On the screen in front of Rus a rotating car appeared. It was a big car.
“Now, what do you see?” the manager asked.
“A car,” Rus said.
“It’s a Saab 9-5 Aero,” the manager said. “I’ve ordered it. I’ll get it next week. It has seventeen-inch rims, a redwood dashboard. Click on dashboard.”
The manager smiled.
“What do you think?”
“It’s big,” Rus said hesitatingly.
“Ha,” the manager said. “It’s the biggest sedan available. Rain detector, park sensor, climate control, TV screen with a DVD player in the back. Great ride, don’t you think?”
“Certainly,” Rus said. “Yes. But—”
“Feeling better now?” the manager asked. He tapped Rus on his shoulder. Then he opened the door with a button.
Rus got up from his chair. He took the plastic bag.
The manager spun around on his chair.
“And Rus!”
Rus turned around in the doorway.
“Everything in life has a place. There is a place for work, which is the office. There is a place for sleep, which is the bed. And there is a place for imagination, which is the television. Remember that.”
THE SECRETARY AND MRS. BLUE’S BODY
The secretary was standing in her doorway. She looked at the elevator doors that had just closed. Her heart was racing. The thing he said, the thing she heard him whisper. She could feel the hairs on her arms stand up.
From her apartment the sound of her phone came into the hallway. “It’s Dr. Kroon,” Dr. Kroon’s voice on her answering machine said.
The secretary did not move. She looked at something that was lying on the floor in the hallway.
“You have missed your appointment today and I was wondering if we need to start with medication, perhaps.”
The secretary bent down and picked up the strange fabric.
“There have been some of the first winter flowers blossoming outside my windowsill. Yellow, with an orange stamen. Apparently yesterday’s rain has made them push their little buds up out of the ground. What is it that makes plants push their buds up out of the soil and makes them grow? What force is behind it? Where does energy originate? Either way, Dr. Kroon, about your medication, 009—”
The things lying on the floor were stockings, dark brown stockings of a very thick elastic. The secretary remembered Mrs. Blue wearing them.
“Mrs. Blue?”
She knocked on Mrs. Blue’s door.
There was no answer.
The secretary did not knock a second time. She ran into her own apartment and took the emergency keys from her purse.
“Mrs. Blue! It’s Laura,” she shouted as she opened the door. “I’m coming in!”
No one responded. Mrs. Blue’s hallway was dark and her walker stood in the corner, her coat hung neatly on the coat rack. She walked into the living room. The patterned wallpaper and the little sculptures of cats along the mantel were as they always were, but the light blue curtains were closed still.
“Mrs. Blue?” the secretary said.
The apartment was silent.
In the bedroom Mrs. Blue was lying on her back on the bed, her legs over the edge.
The secretary stepped in through the open door and stood by the bed. She took Mrs. Blue’s wrist in her hand. It was cold. There was no ticking against her thumb. Mrs. Blue was not in there anymore.
GRACE IN THE STORY
“Mr. Wheelbarrow,” Grace repeated the name softly to herself.
A pleasant and warm feeling had come over her when she heard his name, like a wave that picked up her thoughts and washed them away. She leaned back in the car seat. The questions that filled her head started slipping away, but she did not resist. She let out a deep breath.
Mr. Wheelbarrow stopped in the driveway of the Fata Morgana mansion. The garden and the house looked just the same as always: the grand building surrounded by the flowing lawn and pink pergola trees.
The warm feeling had taken over her entire body now, making her legs and arms feel heavy. Her thoughts slowly ground to a halt in her head.
She did not know where Mr. Wheelbarrow had gone, but his voice was in her ears now—a warm, soothing voice that resonated through her body, as if she had slid into a warm bath.
“Grace opens her eyes,” his voice said. “And enters through the front door of the Fata Morgana mansion. She walks up the stairs.”
Grace nodded. Her hand opened the door.
The voice filled up all the space in her head and all the space in the world around her. Rick was right after all, she thought distractedly, there is a voice pulling and pushing us, moving our thoughts and our tongue.
She wanted to think more about this, but she could not remember what to think about, nor why, and before she knew it she was already halfway up the stairs, and then in the hallway, taking a pin out of her hair and sticking it in the lock of the dresser.
THE SEA
Ashraf walked over the parking lot of the Royal Mail Centre toward his van. His boss had given him an apology form that he had to fill out, which would be sent to the lawyer. If the lawyer agreed to drop his complaint then he could keep his job.
Ashraf looked at the people loading the packages into the vans, the post boss smoking his cigar outside, talking animatedly to the postmen. He started the van and drove away from the post center, down the street, and past the market square. There was a family in tracksuits coming out of the McDonald’s, there were women standing by the shop windows looking at the ads on the televisions, and there was the billboard girl with the can of beer between her breasts watching over it all.
“Don’t project your feelings,” the school counselor had said. “If you feel miserable, that doesn’t make the world miserable. The problem is inside of you.”
Ashraf took a turn and drove onto the ring road. He himself felt that the problem was around him, and that inside of him was no real problem at all. He did not want to go back to the boss anymore; he did not want to be accused of things he had not done.
