The message ended with a beep.
The package boy looked surprised at the secretary, raising his eyebrows. Then he smiled broadly.
She smiled too. “I was going to take a shower,” she said. “Do you want to shower with me?”
The secretary and the package boy undressed without saying anything in the bathroom. She turned around when he took off his boxer shorts and he looked at the ground when he stepped in the shower with her.
His hair went flat on his forehead from the water.
The secretary looked down at his knees. His legs were hairy. The stream of water was too narrow and hardly touched either of them. It was different from how she pictured showering with someone, because when she pictured it she hadn’t thought about how it echoed in the bathroom, she hadn’t thought of the toothpicks in the sink she should have thrown away, and she hadn’t pictured how cold it would be on the tiles. Most of all she hadn’t pictured a boy standing in front of her, hands alongside his waist, like he was waiting at the bus stop. Still she felt excited, elated by all these details, which made it so different from how it was on TV. She couldn’t help smiling the entire time, but the boy looked very serious.
She stepped back a little bit to let him get farther under the water stream. Their toes touched. “Sorry,” he said.
“Did it change you?” the secretary asked suddenly. “To be in a police cell, I mean. They say it changes you.”
The boy shook his head. “The first time I was in a police cell I was twelve. I accidentally set an old building on fire. They put me in the cell for an hour so I would learn a lesson.”
“Did you?”
“I learned not to be afraid of police cells anymore.”
He smiled. The water made a see-through layer over his cheeks and forehead. She stepped a little bit closer to him. Their bellies touched and he put his hands on her waist. She smiled—she could not stop smiling. His hands moved up along her waist and down again. He brought his face close to hers in the shower.
“Do you like me?” he said. He smiled nervously as he said it, and she saw his smile was uneven, it was a little more to the right.
“I like you,” she said. They stood together like that for a while.
“Shall we start then?” he asked.
She looked up, not knowing what to say. He looked at her timidly. “I’ll start,” he said, nodding and then bending down for the shampoo.
She felt his fingers gliding up her spine to the back of her head, putting the shampoo in her hair and rubbing it on her scalp. She bent her head and let him soap her hair. He did it very attentively, rubbing shampoo onto each strand of hair from beginning to end. It wasn’t really necessary to do it like that, but she liked it. When she turned around and rubbed the washcloth over his cheeks and over his mouth, she felt closer to him than she had ever felt to anyone before.
MRS. BLUE PREPARES
When Mrs. Blue walked into her apartment the light on her answering machine was blinking. It was her son, Glenn.
“Ma, I just got a very strange letter in the mail from you. It says you have a job as a secretary. What is going on? What is this about? I am very concerned.” The answering machine beeped and announced the second message. “Why aren’t you picking up the phone, Ma? It is six in the morning over there, I know you are home. What is this about? You know I can’t leave my work now. I’m sending you a ticket; you can take any flight you want, any hour that pleases you. Please come, Ma, it’s not that far. They will help you.”
Mrs. Blue switched the machine off. She thought about the boy in the van. How he’d lifted her up from the backseat when she could not get out, like Harold used to lift her up when they were younger. Sometimes she felt like she was still there with Harold, spending days in his workshop, where the time went slow like a glacier, where he taught her how to weld and solder. She wore knee-length skirts in those days, and pantsuits. Ruby Blue’s “I Love You”—Harold used to sing that to her and he wore his hair slicked back with Brylcreem. Harold made engines and she soldered the electrodes for him. At the end of the day, when she would not stop working, he put his hands under her arms and lifted her up from the chair, and carried her up the stairs over his shoulder and put her in their bed.
Mrs. Blue took their old wedding picture off the wall and stuck a yellow label on it, on which she wrote “Glenn.” She put another “Glenn” label on his baby photo album, and one on a picture of her and her mother.
She leaned on her cane when she walked to the bedroom. There, she took off her coat and sat down in front of the mirror. Carefully, she applied her pink lipstick, her blue eye shadow, and drew shaky lines in place of her eyebrows. She combed her hair and put some wax in it. One last time she walked around her apartment, dusting the vase in the corner, picking up the cup in the sink and putting it back in the cupboard. She thought about the strangers who would be coming in there, how they would walk past the large leather chair with their shoes on the carpet, walk past the couch into her bedroom.
Mrs. Blue stopped in front of her bedroom window and opened the curtain. Across the canal the post girl sat by her desk, as always, writing things down on a piece of paper. Somebody was standing behind her, looking back at Mrs. Blue.
Mrs. Blue raised her hand and waved at them. They waved back.
For a second they looked at each other across the water, until Mrs. Blue nodded and the post girl put her pen down again.
At that moment the stroke happened.
Mrs. Blue staggered and fell back on the bed. She tried to move her arms to get under the covers, but they wouldn’t move. She could not see anymore.
In the distance a siren sounded.
She wondered if it was coming for her, but then realized they couldn’t know yet, and then she could not remember what she was thinking about. She thought she was already dead, but thinking meant she must still be dying. Then her thoughts fell apart and the world moved away from her. She blew the air out of her lungs, not breathing in again.
