“Walk over it,” she said.
The glass broke under his feet.
The Queen looked at the blood seeping from the glass onto the carpet, and she covered her face with her hands. “No,” she said sadly, “that does not prove anything.”
THREE O’CLOCK
As the day went by, Rus got better and better at entering the numbers, faster and faster at translating the amounts of materials collected and the amounts of materials sold. He worked without stopping for hours, and only looked up at three o’clock when the telephone and printer noises around him ceased suddenly, and he saw that all his colleagues had gotten up from their desks. Voices and laughs and a smell that reminded him of Starbucks came from a corner of the work floor.
Rus stood up from his desk and walked toward the voices, but there was no Starbucks there, just a kitchen block with a coffee machine and an enormous bottle of water that was standing upside down.
The colleagues stopped talking when Rus walked toward them.
“This is the coffee corner,” one of the women said eventually. “We always have a cup of coffee at three.”
Fokuhama was pouring coffee into the coffee cups of the women.
“I always used to go to the Starbucks,” Rus said. He took a cup from the table and held it up too.
Fokuhama stopped pouring the coffee. The colleagues looked at one another.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We all have our own mugs. And this one is Fokuhama’s.”
“Oh,” Rus said.
“Otherwise no one does the dishes,” the woman said. “No one feels responsible for the dishes. They all think, Oh, that was not my cup, and they leave it there. It gets very messy.”
Rus put the cup back on the table. He turned around and walked back to his desk, feeling the eyes of his colleagues on his back. Right leg, right arm, left leg, left arm, and he sat down at his desk where he continued to read and translate and type, file after file. A scratching sound started in the air vent above his head, but Rus kept his head bent and pushed it away, working steadily through the files.
PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS
The secretary came out of the office and walked onto the business square. The square was busy with people coming out of offices and the wind blew trash down the street. She walked away from the office, her coat wrapped tightly around her body. A woman passed her by, pulling a suitcase behind her. The lack of color made the world around her seem further away than ever. As if it had nothing to do with her. There were TV screens on the buildings showing commercials for shoes. In the café for after-work drinks there were men in men’s suits talking to women in women’s suits, drinking beer and wine. She could hear bits of conversations drifting toward her: “always finding opportunities to move forward, otherwise you’re going backward,” “then I think, Come on guys, what is the corporate value of all this?” “I am the type of person who goes through with these deals, who goes for the last penny—that is just me.”
The secretary stood still. She dropped her bag on the pavement. It was the first time since she started working in the office that she wasn’t daydreaming as she walked home: going over the small conversations she’d had that day, or planning future events, or thinking about how she was going to make a joke and how everyone would laugh. The longing that had filled her thoughts and her days was missing and it scared her. For the first time she really saw the world around her, not only registering what people were saying but really hearing it, not only looking at the tall office buildings but really seeing the dark rectangles against the gray sky.
The secretary started to feel sick, yes, she felt extremely unwell; her legs felt heavy and her throat felt clogged, as if she could not breathe. She wanted to shout, but instead she stumbled over to the tunnel under the railway and she sat down against the wall. She gasped for breath. There was graffiti on the wall that said MR. LI IS IN EAST. She read it over and over again. MR. LI IS IN EAST. MR. LI IS IN EAST. The words danced in front of her eyes. Her arms were heavy and she needed all her energy to breathe.
Then dark spots came in and they clogged her view. For a moment there was nothing. Then there were voices around her. She did not know those voices. Two women were talking about someone who’d had too much to drink. She felt the cold stone under her hands. A man was asking someone, “Can you hear me? What is your name?”
The voice was very loud and she tried to open her eyes. There was a man with a round face standing over her, holding his finger in front of her eyes. “Follow my finger,” he said. He reminded her of Dr. Kroon. She closed her eyes again.
“I know her.”
The secretary opened her eyes. She saw the face of a boy above her now, a boy with black hair.
“I bring the packages to your office,” he said. “Remember? Can you get up?”
The secretary got up. She felt very tired.
“Thank you all,” she said to the group of people who were standing in a circle around her, and she waved at them as if she were famous and her legs gave away under her again. The boy caught her. The warmth of his shoulder went through her body like a shock wave.
ASHRAF AND THE SECRETARY
They drove away from the business square in silence. Ashraf looked to the side. The girl from the office was sitting curled up in the passenger seat with her head bent. Her face was white under her thin black hair. She was wearing a brown skirt and a yellow blouse, and she was clenching plastic bags between her knees.
“I don’t need to go to a doctor,” she said. “I have already been. It is a mental problem.”
Ashraf saw the pores on her nose, tiny little dots gleaming with sweat. He’d seen a James Bond movie once in which a woman was painted in gold paint, and in the movie they said she died because her skin could not breathe. It was a mistake they made in the film, Ashraf knew, because people breathe through their mouths and noses and not through their skin. It was possible that the woman died from overheating though, but that would have taken much longer.
