Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (10 page)

They held hands as they walked through Old Town, each daring the other to let go first. She stood on the stairs of St. Olav's and Maxim took her picture, clipping off her head at the scalp. A pitiful gesture, but momentarily gratifying. He kissed her afterward, tasting her makeup.

He missed Lori. A few hours with her, or a tolerable likeness, would cure just about everything. Lori was not beautiful, but she was kind and she had fat memorable thighs. She was studying to be a neonatal nurse; she wanted to work with preemies. Right now Maxim would like to rest his head in Lori's lap and pretend he was a preemie. Too tiny for the world, he needed to steal Lori's warmth. How generous she was. How easy his life was. As lucid and hummable as a song about life . . .

“Bells,” he called. “The singing fruits of my homeland.”

A grubby feeling scraped along his abdomen.

What he needed was the kind of nurse who examined your injuries and declared them superficial.

He breathed. He tried to rid himself of himself.

An elderly woman approached the cart and asked, “Am I in Turkey, sweetheart?”

“You're in Estonia,” Maxim said, shielding his mouth with his hand. “Land of bells and mud and toilet tissue. Welcome.”

The woman's face grew delighted and sincere, the face of a child selecting a teddy bear. “You are so cute in that little costume. I could eat you up.”

“I assure you,” Maxim said, “I would not taste good at all. You should eat someone from a Mediterranean country. A Sicilian perhaps.”

“Now you see, that's a language barrier.
Eat you up
's a saying. It just means I like you.”

“Ah, interesting. Tell me something,” Maxim said. “Would you ever search through your own feces for a tooth if you had no money to buy a new one?”

The woman backed away very slowly, her upper body remaining stiff while her legs took her away. Maxim waved good-bye. “Bells,” he called to the park-goers streaming by. “Bells. Made by hand, with love, for you.”

T
he alimentary canal might sound like an enchanted place where lovers share a paddleboat and whisper lies to each other, but it is actually the tubular passage between the mouth and the anus. Three days later, Maxim's crown sat in the lower portion of his alimentary canal—the jejunum of his small intestine, to be exact—while Maxim sat in the employee cafeteria, studying Miss Beebee's vilest invention yet, cheeseburger sushi.

“This is no food,” he said to her when she handed it to him. “This is a crime against food. What about some cereal? Maybe a simple banana.”

“You need to realize,” Miss Beebee said, “I'm not cooking just for you, Maxim from Estonia. Do you know there are cultures who'd rather eat a bowl of tadpoles than a bowl of cereal? Cultures that regard bananas like we would a filled baby diaper? I'm cooking for every single country in the world. This involves compromise. You know what compromise means? It means not getting what you want. You know what not getting what you want means?”

“Yes, Miss Beebee, I know exactly what it means.”

“I always say if you can't eat the thing you love, love the thing you eat.”

“Talking to you always makes me so sad.”

Maxim wasn't hungry anyhow. He sat at a table and sipped his water, aware of the other diners staring at him. Somehow, news of the broken crown, and of his attendant difficulty, had spread through the park. The dentist had called a few days ago, his voice sounding brittle and strange. “Everyone here's behind you,” he said. Maxim heard music and loud voices in the background. “And there's unanimous agreement on the dire nature of your situation.”

At the next table, a man in white linen offered a tentative thumbs-up. He waited for Maxim to return it.

Maxim frowned.

“Fig juice,” the man shouted. “It make bowels into factory!”

As Maxim was about to clear his tray, Paula walked into the cafeteria. She wore the same uniform, but something was awry. Her hair? No, her hair was still immaculate, softened by gilded tongues. She said hello to everyone, deftly fitting one greeting to the next without a seam. She approached Maxim's table and he quickly wiped his hand over his mouth and steeled himself. The phrase
filled baby diaper
had taken residence in his mind and would not leave. Was she wearing new lip gloss? Her lips were certainly glossy, but it appeared so natural, an innate gloss . . .

