Mesopotamia Read online

  “A dickwad?”

  “Yeah, a bigtime dickwad. He’s a real louse, always flooding his downstairs neighbors’ apartments. He acts like it’s just our shitty plumbing, but I think he does it on purpose. Then there’s our floor, you already know everything about that.”

  “No, I don’t. How’d you wind up with two apartments?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Dasha answered, “but I’ll tell you anyway. My ex-­husband left me the one I live in. His grandma used to live there. She didn’t really like her grandson, so she left me her apartment.”

  “Where is that husband of yours?” I asked with some suspicion.

  “In the Emirates, I think,” Dasha answered. “Or Saudi Arabia. He moved all his assets overseas. It’s too cold for him here.”

  “What about his grandma?”

  “His grandma died. She was one tough cookie. She was a mail lady, and she stuck it out to the end . . . i.e., until she got canned. Oh yeah, upstairs,” she whispered, “you hear those footsteps? That’s Mr. Ivanovich. He’s trying to sell some factory . . . has been for ten years already, but no dice. Hey, John!” she yelled into the sky.

  Up above, a man—a bit under forty, a little too skinny, weary eyes, cigarette between his teeth, dark-­colored suit, stale shirt—poked his head out. He nodded amiably at Dasha and gave me an attentive look—he had the air of a guy who just got back from a wake.

  “Is that one yours?” he asked.

  “Yep,” she confirmed—it didn’t seem like she’d understood his question.

  “They grow up so fast . . .”

  “Huh?”

  “Forget it.” He waved and went inside, shutting the balcony door.

  “If you scream at night, he’ll hear you. Well,” Dasha said, adjusting her robe like the general of a defeated army tightening his greatcoat. “Soak it all up.”

  But how could I possibly soak it up? What kind of life would I have here? I couldn’t keep my cool any longer. “I’m not gonna get any, am I?” I thought, standing by the window and observing the rising sun. “What’s going on in that crazy head of hers?” I just stood there on the balcony till the afternoon and then lay around in bed till evening, when I went out to meet her on her way back from work, putting on the remnants of my stoic face and hiding my rage and despair behind my sunglasses. I prowled up and down the street—from the army recruiting office to the TB clinic, and from the beauty salon to the mistresses’ mansion, going there and back—back and forth, over and over again. After yet another round trip, I saw her at the end of the street, walking slowly and looking at the fires behind the yellow windows of evening. I headed toward her, keeping it strong and silent. I said hello, asked her how she was doing, told her about my exciting day, and fed her some line about having a bunch of business meetings—“I was running around all day (yeah, in my sandals, why not?) and meeting with all my business partners (well yeah, with my shades on, obviously). It’s a good thing we bumped into each other. Let me walk you back to the apartment. I’ll carry some of those things for you.” All she had was a glossy business magazine, which she refused to let me take.

  She ascended the stairs without a word, clearly preoccupied; she even tried lighting the filter of her cigarette. “That’s a good sign,” I thought. “She’s ready. She can feel it; she saw what she needed to see and now she’s down for anything.” I also noticed how different she looked in profile, like a sly fox, with a certain degree of suspicion showing in her eyes. “Huh, that’s weird,” I thought. “You can’t see any of that when you look at her straight on. It’s as though she’s concealing her real face, pretending to be someone else. It’s all in her lips—there’s something odd about their color—no, it’s the composition, but you can only see it if you look at her from the side. I guess that’s just how it goes sometimes,” I thought. “And it makes her look even better.”

  On our floor, the very moment I tried to block the doorway to stop her, get in her way so I could finally touch her, somewhere deep in the pockets of her suit her phone snarled, and she pushed me aside firmly, with one brief, iron-­willed motion, just like a real lawyer ought to do. She took out her cell, tensed up, ignored the incoming call, and disappeared without so much as a “Sweet dreams.”

  But I had them anyway.

  “My princess,” went my song of praise the next morning as I lay there staring sullenly at the ceiling in my wrinkled jeans and stale shirt. “Why must you break my heart? Why must you toss it to the pigeons in the square? They play with it, perched up on the city’s TV antennas, and I weep, my princess, while you paint your own portrait with only the most vibrant colors. Why do you keep me in these silver chains? Why do you put this black, suffocating collar around my neck and keep me from telling you all my thoughts about love and cruelty? My princess, where do you run off to every morning? In what burrows do you hide from me, you lovely fox? Why don’t you return and let me go? Why do you hold me captive? Why don’t you ever call me by name?”

