The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  Out there somewhere is where Nicholas lives. This morning, before he took a seat in the back row of the class to sit with outstretched legs and gaze out the window with evident disinterest until the math class was over, he had given me a

  passing glance. Which was enough to set my heart racing. I’m certain Nicholas didn’t recognize me. Both of us have changed since that winter four years ago. His shoulders are broader, his facial features are sharper, and his black hair is longer than it was then. Only his eyes are exactly as I remember them— bright, unfathomable, and disturbingly dark.

  I toyed briefly with the idea of telling Kat that I knew the new boy, that I’d seen him once years ago, and about the deep impression this encounter had made on me. So deep that over the years I kept thinking back to it at every opportunity, appropriate or not. The crushing verdict handed down by Kat during one of the recesses made me decide to play safe and keep quiet for the time being.

  “He’s a phony.”

  “A what?”

  “A phony. Plays the Lone Ranger—hard on the outside, sensitive on the inside. He’s actually weak on the outside and boring inside. Believe me, I know these types—Thomas is just the same. You can cross him off.”

  “It couldn’t be that you’re annoyed at being wrong? Because your little compass needle was pointing in the wrong direction?”

  “That’s life.”

  She sounded almost furious. I said nothing and felt like a traitor because I didn’t share Kat’s dislike for the newcomer and didn’t want to. I didn’t tell her that I found Nicholas attractive, that I found his silent manner appealing rather than repulsive. Kat may cross him off, but I’m keeping my options open. I want to get to know him. I have to. The longer I stare out into the receding thunderstorm, the more determined I become. It comes from the feeling that the newcomer owes me something. It’s as if back then in the winter cold he—no, we had made a pact with each other that I’d sealed with my bitten lip and my blood, a pact that has still to be redeemed.

  The crunch of gravel breaks into my thoughts, making me look down just in time to see Dianne’s slender figure lit up by sheet lightning as she disappears into the woods. I resist the temptation to call out her name. She obviously thinks she hasn’t been spotted, and just as obviously wants to be alone. The creaking of the floorboards earlier outside my door may have been Dianne peering through my keyhole to make sure that I’d gone to bed. I’m surprised, but greater than my surprise is my relief. The insect is leaving its amber trap. Dianne is going to meet someone; I can’t believe that she’s leaving Visible at this time of night and in this weather just to be alone.

  Although it’s years since Dianne and I have drifted apart, suddenly I’m overcome by something like jealousy. At one time we used to be inseparable; hand in hand we discovered the world together. We innocently played at doctor, after which we would call each other nothing but “pipi” and “Pillerman” for weeks on end and laugh ourselves silly, and later on we fought a battle together. Then somewhere along the line, for no apparent reason, my sister stopped talking. She disappeared from sight like an illusion. Whoever she’s going to meet now knows more about her than I do.

  I don’t move away from the window until the thunderstorm has passed. The heavens open, tearing the clouds apart and revealing the moon hidden until now. Full and shining brightly, it hangs above the stream and the town. Paleiko sits quietly on his shelf. I get undressed under his bright gaze and lie down on my bed. I listen to the regular patter of the rain and the distant rumble of thunder. Visible envelops me like a shell. And suddenly I feel like the little boy I once was, a microscopic dot in a gigantic pod. I’m alone. Glass isn’t back yet from meeting her fraud case. Dianne has gone off; she doesn’t need me. I place my hands across my chest and focus on the rising and falling of my diaphragm, the rhythm of my breathing. In, out, in, out …

  And then the pod dissolves, leaving nothing but a vacuum, a boundless nothing. I’m overwhelmed by a loneliness that the presence of Glass or Dianne or Kat would not be able to disperse. Even America doesn’t comfort me—it hasn’t for years, and couldn’t. It’s as if my mouth is sealed and refuses to utter the magic word.

  My hands glide down my belly as if of their own accord, stay there briefly, warm skin on hot skin, and then slowly feel their way further down, where they find their own practiced rhythm, faster than my breathing, faster than my pulse. I’m counting on this to banish my loneliness, but it just increases it all the more.

  “D’you know how to do it, little feller?” Annie Glosser asked me.

  “Do what?”

  “Get a good feeling. How you can get yourself a good feeling.”

  A good feeling was being an eight-year-old little feller sitting beside this fat woman on the rim of the fountain in the marketplace under a cloudless summer sky, licking the ice cream she had just generously treated me to. And as I did so, a good feeling was watching the pigeons at our feet, fighting over the fallen wafer crumbs as they dropped. To my intense satisfaction I had Annie Glosser all to myself. The very first time she had shown up at Visible, Dianne had refused to so much as look at this fat woman. Right from the start she kept Annie at the same safe distance she had previously reserved for Gable. I couldn’t think of any reason why she rejected her, for Annie was the most harmless creature in all the world. Maybe Dianne simply had the feeling that she shouldn’t get in the way of fat people and had to make room for them, even when they were already sitting down.

