“Tell your mates I’m going to kill them! I’ll throw them all down the stairs. Tell them that, you piece of shit! That’s the only reason I haven’t put a knife in your guts yet, because you’re to fucking go back and tell them,” says Sebastian.
“Who is he? Sebastian!” I shout but instantly see the answer. Behind the boy, on the stairs, lies a thermal bag with the logo of a pizzeria; it’s splashed with garlic sauce from a cracked container. The same logo is on his zip-up jacket.
“How did you get in?” I ask.
He can’t speak. Sebastian is pressing him against the grating, hard, as though wanting to yank him to the other side. The bars dig so deeply into the boy’s face it flattens it. I tap Sebastian on the shoulder. He grabs the boy with one hand and with the other catches him by the chin and bends his head back.
“As usual, by the stairs. The lift’s not working. They’re repairing it. I saw them on the way in.”
“Who’s repairing it?” I get close to him as though I were about to kiss him. Smell his cigarettes, chewing gum, deodorant from Carrefour, and the sweat of fear.
“Fucking hell, the people who repair lifts!” he screams. “Are you completely screwed up? Guys in overalls, with tools. They said the lift’s going to be out of order until tomorrow.”
I stretch and raise my arms. Realise that I’ve spent most of the day sitting in the armchair chain-smoking, in one position – the position of someone ready to jump up immediately and attack. I’m one enormous cramp.
“Tell your friends they’re dead. Fuck you!! Cars are going to pick them up, their mothers packed into the boot, and they’re going to fucking bury their mothers in the forest. You tell them that,” growls Sebastian, like a raging beast.
This time I place my hand on his huge oval bald head as though checking if he has a fever.
“Let him go,” I say.
“You must be crazy to think I’m going to let him go.”
“He’s only a pizza guy.”
“Sure.”
“Let go, Sebastian.”
Sebastian’s panting again, throbbing like an overheated machine, but he does what I say.
“Nobody here’s ordered a pizza,” I try to explain to the boy, but he’s frantically looking for something in his pockets. Finally, he pulls out an order form and starts to read out loud:
“Apartment 12, 20 Mickiewicz Avenue. Four large pepperoni pizzas. Somebody ordered pizza here. They said you were shooting a film, a horror film, but I see it’s even worse, bloody hell.” The boy rattles out.
“Yes, that’s here,” I reply calmly, as though explaining to a retarded child. “But nobody here has ordered a pizza. There’s no way we can phone. Our phones aren’t working.”
“You don’t understand, nobody ordered pizza by phone. A woman came in this morning, just after we opened, ate something on the spot and ordered pizzas – to this address, this apartment, to be delivered now.”
Iga and Veronica step out of the apartment.
“What did she look like?” asks Iga.
“Shooting a film? Who said we’re shooting a film?” I ask.
“My God, some woman, okay? She was about forty. Dyed hair. Clearly looks after herself. I don’t remember anything else… Glasses. I remember she wore glasses.”
“What film?” I ask.
“I don’t know!” yells the boy. “I don’t fucking know what film! What’s happening here, what’s wrong with you all?”
For a moment, there’s silence.
Sebastian spits through the bars at the pizza.
“We’ve got food,” he says, then turns to me and adds: “They’re probably spiked with something more than cheese and pepperoni that’d knock us out, damn it, so take the sodding pizzas and fuck off. Eat them yourself if you want.”
“You’re all fucked up,” the boy sums up.
“Bugger off!” bellows Sebastian. “Sod off, out of sight. Here’s two tenners, take those and fuck off.”
“Wait,” I say to the boy as peacefully as I can, wanting to hold him back for a second. “Wait, you’ve got to do something for us, wait, please.”
The boy hides the money in his pocket, grabs the pizzas, and, in one leap, lands on the mezzanine. But a moment later, he turns and walks up again. The bars are imprinted on his face and a metal leaf from the fin de siècle adornment has cut his nose; blood trickles down his face. He pulls something out of the thermal bag, slips it through the grating and drops it on the floor at my feet.
“The woman asked me to leave this here.”
