“May this war never happen again,” the Queen spoke. She was standing on the stage between the pillars of the monument. Mr. Lucas had a perfect view.
“Although it is not very likely that it will happen again,” she continued her speech, “it is much more likely that some other horrible thing will happen. In that case may we quickly determine what exactly is going on and who is to blame. Unfortunately, it is always very hard to determine what exactly is going on and, if we do, to figure out what we must do about it. Especially if it happens far away.”
Mr. Lucas had to keep himself from nodding at the Queen’s words, which he thought were very significant and true. It is always a relief to hear people say the things you feel, Mr. Lucas thought. It makes one feel less alone.
Suddenly the stone on the monument seemed to him a symbol made specifically for how he felt at that moment, a symbol of his own sufferings, not only his suffering in the war, of which he did not remember much, but of all his sufferings. It was like his worries were lifted from his shoulders and walking away from him on a hundred skinny pins. Mr. Lucas smiled. The sky above him was dark blue. The streets around the square were deserted. It’s beautiful, Mr. Lucas thought, the most beautiful moment.
But then the sea of calm around him suddenly parted. In the street a little to the left of the Queen a white van appeared.
Mr. Lucas shook his head. “The white van,” he said. With one wave his hypnosis streamed away from him, leaving him unprotected in the middle of the square.
Mr. Lucas brought his hands to his neck. “The white van,” he said. He stepped back and forth. “My hypnosis.”
The white van disappeared into a side street.
“My hypnosis is gone.”
“We try, we try,” the Queen concluded her speech, “but it is just too difficult.”
Mr. Lucas turned on his heel and started pointing and talking. “This is not right,” he said, “there is something wrong. I saw the white van. This is not right, this is not right.”
He suddenly saw the mass of people surrounding him; he did not like masses of people, and he suddenly saw how unprotected he was. He felt like he could hear everyone breathing, everyone surrounding him with their thoughts and their personalities, entering his personal space.
Then he saw the van again, reversing and trying to get onto the square, trying to get to him. Mr. Lucas blurted out, “Excuse me,” and started walking straight ahead, through the red rope fence that was set up around the Queen.
“Excuse me,” he said, his heart racing, “the white van, my hypnosis, I have to get out.” He did not know if there was sound coming from his mouth or if his lips were moving breathlessly. He saw two guards coming toward him, their black boots stamping on the ground.
“Don’t arrest me,” Mr. Lucas said. His voice was suddenly the voice of a young Mr. Lucas, a child Mr. Lucas, who hid behind his mother when the soldiers came in. The guards, the black boots, the panic; memories started flooding Mr. Lucas’s brain, memories of fear that grabbed his throat, choking him. He started running straight ahead, pushing people away. He screamed.
The Queen stopped speaking. Then the first people in the crowd started moving, looking over their shoulders to see what Mr. Lucas was running from. Someone else screamed too and then the crowd started running. Like a flock of birds they spread out in all directions and then came back and formed a group again, all following Mr. Lucas to the exit of the fenced-in area. This exit was very small and next to the monument. People started pushing one another to the sides, pushing one another against the skinny legs of the monument. While Mr. Lucas was running into the shopping district, behind him the legs started bending—one pin after another they bent—and the stone tilted sideways.
THE FIRE
The secretary opened the door of the copy room and stepped into the hallway of the office. Everyone would have left the building by now; it had closed at eight because of the Memorial Service. The secretary walked through the empty dark hallway to her boss’s office and opened the door with the company’s master keys. She took his cigarettes and his lighter out of his drawer and walked toward the lawyer’s office. There she pulled all his furniture toward the middle of the room: the couch, the desk, the leather chair, the posters, the pencils, the law books, the photos, the curtains, the carpet, the cushions. She opened the file boxes and took out his files—the A files, the B files, the C files, the D files . . .—she took them out and piled them on top of the desk and made small piles around the heap in the middle of the room. After that, she sat down on top of the pile and lit a cigarette.
She kept the smoke in her mouth, slowly blowing it out toward the ceiling. The clock said four minutes to nine. When the cigarette was almost done, she dropped it in the heap of files. A small white flame rose up out of the paper like a tiny flower, and it spread around the grayness, taking bites off the paper and turning it into flames. Soon the flames were joined by other flames; they spread out over the paper and the furniture. Smoke filled the room. The secretary turned around and closed the door of the lawyer’s office behind her. In the hallway she set off the fire alarm and the sprinkler system, took the elevator down, and left the building.
At home the secretary took the gray blanket from her bed and wrapped it around herself. The felt of the blanket and the smell of fire in her hair reminded her of a story she once read, about a man who had fought on the wrong side of the war and crashed his plane. He was found by a strange people who rolled him in felt. When he came out, he had become a new person who had nothing to do with the person who fought in the war. He still had his memories, but aside from that he was a new person, a blank slate.
THE QUEEN’S ENDING
The Queen stood on the stage in Memorial Square. She watched the pillars of the monument bend.
Below her the people were running toward the exit, her guards shouting to calm them down, holding them back to keep them from pushing one another. The Queen did not move. She kept her eyes fixed on the giant stone that was slowly starting to slide off the pillars.