  Annie Glosser lived in a small house painted pale green that, like Visible, stood near the stream and some way outside the town, even though it was on the same side as the Little People. That was enough to make me think of Annie as far more like Glass, Dianne, and me than like the town dwellers, for Annie, as she had said to me on more than one occasion, and not just being critical of herself because it was me, was a bit crazy. She had come to Visible because some compassionate soul, probably mistakenly thinking she had some problem with men, had assured her that Glass could solve all such issues. But Annie did not have a problem with men. She simply couldn’t add. She couldn’t make out advertisements in the daily paper for special offers from supermarkets and liquor stores far and wide, particularly special offers on cherry brandy, and as a result she was always afraid of being taken for a ride when doing a big shop. The simplest addition presented Annie with as much of a headache as anyone else would have with the details of the theory of relativity. Glass explained to her that given the extent of her disability allowance, it didn’t make a scrap of difference which kind she chose; she could even have covered each bottle with gold leaf if she felt like it. Glass sent Annie back home. “You should stick to this Annie,” she advised me. “Go and visit her. You can learn a lot from crazy people.”

  Glass couldn’t have dreamed how right she turned out to be.

  Exactly what Annie’s disability consisted of I never found out. Perhaps she was nothing more than one of those somewhat rare but highly typical products of this sewer, as Glass came to call it in later years. She was harmless, sniggered at, and, as I imagined with sympathy, must have been a favorite target for cruel ridicule as a child.

  “Annie’s terribly lonely sometimes,” she confessed to me on one of my visits. “S’why she’s bought herself these little red shoes.”

  Annie’s mentally challenged agility was only seemingly matched by the apparent sluggishness of her physical bulk. In actual fact Annie was surprisingly nimble. In her red shoes she sashayed through the town in an erotically aggressive kind of way, with an occasional saucy lift of her skirt revealing her hefty thighs and chunky ankles for all to see. What made Annie so fat I never did find out. As I never saw her eating ice cream or anything else myself, at some stage I did get the idea that all she consumed was in liquid form, possibly her beloved cherry brandy.

  “What sort of good feeling?” I now asked Annie, and scattered the last of my wafer crumbs to the pecking beaks.

  “Just come and see Annie, then
ya’ll see,” she offered. She was swinging her legs, frowning with her lower lip stuck out, and looking at her red patent leather shoes gleaming in the sunlight. Maybe she was asking herself why it was that in spite of this lure no man was coming to speak to her. “You come by, ’n she’ll have something to show yer, will Annie. And yer’ll get another ice cream as a reward.”

  The very next day I was standing at her door, the first of many visits. The house was surrounded by a small garden luxuriant with greenery and flowers. Annie was the only woman I knew who talked to her plants. I would sometimes see her from afar, a watering can in her hand, standing on the rose-enveloped path that led through part of the garden. She swung the can to and fro and chattered away to the greenery as if she’d invited guests to a tea party.

  By way of greeting, Annie placed her fat arm around my shoulders. Since everything about her was fat and fleshy, I didn’t even notice the flabby mass on my back. Far more striking was the protruding lower lip, which always looked as if it was ready to take the next sip of cherry liqueur, or alternatively as if its owner was offended. The other striking thing about Annie was her huge, sleepy eyes. Last spring, just before the only cinema in the town had closed down, Glass had taken Dianne and me to see Bambi, in which to my relief there was no one with ears that were either too big or too small. But there was a skunk called Flower who was always tired, and it was Flower’s face that I rediscovered in Annie’s good-natured fat face.

  I was surprised how tidy her home was. At Visible I was used to dusty rooms with pieces of old furniture and boxes and cases standing about higgledy-piggledy. Here everything was spotlessly clean and in its own place. Annie too. She dragged me into the living room toward a comfortable sofa with a deep hollow in it. With a great snort she flopped down into it. After downing three glasses of cherry liqueur in rapid succession she slurped with her tongue and tapped her forehead with her finger.

  “There’s a roaring sound in there. It’s white. Can yer hear it, little feller?”

  I knelt down on the sofa, pressed my right ear against her left ear, and listened for a while. I really did hear a distant noise, but I would have been lying if I’d called it white, and whether it was in fact the roaring, I didn’t know either. All the same I nodded. There was an ice cream at stake.

  “Sometimes s’there and sometimes ’tisn’t,” Annie observed. “When ’tis, then Annie gets spots in front of her eyes. Rushes and rushes, like peeing—eh?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, stared into space for a moment with her sleepy eyes, and then heaved herself off the sofa. “Now I’m gonna show yer something, little feller.”

  She went to a tall chest and, smiling secretively as she drew a little key out of her overall pocket, opened one of the doors. Seconds later she had whisked a television onto the table—not a real television set, but a miniature one made of a garish orange fabric, about the size of a cigarette box, with a tiny peephole and a switch on the side. At Annie’s instruction I looked through the peephole and pressed the switch. The little machine showed twelve pictures one after the other, teeny transparencies. Essentially they were all the same—naked women with impressive upper halves and legs spread so wide as to give an unimpeded view into the furthest anatomical depths. I didn’t know what to make of this.

  “S’porno, tha’ is,” whispered Annie, close to me, and cherry blossoms seemed to waft through the room on a cloud of bitter-smelling alcohol. “Filthy stuff.”

  “Sporno,” I repeated reverently.

