Rus Like Everyone Else (31 page)

“My filing system!”

The lawyer stopped talking. She only heard him breathing for a while.

“How dare you do this to me!”

She pulled the blanket off. The ceiling was gray with dusty white stripes drawn on it by the sun that shone through the curtains. She got up out of the bed and pressed the mute button on the machine.

She walked to the window. Bright white light shone into her eyes; the sun was hanging low in the sky. The secretary squinted at the sun.

“Yellow,” she said to the sun. “Yellow.”

The sun was hanging still above the hardware store.

“Yellow,” the secretary said again. The sun shone back at her. Slowly the white rays piercing her eyes colored yellow.

The secretary smiled. She did not know if her mind was coloring the sun yellow or if the sun was sending its yellow into her eyes, but she didn't care. She saw the dusty yellow stripes moving over the floor when she opened the curtain farther, she saw the yellow edge glowing around the Halfords on the horizon, the yellow of the buttercups along the canal, the yellow of the streetlights—the light shade of yellow the sun gave all things.

The secretary closed the window and turned around in her living room. For the first time since she'd lived there, her doorbell rang.

YOU CAN COME UP

Ashraf pressed his hands to his face and took a big gulp of air, and another one, and another one. He stood there for minutes, in front of the apartment building of the office girl, his head thrown back. He could not utter a word when he heard her say hello through the speakers; he did not even know what he was doing there. He was just so tired. He had never felt alone like this before. The air did not want to get into his lungs, and he had to gasp for it every few seconds, like a fish.

He pressed his hands to his forehead.

“You get ten seconds of pity,” he heard his father say. That was what he always said when one of them fell and was crying. While they were crying he would count down from ten, and when he reached one they were calm again. Ashraf counted down from ten as he looked up to the sky. When he reached one, he would go on again. Seven, six, five . . . He tried to slow his breathing down.

“I can see you from my window,” a voice behind him said. It came from the speaker next to the doorbell of the office girl's building.

Ashraf stopped counting.

“You don't look so good.”

Ashraf looked up. The office girl was looking down out the window with the telephone in her hand.

“I've had a bad night,” he said. “I slept in a police cell. I haven't showered in three days.” His face flushed immediately as he heard himself say this. He sounded like some kind of homeless criminal, he thought. He wanted to turn away before she could politely tell him to go, but then the door made a buzzing sound behind him.

“Please, come up.”

THE SHOWER

The secretary watched the package boy walk into her hallway. He nervously searched the hallway for a place to hang his coat. When he saw there wasn't one, he carefully put it on the floor next to hers. He looked nervous, she thought, but mostly he looked tired. There was nowhere to sit, so he stood.

The secretary did not know what to say. She cleared her throat, but no words came out. It was silent in the apartment. Then her phone started ringing again.

“Not only will I get you fired,” the voice of the lawyer shouted through the apartment, “I will make sure you will never work in any other office again!”

The message ended with a beep.

The package boy looked surprised at the secretary, raising his eyebrows. Then he smiled broadly.

She smiled too. “I was going to take a shower,” she said. “Do you want to shower with me?”

The secretary and the package boy undressed without saying anything in the bathroom. She turned around when he took off his boxer shorts and he looked at the ground when he stepped in the shower with her.

His hair went flat on his forehead from the water.

The secretary looked down at his knees. His legs were hairy. The stream of water was too narrow and hardly touched either of them. It was different from how she pictured showering with someone, because when she pictured it she hadn't thought about how it echoed in the bathroom, she hadn't thought of the toothpicks in the sink she should have thrown away, and she hadn't pictured how cold it would be on the tiles. Most of all she hadn't pictured a boy standing in front of her, hands alongside his waist, like he was waiting at the bus stop. Still she felt excited, elated by all these details, which made it so different from how it was on TV. She couldn't help smiling the entire time, but the boy looked very serious.

She stepped back a little bit to let him get farther under the water stream. Their toes touched. “Sorry,” he said.

“Did it change you?” the secretary asked suddenly. “To be in a police cell, I mean. They say it changes you.”

The boy shook his head. “The first time I was in a police cell I was twelve. I accidentally set an old building on fire. They put me in the cell for an hour so I would learn a lesson.”

“Did you?”

“I learned not to be afraid of police cells anymore.”

