by Tom Rachman
Gray blotches spattered the dry pavement. It was rain—from specks to a gushing torrent within seconds. They speed-walked for Sukhumvit, where tuk-tuk taxis awaited. “Can we take one?” she asked.
“They’re not safe,” he replied, the downpour plastering white hair over his forehead, rain dribbling down his spectacles. “It’s like a cart—you can just fly out. We need a proper taxi.”
They continued into the deluge, rain overwhelming the grates, water rising out of the gutter.
“Look!” she said. “Rats! They’re swimming.”
“Don’t look at them, Tooly! They’re diseased. Tooly—keep up!” Glancing left and right for a taxi, he hurried onward, inadvertently leading them down Soi Cowboy, a strip of winking-neon bars, with hookers sitting cross-legged on stools, smoothing down miniskirts, gabbing in Thai above tinny pop music. They spotted the farang man and cooed. One waved innocently at Tooly, who waved back. “Don’t!” Paul told her. “Really, don’t.”
She spotted a taxi and flapped her arms at it, then tugged Paul’s shirt so that he might turn and believe he’d discovered it himself.
“Here’s one!” he exclaimed, pushing past, nearly treading on her. “Hurry, I’ve got us a cab!”
Communicating to the driver that they wanted lasagna was beyond Paul, so he allowed the man to drop them outside a place in Chinatown.
A waitress ushered them into No. 2 Heaven Restaurant, past a tank of underbite fish, which glared at each new customer, and with good reason. Framed photos of suckling pig, roast lobster, and shark’s fin soup hung on the red-gold walls. Paul took a metal water carafe and slopped a wave into her glass, which filled with a fast glug and overflowed onto the maroon tablecloth, a dark patch that expanded.
“Do animals get haircuts?” she asked.
“Which animals?”
“Rats.”
“They don’t need them. Their hair doesn’t grow long.”
“It just stops growing?”
“Yes.”
“So why doesn’t people’s?”
“People’s what?”
“People’s hair.”
“Tooly, please. We’re about to eat.” He raised his menu.
She consulted hers. “You don’t like sweet-and-sour, do you.”
“No,” he confirmed. “I want food that can make up its mind.”
“What is ‘cheeking breast’?”
“It should say ‘chicken breast.’ ”
“They have something called Unique Leg of Camel. What’s ‘unique’ mean again?”
“One of a kind.”
“Isn’t every camel leg one of a kind?”
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Please, Tooly, let’s not talk of animals at the table.”
This made discussing the menu difficult. Eventually, she defied him, speaking so fast that he didn’t have time to object: “They have something called ‘lamb without odor’ and ‘slice pigeon.’ ”
“We’ll get the chef’s special noodles,” he informed her, closing his menu. “Plus crab meat with asparagus.” Paul always picked for her. It never occurred to him that this was bossy.
“I shall tell them our order,” Tooly said, swiveling around for a waiter. “Excuse me!”
“Tooly, quiet.”
“Then how do we get them to come over?”
“We wait. That’s why they’re called waiters.”
The staff confirmed his interpretation, chatting at length by the fish tank, then vanishing through the swinging kitchen doors for dishes that sailed past their table. Tooly swallowed hard, suddenly famished.
She folded and refolded her napkin. Paul did the same. Now and then, he refilled their water glasses. Something to say! She wished for a sentence. When they were on flights or at home, there were distractions. But dining, seated opposite like this, there was nothing. Silence sat between them as if upon its haunches on the table. She watched the uniformed doorman, who watched the fish, which watched Tooly. “Is that man a soldier?” Tooly asked, knowing he was nothing of the sort.
“He’s a guard.”
“Why do they have a guard at a restaurant? In case the cheeking escapes?”
He looked at her, uncomprehending, then at his water glass from several angles.
