The Waiter

by Matias Faldbakken

  PART IV

  SLEEP

  EVERY MORNING I’M STUPID ENOUGH to check my phone when I wake up. Today, still lying in bed, I had to relate to a video comparing the agile jumps of animals with those of athletes. An automated five-necked lute playing a tune on itself with some kind of robotic fingers. A teenager who made a functioning Luger out of straws. A clip of a drunk man (The Baltics? Russia?) who managed to stumble into a dump truck and disappear. Two unfaithful women being stoned in the Middle East. A Brazilian boy refusing to eat chicken wings because he’s seen the film Chicken Run. A debate about the Californian drought and Nestlé. An article about Baudelaire’s hash consumption. A swing bridge in India decorated with thousands of grotesque little cloth dolls. A sad Ford Mondeo advert. A Sami teenager’s singing making a female foreign minister (Spanish? Polish?) cry. Because of this, I’m already wrecked by the time I get to The Hills to start the morning shift.

  Old Johansen’s liver-spotted hands dance across the piano keys on the mezzanine. I thought the Maître d’ had forbidden him from playing it, but he is actually playing Pachelbel’s Canon for three violins and basso continuo, his Canon in D Major. The piece doesn’t sound patent on the grand piano. Old Johansen has, however, sharpened it a little, making it more difficult to recognize, which is possibly why he’s getting away with it. Pachelbel’s Canon for piano, however flabby it might be, is still preferable to a lot of other things. Rap music drones away out there.

  I’ve attached the Zeitungsspanners to the spines of the newspapers and started serving cappuccinos, espressos, americanos, and one freshly baked croissant after another. In between making espressos, the Bar Manager is adjusting an uncomfortable ring, as one calls it; she rubs her finger, the ringless one. Representatives of the adult world of conversation and commerce, as it’s also known, come in one by one, ordering what they want to put in their mouths, which, as a rule, is something coffee-based, followed by baked goods. Who said that the concept of living well was a craze for times of crisis? Was it Balzac? Was it Cioran? If these aren’t times of crisis, I don’t know. Sometimes, when I overhear what is said at the tables, it’s not really possible to distinguish between genuine statements and parody. I have real trouble telling sincerity from satire. The farce of everyday life seeps in here at The Hills as well, where we try to keep it at bay through rigid routines. You can probably assume that businessmen, functionaries, and lawyers don’t parody their own world over their morning coffee, but it sure seems like it. Today I opened the bandage at the crack of dawn. The blister looks horrendous. The skin is pale and dead and loose. I wrapped it back up with the same bandage.

  The Bar Manager has tried to talk to me about how things unfolded yesterday evening and night three times now, but I wriggle out of it. I fetch the coffees she places on the counter and carry them over to their orderers. Are they called orderers? The people who order. The guests. The customers. The askers. The people who ask for something coffee-based, to be followed by baked goods. I won’t let myself be fooled; I don’t want to talk about yesterday. I’ve got enough to think about, I don’t need to speculate about Sellers and the Child Lady, and, worse, Edgar and the Child Lady. I’m like a shuttle service with coffees in my hands. Cof-fees. Coffee cups. As long as the Bar Manager places a coffee or two cof-fees on the counter, she won’t get any conversation about yesterday out of me.

  She just stood there glaring all evening anyway, passively, while I ran around serving, like a headless chicken, and, not least, made sure Anna was OK while Edgar went over to Sellers’s table and strutted his stuff with handshakes and laughter. What crazy rashness he was up to, Edgar. You don’t go over to other people’s tables like that, like some autograph hunter; you just don’t. He was even asked to sit down, between the Child Lady and Sellers. I had to serve him while he sat there on his throne. He let me carry over one Moretti after the other. It behooved me to serve. Behooved? Anna had immersed herself in her book over at the other table, drinking cocoa for what seemed to me—and probably also to her—like an eternity.

