After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  Later, after we had said goodbye and closed the door behind them, we stood in our respective corners of the kitchen, staring into the living room. It was so full of their honesty and our pent-up conflict that we had two possibilities: either cry or shout at each other, either fight or be sad by ourselves, so we went straight to the bedroom—Rory through the door with Aurora at his heels, me through the hole in the wall—and met in bed in an indecisive embrace. Sex between the three of us could never become that self-contained formation that shut out everything else, the snake biting its own tail, we were always trying to open and extend the pleasure, with hands and mouths, across the mattresses, through the room, up and out of the building. While the train screeched through every ten minutes. Water glasses rattled on the nightstand. The flat bulged red with heat against the night’s blue-black. The air was riddled by traffic moving in all directions, up to the satellite and back again. Someone shouted, started running after someone else, Hey, you! Cars accelerated and hit the brakes at the foot of the bed. Aurora’s belly was bulbous with visible veins, we navigated around it with caution. At one point I was on my knees with Rory inside me and Aurora lying diagonally in front of me. I was sucking on her nipples and could have sworn some milk came out, just a few drops. Just a second of that body-warm, sugary, a little oniony, a-little-too-soon liquid in my mouth, and right after, an impulse to suck away, to drink so much that it would fill me all the way up and push out Rory’s cock, but there wasn’t any more. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate his presence, but there was a longing inside me to be alone with Aurora and be pure milk. Sometimes when he fucked me I could feel so specific and demarcated, bound to the bed. The morning after our first night together he made scrambled eggs and said I should stay around. So strange sitting there together, eating breakfast in a T-shirt on a cold stool, like the two of us were going to be a couple, but then he said, I think Aurora would be happy if you were here when she came home. Rory had a way of being in the flat without her, always in the process of taking care of something or other, which I really liked about him. He would gently rearrange the furniture and clothes, wipe the crumbs off the table, make the bed and air the place out. Water the plants with a spray bottle and nuzzle the leaves between two fingers, count the cash and meticulously decide what kind of soup he would make today, and which ingredients he’d have to steal for it. He dragged everything out, as if to fake a household and make it last until Aurora got in—maybe that was part of why he wanted me to stay? Back then she would come home early, and we would have started flirting around noon, stirring up a mood she could wade right into and release. Later, if he hadn’t already that morning, Rory would go do the stealing, and then me and Aurora would make out hungrily and wait to do more until he got back home. A lot of me loved her exclusively, wanted her now and all to myself, but 1. that would ruin their marriage; 2. then I might have to leave the flat, or at least not be under Rory’s care anymore; 3. I cared a lot about Rory too; and 4. it was because of their marriage, with my place in the sweet spot between them, that I could even be close to Aurora in the first place. Without them I might lose her for good.

  Now I was looking up and saw a guilty but also kind of outbound expression in her eyes. I looked over my shoulder and realized that they were responding to Rory’s, which were looking at her the same way as when we had come home late that afternoon: an injured look that expressed the same feeling that I had had next to her in the City Church all day: she was on her way out. She was turning toward something that made her stay in her seat much longer than necessary, forget to eat and drink, and which made her care about everything but her sales, the baby and us waiting for her at home.

  Six months later, I suddenly spot the reflection of the man in the dull gray trench coat in the glass I’m looking out of. In the opposite window, he’s sitting with his hands in his lap, letting himself be rocked by the swaying of the train on the tracks. He’s staring straight ahead at the empty seat across from him, apparently so familiar with the scenery on this route that he can just as well let it slide blurrily by. Who knows what it’s like: being a dealer, spending your days on those efficient, silent transactions. Recognizable, at this point even familiar, buyers in the seat across from him, who he can’t talk to or really look at, just a second of eye contact to confirm the imminent sale. Maybe it’s not only a matter of discretion, maybe he actually prefers it that way, cutting straight to the bone of the transaction: in the dark of the tunnel handing over a zip-lock bag with a right hand, taking the cash in a left, getting up and leaving the car before it gets light again. The train turns softly to the left, setting course for an arch of brown bricks that frame a darkness for me. Two deep breaths and I block my throat, haven’t been able to breathe in tunnels ever since Aurora told me you couldn’t. It’s a game she used to play. Hidden by the dark and the mechanical rumbling, I get up and walk over and kneel on the seat behind the dealer. I dip my hands into each of his coat pockets, close them around whatever they’re holding, pull them out and walk fast out of the car.