GRACE IN THE STORY
Grace sat in the backseat of the light blue Porsche that had followed her into the fields. She was watching the driver; he used his cane to push the gas pedal, causing the car to shoot forward in jolts.
Grace and the man did not speak as they drove away from the city lights, passing by the abandoned building and the fields she had seen on the way over. The city became smaller and smaller behind her. It was just a dot of light on the horizon now. Slowly the landscape faded back to white nothingness.
The strange man behind the wheel started singing softly. Grace immediately recognized the tune. “Time can’t erase . . . the memories of . . . these magic moments.”
He turned around in his seat and looked at her. His thin gray hair was combed neatly around the sides of his head, and he was wearing an immaculate soft-yellow summer suit.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Where are you taking me?”
“I’m Mr. Wheelbarrow,” the man at the steering wheel said. He grinned. “The heart is a restless thing,” he said in a deep voice, “where will it take us next?”
WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER
Ashraf was lying next to the girl on the bed, their feet touching at the foot end. Her hair was still wet, and when he turned toward her he felt little streams of water going down his shoulder. Her belly was going up with each breath.
On the radio they were airing a speech from the past.
“We shall fight on the beaches,” a mumbling voice said, “we shall fight on the land, we shall never surrender.”
Ashraf looked to the side at the girl. She had her eyes open and looked at the ceiling. Her cheeks were flushed red.
“Great speech,” the presenter on the radio said. “What unity they must have felt back then.”
Ashraf looked at the clock above the bed. It was almost nine. He did not want to leave. “I don’t want to leave,” he said.
She squeezed his hand under the blanket.
“When you are with someone, you can forget your
self,” he said. “Your worries.”
“I don’t want to forget myself,” she said, still looking up. “You can be happy without forgetting anything. I remember that from when I was young.”
They lay together quietly for a while. Ashraf looked at her, her hair sticking wet to her forehead. He could see the blood pulsing through a vein in her neck, just below her ears; it pulsed with her heartbeat. He had never seen anyone’s heart beat before.
“It’s just that I feel trapped sometimes,” he said. “I don’t know, it’s like whatever I do, it never makes a difference. Like everything is already determined for me. Sometimes it seems like my thoughts are even locked up or something. Like I am not free in my head. I just want to feel more free.”
He inhaled deeply, almost desperate at his lack of words for describing how he felt, and when he listened to himself it sounded nothing like what his actual feelings were.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe I’m just spoiled.”
“You are not spoiled. You live in a van.” The girl turned toward him. She looked very serious.
Ashraf squeezed her hand tight.
“Do you know there are two kinds of infinity?” he said suddenly. “There is infinity in large numbers, like the universe, that can grow endlessly. But there is also infinity between one and zero.”
“Between one and zero,” she echoed.
“Small parts divided endlessly into smaller parts,” he said. “So infinity is in everything. You even carry it around inside yourself.”
The girl did not say anything. Ashraf looked to the side. She was smiling with her eyes closed.
Ashraf put his fingers on her eyelids and lifted them slowly open.
“What is your name?” he said. “I never asked you.”
“Laura,” she said. “Laura Zimmerman.”
PHOTOGRAPHY
It was nine o’clock in the morning, and Rus was standing in the photo store across from the Overall Company, pacing up and down in front of the service desk.
“Glossy or matte?” the photo store woman asked him. “Double or single? Thirteen by eighteen, eleven by fifteen, A4, or poster format? One-hour or one-day development service?”
She took the camera Rus had bought in the shop in the metro station from his hands and turned the wheel.
“There’s a bird in the pictures,” Rus said. “He lives in the air vent above my desk. It is a gull.”
The woman looked at the camera.
“Nature pictures,” she said.
Rus shook his head. “He is in the office, in the air vent. They are office pictures. I need them to be very clear.”
“I don’t develop them myself, you know,” the woman said. She leaned over the counter. “I just put them in the envelope. Then they go to the laboratory. And the people in the laboratory cannot decide what size they will be. They cannot make that decision. And if you don’t make that decision, the film will probably end up in some giant bin.”
She turned the camera around in her hands.
“Glossy,” Rus said. “Thirteen by eighteen, double, one hour.” He opened his mouth. The air did not go in.
ASHRAF IN TIME
It was ten o’clock. The sun was hanging above the horizon again, shining into the eyes of the people in the traffic jam, and Ashraf was waiting in his boss’s office. It is funny, he thought, how everything in nature is a circle, but time is a line. The clock above the desk ticked, twenty past ten, ten thirty. He thought of the universe expanding and expanding. He imagined that at some point it would touch its own edges and start imploding, until it was as small as a marble but still as heavy as the universe. If that exploded again, how likely was it that everything would take the same course? The same rocks forming the earth, the same cells forming organisms, forming fish that crawl onto land, monkeys turning into men and his dad meeting his mother, him kissing the office girl in the hallway by the elevator. And all the other things happening the same way.
His boss swung the door of the office open. “He is awake!” he exclaimed. He grabbed Ashraf’s shoulder. “Awake!”
“Awake?”
