by Joe Meno
—What is he saying? Clark asks. Kristin shrugs her shoulders.
—He says he won’t let you take us.
Clark slams the phone down. It rattles with a weak ring, which then reverberates throughout the large vault.
—What now? Jan asks, looking up from his hands. His face is red, his bottom lip quivering uncontrollably. What will we do now?
—We must wait until they change their mind, Clark says. Jan shakes his head. He begins to sob once more.
—In 1996, you will be arrested outside a bank in Oslo, he whispers.
—If you say so.
—We will no longer be friends by then.
Clark clucks his tongue and pats Jan on the shoulder.
—That is enough of that.
Clark picks up the assault rifle and begins to pace back and forth, thinking. During this time, Jan Olsson does not try to stop himself from crying. Kristin Ehnemark watches Clark, wondering what kind of birthday present he might give her if they were close friends. Elizabeth Gullberg has fallen asleep, mumbling to herself. Sandra and Diane Ekelund blink at each other silently, in a secret code no one else can understand. When Clark stops pacing, it is as if they have all given up. He sits down in front of the vault door and, using the muzzle of his rifle, traces the shape of a Swiss mountain along the dusty floor.
By the third morning, the bank robbers have become thoroughly depressed. Clark has begun to pick at his fingernails, while Jan refuses to even lift his head. At around 9, they hear a far-off song, like a bird captured within the dark cell of the vault. Soon the plaster above their heads cracks, shaking and trembling in place.
—What in the world is this? Clark asks, grabbing his rifle.
A tiny hole appears and slowly begins to expand.
—They are using magic on us! Jan screams, pointing. I knew they would if we weren’t careful!
Clark stands beneath the hole, smiling.
—They are drilling.
Just then the telephone begins to ring. Clark hurries over and places the phone against his ear.
—Hello?
—This is the police. We are drilling through the roof of the vault. We are going to insert a small camera in the hole. We want to be sure the hostages are still alive.
Clark laughs. He turns and stares up at the hole, and at that moment a small black device appears through the tiny opening. Clark stands beneath it, smiling. He places the phone beside his ear again and says, So what do you see?
—It looks like everyone is still alive.
—Just as we promised. Now, will you let us all leave?
The phone goes dead. The tiny black device disappears.
—Hello? Clark says. Hello?
He hangs up the phone, then walks across the vault, staring up through the tiny hole. At that moment, another sound, something unfamiliar, something lacking any music or melody, begins to hiss. Elizabeth Gullberg starts to cry frantically.
—Snakes? she shouts. Is it snakes?
Clark peers up into the tiny hole, laughing.
—No. It’s …
He suddenly frowns. The sound grows louder and louder.
—Gas.
He throws down his weapon and tears off his shirt. He wraps it around his face and mouth, but it’s too late. His throat has already begun to close up; his nose and eyes are watering furiously. He decides he must free the four young women. While he fumbles with the tiny knots, he begins to choke on his tears. He unties Elizabeth, who collapses to the floor, then the two twins who have been lashed together. He is only able to untie Kristin’s neck and wrists. She is coughing and choking, reaching out through the smoke for Clark’s shirt. They fall to the ground together, covering their faces, her hand tightly grasping his flowered shirt. In the corner of the vault, Jan Olsson continues to sob, the gas making his tears bright silver. He folds his head into his arms, wishing now he had not stolen the unlucky pistol from the American car. By the time the riot squad throws open the door of the vault, Jan has decided to surrender. He crawls out with his hands over his head, his face red, in a posture of certain, final defeat.
Olsson and Olofsson will be charged and sentenced for kidnapping and robbery. Jan Olsson will choose to represent himself in court. During the court proceedings, he will ask several important eyewitnesses if they will please sing for him. All but Kristin Ehnemark will refuse. She will sing “Frère Jacques.” Jan Olsson will then place his head on the defense table and slowly fall asleep. The judge will quietly try to wake him. Olsson will apologize to the court. All of this will be later stricken from official court records.
