The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “Well, all right …” Glass sniffs loudly, an indication as good as any that for her the subject is now closed. “And what happened just now between you and Nick?”

  I have to blurt it out quickly. If I hesitate, I won’t be able to say it at all. “He and Kat slept together. Neither of them has any idea that I know.”

  Whether what followed really happened or whether I just imagine it did I can’t really tell afterward, just as I couldn’t really distinguish between sleeping and waking these past few days. At my words Glass looks at me, and the familiar features in her face seem to rearrange themselves. Her forehead and the corners of her mouth droop, and an expression of such consternation enters her wide-open eyes that I have a crazy impulse to laugh out loud. I feel terrible, for the whole business is terrible, but there are worse catastrophes than betrayal or loss of love, and even both together shouldn’t trigger such a reaction.

  As if you’d had your skin torn from your flesh and then had salt rubbed in.

  The words rush into my mind, voiceless, soundless, speechless, more the scraps left from the memory of speech—a memory of Glass. An old memory—moreover, it’s worn like the ragged edges of a much-handled photo, and even the colors are faded, strangely washed out and sepia-colored.

  “… or could you imagine sharing him with Kat?” asks Glass.

  I’m certain I missed the first part of the sentence, and equally certain that my imagination or my tiredness has been playing tricks on me, for Glass is still looking at me, and her face shows no sign of consternation or sadness. There is just a lively interest, and behind it a trace of empathy. At her question, I shake my head forcefully.

  “No, stupid of me, who could possibly do so?” she murmurs. “I was just thinking … Maybe that’s what Nick wants. It doesn’t have to mean anything, his sleeping with Kat. It may have been a one-off for the two of them.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Glass shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe he isn’t gay at all. Or maybe he feels the same for men as he does for women. Has that ever occurred to you?”

  “Yes. And even if that was so, I still wouldn’t want to share him with Kat. Just as Kat wouldn’t be prepared to share him with me. Hell would have to freeze over first.”

  “Give me your hand, Phil.”

  Glass strokes the whispering foam and the drops of water from the back of my hand. It’s one of those rare physical gestures—I used to think that Dianne and I received so few of them because her lovers demanded so much for themselves.

  “It’s not fair,” I whisper.

  “It never is, darling.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  How often must Glass have been asked that question—a hundred, two hundred times? Even more? And how often have I heard her answer this question, sitting with Dianne under the kitchen table in the late evening or at night, eavesdropping on her talks with her clients?

  “What are you worth, Phil?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whom do you love more, yourself or him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Glass lets go of my hand and stands up. “Well, now, once you do know, you won’t have a problem anymore.”

  “Thanks a million for your help.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Her gaze softens. “I’m quite serious, Phil. Don’t do yourself down just because you don’t want to lose Nicholas.” In the doorway she turns round again. “And don’t stay in the tub too long. You’re getting all wrinkled.”

  I wait till the sound of her footsteps fades away down the corridor, then I shut my eyes. I take a deep breath, hold it, and let myself go under. Water and foam wash together over me. I listen to the intensified, booming, creaking and whispering of Visible, the metallic cranking of the ancient pipes, and hear the pulsating rush of the blood streaming through my veins. At a certain point my lungs threaten to burst. Red spots begin to dance before my eyes.

  Pascal’s postcard says: How much longer are you going to play the bystander and keep on feeling sorry for yourself? Wish you better.

  I come up again, very slowly.

  Late on Thursday morning when Glass is at the law firm and Dianne at Kora’s, there’s a ring at the front door. I rush out of my room and tumble down the stairs into the entrance hall driven by the vague hope that it’s Nicholas, who’s made his way here a day earlier than planned.

  The cold rushes at me as I open the door. A boy roughly my age is standing there. He’s wearing black jeans and a dark coat. His face is so pale that it merges into the whiteness of the snow behind him. I notice barely perceptible freckles that must have been more pronounced in the summer. His short hair is not quite red, more bronze-colored, yet his eyebrows and eyelashes are blond, almost invisible. The boy is almost girlishly pretty. And slightly embarrassed—it goes through my mind that had he been standing here on the same spot a hundred years ago, he would probably have been twisting a cap uncertainly in his hands.

  “Hi.”

  “Hallo.”

  “Is this where … Dianne lives here, doesn’t she?”

  “As well.’’

  “Can I … Well, you know me, don’t you?”

  I reflect. Suddenly I’m certain I do know him. I rummage in my memory, but I can’t place this pale face right away, so I shake my head.

  “I used to live here. Not in your house, of course,” he adds hurriedly. He nods his head in the direction of the river. “On the other side, in the town.”

  He looks at me expectantly, his mouth half open. Then he reaches in his right-hand coat pocket and pulls something out. A pocketknife.

  I gasp, less out of fear than surprise. There’s only one boy in the world who would hand me that knife. I might have recognized him sooner, but his hair was even shorter then, stubbly, and his face rounder, like every child’s face.

  “You’re the guy who went for Dianne with the knife, at the Big … down at the river!” I say in amazement.

