The Apartment: A Novel

by Greg Baxter

  It is agreed that Manuela will come with us. I am pleased and not pleased about this. She is, as Saskia said, very pretty, so I am as happy as anyone would be to walk around with her. But I have already met Janos and now Manuela, and I start to feel that I am meeting people I’ll see again. It is not that I don’t like them. It is simply that they reinforce the idea that you can never escape who you are, never truly anonymize yourself. Even if you never speak to anyone, people see you, and they get to know you for themselves. We cross the road through another underground passage. Manuela doesn’t ask any more questions about the Navy, or about me at all, which is a relief, but she tells a funny story about an office colleague who went with her to a conference last week, and who is uncomfortably antisocial. She met some interesting people at a dinner event but he followed her around, reminding her they needed to go back to the hotel and sleep. Every interesting conversation that almost happened with these interesting people was ruined by the colleague, who introduced serious questions about economics whenever the opportunity arose. She went back to the hotel with him, then waited an hour and sneaked out. When she returned a few hours later, very drunk, there was a note that he had slid under the door, saying he was disappointed that she hadn’t done as he said. He’s not my boss! she says. If it weren’t for people like him, says Saskia, economics would be left entirely to people like you. That’s a terrible thing to say! says Manuela. Saskia rolls her eyes. I feel I understand exactly how this friendship works.

  We stop in front of a large department store, which is all glass. Manuela suggests we keep going. This is where my colleagues get their suits, she says. You have to be careful or you will come out looking like a civil servant. Saskia says, He’s just getting a coat. I say, Let’s have a look here and go somewhere else if we have to. We walk through the entrance into a thick gust of heat. All the walls are mirrors and all the effects are chrome. The light is bright and the music is loud. It’s electronic muzak – a bass line repeating with chiming and twinkling bits inserted. The sensation of walking into this environment out of a freezing, old city is profoundly unpleasant. I take off my hat and Saskia takes off her gloves and Manuela takes off her coat. She is wearing a little brown-and-green dress, and tights. Saskia has told me she is a maneater, and this is easy to imagine. She ties her hair up in a ponytail. She has a small, slightly freckled nose and green eyes. Do you need anything? I ask Saskia. I’m broke until next week, she says. How about you? I ask Manuela. I’d never buy anything here, she says, for women at least. Okay, I say, and we go straight to the escalator. What kind of coat are you looking for? asks Manuela. Something better than what I have now, I say. Buy something trendy, she says. I say, I’m not a trendy person. I’m thinking of something classy, something I can wear until it falls apart. I see, she says, and looks at my boots. I pick a foot up so we can all examine the boots, and think about them in relation to a coat. I like my boots, I say. Me too, says Manuela, but they’re combat boots. They don’t look like combat boots unless you hold them up like that, says Saskia. I put my foot down. Oh well, I say. I can buy classy shoes another day, when it gets warmer.

  We land on the second level, which is still the women’s section, and Manuela, before we turn onto the next escalator, grabs a low-cut red dress with shoulder pads. See? she says. My mother would wear this. And suddenly something catches her attention, and she disappears across the floor and among the high racks of dresses and tops and sweaters and skirts and jeans. Saskia gives me a look. You okay? I ask. Fine, she says. She stresses you out? I ask. No, says Saskia. She’s just Manuela. Saskia looks upward, to the next level. I am below her on the escalator, two steps behind. I am looking up at her body and the back of her hair. She takes her coat off and places it in the cradle of her crossed arms. The next level is divided into men’s formal and casual, and there is hardly anyone shopping in the formal section, just some middle-aged men looking at suits. The casual coats have zippers on the sleeves or logos or writing on the back or they are made of shiny fabric. The larges are too small – the sleeves are too short and the shoulders are too narrow – and the extra larges are too big. They all make me look as though I want to look younger. But I don’t feel younger. I feel my age. I feel, now that I am forty-one, that I was born forty-one, that this number was somehow encoded in my DNA – this number was mass-produced by every cell of my body my whole life and for most of my life powered my bewilderment with the way everybody else acted, or what they wanted, or how they went about getting it. As a joke, I try on a coat that is blue and pink and has three small white stripes in a circle around the biceps of each sleeve and Saskia waves me away from the section entirely. I follow her. There is a ledge from which we can stare down at the level below, and we see Manuela inspecting an unsightly coat that would, no doubt, look nice on her. Saskia sighs. She seems eager to get out of here. Perhaps because her father was a civil engineer who ate himself to death, she equates the efficiency and usefulness of contemporary commercial architecture with ruthlessness and disease. She likes old, small, run-down places. In her camera phone she has photos of a thousand crumbling doorways and rusted gates. Since I have known her, she has added dozens. She has photos of broken windows in palaces and overflowing trash bins outside official buildings.