  An hour later I’m knocking on Rory and Aurora’s door. It hurts in my bones going over there, knowing that I have to see them again, but I really need the money. The sight alone of Rory’s puzzled face in the cracked-open door almost makes me cry. He lets me in, and then I’m standing there looking around the kitchen, at the evergreen countertops with all of his lists on them, at the toaster and the kettle, in the yellow glow of the ceiling light. I can feel how my body is sucking everything in because it has forgotten and knows that now’s the chance to get it back: the piles of clothes, the draft and the knots in the floor, the smell of Rory’s soup, the jagged hole in the wall, Rory, his birdlike body in the kitchen, I swallow it all and hold it inside my wide-open belly. Then I take two steps forward and look into the bedroom to the right. Aurora is sitting on the edge of the bed, rocking a cradle on the floor. Something awkward about the way her arm is extended, she must have sat down like that as soon as she heard it was me. The baby is quiet and barely visible between the hat and blanket, snub nose and a tiny open mouth. What’s up? Aurora says. What’ve you got? I take the bag of vowels out of my pocket and say, There’s 98, I took two already. Where’d you get them? she asks. Don’t worry about it, I say. You can have £30, she says. You know I know what they cost, I say. I want 40, minimum. You get 30, she says, even more resolved . . . Listen, I don’t want to know where you got those pills, but if our guy has lost 100, and then we buy half the usual amount the next day, how do you think that’s going to look? No matter what, I’m gonna have to spread those 98 out over a few weeks, or months . . . Fine, I say, 30, that’s fine.

  I handed her the bag of pills. She handed me £30.

  I still don’t know how we ended up with that cruel transaction. Was it my indecisiveness, my inability to take a stand in the fight, that let the two of them close around each other? Was I just too passive, a kind of pet, was I becoming too dirty and unkempt? Or was it the baby, the arrival of the actual baby, that inevitably excluded me? That would be really ironic, because it was most likely conceived the night we first met. After Dave and Sully left, we lay in bed and counted back to that night, and I felt fertile for a second, or at least beneficial to my surroundings. Me and Rory were curled up on either side of Aurora, who was sitting halfway up in bed, each of us with a cheek and a hand on her belly. You’ve never been so pregnant, he said dreamily. Soon there’ll be a baby here. He gestured panoramically across the room like it was a showroom for their life after the birth. I realized that the child, or at least the dream of a home that the child was supposed to fulfill, was Rory’s most of all. He had never really been good at anything, but the flat was his to arrange, to putter around and display at the end of each day. A helpless living creature here would make him indispensable. The next morning I was awoken by the door slamming, jumped out of bed and caught up with Aurora halfway up the street. Hey, you’re pulling my love out of bed way too early! I said, smiling, and grabbe
d her collar. I didn’t think you wanted to come, she said. Her face was blank and exhausted in the headlights of the cars driving by. Sometimes she looked almost wounded by fatigue, it was really cute. I just don’t understand what they’re doing in that church, I said, why don’t they get up at the end? I don’t think I can explain that to you, Aurora said, it’s a kind of meditation—But I want to be part of it, I said—on the hangover, she said, the state that comes after. Okay, come on then.

  The City Church was in East London, Stratford I guess, in a remote industrial neighborhood twenty minutes walking from Leyton Station, and the patients had already served their five hours when we got there a little before eleven. That was how they paid for their stay at the rehab center, Aurora told me, by working it off in the factories. The whole complex was owned by one of the private companies that the state had started using to contract its social services. People were sent here after being on welfare support for a long time, as a kind of combined detox and job training. Even from a purely therapeutic standpoint, the work played an important role, Aurora explained; getting sober was all about rediscovering your functionality, teaching yourself each day that you’re good for something. In the work halls, screens listed the day’s productivity stats, and once a month you had to sit in the observation room to watch the big picture and be reminded of each person’s indispensability on the production line. But I always felt totally replaceable, Aurora said. The days I produced the most, it was like it was running right through me. What do they make? I asked. Turbines, computer chips, that kind of thing. A bell rang, or the sound of a bell was played from speakers on the roof of the church, and a few minutes later people left the factories lining the road, and walked down the sidewalk and across the gravel parking lot. There was something protracted and uncertain about their movements, on the way to yet another demanding job, one they weren’t sure they could complete, but also something serene, a kind of faith, maybe, that it was worth doing anyway. On the way into the church, which was actually an empty factory, a box-shaped building with peeling walls and the trunks of demolished chimneys sticking out of the roof, they stopped by Aurora to exchange £1 for a vowel with a handshake or an embrace across her belly. She was pale and professional in the late-morning sun.