  He nods and puts the knife back in his pocket. Back then Dianne had dropped the knife in the river after she’d pulled it out of the wound in her shoulder. The boy must have gone back for it later. He looks at me expectantly. He has very pale green eyes. Sometimes when I dreamed about him, about him and his knife and Dianne’s wound, where the flesh split open like overripe fruit when he stabbed her, I studied these eyes. As a child I had thought I detected meanness in them, an evil intent, if such a thing exists. But even in my dreams there had been something more—I remembered how the boy had hesitated before lunging out and how the hesitation had been evident in his whole posture and in his eyes. Then there came a time when I virtually forgot the episode. After the Hulk and the little stabber had left town I scarcely ever thought of them. In my memory they had turned into phantoms that disappeared into the shadows, cast over the world by Dianne’s and my own superhuman heroic figures.

  “What do you want?” I ask the boy.

  “To see your sister.”

  “What for?”

  “To apologize to her.”

  I can’t help grinning. “After all these years?”

  He looks down at the ground again. It must have taken a huge amount of courage to turn up here.

  “Come in for a minute before you freeze to death.” I guide him into the kitchen. Glass had lit the fire earlier in the morning, and it’s still warm. I poke around in the glowing embers, blow on them, and wait for the first fiâmes to flicker. The boy has sat down at the table and is looking round. He hasn’t taken off his coat.

  “And?” I say.

  “What?”

  “Is it like you expected? The witch’s house?”

  He relaxes. It’s as if the warmth from the fire is thawing him out. He has dimples when he laughs. “When we were kids, we really believed it—you and your sister gave us all the frights.” He spreads his arms out. “Now all I can see is a kitchen and a guy who seems quite nice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Maybe I’d see things differently if we
’d stayed here in this little backwater. The people here are a hundred years behind the times.”

  “Things have improved a bit over the years,” I say. “You left pretty quick after the business at the river, didn’t you?”

  The boy nods. “About three months later. I hardly remember. It was more like escaping than moving away. My mother packed a few bits and pieces, and we did a disappearing act, and that was it. Off down south, near the border. The old man was sitting watching TV.”

  “Does your father still live here in the town?”

  “He died two years ago. Drank himself to death.”

  “Oh.”

  “No need to feel sorry,” said the boy coolly. “The guy was a real loser. Boozing, thrashing, more boozing. I didn’t feel sorry, none of us did.”

  “D’you have brothers and sisters?”

  “A brother and an older sister.”

  I sit down at the table facing him. Perhaps I ought to offer him coffee or tea, but getting the fire alight has drained me of all my remaining energy. I’ve been lying in bed as good as dead for days, and now I’m completely done in.

  “Did you ever see your father again after you moved away?” I ask.

  “Just once. I was twelve or thirteen at the time. Actually, I did a runner to go and see him. Funny or what, when he made life such hell for us?” He considers his slender hands as if they had something to do with that hell or with his father. “Anyway, when I arrived, he was so drunk, he didn’t even recognize me at first. And then at some stage he started bawling and yelling that my mother was a whore and so on. And then I asked myself—who wants an asshole like that for a father?”

  Strange that I’ve never thought of it before—that Number Three, if I ever met him, might turn out to be not the longed-for great savior and wonderful father, but someone who beat, drank, and raped—one of those men, in fact, whom Glass’s clients usually spoke about in hushed voices, the way you do about sleeping monsters, for fear of waking them just by whispering their names in the air.

  “Actually, I have your mother to thank,” the boy continues. “If it hadn’t been for her, we’d never have taken the plunge.”

  “I thought she only spoke to the Hulk’s mother at the time.”

  “The Hulk?” The forehead furrows above the green eyes. “Oh, him, yes. That was what some people called him.”

  “D’you know what happened to him?”

  “No idea. In any case, our mothers, yours and mine, did talk. Otherwise we’d never have got as far as doing a runner and that.”

  “And now you’ve come back all that way to …”

  “No.” The boy shakes his head. “My mother’s come to visit a friend. I just came along with her.”

  A silence follows that I’d fill with questions if I could think of any. The fire gives out soft popping and crackling noises and the hissing sound of warmth drawing through the chimney. The disconcerting situation must be even more embarrassing for the boy than for me—at least I have the advantage of being on home ground. All the same I’m relieved when I hear the jingle of a key followed by footsteps approaching the kitchen. Then Dianne is standing in the doorway.

  “You’ve got a visitor, Dianne. This is …”

  The boy has got to his feet. Suddenly he appears as embarrassed as he was when I opened the front door to him.

  “Dennis,” he says.

  Dianne narrows her eyes and just stands there for a few seconds, tilting her head slightly to the side, her cheeks reddened from running in the cold. Finally she nods, as if she’s just found the answer to a question that’s been bothering her for ages.

  “Dennis,” she repeats.

  “I just wanted to—”

  “You know what, Dennis?” Dianne interrupts him. She goes toward him, throws her bag on a chair, and leans on the table with both arms. Her face is so close to the startled boy that the slightest movement further forward would bring her near enough to kiss him. “I would have stabbed you then if I’d had my own knife with me.”

