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At night I tell them a story before they go to bed. Janet forgot to bring their books with her, so I make up a story on the spot. It’s a story about a pair of twins who, individually, are totally regular. But when they touch each other, they get superpowers. The boys love it. Kids are just crazy for superpowers. After they fall asleep, Janet and I smoke something that Ross, the school janitor, sold her. It’s quality stuff. We, the two of us, are floating. All night, we’re just fucking and laughing, laughing and fucking.
Only at noon do we wake up. To be more exact, Janet wakes up. And I wake up only from her screaming. I go downstairs to find the whole living room just swamped. David and Jonathan are standing next to the Mustang with the hose dragged in from the garden. Janet is yelling at them to turn off the water, and David immediately runs out into the yard. Jonathan sees me next to the stairs and says, “It’s busted. We used a ton of water but it wouldn’t mix.” The little rug in the living room is totally adrift on this kind of current that’s formed, and the old records, too. And I notice my stereo is giving off little bubbles from under the water like a drowning animal. It’s just stuff, I tell myself. Just things I don’t really need. “This one’s fucked up,” Jonathan says, still swinging the hose. “They sold you a broken one at the store.”
* * *
—
Janet shouldn’t have slapped him, and also, what I did on my end, wasn’t right. I shouldn’t have gotten involved. These aren’t my kids, and I definitely didn’t need to react the way I did. She’s a good mother. It’s just finding herself in this very irregular situation that put her under so much pressure. Me, too. And if maybe that slap of hers just slipped out without any evil intent, maybe, you know, she could also try to understand my shove. The last thing I wanted was to hurt her. I was only trying to put a little distance between her and the twins, just until she calmed down. And if there hadn’t been all that water sloshing around, she wouldn’t have slipped and gotten hurt.
I’ve already left five messages but she hasn’t called back. I know she’s completely fine, because her mother told me as much. Only a little blood and a few stitches. They also gave her a tetanus shot because the Mustang’s kind of rusty. After she took the twins and left, I worried. So I go to her house and her mother comes out and tells me Janet doesn’t want to see me anymore, and after a long smoker’s cough, she adds that I shouldn’t take it too hard—if I give her enough time and some space, it’ll definitely pass.
Tomorrow, when I go to work, I’ll bring her a little present: hair gel or socks. She goes nuts for those weird sorts of socks, the ones with big red polka dots or with droopy ears sewn on the sides. If she doesn’t want to talk, I’ll simply leave the present—all wrapped up nice—next to the register and head into the kitchen. In the end, she’ll forgive me. And when I take her home again, I’ll tell her the whole story about the car and about my father. About all the things he did to me and my brother. How we hated him. And how when Don went to prison, the one thing he asked was that I find my father and tell him to his face, also for Don, what a shit father he was. I’ll tell her about that night at the scrap yard. About how I enjoyed seeing the car he loved so much compacted down to a hunk of crumpled steel, totally stripped of purpose. I’ll tell her everything, and then maybe she’ll understand. Actually, it’ll be almost everything. It’ll be everything but how, when I brought my father’s car to the scrapyard in Cleveland, the old man’s carcass was still warm in the trunk. And after I’m done and Janet forgives me, she’ll bring the kids by again. And me and them, we’ll close the doors to the living room up tight. We’ll shove rags in the empty spaces after we snake through that hose. Then we’ll turn on the rusty faucet in the yard until it won’t turn any more, and we won’t shut if off until that big empty room fills up like a pool.
AT NIGHT
At night, when everyone is asleep, Mom lies awake in bed, eyes closed. Once, when she was a little girl, she wanted to be a scientist. She longed to find a cure for cancer, the common cold, or human sadness. She got excellent grades and had a very neat notebook, and in addition to healing the human race, she wanted to travel to outer space or watch a volcano in action. It’s hard to say that something went wrong in her life. She married the man she loved, works in a field that interested her, and gave birth to a sweet little boy. And yet she can’t fall asleep. Maybe it’s because the man she loves went to pee an hour ago and still hasn’t come back to bed.
At night, when everyone is asleep, Dad walks barefoot to the balcony to smoke a cigarette and add up his debts. He works like a horse. Tries to save. But somehow, everything costs just a little bit more than what he can afford. The neckless man in the café already lent him money once and soon he’ll have to start paying him back, but he has no idea how he can do that. When he finishes his cigarette, he hurls the butt from the balcony as if it were a rocket and watches it crash into the sidewalk. It’s not nice to dirty the street, that’s what he tells his son whenever the kid drops a candy wrapper on the ground. But it’s late now, he’s very tired, and the only thing on his mind is money.
At night, when everyone is asleep, the boy dreams exhausting dreams about a piece of newspaper that sticks to his shoe and won’t come off. Mom once told him that dreams are the way our brains tells itself things, but the boy’s brain doesn’t speak clearly. Even though that annoying dream recurs every night, smelling of cigarette smoke and wet with stagnant water, the boy doesn’t understand what it’s trying to say. He tosses and turns in his bed, knowing deep down that at some point, Mom or Dad will come in and cover him. Until then, he hopes that the moment he manages to peel that piece of newspaper off his shoe, if he ever does manage to peel it off, a different dream will come.