I pick up a typically girly purple-red bag speckled with blobs of coloured thread and sequins.
“Will you do something for us?” I ask the boy.
“Leave me alone. You’re totally screwed up,” he replies.
“Please?” I ask, more pleadingly. “Go to the police. Tell them that we’ve been locked in our apartment. Our phones have been stolen and the internet’s been cut off. We’ve been shouting from the windows, but nobody can hear us. And tell those guys repairing the lift to come up. We want to talk to them. Please?”
“You’re screwed up.”
“I know that’s how it looks.” I look him in the eyes. “But I’m begging you. I can give you money. I’ll give you two hundred złotys right now.”
“You’re screwed up.”
“Two hundred złotys now and more when you come back,” I say.
“You don’t want that,” he replies.
“Don’t want what?” I ask.
“Those guys down there to come upstairs.” The boy chucks the boxes of pizza at my feet and runs down the stairs very fast, so fast that for a moment I’m sure he’s going to trip and somersault all the way down.
“My bag. You’ve got my bag.” Anna’s voice behind me sounds like glass cracking.
I hand her the bag. She grabs it for a brief moment then immediately drops it on the floor, lowers her head and freezes like an appliance cut off from power. Iga picks the bag up and takes Anna by the arm.
Anna opens the bag. Starts to rummage inside.
“Anything there? What’s in it?” I ask.
“It’s not, it’s not there… my phone’s not there… only useless…” she says quietly to herself. Finally, she pulls something out. A crumpled piece of white paper. On it, in red ink, are the words:
WE’RE GOING TO MEET SOON.
“Go in, Anna,” I say. “Go in.”
She’s looking at me. Reminds me of a frail animal. “Go in,” I repeat, and she finally listens. Sebastian returns to the landing. He’s shaking all over, as though he’s been standing over a pneumatic drill for hours.
“We’ve got to get out of here.” I turn to him, indicating the grating. “As quickly as possible. Then we can go to the police.”
“Get out?” yells Sebastian, waving his arms. “And to what police? What the fuck for? We’ve got to wait for them here! They’ll be here soon and then we’ll fucking do them over!”
“No, Sebastian,” I say, loud and clear. “No. They’re not going to come unless we give in. They’ll let us out when we let them know that I’m handing the apartment over to them.”
“I don’t understand,” replies Sebastian.
“‘They’ have to come here to let us out,” I reply.
“You’re crazy.” Iga has returned to the landing with a new cigarette. “You’re crazy, woman, it’s yours. We’re going to help you defend what’s yours.”
They watch me, troubled, not understanding what I’m saying.
I have to inhale a bit more air, then slowly let it out. Several times. I explain further:
“It’s my apartment and the decision’s mine. We’ll let them know they can have it so that they’ll let us out, and then we’ll go straight to the police. We can’t do anything stuck here. We already know it’s not a joke, and since it’s not a joke, it means they’re capable of doing anything. I’m scared that they’ll set fire to us, pump gas in or something. I’m scared.”
“A
gnieszka, wait,” says Iga. “People are going to start looking for us soon. Somebody’ll come, try to visit us, try to get in. Tomorrow morning. At the latest. I’m sure of it. Maybe we should all just calm down?”
“Listen, Iga, how often do you phone your mother?” I shake my head. “My daughter calls me twice a week. But she’s twelve. Besides, she lives in Warsaw. Friends? They’re all used to our phones being off for days, us not answering. People we know? Everyone we know in Cracow needs two weeks to sober up, let alone register that someone’s missing.”
“Our bosses,” says Iga. “Someone at my uni. Someone at Gypsy’s company.”
“Iga, you just get kicked out if you miss uni or work. Nobody cares where you are.”
“People at the Cat, Agnieszka.”
“Everyone at the Cat who you talk to is here in this apartment with you.” All this explaining is so exhausting I have to sit down.
“Agnieszka, we’re in the town centre of a big city in Poland. This is going to end soon, it has to.” Iga tries to sound positive.
“Exactly. We’re in the centre of a big city in Poland,” I reply.