“Fully conscious,” the boss said, sitting down opposite Ashraf. “I wanted you to be the first to know.” He smiled, looking very different suddenly from how Ashraf knew him. “I got a call from the hospital, and when I got there, he was awake, talking to his client, Mr. Wheelbarrow.” The boss looked enchanted when he said the name. “A very sensitive, decent man, Mr. Wheelbarrow. A writer. He and I had a talk in the waiting room. He sees my son in a very different light from most people. He said my son was highly intelligent and burdened by the impossibility of a happy existence, in the context of the world’s problems, of which he was conscious at an exceptionally young age. He said he suspected my son had been eating so he would not feel so small when faced by the world.” The boss sat down at his desk and looked at Ashraf with an astounded look. “Who would ever have guessed there was such reasoning behind what he did?” he said, shaking his head. “According to Mr. Wheelbarrow, my attempts to prepare him for life had weighed so heavily on him that he never thought he could do it right.”
The boss shook his head. “I always assumed he was ignoring me,” he said. “I mean, you have a son, you are afraid he will get hurt, you don’t want him to mess his life up. So what do you do? You give him some advice, you know?”
Ashraf nodded.
“Apparently, he was taking it very seriously,” the boss said, shaking his head in disbelief. “But now everything will be different. The first thing I did when they let me in the room with him—they’d made it dark so his eyes could adjust—the first thing I did was hold him by the shoulders and say, ‘Son, why in the world were you listening to me? Why?’”
The boss held on to his imaginary son in the office. “He could not reply because he was so weak, but I could see his eyes grow watery.” The boss used a tissue to wipe off his forehead. “‘Son,’ I said, ‘you have to steer your own course, be who you want to be. You have to stop listening to other people. Do you hear me?’” The post boss took a cigar out his drawer and lit it.
“It was a very beautiful moment,” he said, his tired gray face surrounded by smoke, looking like an antismoking advertisement. “And I wanted you to be the first to know. We are all men of course, but sometimes a man needs someone to listen to him, if you know what I mean?”
He took his glasses off and rubbed them with a tissue.
“I get calm around you,” the boss said. “You are someone who makes people calm.” He patted Ashraf’s hand on the table. “You should do something with that.”
Ashraf closed his eyes. “Lately, I have been wondering if there is a place for me,” he started.
“Yes,” the post boss said. “About that.” He paused and coughed. “We had a call from the police this morning. They found the missing package with the racing suit in your van, half opened.”
THE DEAD BODY
The body of Mrs. Blue was on the bed. The blood in the veins was not being pumped around anymore, and there were no signals sent from the nerves to the brain and from the brain back to the muscles. If the blood pumping could be started again, too many brain cells would have died by now to make the body rise up off the bed and become Mrs. Blue again. She was dead.
THE MANAGER
Rus sat waiting for the manager in his front office. The secretary’s desk was empty. All his colleagues were standing down the hallway, looking at the charred office of the lawyer. It must have caught fire or something, but Rus didn’t care. He needed to talk to the manager and he was waiting for the secretary to come in and announce him. The clock above the glass hallway ticked loudly. After three minutes Rus got up and pushed the manager’s door open.
Carefully, Rus laid out the pictures on the manager’s desk. “These are the feathers under the radiator and here on my telephone. They are in more places, but I didn’t photograph them all. I could point them out. This is the bird itself, behind the grating. This one is a little
blurry, but that’s its head. These are crumbs that I found. I think they come from the floor above us, the top floor, so maybe I should have a look up there. And also I think that maybe the president-director should be informed. Maybe if he knew the situation, he would put an extra chapter in the guidelines.”
Rus slid the photos over the table toward the manager, who studied them carefully, one by one. After that he put them in a drawer with a B on it. He turned the key.
The manager rubbed his forehead. He sighed.
“Rus,” he said.
After that he sighed again and moved around on his chair.
“You are a nice man. A nice boy perhaps. I don’t know about all that. You come here, to me, with your story and your pictures. Why?”
Rus didn’t know what to say.
The manager tapped his laser pen on his desk. Then he opened his copy of the guidelines to the first page and read: “‘The employee has unlimited freedom to move within the codes of conduct as described in these guidelines.’”
He nodded at Rus.
“That means that you have to stay within the rules.”
Rus looked at the drawer with the B on it.
“You should look at it like chess,” the manager continued. “You have the pieces and the board, and then you have the rules for how you can use them. You cannot come up with a bird and fly all over the place. Does that make sense to you, Rus?”
Rus was quiet for a moment.
“Can I go to the eleventh floor and see if I can get to the vent?”
The manager studied Rus’s face for a while, his hands, his suit, the plastic bag he had placed on the table. He sighed deeply. “Rus.” The manager sighed again. “Let me tell you a secret. Let me show you something that I haven’t shown to anyone. Because I like you.”
The manager switched on his computer.
“I trust you can keep your mouth shut,” he said, lowering his voice and pulling Rus closer to the computer screen.
“Type this: ‘Saab.’ And now, click 9-5. Gallery. Images.”
Rus Like Everyone Else Page 20
