“I was just walking past the hospital yesterday,” Wanda said, “on my way home from work. There was no one waiting for me, so I just thought I’d check on you.”
She glanced sideways.
“And today was my day off, and since you don’t seem to have anyone else I thought I’d arrange these things for you. I felt responsible. But now I know you are all right.”
Rus did not feel all right. He would have liked a name that was a bit more adventurous, like Cloud, or Ocean. Rus Ocean. But it was not possible. Wanda had explained it. Your name is determined even before your body is there, and the reason you can’t change it is because it is very difficult and there are lots of papers and you just can’t have everyone going around changing everything.
“My mother never told me I was called Ordelman,” he said.
Wanda was not surprised. There were some other things his mother did not tell him. There was a history of suspicious transfers in her name, and it seemed as though her boyfriend, Modu, was not nicknamed Snow because he liked to play in the snow but because of shady business. Also, it seemed like they had not left for Africa for the birds, but for the business. The money on the debit card was a monthly disability benefit, which she clearly was not entitled to and had to be stopped now, obviously.
Even though Rus listened very carefully, it did not make sense to him and only made his headache worse. He pressed his hands against his forehead.
“How are you feeling?” Wanda asked him, looking sideways from the steering wheel.
Rus did not know what to say. He had just found out he had an awful name, he had vertigo, and he was in a car with a woman whose breasts bounced up every time they went over a bump in the road. He did not understand why they sent him out of the hospital when he was obviously so miserable.
“Only physical problems,” they said when he told the doctors about the letter.
Rus looked sideways at Wanda. Her face was brown and she had painted her cheeks pink. She was wearing a blouse and glasses. She drove through the busy city center with brisk turns, throwing angry glances at other drivers if they tried to get in front of her. If she got such a letter, she would certainly know what to do, Rus thought. They probably would not even dare send her such a letter.
Rus did not want her to leave anymore. He had a vision of Wanda taking care of him, of Wanda filling out his forms and driving him around in the car.
“You look like an angel,” Rus said, “with your glasses.”
Wanda did not respond. She looked at the road. When they were at a red traffic light she took a wrinkled envelope out of her bag. “Here’s the letter back,” she said. “You cannot return your letter to the tax office; you really need to pay your bill.”
“Oh,” Rus said.
“And your key was in your suit,” Wanda said. “I put it in your coat.”
Rus searched the pocket of his fur coat. The key was there. Now he could go home, to where the collectors were probably already lining up in the street. “Thank you,” he said, almost without a voice. They were silent again for a while.
Rus tried to cry without sound, but he was not very good at it.
“First,” Wanda said after a while, “you have to make a résumé listing your professional experiences. You said you were a sailor, so you make a list of the ships you have worked on and for how long. Then you appeal the decision of the taxes. There are some costs regarding your registration process, because you have to go through foreigner screening. You will need a lawyer for this, but you can apply for compensation. In order to get compensation you do need to report at the Foreign Bureau, which will have to define your current status.”
“All right,” Rus said, almost inaudibly. “A résumé of the screening. The ships where I worked. Applying for the forms. I will do all that. Thank you.” He was sitting with his head bent and pressing his hands against his eyeballs. Wanda’s words sung around in his head without getting any meaning—“appeal” and “registration” and “screening”—and he really missed his mother, he wanted her to come back and give him another debit card and tell him not to worry. But they weren’t coming back, they had left him, they had left him for the money, left him to rot. He had never realized before how awful his life was.
“Also,” Wanda said, “the ambulance bill is two hundred fifty. Because you did not have insurance. You need to get insurance too.”
Rus pressed his fingers harder on his eyeballs, but the colors dancing around behind his eyelids did not relax him anymore like they used to. He was all alone and would never be someone like Wanda, who could shout about “make way” and “coming through” and wore glasses and had a car and knew all about everything. His bed was going to be sold and his kitchen, and he was going to end up on a bench in a park with a blanket, just like the unemployed.
“I don’t want to be unemployed,” he whispered.
Wanda looked at him sideways. He did not want to look at her and shrank into his seat.
“Do you know what an alliance is, Rus?”
Rus did not know, and she guessed that because she answered for him.
“An alliance is a cooperation of two different parties. Together they are stronger and have more of a chance to survive. But both parties have to stay in the alliance and honor the agreement. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Rus wasn’t really sure what she was talking about, but he nodded because she looked so serious.
“But the alliance only works if both parties stay in it,” she said. “They can’t just form an alliance with someone else, leaving the other party with all the new furniture.”
Wanda was squeezing the steering wheel with white knuckles. They were silent for a while. Cars were racing past them at the traffic light. Then Wanda blew out a lot of air and looked at Rus. “We will work on your papers at my house,” she said, “and you will provide me with the information to put together your résumé.”
MRS. BLUE AND THE SECRETARY
“If you smile, it will turn into a good memory,” the secretary said. “Memories are just pictures of yourself in your mind.” That was what her mother always said at least.