Clark Olofsson will shave his beard during the trial. He will receive a number of marriage proposals from lonely women, some of whom are already married to other convicted criminals. After being sentenced, Olofsson will claim that he had nothing to do with the robbery and was only there to prevent his best friend from hurting the hostages. A Swedish court of appeals will eventually find him innocent, and his friendship with Jan Olsson will come to an end shortly thereafter. Clark will be released and then arrested again within a year.
Criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot will coin the term “Stockholm Syndrome” in a news broadcast, referring to the hostages’ evolving sympathy with the robbers during the ordeal. He will comment on how the girls stated that they were more afraid of the police than the robbers themselves, and he will write a number of papers on the subject. He will then buy a yacht and have Stockholm Syndrome etched in silver lettering along its colossal bow. No one will ask to go sailing with him. Not ever.
After he is acquitted, Clark Olofsson will begin a lifelong friendship with Kristin Ehnemark. On holidays and birthdays, when he is not in prison, they will exchange presents with one another. One year, for Christmas, Olofsson will give Ehnemark a white rabbit in a perforated box. It will have a blue bow around its neck. It will smell of violet perfume and will be stolen from a local pet store. It will be the best present Kristin ever receives. Clark and Kristin will visit each other whenever they are upset about something: This is made more difficult by the fact that Clark will be incarcerated quite frequently. Often, when they have a dream in which the other person appears, they will telephone to discuss what they have just witnessed in their sleep. In her dreams, Kristin sees Clark as a hand made of ice. In his dreams, Clark imagines Kristin as a lovely white dove.
illustration by
Geoff McFetridge
Apples are kissing other apples. Gray cats are kissing other gray cats. Trees are kissing trees. You and I are not kissing. We work in an office together. We are both married to other people. It is okay because we only have ideas, you and I, about whether we should kiss or not. These ideas are both good and bad, probably. At work, we do not say these ideas out loud but make elaborate diagrams for one another using pink phone-message sheets. You write these words: Kissing you would be like this, and draw a picture of two butterflies being struck by lightning. You hand me the note over the gray cubicle wall. I stare at it and wonder if you may be right. I do my own drawing and write, Kissing you would be like this, and sketch a picture of a man made of ice kissing a woman who is actually a stove. We have made hundreds of these drawings. We do not actually do any work in the office anymore, other than trying to imagine what it would be like to kiss each other. We have been thinking about it so long we have forgotten what it is we should be doing.
Your husband is a man I have met once or twice. He always looks sad. His chin is weak. His eyes are dark and he is always carrying a black umbrella. I have seen you climb into his black automobile, watched the mesmerizing flash of your white ankle disappear into a world I do not want to imagine. I have seen you crying and I know he is the one who is making you cry. I have seen you smile while you are speaking to him on the phone, your voice becoming soft and girlish, someone else, someone who I want to kneel before, and then lift her gray flannel skirt above the safety of her knees. I do not know if you still love him, your husband. I don’t know if you know, but
I have a wife who I do not speak to anymore. She is living with someone else, somewhere in Germany. I do not have a photo of her but I remember her face as angrily aglow, her short blond bangs framing eyes fixed in a stare of complete resignation. Other times, I remember her as being tall and lithe and having narrow white fangs. We were young when we got married though neither one of us now, you or I, are so very old.
At work, you make paper airplanes. For these airplanes you have a number of names: the two-spinner, which flies in two complete circles before its inevitable crash; the submarine plane, which goes underwater; the perpetual drifter, a plane you have devised which, through aerial locomotion, can stay airborne forever. We make two of each of these and send them out the office window, watching them take to the air, wing in wing, disappearing over the city. When they crash, giving in to the luxury of gravity, I think of kissing you and know that is exactly how it would feel.
One day, we go to lunch together. On the way, you find an eyelash on my cheek.