  I sang and sang as the street outside the window awakened, I sang as the building came to life, and I went on singing, not even trying to get out of bed. “I guess now I know what it means to be unhappy in love,” I thought, despairing. “It can be painful, and it can put you in a rotten mood. Who would have thought? Who could have foreseen it?” Meanwhile, there was more and more sun, and the voices were getting more and more grating—the building was filling up with them, so I simply didn’t have any more time for my suffering. I liked this building. It was like an electric organ. In the mornings, I’d wake to the workers stretching a cable along the cold, damp asphalt and connecting it to the blue waves of electrical current running through the apartment block. The doors were always open, and cold drafts pooled in the hallways, swaying like seaweed as soon as anyone ran inside. After midnight, when everyone was already asleep, if you listened closely enough, you could catch the chittering of mechanical alarm clocks, the dripping of water in the kitchens, the whispering of drowsy pigeons on the roof, and the women sighing quietly in their sleep, as though somebody was tuning all the cords and antennas, preparing for a concert staged to celebrate a holiday. In the early morning, the building would be set in motion and the first sounds would emerge—brisk air would whip through the windows and rooms like breath through woodwinds, the floors would creak, perky radio voices would echo, knives, frying pans, razors, and hair dryers would chime in as well as some toasters, irons, and loud ringtones, anchormen would deliver the latest news in their sweet, reassuring voices; you could hear dishes, you could hear water, kisses and whispers, people humming marches and reciting prayers, running giddily down the stairs, which finally woke all the balconies and hallways from their slumber—now it sounded like a piano was scraping across the floor, and you were inside it, in the midst of the deepest sounds, in between the most disquieting notes, listening to the wood and tin, iron and cement, glass and skin that held the floors and ceilings together. When children ran into the building around lunchtime, their high-­pitched voices made invisible microphones screech, and booming sound ricocheted off the walls, and this music persisted—wistfully in the afternoon, adamantly at dusk, ecstatically at night—never slackening, never pausing, just going on and on. The music made me want to die.

  I got right down to it.

  By the evening, alcohol was pooling in my blood, rising like thaw water on the verge of flooding the empty streets of this defenseless city. Everything I had drunk, everything I had dared to ingest, whatever I touched—bizarre mixes and curious combinations of champagne, sherry, and rum (disappointingly, acquiring them was as wild as my imagination turned out to be)—all that fluid was inside my heart, cooling it down, delaying the inevitable, like graphite in a nuclear reactor, yet it gave me no reason to doubt that the inevitable was waiting patiently for me, just up ahead. I loved myself too much to have any experience with abusing alcohol, but I was too cocky to call it quits. I went to a bunch of shady places, stopped by all the basements and burrows she’d me
ntioned earlier, paid the Arabs a visit, stuck my head into the Vietnamese joint, became best buddies with the guys that worked at the McDonald’s, strolled into the TB clinic and drank, arms intertwined, with the patients, ordered champagne at Health, the local sauna, lost consciousness in a dark basement across from the synagogue, regained it at a family restaurant (the waiters were busily setting up for some kid’s birthday party the next morning) by chasing milkshakes with herbal liqueur, asked for directions at the pizzeria, died from cognac fumes in a bar run by some Georgian dudes, and resurrected myself with some Madeira in an empty supermarket. I was hanging in there, doggedly drinking her health, insisting that everyone praise her phantom profile, drink to her voice and her skin, and to the hairdresser who conjures up cosmic landscapes out of her unyielding hair. I stood there, wobbling like a cabin boy, and butted into conversations with learned proofs that no other woman in these parts had such green eyes, none of them could unleash a string of curses and then ask for forgiveness as eloquently as she could, and none of them had such high heels, such thin wrists, and such a thrilling biography. It’s odd that the TB guys didn’t beat me up. It’s astounding that the Vietnamese people didn’t mug me. It’s nice that I got thrown out of the McDonald’s. I only had a few hours left to live and I was determined to get something out of them, but I just couldn’t.

  She found me on the steps inside our building, leaning up against the door and blocking the entrance. She was angry and then scared. She hoisted me in her arms as best she could and carried me up the stairs. She was still lugging me along when I woke up; I tried to use my cellphone as a flashlight and get a better look at her, but just wound up dialing some random numbers, made what I thought was a good joke about her name—no, I’m positive it was a good one—asked her to marry me, and hung on to her, tenderly, at least I’d call it tenderly, hugging her with one arm and holding the railing with the other. She sat me down in the kitchen and told me to shut my trap, walking around and trying to decide what to do with me. At first, she thought about calling my mom. Then she decided to make me some strong tea. Then she got all anxious, suggesting we try to flush my stomach, hook me up to an IV—take a sleeping pill, take some vitamins, drink some cranberry juice, take some potassium permanganate, take some potassium permanganate with cranberry juice, take some potassium permanganate with a sleeping pill, hold the cranberry juice, or take all of them together and wash it down with some tea—no matter how you looked at it, she was taking care of me, which caused my heart to start pumping more blood; the liquid that flowed in was pink, what came out was dark, like blood ought to be.

