The Apartment: A Novel

by Greg Baxter

  It seems like a long time ago that I read those things about perspective. Everything I have experienced here – even our bus ride into town this morning – feels like it happened years ago. Saskia and I once had a conversation about this time distortion. We were sitting in a café that is on the top floor of the museum of contemporary art. I had spent the afternoon there, and she came after work. She was in black trousers and an ultramarine top with a fat bow around the neck. She’d had a long weekend of parties, and looked exhausted. Our surroundings, she said, so long as we keep them familiar, remind us of yesterday more than, for instance, fifteen years ago, because, if our whole life is in every memory, it is the recent memories that seem more superficially consistent with reality. Go somewhere you haven’t been for fifteen years. Walk around the places you knew, and try to think of what you cared about the day before you got there. I did this recently, she said. I was sent away for work. I hired a car and drove to the place I used to live. I had a sandwich near a fountain I used to sit beside, and where I imagined what my life would be like once I became an artist. I was going to build a sculpture the size of a cathedral. I sat at this fountain, and had a bottle of water and watched people go by, and nobody recognized me and I didn’t recognize them. My memory of the fountain did not seem at all like a memory. It seemed like I had only had the thought about being an artist that morning, and the reason I had flown there, for work – all that seemed like something I’d done thirty years ago. And I’m not even thirty. She turned her palms upward, then pulled her hair back over her shoulders. A waiter came by and asked if we wanted anything else. She ordered a cocktail and I ordered a sparkling water. I asked her, Are you disappointed that you did not become an artist? Not at all, she said. And only today do I realize that she meant Spain – some fountain in Spain – and that she was, even if she did not know it then, telling me about her mother.

  At every large intersection there are glass-and-metal entrances to the underground, and the unstable serenity of the crowds moving in both directions seizes suddenly at the mouths of these structures. We could take any of them, Saskia says, but maybe we don’t want to squeeze ourselves into the same trains all these people are boarding. Manuela says, Let’s take a taxi instead. This seems like a good idea, but the taxis are all stuck in traffic, so we keep going. The street curves and descends a bit, and we enter a square. I’ve been here several times before, but I’ve come from different directions. In the middle of the square there’s an elevated section for pedestrians and picnics, with benches, and in the middle of that there is a tall pole with a large four-faced clock on top. There is a museum of engine-making that is covered in scaffolding. All the buildings to the left of the scaffolding are bright white, and all those to the right are sooty. The work moves slowly. Since I’ve arrived, not a single scaffold in the city has moved, including the one in this square, which I have come across several times. The freshly blasted stone transports you back three hundred years, and makes you think of streets full of horseshit and buckets of human excrement and the knocking sound of carriages, and, though I am of course mixing things up badly, boy pickpockets and a villain with a dog. Saskia’s phone buzzes in her bag. She lifts it out and checks it. It is either a long message, or she’s reading it many times. Her face changes. Janos, she says. What does he want? asks Manuela. Nothing. She types something back, sighs, and stuffs the phone back in her bag. She looks around. You know what? she says. I think we’re not early any more. I’m not even sure if we’re on time. How did that happen? I ask. I have no idea, she says. It took us twenty minutes to get here, and I thought it would take five. That’s because I walk slowly, I say. You do, says Manuela. Let’s hurry, says Saskia. She points to a little entranceway in the side of a building on the far end of the square, with a blue U outside it. We walk with quick steps across the middle of the square, across the raised platform, which has been swept clear of snow, though a thin layer has fallen since. This is the first time I’ve really hurried since I got here, though sometimes I walk fast to make myself look like a local, and I mutter things when people hold me up. I do this not out of dislike for tourists but out of love for the city. The city has, on certain streets, a tempo, and it’s important to move in step with it. But I am not really hurrying, because once I get past them, and walk a little further, I stop at a street corner and smoke a cigarette. Today I am actually hurrying. I feel exhilaration and fatigue. Here comes, perhaps, the end of a life. Forty-one years of waste. Or worse. The seconds are counting down in rapid red digits. We speed down the steps.

