Rus Like Everyone Else (22 page)

The secretary started to feel sick, yes, she felt extremely unwell; her legs felt heavy and her throat felt clogged, as if she could not breathe. She wanted to shout, but instead she stumbled over to the tunnel under the railway and she sat down against the wall. She
gasped for breath. There was graffiti on the wall that said
MR. LI IS IN EAST
. She read it over and over again.
MR. LI IS IN EAST. MR. LI IS IN EAST
. The words danced in front of her eyes. Her arms were heavy and she needed all her energy to breathe.

Then dark spots came in and they clogged her view. For a moment there was nothing. Then there were voices around her. She did not know those voices. Two women were talking about someone who'd had too much to drink. She felt the cold stone under her hands. A man was asking someone, “Can you hear me? What is your name?”

The voice was very loud and she tried to open her eyes. There was a man with a round face standing over her, holding his finger in front of her eyes. “Follow my finger,” he said. He reminded her of Dr. Kroon. She closed her eyes again.

“I know her.”

The secretary opened her eyes. She saw the face of a boy above her now, a boy with black hair.

“I bring the packages to your office,” he said. “Remember? Can you get up?”

The secretary got up. She felt very tired.

“Thank you all,” she said to the group of people who were standing in a circle around her, and she waved at them as if she were famous and her legs gave away under her again. The boy caught her. The warmth of his shoulder went through her body like a shock wave.

ASHRAF AND THE SECRETARY

They drove away from the business square in silence. Ashraf looked to the side. The girl from the office was sitting curled up in the passenger seat with her head bent. Her face was white under her thin black hair. She was wearing a brown skirt and a yellow blouse, and she was clenching plastic bags between her knees.

“I don't need to go to a doctor,” she said. “I have already been. It is a mental problem.”

Ashraf saw the pores on her nose, tiny little dots gleaming with sweat. He'd seen a James Bond movie once in which a
woman was painted in gold paint, and in the movie they said she died because her skin could not breathe. It was a mistake they made in the film, Ashraf knew, because people breathe through their mouths and noses and not through their skin. It was possible that the woman died from overheating though, but that would have taken much longer.

Ashraf looked sideways at the girl sitting in his passenger seat. She stretched her hands out in front of her and moved her fingers in the red of the traffic lights, as if she was looking for something. He had read something once about phosphenes, which where colors and shapes that you could see after you fainted. If you spent several days in a dark room you could start seeing them too. Prisoner's cinema, they called it.

He parked the car in front of her building on Canal Street, apartment number 424.

“You still look a bit pale,” he said.

“I am a secretary,” she replied softly, “so I am inside the office a lot. And I don't know a lot of people yet to do things with. That is why I am pale.”

She looked at him when she said it, and it suddenly seemed to him that she was not a real secretary, but someone disguised as one. He put his hand on her forehead. It was cold.

“It is cold,” he said. “That is a good sign.”

The secretary put her hand on top of his hand and folded her fingers between his. He was amazed at how small her hand felt; he could feel the thin bones under her skin.

“We're here,” Ashraf said, but she did not let go of his hand. She moved his hand down, down her forehead, over her nose, over her lips, over her blouse, her breasts, her legs. She took a deep breath, like she wanted to say something, but she didn't.

Ashraf felt the soft skin of her thigh under his hand. He closed his eyes and tried to think clearly, but a thick fog came down inside his head. The girl climbed out of the passenger seat and over the gear stick and sat down on his lap. Ashraf opened his eyes. Her hair stuck in little strings to her forehead. He suddenly felt a strong urge to press her against him, to hold her very tight. But he didn't. He could not be with a girl right now, and not a girl like her. It would be like tying two rocks together, hoping they would help
each other float. She pressed her upper body against him, her hand going under his shirt.

“Stop,” Ashraf said.

The girl did not look up. She was looking past him, somewhere in the distance, at the sky outside the window.

“Stop,” Ashraf said again. He took her hand.

Her eyes focused on him. They were gray, really gray, without a spark of color in them. Then she slid off him and climbed back over the gear shift to her seat.

Ashraf put his hands in his lap and breathed in deeply. He wanted to say something, but he did not know what. He heard Richie's voice in his mind, talking about his conquests. He hoped that one day he would forget all about Richie, and if someone mentioned him, he would not be able to find him in his mind.

