The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  A man walked next to them. He waved at Udo. When Udo waved back, the man put his arm around Udo’s waist. “He’s mine, actually,” Michael said, calves resting against Udo’s sweaty chest.

  The man kept walking next to them, kept smiling at Udo, who smiled back with polite resignation. When the man tried to take Udo’s hand, Michael returned to the ground to protect his cousin. A song blared. Michael and Udo danced. Udo found an abandoned boa and wrapped it around Michael like a leash. They pantomimed animal and keeper. In certain flashes, Michael went wide-eyed with wildness. In others, he showed the religious calm of the tamed.

  Though he didn’t yet have a license, Michael drove them home the next morning. At a highway rest stop, they downed coffees. Every once in a while, Udo laughed at the memory of men sucking each other off, or the sadness on his stalker’s face when he watched Udo and Michael dance together. “For a minute, I was going to let him suck my dick,” Udo said.

  “Like you give change to a homeless person,” Michael added.

  “It was probably the pills talking,” Udo answered, and took a sip.

  Though they joked about other things the pills had almost tricked Udo into, Michael knew it was his cousin’s goodness talking. The further they moved from the immigrants, from Adela’s exit, the more relief Michael felt in having defended his cousin, which he’d done first because Adela’s need to punish Udo had terrified him. Udo was good, Michael realized as years stacked on top of one another, as he watched Udo make Mutti dinner in the week Josef left her. Michael and Udo moved into their twenties, renting apartments two blocks apart from one other. When Michael was heartbroken, it was Udo who came over, once picking Michael up and putting him to bed, telling him that he’d never feel better if he kept sleeping on the sofa.

  When Udo brought up the immigrants, Adela was his focus. He told Michael how he’d written her, though she’d never written back. How he thought of that night as a line he’d crossed and couldn’t cross back. “I’m shit on a shoe,” Udo said, often when he was drunk, his head so close to the bar that it looked as if he were asleep. “You did a shit thing. You do other things that are the opposite of shit,” Michael said.

  “What’s the opposite of shit?” Udo asked, and never seemed convinced by Michael’s answers.

  14

  2009

  After working for a decade at one bar or another, Michael piled together his savings, along with loans from Mutti and Udo, and branched off on his own. He gave his place an English name: Secret Police. He installed lamps that were metal and military, painted the walls a Soviet red. Vintage GDR posters lined the walls. One over the bar said: SOCIALISM IS THE FUTURE. Another celebrated the kerchiefed women of their former republic. Michael spent weeks shaping the drink menu, which included creations like “Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid” and “The Party Line.” Some nights before the bar’s opening he’d forgo sleep. As the sun rose, he would realize he’d spent an entire night unpacking glasses or rearranging furniture. Udo called him a vampire.

  “Vampire,” Michael would answer back when his cousin stopped by the not-yet-opened bar at sunrise.

  “Vampires together,” Udo would say, when Michael asked why he was up, too.

  As sun burned through the bar’s small windows, Udo pulled pastries from his pocket and said to Michael, “I’d like a cousin coffee.”

  “I think you mean a coffee, cousin,” Michael answered.

  “No. I mean a cousin coffee. A coffee made by you,” Udo answered, and laughed.

  Sometimes Michael asked if he’d been out all night. Sometimes they’d fall asleep with their faces on the bar. They’d wander back to their apartments, two blocks apart, calling each other a few hours later to make sure they’d made it to work.

  Friends made jokes about the two of them being married. “Married people have to want to have sex with each other,” Michael would answer, his friend Jana answering back that he’d clearly never been married before. But Michael and Udo loved those jokes, also the nicknames a coworker of Udo’s gave them one afternoon when Michael showed up at a store they were installing dimmers in to bring Udo a sandwich: Little Husband and Big Husband.

  * * *

  Then Udo met Angela, a mousy bank teller, and jumped into a period of blissful infatuation. In a month he’d moved in with her. By the third, he’d proposed.