  Some of the bigger stations are like miniature cities, but this one is just a large landing, a half-shuttered window to an unmanned ticket counter, and two escalators, one going up and the other down, and between them a stairway. We hurry down the escalator. Even though it’s a long way down, you know if a train is there or not, and now there is no train, so we slow down. The platform is a grey slab dotted with pillars, purple and pearly. The tiles are small and square, like the tiles you find in showers. The benches are chrome. The ceiling is the colour of coal, and so are the tunnels on either side of the platform. The monitor says our train is going to arrive in two minutes, and I can already hear it. Trains come every nine minutes on weekends and every six minutes on weekdays, no matter what time of day, except perhaps for very late, and in rush hour they are always full. You have to push your way on and throw yourself off. Nobody shows you any generosity, nor forgiveness. Though I do not travel at these times, I sometimes stand in stations and watch. Now our train has arrived. It’s a green train, and it’s lit orange. It’s not too crowded. Saskia grabs the latch, pulls sharply, and the doors open automatically the rest of the way. We step in. Saskia and Manuela sit beside each other, facing two empty seats. I stand and look up at the chart that plots the courses of the various underground lines. One day, when I feel I know the inner city well enough, I shall begin a slow exploration of the rest of the city by underground stops, and it may take a few years or it may take my whole life, or it may not even be possible, since I am not going to rush. I’m going to take the underground to each and every station, walk up to the surface, find a place to have a coffee, talk to somebody behind a counter for a while, ask them how they are, stroll around, find something odd, and go back home.

  How many stops do we have? I ask Saskia. Four, she says. Manuela says something to Saskia. Saskia responds. They have momentarily abandoned English, and I feel guilty for forgetting that they’d been speaking English since we met. It cannot be easy, so I give them some time alone. Every once in a while there is a bright electric spark that lights up the tunnel, but apart from that, all you see in the window is your own reflection. My reflection looks at me with equanimity, but that equanimity is not in me. Saskia and Manuela are trying to figure something out. There’s a disagreement, but it’s not heated. Finally Saskia nods, and snaps her fingers. The train slows down. I sit. Saskia says, Manuela knows a better way, but we must go an extra stop. Are we going to be on time? I ask. Maybe five minutes late, she says. Manuela is reading a financial paper that someone left behind on a seat. It’s orange-pink, like the Financial Times, and it’s one I’d regularly buy and sit down with at my little café and imperfectly translate with the Italian waiter. Saskia tells her not to depress herself. The economy, here, like everywhere else, is in bad shape. Every time I read a gloomy prognosis in the paper, I feel a little thrill, Saskia says. It’s shameful, really, she adds. Everyone’s like that, said Manuela. Everyone feels a thrill when they see disaster in the news. Manuela looks at me. Don’t you? she asks. I suppose, I say. Manuela goes back to reading her paper, and Saskia looks over her shoulder. She says, I hate the rich. Manuela gives her a quizzical look. I find that I suddenly don’t know what to do with my hands. I say, because I feel a nervous need to change the subject slightly, that I remember an interview with a woman in Thailand after the 2006 tsunami. The reporter – this was, I think, BBC World or CNN; it was playing in a hotel room – sat down with the woman on
some steps outside her house, which had been demolished, and they spoke about the woman’s daughter. The woman told the reporter she’d held tightly onto her daughter, who was eight, until the force of the water was too great and she lost her grip. She hoped the daughter was alive, she said. She held up a photograph of the daughter, and instantly they cut to another story. I was half-sickened by the way the story had been presented not as a piece of news but as a confession, not so that we would learn about the suffering taking place in Thailand, but in order that we might hate and then decide to forgive a woman who couldn’t save her daughter, who let her daughter go, probably to save herself from drowning, a decision that was for her no more deliberate than the decision to breathe. But of all the things that disturbed me, what disturbed me most was the daughter’s photograph, which had been presented very much, I felt, in the manner of a photograph of a lost dog you find stapled to telephone poles, as though the story were not at all the prostitution of human suffering but a public service announcement. Saskia says, I read, once, about a woman who lived in an apartment with three children. For no apparent reason, she began to throw her children out the window, a five-storey drop. First she threw the baby, then the toddler, then a six-year-old boy. The baby and toddler died on impact, but the older boy lived for a few minutes. Then the mother threw herself off and died. The older boy, while lying on the ground and dying, was interviewed by three journalists. Is that true? I ask. It is, says Saskia, except that it’s an old story.

