The Apartment: A Novel (18 page)

I went out to the smoking area with my beer, and stood in a huge, drunken mass of handsome young people. To find a comfortable place to stand and smoke, I had to go all the way to the barrier and lean my arm over it. It seemed to me they could have moved the barriers two or three feet further out, though that would probably just bring more people out. All over the place, propane heaters burned orange and hot, and people took turns standing under them. Beyond a few metres the heat evaporated, and where I was standing, trying to light a cigarette with my gloves on, it was frigid. Saskia had said it was going to hit minus fifteen that night, which was a whole lot colder than it had been. I got the cigarette lit, and was just standing without thoughts, a little tired, when from out of the bar and into the smoking area came two American guys and one girl. I heard them a long time before I saw them. I thought of Schmetterling and the violin, and the way American accents rise above all others – that if you put a hundred nationalities in a room and asked them all to complain about the lack of customer service, the overweight woman from Ohio will be the one that shatters the nearest chandelier. The three Americans who walked into the smoking area were bad enough that I could hear every word they were saying. I figured they might be exchange students. The girl had short, ice-blonde hair. One guy wore glasses and had a beard, and the other wore a baseball cap. They looked about twenty, each of them. At twenty, I might have been even more conspicuous, I reminded myself. I tried to ignore them. I had about half my cigarette left, and I wanted to enjoy it by returning to my lack of thoughts – but just as I had been forced to the spot where I stood, they were being forced to the spot where I stood, and there was not a whole lot of room. The guy with the baseball cap wore a black leather motorcycle jacket. The girl wore a blue anorak. I don’t remember what the guy in the glasses wore. I remember the leather jacket because the guy in the glasses kept calling him Hard Core while the girl kept calling him Brian. I remember the girl well because she had such large teeth, such a large mouth, and when she spoke it seemed to me like a huge monster gobbling up calm. Hard Core said something to me. I told him I spoke English. So he said, Fucking cold, right? I must have been shivering. I didn’t say anything back. I didn’t think I was supposed to. But it pissed him off. He said, mumbling, turning back to his friends, Asshole. I guess that was why his buddy called him Hard Core. The guy in the glasses said, Fuck that guy, Hard Core, forget it. You’re right, said Hard Core, then he laughed – a flustered laugh – and said, Whatever, try to be fucking nice. It was hard to say nothing, but easy to see how irrelevant responding would be, how pointless it would be to have an argument out here, or simply skip to reconciliation, go straight to the bit where he buys me a beer, says I’m the coolest guy he’s ever met, and reveals that he is the opposite of hard core, he is just afraid and young.

I finished my cigarette and tossed it beyond the barrier. I didn’t feel like drinking my beer any more, so I put it on the ground and left it there, and went looking for the bathroom. You had to walk back to the front, go down a staircase of wet and mildewed concrete, into a little maze of corridors. I found the men’s room and had to stand in line for the urinal, which was just a trough filled with ice. I saw Zaid ahead of me in the line, reading the screen on his phone. Someone behind me recognized him, and yelled his name. He turned around and saw me, and for a moment looked as though he thought I was the one who had called out to him. Then he saw his friend. I looked back and the friend was pointing at me. They spoke. At that point, everyone in the line turned around and looked at me. I said nothing, did nothing. I only thought that this night, the eve of a life that I hoped would represent the entombment of the violence I have witnessed or imposed upon the world, seemed headed for violence. I pictured myself picked up, thrown in a urinal full of ice, and beaten by everyone in the bathroom. I thought of Hard Core coming in after it was done, finding me half alive, and urinating on me. I remember thinking, Oh well, because I did not really care. But as soon as everyone had turned to have a look at me, they turned back, and it was over. Zaid went back to his phone, and pretty soon it was his turn at the urinal, and a little later it was my turn.

