Mesopotamia Page 22

  “Are you going to date every single one of my friends?” I asked.

  No response. She was probably trying to figure out whether or not she should take offense; she decided against it.

  “You have some pretty good friends. They could teach you a thing or two about manners.”

  “Huh, imagine that,” I thought. “Someone who slept with Vadyk Salmonella is giving me pointers on etiquette.”

  “Don’t get so defensive,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she answered, and headed back in to warm up.

  Hustav got some job on the mayor’s PR team. Then he got fired a little while after that and sold his camera and his apartment, too. Life robs us of more than our illusions.

  Eight years ago, she started going to night school. My professor friends griped that she didn’t know the first thing about finance—not that they had a very firm grasp of the discipline they were supposed to be teaching either. “Nobody knows anything,” they griped. “Nobody really knows what they’re talking about. We’re all faking it, pretending to know something, pretending to feel something; we live by illusions. But the problem is we have to pay good money to keep it going.”

  We wound up at the same concert a couple times, and we crossed paths on the metro once—she was with a pack of Hasidic Jews. As far as I could gather, she was giving them a tour of the city. They looked like a big family that had bought an apartment downtown and were disappointed to learn that it was still infested with cockroaches. She had long hair again, which made her look more experienced and grown up. Nevertheless, she was still resorting to the same mistrustful and confrontational tone, as though she were trying to prove something to the adults around her, as though she were attempting to convince all the Hasidic Jews in the whole wide world that the transaction she was facilitating was necessary and appropriate.

  Seven years ago, I changed stations. This was a big step for me; it took me a while to pull the trigger. The new station could have easily tanked a few months after it went on the air, but this was a real job. It was time to make a move. I wouldn’t even have considered something like that a few years back. But then one day, out of the blue, I started asking myself some tough questions—Do you really want to keep wasting away doing something you don’t enjoy? Do you really want to keep breaking your back for some boss? How much longer can you be dependent on someone else and change yourself to accommodate them? “C’mon,” I said to myself, “go for it. You’re not some twenty-­year-­old punk. You’re as old as Jesus was—it’s time to work miracles and raise lepers from their graves.”

  I bumped into her downtown one May morning. She was sitting on the steps of a bank, still closed at such an early hour. There she sat, looking a bit lost, though she wasn’t crying or anything, her head propped up on her fist, staring off into space. She had a tiny little watch dangling from her wrist, but I’m absolutely certain she wouldn’t be able to tell you the time. She simply wouldn’t process the question. She saw me and gave a weak, forced nod. Something compelled me to stop—it may have been that she nodded first. I didn’t hesitate, sitting down beside her and asking her about her life, her studies, and our mutual friends. She nodded in reply and talked a little, quite reluctantly. Then she went silent.

  “What’s up? Did something happen?”

  “Nah, not really. It’s just that I was getting my brains fucked out all night.”

  “All night, really?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yep, all night.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I waited for a bit. She wasn’t saying anything either, though. I reached into my bag, pulled out a carton of milk, and handed it to her. She ripped it open and started sucking it down greedily. “Fucking all night must be pretty exhausting,” I thought. I noticed that her fingers were trembling, as if she’d just done an intense workout at the gym. I noticed the veins bulging in her neck when she flung her head back to drink. I noticed dark circles under her eyes—the kind women only get when they’re in labor . . . or when they haven’t gotten enough sleep, I suppose. Well, at any rate, only women who are emotionally invested in what they do and afraid of slipping up can have those deep, translucent circles under their eyes. The weary and distant expression on her face indicated that last night had been nice, yet hard on her, that she was concerned about what happened, yet she didn’t have the slightest regret. She smelled of warm shower water, morning cigarettes, and someone else’s soap. It seemed as though the blood had deserted her fingers, flowing away to a safe distance. But those lips of hers—­bitten and puffy—blazed darkly under the morning sun; she kept nibbling on them, as if she were thinking back to what had transpired that night, as if it had still not ended in her mind. It even seemed like she wanted that night to keep going, like something very important had withdrawn from her, something that she started to lament the instant that the dark of the night retreated—she’d been sitting there for God knows how long, for no apparent reason, lamenting the loss of something she’d just acquired. I must have been gawking at her lips—maybe that was why she choked on the milk. It ran down her chin. She quickly wiped it away, covered her lips with her hand, and started speaking, seemingly not even addressing me, talking in muffled and disjointed spurts, touching the wounds on her thin, vulnerable skin, stopping the blood that rushed to them after every outburst and question, growing anxious, and realizing that I could see it. She tried changing the subject; I kept the conversation going, trying not to look at her and feigning a casual and carefree attitude, yet constantly thinking to myself, “She was getting fucked all night! All night! She was willing to give love and understanding all night; she didn’t sleep all night, she forced herself to stay awake all night, making utterances, listening to confessions, remembering promises, and screaming words of ecstasy. She was feelin’ good all night—they kept her up all night—they kept her hot and bothered all night. She slipped into the dream world and was plucked out of it again, into the black air; she caught someone’s breathing, felt someone’s caressing fingers, tried to adjust to someone’s movements, listened to someone else’s heart beating, and got used to someone else’s smell, someone else’s voice, and someone else’s love.”