  “A surprise,” Udo told Michael one afternoon. They got in his car. They shared a cigarette and Udo tried and failed to sing along to a popular song on the radio.

  They got to Mutti’s, stopped just before her driveway. In the last year, the lot of rubble next door had turned into a pair of new houses. Dirt for lawns. Saplings shivering in front of them.

  “Fuck a duck,” Michael said when Udo unlocked the door of the house closest to Mutti’s. Mutti’s windows lined up with Udo’s. A suitcase of Angela’s clothes sat in the empty living room.

  “Not kidding,” Udo answered. “Angela and I live here now.”

  He mentioned a job he’d done for the man who ran one of the new hotels, how he was sure this man and Michael would make a perfect match.

  “Set it up,” Michael said.

  “I have no idea how to do that.” Udo laughed. “I was just going to give you his name and let you do your thing.” His hands folded in porno sign language.

  “So you’re telling me to rape him,” Michael said.

  Udo, giddy about everything, rested a hand on Michael’s shoulder.

  A month later, Udo and Angela were married. They got drunk at their wedding, stumbling across the dance floor and tripping on things that weren’t there. They danced with Angela’s nose smushed against Udo’s torso and left without her shoes.

  * * *

  Angela and Udo moved into the house, so lovestruck they couldn’t pick out a single piece of furniture. They had a sofa that Liesl had given them. A mattress was angled on the floor of the largest bedroom. Everything else stayed bare. When Michael texted Udo, he often got no reply. When Udo did respond, his answers were full of jokes Michael wasn’t in on. One night, Michael just back from his bar with a young man in tow, his phone rang. He ignored it. As he showed the man his apartment in a recently refurbished building, with windows that showed views of the river, the ringing started again. “Let me just turn this off,” Michael said, but saw it was Mutti calling, so he answered.

  “I need you to come over,” she said. “It’s important.”

  Since Mutti never made requests of this sort, he told the young man there was an emergency. The man looked at him doubtfully until Michael showed him the four missed calls from Mutti’s Cell.

  Michael showed up to find his mother in her yard. Next door, at Angela and Udo’s, a fight raged. Angela ripped down the sheet Udo had hung over their bedroom window. She dragged it from room to room, shouting things Michael couldn’t catch, turning on all the lights. Udo followed and turned them off again. Angela shouted again and Udo stepped fast toward her, holding her against a wall in a gesture that seemed almost tender until Michael saw the red grimace on Udo’s face, Angela’s hands pinned under his. Michael ran to the window and knocked. Startled, Udo stepped back from Angela, who took that moment to run outside and get into her car. Udo followed, standing behind her car. She tried to back up, but he held his ground. The car’s bumper pressed against his shins and Udo growled, “Do it!” Finally Angela barreled across their lawn and down the street. Udo ran after her in only a pair of shorts, though outside it was freezing. A car coming from the other direction honked at him.

  A week later Heinz called Michael and asked if he’d seen Udo, who hadn’t shown up to work in days. Michael got to the house and found Udo jumping rope in the empty living room. He stank of sweat, his face the red of a cardiac episode.

  The rope clicked across the floor. Udo tried to smile, but looked injured. Michael grabbed for the rope and caught it the second time. It burned against his palm.

  “I’m single again,” Udo wheezed. “Ladies don’t like fatsos.”r />
  A mostly eaten chicken lay on the counter. Michael pressed Udo on what had happened, but his cousin only said that she’d left. He asked what was going on when Udo had Angela against the wall, and his cousin said, “I was holding her hands so she’d stop hitting me.” Michael thought back but couldn’t remember Angela’s hands on him.

  Udo turned on the television. He dozed, woke up again.

  “I emailed her,” Udo said, eyes mostly closed.

  “Angela?”

  “Your sister,” Udo answered.

  He slouched so low that his ass hung off the sofa. They watched a movie about a man who loved to sleep with married women. One scene had him hiding naked in a closet; the woman’s husband had just come home. Each time the husband walked past, his shadow knifed under the door. For some reason, Udo found this funny.