  Inside, we sat on folding chairs, swallowed our pills and listened to the prelude. After a few minutes I felt the light of the vowel expanding my body, activating an alternative nervous system that was directly connected to everything around me. My skull and my rib cage enveloped the hall, the organ and the sermon quivered inside me. As the priest pronounced the blessing he melted into my spine with a fluid click, pushing my ribs from each other with his arms. Our addiction was a hallmark, the sign of a foundational weakness and impotence that we had to accept in order to let God accomplish inside us that which we couldn’t do ourselves. And when we speak of God, we mean God as you perceive him. He said that several times.

  There’s nothing to say about the séance after the service. No altar, no ornaments in the empty, square room could distract me from the unbearable feeling of paralysis or permanent sedation of my soul with which I was left after the trip. Even the light was useless, falling without shadows or nuances, it probably hadn’t been changed since there was a factory here. After a few hours I started getting hungry, and what about Aurora, could she feel the baby complaining inside her? Was she ignoring it like she was able to ignore her own hunger? The air was greasy from the gas that had been burned in the room. Grease got stuck in my eyes and the roots of my nails, and I felt the creeping griminess I remembered from living on the street, before I moved in with Rory and Aurora, in an inhuman crowd of people and vehicles. It’s a boundless space, not fit for living, you can’t tidy or clean or decorate anything. You own nothing around you.

  When the bell finally rang again, who knows when, we got up in a daze from our folding chairs and left the church in the opposite direction of everyone else. They squeezed past us, heading toward the back wall. On the threshold I turned around, grabbed Aurora’s hand and watched them disappear through a double door made of dark-green metal. They stepped out onto a muddy field, in the dusk that fell murkily into the church. What are they doing? I asked. The rehab center, Aurora said, it’s on the other side of the field, and pulled my arm. I hesitated for a second, trying to make out a building, but saw only blue-gray fog framed by the doorway, and the patients sliding away, disappearing into it, one by one, in the middle of the field.

  Several worn faces looked up at us as if we had interrupted them in the middle of a sentence or a prayer. At least ten homeless men and women were seated around the table, on the two barstools in the kitchen, on the floor against the opposite wall and on the windowsill, with their bare feet resting on stools and piles of clothes, in a stench that made the flat swell. It was completely silent for maybe five seconds, until a bony woman with long, iron-gray hair burst out laughing from the window and said, They weren’t expecting that, were they now! Just look at those two! Rory laughed too, goofily resting his hands on our necks. But they’re totally speechless, the woman said, haven’t they seen a homeless person before? And in their nice little living room too. Come on, give them a break, Ellen, said a slightly younger man at the kitchen table, let them get through the door, all right? And I’m not doing that, or what, Ellen said, not giving them a chance? No, you’re not, the man said. I’m just teasing them a bit, she said, just joking around. I mean, they look like they’re at the zoo! And that’s no problem at all. That’s just fine. We are a bunch of old seals, the two of us and the others, a flock of crows, free birds in a cage that’s too big? No, we’re not, there was a third who said, we’re wild dogs, and then their eyes and voices kind of let go of us and turned to each other, so we could throw off our jackets and turn to Rory, who was awkwardly stirring his soup. His cheekbones shone boyishly in the steam. Up in front of the shelter, he said quietly, I stopped by on the way home from the shop. And they were all standing there freezing and their numbers weren’t getting called, you know, it’s completely packed tonight. There’s a storm coming. So I said they should come over here to warm up and have a bite to eat . . . You know, honey, I want us to be able to take care of people here, just provide the bare necessities. That’s why we have a home, right? Someday you’ll be old too! Ellen shouted over everyone else. She had gotten up from the windowsill and was hanging in the middle of the room, her crinkled skin aglow like a paper lamp, like an ancient creature on speed. Ellen, Rory said, and went to meet her on the floor. Calmly, he placed his hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eye, as sure of himself as he was when he stole. Do you think they understand the insanity of being sixty years old? she shouted. I don’t think they do, Rory said. They’re not listening to me, she said, they all think they’ll just die in their sleep whenever they’re ready. But you know a thing or two, Rory said, that’s for sure. Yeah, just look at me, Ellen said. Here I am, spent my whole life on the street, getting ready to die, and still I’m afraid! Still, I want my life. I can’t take it anymore, not for another second. Don’t think about that right now, Rory said, it’s time to eat. I made pea soup. She thought about it for a second. Yeah, she said, sinking into herself, I’m so hungry.