  I took the milk out of her hands and started gulping it down too.

  “You know anyone that’s hiring?” she asked suddenly.

  “I’ll ask my boss,” I promised.

  I tried to pass the carton back to her, but she shook her head as if to say, “I’ve had enough for today.” I got to my feet, said goodbye, and headed home, throwing the rest of the milk in a trash can along the way.

  For some reason, my boss agreed to give her a job immediately. Now we were working in the same building. She sat in the next room over, copying out news stories from the internet so we could use them for our broadcasts. She hit it off with everyone, settled in quickly, and seemed to enjoy the company of her many new gal pals. She had a nice personality and a bad memory, almost never got angry, and almost never griped about anything. I’m not sure if she actually liked her job. I’m not sure if she even considered it a real job—endlessly surfing the internet, constant smoke breaks and phone conversations, soaking up the bright sun flooding through the wide-­open windows, and hearing voices on the steps and car alarms erupting in the fresh morning air. She always seemed to be expressing a certain degree of appreciation for what I’d done for her, which I found pretty exasperating, because it rendered whatever prospects of getting with her I might have had nonexistent. We’d say hello in the morning, drink knock-­off cognac at corporate birthday parties, and then she’d disappear again, and I’d pretend that was how things were supposed to go. I’d invite her out, suggest grabbing a drink together, and try talking about something besides work, and she’d agree in such an aloof and dejected tone that my desire to take her out would disappear.

  “Don’t sweat it. Whatever happened to not mixing business and pleasure? Just let her work. When you put in a good word for her with the boss did you really think th
at meant you’d be the one fucking her brains out all night?” I thought, really letting myself have it. “Yeah, admit it. You did. What else could you have been thinking about when you saw her that morning, drained and bloodless? Three years ago, you would have finished what you started, no doubt about it. You would have caught her at the office after hours and slipped your cold hands down her orange T-­shirt, brushing up against the hard pebbles of her moles. So what if she resisted, so what if she complained to the boss, so what if she gave her two-­weeks’ notice? What would I care? Huh, that’s exactly how it would have gone,” I thought, agreeing with myself. “I don’t even know what’s holding me back now.”

  But something really was holding me back. So much so that late one night as I was passing her desk on my way out of the office, I discovered, much to my surprise, that she hadn’t signed out of her email. I tried convincing myself to just walk away without reading her messages, but I just wasn’t persuasive enough. I sat down at her desk and tried reasoning with myself once again. “What’s wrong with you? You’re gonna have to see her every day.” Eventually, I got up, shut down her computer, and closed the door behind me.

  And then, at the end of the summer, events took a surprising turn. It was an evening meeting that somehow devolved into everybody pounding booze. I’d been in a good mood all day. I was brimming with optimism, looking out the window where, cooling down in the twilight like radiators with no steam in them, heavy trees stood, drained by the white August sun. My spirits had gotten a lift that morning when I bumped into some old friends downtown, right in the middle of the street, taking an unexpected breather in the heat of a tough workday—drunken hugs and sweet memories of people I hadn’t seen in ages, about those who’d disappeared and were now hopelessly lost, promises to keep in touch, demands to not be a stranger, exchanges of vows and unsolicited advice, tears, and the restrained singing of men. The point is I came to the meeting a few drinks deep, so I had a bit of a head start. Then once we’d settled all our official business and everyone was feeling more laid back, I refused to listen to any admonitions or appeals from my friends. She was sitting there the whole time, obviously, right next to me, at someone’s desk cluttered with reports and newspaper clippings, and I could feel her warmth and her soft touch all evening, obviously, so I flew off the handle, obviously, because “When else am I gonna pull the trigger?” I thought. “It’s now or never.” I spoke only to her and listened only to her, told only her all my tales of heroism, and concerned myself only with her reaction. At one point, I was being ridiculously brazen about it, obviously, and she, being a person who was concerned about her reputation and did not wish to offend her good buddy, obviously, took the initiative and suggested we go for a little walk. She said that we could sit there in the office all night, listening to the trees breathing heavily outside. Nobody would judge us for doing so, obviously. The hour was getting late, though, which made absolutely no difference to her, since she lived nearby and did not depend on the city’s public transportation system; however, she was clearly emotionally invested in my plans and my fate. Soon Kharkiv would close the luminous gates of the metro to its citizens, and she had no idea how I’d resolve my transportation woes then, obviously. What if it doesn’t occur to me that I can call a taxi?

