Rus Like Everyone Else (18 page)

The secretary walked along the canal. She had picked up her manager's dry cleaning at the 24/7 Wash-o-Matic and she was carrying the big bag of laundry under her arm. It was a quarter to nine. The sun had gone down and she could hear thunder in the distance. Above her head the clouds moved fast. She sat down on the bench on the bridge to rest her arms and watched the clouds gather above the houses for the thunderstorm. The blue slowly drained from the sky and was replaced by dark gray. A heron flew over, shrieking with its neck thrown back. A man sat down next to the secretary. He leaned over toward her and grabbed her arm, his fingertips digging deep into her flesh.

With a shout the secretary pulled loose and immediately started running, holding the laundry pressed to her chest. Her heels echoed between the buildings. Behind her was the sound of the man's footsteps. He was following her into her street. The secretary tried to open her purse while running to get her key, but she couldn't because of the laundry. She dropped the laundry at her front door and got hold of her key. With trembling hands she held the electronic fob above the scanner. She looked over her shoulder. The man crossed the street toward her. She jammed her shoulder between the slowly opening sliding doors, worked herself inside the building, and pushed the doors closed again. Then she ran into the elevator and slammed the button.

On the other side of the glass entrance doors the man was looking in. He held a small pocketknife in his hand, which he pointed at her. Slowly the elevator doors closed and the secretary went up to her apartment. There she shoved all her boxes against the door handle and called the police, still out of breath.

“There is no one in front of the building anymore, miss,” the police said on the phone. “We have a screen here on which we can see every part of your street. There is no one there at the moment.”

They promised to have a police car drive along the building and that someone would look into her report.

The secretary opened the tap and held her face under the running water. Then she sat down against the boxes and waited for her breathing to become normal. She was too scared to walk to the
window to see if the man was gone. Even though she was on the fourth floor, she had a strong fear that the man was right behind the curtains. She opened her purse and called the number the lawyer had given her. He was brushing his teeth.

“Hold on,” he said. The secretary held on. Her hands were shaking.

“You know,” the lawyer said when he had brushed his teeth, “this kind of thing would never happen to me. It's all about how you carry yourself. Wait.”

The secretary heard water running.

“Have you ever noticed that I never look away first when making eye contact? And I always keep my shoulders straight. You slouch behind the desk. I've been meaning to point that out to you. I would have come on to you much sooner if you didn't slouch like that.”

“Oh,” the secretary said. She looked at the curtains. They were open. She thought she'd closed them when she left. She was almost certain that she'd closed them.

“You don't sound like you're listening to me,” the lawyer said.

“There are fire stairs outside my window,” the secretary said. “And my window is open.”

“No,” the lawyer said. “Listen.”

“I closed the window when I left,” the secretary said.

“Listen,” the lawyer said again. “I am taking the time to help you here, which was not what I gave you my phone number for. How are you going to fix your posture?”

“I never lock the window,” the secretary said. “And now it is open.”

“You should always lock the window,” the lawyer said. “Otherwise the burglary insurance won't pay out. Now say it with me: ‘From this moment on, I will never slouch again.'”

“Can you come over?” the secretary said suddenly. “I'm scared.”

“This is an opportunity to improve yourself,” the lawyer said. “If you are not willing to improve yourself you will never get any further in life.”

“I think he is in the house.”

“Nonsense. Say it with me: ‘From this exact moment on, I will never slouch again.'”

“I don't see him,” the secretary said while she got up off the floor, “but I'm afraid he's hiding. I'm afraid he's in the bathroom.”

“‘From this moment on, I will never slouch again,'” the lawyer repeated. “Come on.”

The secretary didn't answer. She walked slowly to the bathroom and yanked the door open with a scream. There was no one there. She gasped for breath.

“You are acting hysterically,” the lawyer said. “Do you know how impolite it is to—”

Click
. The secretary hung up. She didn't even think about it. She was just very tired now. She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, and without switching on her computer to see if Katie was there she fell asleep.

PUSH IT DOWN

Wanda had been very happy about the job and she had made Rus a Caesar salad, her favorite, to celebrate, but he could not eat. He read her the first paragraph of the Company Guidelines book that the manager had given to him because it worried him a bit.

“‘As the employee goes through his trial period, it will become clear which parts of the spectrum of his personality are of benefit to the company and which parts are not. The employee will practice his working skills like he is meditating: there is a focus on one thing, the work, and every other thing that comes up in the mind or in the office environment is pushed down. Comes up and is pushed down, comes up and is pushed down, until this is an automatic reflex. Use the Company Guidelines as a filter to pour the personality through, until a suitable remnant remains.'”

“That sounds great,” Wanda said, “don't you think? Comes up and is pushed down, comes up and is pushed down. I like it.”

She stood up from the table and pointed at the clock.