  Edgar had given her a fantasy book—not exactly ambitious, in other words. I tried asking Anna about the plot but didn’t really get what it was about. A group of teenagers were being kept as “tear slaves” in a dystopian, futuristic dictatorship. Thanks to a serious shortage of H2O, human tears were a resource, and certain poor, un-free creatures (teens) were forced to cry in a factory. No, that can’t be right. That seems too thin, even for fantasy. Even for fantasy? What do I know about fantasy? Doesn’t Anna have school tomorrow? I eventually had to ask Edgar. It was almost a quarter to eleven. Edgar, cackling, smiling, between the Child Lady and Sellers. He took the floor every now and again, I could see. He went on about both this and that, and had the entire table listening. The clock struck ten past eleven before he pulled himself together and left, dragging an overtired Anna with him. Indefensibly late for a school child, you could say. I left shortly after. Sellers, the Child Lady, Bratland, and Raymond continued their bacchanal—yes, that’s the word the Bar Manager chooses to use; their bacchanal continued until the restaurant closed, well into the night. The Child Lady was there until the very end, says the Bar Manager, tête-à-tête with Sellers. They were talking about cars, she says. That can’t be right, I say. Yes, they were completely absorbed in a conversation about automobiles, the car industry, different models. It looked like autism for two, she claims. The old 250 Lusso is a masterpiece, Sellers had said. Can you call “Pinin” Farina anything but a master? the Child Lady had replied. All this while I slept.

  And what do you know? Here comes the Child Lady, so early: here she comes through the curtain, pushing it to one side. It’s only a quarter past seven. It is she? I’m not sure. It’s like her. Yes, it is she. Isn’t it? She looks like herself. She looks like a thousand others. But it is she, it has to be. There’s nothing special about the Child Lady, and in a way that’s her beauty. Fresh as the morning dew, wrinkle-free, featureless, pretty. She looks rested. She sits down at the bar, right in front of the Bar Manager, who will be making a firm mental note of that, if I know her right. What’s her order? Quadruple espresso. Another quadruple espresso. Doesn’t she sleep? As Edgar often says, sleep is good. Sleep is an uncompromising break from the thieving of time that the hawker subjects us to. Edgar likes to sleep. The majority of seemingly irreducible necessities in life—hunger, thirst, friendship, desire—have been rediscovered in financial forms, so to speak. Sleep is a human need and a “dead’ interval which can’t immediately be colonized or placed under the hawker’s yoke, Edgar often says, slightly clumsily, with his index finger pointing again. In that sense, sleep remains an anomaly, an unknown territory for the hawker. Despite all the research in the field, sleep continues to frustrate and make strategies for exploiting or reshaping it to the hawker’s wishes impossible, Edgar says. It’s not bed manufacturers I’m talking about here. Not the psychoanalysts, either, with their dream reading. The fascinating truth is that nothing of value can, as yet, be extracted from sleep itself.

  But doesn’t the Child Lady sleep? She just keeps coming back like an itch or a flu or the tax man. I’m all for predictability and repetition, but the routine of being exposed to the Child Lady every day . . . I’m not so sure. Her steady coming makes everything else wobbly. She’s wearing crisp, fresh clothes. No kinks in her hair. Absolutely no bags beneath her eyes. She looks productive. She sits there, sipping her quadruple espresso, just a short time after participating in the bacchanal around Sellers’s table. Yes, I’m calling it a bacchanal, too, even if it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a “sumptuous celebration of the grape.” Sellers’s bacchanal is more a celebration of the flaky, it might seem. A celebration of ongoing, persistent procrastination, time wasting, with tormenting idleness the consequence. Flake. An indulgence of inactivity and inept behavior. How can the Child Lady be so energetic after taking part in that all night?

  She reaches for an object. Sometimes, for brief moments, it’s as though my language beco
mes confused. One word or another might dissolve completely, and I can’t come up with it when I need it. Right now, I can’t think of the word for the object lying on the counter. It’s panicky. As I lose the ability to attach words to things, like now with this object of the Child Lady’s, I become one great big eye, an enormous retina. What’s it called? Aphasia? Can you develop aphasia without a stroke, without a tumor on the brain or some other damage? The object is colorful. She grasps it and retrieves something, picks up or produces something; she pulls something out, fishes something up, a telephone, which she then swipes across, swipes up a number, and raises it to her lovely ear, which is decorated with a large, glittering earring—it must be a diamond.