Ashraf looked sideways at the girl sitting in his passenger seat. She stretched her hands out in front of her and moved her fingers in the red of the traffic lights, as if she was looking for something. He had read something once about phosphenes, which where colors and shapes that you could see after you fainted. If you spent several days in a dark room you could start seeing them too. Prisoner’s cinema, they called it.
He parked the car in front of her building on Canal Street, apartment number 424.
“You still look a bit pale,” he said.
“I am a secretary,” she replied softly, “so I am inside the office a lot. And I don’t know a lot of people yet to do things with. That is why I am pale.”
She looked at him when she said it, and it suddenly seemed to him that she was not a real secretary, but someone disguised as one. He put his hand on her forehead. It was cold.
“It is cold,” he said. “That is a good sign.”
The secretary put her hand on top of his hand and folded her fingers between his. He was amazed at how small her hand felt; he could feel the thin bones under her skin.
“We’re here,” Ashraf said, but she did not let go of his hand. She moved his hand down, down her forehead, over her nose, over her lips, over her blouse, her breasts, her legs. She took a deep breath, like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t.
Ashraf felt the soft skin of her thigh under his hand. He closed his eyes and tried to think clearly, but a thick fog came down inside his head. The girl climbed out of the passenger seat and over the gear stick and sat down on his lap. Ashraf opened his eyes. Her hair stuck in little strings to her forehead. He suddenly felt a strong urge to press her against him, to hold her very tight. But he didn’t. He could not be with a girl right now, and not a girl like her. It would be like tying two rocks together, hoping they would help each other float. She pressed her upper body against him, her hand going under his shirt.
“Stop,” Ashraf said.
The girl did not look u
p. She was looking past him, somewhere in the distance, at the sky outside the window.
“Stop,” Ashraf said again. He took her hand.
Her eyes focused on him. They were gray, really gray, without a spark of color in them. Then she slid off him and climbed back over the gear shift to her seat.
Ashraf put his hands in his lap and breathed in deeply. He wanted to say something, but he did not know what. He heard Richie’s voice in his mind, talking about his conquests. He hoped that one day he would forget all about Richie, and if someone mentioned him, he would not be able to find him in his mind.
The girl said something very softly with her eyes closed.
He bent over toward her to hear it.
“Do you have any plans for a vacation?” she said. The words came slowly out of her mouth, as if she had to push them. He looked at her, a girl asking about his vacation plans with her eyes closed and a voice that sounded as though it came from very far away.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I think about leaving forever, just to try it somewhere else.”
“Oh,” she said. They sat in silence for a while.
Then she opened the car door.
“And you?” Ashraf said, realizing he should say something. “Do you have any vacation plans?”
She shook her head and stepped out of the van.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but she had already closed the door.
RUS IS LIKE EVERYONE
At six o’clock Rus’s new colleagues put on their coats and got up from their desks. Rus kept his head down, pretending not to see how they looked at the stack of files he still had on his desk when they walked by, or how they glanced at the plastic bag under his seat. He worked on steadily when one of his new colleagues imitated the way Rus moved his lips when he read the files, and ignored it when Fokuhama left with the last colleagues and they switched the ceiling lights off and laughed in the hallway.
Alone in the dark office Rus worked and worked, copying the numbers of the last fifty files, his eyes close to the paper. At eight fifteen, when he had finally entered the last number of the last form into the system, Rus got up from his desk. His back was stiff and his eyes were pained. He bent down slowly to take the plastic bag from the floor and walked along the empty desks to the doors of the dark department. It had gotten very quiet in the office; the only sounds were of Rus breathing and that scraping noise in the air vent now and then.
Rus was tired. Breathing felt difficult, but he said to himself he was happy, very happy even, as he floated down in the elevator to the ground floor. He hid the plastic bag under his jacket and he smiled as he stepped out into the office parking lot.
The business district was still very busy. People were having drinks in the bar and walked hastily down the streets. Rus looked at the people around him as he stood in the metro. He recognized the look in their eyes; it was the same weary look he saw in his reflection in the metro window. His first day was successful, he decided, as he got pushed back and forth by the people leaving the train at each stop. When it was his turn to get out Rus too used his elbows to push the people away from him, and he felt his heart growing warm. He was already becoming a part of them. He was not a complete stranger anymore.
THE SECRETARY COMES TO A HALT
The secretary sat on the edge of her bed. Since she came home she had tried to eat, but she couldn’t; she had tried picking up her diary and writing her coworkers’ birthdays in it, but she couldn’t; she had tried to make plans for the next day, but they did not come. Nothing came. She could not even think her normal thoughts—soon things will be different for me, soon they will change—because the sentences kept stopping in the middle. Now that her thoughts were gone there was an emptiness in her head that she felt afraid of. She tried to suppress it by getting up and walking laps of her room, naming everything she saw in her head. Every time she passed by the window she saw the gray moon in the sky, the gray trees in front of the window. She picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number, but when her mother answered she put the phone down again.