“At nine we move to the living room,” she said. She put the dishes in the machine that did them and took Rus to the white couch, where she wiggled herself deep into the cushions and switched on the television. Wanda smiled and glanced sideways at Rus. The wall colored with the lights of the television.

“This is it,” Wanda said, her eyes beaming at Rus. “This is what you get in return.”

The TV was playing the show about the shoes and the women, the floor was shining and the curtains were closed. There were no patterns on the wall to look at, no tap that dripped every fifteen seconds like a slow, relaxing clock.

“What we do is we sit on the couch,” Wanda explained when he didn't answer. “If it is cold me and Barry used to get under a blanket together. And then we watch television and eat crisps. I am on a diet, but not today.”

She pulled the blanket over her legs and looked at Rus intently, studying his face.

“This is it,” she repeated.

“Yes,” Rus said. He wished he was on his own, but it was fine, and it was warm, and he was not homeless.

HYPNOSIS

“Your eyes are starting to feel droopy, you feel relaxed. There is nothing to worry about. Slowly your arms fall down alongside your body, your feet fall out to the sides. Your breathing becomes deeper and slower. Do you notice your breathing? You are breathing deep and slow, and you relax as you focus on these words...”

Mr. Lucas's feet fell out to the sides on the couch as he listened to his own voice reading the self-hypnosis text. He tried not to think too much about the sound of his voice (which he had always thought to be warm and vibrating, but that the tape recorder mutated in a way that made it high pitched and strange); instead he tried to concentrate on feeling pleasant and relaxed.

“You're starting to feel a strong urge to close your eyes: you blink more often, you keep them closed longer in between blinks.”

Mr. Lucas opened and closed his eyelids slowly, the ceiling lamp coming in and out of sight.

“It feels like there is a heavy weight lying on your eyelids. You cannot help but close your eyes.”

Mr. Lucas's eyes were closed. A warm and heavy feeling pulsed through his body.

“Very good, Sam,” the Mr. Lucas of two hours ago said. “The body is relaxed, the mind is relaxed. You are standing at the top of a
staircase now, on the tenth floor. Do you see the number ten under your feet?” He saw it. “Step by step you descend the first stairs, to the ninth floor. While you descend you feel you are moving further and further away from your thoughts, descending into your subconscious. When you get there, you will be completely open and susceptible to suggestion and change.”

Mr. Lucas nodded invisibly on the couch. “It feels like something is pulling you down the stairs, you feel so heavy you are floating down without effort, and the number nine passes under your feet. A heavy and warm feeling surrounds you, pulls you down to the eighth floor.”

Mr. Lucas saw it all vividly in front of him: the spiraling stairs, the black floor with the white numbers. He had to suppress his enthusiasm. He thought it would be scary to be under hypnosis, but it wasn't scary at all. It was all done very professionally, if he could say so himself.

“The number four is now behind you, and you are getting closer and closer to your subconscious on the ground floor. You pass by number three, you're floating down, so heavy and relaxed, number two, number one, and you're there.”

Mr. Lucas let himself sink down until he felt the floor of his subconscious under his feet.

“You see a large open space around you.”

Mr. Lucas saw it; his subconscious was a large room with pillars supporting the roof. It looked a little bit like the program he had seen on television a few days before, about the prisons in Russia. It was a nice program, but the subtitles were too small and therefore very hard to follow.

“A warm and secure feeling comes over you now, the feeling you had when you were two years old, before the war. Remember how Dad lifted you up to look out the attic window, and the world outside seemed so light and inviting, the people so beautiful, so wonderful, and you could not wait to meet everyone? When you pass through the door on the other side of this room and wake up, you will take this secure and warm feeling with you. It will stay with you when you go out into the street, when you take the bus, when you meet people. There will be no white vans anymore; there will be no violence. There will be no fear or panic attacks. It will be like
you are floating in a sea of calmness.”

Mr. Lucas felt calm and secure in his subconscious, more secure than he had felt in a long time. He felt like he did when he was child, when he did not have any worries yet.

“You walk across the room, where you see a large red door,” his voice said. “When you open that door, you will wake up.”

A calm and stable Mr. Lucas walked across the floor of his subconscious toward the red door at the far end of the room. He placed his hand on the doorknob.

“Open it now,” his taped voice said.

NOTHING TO HOLD ON TO

Ashraf sat in his van with his brother. He had parked it near the edge of the city where the building sites were, so he did not have to pay parking money. He had a headache. Richie had been telling him stupid stories all day, about girls and automatic weapons and about all the times he claimed to have been seduced by women when he brought the packages, women who had a thing for package boys and opened the door in lingerie. They'd finished the deliveries at eight, and after that he'd had to go to the police station again to get his car keys. They'd made him wait for an hour and a half.