missed my ex-wife and the few friends I used to have here, all the ones who let me down or whom I abandoned as soon as they showed they needed me. Suddenly, I felt like I had given up my life back then, ceded control to someone else. My life was lonely and irrelevant. Alvin’s hands weren’t quite folded, but intertwined in a forced grasp, as if they had been trying to find each other when sleep came over him. “I’ve never been to Romania.” I gave a start under the duvet. “Have you ever been to Romania?” I heard as Alvin’s lips moved again. “No,” I whispered. “Never.” We arrived in Bucharest late at night and took a cab from the airport to the hotel. Still slightly drunk from the flight, we threw ourselves on the Bordeaux-red bedspread, wrecking the two towel swans. It felt like we were inaugurating the room, just lying there with our computers on our bellies, checking stock prices and receiving offers on their derivatives, and an hour later—when eucalyptus streamed from Alvin’s shower and intermingled with the smell of our socks on the radiator—I felt at home, and had entirely forgotten that we were in Romania. “Your turn!” Alvin shouted. I threw off my clothes, squeezed past him at the sink and stepped into the tub. “Why didn’t you use the free shampoo?” I asked through the shower curtain. “Someone else can use it,” he said, handing me a little torso-shaped bottle. “I discovered this in South Africa in ’08 and it’s the only thing I’ve used since. Give it a try.” I squeezed a little blob out of the bottle—aromatherapy: stress relief—and massaged it into my scalp. A prickly coolness penetrated and settled under my skull like an internal shower cap made of a hundred tiny massaging hands. “Fantastic,” I said, feeling the steam relax my airways as I rinsed out the shampoo. “Yeah, right?” said Alvin. “And hey, didn’t you say something about your back hurting? It’s also great for knots and tension.” Unable to reach the painful spot under my shoulder blade, I must have groaned, because Alvin said “Let me” and stuck his hands through the opening in the shower curtain. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay out here. Give me some shampoo.” I squeezed a blob into his hand, olive green and viscous, and turned my back to him. He moved up from my lower back until I said “Oooooeeee, yes, yes, right there!” and then he pressed until the knot loosened and dissolved into my body. “You seem very tense in general.” He continued up my neck and down again along the left side of my spine. “These essential oils come from a species of eucalyptus called fever tree. Isn’t that a wonderful name, fever tree? It’s because people used to plant tons of them in areas with malaria. They dry out the swamps where the mosquito larvae hatch.” He was now squatting on the other side of the curtain, massaging the back of my thighs. “The active ingredient in the oil, eucalyptol, is pretty strong. Sometimes, when it’s very hot and there’s no wind in the forest, eucalyptus trees emit so much volatile oil that even a little spark, from a cigarette for example, can trigger an explosion and start a fire. Turn around.” A slap on my calf, I turned my chest toward him. There was so much steam in the room that I could no longer see the opening in the shower curtain or what was on the other side. I leaned my head back and watched the water fall out of the air like warm rain made especially for me. “More shampoo.” I squeezed a blob into his bowl-shaped hands. They distributed the liquid between themselves and began to massage me from the forehead down. Alvin kept talking, but I was no longer listening to what he was saying. The words splashed out of the air like blobs of sound with the water, running down my face and chest with his hands, his finger pads pressing against my muscles so I could feel their soreness. The camphoric cold heat spread with his hands. From my groin they moved in arcs around my genitals and continued down my thighs. Eucalyptus, like a living suit under my skin, covered my entire body, apart from the places his hands had left untouched: my eyes, mouth, groin and ass. And because of the intense sensation all around them, my eyes, mouth, groin and ass disappeared, or they felt like lumps of nothingness, like infinite holes that would swallow anything that came near. I registered a tightening sensation at the base of my stomach, growing in intensity, like dark matter contracting into itself, and as his hands stretched to reach around my ankles, and his cheek came into view against the curtain, the sensation became so small it disappeared. For maybe ten seconds, I was in a funnel of time, seeing only myself at the other end. It was very lonely. Afterward, we lay in bed with towels wrapped around our waists and shared a cigarette. The next day we rode tirelessly around Bucharest on the kick scooters that Alvin had brought in his duffel bag. The sidewalks were smooth and nicely droning to roll across. Ornamented buildings in harmonically round shapes were interspersed with massive apartment blocks from the Communist era. A man was standing in front of the entrance to the metro with outstretched arms, his hands full of cucumber peelers. From a string tied around his neck, long, dark green peels dangled, sweating in the sun, as evidence of the efficiency of his product. Another man handed me a sheet of paper with a strange illustration on a background of twilight beach lagoon: a Barbie-like figure in a white bikini straddling a rocket headed toward the upper right corner, the rocket transparent, so you could see its three layers: three penises contained within each other, gradually increasing in length and thickness along the measuring tape running parallel to them. I folded the piece of paper and put it in the pocket of my khakis. A woman, her eyes pure iris, dropped a watermelon in a