She sat down across from him. She gathered his hands into hers. Her hands felt—he was too overwhelmed to discern single impressions. It was like trying to evaluate the craftsmanship of a knife that was stabbing you. “We've been talking about you all day,” she said.

“I am.” Maxim cleared his throat several times. “Happy.”

He listened to Paula as closely as he could. She was saying all kinds of significant things. “Freedom's being able to choose,” she said. “Having choices, being free. That's why it's called freedom, Maxim.”

The moment she said his name, he ceased to pay attention.
Maxim
. It fell from her mouth like a spit-smoothed pearl. He studied her lips while they lifted, contorted, connected, made words, a necklace of words. She seemed to be discussing his recent trip to the dentist. So she, too, had heard. Maxim registered this and stashed his embarrassment in a faraway pouch. She was saying, “No one should have to touch his own poo. No one with a choice. No one with freedom, Maxim.”

Again! His name was, like,
cascading
out of her mouth. She scrubbed it of casualness and habit, suffused it with magic. Maxim. He must've been a king in a past life. Or at least one who worked very closely with a king. Paula still held his hands in hers and he could, now that he was aware of it, feel delicate rivets beyond her skin. The imminence of her skeleton.

She said, “Don't do it.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it, Maxim. We can talk to the dentist, work out a payment plan. We have a ton of ideas to help you through this.”

“This is an excellent coincidence.” Maxim felt himself lose contact with coherency. “Yes, I would like some help from your ton of ideas.”

Paula gripped his hand one last time before letting go. “The coincidence is that I'm totally into coincidences. And helping people.”

“I enjoy to be helped. It is my favorite thing.”

“Another coincidence,” Paula said.

After she left, Miss Beebee approached his table and said, “Maxim from Estonia, you need to close your mouth when a pretty girl talks to you. Girls don't want to be stared at like optical illusions. You didn't see me waving? I was like,
Close your mouth
. You got to act like you been there before.”

Maxim studied his cheeseburger sushi, congealing on his plate into something moist and unmentionable; he studied Miss Beebee, pink-necked and avid but softened by concern. She looked like a character on a package of sweets. He said, “What if I've never been there?”

Miss Beebee laughed. “Start pretending.”

I
f not for the events of the past few days, Maxim would have recognized this as sound advice. Combined with his glee at hearing Paula say
Maxim
, it might have reminded him of when he brought his marching-band vest to the shop in Delray Beach to have his name embroidered on the pocket. Maybe the counterwoman was hard of hearing, because when he picked it up a week later, stitched in gold cursive on the pocket was
ROBBY
. He paid her and dutifully wore the vest during football games while he banged cymbals and counted steps. His bandmates began calling him Robby, then friends of his bandmates, then friends of the friends. “Robby's here!” they'd say. “Robby's running things!”

He wore the vest to school. He liked being Robby. Robby was loosely hinged, hazardous to women. Maxim napped with his hands in his underwear and was still afraid to watch
The Wizard of Oz
, but Robby wasn't afraid of any goddamn thing. Robby laughed at flying monkeys. Robby studied the crowd during halftime, confident they were there just to watch him bang his cymbals. He didn't need to explain where he came from. He didn't need to create digestible capsule versions of his country. Robby was like
night
. You didn't hear people asking night where it came from, did you?

One day some kids from marching band came into the doughnut shop. When they left, each said good-bye to Robby, and Maxim spent two hours explaining to his mom who Robby was.

“Maxim is your name. It means
greatest
,” she said. “What does Robby mean?”

“Danger, I think. Or a kind of leather.”

“You are not a kind of leather,” she said in Estonian. “You are Maxim.”

Yes, he was Maxim. Short, unlovely, pervious Maxim. Maxim with the hairy neck and donkey laugh. Maxim with the telltale clothes. The irregular-fit pants, the imitation American T-shirt that said
WARNING: HOT SUMMER PROPERTY
. Maxim who was too busy learning English and selling doughnuts to acquire a hobby.

Maxim who since arriving in the United States had grown very good at pretending. Later in the day, in fact, sitting in the bell cart with Danni, he pretended to be uninterested in a story of how he, Danni, had seduced one of the Angolan candle dancers the night before.