  THIRTEEN MISSED CALLS

  “I’M AT THE HILLS,” I hear her say. “No, no . . . Yes, I’m here now . . .”

  She clears her throat and sounds like a small engine.

  “For sure! I’m not kidding.”

  With that, she giggles quietly and turns away, as though she wants to hide her laughter from the Bar Manager, and possibly also from me, standing here like a statue. The Bar Manager has placed a glass of water next to the Child Lady’s coffee; it remains untouched. The espresso goes down. Now she rubs her phone as she sips her quadruple. She rubs and rubs the glass with her index and middle fingers and stares at the screen. She leans forward, bends over it, buffering the screen, you could say. I collect a plate and a cup from the now-empty table three, where a Wiersholm, Mellbye & Bech lawyer was just eating. As I set the cup and saucer on the bar, I cast a long glance, as it’s known, at the Child Lady’s screen, but can see precious little. Is she on social media? Probably. Now she’s socializing, in a sense, through media which are social. Or? It’s difficult if not impossible for me to say who she is socializing with and how. As long as I can’t see the screen properly, I don’t know a thing about who she interacts with, even if she is sitting right in front of me. And not just that. I honestly can’t know whether she’s reading or looking at pictures, either. I don’t know if she’s political, an activist, if she pays her bills, if she works, has sex, watches films, talks to her parents, goes to school, is buying clothes or furniture, maybe a car. It’s impossible to know. Even if she is sitting there, in full view, as they say. Her hunching over the screen is and will be the same, regardless. The square centimeters of the screen have, in a sense, taken on a similar function to banknotes—the absolute translator of all things, I’ve thought, via Edgar. Work, leisure, pictures, relationships, knowledge, nonsense, text, bullying and drudgery, buying and exchanging, production and unrestrained consumption, birds and fish, endless inventiveness and wild control, desire and systems—everything can be translated into money, and all this can be translated again to play out on the screen.

  The majority of “things” become styled and trimmed down to fit the screen, just like all “things” are styled and reworked so that they can be turned into bills in one way or another. Banknotes and the screen are related. The screen is the banknote’s window. The screen is the hawker’s window. That’s probably it. The hawker stares back up at you from the screen. He probably does. Especially at Edgar. The Child Lady raises her head before I manage to compose myself; I’m rubbing my hands on a kitchen towel embroidered with the restaurant logo, bleary-eyed, I can imagine, staring at a fixed point, as they say, insidious, demanding, worrying, staring at her, the Child Lady, for no good reason. She stares back. For a moment I see the hawker staring at me, the way he stares out from the screen. Now I see the Child Lady. Now the hawker’s awful face is visible again. And now I see the Child Lady’s immaculate face once more, and all I can do is fold the towel into a long rectangle which I lift up and bring down against the bar like a short bullwhip or baton. It makes a nice crack, and it looks like some kind of habit, hopefully, a ritual, a waiter’s practice, something “French,” something to symbolize a period, a full stop, the transition from one duty to another: I spin around and immediately start going over the tables with the incessant crumber; I slash away crumbs, croissant flakes, imagining that my sweeping looks experienced, but also feeling enormously bent and idiotic. The Child Lady jumped a little when I whipped the embroidered towel against the bar. She looked at me. Imagine the number of waiters and coachmen (now taxi drivers) who have quietly been forgotten by history. Imagine the number of men who have vanished into waiting work or driving, in Europe, over the years. The eternal coachman. The eternal waiter. There has been plenty of driving. There has been plenty of dishing out food and quenching thirst.

  The Child Lady gives me a wave, and I go over. There’s a distinct smell around her; I still believe it’s musk. Unfortunately, I slept on one cheek last night, meaning I have a vertical crease from my eye down to the corner of my mouth. I must have been in the same position all night, because the crease won’t go away. It makes me look considerably older than I am.