At night, when everyone is asleep, the goldfish comes out of the fishbowl and puts on Dad’s checked slippers. Then it sits down on the living room couch and zaps on the TV. Its favorite shows are cartoons, nature films, and CNN, but only when there’s a terrorist attack or a photogenic disaster. It watches TV without sound so as not to wake anyone. At about four a.m., it goes back to the fishbowl and leaves the damp slippers in the middle of the living room. It doesn’t care that Mom will have something to say to Dad about that in the morning. He’s just a fish, and if it’s not a fishbowl or a TV screen, he couldn’t care less.
WINDOWS
The man in the brown suit told him that it’s okay if he doesn’t remember anything, that the doctors said he just needs to be patient. The man in the suit added that the doctors said it to both of them, and if he doesn’t remember that either, it’s totally okay, that’s how it is after an accident like his. He tried to smile and asked the man in the suit if the doctors told him what his name is. The man in the suit shook his head and said that when they found him on the side of the road, he didn’t have any papers on him, but for the time being, his name can be Mickey. “Okay,” he said, “I don’t have a problem with that. For now, we’ll call me Mickey.”
The man in the suit pointed to the bare walls of the one-room, windowless apartment. “It’s not the most beautiful place in town,” he said apologetically, “but it’s a great place to recover in. Every time you remember something,” he said, pointing to the laptop on the desk, “write it on that so you don’t forget it. Memory is like an ocean,” the man in the suit added in a pompous tone, “you’ll see, things will slowly begin to rise to the surface.”
“Thank you,” Mickey said, and reached out for a parting handshake. “I really appreciate it. By the way, you didn’t tell me your name. Or maybe you did and I forgot.” They both gave a short laugh at exactly the same moment, and right after that, the man in the suit shook his hand warmly. “My name’s not important, we’ll never see each other again anyway. But if you have any problems or you need something, you can just pick up the phone next to your bed and dial zero. Someone will always answer, like in a hotel. Our support center works twenty-four hours.”
Then the man in the suit glance
d at his watch and said he should go because he had three more patients waiting for housing, and Mickey, who suddenly didn’t want the man to go and leave him alone, said, “It’s really depressing that there aren’t any windows here,” and the man in the suit slapped his forehead and said, “Wow, how could I forget.”
“That’s my line,” Mickey said, and the man in the suit gave another one of his short laughs as he went over to the laptop and tapped a few keys. The instant he finished, large, brightly lit windows appeared on two of the walls, and a half-open door appeared on the third. Through it, he could see a spacious, elegantly appointed kitchen with a small table set for two. “You’re not the first to complain about the rooms,” the man in the suit admitted, “and in response, the company I work for has created this innovative application, which affords a sense of open space. From this window”—he pointed to the window that had appeared above the desk—“you can see a yard and an ancient oak tree, and from the other one, you can see the road. It’s very quiet, hardly any cars on it. And the door gives a sense of the continuity of a home. It’s only an illusion, of course, but the windows and the door are synchronized, and you’ll always see the same weather and angle of light in all of them. It’s quite brilliant, when you think about it.”
“It looks amazing,” Mickey admitted. “Completely real. What did you say the name of your company is?”
“I didn’t,” the man in the suit said with a wink, “and it really doesn’t matter. Remember, if anything’s wrong or even if you’re just in a bad mood, you can simply pick up the receiver and dial zero.”
When Mickey wakes up in the middle of the night, he’ll try to remember exactly when the man in the suit left the room, but without success. The doctors, according to the man in the suit, said that the memory loss resulting from the blow he received might continue, but as long as it wasn’t accompanied by nausea or impaired vision, he needn’t worry. Mickey will look out the window and see a full moon illuminating the ancient oak tree. He’ll be able to swear that the hooting of an owl came from among its branches. From the window that overlooks the road, he’ll see the lights of a truck moving into the distance. He’ll close his eyes and try to go back to sleep. One of the things the man in the suit said was that he should sleep a great deal because memories very often return through dreams. When he falls asleep again, he really will dream, but there won’t be any solution in his dream, only himself and the man in the suit climbing the ancient oak tree. In the dream, they’ll look like children and something will make them laugh, and the man in the brown suit, who’ll be wearing denim overalls in the dream, will laugh constantly, a wild kind of laugh, unrestrained, the kind that Mickey has never heard or at least doesn’t remember that he’s heard. “Look,” Mickey will say as he hangs from a branch with one hand and scratches his head with the other, “I’m a monkey, I’m totally a monkey.”
* * *
—
Almost a month goes by, at least it felt like a month, and nothing has changed. He couldn’t remember anything from the past and continued to forget things that happened only a few minutes earlier. No doctors came to check on him, but he remembered the man in the brown suit saying that there was no need for an on-site doctor’s visit because he was being monitored constantly, and that if anything was wrong, the system would react to it immediately. A white van occasionally pulled up next to the oak tree visible from the window, and inside it were a gray-haired, suntanned man and a fat young girl who looked at least twenty years younger than her companion. They groped each other in the van, and once they even got out of it, sat under the tree and drank beer. Nothing changed in the kitchen during all that time. There was a large window there, too, and it let in a great deal of light, but Mickey couldn’t see anything through it from his room because of the angle.