The Queen took a deep breath. The people around her were running and screaming. They had never seemed more unreal to her than in that moment.
Finally, the rock slid off the pillars and came down with a thundering noise. The Queen crossed her fingers behind her back and dove forward.
Twenty minutes later, in the hospital room, the heart rate monitor made a flat line. To the astonishment of the doctors, she sat up right at that moment and opened her eyes, smiled, said, “Well, hello there,” and fell back on the bed.
MR. WHEELBARROW
Mr. Wheelbarrow sat bent over his desk, his head buried in his hands. Then his telephone rang. It was the hospital. “Good news, Mr. Wheelbarrow,” a voice said. “Freddy just woke up.”
GRACE IN THE STORY
“Hello?”
Grace opened the door of the small, white-tiled building that she found along the road. There was no one inside. There was just a sink and six bathroom stalls. Grace walked into the building and looked into the long mirror. There was a crack over the whole surface of the glass. The white-tiled wall was dirty and the ceiling lamp flickered. Someone had written MR. LI IS IN EAST across the wall.
Grace thought of the pastel tints in the mansion. Even the basement Roberto had kept her in during her abduction had been more stylish than this, the light more gentle.
Carefully, Grace sat down on the seat of one of the toilets. She wondered if she would forget this moment too, like she had forgotten almost everything. Would she remember this place if she ever came here again?
She tried to print the image onto her memory—the dirty tiles, her torn wedding dress, the names etched on the wooden door of the stall—but she could already feel it slipping away from her. Resolutely, she took another hairpin out of her hairdo, to etch her name into the wood. But when Grace placed the tip of the pin against the door, she gasped. A name was already written in that spot on the door.
GRACE WAS HERE.
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br /> ASHRAF IN THE UNIVERSE
Ashraf stared into the back of his van that he’d parked by the construction site. The clouds were dark and they were floating over him at a quick pace. The Royal Mail Centre was closed so he could not return the packages, and there were thirty or so still in the van. Deliverers were not allowed to keep the packages overnight. They could suspend him for it.
The first package Ashraf pulled out of the trunk was addressed to the Overall Company, from Racewear Supershipping. It was half opened.
“Dammit.” Ashraf banged the door closed so hard it bounced open again. He would have to deliver that stupid racing suit tomorrow, too late and half opened. They were never going to believe he got it like this. “Dammit.” He banged the door closed again and again, until it finally stayed closed. He sat down in the passenger seat, for the umpteenth time that week, and stared outside.
By ten o’clock he had drunk the last bit of vodka in the bottle his brother had left in the van. It was just enough to make him feel a little more relaxed.
The sky above the van was dark, and he could see vaguely the contours of the Milky Way, looking like spilled milk in the sky. He switched the radio on and heard a man say, “A dark day, a black day in the history of this country, and the question is: How—” and he switched it off again. In his damp sleeping bag he thought of all the news in the world coming to each separate person, and what you were supposed to do with all that.
It is strange, he thought. There is Ashraf, the little dot in the universe, then there’s Ashraf who is a part of this city, Ashraf who is part of the world, then there is Ashraf in biology, a collection of cells whose thoughts are just pathways in the brain, whose feelings are a shortage of this hormone and an excess of that. There is Ashraf in my memories, whose life is like a story of cause and effect. Ashraf in the economy, high up in the money pyramid compared with the people in other countries, low in comparison with the people here. And then there was Ashraf the son and the brother, and Ashraf in history, who was just as small as Ashraf in the universe. But during the day, there was just Ashraf who was trying to get to the other side of town, who set off the alarm of the motorcycle and disturbed the entire Memorial Service, who wanted to go home but would not be left alone by his family, and who was probably going to get fired over some stupid yuppie’s racing suit.
Like spiderwebs, all these realities laid over the world he saw around him, over all of his thoughts and actions. He remembered a teacher in high school who called his interest in the universe escapism. “He has very little attention for the here and now, the reality of the classroom and what is required of him.” The reality of the classroom, with its latest educational system, which was made up by someone somewhere. The reality of “A farmer goes to the market in a tractor going 25km an hour. He encounters a hill.”
Ashraf closed his eyes and pulled the sleeping bag over his nose. “He reads four lines in a book and then stares out the window for half an hour. He finds the things in his own mind more important than what is in the books.” The startled face of his father at that parent-teacher meeting; somehow he could only remember his father’s eyes, how they looked at him, but not the rest of his face.
Tomorrow he was going to take that racing suit to the Overall Company straightaway, before work. Then he’d pick up the rest of the packages at eight and work faster than yesterday, more focused and efficient. The beginning is always the hardest, he thought. The rain trickling down his window made him calmer, sleepier. This land was cleansed weekly, daily, sometimes hourly by the sky. He thought of the office girl, her hand on his trousers. Maybe he could send her some flowers when his first salary was paid. Slowly his thoughts started dipping into a bath of sleep, flooding his plans with dreamy images of his boss in a tight racing suit, motorcycles in narrow streets, and his mother tapping on the window of his van.