A waitress arrived and food came soon after—a huge bowl of soup they hadn’t ordered. Tooly launched herself at it before Paul could protest. She spooned it in ravenously, while he held her hair out of the way. Plates seemed to emerge from the kitchen at random, dishes served whenever it suited the cook. Presently, another arrived. “Oh, no!” Tooly said. “Fish!”
“It’s not one from the tank,” Paul said unconvincingly. “Anyway, we have to eat it or it’ll be perceived as an insult.”
“By the fish?”
Paul chewed on one side of his mouth, gazing off as if there were something untoward about dining, a necessary embarrassment like toileting.
“Was your job okay today?”
“Was it okay?” he said, the wrinkle tightening between his eyebrows. “I heard that my father is sick.”
“Shall we venture to America to see him?”
“Why are you talking like that?” he said. “I just told you my father’s sick.”
“Sorry.”
“We can’t go back. And that’s that.”
When Tooly was younger, she had met Paul’s father, but had no memories of him, only images from two photographs: one of a cheerful bald man with a mustache and a butterfly collar clowning around; the other of a youth in an army uniform. Burt Zylberberg, a basketball player in college and later an insurance salesman, had converted from Judaism to Catholicism as a young man, and served as a chaplain in World War II. During the Anzio invasion, an explosion shredded his legs. He and his wife, Dorrie, had intended to start a family after the war, but the extent of his wounds precluded that. They adopted a boy, Paul, and settled in Northern California. They were jovial parents, particularly Burt, an indefatigable optimist despite his infirmity. But they were so different from their adopted child, an earnest boy without any spiritual inclination. Yet he was intensely loyal to them. Whenever people asked if he thought of finding his real parents, he grew annoyed—he had no curiosity about those people, and never developed any. Paul went on to study computer science at UC Berkeley, which gave him access to high-end mainframes. In the wee hours, he haunted the computer lab, partly because all the interesting hardware was available then, but also to escape his peers’ cavorting. The hum of mainframes produced in him a conditioned response of tranquillity. During his final year of college, a surprise came: his parents informed him that he had an elder brother. When World War II was breaking out, they’d given up a baby, and that child had grown up and found them. This biological son—having just met Burt and Dorrie—already interacted with them with an ease and warmth that were alien to Paul. Rather than spurring him to seek his own biological kin, the development instilled the sense that he had no origins at all.
Paul placed his credit card on the bill, and went to the toilets. Tooly waited and waited, then wandered toward the front door, which a waitress opened for her. Outside, the air was hair-dryer hot and smelled of exhaust. Pedestrians gushed down the sidewalk, a human river coursing past the Chinese-Thai shopfronts displaying vases, gongs, ceramic lions, meat grinders. She found herself swept away, bundled along among strangers until the end of the block. On her return to the restaurant, Paul had still not come back from the bathroom. She approached it, heard his inhaler hissing in there, and she whispered his name.
Sheepishly, he edged out, a water stain down his trousers. “The sink area was all flooded but I didn’t see,” he said. “I leaned against the counter and got soaked. It looks …” As if he’d urinated down his khakis.
“I’ll ask for a napkin,” she suggested.
“Don’t say anything, Tooly!”
“Can we just run out?”
“I haven’t got my credit card back.”
“I could knock
over the water. Then everything will be wet and they won’t see the difference.”
“That’s a terrible idea.”
“I can run through the restaurant and you chase after me, shouting that I poured water on you.”
“We can’t do that.”
But they did, to the bewilderment of the waiters and diners. Paul hunched forward in humiliation, mumbling his lines. “Why did you do that?” he said, rushing after her.
“I poured water all over you!”
“You’re a bad person! Where’s my credit card? Look what you did!”
“I threw water all over!”
Outside, he crossed his hands over his crotch as she searched for taxis, waving wildly at the passing traffic. “Don’t make a scene,” he pleaded.
In the cab, Paul said, “I wasn’t really angry in there.”
“I know you weren’t.”
They arrived back at Gupta Mansions, took the elevator up, unlocked the front door. “Good to be home,” he said.