  I see a coat on a headless mannequin at the other end of the floor, in a row of headless mannequins wearing nice coats. The coat is grey, almost silver. We walk to it. We stand beside the window overlooking the street. The coat has a lapel collar and epaulette sleeves and hidden buttons. Saskia says, It’s beautiful. She runs to find one my size. It’s ninety-nine per cent cashmere and one per cent cotton. It’s so soft, says Saskia. But look. She holds out the price tag, which is hanging out of the cuff. I don’t make that in a month, she says. It really is nice, though, I say. Yes, the best by far, she says. If you can afford it, you should get it. I feel inside the sleeves. It is expensive, but it’s also one of the nicest coats I’ve ever seen. And I may never buy a coat again. Put it on, says Saskia. I put my old coat on the ground and kick it away from me. I take the new coat and put my arms through the sleeves and pull the collar to my neck, and it fits. It’s a lot warmer than my other coat. It falls to my knees and there’s a large slit up the back.

  Now Manuela appears. What do you think? I ask. Very stylish, she says. Is it expensive? A little bit, I say. A lot, says Saskia. Maybe, I say, but I don’t plan to buy myself any more coats for a long time. My colleagues wear coats like this, says Manuela, but not as nice. Your colleagues do not wear this coat, says Saskia. That’s what I said, says Manuela. Not as nice. Well, I say, it’s pretty conservative. I’m not trying to stand out. That’s what I mean, says Manuela. You won’t stand out. I stretch my arms to make sure the sleeves are the right length, and they are perfect. I say, How about gloves and a scarf now? Let me pick the scarf, says Manuela. Okay, I say. You need some colour, she says. What’s wrong with grey? I ask. She looks at Saskia and says, Exactly. She departs, and Saskia says she will look for some gloves. Something heavy, I say. I go find a mirror and have a look at myself. It is strange to spend this kind of money on anything that does not move or can’t be lived in. But this is not the beginning of ostentatious spending. This is just the once. Manuela returns with a scarf. I knew it the second I saw it, she says. It is a silk scarf with thin tassels at either end, light blue patterned with large, narrow-lined, orange-pink squares. What do you think? she asks. I love it, I say, but it doesn’t look very warm. No, says Manuela, it doesn’t, but you can’t wear a big wool scarf with that coat. I put it around my neck. You’re probably right, I say. Tie it, says Manuela. Okay, I say, and I make a knot and pull tight, which strangles me. I look at myself. Oh, I say, and untie the knot. Have you worn a scarf before? she asks. I don’t think so, I say. The only coat I would have ever worn, before I arrived here and bought my ugly coat from the Arab, was a pea coat, and you do not need scarves with pea coats. Give it to me, she says. She makes a loop, which she wraps around her neck, and pulls t
he ends through the loop. She tugs it tight. The tassels dangle over the breast of her dress. See? she says. I see, I say. I take the scarf and tie it in the way she has demonstrated. Much better, she says.

  Saskia returns with a few pairs of gloves. We all look them over. Manuela rubs them on her cheek. Then she sniffs them. Try these, she says, and hands me a pair of thick black leather gloves with brown fur lining. Manuela reads the label and says, Beaver, I think. Beaver? says Saskia. Now I’m wearing everything – the coat and the scarf and the gloves. And my boots. I look at myself in the mirror and feel different. Nobody changes himself from the inside. Nobody wills change from the innermost depths of his soul. This is because a person cannot ever look within himself, or search himself, or witness an emotion in himself. A person looks at a chair, and the chair becomes hatred. Or a light bulb flickering in a bathroom. Or a doorway. Or a shelf full of books. Or a house. Or a city. Or a temperature. Or a kind of light in the sky. Or an articulated thought, or a dream – which is where thoughts become externalized facts. Or a reflection of himself. You look at yourself in the mirror, and feel hatred. But you have not felt hatred. Hatred stares back at you. This is what hell will be. A room, without walls or dimension, full of all the objects that hate you. Not fire and cinder, not pain, but mundane views of streets, television sets, and acquaintances.

