Carl ran the entire way back. As he ran he wiped the shaving cream from his face with his sleeves. He ran past the row of parked cars as if he were following a train of thought backwards. The car with the jug-eared mirrors was still there, and it was still a mustard-yellow Mercedes 280 with black upholstery. A pink Ford in front of it, a lilac Ford behind it. He went around the car. Then he squatted down by the rear tire and looked at the 7Up can and the ants going in and out of the opening. Was it this? Was this the image? He tried to pull the can out from under the tire, but he couldn’t. He looked inside the car. He didn’t see anything unusual. The seats appeared to be made of leather. There was a brown briefcase holding a packet of paper in the passenger-side footwell. The window was cracked slightly open but the door was locked. A normal car with normal things in it… He kneeled down by the rear tire and looked at the aluminum can. He tugged on it.
“What are you doing?” Two young men were now standing behind him. They weren’t police. One was the merchant whose shop the Mercedes was parked in front of.
Carl waved them away and lost himself again in looking at the soda can. He looked at the stream of ants. He looked at the street. He looked at the aluminum.
“Hey, man.” Aggressive tone. Very aggressive tone.
“I’m only interested in the can here,” said Carl, trying to wave them away like flies.
“You tried to open the door of the car.”
“So?”
“Is it your car?”
“What does it matter to you? Is it your car?”
“No, it’s not mine. But is it yours?”
“Yeah, it’s my car!” said Carl, annoyed. The can moved a little. He bent part of it upward so he could grip it better, and yanked at it with all his strength. He didn’t even know what he wanted with it. Ants crawled on his fingers.
The men behind him were whispering. Then one said: “Hey, what makes you think you can talk like that? What makes you think you can talk that way to us?”
Carl again motioned behind his back at them. They should get out of here.
“If it’s your car, why don’t you just move it forward a little?”
Carl felt something hit him in the back, apparently a soft kick. He thought for a moment and then said: “Good idea.” He made a show of pulling his keys out of his pocket as he stood up, patted the dust from his knees and went around the car in the hope that the bothersome pair would take off.
And they did in fact move away, but then they stopped and watched him suspiciously. He stood by the driver’s side door and made as if he were sticking the key into the lock while at the same time acting as if he had noticed something interesting at the end of the street. It worked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the two men wander slowly off. The key slipped into the lock and, with a smacking sound, opened the central locks.
42
Nothing of Importance
ALICIA: My car is outside.
DEVLIN: Naturally.
HITCHCOCK,
Notorious
HE NEEDED A FEW MINUTES to calm down. Once he had settled into the driver’s seat his gaze fell first on the right-side mirror, which showed a crushed soda can beneath the rear tire in a somewhat trapezoid-shaped, gleaming chrome frame with rounded edges.
It overwhelmed him. He slumped with his forehead against the steering wheel and the car’s horn startled him upright again. He took three or four deep breaths and reached for the briefcase of papers at the foot of the passenger’s seat, let it drop and again slumped down. All the tension in his body had seeped out. He didn’t feel well. He didn’t feel well at all. Suddenly he was no longer sure whether he wanted to know who he was. If he wanted to know at all who he was. A few minutes went by. He looked out of the windshield at the narrow street, the light traffic and the two men, who had sat down at a nearby café and were watching him from there. Next to them a boy punched at the air yelling: “Ouz!”
Dull echoes wafted over the buildings.
The contents of the briefcase were disappointing. The stack of paper that dropped out was blank, about twenty pages, white, unlined. Along with the paper a worn map of Targat, an empty glasses case and nothing else.
Carl went around the car to the trunk. Inside was a colorful ball and a wrench. In the glovebox were two brown glass ampules and beneath the seat a pair of sunglasses, a pen made of polished metal, two bottle caps with the Coca-Cola emblem on them and the handle of a razor. Other than that, just a little notebook and a black wool cardigan with empty pockets. That was it. And none of it suggested at first glance anything about the identity of the car’s owner. Not at the second glance, either. The two glass ampules were nine-tenths full of a clear fluid. There was a barely legible label on one of them that seemed to indicate it was a morphine concoction. The notebook was blank, like the stack of papers. The pen wrote with blue ink. The clip of the pen had “Szewczuk” written in script on it. Apparently the name of the manufacturer.
