The Dictator

by David Layton

  “Am I here?” he asked.

  The cab driver looked at Karl through the rear-view mirror and wordlessly pointed to the house with the green door. Karl stepped out onto the curb.

  “You haven’t paid.”

  Karl blinked, and thought, Money, yes, he needed to pay him money, and patted down his pockets. Finding a wallet, he offered it with both hands through the open window in a sign of supplication and waited for the driver to take what was his. Then he proceeded toward the house.

  He pushed the front door open and saw that he was home. There was the fireplace, the chair, the couch, everything that belonged to him.

  He’d learned as a young man to dislike tracking dirt into the house, felt it was a sort of contamination between two distinct spheres and was happy to take off his shoes and leave behind the accumulated confusion he’d picked up outside. He walked, practically ran, to his waiting chair. God, he was tired. And thirsty. He leaned back in his seat. The house was air-conditioned. He’d had an argument about that with Claire, thought it was an unnecessary luxury, a weakness of some kind.

  “So is heating” was Claire’s response.

  He wouldn’t tell her what had happened—it had already begun to appear vaguely preposterous—but he was happy for the coolness. He wouldn’t tell her about that either. They’d had a lot of quarrels back then, arguments he preferred to call them, though he knew they were much more than that. It was his fault. He’d made her unhappy, but it was all right now. Why argue against air-conditioning? Why fight at all, he wondered, searching for his newspaper. Usually it lay on the floor, beside his chair. He was trying to remember if he’d read it this morning, when he heard Claire’s voice call out from upstairs.

  “Hello? Is someone there?”

  “It’s me.”

  He heard her footsteps on the stairs, so distinctive the way they pressed down on the wooden boards as if each step were exploratory, in need of reassurance that the ground wouldn’t give way.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked when she saw him.

  Karl thought he might have missed an appointment—perhaps it was the doctor’s—because she looked at him with worry, if not outright alarm.

  “I came home early.”

  Claire leaned forward just a bit, as if she hadn’t quite heard him. Then she laughed, a quick nervous burst, before she placed a hand over her mouth.

  Karl sensed danger, and if he’d had the newspaper beside him, he would have picked it up and obdurately started reading it. Unfortunately he had no cover, nothing to hide behind, and so he sat there with hands that throbbed on the armrests, and waited.

  “Karl,” she said, “you haven’t lived in this house for almost forty years.”

  HE SAT IN the chair beside the fireplace, a glass of untouched juice beside him along with a newspaper that Claire had brought him. It was a thoroughly domestic setting, which heightened the oddity of the situation.

  “You gave me quite a scare, Karl.”

  Karl rustled the newspaper, an impotent thunderclap to show his disapproval of Claire’s disruption, and resumed reading, or rather he resumed the act of reading, his eyes scanning the print for Middle East wars and bombs and global financial chaos that offered him a measure of dark satisfaction, though he knew he could no longer follow the sequential order of pandemonium that was so neatly and rationally arranged before him. The mortar that bound each sentence and paragraph to the next had, like the synapses in his brain, become soft and loose. At this moment, what remained was the habit of reading, the remembrance of it, which he could, like the newspaper itself, hold up against them.

  “I was upstairs putting fresh sheets on the bed, when you walked in.”

  Karl put down the newspaper and took in the news that he could understand: this woman, this house, and the life they’d had together. He glanced at her wedding finger and saw that it was bare. She’d placed clean sheets on the bed for her own comfort and no one else’s.

  “The house looks to be in good shape,” he said. Karl couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to him that hardly anything had changed since the day she’d asked him to leave. And what was true for the house was also true for Claire. She’d aged, of course, but still the pale blue eyes peered out of a roundish, if somewhat thinner, face than the one he remembered. No wonder he could walk through the front door and make himself at home. She hadn’t done anything to smooth out the wrinkles or tuck back the unwanted parts of herself. He could recognize her as he could the house in all its familiarity, and it was a source of great comfort.

  “How’s the roof holding up?”

  The roof was always leaking. He’d go up there and lay down roofing tile, but somehow the water always found its way into the house again, and he’d climb back up in frustration, searching for cracks and imperfections to seal up. Claire liked to say that their house was a strong man with a bald head, and he recalled the day, years ago, when he’d climbed to the top of the house to make some repairs and seen himself, in an endless duplication, standing on all the other peaked rooftops searching for leaks. It had been some sort of mirage conjured up from rippling heat and light. Or a hallucination. Whatever it was, Karl had turned his back on all his other selves and focused on the roof he knew himself to be standing on, to plug the hole the best he could, because it was the roof that belonged to him, and that was all that mattered.

  “Is that why you came over, Karl? To ask after the roof?” She looked at him—studied him was more like it—tilting her head a few degrees as if a different angle might help adjust her thoughts. “I guess there are a few leaks, but the house is still standing, just like I am.”

  Her smile revealed a missing tooth, not in the front but just a little back, so that it took a large smile to notice. He suddenly felt sad that she hadn’t seen the need to fill the gap, that she’d accepted it.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “Are you hungry, Karl?”