  While she was pacing up and down the room, rooting around in cabinets and drawers, Googling cures for alcohol poisoning, and calling her pharmacist and anesthesiologist friends, I started feeling sicker and lonelier. Her kitchen had been prudently filled with all sorts of herbs and spices, vegetables and seafood. I could easily distinguish the smells of cinnamon and cloves, the hot aroma of curry, the piercing scent of black pepper, the overpowering presence of garlic and lemons, the dark spirit of chopped meat, the bright juice of sliced vegetables, the briskness of ice, and the weightlessness of flour, the bitterness, resignation, and irrevocability of steak, the ghostliness of vinegar, the daydreams of soy, and the delirium of tomato sauce. The smells multiplied, swarmed above me like demons, nestling into my lungs and constricting my throat. They encircled me like an army besieging a fortress; they formed bizarre constructs above me, taking on curious shapes, baffling and suppressing me. My life smelled like frozen fish and my death will be tinged with the scent of Chinese mushrooms.

  I was getting sicker and sicker. The sheer saturation of smells was killing me—and their overabundance was making my death an agonizing one. “Just not here,” I commanded my body. “Not at her place. Go on home, don’t bother her anymore, get the hell out of here,” I whispered to myself. “Just not here.” At that moment, she opened the fridge and I died.

  Then she was standing over me for a while, holding my head under a cold stream of water. I turned my back to her, tried getting up and swatted her hand away, but she persisted in washing the pain and blackness of this world out of my body, holding me down and whispering life-­giving words. Her clothes were completely soaked—I realized that she must be cold and that all this nonsense was the last thing she needed in her life right now and that I was being a real piece of shit. This realization opened the floodgates; tears came rolling down my face, mingling with the cold water on my skin. “What’s wrong with me?” I thought, in a state of utter despair. “Why’d I have to go and screw everything up? What should I do now?” I said I was sorry and told her to let me go, pretending I was doing just fine, lying about how much I’d actually drunk that night, asking her to pour me another, coughing up some champagne and coke, coolly complimenting her haircut, and suavely inviting her to join me in my bed. She listened patiently to all my rambling, giving me a gentle smack upside the head whenever I started sharing my views on premarital sex, shivering ever so slightly in her wet shirt, and cracking a cool little smile in response to all my propositions.

  As I trudged off, leaving copious wet tracks in the hallway, I felt the need to say something meaningful to her.

  “You know, I’d be glad to give you a kiss. But I just puked all over your floor, so you can imagine how much my breath reeks.”

  “Run along now,” she answered, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with me.

  In the morning, I remembered every detail of the previous night—I hadn’t forgotten a single word or a single touch. I remembered how she looked, how tentatively she held my hand, and how prudently she wiped the snot off my face. I hadn’t forgotten anything, although it would have been better if I hadn’t remembered anything. Flocks of startled swallows flew through my memory; it felt like bags of ice were pressing down on my heart, and I wanted to get rid of this body that wouldn’t stop tormenting me. But I knew I couldn’t waste any more time. It was now or never. I got up, somehow managed to get dressed, got my teeth all brushed after two unsuccessful attempts, burned my hand making myself some tea, spilled milk and sugar all over the place, and accidentally kicked over the trash can. “Now it’s really gonna happen,” I said to myself, and marched out of the apartment.

  Once again, nobody was coming to the door. Once again, I had to stand there and listen hard for voices and sounds coming from inside her apartment. “What the hell?” I thought. “She doesn’t wanna let me in, does she?” I started pounding on the black metal door, waking the pigeons perched on the roof. Then some keys started jingling, eventually sliding into the hole, and the door swung open heavily. I lunged forward and crashed right into a boy. He looked like he was seven or so, standing there in a T-­shirt and soccer shorts—­cut-up knees, scratched-­up elbows, thick black hair, furrowed brow—he didn’t inspire much trust in me. He was holding some pens and pencils and sizing me up. Dasha ran out of the kitchen to greet me, putting her hands on the boy’s shoulders with affected carelessness; she was obviously flustered though.

  “Oh, is that you, Romeo? This is Amin,” she said, nodding at the boy.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, taken aback.

  The boy looked at me, his eyes filled with hatred.

  “Those are some nice pens you got there,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “Is that a real Parker? I used to have one of those.”

  “You know how to write?” the boy asked scornfully, and headed toward the kitchen.

  “School just let out,” Dasha whispered quickly. “His grandmother dropped him off this morning. The thing is . . . what’s he gonna do here all summer? He should be down south, swimming in the sea.”

  “Definitely,” I thought, “he should be in the sea, somewhere out beyond the buoys.”