  “Excuse me,” she says.

  I lean forward to suggest “attention”—yes, I’m actually leaning against the counter, and my hand is resting right next to her clutch. “Clutch” was the word I was looking for, that object of hers.

  “Do you know what Sellers said to me yesterday?”

  “Sellers?”

  “Yes, Sellers.”

  “No.”

  “He said that I’m an obsessive thought.”

  “What?” I say.

  The Child Lady giggles; she raises her hand to her mouth. I am—as I often am—left in the same position, unmoving, like poultry, fowl, because I don’t understand. A new giggle forces its way out. It looks like she’s trying to make a poor attempt to hide the fact that she is giggling from me. I’m standing there with my right hand on the counter and the bandaged blister behind my back. Even when she giggles, the Child Lady is at work, I think.

  “Don’t touch the clutch,” she says.

  I realize my hand is resting too close to the so-called clutch of hers, and I pull it back as though from a baking tray.

  “And do you know what Edgar said to me?” she asks.

  “Edgar?”

  “Yes, you know. Edgar, your friend.”

  “Yes, I . . .,” I say.

  “Do you know what he said?”

  They’re on first-name terms. It’s one thing that she’s in circulation, that she moves from the Pig’s table to Sellers’s, but that Edgar is now part of this circulation, this “scene,” is disturbing. Yes, there I said it. Disturbing. How long has this been going on? Edgar played up for Sellers’s table, that was easy to see. He turned it on for the Child Lady. Stood up straight. Gesticulated, moved a lot, virile. Everyone who comes into contact with the Child Lady becomes some kind of child lady themselves, it seems.

  “Don’t you want to hear?”

  “Just a moment,” I say, moving backwards like a crayfish. I have to get away.

  The chef is busy chopping in the kitchen. What’s being chopped? Isn’t the early morning for poaching eggs? His chopping is firm; it feels like he’s whacking my cranium. There’s an old butcher’s block behind him; I stand to one side of it. The block is at least fifty centimeters thick and equipped with an iron belt around the middle. The ceiling above the block—or the chopper, as the chef calls it—is just as black as the vaults above his gas hob; it’s like a black abyss. There’s an old-fashioned garlic press on top of the block, gray and well used, the plunger section itself almost black. Where does the Child Lady know Edgar from? I don’t understand. There’s a carton of twenty or thirty cherry tomatoes, and I push them into the garlic press one by one, squeezing and making some kind of tomato mush, ketchup, from the tomatoes, which runs straight onto the floor. What is the musk around the Child Lady? Is it Edgar’s musk? Does he carry it around with him? Doesn’t “musk” mean “testicle” in Sanskrit? What is Edgar up to? Has he given her musk?

  “What are you doing?” says the chef.

  “Me?” I say.

  “Why are you making a mess? What have you done to my tomatoes?”

  “I’l
l clean it up.”

  I move my head uncoordinatedly from right to left in search of a cloth.

  “And you need to answer your phone,” says the chef.

  “What?”

  “Your phone. It’s been ringing nonstop in your locker.”

  My phone never rings “nonstop.” As a rule, there are zero missed calls at the end of a working day. I never check my phone at work. There’s nothing in my life worth ringing “nonstop” for. Repeated calls this early in the morning can only mean that something has gone wrong.

  “I don’t check my phone when I’m working,” I say.

  “Do I have to listen to it all day? I need the tomatoes.”

  “Not at all,” I say. “Is it OK with you if I check it?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you to do.”

  “It’s unauthorized to have phones. We’ll have to tell the Maître d’ it’s an emergency.”

  “An emergency?”

  “It probably is.”

  “Just check your phone.”

  “I’ll get the tomatoes.”

  I go into the wardrobe corner and pull the ungodly device from the pocket of my all-weather jacket. Edgar has called thirteen times. That’s a bit much. Did something else happen yesterday? Was he too drunk when he left with Anna? Is someone hurt? Why am I asking myself? Wouldn’t it be better to ring him? Can I allow myself to call back?