You hold it on the tip of your white finger and I close my eyes and blow and ask someone somewhere to turn us into pilgrims, one hundred years ago and one million miles away, all alone in a jungle somewhere, naked. At lunch, you only order food that is green. When you finish yours and begin to eat off my plate, it makes me very happy suddenly. I do not like how happy it makes me. I watch you touch the white napkin to the corner of your mouth and imagine how easy it would be to kiss right now, how we could disappear into the bathroom or an empty motel room or the backseat of a taxi and I could feel your mouth on my mouth as we fumble for simple buttons, easy zippers, the desperate waistbands of our unhappy clothes. I could take you and place my hands under your arms, lifting you onto the edge of a marble bathroom sink. Your blouse would part like a crème-colored curtain and your shoulders would be as white and stunning as antelopes made of snow, your breasts two sloping diamonds which would disappear under my hands, my fingers, my tongue. I could tug your flannel skirt up over your legs, the soft nylons stretched tight against your narrow thighs, slipping them down your knees, leaving them to rest at the end of your bare feet, then not thinking, neither one of us thinking, never thinking. I would fall to my knees before you and gently kiss the dimples of your thighs, working my fingers beneath the soft stitches of your pale pink panties. What else would I do? What might you do? What might you say if I was kneeling before you? You would laugh. You would laugh and say what we are doing is okay. It is nothing, really nothing.
Your hair is blond. Your neck is like a giraffe’s. You hands are small but wrinkly. You wear your gray flannel skirts and black nylons. I touch your skirt sometimes and say, You look nice today, though we both know that is not what either of us is thinking. I am thinking about the shape of your hips, which remind me of a harp, and how these hips would fit into mine, naked, your weight under my weight, as everything is knocked to the ground around us. I am thinking how your clavicle might sound when you breathe, how your ankle might feel, your wrist, your earlobe, the base of your neck, your elbow, the perfect soft places other people probably do not ever think to kiss. At work, I have made a very complicated flowchart depicting all of the body parts I could kiss, hundreds, thousands, before ever touching your lips. (If I began kissing your fingertip then I would move to your palm, the inside of your elbow, your shoulder next, then your breast. If I began kissing your foot, I would kiss each toe before moving along the bridge of your leg to the inside of your thigh.) I decide to fax this chart to you. You fax back a document that takes me some time to discover is a price list. Each toe, each earlobe is several thousand dollars, and as you know, I can’t afford any of it.
At work, we have begun inventing reasons to brush past each other, reasons no one, including us, would ever believe. You ask to use my telephone because your phone is too cheerful-sounding. When you’re done with it, the phone has suddenly become lovely: a phone from a dream I once had about you where we were both made of soap. Later, you borrow a pen because your pen is haunted. When you hand it back, you leave the perfect indentation of your teeth along its end. Touching these spots, I understand you have left these teethmarks as a letter, a warning, an invitation to me.
At work, I am sitting across from you in a meeting when you sneeze. I say gesundheit! and you say thank you and I say you’re welcome and it is like we are talking about something else. You are saying, I would like to but I could never forgive you or myself. I am saying, If you let me kneel before you once, I can live without forgiveness for a very long time.
We go for walks in the park during our lunch break. We are suspicious of ourselves so we don’t do anything but hold hands. We sit beside each other and look at the world, suddenly seeing what we are feeling: Bicycles decorated with noisy tin cans are steering down the street arm in arm; dogs are chasing other dogs wearing long white veils; rocks are whispering words of lust to one another in secret.
You do not ask what I do when I am not with you. You do not tell me anything I don’t want to know, like how the two of you fit each other’s bodies together in bed. Does he sleep facing you? Do you have your back to him? Does he mumble something secret to you? What do you sound like when you are about to come? How do you move? Do you close your eyes? Do you make jokes or do you become very serious, ignoring everything? I have asked these questions and you have not answered. I should not ask. I do not want to know any more than I already do.