  “Now pull your pants down.”

  I placed the television on the table and obediently dropped my pants.

  “Now you got to play with yourself, little feller,” said Annie in a matter-of-fact tone. “Till the cock crows.”

  For the sake of the promised ice cream, I followed her command, but without achieving any remarkable results. There is probably nothing in the world more boring for an eight-year-old than an erection that fails to materialize in front of an orange-colored television showing pornographic images. But that didn’t stop Annie from showing me with her surprisingly soft and evidently practiced lingers how I should move my hand for the cock to crow.

  “Well, don’t it feel good.”

  “Sure, sure.” I was getting impatient. The whole business was about as interesting to me as a hole in the air or a photo of a blank piece of paper. “Do I get my ice cream now?”

  Annie nodded and belched several liquor clouds into the air in rapid succession. I pulled up my trousers, and the television disappeared back into its hiding place in the tall chest. Annie squeezed her fat feet into the red shoes, and then hand in hand we walked into town.

  “Ever pinched chocolate, little feller?” asked Annie on the way.

  “No.”

  “Spat in a church font?”

  I shook my head.

  “Annie has,” she said. Her booming breathless laughter must have been heard all the way to Visible.

  Annie seemed satisfied to have taught me something for life, for I was never again offered the television to see the filthy stuff. That was all right by me, for it left more time for extensive visits to the ice cream parlor, which I would regularly recount to Dianne to make her jealous, but without success.

  The reason I would vividly remember that day forever and ever and the nonerotic experience on the sofa was because the moment I had sat next to Annie, I instinctively knew that we were both doing something forbidden. Making the cock crow, stealing a bar of chocolate, and desecrating a church by spitting into the font were all one and the same. They were forbidden, and breaking that ban, yes, that was a good feeling, though not in the way Annie meant.

  Toward the end of the summer Annie Glosser had an accident as she waddled through the town, laden with two shopping bags. The usual white rushing sound must have been going strong in her head; I can think of no other reason why her eyes were blind to the gaping hole in the road, made by workmen, next to a crossing just a few yards ahead of her. Eyewitnesses reported that Annie had been teetering along purposefully toward the site of the disaster, her massive body had split the red and white striped security strip enclosing the construction area, and for a fraction of a second she had hung in midair, as if held by some invisible hand. Then heavy Annie and her equally heavy shopping bags Hew downward. When Annie was rescued—a time-consuming exercise, as it was a mystery how Annie had managed to fit into the hole she fell into—her summer dress was soaked red through and through. There was general panic until her two shopping bags were extracted and exposed to the light of day. These were found to contain sharp fragments of at least six shattered bottles of cherry liqueur, whose contents had spilled out all over Annie, but apart from this no other form of food, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. When Annie was admitted to the hospital, she was found to have lost one shoe. It must have been left behind in the hole, and was probably set in concrete at a later stage.

  Annie had broken both collarbones as the result of her fall. I never saw her again. The same city fathers who after Stella’s death eight years ago had come forward in the apparent absence of any available relatives once again busied themselves out of similar motives and had Annie Glosser, spinster, admitted to a sanatorium without further ado. At least that was the official version. The school kids, as usual better informed through secret sources than the adults, got to the heart of it. “She’s in the loony bin, is Annie. They do things there.” “What sort of things?”

  “They pump them full of electricity.”

  “And injections.”

  “And freeze them in ice, to stop them moving.”

  “She’s in a padded cell.”

  “Why?”

  “So that in a fit she doesn’t bash her head in. She’s really dangerous.”

  “And wears nappies.”

  That last bit of information was what shook me the most. I was terribly sorry that Annie had broken bones. She must have been in pain, and probably been terrified down there in the hole, cov
ered in sticky liqueur. But the notion of Annie wrapped in nappies broke my heart. Altogether I was certain that everything being done to Annie in the lunatic asylum would definitely not give her a good feeling, and the suspicion overtook me that for Annie the days of cherry liqueur as well as the porno-pic orange plastic TV were well and truly over. I was so moved by Annie Glosser’s fate that for a long time had anyone asked me what I would like to be when I grew up, I would have said a psychiatrist. But nobody asked me.

  For several weeks I went prowling round Annie’s brightly painted house, secretly expecting a window or a door to swing open in friendly welcome. Dianne and I won the Battle of the Big Eye, and I would have loved to tell Annie about it. But the summer passed, and weeds took over the neglected garden, suffocating the splendid displays in the flower beds, and when the autumn winds began rattling in vain at the colored shutters I gave up all hope. But I didn’t forget Annie or how to make the cock crow.

  ________

  Years later, when I had successfully satisfied myself for the first time, exactly as I’d been shown, I bought an ice cream wafer next day in honor of Annie Glosser. I took it and sat down on the rim of the fountain in the market square, crumbled the wafer, and fed it to the cooing doves.

  chapter 6

  or

  you’ll

  wake

  them

  The rampant deadly thorn hedges had retreated. Once again the flies were buzzing and crawling along the sooty walls, and the cook had dealt the kitchen boy a resounding box on the ears. There was no longer anything to prevent a wedding. I was more than content. I was thoroughly happy.