  “I don’t think I’ve had any lunch,” he said and immediately wished he’d been less equivocal, that he’d said, I didn’t have lunch. “I was downtown,” he added, because it was true, a fact that he could recall, but it came out as boosterish, as something a child might exclaim to his mother after an excursion.

  “Did you drive here?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Where’s your car?”

  “The car is parked, Claire.”

  “Where is it parked?”

  He didn’t like these questions. They felt cruel and dangerous and forced him to lie. He wasn’t as sharp as he once had been, as he needed to be. Slippages was what he called these strange mental lapses, when he seemed to misplace people and places. None of which was out of the ordinary, he told himself. Especially at his age. Most people were dead.

  “So how come you decided to walk through my front door? You always used to warn me to keep it locked in case a stranger walked in, but I never thought the stranger would end up being you, Karl. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes,” he answered carefully. “I think so.”

  Now it was all coming back to him as if through layers of mist and fog—his apartment, which he reached by pushing the letters PH, the acronym for the penthouse that offered a secret measure of pride and thrilled him each time he stepped onto the elevator, the southward view of the city and the recently replaced sidewalk below, the concrete still white and virginal.

  Noticing his confusion, Claire softened her tone. “Would you like something to eat? I can make a plate of salami, some cheese and pickles.”

  “You never liked salami.”

  “That’s true,” answered Claire, without explaining any further why she’d have some in the house.

  “I think maybe just some coffee,” said Karl.

  “It’s too late in the day for coffee, Karl. You know how you are when you have coffee in the afternoon. You can never get to sleep.”

  Karl, who felt as if he could sleep harder and longer than at any time in the past twenty years
and who was even hoping he might be able to slip upstairs to take a nap on those fresh sheets, accepted Claire’s suggestion of tea instead. After she walked into the kitchen, he realized that she hadn’t asked how he took it, and for a fearful second, Karl wondered if he might not know himself, but she returned with tea that was sweet and milky just as he preferred it, and he discovered that everything about the present arrangement satisfied him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Be careful. It’s hot.”

  Karl blew on the steam, took a few sips and then, just for a second, closed his eyes.

  He had been seated in this very chair—or if not the exact chair then one just like it and in the same spot—when she’d accused him of transferring money every month to an account in the Dominican Republic. He hadn’t expected her to find out. He’d always done all the banking. In those days, a wife needed her husband’s signature to do practically anything when it came to banking, but then things changed—as they always did—and Claire was no longer dependent in the same way. She made her own deposits and withdrawals and eventually asked questions that she shouldn’t have asked and that the bank should never have answered.

  “Why are you sending money there?” Claire had demanded.

  She’d sat on the couch opposite him.

  “I send money to help the community.”

  “That you lived in during the war?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Who, specifically, are you helping?”

  “It’s a private matter,” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” Claire said bluntly.

  “There are things you don’t understand. That you don’t need to understand.” Surely, he thought, she could see that. Karl had spent the war surviving somehow, and then he’d come to Canada and worked hard and met Claire and married her. That was the only explanation worth offering, the only one, like the leaky roof, that mattered. All his other selves were not worth dwelling upon.

  “Karl?” A hand touched his arm. It was Claire, waking him for dinner.

  “You must have nodded off,” she said, and Karl realized that he was not at home and that Claire was no longer his wife. “Come and have something to eat.”

  Karl took his seat at the table set with plates and cutlery and cloth napkins and began eating the food Claire had placed before him. He was so famished, he didn’t notice the arrival of a man and teenage girl who had come through the front door without knocking. They stared at him, and he stared back, before realizing that it was his son and granddaughter. The son he’d had with Claire.

  “Aaron’s here to drive you back to your apartment after you’ve finished eating,” said Claire.

  His son didn’t appear happy at the prospect, and it was strange, too, that he came with a suitcase, as if he were about to go somewhere. Or perhaps he’d come from somewhere else and had now arrived to collect Karl, as if he were an item his son had forgotten to pack away.

  Nobody else seemed to want any food except Karl, so he ate alone, his son and granddaughter and ex-wife speaking among themselves, as if he didn’t exist.

  And at that moment, Karl thought they might be right.

  “TAKE YOUR SHOES off,” Karl commanded, unlacing his shoes and placing them on his shoe rack, something he was fairly certain he’d done when entering Claire’s house.

  “They’re off,” his son said, and Karl watched him petulantly slip one shoe off with the other, the way a teenager would do it. In contrast, his granddaughter actually used her hands, as if purposely declaring her maturity.

  “You always ask me to do exactly the same thing at your place, Dad,” said Petra.

  Aaron just stood there by the door as if expecting something to happen.

  Karl strode toward the row of floor-to-ceiling windows and pulled back the curtains to reveal the high-rise illumination of the city centre. He was pleased by the decision to live in a penthouse apartment, furnished in a Spartan style uncluttered with mementos or bulky objects difficult to dispose of. Stepping back, he noticed a pile of magazines fanned out across the coffee table but also, next to them, a vacuum attachment. It stood upright like a steam-ship funnel, as if purposely placed there.