An apple could make you laugh: You are so charming. On our lunch, we find our way along the crowded boulevard. You stop abruptly and pluck two green apples from someone selling them on the street. You look at them and decide they are in love, these two apples. You make them whisper to one another. You make them dance: The kinds of dances they do are dainty, spontaneous. At the end of the dancing, the apples get married in a little ceremony. After the two apples kiss, you and I laugh. It’ll be okay going for the two apples, they will get on fine, anyone can tell. Together, we walk back to the office and hate each other for how easily we can laugh about this.
One day I cannot take it anymore. I throw my shoes over a bridge. I tear off the blossoms which have begun to bloom. I ride my bicycle into a tree and howl on the telephone to you. Your husband is on some trip. Maybe you are thinking about him being gone for good. I tell you things I later regret. I tell you my ideas about the flannel skirt, your nylons, me on my knees, my hands in your lap. I ask you to move to London with me. There is silence and then you hang up the phone very angrily.
You are as young and as lovely as you will ever be. You are at the office. You are on the phone but not listening. You look up at me and ask if it is okay to kiss me right now. Why not? I say. It is something, you say, you have been seriously considering. We wonder what might happen. We might kiss and the world would end just as we have always imagined. Buildings might fall over and streetlights might turn into silvery glass. A cathedral might become shiny red candy and break apart under its own weight. Children and pigeons might come and eat up all the pieces and then we might disappear quickly. We are not going to find out.
We are not going to kiss, are we? I ask.
You stare at me and tell me your awful news: You have decided to leave your husband. You have decided you are leaving him, the city, and everything.
Really? I ask.
Really, you say. Today. I am leaving everything today.
Oh.
You are going back to wherever you’ve come from and now you will not even look at me.
I ask if I can come along. You tell me, No, sorry. I try to touch your shoulder but your back is turned. I sit on the edge of the desk and watch you pack up your things. You have a little brown box. I wonder if there is some way I can make myself disappear. I ask if you will write me a postcard. You tell me you will try. I convince myself to tie you up but I find I lack the courage. You take everything from your desk and fit it inside the box, not wanting to waste any time. You look around the office for what you might have missed: Oh, yes. Your green mittens. You put them in the
box. I hear you sigh but do not say anything. I watch you button the buttons along your coat. I say your name but you don’t look up.
illustration by
Ivan Brunetti
It is romance whenever the Model United Nations of Flossmoor High School begins to argue. Mr. Albee, their faculty advisor, tries to pay attention to each of the students as they state their opinions, all of them seated in a half-circle in the corner of the library’s meeting room, but in truth, he does not hear what they are actually saying. In his burgundy blazer and tan slacks, he is happy watching the shapes their mouths make as they all politely disagree. Margaret Hatch, in her black turtleneck, the girl who represents China, is standing up, pointing across the fake wood table at Hector, who is supposed to be the ambassador of Argentina. Hector is wearing a formal gray tie and is pointing at Sasha, who, in her yellow skirt, is a very lithe Great Britain. All of them are quarrelling about the unfairness of international interest rates. Their words are like music, an impossibly beautiful concerto, a piece of unbearably eloquent composition played by the secret tympanis of Mr. Albee’s tiny ears. Mr. Albee does not get involved in today’s discussion; today he only watches his wards, mesmerized by the sounds of their formal intonations. When their young and unsure voices begin to tremulously shake, to explode, to rattle with multisyllabic words, with complex ideas, with imperious intentions, when one of his students begins to raise a hand, when one of them begins to raise a point, when one of them begins to raise a protest in their adopted country’s defense, Mr. Albee feels as if he could love them all forever. He could love all of them, even Quinn Anderson, the dour boy in the tweed sweater representing Russia, an adolescent who refuses to learn anything about his assigned country, a boy Mr. Albee forced to join Model United Nations in order to make good on a number of missing or incomplete assignments for his history class. Even then, when Quinn decides to participate, interrupting Margaret, rolling his eyes at the other kids, pointing out that the other boys and girls have got it all wrong and that “People are just greedy animals, after all,” when all of their thoughts are like yellow buds blossoming from behind their white teeth, only then does Mr. Albee finally find what he believes to be true love.