Mrs. Blue did not respond. She was lying on the couch with her face toward the ceiling. She had dislocated her hip when she fell onto the pink chesterfield that was standing on the forklift truck at the studios. The secretary had seen her trying to get into the elevator with her new wheelchair, and she insisted on helping her into the house and getting blankets for the couch. Now the secretary was sitting at the foot end of the couch. She had made tea but Mrs. Blue didn’t want any. She didn’t want anything, aside from the remote control now and then, to see if her show had come back yet.
“So it was a very good TV show?” the secretary asked eventually.
Mrs. Blue opened her eyes.
“When you start telling a story, the people in this story and the world they live in are created,” she said. “It is like God: someone made him up and now he’s there, in our minds and in heaven. They have an obligation to Grace and to the others to end the story properly.”
“And they lived happily ever after,” the secretary said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Blue said, “for instance. Although I personally don’t like the ever after. I myself prefer ‘they closed the curtains, put on their pajamas, and went to bed.’”
“Yes,” the secretary said. “They were in love and happy, closed the curtains, and went to bed.” She thought about the lawyer and the bald spot on top of his head.
She looked sideways at Mrs. Blue, who had pulled the blankets over her head.
“Glenn sent you a nice card,” the secretary said. “He was sorry he could not make it for your birthday.”
Mrs. Blue remained silent.
“He is very busy,” the secretary tried. “Perhaps you could visit him. Do you have any plans for vacation?”
Mrs. Blue sighed. She pulled the blankets farther up.
The secretary took a sip of her tea. There was a radio still on s
omewhere, it seemed. She swallowed the tea and got up from the couch. “I’ll check on you later this week.”
The secretary carried the teacups back to the kitchen and walked to the door.
“Washing machines,” Mrs. Blue said suddenly.
The secretary stopped in the doorway.
“When we invented the washing machine,” she continued, as if she had personally been involved with the invention of the washing machine, “we thought, This is going to save time. People will have extra free time to do things now.” She slowly sat up on the couch and took the remote to switch on the television. There were people on rows of chairs. She switched it off again.
“But everyone is busy,” she said.
“I’m not busy,” the secretary said, but Mrs. Blue did not respond. The secretary stood there for a few seconds, not knowing what to do, until she said, “Well,” and “Just let me know if you need anything,” and “Thank you for tea.”
“For God’s sake, Laura,” Mrs. Blue said with her eyes closed as the secretary stepped out into the hallway. “Don’t be such a pushover. Take what is coming to you. All right?”
“All right, of course,” the secretary said, and she closed the door with a soft click behind her.
GRACE IN THE STORY
“You couldn’t let it rest, could you?” Rick said, his voice strange and mechanic. He was standing in front of Grace, the baseball bat raised above his head. He did not seem to see her, the gun she was holding in her shaking hands. He did not seem to hear her when she said, “I will shoot.”
The bat crashed onto the dresser, splintering the wood. Grace ducked right in time. With her back pressed against the wall she watched how Rick pulled the bat from the wood and started speaking to the empty space in front of him, as if she were lying there.
“I’m sorry, Gracie,” Rick said. “But you left me no choice.” Sweat glistened on his forehead and his face looked gray and exhausted, as though he had been awake for days on end.
Grace folded her finger around the trigger of the metal gun and aimed at Rick’s legs.
MR. LUCAS AND THE HEADLIGHTS
Mr. Lucas was sitting on the chair next to his window. The girl had told him green might not be appropriate for a Memorial Service, and the yellow shirt might be a little bit too cheerful as well. She tried to tell him kindly, Mr. Lucas was aware of that, rambling about her own first day at the office, when her manager had told her that her skirts were much longer than those his previous secretary used to have, but Mr. Lucas had been so acutely nervous and ashamed of getting it wrong again that he had stammered, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and shut the window while she talked.
Now Mr. Lucas was sitting by the window with his head bent, his chin on his chest, but he was not sleeping. He was reprimanding himself. “You cannot even understand a simple thing like wearing black to a memorial. Must always be at the forefront, always get the attention, always think too much of yourself.”
In his hands he was holding the small scissors. He used those to cut up the yellow shirt, cutting it into tiny pieces so he would never consider wearing it again. The suit he placed in a tub filled with water and ink, to color it darker. He watched the fabric sink in the water.
In the background the news was playing. “I have received threats to my life from these people,” a politician said. “I can’t say too much, but it proves they are violent by nature.”
By the time the evening fell Mr. Lucas was breathing in and breathing out normally again. He took the suit out of the tub and held it up in the air in front of the window. The moonlight showed its modest dark green color, almost black; nobody would be able to tell the difference.
Mr. Lucas was almost feeling completely calm and certain again, until he saw two familiar headlights approach his house through the thin fabric of the curtain.