And then I found myself back at the pool table, where Saskia and Manuela and the man with the moustache still had not finished. It had become something of a spectacle, and a large crowd was standing around the table. The guy was so drunk, Saskia explained when I made my way to her through the circle that had formed around the table, that they kept having to explain which balls were his, and that he had to hit the white ball first. Manuela said, We’re going to win. I watched them for a little while. They didn’t hold the cue correctly, or stand correctly, or eye any angles, or hit with touch, or understand a single physical concept about the game that could have helped them. I thought that was pretty damn funny. So did everybody else. The guy with the moustache kept telling them he was about to start taking the game seriously. Saskia missed a shot – everyone cheered loudly, because it was an easy, easy shot, and she had missed badly – and came to stand beside me. Why are we so bad? she asked. Who cares? I said. Yeah, except I’m not having fun any more. When it was Saskia’s turn again, I stood beside her and talked her through it. The guy with the moustache objected. He wagged his finger. What did he say? I asked. Saskia did not know. I told her to point to where the ball needed to be hit, then aim to hit it there with the cue ball. Okay, she said. Now, I said, bend your knees, and hold the cue as flat to the table as possible. Like this? she said. Don’t grip the cue, I said, just let it rest there. She released her index finger. Just like that, I said. She hit it. She potted it. The whole place groaned. But Saskia was happy. She said, That was easy! Manuela high-fived her and tried to high-five me, but I said, I don’t high-five, and shook her hand. The guy with the moustache, who everyone had stopped paying attention to, must have felt we’d broken some rule, because he shouted something, and when we looked we saw he had the cue ball in his hand, and he threw it at us. I don’t know which one of us he’d hoped to hit, but he hit Manuela, in the back, between the shoulder blades. And Manuela dropped.

But that isn’t right. It’s not what happened. I push the sheets off me. I’ve set the heat too high. My mouth is dry. I’ve had six weeks of uninterrupted sleep, and now I am awake and I’m not even tired. Each thought I have gets up on its own legs, grows arms, grips me, lifts me higher and higher into an awakened state, and marches me toward the morning, which is still hours away. I sit up, finally, turn the light on, and see the glass of water I set on the nightstand. I reach for it and drink it. It’s lukewarm. I get up and go to the thermostat, which is in the hallway. I turn on the light, and by the door are my boots, still wet, salt-stained, and dripping water on the floor. Above my boots my new coat hangs on a hook, and on the hook beside it I have hung my new scarf. I turn the light off, go into the kitchen, flick on a small lamp, pour myself another glass of water, boil the kettle, wait while it boils, standing in my T-shirt, pyjama bottoms and bare feet, drinking my glass of water and refilling it and drinking it and refilling it and drinking it. When the kettle is boiled I make some green tea. I let it sit while I go to the bathroom. I wash my hands and face and go back to the kitchen, crack the front window open to let cold air in, and smoke a cigarette at the kitchen table. And there, alone, in the subdued and satiny lamplight, I think, again, That did not happen. It had not happened. The man with the moustache had not thrown the cue ball. After Saskia potted her shot, and I shook hands with Manuela, the man simply quit without paying his debt, placed his stick against the wall, and drifted away, and the rest of the evening – at least the hour or so longer that Saskia and I spent there – passed strangely but without incident. How, I ask myself, had I remembered it as though it were real? How had my mind, even briefly, believed in it? I sit back down at the kitchen table and light another cigarette and let the false memory play out. It is corrupted now, but it still contains sensation: Manuela, hit between the shoulder blades, drops. She bunches her back up. Saskia bends down to help her. Janos and Zaid throw themselves on top of the man with the moustache, then more friends come along. They really give it to the guy. Saskia shouts at them to stop, not because she cares about the guy with the moustache, but because nobody is paying attention to Manuela, and she is badly hurt. She has gone pale. A group of people come inside from the smoking area, having heard the commotion, and more people from the front area, and I realize then that there is going to be a great and unfortunate misunderstanding that is going to get a lot of people injured. Nobody who has arrived late knows why the guy on the ground is being pummelled, so they begin to pull people off him, who resist, and the fight spreads backward. I kneel down over Manuela, with Saskia. Saskia says, What do we do? Just hold on to her, I say. I’ll go get the manager. When I stand, I see that Hard Core is back, trying to calm everybody down. I try to pass but he steps in front of me. I say, Please get out of my way. He doesn’t move. He is frightened by all this violence, but it has thickened in him. His blood has stopped flowing. I say, Well, go ahead, Brian, and he swings at me. He is four or five inches shorter than me, and he does not know how to punch. He misses and I push him down to the ground, not angrily, without heat; I simply place him there, and he realizes he shouldn’t get up. And that is where the story ends. But that is insufficient. I pour myself another cup of green tea and watch the steam rise out of the cup. I blow on it. And the scene rewinds. It goes back again. There he is again, Hard Core, in front of me, just before he is about to throw his punch, and I grab his open mouth with my hands, pull it open, and I break his jaw by physically unhinging it from his skull, just pulling – I have his head in my chest, and pull his face open until it pops. I leave him on the floor.