As they looked at this latest apartment, it felt like home to neither of them.
1999
BLINKING TO WAKEFULNESS, she glanced at her few possessions with estrangement: corduroys splayed across the floor, sweater and coat heaped on sneakers, bra twisted over a low-rise of books. She pushed open her bedroom door and clomped across the main room toward the toilet.
“Good mornink,” Humphrey said in his thick Russian accent. Seated on the couch holding a book, the old man nearly said more, but thought better of it, knowing Tooly to be grumpy at this hour, barely 11:30 A.M.
She lapped water from the bathroom faucet, then returned to her bedroom, pulled on her oatmeal cable knit and a dressing gown, its belt dragging along the cold concrete floor. At her window, she raised the blinds, contemplating their little-trafficked street under the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn. The sidewalks were icy that November day. Shoes hung from the power lines, tossed up there years earlier by kids who’d long since grown into adults.
Much as Tooly wanted to impose her mood on the morning, she couldn’t resist Humphrey in the other room. He’d probably been waiting hours for her company. When she joined him, he had a steaming cup of coffee for her on the Ping-Pong table. She collected it, sat at the other end of the couch, and frowned in order to win a few minutes’ silence. He turned a page, pretending to read, though he peeked at her from under his overflowing eyebrows, raccoon shadows below his eyes, creases around his mouth, which kept tightening, ready to pounce on a conversation, then relenting. Humphrey, who was seventy-two, wore baby-blue slacks high around his gut, a polyester dress shirt of the small size he’d once been, and a loosened paisley tie, all from the thrift shop. Bits of stubble, like toast crumbs, adhered around his thin lips and prickled the cords of his throat; one ashen sideburn was longer than the other, giving the impression that he might tip over. “I’m so tired,” he sighed, “of being loved for my beautiful body.”
She smiled, took a sip of coffee, and plucked the book from his hands: The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld.
“I also have maxim in life,” Humphrey informed her. “My maxim is never let Tooly Zylberberg take book, because it goes and never comes back.”
“If I borrow a book and like it,” she contended, “it becomes mine by law.”
“I overrule this law.”
“I appeal to a higher court where I’m the judge, and I uphold the law.”
“System is flawed,” he observed.
“I have my own maxim in life: Why is it so freezing here?” She reached behind the couch frame to where he dumped his bedcovers each morning and dragged up his comforter, wrapping herself in it. (He slept on the couch and made efforts to move from it minimally. His seat was at the far end, amid a swamp of newspaper pages that he’d flung into the air in contempt. Under the cushion, he stuffed clippings and crosswords that over time had elevated him; each time he sat, newsprint crunched.)
Considering her swaddled in his bedcovers, Humphrey remarked, “You look like bear hyperbating for winter.”
“A bear doing what?”
“Hyperbating.”
“What is ‘hyperbating’? Sounds like a bear that can’t stop masturbating.”
“Don’t be disgusting pervert!”
“It’s a reasonable conclusion, Humph. There aren’t that many other words that end in ‘-bating.’ ”
“Plenty words end in ‘-bating.’ ”
“Like what?”
“Like … Like ‘riverbating.’ ”
“What is ‘riverbating’?”
“ ‘Riverbating’: when there is echo, you say it is riverbating.”
“ ‘Reverberating,’ ” she corrected him, “isn’t a word that ends in ‘-bating.’ ”
“Okay, I give you other.” He paused. “Here, I have it: ‘verbating.’ ”
“ ‘Verbating’?”
“When you speak something and I repeat it back same, then I am saying it verbating.”
“ ‘Verbatim.’ ”
“Yes, sure.”