  Yes, it was a mistake to visit Claire, and the vacuum attachment spoke to him of other problems, but now that he was in his real home, Karl felt as if things might be put back in their place. That included his son, who along with his granddaughter had not just dropped him off at his home but had gotten out of the car with him and carried on through the lobby like tenants. As they stepped into the elevator with him, Karl had pushed the PH button with a sense of infringement.

  If he’d been thinking more clearly, he would have foreseen this eventuality and done something about it, said something. What he had said was “Thank you for escorting me home,” singeing his words with enough sarcasm to let them know what he thought of the idea, but his son and granddaughter had ridden up with him anyway and then stomped through his apartment.

  Making his way down the long hallway, Karl flipped on the light switch to his bathroom and caught his reflection in the full-length mirror: with his hand still on the wall, he looked like a thief come to rob his own home. Age had ruined him. Karl held no illusion on that matter, but on closer examination he was pleased to see that his features remained sharply focused, as if everything non-essential had been stripped away. He was like one of those monumental buildings Albert Speer had designed to age gracefully, like a Roman ruin, long after the disappearance of the Third Reich, and it gave Karl pleasure to think that he was here, still defiantly aging, while those other bastards were dead.

  There were two sinks in the bathroom, and Karl sidled over to the one on the left while looking over at the other sink and wondering whom it was for. He hadn’t dated a woman for years. A bar of soap between the two sinks had dried and cracked from lack of use, and he suddenly noticed the sorry state of his bathroom. Floor tiles had been ripped up, revealing small ridge-lines of sealant that were no longer able to bond and seal. He spotted the telltale signs of water damage and stared at the bathtub. Workmen had been here and not yet finished the job.

  He leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on his face. Feeling the rough stubble, Karl decided to shave before going to bed. It was not his routine to shave in the evening, but turning on the tap and waiting for the hot water to course its way through the copper pipes, he admitted to himself that it had been anything but a normal day. It had been a long day, a wrong day, Karl thought, the whole of it unaccountable to him.

  Karl pulled the blade across his lathered jaw, using his free hand to tug the skin taut. On an impulse, a dare even, he looked again at the other sink, the one to his right. He’d had a number of relationships with women since the end of his marriage to Claire, and looking back, what he most appreciated was their brevity. The last woman he’d been with, Sophia, was sixteen years younger than Karl and a good cook, but she’d started to complain about his cigars. “They’re not cigars, they’re Davidoffs,” he protested, after she’d once again admonished him for smoking in the apartment, especially in winter, when she couldn’t open the windows. He’d burned something, maybe the striped blue and white couch, and she said, “I can’t take care of you anymore.”

  “Who says you need to take care of me?”

  The idea had shocked him. If there was one thing he knew, it was how to take care of himself—

  “Dad?”

  He’d forgotten about his son. But there he was, hovering at the bathroom’s entrance.

  Karl spoke to the mirror. “What is it?”

  This son of his was in front of him, behind him, impossible to be rid of.

  “Dad, we’ve got to go.”

  Karl was pleased they were leaving. As his son stood there waiting for him to finish shaving, it occurred to him that, truth be told, his son could do with a shave as well. He looked Semitic, which was odd, because his mother wasn’t Jewish, and Karl, with his blue eyes and once blond hair, looked Austria
n—was Austrian, Karl reminded himself. That was something they couldn’t take away from him, something only he could voluntarily renounce, and lately he’d felt a perverse pleasure in not doing so.

  “Dad, I’m exhausted. We’ve got to get going.”

  So get going, thought Karl. “Hand me that towel,” he said, pointing to a pristine, sun yellow hand towel that in the mess of his bathroom looked like something from a museum exhibit of a lost domestic era.

  At his son’s beckoning, Karl followed him down the hallway while dabbing at his face with the towel and enjoying the sweet and sour smell of shaving cream. They stepped into his bedroom. The mirrored closet doors had been slid open, exposing a row of plastic and metal hangers, some with paper adverts of their local dry cleaner still on them.

  While he’d been in the bathroom, his son and granddaughter had been snooping around the apartment, entering his bedroom and opening closets and drawers. By what right did his son have to do such a monstrous thing? Who had given him permission?

  With his granddaughter watching from the corner, his son pulled a suitcase out of the closet and dropped it on the bed. Karl noticed the sheets and blanket were tucked in and securely anchored beneath the mattress, but the pillowcases were missing.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Packing.”

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  “We just came here to get some more of your things,” said his son. “Then we’re going back to my place.”

  His son unzipped and opened the suitcase, baring a hungry emptiness that Karl feared would swallow him whole. He thought back to all the suitcases he’d seen lined up on the street, darkening in the soft drizzle that enveloped Vienna, while their owners, in panicked subservience, darkened alongside them. Karl was determined that he would not be one of those who lined up to disappear. Suitcases marked the ending of things.

  “I am sleeping here,” Karl said.

  “You can’t.”

  “I want to sleep here.”

  “I know you do, Dad. And believe me when I say that I wish you could, because I’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight. Do you have any idea how long my day has been?”