  “What did she say?” Michael asked. “My sister.”

  The main character was found out. He ran naked out of an apartment, the angry husband close behind.

  “When does she write anything?” Udo answered.

  * * *

  Michael stopped by the next day while Udo was at work. He picked clothes off the floor and washed them. When he’d visit each night there was a new mess, more food on the counter that Udo picked at. One night he ate only apples. Another was fish sticks straight from the pan.

  Texts from Udo started to arrive at strange hours. I think Angela realized that there’s something wrong with me, Udo wrote at five one morning. Michael squinted at the screen. A young man he’d met at a party snored next to him. I had a dream that I had three children but they refused to leave the house, showed up a few nights later. The day after, Michael’s phone lit up during the bar’s busiest hour: Do you think Adela will think I’m a monster forever? Followed by: Am I a monster? Then: Don’t answer that. When things slowed down at the bar, Michael drove past Udo’s; his car wasn’t there. He checked other bars, then Angela’s parents’ house, though she’d filed a complaint and Udo had to keep a distance of fifty meters.

  A week after came a call at one in the morning. Michael patted his nightstand and spilled a glass of water. He found the phone under his pillow. His bed was warm, the room cold around him. Outside, soupy fog.

  “Cousin,” Michael answered.

  “How did you know?” Udo asked.

  A crowd roared in his receiver. Udo said something Michael couldn’t understand.

  “What?” Michael asked.

  “Geography.”

  While useless in literature and history, Michael had taken to geography’s memorizing with a zealot’s fervor. “Abuja, Accra, Addis Ababa,” he used to mumble as he biked to and from school. “Beirut, Bishkek, Colombo,” he’d murmured at parties as he worked up the courage to talk to a beautiful man.

  “I need to know the capital,” Udo shouted.

  “Where are you?”

  A cacophony of dropping and retrieval. A woman called out Gibraltar.

  “Sorry,” Udo said. “I thought you’d know.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Trivia!” Udo shouted, as if he’d been saying it all along.

  “But where?”

  “You don’t remember.”

  Udo was shouting. Michael shouted back. Outside, people passed on bicycles.

  “Are you fucking someone?” Udo asked.

  “Ha!” Michael said. “Sleeping. Where are you?”

  “Trivia. So you don’t know?

  “What?”

  “The capital of … Hold on.” Rumbling rose, as if the phone were held into wind. Michael turned his bedside lamp on. “Kazakhstan.”

  “Oh,” Michael said. “Let me think. But where are you?”

  “Trivia.”

  “In Kritzhagen?”

  Michael wanted a cigarette, though he was in the midst of a quitting episode. He chewed on the skin edging his nail, looked for clothes in case Udo was stranded as he’d been the week before when he’d called from a bar in Bad Doberan, a town so small Michael was impressed that there was a bar there at all.

  “I don’t think so,” Udo said.

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t even know where you are.”

  “No,” Udo said quietly. “I mean, what’s the answer?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “You’re talking,” Udo grumbled. “Talk, talk, talk.”

  “Thinking.”

  “Talking.”

  “Hanging up.”

  “No!” Udo howled.

  “Find out where you are, please, Big Husband. While I’m thinking.”

  Michael opened his refrigerator. He gnawed through the dried outer layer of a chocolate bar. From his window he could make out slices of the river.

  “Astana,” Michael said, and there was more noise. “Hello?”

  “Astana!” Udo called out.

  Clatter, then quiet. “Fuck,” Michael exhaled. He dialed Udo’s phone. It rang and rang. He dialed again and ate the chocolate bar. He dialed and put on clothes. As he grabbed his keys, Michael realized he had no idea where Udo might be. He lay down and woke up hours later, the sun padding his face like a hungry pet. He called Udo again. His voice mail picked up, Angela’s voice in the background of his greeting.

  * * *

  But as fast as he’d fallen apart, Udo got better. Michael came out of his apartment one morning to find Udo waiting for him.

  “I’m going for a swim,” Michael said.

  “Here to swim with you,” Udo answered.