“To hell with big countries,” Danni was saying. “Brazil, China. Go right for one you never heard of. This woman, her name is . . . I forget. She's black, you realize. I tell her all the lies people've been spreading about Angola, and make it up as I go. I put my arm around her and say, ‘I've always been a fierce supporter of your people. Tonight we're gonna show everyone that love has no borders.' Thirty minutes later we're in her shower, naked, and you can guess the rest.” He paused. “Nah, I'll tell you, so you don't guess wrong.”

Maxim stared over the trees at a sky the color of fogged-up glass while Danni told him all the details of his humanitarian shower rut with the candle dancer. Though Maxim didn't run his tongue over the broken tooth, he was always aware of it. When he breathed, when his stomach hurt. “Bells,” he called out feebly. He hadn't moved his bowels in five days.

“So are you or aren't you?” Danni said after a while.

“Aren't I what?”

“Gonna get that tooth?”

“I don't know. What would you do?”

Danni shook his head. “I'd've made myself cack the second I swallowed it. But now . . . hell, it wouldn't even be a question with me. Course I'd do it. What's the big deal? Someone might find out? Have you ever studied prison behavior, Maxim?”

“No,” Maxim said.

“I have. And you'd be surprised what you can talk yourself into if you don't have a choice either way. It's how your brain lets you live with yourself. Otherwise, there's some people who'd just wake up every morning screaming and crying. People in prison, for instance, those fat-ass world-record twins on their motorbikes, quadriplegics, Nazis, you.”

Maxim sighed. “Have you even been to prison?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Danni said.

Of course it was no use talking to Danni. Still, watching the park-goers streaming by, Maxim involuntarily tried to coax himself into a decision. Since the conversation with Paula, his uncertainty had turned into fear over what she would think. She would be aloofly disappointed if he decided to keep the crown—and that would make Maxim want to jump out of a high window. It'd be easy enough to fish out (no, the doctor amended,
retrieve
) the crown, bring it to the dentist, and lie to Paula about it. But what if she found out later? Sometimes he talked in his sleep. What if one night he started talking in his sleep about the tooth and she, lying next to him, heard?

He knew he had no choice but to fish out/retrieve the crown. He just had to find a way to live with himself afterward. This was the thing, this was always the thing.

“The quicker you do it, the quicker you can start finding ways to forget it,” Danni was saying. He balled up his apron and tucked it under the counter and saluted Maxim.

About an hour after Danni left, Maxim followed a sunlit silhouette as it approached the bell cart. Blond hair, stars-and-stripes uniform. He stared, unself-conscious, because clearly her presence made everything else, including him, invisible. Her smile was unhidden and benign; her gait measured to the fraction.

“Well, hello,” Paula said. “So this is what Estonia looks like.”

Maxim wasn't able to say anything for a long, for an irresponsibly long time. He could hear the heavy metallic ticking of the Putsch ascending its lift hill, then screams.

“We would've cleaned up if we knew you were coming,” he said finally.

“It's cute.” She tilted her head from side to side, roughly in time with the CD that was playing. “I love music,” she said, sitting down on the wooden stool.

“This is folk music from Estonia.”

“That's too funny,” she said.

Maxim waited for her to explain, but apparently she felt she didn't need to. Probably it was too obvious for her to point out. Maxim laughed to show that he understood.

“We've been thinking a lot about you and your problem, Maxim,” she said. She pulled a piece of paper from her breast pocket. She unfolded it to reveal a typed list of months with numbers next to each. “Here's your payment plan. Just a little each month adds up to a lot. The dentist, he's been super-nice. He agreed to not charge interest, so what you have's a really special deal.”

He touched the piece of paper: it was warm. He felt a surge in his abdomen, a sensation of either love or lust or hopefulness or the idiot churning of his digestive system. “Paula,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Paula.”

“Yes, Maxim.”

“Paula. I know you're trying to help me learn about freedom. I know you have good intentions.”