I stand up, feeling an uneasiness that goes everywhere in me, down to my toes and fingertips, into my lungs and eyes, and makes me dizzy. I need to walk around. I open the cupboards. I find a mostly full bag of flour. There are also some jars of spices. I open a few and smell them. Cumin. Paprika. Caraway. I open the refrigerator. Nothing is there, except some lard. The lard has been opened – one of those grease paper wrappers that butter comes in. I take it out and set it on the counter. I see a bite mark on it, or maybe it’s a fork mark. I lean in. It looks like teeth to me. I go back to my room. It’s about four in the morning. I still don’t feel tired. I have a few books. I could turn on the radio. I don’t have a TV. What I really want to do is go to sleep. I’d like to sleep until the sun comes up. I open the door to the living room and, even with the curtains closed, I see that the room is bright. I walk to the windows and pull the curtains back, and I see something unexpected and wondrous. The clouds have come way down, and the streetlamps are glowing violet. The violet light smashes upward, then reflects off the heavy, low clouds upon the snowy graveyard, and rises up pink. It is a wild, breathtaking sight. It makes me think of the way I imagine the outer boundary of the universe to be, not black, not vast, not raging, not full of electric storms or combusting debris, but cloudy, bright, and snowing little pink particles of dust. There is nobody walking around, obviously, though it would be nice and mysterious to see a man or woman standing on the sidewalk, or wandering around the headstones. I stand at the window for a little while. It might be five minutes or it might be ten minutes. I remember that I have not hung the painting Saskia gave me. It’s leaning beside the couch. I look around the room at the various paintings and prints that came with the apartment, all bland, and decide to remove one that features a snowy landscape. I take it off and place it on the floor. I take the painting Saskia and I bought and hang it there. I step away from it. It seems level. Then I go back to the kitchen and close the window, because the apartment is finally getting cool again, and I grab the little radio in the kitchen, take it to the living room, plug it into a socket and raise the antenna. I scroll through the bandwidth. It’s an old radio, so it has a dial. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I start at the bottom, at 88. There is a lot of odd music in this city. I go very slowly. The squelch between the stations is nice, that sizzling and scratching you ride right into the sweet spot – I did some work for Peace 106 in Baghdad, and I remember lots of afternoons when I sat in my hotel, holding a little silver Sony single-speaker FM radio, which ran on batteries, rolling the dial from 106 to 105 and back to 106 and on to 107, and back again, very slowly. Here, in my apartment, I go all the way up, and find what sounds like a weather report. It is, so far as I can tell, just names and numbers, cities and temperatures, delivered without inflection. I sit down on the couch and imagine the man who is reading these. I picture him in a bright room under long fluorescent bulbs, wearing a white shirt and a navy blue tie, undone. Every few minutes he pauses. I presume this is when he flips a page or has a drink of water. Or he might be on a loop, and this is a bulletin he recorded an hour ago, which will play every hour until six a.m., and in that case I am thinking of him driving home, wearing a huge puffy brown jacket with a furry hood, and large square spectacles, and he drives as languidly as he speaks. If somebody cuts him off, he brakes, checks his rear-view mirror for oncoming danger, and speeds up again when it is clear. He drives so slowly that people overtake him on dangerous stretches of road, simply because they believe his car is malfunctioning. Curiously, he has never, not even once, turned the dial on his radio to himself, to hear himself speaking. He is in his late forties. He is the kind of guy who takes apart his remote control, draws a schematic, then rebuilds a remote that is ten times the size, full of huge buttons, which only he can use. He drinks milk that is five or six days past its use-by date, because he believes the whole idea of use-by dates is an industry conspiracy. He reads fantasy books that are written for children. He washes the leaves on his plants with a damp cloth. He does not like other people, yet he lurks in their radios at night, a voice from beyond, outside geography and time and temperature, as if he might, by the power of his own disintegrated life, save them.