He smiled. The water made a see-through layer over his cheeks and forehead. She stepped a little bit closer to him. Their bellies touched and he put his hands on her waist. She smiled—she could not stop smiling. His hands moved up along her waist and down again. He brought his face close to hers in the shower.

“Do you like me?” he said. He smiled nervously as he said it, and she saw his smile was uneven, it was a little more to the right.

“I like you,” she said. They stood together like that for a while.

“Shall we start then?” he asked.

She looked up, not knowing what to say. He looked at her timidly. “I'll start,” he said, nodding and then bending down for the shampoo.

She felt his fingers gliding up her spine to the back of her head, putting the shampoo in her hair and rubbing it on her scalp. She
bent her head and let him soap her hair. He did it very attentively, rubbing shampoo onto each strand of hair from beginning to end. It wasn't really necessary to do it like that, but she liked it. When she turned around and rubbed the washcloth over his cheeks and over his mouth, she felt closer to him than she had ever felt to anyone before.

MRS. BLUE PREPARES

When Mrs. Blue walked into her apartment the light on her answering machine was blinking. It was her son, Glenn.

“Ma, I just got a very strange letter in the mail from you. It says you have a job as a secretary. What is going on? What is this about? I am very concerned.” The answering machine beeped and announced the second message. “Why aren't you picking up the phone, Ma? It is six in the morning over there, I know you are home. What is this about? You know I can't leave my work now. I'm sending you a ticket; you can take any flight you want, any hour that pleases you. Please come, Ma, it's not that far. They will help you.”

Mrs. Blue switched the machine off. She thought about the boy in the van. How he'd lifted her up from the backseat when she could not get out, like Harold used to lift her up when they were younger. Sometimes she felt like she was still there with Harold, spending days in his workshop, where the time went slow like a glacier, where he taught her how to weld and solder. She wore knee-length skirts in those days, and pantsuits. Ruby Blue's “I Love You”—Harold used to sing that to her and he wore his hair slicked back with Brylcreem. Harold made engines and she soldered the electrodes for him. At the end of the day, when she would not stop working, he put his hands under her arms and lifted her up from the chair, and carried her up the stairs over his shoulder and put her in their bed.

Mrs. Blue took their old wedding picture off the wall and stuck a yellow label on it, on which she wrote “Glenn.” She put another “Glenn” label on his baby photo album, and one on a picture of her and her mother.

She leaned on her cane when she walked to the bedroom. There,
she took off her coat and sat down in front of the mirror. Carefully, she applied her pink lipstick, her blue eye shadow, and drew shaky lines in place of her eyebrows. She combed her hair and put some wax in it. One last time she walked around her apartment, dusting the vase in the corner, picking up the cup in the sink and putting it back in the cupboard. She thought about the strangers who would be coming in there, how they would walk past the large leather chair with their shoes on the carpet, walk past the couch into her bedroom.

Mrs. Blue stopped in front of her bedroom window and opened the curtain. Across the canal the post girl sat by her desk, as always, writing things down on a piece of paper. Somebody was standing behind her, looking back at Mrs. Blue.

Mrs. Blue raised her hand and waved at them. They waved back.

For a second they looked at each other across the water, until Mrs. Blue nodded and the post girl put her pen down again.

At that moment the stroke happened.

Mrs. Blue staggered and fell back on the bed. She tried to move her arms to get under the covers, but they wouldn't move. She could not see anymore.

In the distance a siren sounded.

She wondered if it was coming for her, but then realized they couldn't know yet, and then she could not remember what she was thinking about. She thought she was already dead, but thinking meant she must still be dying. Then her thoughts fell apart and the world moved away from her. She blew the air out of her lungs, not breathing in again.

GRACE IN THE STORY

Grace sat in the backseat of the light blue Porsche that had followed her into the fields. She was watching the driver; he used his cane to push the gas pedal, causing the car to shoot forward in jolts.

Grace and the man did not speak as they drove away from the city lights, passing by the abandoned building and the fields she had seen on the way over. The city became smaller and smaller
behind her. It was just a dot of light on the horizon now. Slowly the landscape faded back to white nothingness.

The strange man behind the wheel started singing softly. Grace immediately recognized the tune. “Time can't erase . . . the memories of . . . these magic moments.”