The girl said something very softly with her eyes closed.

He bent over toward her to hear it.

“Do you have any plans for a vacation?” she said. The words came slowly out of her mouth, as if she had to push them. He looked at her, a girl asking about his vacation plans with her eyes closed and a voice that sounded as though it came from very far away.

“I don't know,” he said. “Sometimes I think about leaving forever, just to try it somewhere else.”

“Oh,” she said. They sat in silence for a while.

Then she opened the car door.

“And you?” Ashraf said, realizing he should say something. “Do you have any vacation plans?”

She shook her head and stepped out of the van.

“I'm sorry,” he said, but she had already closed the door.

RUS IS LIKE EVERYONE

At six o'clock Rus's new colleagues put on their coats and got up from their desks. Rus kept his head down, pretending not to see how they looked at the stack of files he still had on his desk when they walked by, or how they glanced at the plastic bag under his seat. He worked on steadily when one of his new colleagues imitated the way Rus moved his lips when he read the files, and ignored it
when Fokuhama left with the last colleagues and they switched the ceiling lights off and laughed in the hallway.

Alone in the dark office Rus worked and worked, copying the numbers of the last fifty files, his eyes close to the paper. At eight fifteen, when he had finally entered the last number of the last form into the system, Rus got up from his desk. His back was stiff and his eyes were pained. He bent down slowly to take the plastic bag from the floor and walked along the empty desks to the doors of the dark department. It had gotten very quiet in the office; the only sounds were of Rus breathing and that scraping noise in the air vent now and then.

Rus was tired. Breathing felt difficult, but he said to himself he was happy, very happy even, as he floated down in the elevator to the ground floor. He hid the plastic bag under his jacket and he smiled as he stepped out into the office parking lot.

The business district was still very busy. People were having drinks in the bar and walked hastily down the streets. Rus looked at the people around him as he stood in the metro. He recognized the look in their eyes; it was the same weary look he saw in his reflection in the metro window. His first day was successful, he decided, as he got pushed back and forth by the people leaving the train at each stop. When it was his turn to get out Rus too used his elbows to push the people away from him, and he felt his heart growing warm. He was already becoming a part of them. He was not a complete stranger anymore.

THE SECRETARY COMES TO A HALT

The secretary sat on the edge of her bed. Since she came home she had tried to eat, but she couldn't; she had tried picking up her diary and writing her coworkers' birthdays in it, but she couldn't; she had tried to make plans for the next day, but they did not come. Nothing came. She could not even think her normal thoughts—soon things will be different for me, soon they will change—because the sentences kept stopping in the middle. Now that her thoughts were gone there was an emptiness in her head that she felt afraid of. She tried to suppress it by getting up and walking laps of her room, naming everything she saw in her head. Every time she passed by the
window she saw the gray moon in the sky, the gray trees in front of the window. She picked up the phone and dialed her mother's number, but when her mother answered she put the phone down again.

The secretary opened her laptop and searched for the website group she'd joined. Katie appeared on the screen with shiny eyes, looking fixatedly at something just below her camera. The secretary lifted her hand up to her screen.

“
Moshi moshi
,” the secretary said. “Hello.”

Katie smiled faintly and raised her hand as well.

For a while they looked at each other's image without saying anything. Then Katie's hand appeared and became larger and larger on the secretary's screen. Katie picked up the camera and turned it around her room. The secretary saw flashes of a small girl's room filled with magazines and empty plates, cups and stacks of paper. Then the camera turned toward Katie's computer screen. Her screen was filled with little squares in which faces of people were visible, boys and girls with black hair and blank stares. Suddenly, the secretary realized she was one of those faces too. In the square left from the center she saw her own face, white and with a shadow falling over her eyes. Slowly the secretary raised her hand and waved. Some of the other people in the squares lifted up their hands as well and waved back, but most of them remained still, staring at their computer screens.

The secretary looked at her face on Katie's computer screen, her white face, her black hair. Her eyes were big and shiny, like the other people's. The secretary looked around her apartment, at the white walls, the gray trees behind her window, the dark glass building across the canal, the boxes she'd stacked up against the door, the gray moon. She looked back at Katie, who had turned the camera at herself again and was staring glassy-eyed at her screen. The secretary closed her laptop. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her body folded double in the chair and she threw up and up and up.

THE DAILY LIFE