Carl took the pen apart, wrote another squiggle on the notebook with the ink cartridge and then put it back together. He unfolded the map of Targat. In the upper-right corner, contrary to geographical reality, was an inset with Tindirma. He opened the glasses case and closed it again and felt the exterior. He felt the ball. It was sewn together out of many different-colored segments, a ball for children… blue, red, yellow and a washed-out orange that was reminiscent of cut-off fingertips, if one had the inclination to think of it for some reason. The ball seemed to be filled with wood shavings or stringy foam rubber. Carl pushed on it and kneaded it and tried to feel for anything inside. He bit the ball and ripped it open. Wood shavings and more wood shavings. Finally he took the briefcase and then all the other items one after the other, stared at them and turned them around in his hand. He looked through the glovebox again and then under all the foot mats. Beneath the passenger seat he found another small pencil stub and a receipt listing among other things the words for fruit, water, eggs and beef. He looked at the piece of paper as if it were a transmission from another planet and then began to cry.
He threw the wads of wood shavings out of the window with energetic swings, stuffed everything else he had found into the briefcase, locked up the Mercedes and went back to Helen’s car. His note was sitting unmoved on the driver’s seat; no sign of Helen. The entrance to the commune’s courtyard was now barred with a wooden gate. Carl shook it and peered through the cracks. He called Helen’s name.
A man armed with a club trotted down the street behind him, screaming. More shouting could be heard in the distance.
Carl sat down in the pickup, crossed out his previous note and instead wrote to Helen that he still didn’t know who he was but that they would probably be driving back to Targat in two cars. He had found his own car, a yellow Mercedes with black interior, down the street in the direction of the arrow he drew, and he would wait down there for her at a café within sight of the car. He wrote that he was very happy and unhappy at the same time and that he desperately hoped that nothing had happened to her, Helen. Then he crossed out the word “desperately” and in the end crossed out the entire last bit, since he realized it was written more to himself than to her. He read through the whole note again. In tiny letters and winding several times around corners, his barely legible sentences covered the paper. He pulled the little notebook out of the briefcase in order to rewrite it all from scratch, and when he put the notebook on the dashboard he noticed in the sideways light grooves pressed into the top piece of paper.
He rubbed across the grooves with the pencil stub and a word became visible: CETROIS.
Nothing more. Carl stared at the writing for a long time and then wrote the word again next to the original. The two versions looked exactly alike. It was his own handwriting. Why had he written down that name? Had he been looking for Cetrois before his memory loss, too? Up to that point he had assumed that the person he was seeking was some sort of friend of his, a buddy. In any case, someone who shared his fate, being chased by four idio
ts in white djellabas. But why would somebody write down the name of a buddy or a confidant—and only his—in a notebook? To visit him? To call him? Nothing sensible occurred to him, and the longer he stared at the letters the more sure he became that Cetrois was no friend of his. At least not one he knew well. Probably a total stranger. Helen had likely been right after all.
Carl waited and drank an iced water in a little sidewalk café with a view of the yellow Mercedes. As he tried once again to remember first coming to and fleeing the barn and, without even noticing that he was doing it, made complicated geometrical shapes in the air with his hand, he noticed a woman at a nearby table staring at him. Smiling at him. Had his gestures attracted her attention? Or did she know him? He looked away, and when he looked back at her she was still smiling. Was it possibly a woman from the commune that Helen had sent after him? No, she didn’t look the part, not with her neat, tidy clothes. And besides, it seemed to Carl that he’d seen her enter the café from the opposite direction.
Carl had become accustomed to nodding at total strangers in the last few days. He smiled back. She immediately got up and came over to his table.
“Hello,” she said loudly and distinctly.
“Hello,” he said.