  The walls of the tunnel go bright suddenly. We whoosh into the open air, the city. It is snowing again, or maybe snow is blowing off rooftops. Everywhere, there are gleaming red and white and orange billboards. There are high-rise hotels and office blocks of green glass and blue glass. Behind the billboards and the high-rises lies the stone maze of buildings stretching back for crowded miles. Manuela asks what Saskia and I have planned for later. Dinner, I think, I say. Yes, says Saskia, definitely, if you’d like. We have to eat, I say. Saskia looks at Manuela, pauses, considers whether to speak, then speaks: Do you want to join us? Manuela says, I’m going to dinner at Anton’s. Oh yeah, says Saskia, I forgot about that. Manuela says, You should come. I hate Anton’s dinner parties, says Saskia. Manuela crosses and uncrosses her arms, a gesture I interpret as a sign that she hates them too. The train is slowing down. We’re coming to the stop for the city park. It’s one of the biggest parks in Europe, right in the middle of the city. Manuela tells us that afterwards they’re all going to Chambinsky, a bar that used to be an old theatre. Oh yeah? I say. Saskia says, It’s huge. Sometimes they have live music on the old stage. They have lots and lots of billiard tables. Anton and Janos think they are professionals. They take themselves very seriously. Could you beat them? I don’t know, I say, it depends on how good they are. I haven’t played for a long time. Saskia and Manuela take a break from English to share a joke, which I presume is at the expense of Anton and Janos. Then Manuela says, Please, please come and beat them.

  My father played a lot of pool, and he was very good. In fact, he was a three-cushion billiards champion. Three-cushion or carom billiards is, at least everywhere I know of in America, so unknown by ordinary pool players that it might as well be obsolete. You have a cue ball and two object balls. To score a point you must hit both object balls and at least three cushions with the cue ball; at least one of the object balls may be hit only after the cue ball has hit the cushions. It is a difficult game to play, and if you score a point once for every time you miss, then you can quit your job and play the game for the rest of your life. The average pool player who takes himself seriously – even guys who can run tables, on the rare occasion, in eight-ball and nine-ball – could play for an hour straight and never score a single point, except accidentally. A person who plays carom billiards always plays pool differently than a person who has never, or rarely, played carom billiards, and this is because a carom billiards player has a different concept of the ballistic space of a pool table. The rails are not something to avoid or use in emergencies; they are theoretical extensions of space. When I was a teenager, my father used to play me in eight-ball. To keep it close, he required himself to hit two cushions with the cue ball before potting a ball. Other times he played one-handed, or with a bottle of beer on his head. I practised a lot, and though I was never as good as my father, not even close, eventually he had to stop hitting cushions, stop playing one-handed, and stop balancing things on his head. A good billiards player – and even a very good pool player – has an affinity for, or perhaps a natural understanding of, ballistics – internal, transition, exterior, and terminal ballistics. I used to say this to people I played pool with, and they looked at me the way you’d look at a person who says something very obvious while believing it to be profound. And yet none of them could appreciate the irony of the fact that the guy who won a straight pool tournament in Camp Victory, a nerdy Air Force guy who beat me in the semi-finals of that tournament, was killed by a mortar while on the can a few days after his big win. The mortar had cleared the high Alaska walls and dropped squarely on him.

  The train stops at the city park station. A woman with a stroller and a sleeping baby gets off, and the cold comes through the carriage and right through my nose and into my brain. I say to Saskia and Manuela, I wish those doors would close. They don’t seem too bothered by it. Then there is some beeping and the doors begin to close, and I hear a shout. A man, running from the stairwell, making huge white clouds of breath around his head, is waving at the train, telling it to wait. He’s wearing a black trench coat and a black winter hat. He seems like an unstable fissure in the fabric of reality, a wild blackness, expanding in the way that paper burns if you light a piece of it in the middle, and through which, if it reached us, the whole weight of time in the universe would crash in upon us, and burn and pulverize us, and the powder that remained would drift slowly into the stars. The doors close almost as soon as he jumps from the stairs to the platform, but he keeps running anyway. He runs straight to our carriage, straight at us, and slaps his hand on the window by the seats in front of us, where nobody is sitting. What’s he running for? I ask. Maybe he’s being chased by a tiger, Saskia says. Manuela gives Saskia a funny look. From the zoo in the park, Saskia clarifies. The train pulls away, and we pass by the man, who has already turned to find a seat to wait nine minutes for the next one. And the mystery of his hurry goes with him, silently, with the steam that comes off his head when he takes off his hat.