  Some weeks ago, when it was sunny and clear, and not too windy, I took a long journey by train to the uplands just south of the city. It was a weekday, and the train was full of empty seats, and I flipped through a newspaper I couldn’t read. The train blinked out of the suburbs. There were yellow and white houses with sharply angled rooftops sparkling with snow and ice. Smoke rose out of their chimneys and light flashed off their windows. When the houses were all gone and there was nothing but countryside, the train accelerated. There was nobody but me then – everyone else had disembarked at the suburban stations. I fell asleep. It was one of those sudden, accidental sleeps, which I had never been capable of until I arrived here. When I woke, the train had come to its terminus. I had missed my stop. The train was silent. The engine was off, and so were the heaters in the carriages. There were no other trains in the station. I stayed seated for a few minutes. Since I have never felt so calm in my life – or have no memory of a time when I felt this kind of calm – sometimes I like to sit and dwell in it. It’s like floating in the distant wake of a huge ship, a ship you no longer see, which has moved into fog. The open sea smells like nothing you know how to smell, and it makes no noise, though there is a great noise in it, deep beneath you, which carries you even though you cannot feel yourself moving.

  Eventually I decided to get off the train and go for a walk. There was no point worrying about having missed my destination, since it was not an important destination. A girl at the tourist office – I had gone to the tourist office to get brochures in English on walking tours – had suggested I go there, a small and pretty village in the mountains, where the children in the city went to learn to ski. Now, as far as I could tell, I was on the other side of the mountains, in the flat and vacant sprawl of the bottom of a huge valley. The station was just two low-lying platforms, with narrow shelters and a hut at the end. There was a guy in an orange high-viz jumpsuit pulling a gas-powered generator on wheels behind him. He saw me get off, and he stopped what he was doing to watch me, amused but also infuriated. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, but I gave him an apologetic smile. I walked the length of the platform, through a gate, and into the small town. There were cars parked on the streets, and the shops were open, but there was nobody walking around. Because of the extreme clarity in the sky and the bright sun near its noontime winter apex, the streets were – as I walked around them – alternately very warm in the light and freezing in shadows. Shadows stretched across empty lots; chimney smoke made shadows too. The shadows of delicate weathervane animals stretched monstrously over the streets. And when you walked from a patch of light into the shadow of a building or a house, your breath appeared. I had never seen anything quite like it, so sudden, so delineated. This was before I had my boots, so my feet quickly became cold and sore, and I wanted to sit. I found a hotel with a view, from its restaurant, of the motionless plains that lay to the south-east. The hotel was old and quaint and a little depressing, and the woman serving me spoke no English. A small fire burned, and I sat close to it.

  After about an hour an American man came into the dining room. He had a laptop, a wireless modem, a mobile phone and a sat phone. He found a table as far away as possible, but the restaurant wasn’t large, and when he spoke on the phone he spoke as though he were shouting across the Atlantic. He talked about energy, and drilling, and also about sustainability and diversification. He was ex-military. Even if he hadn’t looked ex-military, being in the military creates a way of speaking. I placed him from the South – North Carolina, maybe Tennessee, though it gets harder and harder to tell. After a few long conversations he closed his computer and put everything in his bag and leaned into his chair, really sank into it, and pulled his baseball cap down, the way a cowboy pulls his hat down to go to sleep, and crossed his arms, and he looked out the window, just as I had been doing. He was probably my age, maybe a little older. He had closely cropped grey hair. I considered it too strange that two American men had come all this way to stare out the same window, so I got up and started to leave. Nice view, he said. Sure is, I said, and kept walking.