  I sat there in the kitchen—Dasha was bustling around, cooking something, showing how hospitable she was; the kid was watching with obvious skepticism. He didn’t look like his mom, but he did look like he loved her very much. Clearly, I was
just getting in his way. And he was getting in mine. Dasha became more anxious, some of the meal got burned, some of it got way too much salt, and some of it just wound up in the trash can. I was trying to break the ice with Amin, but he kept giving me lip. His mom scolded him, but he gave her some lip, too, which made her even more anxious. Eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore; she grabbed her phone, ran over to the other room, and had a long conversation, while the kid indignantly drew monsters and serial killers in his school notebook. I got up and headed back to my place. The kid didn’t even lift his head.

  Things went on like that for two weeks. I’d wake up at the crack of dawn to the sound of her footsteps through the wall, listening to her running around the apartment, getting the kid up, making him breakfast, rushing to get ready, picking out her clothes, vainly trying to impose order on that hair of hers, frantically searching for her shoes, desperately calling someone who wasn’t picking up, hopelessly pouring milk into cold coffee, resignedly running out the front door, tossing all her phones, pills, and sunglasses into her purse. She wouldn’t be getting back until late, so I could bide my time. Her friends, neighbors, teachers, and babysitters would come by to keep the kid busy. One time she asked me to keep an eye on him, but the kid purposely (yep, it was on purpose, I know that for a fact) knocked over some pots and pans, called his mom (his phone was more expensive than mine!), and started griping and sobbing. She had to hail a taxi and race home. I told her my side of the story; she even seemed to believe me, but I wasn’t asked to watch him again. I was pissed, cursing him to high heaven. “What’s he even doing here?” I thought. “Why doesn’t he go down south to the sea or some lake, or better yet a swamp, closer to nature and preferably some wild animals?” The kid kept ignoring me—he wouldn’t speak to me or open the front door for me (he’d just stand on a chair and look at me scornfully through the peephole); he’d protest by making a big show of refusing to eat whenever I sat with them in the kitchen and blast his music whenever she talked to me on the phone. I even started to respect him for it. “He’s taking a real stand on this one,” I thought. “Actually, he’s completely harmless,” I assured myself. “Everything’s gonna be just fine.” But none of my attempts to reach out to him got anywhere. He really didn’t look like a trusting, defenseless child; he had a grating personality and grown-­up toys—pockets stuffed with indelible pencils and office supplies (I once saw him trying to staple my shoelaces to the floor—she didn’t believe me, obviously), a used pepper-­spray can he’d gotten from his dad (well, she thought it was all used up), an empty cigar case he’d gotten from his grandpa (I told her it didn’t smell that empty to me, but she really didn’t want to hear it), a stethoscope he found somewhere (“What does he need that for?” I asked anxiously), some borrowed shotgun shells, a Swiss Army knife he’d stolen from me (he stubbornly claimed it was his—she seemed to believe me again, but she didn’t make him give it back). Worst of all, she’d practically stopped talking to me, although sometimes she’d stop by for a bit, keeping the apartment door ajar, as though she was always on the lookout—whenever I’d try to catch her on the stairs, strike up a conversation on the street, or lure her into some dark, cozy corner, she’d tense up immediately, turn falsely carefree, obtrusively friendly, or ostentatiously earnest. He was constantly lurking—­waiting for her on the balcony, calling her as soon as my hand touched hers, waking up as soon as I tapped on her door in the middle of the night, cutting himself or burning his tongue, ripping his clothes on loose nails and getting in fights with the neighborhood kids, sticking spoiled food in his mouth and bringing stray dogs home—whatever he could think of to shift her attention away from me, get her back on his side, and elicit sympathy, tears, laughter, love, or at least frustration. She’d get mad at him constantly and fight with him more and more openly, perfectly aware of what was going on. “Well, what’s the point of arguing with him. He’s a smart kid; he’s in the right—I’m the outsider here, and Dasha should be getting mad at me, not him.” Nevertheless, it was him she got mad at. We gradually established an odd relationship based on leaving the kid with nothing. She’d try to call me after work so we could walk home together. At night, she’d send me texts, asking me about the weather and any breaking news stories. In the morning, she’d drop by for a second, just to say hello, and then vanish, leaving the sweet smell of freshly baked bread in her wake. The kid knew what was going on, he mounted a defense, setting clever little traps all over the place, taking her phone to bed with him, patrolling the neighborhood, plugging up the lock of my apartment door with playdough (good thing it was just playdough), and leaving me notes containing black spots and voodoo curses. All of this stuff wore me out, and I lost sleep and my peace of mind over it; at one point, I even thought about moving back home. I felt bad for the kid, as I was clearly bugging the hell out of him, her, as she was stuck in the middle of our feud, and myself, but I don’t even want to get into that. That’s how the summer started, and that’s how all my hopes and dreams died.