  I’ve visited the park a few times. It’s not possible to experience it in a single day. It’s vast and variegated, with wide-open spaces and straight pathways, and secluded spaces with winding pathways. There are hothouses, rose gardens, a zoo, an amphitheatre, a natural history museum, some ruins, the American and British and French ambassadors’ residences. There’s a large hill where you can get a nice view of the city and the surrounding lowlands. There are tandem bikes to rent, and bikes with trailers for small children. There are fields for sports, soccer and volleyball, basketball courts, a field for throwing javelins and discuses. And on and on. But in winter, as I have seen it, it’s empty. Saskia tells me joggers flood the park in the mornings, but by the time I get there almost everyone has gone. It’s just snow and ice. The ponds are frozen. The fountains are emptied. The trees are leafless. Large parts of the zoo are shut down, and hardly anybody visits. It feels good to come here after a few days of immediacy and noise in the city. Manuela says, I think you should definitely come to Chambinsky. Maybe so, says Saskia. They look at me. I can’t think reasonably about anything beyond the apartment. Sure, I say, sounds fun. Even though it does not sound like fun. The train starts to rise from the depths of the walled trench, to the level of the surface, then higher, above the first-floor windows, and higher still, above the rooftops, so high that you feel a dreamlike disconnection from the city, which appears, to one side of us, as a silver-grey and irregularly blinking boundlessness under a snowy, fogged, silver-grey sky. There isn’t much light left in the d
ay. Pretty soon, street by street, in dusk, the Christmas lights will switch on. When I first arrived, they were just beginning to string the lights up. Huts came out where the Christmas markets would be, but they were all padlocked shut. On the first day of Advent, in the evening, the lights came on and the markets opened, and instead of hurrying home to escape the cold people began to hang around for a few more hours, in the markets. The nights attained a state of extreme slow motion.

  When we get to our stop, Saskia stands first, then Manuela, then me. This could be your stop forever, says Saskia, jokingly, but that word, forever, suddenly has the same effect as that man in black running at us. I ask her, Do you have all the documents? She pats her bag. Do you have the money? she asks. I sure do, I say. We’ll be a few minutes late, she says, but it’s nothing to worry about. Half my mind is worried we’ll miss the appointment, and half my mind is hoping we will. Half my mind has concluded that if I do not get this apartment, which I have never seen and which may be awful, it will be a failure so significant that I will have to pack my bags and go back to the desert. And half my mind is calm, telling me it doesn’t matter, that there are other apartments, that hotel life is better anyway. I slap my gloves together. This, I guess, is nervousness. I put my hat on. Here we go, my mind says. The last time it said that was upon my second arrival in Baghdad, my arrival as a civilian. We were corkscrewing in on a jet that had departed out of Amman, and the city, as the plane angled down and back for turns, rose and crashed out of sight like waves in heavy seas might look to someone who has fallen overboard. I set my watch one hour forward, to Baghdad time. Then I said, Here we go. A person says a thing like that when, I suppose, he’s decided to throw himself at the feet of the gods, without enough preparation, or when sufficient preparation is impossible. Saskia and Manuela put their hats and gloves on. The doors open and we walk down the platform. The station is elevated, and though we are in the middle of things, the height gives a false impression of remoteness. The station, too – which is just a green hut leading to a staircase – gives that impression. On days I know I’m going to use a lot of public transport –three trips or more – I get a day pass. Once the day pass is validated, you just hop on and off anything you like, as often as you like, and travel as far as you like. It works on buses, streetcars, trains, regional trains. You travel without impediments, and everything runs on time. I tried to tell Saskia once how impressed I was by the system. The system? she said. How could you live in a city without such a system? Exactly, I said. Why don’t you buy a monthly pass? she asked. I get too much joy out of buying the daily pass, I said. The walls in the little hut are green and white, and there are two huge maps of the city: a transit map, with perfectly vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, and a street map. Saskia stops at the street map to point to the location of the apartment. She wants to show us how close it is. Manuela says, I have a map on my phone. I see a small empty rectangle beside the spot Saskia points to. A park. A park, I say. A park! says Saskia. We take the stairs down to the street and walk through an arched stone gateway to a hectic little transport hub, with bus stops and streetcar stops. A streetcar halts right in front of us, and a handful of people get off. A few dash across the road to the staircase that takes you back up to the underground station. The green pedestrian light – a green man – becomes a red man just as they get to the street, but this does not deter them. They have already decided to cross, so they cross. They hold their hands up to the waiting cars as if to say thank you for waiting. The cars behind those cars honk their horns. Everyone crosses, and the cars move forward. We are underneath the wide, elevated tracks, from which very large icicles hang. Another train comes in the opposite direction and the tracks make a thundering noise, and the icicles shiver. I imagine what happens when a thaw comes, when drops of water fall steadily and with great weight, and the icicles detach and plummet, and shatter on the street.