“You look good,” she said, as if they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and to him it made him think—she knew him! Even if she apparently didn’t know him well, since before she sat down in the empty chair she visibly hesitated.
The urge to immediately confide in the woman was unbelievably strong. She had an honest, unattractive face, and nothing about her suggested any sort of danger… or did it? Was he fooling himself? What if she was an acquaintance of Adil Bassir’s, a messenger perhaps, sent to remind him of the ultimatum? But no, no, that was nonsense. Her face was far too harmless. And how would she have found him?
He decided to count silently to twenty and then open up to her. And if he let himself talk to her perhaps he would be able to figure out (or she might just tell him) who he was… and who she was. It shot through his brain: maybe she’s my wife? But a wife who had been missing for days and who had been threatened with rape and having her son’s finger cut off would greet her husband differently. No, she was a close acquaintance, Carl decided, maybe his lover. Though again, she seemed far too honest and upstanding, not to mention ordinary, to be the lover of a violent criminal. The frizzy perm alone. And there was something off about her eyes. Her gaze was as unsteady as his, and when he got to twenty and communication was still stalled, he considered the possibility that she too had lost her memory. She smiled, then looked pensive, then smiled again. Then she looked pensive again. Finally she blushed.
“Don’t make me do it all by myself,” she said.
Perhaps she was mentally ill.
“I’m happy to see you,” he said, making an effort to stay calm while his feet twitched uncontrollably beneath the table. His urge to flee was almost as strong as it had been when he first came to in the attic of the barn. Should he not give more credence to his own body? The woman, who noticed his anxiety, threw her head back and laughed theatrically.
“There’s a hotel nearby,” she said.
Carl nodded.
She blushed again. She’s insane, he thought, she’s talking totally incoherently… no. No, it had to be something else. Probably something so simple and obvious that he was missing it. He decided to stop playing games and tell her the truth. It was too late for anything else. He leaned across the table and whispered: “I know it sounds crazy, but I don’t know you.”
The expression on her face didn’t change at all. Had she not understood him?
“Are you married?” she asked.
“What?”
“I know,” she said, running both hands through her hair. “I know that it’s not normal. The hotel is over there.”
She stood up and walked off without looking back even once. Carl, whose hands were trembling so badly he barely managed to toss two coins on the table, followed her. The waiter licked his lips.
43
Sirens
Images of humans, how horrid. Humans don’t interest me, if I may be frank.
LUHMANN
THE HOTEL CONCIERGE didn’t even lift his head as he put the key with the number 7 on the counter.
They went up a shabby staircase, down a shabby hallway and into a shabby room. The woman immediately ripped her shirt off. Carl had never seen anything like it. A naked breast… another naked breast… at least if he had he couldn’t remember it.
He was powerless.
“Talk Arabic to me,” said the woman as they were lying next to each other.
“Why?”
“Talk to me, you wild man!”
“What?”
“Speak Arabic!”
“What should I say?”
“Anything.”
“I can’t think of anything,” whispered Carl in Arabic.
She nodded, slowly closed her eyes and pulled him on top of her. Her face took on a rapturous look. “Keep going,” she moaned, and Carl, who noticed she didn’t understand Arabic, called her a stupid cow, an ugly old woman, an idiotic perm-girl. As the room rhythmically wobbled back and forth, his gaze fell on the yellow blazer that he’d thrown next to the bed. It made him think of the items in the briefcase, particularly the map. He couldn’t keep his mind on the deed at hand. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it was Helen. He stuck his head in the woman’s armpit and knew: this wasn’t the first time. He had a wife and child, he had done it with his wife. He forgot to breathe and gasped for air. Finally their motion stopped.
While the woman was showering, he lay on his back in bed and stared at the ceiling. The woman returned with a slam of the door. He heard her drying off, heard her pulling on her clothes. As she did she softly talked the whole time. She said he was a merciless lover, a hard fuck, an animal. She’d said the same sort of things the whole time in bed, too (and she repeated them now perhaps not to seem unstable to herself, as she appeared to be nearly in tears). In parting she approached him and put a finger on his lips, then on her lips, and said: “If we happen to run into each other again: you understand. We don’t know each other.”