“Do you know it is illegal to park here?” a voice said through his window, and then more taps. Ashraf opened his eyes but did not look to the side for one moment. He took two deep breaths before facing the police officer he knew was at his window. “Can we take a look in the back of your van, please?”
WHAT I NEED YOU TO BE
When Rus came home from the office at eight there was no one in the living room and there were only empty plates on the dinner table and no dinner for him. Rus walked to the kitchen and placed his forehead on the cold steel of the kitchen counter, breathing in and out slowly.
When he opened his eyes he saw a hand in front of them on the counter, the nails tapping on the steel. It was Wanda’s hand; she had painted her fingernails lilac. Then Wanda started talking about how she had heard from her friend who worked at Overall how he had acted during the meeting, and could he imagine how embarrassing that was for her, and how disappointed she was in him.
He sat down at the dinner table and Wanda walked around him and around the dinner table as she talked, and she did not really shout but her voice was very sharp sometimes, and then her voice got very soft suddenly and she cried and said she felt alone when they were together and that she was prepared to be self-critical and change for him, and he could say what he did not like about her.
Rus shook his head. He had nothing he wanted to change. She could just be Wanda, who ate crisps from the bag hidden behind the cupboard door in the kitchen; Wanda whose eyes sparkled when she talked about her grandpa, who used to shoot the ornaments from the Christmas tree with a slingshot when her grandma wasn’t looking.
“There is something very strange at the department,” Rus said. “If you would come with me you could see the bird for yourself. It makes very loud noises and I don’t understand—”
Wanda did not let him finish. “I’ve given you a chance because I believe in you,” she said. “I used my connections to get you that job interview. It is very important to me that you keep this job, no matter what happens in the air vent. Do you understand?”
Rus tried again to explain about the noise and how disturbing it was, but then Wanda pulled his plate from the table although he hadn’t eaten yet and smashed it in the sink. She said she had done everything for him, that he needed to see this from her perspective, to think of someone else for a change. She said he had to be mature and focused and finish his trial period, and asked if he understood that.
“But the bird—” Rus said.
“I don’t want to hear one more word about it.” The conversation ended with Wanda slamming the drawers, like Rus’s mother used to do when Modu came home singing “I Shot the Sheriff,” and laying out the receipts of all the things she’d bought for him.
Now Rus was lying next to Wanda in the quiet bedroom, looking at her back, the round curves of her shoulder blades. Rus wanted to press his head against her shoulder, but he was scared. When he switched off the light and closed his eyes, he heard her voice in the dark.
“Promise me you will leave this thing alone,” she said.
Rus did not say anything.
“Promise me.”
“I promise,” Rus said, sinking deep under the sheets.
It is night again and the moon is shining on our city. The Memorial Monument, which we could see from our spot by the window, is now missing from the skyline.
Mr. Lucas is standing in his bedroom in the dark.
We saw him come home a few hours ago, rushing down the dark street, walking so close to the wall his jacket grazed the stone. The windows stayed dark after he went in; he was too afraid to turn on the light. Without making any sound he now takes his suit off, and his shirt, and pulls his socks over his pajama pants. With another failure added to his list of failures, he steps quietly into his bed and pulls the sheets over him.
We look out over the dark windows of the city. In all those different cubicles people are sleeping, reading, sitting up in bed, dreaming, eating, just going to bed, or just getting up. How often do you sleep curled up to someone under the covers? Do you stretch your legs or do you sleep on your side with your legs pulled up? Do you look fo
rward to the morning?
Some people lie awake with their eyes closed like Mr. Lucas, buried deep under the covers, trying to hide from everything.
Others, like Mr. Lucas’s old neighbor Rus, across the city, aren’t paralyzed by fear but acutely activated by it. Lying wide-awake in his bed, staring up at the ceiling, Rus presses his nails into his palms and clenches his teeth. He’s been trying to count sheep jumping over a fence to fall asleep, but a bird keeps landing on the fence and tapping loudly on the wood.
The only one sound asleep is the secretary over there, rolled in the felt blanket. She is in her deepest, most peaceful sleep for a very long time. She won’t even wake up when, in an hour or so, Mrs. Blue hammers on her door.
GRACE IN THE STORY
Grace ran along the dark, empty highway toward the city lights. There were no cars passing her—the road was empty, and she was all alone. She could not understand how her name could be etched in the door in her handwriting; she could not understand how she could have been here before. It was as if she had gotten caught in a revolving door within a revolving door.
A yellow emergency phone was standing alongside the abandoned highway, lit by a blinking green SOS sign. N5 CONTACT POINT, it read.
“I don’t know if anyone can hear me,” Grace said in the receiver. “But I am in trouble.”
The line crackled.
“I am on a highway. The signs say N5. Can somebody help me?”
She paused. There was no voice on the other side, no response.
“Please, can anyone hear me? I’m on a road called N5. I’m in a white wedding dress. I’m all alone.”
Her voice broke. The line was still quiet.
Grace lowered the receiver. She’d heard something behind her. A car. She turned around. In the distance two headlights were coming toward her. The lights weren’t coming from the direction of the city, but from the direction she had come from herself, from the empty space.
Rus Like Everyone Else Page 18