Their current home was on the upper floor of a two-story storage space, with lightbulbs hanging from bare wires, the furniture damp. This main room served as kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and his sleeping quarters. She worried that he did this as gallantry, to ensure that she had the lone bedroom. Anyway, he was unmovable. Intermittently, she made efforts to clean the apartment. As for Humphrey, he was never renowned for tidiness. “My nature abhors the vacuum,” he said. In explaining his inertia, he cited a principle of physics that had yet to appear among the standard Newtonian laws: Slob Gravity. A slob such as himself, he claimed, struggles under a greater burden than others, being subject to a higher force of gravity. “More you are slob, more heavy gravity is.”
Over the years, he had amassed a huge library that was notable chiefly for its wretched condition. These were great works but pitiful volumes: disintegrating paperbacks of Kafka, Yeats, Goethe, Cicero, Rousseau. There were oddities, too, such as the user’s guide to Betamax, travel memoirs about countries that no longer existed, histories with half the pages and half the centuries missing, causing the Ming Dynasty to contest the Wars of German Unification with one swish of the page. Many volumes had come from garbage cans or boxes left on the sidewalk. This was less a library than an orphanage. His stated plan was to read everything ever printed. He claimed to be nearly there. Were it possible, he’d have read in the shower. But Humphrey’s books had little to fear from onrushing water, he and soap being on terms of only passing familiarity.
When they moved to this city several weeks earlier, Humphrey had gone immediately to explore the New York Public Library, awed by the ceiling fresco of heaven in the Rose Reading Room, at whose front bench he sat, watching readers submit chits for books. As in previous cities (their most recent being Barcelona), Humphrey’s next priority after books was finding the chess. This he located in Washington Square Park, where he watched ex-con hustlers facing off against nerdy grandmasters. He’d also discovered a Carmine Street store, Un-oppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, where he could indulge another hobby, debating politics. He was still unconvinced about the Cold War. According to the world, capitalism had won that contest, but Humphrey called it a tie at best. He couldn’t see capitalism lasting. What was the point of any system, he asked, if it only encouraged the worst in humanity, elevating self-interest to a virtue? He described himself as a “Marxist, non-practicing,” and certainly seemed a Marxist in the sense of being broke.
His sole source of income was consulting for wealthy book collectors who sought to expand their hoards. He surveyed their shelves and identified which editions were lacking and where they might be found, marshaling his impressive recall of antiquarian bookshops around the world. The collectors (it was almost exclusively men who suffered this acquisitive hunger) viewed him as an idiot savant, a novelty act notorious for smelly clothing, thick accent, and gruff manner, along with rumors of an ancient stint in jail. Humphrey’s consultation
s were free, but the custom was to give him a volume of moderate value, which he immediately sold to Bauman Rare Books for spending money.
“Hungry?” He fetched a paper bag from the kitchen containing two stale croissants and one bruised avocado. Humphrey rejected the idea of meals, eating whenever he felt it appropriate, not because it was the ordained hour. His sleep followed the same principle: he remained up all night if reading, or slept till dark if the day offered nothing of note. To allow a clock to dictate one’s life was mere conformism. He emptied the bag onto the Ping-Pong table and invited Tooly to join him.
She dipped a croissant into her coffee, losing half the pastry in the mug, flakes floating, as he rhapsodized about his mushy avocado. Humphrey prided himself on the purchase of expired produce, which he talked supermarket stockers into saving for him. Despite moderate indigestion, he kept Tooly and himself going this way on almost no money. And Humphrey wanted nothing more than this existence: nibbles and books, gesticulating and pontificating, with Tooly there to answer back. “Movement is overrated,” he said.
She herself was subject to the laws of Slob Gravity, able to remain inside for days, her nose in books, consuming whatever vittles materialized on the Ping-Pong table. At other times, though, she marched outside, walking tirelessly around the city, marking her map, scanning for building doors left ajar and talking her way inside. Whichever condition—activity or indolence—held sway, Tooly struggled to break its spell. When slobbing around the apartment, she could barely propel herself farther than the bathroom and back. When striding block after block, she required a force of will to return home at all.
“Do you think,” she asked, following an hour of reading on the couch, “that I should get dressed at some point?”