She looked at him until he nodded. Then she left, and he remained lying on his back staring at the ceiling. He could make out the remains of crumbling stucco in all four corners of the room. Concentric rings of water stains extended out from the windows. Their calligraphy-like contours meant nothing to him, which was exactly what most other things and faces meant to him, and he thought about the secret significance of this analogy. He closed his eyes.
After a while he heard sounds from the next room. A moan, as if two people were going at it. Carl didn’t want to hear it and buried his head in the pillow. The couple’s moan grew louder, though technically speaking only the woman was audible. His mind had added the man. It could also have been two women pleasuring each other. Or a woman and two men. Or a woman on her own. The number of possibilities unsettled him.
He thought about the fact that the same sounds could have been heard a few minutes before from the room where he was now, and suddenly it occurred to him that it could be not just the same sort of sounds but the same actual sounds, the moaning of the crazy woman, that were bouncing back through the walls in a delayed echo. Like a tape recording that someone in the next room had made of them and now was playing back, an echo of his own no longer present lover. He sat up in bed, an ear to the wall. The moaning rose rhythmically for several minutes and then suddenly dropped an octave like a police siren passing by while a second voice wheezed breathlessly, muted. Then it was quiet again.
Carl was relieved to have heard the man’s voice, which was clearly not his own. He had spoken Arabic only at the beginning of the whole thing, quietly, and then tried to be silent; out of embarrassment on multiple levels. First, he didn’t know the woman, or at least he was quite sure he didn’t. Second, he was hiding something from her, though it was hard to say exactly wha
t. And third, he knew that people made noises during sex, but he wasn’t sure what sort of noise he would make, and worried about having to hear a bunch of appalling, unknown sounds coming out of himself.
Without meaning to, he fell asleep. Half asleep, he thought he heard an actual police siren go past, told himself that they were after him… and fell back to sleep. Something was picking painfully at the back of his skull. He blinked his eyes open and saw a beam of light in the shape of a crescent moon wander across his retina. Quivering, the crescent glided leftward into the night, quivering. In his dream he saw himself drinking a glass of green tea. He saw himself sitting at a green table, looking at a green building that had a white flag waving atop it. A jeep drove past, he suddenly remembered the soda can again… he jumped out of bed.
From the pockets of his blazer he ripped the ampules, the notebook, the map and the other objects. He spread the map out on the bedspread, used his finger to find the spot where he currently was, and suddenly froze. The hotel was marked with a blue squiggle. The squiggle was somewhat ambiguously scrawled on the entire area… it could also have been marking the commune rather than the hotel. Or another building on the street. No, surely it was the commune! His heart beat wildly. Then he discovered another mark a few streets away, then he saw that places all over the map were marked and circled. “Who would do that?” he said to himself. “A mailman?”
The bulk of the markings were in Targat. Carl counted nearly thirty blue markings. But none of the key places, that is all the places that had played a certain role during the most recent few days of his life (the Sheraton, Adil Bassir’s villa, Dr Cockcroft’s practice, etc.), were marked. The bar where he had met Risa wasn’t marked. The workshop where the two men had trapped him wasn’t marked. Helen’s bungalow was nowhere to be found. He picked up the pen and circled an area in no man’s land in the desert, approximately where the barn was. It was a different shade of blue. He stepped to the window and for a second time took apart the pen and held the cartridge up to the light. Metallic silver, maybe five or six millimeters in diameter. At the front end a narrow bit with a nib fitted over it, and the back a blue plastic plug that proved impossible to open. Here, too, a threadbare imprint of the maker’s name: Szewczuk. He looked closely at all the individual parts of the pen again. Two sheaths, a jagged piece of plastic, a compression mechanism, the cartridge—mine in French—the ring and the nib. He pressed the nib between two of his fingers, it bent and then sprang against the window with a click.
Sand Page 23