Iga lights one cigarette from the other.
“It’s not worth it,” I say.
Everyone is silent, so I raise my arms to show I’ve said all I wanted to say.
“How do you want to let them know?” asks Iga.
“Fuck this shit.” Sebastian turns and goes back into the apartment.
I stay outside. It’s still painfully cold on the landing.
“I’ll write it on the door,” I answer.
I tell Iga to fetch some paper and felt-tip pens. She does. We share them out. Each piece of paper is a letter. We get to work. Iga, Veronica and I sit on the floor. I give everyone some letters. We draw each letter’s outline and meticulously fill it in.
Gypsy stares at his watch as though keeping time.
“I’d like to go to the cinema. Or a bar. Get fried,” he breaks in.
“There’s nothing on at this time anyway,” I remind him, drawing the outline of the letter G.
“Then at least get drunk,” says Gypsy. He finally climbs out of the armchair, picks up another piece of paper and, instantly guessing what the note’s going to say, starts to draw the letter L. “Get so pissed I pass out on a bench in Planty at five in the afternoon.”
When I finish filling in the E, Anna emerges from my room. Wrapped in my jumper, silent and calm.
“I’ve got some lorazepam if anyone wants some,” she says, her voice flat and warm. I hand her a free felt tip and a piece of paper. It takes her three long seconds to react and take it.
“Draw a huge P,” I tell her. It takes another few seconds for her to finally squat down and start to slowly, methodically draw a line.
“Can I have another cigarette?” she asks.
I pass one over to her, glancing at Robert, whose eyes are already closed. He’s breathing too fast to be asleep; he simply can’t look at anything anymore.
About four o’clock in the morning, the sign is ready. We carefully pick up our pieces of paper and go out to stick them on the door. Without looking at us, Gypsy says:
“We’ve let ourselves be pulled into some total idiocy. It’ll be all over YouTube tomorrow.”
I’m not listening to him. I’m going out to hang my pieces of paper according to my plan. ‘They’ are going to come in and we’re going to get out. Then when we’re out, we can do anything we want.
“We’re going to get out,” I state, sticking a straight, evenly filled P to the door. “And then we’re going to come back,” I add, sticking on a T. “And ‘They’ are going to get out.” I stick on a U, then another U.
When we’re done, the whole door of the Institute has got pieces of paper stuck to it. Six words, sixteen letters in all, on the same number of pieces of paper.
WE GIVE UP, LET US OUT.
The sign gives me strength, pours cheering warmth into me. Let ‘Them’ come. Let ‘Them’ have it. You can’t simply take someone’s apartment away from them.
For a moment, we stand on the landing without saying a word. Drink tap water. Then we go in, block the door with the mop handle, barricade it shut with the green sofa and close ourselves off in our rooms. We have to get some sleep, at least a little. I go to my room, the first on the right. It looks like a depot full of colourful objects just after a bomb attack. I wade my way through the rubbish scattered on the floor: clothes, bags, shoes, books. To bed, under the duvet, fully clothed, dirty. My face is starting to burn. Old make-up. Black follows me into the room, leaps onto the bed, curls up by my belly, but doesn’t purr, constantly listening.
It’s starting to get light outside. Slowly the whiteness in my room grows more intense. Birds start to sing; they’re on the branches near my window. I imagine the first lot of people on their way to work and the last shift of factory and shop workers, those returning from parties and events, drunk students hanging on the arms of exotic guys making their way to hotels. Pissed Englishmen. The homeless. Municipal services and city cleaners. A whole lot of lucky, free people.
Veronica enters, opening the door gently, although nobody’s yet asleep. Right up until our alarm clocks go off, the apartment’s going to be filled with the sound of people trying to fall asleep: creaking springs, nervy gulps of water, doors opening quietly. Only at this moment, this brief and appalling moment, everyone’s trying to even out their breath, to be momentarily still.
“Take a bath,” she says.
“Yes, I should,” I reply truthfully. “But I haven’t got the energy.”