  Dianne steps back. I look at Dennis, and he looks at me out of his pale green eyes, and from me he looks at Dianne, and from her back at me. The witch’s children. And then all of us, Dianne included, burst out laughing.

  On Friday morning Nicholas comes to fetch me from Visible. He suggests going in the direction of the sports field, and, unprotesting, I trot along after him. We cross the bridge to the town, and on the Little People’s side we turn off to the left along a footpath. The winding trail follows the river for almost half a mile, alongside allotments and a few isolated houses. The sky is grey, it’s one of those sad winter days that get lost between dawn and dusk, as it never really gets light.

  At some point Nicholas branches off the well-trodden track and plods through the snow-covered grass. He talks about his relatives, superficial uninteresting little stories that I hardly pay attention to. I hear him speaking next to me, and from out of nowhere a feeling steals over me as if I’m detached from my own body and floating somewhere above us, taking in all the immediate surroundings with every one of my senses—I sniff the empty classrooms with their smell of chalk, see the Christmas tree with a pathetic string of lights, rise beside the war memorial in the market square, hear the rustling as the UFO turns the pages of a photo album looking at pictures of her husband, feel the ice spreading outward from either side of the river, taste the sugar on roasted almonds being packed into pink bags by a stall holder outside the supermarket.

  “In other words,” Nicholas concludes, “my entire family consists of boring rich people who feel bound to get together at Christmas and talk, talk, talk incessantly so they don’t run the risk of realizing how useless they are during the long stretch of imposed leisure.”

  “If they’re that boring, why do you go and visit them?”

  “It’s what we do.”

  The words bear no contradiction. I recall that when we were having a row some weeks back Nicholas had said something about having to keep an eye on his parents. I don’t remind him of it.

  We pass Annie Glosser’s abandoned house, which has gradually been growing derelict over the years. It looks like a bewitched gingerbread cottage from a fairy tale. Snow weighs down on the roof, and two of the shutters are swinging open. They hang crookedly from their hinges, and the windowpanes behind them are shattered. I stand in front of the fence and look at the white garden, where legions of wild roses grow rampant every summer, as red as Annies shoes. Suddenly I long for this crazy fat woman like nothing else on earth. And from one minute to the next it seems the easiest thing to spit in a church font or confront Nicholas. Only its hard to do so while I look at him. I plunge my hands into my coat pockets and stare into the darkness beyond the broken windowpanes.

  “I saw you having sex with Kat.”

  “You did … what?”

  “I wasn’t spying on you,” I added hastily. “It just happened.”

  “I could say the same.”

  “What?”

  “That it just happened,” says Nicholas slowly. “With Kat and me.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “No.”

  “Do you love me?”

  I still don’t dare to look at him. My words have pursued a singular, sober, and merciless logic, emerging inevitably from what has gone before. Now they’ve been spoken, and hang in the air vibrating silently, and can’t be retracted.

  “I need you,” replies Nicholas. “But I don’t love you.”

  “That’s pathetic.”

  “No, it’s honest.”

  “And altogether practical, isn’t it? Probably soothes your conscience after you’ve made use of people like stuff on sale in a ten-cent store.”

  My legs have gone weak. If I don’t move, I’ll fall or vomit. I turn round and go off following the line of the hedge whose proximity offers protection and safety. Nicholas stumbles after me.

  “What’s the difference between loving each other and needing each other, Phil? Who’s to say that what yo
u feel for me is love? How can you be so sure? And damn it, how can you judge me so self-righteously? After all you’ve told me, what your mother gets up to is no different from me.”

  “Glass has her reasons.”

  “Everyone has reasons for what they do.”

  I wish I could draw comfort from the thought that he’s just hiding behind rhetorical hair-splitting. I wish I could reply by saying that Glass, unlike him, speaks about her reasons, but of course she never has. I feel I’ve been driven into a corner, and I quicken my pace.

  Nicholas grabs me by the arm. “Phil, what difference does it make whether I love you or not? I like you. We get on well together. We spend time together. We have good sex.”

  I stop walking and shrug him off. “I want more than that.”

  “For example?”

  “For example, that you take me into your confidence.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t! You don’t tell me about yourself, not really. I don’t know what goes on inside you. Actually, I don’t really know anything about you.”

  “There’s nothing to know.”

  “Is that so? Have you ever tried explaining that to Kat? She’ll be even less satisfied than I am just to jump into bed with you! And even still less inclined to share you with me. Sooner or later you’re going to have to decide on one or the other of us.”

  Nicholas shakes his head. “I like you both. It’s not a question of deciding.”

  “For me it is. And if you’re not able to do so, then I’ll have to.”

  I turn away from him and trudge on. To the right of me the hedges part and open onto a small meadow. Around the edges stand closely ranged snow-covered fruit trees. Some of the trees were cut down in the summer; a tall pile of logs is stacked up at the end of the meadow. I don’t realize that Nicholas has stopped following me until I no longer hear the sound of his footsteps beside me and I turn round to him. He’s standing some feet away from me in this white nothingness, an island all alone. Then he comes slowly toward me, cautiously, almost as if he’s afraid the snow might give way under him and the ground might swallow him up.