  The rest of the night he took care of everyone, ladling and clearing the table, moving things around and making soft encampments out of pillows and clothes, with a new spring in his step. And at the same time he was trying too hard, wriggling his hips, carrying four bowls of soup with demonstrative ease whenever Aurora was watching, as if to say, Look! You too could be this nimble and caring if you hadn’t spent all day wearing yourself out in the pews. I leaned toward her, attempting to squeeze myself into the place he was trying to appeal to. I avoided making conversation with the homeless people. In the corner of my eye, they were a wall of voices, a grayish fog, and I felt ashamed. But I couldn’t see anything in them but fatigue. That deep, undying fatigue that takes over a face and settles inside it. Too much bad weather and
bad sleep, too much noise, abuse and traffic, that was all they expressed. That was what scared me about them, the way their features had yielded to a far-too-general and shared condition. It hadn’t happened to me, not in the year and a half I was living on the street, which was part of why I was able to find a clean set of clothes, dress up, go to the bar and flirt my way home with Rory and Aurora. Now they were saying good night, and I hurried after them into the bedroom. We got into bed and listened to the storm and the snores of the homeless people. One of them had put their feet through the hole in the wall. I had the urge to chop them off at the ankles.

  On the train the next day, both Aurora and the trees on the other side of the glass, which I loved, and in which the sun slowly rose, were dead to me. In the church, when the high started to fade, I recognized the down as the same condition of insufficiency: not being able to give the world back the meaning I knew it had, for me too. For hours I sat there, feeling that absence, and it hurt in my bones like they were crumbling.

  Aurora shouted hi and walked straight to the bedroom in long leaping strides to avoid stepping on anyone. They were everywhere and more since yesterday, strewn across the floor, talking and tea-drinking, slumped over like the participants in a shabby symposium. I was on the toilet, my butt cheeks freezing, when her voice cut hostile through the wall, quickly followed by Rory’s. Without being finished I pulled up my pants, ran across the living room and stopped at the door to the bedroom. Do you have any sense, Aurora was shouting, do you have any idea what it’s like? If you’re so fucking pregnant, Rory said, why don’t you come home and relax when you’re done working? Why are you staying out so late? But you’ve got a room full of people! she said. Yeah! I said, and took a long step into the room, maybe you should be taking a little more care of them. I nodded in the direction of Aurora’s belly. This all started long before I started helping those people, Rory said, and don’t you try to teach me anything! You’re the one out with her all day, what the fuck are you thinking? I’m taking care of her, I said, and looked at Aurora. As she stood there on the bed, emaciated and bulging like a chicken carcass picked clean, with one hand under her belly and the other raised at Rory, I realized that I had completely forgotten about her in the church the last few days. I felt the kind of sadness that collapses in your belly when you realize the person you love and live with is lonely. In the hallway, some of the homeless people were pulling on their boots. Rory ran over and blocked the door with outstretched arms. But you’re already here! he said. We don’t want to intrude, they said. It’s just a little squabble, he said, lowering his voice, the kind of thing that happens when you live together. My wife . . . it really doesn’t have anything to do with you. Stay, won’t you? He came back in, got up close to Aurora and hissed into her ear: Come back home to me when you’ve done your thing. The violent potential in his voice reminded me of that night when the pot of soup was steaming away in her absence. All of a sudden, he got up and hurled it at the wall and made the hole through which the homeless people’s awkward silence was now audible. There was soup everywhere. Then you get rid of all these people, Aurora said. If you don’t come home late again, he said.