“Don’t let your pride get in the way,” his dad had said.
“Never let a man insult you,” Youssef had said.
“This is just the way things are, and you had better accept it now,” the post boss had said.
Ashraf did not feel a lot of pride or acceptance at the moment. He felt tired. His phone beeped. Youssef had sent him a text message: In case you change your mind: 17:00 Jona’s house. He wants you in.
Ashraf put his phone away. The light of the petrol gauge on the dashboard flashed on.
He was running out of gas. Of course, he thought.
The strong feeling of inevitability came over him again. Ever since he got pulled out of the classroom five years ago, when he walked down the corridor with the headmaster who said, “He did not suffer, fortunately,” who talked about “condolences” and “strength.” Ever since the janitor drove him home from school, listening to George Michael on the radio, he had felt it—that all of this had happened before and he was walking in his own footsteps.
He felt it from that day on. When the family came to the house later that day, whispering in the kitchen, coming into his bedroom now and then, sitting on the edge of his bed, saying things—it all seemed like a movie he had seen before. Everything that had happened to him from that day on felt like it had been unavoidable. No matter what he did, he could not change anything.
Ashraf pulled the steering wheel of the van and made a U-turn on the ring road, driving through the red traffic lights. He wanted to shake off this feeling; he wanted to take his fate in his own hands. With a brisk move he took the first exit and then took a left and a right turn, a left and a right turn, a left and a right, until finally the engine muttered and stopped.
He let the van roll and parked it along the sidewalk. Ashraf got out of the van and felt the wind blow tiny grains of sand against his cheek. He threw the apology form in the wind and walked toward the white dun
es. He sat down on the sand with his back to the city.
MRS. BLUE CANNOT BE ERASED
The secretary looked at Mrs. Blue, the deep wrinkles in the face and in her neck. One of her hands was folded around the covers, as if she had wanted to get into the bed. The secretary lifted Mrs. Blue’s left leg up and placed it on the bed. The leg was stiff and hard to move. On the place where she touched it small, pale patches appeared, because the blood that was pushed away did not flow back anymore. She pushed the body a little farther to the middle of the bed and pulled the blanket from underneath Mrs. Blue. Carefully the secretary placed the blanket over Mrs. Blue’s dead body and folded the edges back. Somehow she thought that was how Mrs. Blue would make her bed.
She then took Mrs. Blue’s rigid hand in between hers and sat down beside her. The room was quiet except for some gray noise that was coming from a radio that was still on.
“Well,” she said to the empty body. “I did as you said. I stood up for myself.”
The empty body did not reply. There was no one in there anymore.
The secretary let go of the hand. She looked around the room. On the nightstand was a sketchbook with a pen lying on top of it. The secretary opened it. On the first page the name and the phone number of Mrs. Blue’s doctor were written. The secretary browsed through the other pages. On the last page Mrs. Blue had written something in curly handwriting: “Everything that is thought of starts to exist. In the mind, in the words, and in the shapes. Nothing can ever completely be erased.”
The secretary closed the book and put it in her bag.
She got up from the side of the bed. Mrs. Blue’s hands were slowly changing color. A purplish blue appeared on the fingernails. The secretary watched the blue creep to the fingertips, up the hand, and to the wrist.
When blood stops circulating, she remembered, and the cells have used up all the oxygen, the blood cells turn blue, giving the flesh a purple color. Some of the cells remain working for a while, but as the waste piles up in the cells and the temperature drops, they stop. She remembered this from school—there had been a test about it. The secretary watched the lips turn blue as well. The body turns into gases and liquids and dissolves. The eyes, the stomach, and the intestines go first; the heart becomes thinner and thinner; the brain liquefies.
The secretary put her hand on Mrs. Blue’s forehead. She closed her eyes. Somewhere in the distance someone was drilling a hole in a wall. Outside a car honked and someone shouted. She stood up and took the phone from the nightstand, calling the number of the doctor. After half an hour the doctor came with the men in the white jackets, who walked into the apartment and bent over Mrs. Blue, lifting her up from the bed.
THE GULL
“Four hundred thirteen tea towels, two hundred tablecloths.” Rus had his forehead almost on the paper as he tried to decipher the numbers, his voice unstable and weak. It was torment what was happening here. It was not fair; it was not his fault.
Why couldn’t he just focus? Why couldn’t he be like the others, who worked continuously, not looking up once when that bird yelled?
Rus saw the claws of the bird stick through the grating of the air vent and he could not help but look at the light pink skin of its feet, the nails on its toes. The white head with the yellow eyes appeared behind the grating too, and Rus saw a glint in the black pupils when he looked at it. Something was living inside that animal, Rus thought, and for a second he felt like an animal himself, with paws and a head, but he pushed that thought far away as soon as it came to his mind.
With sweat on his forehead he forced himself to keep his eyes on the files, to work on, but his pen hardly touched the paper. By the time the building closed at eight o’clock and Rus raised his head, he saw that the pile of files on his desk had not shrunk one bit, it only seemed to have gotten higher. Around Rus’s desk more files were spread out on the floor. Rus looked at the file that he had been working on.