He would sit in front of the laptop, stare at the walls for a while, and wait for a memory or a thought to come out of nowhere, like a bird landing on a tree, like the suntanned guy and the fat girl, like . . . At first, Mickey thought he was imagining it: a kind of furtive movement, a shadow without a body that darted across the frame of the half-open door and vanished. Mickey found himself hiding under the bed like a child hiding from night monsters. Now he couldn’t see anything, but he heard the sound of a cabinet closing and someone or something flicking a switch. A few moments later, something was visible in the frame of the half-closed door again, moving slowly this time. It was a woman, about thirty. She was wearing a short black skirt and a white button-down blouse, and she was holding a coffee mug with a picture of a sun and the words RISE AND SHINE! encircling it in colorful letters. Mickey didn’t come out from under the bed. He remembered what the man in the brown suit had said, and realized that even if he stood up and started waving, the woman in the kitchen apparently wouldn’t see him, because the woman didn’t actually exist, because it was just a projection on a wall designed to keep him from feeling trapped in his small, windowless room.
The woman in the kitchen was texting on her cell phone now, and as she tapped out the message, her feet tapped nervously on the white marble floor. She had beautiful legs. Mickey tried to remember a girl with legs more beautiful than hers, but except for the girl in the kitchen and the fat girl in the white van, he couldn’t remember any girls. The woman in the kitchen finished texting, took a final sip of her coffee, and moved out of Mickey’s field of vision. He waited another minute and heard something that might have been the sound of a front door slamming, but he wasn’t sure. He hurried over to the desk, picked up the phone, and crouched behind the bed. He dialed zero. A tired male voice answered, “Support Center. How can I help you?”
“In the kitchen . . .” Mickey whispered, “I mean, the projection of the kitchen on the wall . . .”
“In the application?”
“Yes,” he continued to whisper, “in the application, there’s someone there. Someone lives there.” He heard the tired guy type something on the other end of the line. “There’s supposed to be a woman there, Natasha, tall, curly black hair . . .”
“Yes, yes,” Mickey said, “that’s her. It’s just that there was no one there before, so it was a surprise . . .”
“Our bad,” the tired guy apologized, “we should have informed you in advance. We’re always updating and improving the application, and lately we’ve had more than a few complaints from users that the projected rooms are always empty, which makes them feel lonely. So now we’re trying to add a touch of human presence. The Support Center should have informed you of the change. I have no idea why they didn’t. I’ll add a note to your file and someone will catch hell, I promise you.”
“Never mind,” Mickey said, “really. No one needs to catch hell. Everything’s fine. Who knows, maybe they did inform me and I forgot. After all, I’m here because of memory problems.”
“Your call,” the tired guy said. “In any case, I apologize on behalf of the Support Center. It’s supposed to be an upgrade, not something that frightens the users. And I must tell you that for now, the service is free, but the company reserves the right to demand additional payment for human presence in the future.”
“Payment?” Mickey asked.
“No one is saying that we will,” the tired guy said in a defensive tone, “but we reserve the right. You know, it involves additional outlays and . . .”
“Of course,” Mickey interrupted him, “it’s perfectly understandable. Photographing empty rooms costs next to nothing, but a live person . . .”
“You’re pretty sharp,” the tired guy said, waking up. “It’s a complicated business, especially an application like ours where every system is matched up with a different human figure. At any rate, if it bothers you, don’t hesitate to call us at any time. She can disappear just as suddenly as she appeared.”
* * *
—
From the minute Natasha appeared, time began moving faster for Mickey. Or slower, actually, depending
on the time of day. In the morning, he’d wake up a little before she did and wait to see her drink her coffee, and sometimes she’d even eat some toast or cereal, and text or talk to someone, apparently her sister, on the cell phone. Then she’d go to work, and time would start to drag. Mickey tried to remember things, sometimes he did a few drawings or, more precisely, scribbled in pencil on the lined pages of the notebook he found in one of the drawers. Sometimes he’d read something in one of the travel magazines he found in the bedside cabinet. Once there was even an accident on the road projected on one of the walls. A motorcycle driver skidded and had to be taken away in an ambulance. The suntanned man and the fat girl arrived every now and then, groped each other in the van under the tree, and drove away. But most of the time, Mickey found himself sitting and waiting for Natasha to come back. In the evening, she’d come home and eat a little meal, always simple things—it looked like she didn’t really like to cook. She often ate dinner after her shower, barefoot and wearing only a T-shirt and underpants. Mickey would look at her and try to remember. Maybe he once knew someone like her, not Natasha, a different woman, with straighter hair or less beautiful legs, a woman he’d loved or who’d loved him, a woman who’d kissed him on the lips, who’d gotten down on her knees and put his prick in her mouth like it was the most natural thing in the world . . .