  I went back to the train station and checked the time for the next train back to the city. I couldn’t make sense of the timetable. The man in the high-viz jacket was gone and there was nobody else around. I sat on the kerb and smoked a cigarette. I figured another train would come along soon. I finished my cigarette and walked over to the hut to look for somebody, but it was padlocked. I went back outside the gate and started to light another cigarette when the American man drove up in a black Range Rover and rolled down the window. I could hear country music playing in the car. It was a weird thing to hear. You trying to get back? he said. Affirmative, I said – I wanted him to know that I knew he was military; I wanted him to know that he did not blend in. Army? he asked. Navy, I said. What the hell are you doing out here? he asked. I missed my stop on the train, I said, and I figured I’d have a look around. I’m just here visiting. He wore silver-framed, square sunglasses, and he mostly spoke to me while staring straight ahead, or into his rear-view mirror. The next train isn’t until the evening, he said. People come and go once a day. What’s out here? I asked. A power plant, he said. A big motherfucking power plant. You live out here? I asked. Hell no, he said. I’m leaving tomorrow, back to the States. So, Army? I asked. Yeah, he said. Retired. Oh yeah, I said, me too. Forty-second infantry, he said. No shit, I said. I told him what I did, and that my FDE worked with the Forty-second. Hey, he said, now that is some crazy-ass shit. Then he said, Listen, you got hours to kill, and I don’t have shit to do. I’ve been wanting to drive out to some ruins since I got here. You want to join me? I looked up and down the deserted street. I thought of my cold feet. So I walked around the other side, opened the door, and climbed inside. The seats were of soft leather, and I had endless leg space. My God, I said, this is a sweet fucking vehicle. I was worried he might go on about Iraq, or talk about his work, or ask me a hundred questions, or pointlessly chat about weather, but instead he cranked up the country music and said, All right, and jammed the gas down and we were screaming through the desolate and icy countryside. He took out some Kodiak and filled his gums with it. Want some? he asked. But he pronounced it, ’awnt sum. Sure, I said. He handed me an old white polystyrene coffee cup, the kind you drink out of on construction sites while wearing hard hats, and we were spitting and sucking and I was starting to feel a bit fucked up and queasy. I couldn’t believe he was driving fast when there were patches of ice and compacted snow everywhere, but I placed great trust in him immediately, and assumed he knew what he was doing. The tremendous white and yellow light was everywhere, and warm.

  His name
, this ex-Army guy, was Early. That’s what he went by. It could have been a last name or a nickname, or it could have been a first name. Early said, I love the Oak Ridge Boys. And he did seem to love them. They made him want to drive fast and say nothing. But what I really love, he said, is playing the Oak Ridge Boys out here, driving this goddamn machine. That’s what I’m going to miss. I’ll be happy to get home. I go abroad for six months, then I’m home for six months and play golf and take the kids to swim practice. I love that shit. You’ve been all over? I asked. All over, he said. Oil in Nigeria, Venezuela. Renewables in China, Ireland, fucking Antarctica once. You believe that shit? Antarctica, I said, holy shit. And obviously the Gulf. And I blast the motherfucking Oak Ridge Boys wherever I go. For a moment I became entirely lost in the beauty and mystery of blasting the Oak Ridge Boys from some massive ATV with a hundred headlights driving at night around the South Pole – a Sno-Cat or a Mars Humvee screwing recklessly into the black force of an Antarctic blizzard. I’m only messing with you, he said. I don’t have kids. And he turned the music down. This is actually on the motherfucking radio, he said, without the accent. Can you believe that? We drove for a little while longer in the quiet discomfort his joke had created. I didn’t know what was the truth, and I guessed he liked it that way. He changed the radio to a classical station and we were listening to strange violin music. He said, the minute he heard it: Alban Berg, fucking genius. Then he told me a story – by way of explaining his sense of humour – about a time, maybe ten years ago, he had put on a hat and some ragged clothes and sunglasses and fake redneck teeth and hopped on a bicycle and rode around his neighbourhood. He called his girlfriend, who was at home, on his cell phone – while he was riding the bike – and said he’d heard on the news that a man fitting his description had raped and murdered some women and was last seen in their neighbourhood. He told her to go to the window and see if the man was there. She saw him – this figure he described, himself, exactly, down to the colour of his shorts – and she became so frightened that she started sobbing and hyperventilating and trying to scream. He told her to calm down and get a gun. Then he knocked on the door and ran away, and she shot the door to pieces with his .357. He smiled after he told me that. That was pretty damn funny, he said. Well, I said, what did your girlfriend say when you told her it was you? How the hell would it still be funny if I told her? he said.