“Four hundred thirteen tea towels, two hundred tablecloths” was scribbled on the paper, “leave me alone please leave me alone.” When Rus saw this he got up from his desk and pulled his plastic bag from behind the copying machine. His life was a line going down, and it went down rapidly, like the elevator.
ASHRAF IN THE SAND
Ashraf let the white sand run through his fingers. He thought of his father opening his door every morning before he went to work, to wake him up for school. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of his bed in the morning, telling him to work hard at school, talking about the benefits of high grades when applying for jobs, while Ashraf was still half asleep. He thought of what he had already known back then but never told his dad.
“I’m not going to be a success,” Ashraf said out loud. “I am not made for it. I don’t know what I am going to do.”
He lowered his head and looked at the sand between his feet.
“And I don’t like it here.”
It was quiet around him, no one answered. There was wind and the sound of a gull. The bird landed on the sand in front of him and started picking at a dead jellyfish. Ashraf put his face in his hands and cried, without counting, until he could not cry anymore.
When he finally opened his eyes the sun was going down behind the sea and a ray of red light colored the horizon. He lay back against the dune, his feet up toward the sky and his head low toward the beach. The sea was hanging above him now, as if some giant force were keeping it up. He imagined it falling down, the entire sea washing over him. He closed his eyes. For a moment Ashraf felt like all his thoughts were washed off him, all the systems he had placed over the world were gone, all his worries and his plans were swept away and for a moment he was just some boy in the sand by the sea.
The stars below the sea were shining bright now; the sea was black. The light from the stars was not strong enough for the sea to reflect the blue rays. Thoughts started trickling back into his head. He thought of the office girl who lived in her white apartment and tried to be as normal as possible.
“I have never met anyone like you,” she said when he stepped into the elevator. “You think about a lot of things, but you have no conclusions.”
Ashraf smiled as he got up from the sand. On his way back to the main road he found the apology form. The wind had blown it into a patch of dry grass at the edge of the dunes. It seemed funny to him now, an apology form. He picked it up and folded it. There was a gas station farther down the street and he still had a twenty in his pocket. The city in the distance had turned into a collection of lights, forming lines and squares against the dark sky.
THE LAST DAY
“Maybe we moved too fast,” Wanda had said, lying next to Rus.
Rus hadn’t understood this at first. He was not moving at all; he was afraid to move and he had been lying completely still ever since she started shouting and screaming at him about his probationary period. Then she had gotten really calm and lain down on the bed with him. She was lying with her face close to his face. Rus felt her breath on his forehead, and it paralyzed him.
“Are you not going to say anything?” Wanda asked. “Say something.”
Rus tried to say something. He tried to shut down the noise in his head. “I—” he said with a lot of effort. “I’m doing my best.”
“That’s it?” Wanda asked. “You are doing your best. What are you going to do to improve this? How are you going to make it through your trial period?”
Her voice was hard and it came from very close, piercing through Rus’s forehead. Inside of his head the gull was still there shrieking, preventing him from thinking, from saying what she wanted to be said.
“The bird,” he started to explain, “I cannot focus,” but then Wanda exploded. She sat straight up in the bed.
“Is it that you don’t understand, or that you are really not capable of the simplest things?” she shouted at him.
Rus didn’t know. It was probably both.
“I’m sorry,” Rus said softly. “I’m sorry.” He wanted to say more, but
he couldn’t. He pulled the sheets up over his head.
Wanda said, “That is it then,” and lay down with her back to him on the bed. Rus heard her breathe short, sobbing breaths. “Nobody stays on a sinking ship, Rus,” she said.
“I know,” Rus whispered under the blankets, “it is true.” Again he had wanted to say more, say something better, but he had nothing, this was him.
Across from us, Mrs. Blue’s window is dark. The ambulance personnel have switched off the television, they have even switched off the radio. For the first time in three years it is completely quiet in Mrs. Blue’s apartment.
Next door, at the secretary’s house, we see her move around her living room in her underwear. The secretary places the mirror from the bathroom against the wall in her living room and unrolls a roll of wallpaper out across the whole floor. On the back side of the wallpaper she draws a map of her body: she uses blue for her veins, which run like rivers over the paper, and red for her skin, and yellow for the lines on her hands and underneath her feet. Before she goes to sleep she hangs the paper on the wall with Sellotape, like a flag above her bed.
High above the city’s buildings, we see a small blinking light move through the clouds in the dark sky. Do you see that plane approaching the city? Mrs. Blue’s son is in there. He took the first plane when the doctor called. He tries to suppress the thoughts that keep coming up in his mind by concentrating on the movie on the screen in front of him.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, our dear friend Rus is listening to Wanda breathe as she lies still and angry on her side of the bed. There is as much space between their bodies as is possible. When Rus finally hears the little sounds that tell him Wanda is sleeping, he quietly gets out of the bed. He takes the guidelines out of the plastic bag and reads the last page: “Written by the president-director and founder of your company, Arthur K. Zeitgeist. He is the head of the company; he holds the helm. If it weren’t for him the company would grow aimlessly without an end goal, like an ordinary organism, just living to live. Signed by the president-director: Arthur K. Zeitgeist.”
Rus Like Everyone Else Page 21