“Everybody’s already had a bath. The bathroom’s free,” Veronica says in the soft voice of a psychic reading tarot cards on some esoteric TV channel. I haven’t the strength to say anything. Veronica understands, smiles. She always understands. I, too, smile at her.
Veronica shares a room with Iga. She was the last to move in, not really that long ago, a couple of months at most. She’s a pale girl with a storm of red hair and is usually smiling. She wears odd clothes. Looks like a walking advertisement for The India Shop. She has a triangular face, narrow lips, wildly green eyes hidden behind horn-rimmed glasses. Veronica’s gaze stops you short, giving you two choices: to quickly turn your head away or stare into her eyes for a few moments. Veronica hasn’t got a boyfriend, doesn’t go out much, hardly knows anybody – we in the Institute were the first people she met in Cracow. She works in a library and tops up her earnings working on the till at Cinema City in Cracow Plaza.
In Veronica’s mind, ‘They’ don’t exist in three-dimensional, tangible space. ‘They’ are like some kind of a shining, the invisible traces of past events. Without using such trite tricks as checking your lifeline, Veronica can tell you how long you’re going to live, and she’ll tell you to take some pills because she knows that you’re going to get a sore throat in two weeks’ time. To Veronica, ‘They’ are dead – former inhabitants who can’t escape because they’ve got no bodily form endowed with arms and legs. They’re locked in here like air trapped in an upturned glass. They’re furious that they’ve crossed over to our tangible human dimension. Veronica’s sure of it and is the calmest of us all.
That’s why I got scared when Veronica used the word “strange”. And that’s why, when I recall how she said the words “Agnieszka, something strange has happened,” I start doubting what’s going to happen tomorrow; that we’ll go to the police station and they’ll help us get my apartment back, that we’ll get out of the Institute at all. But I try to forget the word “strange”, which I scrunch in my head like some needless piece of paper. We’re going to get out. We’re going to come back. We’re going to win it back.
“Good night, Veronica,” I say with great effort and turn onto my other side.
She leaves the room even more quietly than she’d entered. For a moment, she stands in the doorway and turns towards me.
“What do you think? Who are ‘They’?” she asks.
“I don’t know,�
�� I reply truthfully. “Does it matter?”
Because it doesn’t matter. It’s starting not to mean anything. Slowly I’m losing interest in who’s locked us in the apartment and why. I’m more interested in thinking about how to stop myself from doing them permanent harm.
I blink my eyes. I’m trying to cool my brain so I can sleep for at least two or three hours. But I can’t. Something occurs to me, a random thought; it’s not going to let me fall asleep, it’s going to scorch me like a hat left out in the midday sun. Maybe Veronica’s approach is right. Maybe, in a certain sense, ‘They’ are a shining, a trace, a relic. But before the thought is clear, I start to fall asleep. Slowly, a heavy black eiderdown falls over my head. I surrender to it, lie beneath its weight, exhale, allow it to pour into my eyes, nose, ears.
Then another thought occurs. In a flash. Wakes me like a needle digging into my neck. I sit up in bed and breathe deeply. My heart’s beating fast, I feel it as though another, smaller Agnieszka, hidden somewhere within me, is pounding me with her fists from within, as hard as she can.
“They said you were shooting a film,” the pizza boy had said. “It’ll be all over YouTube tomorrow,” Gypsy said.
I run from my room, thump on Iga’s door. Thump hard.
“Iga, Iga, get up. Get up!” I say. All I hear is the quiet moan of someone utterly exhausted, but I keep pounding. “Get up, we’ve got to search the apartment. We’ve got to search the apartment for cameras!” I shout.
* * *
Before my daughter told me that Thelma and Louise had gone to heaven, before we both lay down on the bed, spending the entire night prior to my leaving for Cracow wiping our noses, guzzling a nauseous amount of ice cream and watching Mamma Mia! and Notting Hill, before I got up at seven in the morning and made us breakfast – fried eggs for two even though a third person, my daughter’s father, was asleep on the sofa – before I ran away a second time, for good, before all this had happened, a couple of weeks previously, the phone had rung. My mother.
The Institute Page 5