ASHRAF AND THE CELLS OF THE BODY
Ashraf lay down in the passenger seat of his white van, the back of his chair reclined. He had parked it in a quiet street on the corner of the canal. He was going to sleep in the van tonight, because his aunt Nadia had found out he’d quit his job at City Statistics and they were all being hysterical about it. His uncle kept going on about the van, how it would be broken in a week. His mother was worrying about the payments on the mortgage and that his savings were gone.
Ashraf pulled the sleeping bag up over his chin and looked at the boats rocking back and forth in the canal. He wondered if there were fish in the canal and whether they could look above the water, and if they could, what they would think about what they saw. Fish don’t think of course, he corrected himself. Fish do not know they exist at all. They just are, hanging in the water, eating plankton or something. Some fish did not even have a brain, like certain jellyfish. They were a collection of organisms that moved in the way that plants grew, not steered by the mind but more like pulled toward something: sunlight, food, mating. Ashraf looked at his face in the side mirror. He was the captain of his collection of cells, or at least his brain cells were. And all the cells renewed all the time, so the Ashraf he knew yesterday was not the Ashraf he was today. He was held together by his memories and his plans.
His first memory was of his mother, trying to tie a bow tie around his neck for the first day of school. They had put a wet cloth on his face because he was crying too much. Was that him? There was a teacher called Swan, he remembered, whom he planned to marry back then. Then he remembered his father’s funeral; the memory always came back to him as a soundless black-and-white movie, him throwing up behind the bushes. He always had that eerie feeling that he was still there, stuck in that day forever, slowly progressing down the graveyard lane, throwing up when he saw the casket, carrying the casket, putting it down, lifting it back out again, back up the lane, and up again, over and over endlessly.
“Your father never had a problem with hard work,” his mother said today.
“And he died of a heart attack when he was forty-five,” he said.
He had made his mother cry. His mother cried very easily, but he still felt bad. He missed his father too, but he did not want to be like him, getting up every morning at six to work for some boss, making profit for some people he had never even met and not getting a step further himself. The problem with work was not work; he did not mind work, he liked work, he liked thinking and building things. He did not like what was expected of him. He did not like Nina at City Statistics putting her arm around his shoulders, saying, “You’re not going to marry someone you’ve never met, are you, Ashraf?” And he would have to say, “No, of course not,” and dismiss the kind of living that he did not have anything to do with in the first place but was always associated with. Distance himself.
Ashraf looked out the window. There was an old man staring at him from behind a curtain. Ashraf raised his hand, but then he realized the man couldn’t see him through the tinted windows. Ashraf pulled the sleeping bag tightly around him. With the radio playing he fell asleep.
RUS AT WANDA’S HOUSE
“So what do you think?” Wanda said as she stood in the living room of her house, waving her arm about her.
“What do I think,” Rus said.
“Of the house,” she said.
Rus looked at the white walls, the drawing of roses on the wall, the shiny floor, and the table and the drawers.
“There is nothing lying around,” he said eventually.
Wanda smiled.
“Exactly,” she said. “Many people don’t realize that storage is the key to an organized environment. Nobody has to know what scary things are happening behind those cupboard doors.” She pointed at a white chest and winked at him.
Rus stared at the chest. He had a brief vision of someone sitting in there, his hands tied, his eyes wide. Then he sat down on the couch next to Wanda.
“Shoes off, please,” she said. “And use coasters.”
Rus obediently took his shoes off as Wanda took a stack of paper from her bag and started leafing through it. Only when Rus took a s
ip of the water and placed the glass carefully back on the coaster did she look up briefly. She nodded contently at him. Rus was amazed at how she worked through the papers, how she was unfazed by the words in the letter from the debt collector about auctions and evictions, and how she filed applications for registration processes and insurance forms.
They paused at nine for Wanda’s show, which she watched every day. It was about women who talked about shoes and men, and they sat quietly together as the women on the television talked about shoes and men and hugged other women and cried in the shower, Rus taking sips of his water, Wanda drinking pink wine. Then, at ten, Wanda wanted to get started again, even though Rus was dizzy from the television flashing its lights at him and the questions Wanda kept asking him about his days and how she kept repeating, “So you have never worked in your life,” to which Rus said, “No, no, no, I haven’t, I haven’t,” until she had turned all his daydreaming into interesting research and relevant job experience. It turned out that many of the skills Rus developed were not useful at all, according to Wanda, but she made bird-watching “fieldwork” and named his Starbucks visits “undercover customer experience.” She practiced with him what he should say in a job interview, and how when they asked him about his bad habits he would say, “Working too hard.” When they finished the bus did not go anymore, and she said he could have a shower and sleep in the spare bed in her room if he wanted to.
Rus walked through the hallway of Wanda’s house toward the shower. He had put the glasses in the machine that did the dishes as she asked him. The hallway was white too, and there were pictures hanging on the wall in an irregular pattern. There was one picture of Wanda in her bathing suit by the ocean, then there were two empty spots, then one of Wanda again where she wore a funny hat.
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