pedestrian crossing. Impossible to see the sky behind power lines stretched between telephone poles. CABINET PSIHOLOGIC was written on a yellowish house with cracks in the walls. A group of kids observed a beetle trapped inside a glass vase turned upside down on the asphalt. Water like dust fell onto my boiled skin from valves in the cafés’ awnings. Cash made of plastic in Alvin’s cold hands, impossible to rip, soak, set on fire. He said, “What’s mine is yours.” “Thanks” died unsaid on my lips, as if someone had placed a long, cold finger over them. I remember all the things he used to do: pelvis against the handlebars of the scooter, center of gravity sinking into his knees, he leans into the bumps on the road. The slight irony in the way his fingers hold a cigarette. That day, even the planes were beautiful. Broken air. Plants shooting up through broken asphalt. Rancid smell of beef and other dead animals in a market on the city outskirts. A gorgeous butcher shop, wasps floating in blood. “I never use public transportation,” Alvin said. We were eating breakfast in dark-green patio chairs in the fenced parking lot of a gas station. We had taken a busy road lined with apartment blocks and auto body shops, a good hour past the railway tracks that bordered the city to the west. Under umbrellas five yards from us, a group of men in work clothes were drinking beers and smoking with their eyes on the screen. You couldn’t hear anything over the traffic, but the outdated television set and their silence were enough to make me feel like I was sitting in a bar or community center with its own slow kind of time. Most of them were about my age, one closer to Alvin’s. The skin on their faces was hard and dry like the skin of hands. Their heads followed the waitress, who I think was the owner’s daughter, not more than twenty years old. Every ten minutes, she would come out with a new beverage and candy bar for Alvin and me, since Alvin had ordered a large assortment and paid extra to have her serve them to us one by one. Now she was filling our plastic cups with a black liquid that resembled Coke, but that turned out to be terribly bitter, almost antiseptic. “When you travel by scooter, you don’t miss a thing,” Alvin said. “There aren’t those breaks in continuity, like when you arrive at one place from another underground or in the cabin of a plane . . . Oh fuck, I’ve tried this before! It’s just Romanian Chinò!” He held up the cup
in front of his face, disgusted. “Exactly this . . . I’ve had this before!” he said, and dumped the liquid onto the sidewalk. He gathered his composure for a moment before he continued: “But still, it’s like the city stays at the level of surface. I think it’s because of the speed, how everything just slides by. You can’t pretend you’re able to see through any of it.” And then the cup was yanked out of my hand and emptied like Alvin’s. I looked up at a tall, sunburnt man in work clothes. He put my cup back on the table and nodded toward the street. We followed his gaze and looked back at him, perplexed. “Yes,” he said, looking me in the eye with crossed arms and a didactic expression on his face, patient and determined, and I felt ashamed. “What does he want?” Alvin asked. “I think he wants us to leave,” I said. “But we’re in the middle of a tasting here—” “Yes,” the man repeated. One of the younger men in a black tank top came out of the shop with the rest of our purchases in a bag, which he dropped into Alvin’s lap. “Okay,” Alvin said, gathering the empty wrappers and cans. We got up, unfolded our scooters and rolled away, bottles and papers hanging out of Alvin’s pockets, bulging out of his duffel bag, clinging to him. Back in the city center, we passed an exact replica of the Arc de Triomphe. The boulevard was forty yards wide, divided by a bed of flowers and a fountain lit up in neon colors: blue, pink, silver. There were clothing stores with names like Fashion Victim and Shopping Is Cheaper Than Therapy. In the old city center, we stopped at a street theater, folded up our scooters and stood among the other spectators. I could feel the body heat, not only from the people standing closest to me, but like a homogeneous cloud that everyone in the audience was simultaneously producing and contained within. Everyone’s attention was focused on the stage. The sun had set but its light was still in the sky, a pale blue afterglow canceling out the dark for a little longer. Some had children on their shoulders, others leaned their heads back and laughed into the sky whenever something funny happened. On stage, about twenty yards in front of us, were two people on stilts, one with a snare drum and the other with some sort of little horn hanging around her neck, playing a medieval tune mixed with a bit of jazz. At their feet, two petite figures, costumed as knights in red and green, approached each other and exchanged what sounded like hostilities. I repeated their words out loud. A peculiar combination of sounds I didn’t understand entered my body and came out of my mouth; I didn’t know the language, but it made me high. Just as involuntarily, I repeated the next thing that was said, and Alvin responded by repeating the lines of the other knight. Now they were throwing themselves forward, tightly interlocked at the elbows, using all their weight to drag each other to the ground. The one in green gave in and took a step backward to keep his footing, tipping his upper body back so that the one in red was lifted into the air, where he hovered horizontally for a few seconds before he landed, sending the one in green into the air in turn. Their struggle turned into a dance, their bodies like leaves somersaulting in the wind without letting go of each other. They kept shouting, the dance an extension of their struggle, and we kept repeating what they said. Abruptly, the knights came to a stop in the grip with which the dance had started. Their feet yielded beneath them and their bodies lay outstretched, almost horizontal in the air. And then they fell to the ground with their foreheads pressed against each other. It was quiet. They raised their faces and looked each other in the eye. One of them said something, loud and clear, but with a tenderness too, and as I repeated what he said, applause erupted around us. I turned to Alvin and repeated the line, yelling as loudly as I could, again and again, until I felt a poke on my shoulder. A young woman, laughing, said in English, “Do you know what you just said to your son?” “No,” I said, “he’s just my friend.” “Your Romanian is terrible.” “But what did I say? What did it mean?” “You said, ‘My brother, you may never leave me again.’ ” I don’t know whether Alvin heard her, he looked as indifferent as usual: horizontal mouth and metal-bolt eyes, not a single direction in that face. Back at the hotel, we took a shower one at a time. “Use my shampoo,” he said, squeezing past me. I can’t describe the joy I felt lying next to him, all of my muscles exhausted, unable to fall asleep. The darkness was thick, our breathing heavy, but each of us knew the other wasn’t asleep. Our awareness filled the room like something large and encompassing, and if I was inside it then Alvin was too. Later that night, I heard him sit up, swing his legs over the edge of the bed and put on his clothes. He got up and gently lifted the duffel bag that had been packed in advance, but couldn’t avoid a little clinking from the bottles and paused for a second. He stood still, probably trying to hear whether he had woken me up, though I prefer to think of those seconds as seconds of doubt. That way he can stay, as strong and indefinable as ever, sleeping, trading, showering in my memory. After he closed the door behind him, I stayed in bed for several hours without turning on the light. When morning streamed white into the room, I packed my things and left the hotel on the scooter he had left behind. At the airport they told me that I didn’t have any money. None of my bank accounts existed anymore, my debit cards were untethered, their ties fluttered in the wind. I laid all the cash I had on the counter and was told that I probably had enough for a train ticket. The continuousness of the trip calmed me down. Back in Copenhagen, I went to the bank hoping to get in touch with one of the employees who knew and could probably help me. The ruins were still there. I climbed a piece of marble at the edge and looked over the wreckage, which lay spread across a large expanse, torn up like a lake full of garbage, steel-gray and gray-white, yellowish with wood here and there. Above hung a dense swarm of insects and a dark, sweet smell like rotting tea leaves. I broke into a run across the wreckage, calculating my leaps and landing deftly, all at once feeling young and in control of my body. I found a pit between two big pieces of marble that was fairly accessible and appeared to flatten out a few yards below. Holding on to the marble, I lowered myself down, finding a foothold in the jagged walls. The air became heavy, the insect sky framed by the opening of the pit; my toes grazed the ground, which seemed solid. I let myself fall, hunched over and continued on all fours through the narrow tunnel that opened darkly in front of me. The marble was hard against my knees; in places, I had to pull them up to my belly or arch my back to avoid sharp edges and protrusions. The tunnel narrowed and turned, and I followed its path on my elbows, dragging my torso behind me, until suddenly my head was poking into something that resembled a room—a big hole created when the building had collapsed: steel, plaster and wood held up by large rock fragments. But the materials were all so irregular, haphazardly placed and full of cracks leading to other tunnels, that it was impossible to get a sense of the room’s dimensions. Bank employees lay curled up, in broken and cocooned positions dictated by the uneven walls of the pit, with computers in their laps or on their stomachs. Their faces were dirty and pale, some were wearing masks in the dusty air. “Are you looking for someone?” a young man asked, and came over to help me out of the wall. “No,” I said, and managed to stutter the name of the system administrator. “Follow me,” he said, and showed me through the cracks and holes, crawling, climbing and snaking ahead depending on the spatial parameters. Something about the writhing way he moved his body gave me the sense that he was being pulled or sucked through the passageways. That some subterranean intelligence or will had laid the bank in ruins and was now forcing its employees into new shapes. People had set up work spaces in the most unexpected places. Cables drew electricity in every direction, illuminating the connections between them. I imagined a monstrous and hollowed-out architecture, the crushed building materials poured into a colossal anthill, held together by internet waves and the fermented, organic breath that swelled in every tunnel. A choir of fingers on keyboards rose from the depths. We slid around a warped steel plate, legs first, and into another room. At its center, the system administrator was seated on a pillow in lotus pose with three screens in front of her. A mouse rested on a hunk of marble by her right hand. “W
hat the hell,” she said, and looked up at me, laughing. “Weren’t you supposed to be here ten days ago?” “Yes,” I said, and started to make up an excuse that made no sense to me, and took a step forward, kicking some small rocks with my foot. After maybe ten seconds, they hit the water. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, dismissing my apology with a wave of her hand. “Let’s get to it, then.”