  They went to the hotel pool Michael swam in during colder months. Udo tried to race him, though four laps in he gasped and held on to the wall. He met Michael the next day, too, in a jacket over his swimsuit so it looked like he had no pants on. Udo slid into the water. Goggles sank into the fat that filled out his face. He completed ten slow laps before he retreated to the wall.

  * * *

  A few weeks after that Udo bought a tiny sailboat for almost nothing. Though it was winter, he took it out every day. Michael drove to the harbor to meet him. Udo came in from a sail, the boat so low Michael could only see his cousin hovering above the waves.

  One morning in March in the throes of a warm spell, Udo invited Michael and Mutti out on the boat. Mutti’s braid lifted like a kite’s tail. When Udo sailed them into larger waves, she clutched her collar, then laughed, then put her hand on Udo’s shoulder.

  “I told you I can sail, Tante Mutti,” he said.

  They floated over waves, and the sun warmed their faces.

  “Did you see?” Udo said, and had them lean over the side of the boat. Just before its bow, he’d painted its name—The Lady Michael. Mutti beamed; the sail turned pompous with wind. A couple biking down the beachside path appeared to be racing them.

  “A dare,” Udo said. “That you take a dip.”

  He and Michael spoke in dares: ask that one on a date; eat the blubbery fat off a rib eye; don’t jerk off for eight days. Though it was March, summer light burnished the water.

  “Just because it’s warm outside,” Michael answered.

  “Why it’s a dare,” Udo said. His sunglasses were mirrors. His gut rested on his knees. Udo hadn’t gotten drunk in months. Though he was heavy still, muscle began to reemerge, like grass pushing through snow. Michael stripped to his underwear and stood on the boat’s bow. Trees at the shore were quilted in green. Michael stared at the water as if it were a wall he might crash into.

  Then he was in and breathless. Michael loved actions that wiped thinking clean—sex, certain drugs, this moment in the frigid water. With a few quick adjustments, Udo turned the sail full and pulled away, toward Denmark, a place they talked about as if it were a pretentious friend.

  “Fucker,” Michael howled, and pushed into a front crawl.

  “Muzah fucka,” Udo answered.

  The boat slowed. As Michael got closer, Udo pulled away again. Water stung the backs of Michael’s knees. His fingers began to go numb just as Udo lifted him into t
he boat. Once in a while, water shrugged over the bow.

  “I think I’m ready to go home,” Michael said.

  They moved into the city’s grid of docks, Udo’s the smallest vessel there. He dropped Michael and Mutti off and said it was too nice to be inside.

  “Don’t you have, like, a job?” Michael asked.

  “Heinz is on another vacation,” Udo said, as if that explained, and turned the boat back toward the sea. They watched the sail pull him away, saw him wave just before he moved behind a bend in the shore.

  As sun fuzzed the sky and gulls croaked, Michael wondered if Adela had ever written him back. His sister lived in South Africa and had a son. Michael hadn’t seen her in a decade.

  “That boat,” Mutti said.

  “I think he’s in love with it,” Michael answered.

  Michael liked to pretend that this was the last time he would see his cousin, instead of Udo’s call a few nights after. The dirt and the dog. Michael insisting that they undo what Udo had done, his cousin as red-faced as he’d been after Angela had left him and he’d jumped rope until it turned hard for him to breathe.

  * * *

  Michael was at the bar eight days later when Mutti called. He said hello and was answered with shrieking. For a moment he thought she was being attacked, that she’d dialed him in a last-ditch effort.

  “Where are you?” he shouted, so loud that his nonplussed bartender, Justine, appeared startled. Both he and Justine had been slicing limes. Michael’s sticky hands gripped the phone.

  “Who is hurting you?” he asked, and imagined her gone, that loss large, one he wasn’t ready for.

  “I’m not being hurt,” Mutti said. “I’m trying to tell you something.” Her voice was calm, also deep, as if she’d smoked a pack of cigarettes in one sitting. “But Liesl keeps screaming.”

  * * *