The secretary opened her laptop and searched for the website group she’d joined. Katie appeared on the screen with shiny eyes, looking fixatedly at something just below her camera. The secretary lifted her hand up to her screen.
“Moshi moshi,” the secretary said. “Hello.”
Katie smiled faintly and raised her hand as well.
For a while they looked at each other’s image without saying anything. Then Katie’s hand appeared and became larger and larger on the secretary’s screen. Katie picked up the camera and turned it around her room. The secretary saw flashes of a small girl’s room filled with magazines and empty plates, cups and stacks of paper. Then the camera turned toward Katie’s computer screen. Her screen was filled with little squares in which faces of people were visible, boys and girls with black hair and blank stares. Suddenly, the secretary realized she was one of those faces too. In the square left from the center she saw her own face, white and with a shadow falling over her eyes. Slowly the secretary raised her hand and waved. Some of the other people in the squares lifted up their hands as well and waved back, but most of them remained still, staring at their computer screens.
The secretary looked at her face on Katie’s computer screen, her white face, her black hair. Her eyes were big and shiny, like the other people’s. The secretary looked around her apartment, at the white walls, the gray trees behind her window, the dark glass building across the canal, the boxes she’d stacked up against the door, the gray moon. She looked back at Katie, who had turned the camera at herself again and was staring glassy-eyed at her screen. The secretary closed her laptop. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her body folded double in the chair and she threw up and up and up.
THE DAILY LIFE
When Rus got home Wanda talked about her work at the tax office while she warmed up the lasagna she’d made for him. She was very happy when he told her he finished the two hundred files and that he talked to the colleagues in the coffee corner. She watched him as he ate and asked him questions like “Maybe you could do even more files tomorrow?” and “Did you make a good impression on your coworkers?” and “Do you agree we should get a new car when you have a full-time contract?” and “What color should the car be?”
“Yes, I will try, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Rus answered as he got up from the table. The numbers on the screen were still there every time he blinked, and the scraping sound coming from the air vent was still sounding in his ears. He took his plate to the kitchen, as Wanda had explained to him, and held it under the tap as she’d said before putting it in the machine that did the dishes for them. Then it was nine and they moved to the couch where they sat under the blanket. Rus stared at the white wall above the television.
Wanda looked at him sideways. “When Barry came home, he used to chase me down the hallway,” she said, “and tickled me against the wall.”
Rus nodded. He remembered how Modu sometimes came home late at night singing “I Shot the Sheriff,” and you could already hear him when he was on the stairs outside.
“I’ll just switch on the television,” Wanda said. “For some background sound.”
As the show played Rus kept his gaze fixed on the white wall above the television. The screen was too busy for him, and Wanda was talking about cars and how they could tell you where to go nowadays and you did not even need a map, and the people on the screen were talking, and the lights flashed and colored the wall. The windows at the office had some kind of screen that was supposed to block out the sunlight, he thought, and the metro was under the ground.
Outside the streetlights have switched on again, the buildings are black rectangles with a few yellow squares where the lights are still on. Over there, at Mr. Lucas’s house, you see the television light up his curtains. He is watching the news about the Memorial Service; there is a special monument designed for the square. On the screen a large crane l
ifts a huge rock of two thousand kilograms on top of a hundred thin steel pins. The monument symbolizes the weight that is too heavy for one person to carry, but possible to carry if everyone helps.
Mr. Lucas nods as he watches the television, taking notes as the newscasters explain where the Queen will stand and how long she will speak for.
If you look in the distance, past the roofs of the houses on Low Street, you can even catch a glimpse of the monument from our window. There, to the left of the hospital, you see its black shape illuminated by a shaft of light.
Much farther in that direction, all the way on the West side of the city, in a newly built neighborhood, Rus sleeps in Wanda’s bed. He sleeps with his shoulders up and his nails pressing into his hands. Instead of his usual tossing and turning, he sleeps like he is standing at attention tonight, and he wakes up every few minutes, opening his eyes to see if the first sunlight has reached the window yet, indicating seven A.M.
And here, right across from us, at Mrs. Blue’s house, you’ve noticed that nothing has changed for a while now. We have not seen the light switching on or off, or the curtains open or close. We see only the television in her living room, the continuing flicker of that snowy screen. Mrs. Blue is lying on the couch in front of the television. Her face is colorless—no pink lipstick, no eye shadow—her wrinkled eyes closed in resistance. She’s hardly moved in quite some time now, but no one has noticed. No one but you and me.
GRACE IN THE STORY
Grace ran her fingers over the engraved letters on the gun. “What should I do, Mr. Blue?” she whispered, folding her finger around the trigger and pressing it lightly.
She imagined a bullet shooting out of the gun, penetrating the mist in front of her, creating a tunnel to another world. She longed for something to happen: she had no idea how long she had been walking for, nothing had happened, nothing had changed, no one moment stood out from any other. It felt like she was not really going forward at all, but that the world was just moving under her, like a treadmill.
Rus Like Everyone Else Page 14