  “Well, it’s not gonna occur to me, it just won’t,” she said in a trusting tone. “But who says it’s gonna occur to me?” I asked myself. “Yeah, it just won’t,” I told her and myself. So, she grabbed my hand and dragged me along the passageways of the editorial department and down old stairwells, walked with me through a black, neglected courtyard, under tree branches hanging low like winter clouds, through an unexpected nighttime rain shower, ran across the street with me, and popped into a park with me by her side. It was precisely there that I tried to stop her and tell her everything that needed to be said at that moment, and, well, do everything that needed to be done. It was precisely then that two melancholy foot patrol shadows emerged from beyond the trees. And that was precisely how things came to an end. She flashed her press pass; I demonstrated my self-­defense techniques. She called the station and handed the patrol officers her phone; I tried taking their billy clubs away and handed them a string of curses from the depths of hell. She tried paying them off; I called them a bunch of whores. They took us back to the station, obviously, the both of us; however, they complied with my request to let her go immediately, suggesting I be their guest for the night. She became hysterical, bawling her eyes out and pleading with them, which gave me the strength to fight on. I snatched a can of pepper spray when one of the patrol officers turned around to fill out some paperwork and unloaded it at the ceiling with a cheerful whizz of compressed liquid. Everyone had to step into the hallway for a bit, and the officers punched me in the ribs a few times. She probably would have liked to pitch in, too. Then suddenly she and one of the officers started hitting it off—they were all looking at me judgmentally, thoroughly irritated, all of them appalled by my behavior. I was glad, though—I finally saw a glint of some sort of interest in me. So what if that interest only amounted to wanting to slug me as hard as she could? She was looking at me, she wasn’t looking away, everyone was looking at me, the whole station hated me; I was a real hero, and that feeling made life worth living. They aired out the room, and then we all went back inside. They demanded that I empty my pockets. I complied reluctantly. She stood next to me and carefully followed my movements, as though she was afraid of missing something, not picking up on some sign. Her T-­shirt and Keds had been soaked by the rain shower, and she was quite cold, so she wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Her eyes were frozen on me as I took out a large ring of keys with a few machine-­gun cartridges attached. You could say they were my good-­luck charms. I had a lot of keys, since I had to look after two apartments downtown—the owner of one of them, my high school friend, was in the can, while the owner of the other, my former business partner, was hiding out somewhere, otherwise they would have thrown him in the can too. I had the keys to a few mailboxes, since I’d pick up my elderly neighbors’ academic journals for them. They stubbornly kept their subscriptions up, although they hardly even left their apartment anymore. Their children never visited them—I may have been the only person who actually remembered their names. My address book flew through the air and landed on the table after the keys. One of the officers flipped through it, just for kicks, came across a few names he recognized, and placed it off to the side, rather uneasily. My address book contained the numbers of basically all the city council members. Well, enough of them to form a viable majority, at least. I could have called one of them and asked for help but I’d been stripped of the right to make my one call, and all three of my phones were now on the table in front of the officers. One of them had been stomped on during an International Workers’ Day parade and then taped back together. The letters on the second one’s keys had faded completely, so I could receive texts but I couldn’t really send them. The third one was pink and covered in rhinestones—my sister had left it when she came to visit. I hadn’t gotten around to throwing it out. The officers looked at all this stuff, their suspicion mounting with each new object I produced. I took out a bunch of business cards—some pediatricians I’d tried to help recently by inviting them to talk on one of our radio programs, some human rights advocate who’d make occasional appearances on the air and complain about stray animals being mistreated, a young lawyer lady who represented the employees at the trolley depot, and the owner of a Georgian restaurant in town who kept inviting me to his place for a barbecue dinner—but I stubbornly refused, knowing perfectly well what kind of dirty money he had behind him, what kind of business he was running, and how many scalps he’d taken. Next came a few flash drives, a dozen or so batteries, loose pieces of gum, cough drops, and, for some reason, a metal referee’s whistle. The whistle caught their eye. They fiddled with it a bit and passed it back and forth. Finally, one of them, probably the junior of the two, who had a bullied look about
him, simply couldn’t take it anymore and he blew it. The other guy jabbed him. I was most concerned about the condoms in my back pocket. I was initially hoping the officers would let them slide, but instead they decided to wring every last cent out of me. She kept quiet, examining my wet, shaggy hair, black T-­shirt with an anti-­Parliament slogan on it, dark, coffee-­stained sweater, jeans, and sneakers as if she was committing them to memory, as if she’d never noticed any of it before, never paid any attention to it, never seen that my sleeve was marked with traces of blood, never spotted the drops of hot asphalt on my shoes, never known what I did outside work, what interested me, who I hated, and who I was battling against. Just the condoms were left. Well, they were definitely the main problem. “On the one hand, it’s a good thing she’ll see I have protection on me,” I assured myself. “That shows I’m a serious-­minded and responsible individual, not some punk kid, that I’ve got everything under control and I’m ready to make a commitment. Commitment? What the hell are you talking about?” I couldn’t help but object to my own faulty reasoning. “I’d say you’re just preoccupied with sex—you’re always carrying jimmy hats around, you even bring them to work. It’s obvious what’s on your mind and it’s obvious what you want from her, ya dickwad. However,” I continued, presenting new arguments to myself, “having prophylactics in your pocket attests to your constant readiness, tempered masculinity, and unmistakable grit. You’re a real man, and it’s just ridiculous to be ashamed of that. However,” I reminded myself, “you’ve been carrying those prophylactics around for about two months now. They’re so worn and shabby that desperation is what they suggest, not masculinity.” So I made a big show of reaching for my belt, removing it, and handing it to the officer.