Rus Like Everyone Else (13 page)

Wanda was squeezing the steering wheel with white knuckles. They were silent for a while. Cars were racing past them at the traffic light. Then Wanda blew out a lot of air and looked at Rus. “We will work on your papers at my house,” she said, “and you will provide me with the information to put together your résumé.”

MRS. BLUE AND THE SECRETARY

“If you smile, it will turn into a good memory,” the secretary said. “Memories are just pictures of yourself in your mind.” That was what her mother always said at least.

Mrs. Blue did not respond. She was lying on the couch with her face toward the ceiling. She had dislocated her hip when she fell onto the pink chesterfield that was standing on the forklift truck at the studios. The secretary had seen her trying to get into the elevator with her new wheelchair, and she insisted on helping her into the house and getting blankets for the couch. Now the secretary was sitting at the foot end of the couch. She had made tea but Mrs. Blue didn't want any. She didn't want anything, aside from the remote control now and then, to see if her show had come back yet.

“So it was a very good TV show?” the secretary asked eventually.

Mrs. Blue opened her eyes.

“When you start telling a story, the people in this story and the world they live in are created,” she said. “It is like God: someone made him up and now he's there, in our minds and in heaven. They have an obligation to Grace and to the others to end the story properly.”

“And they lived happily ever after,” the secretary said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Blue said, “for instance. Although I personally don't like the ever after. I myself prefer ‘they closed the curtains, put on their pajamas, and went to bed.'”

“Yes,” the secretary said. “They were in love and happy, closed the curtains, and went to bed.” She thought about the lawyer and the bald spot on top of his head.

She looked sideways at Mrs. Blue, who had pulled the blankets over her head.

“Glenn sent you a nice card,” the secretary said. “He was sorry he could not make it for your birthday.”

Mrs. Blue remained silent.

“He is very busy,” the secretary tried. “Perhaps you could visit him. Do you have any plans for vacation?”

Mrs. Blue sighed. She pulled the blankets farther up.

The secretary took a sip of her tea. There was a radio still on
somewhere, it seemed. She swallowed the tea and got up from the couch. “I'll check on you later this week.”

The secretary carried the teacups back to the kitchen and walked to the door.

“Washing machines,” Mrs. Blue said suddenly.

The secretary stopped in the doorway.

“When we invented the washing machine,” she continued, as if she had personally been involved with the invention of the washing machine, “we thought, This is going to save time. People will have extra free time to do things now.” She slowly sat up on the couch and took the remote to switch on the television. There were people on rows of chairs. She switched it off again.

“But everyone is busy,” she said.

“I'm not busy,” the secretary said, but Mrs. Blue did not respond. The secretary stood there for a few seconds, not knowing what to do, until she said, “Well,” and “Just let me know if you need anything,” and “Thank you for tea.”

“For God's sake, Laura,” Mrs. Blue said with her eyes closed as the secretary stepped out into the hallway. “Don't be such a pushover. Take what is coming to you. All right?”

“All right, of course,” the secretary said, and she closed the door with a soft click behind her.

GRACE IN THE STORY

“You couldn't let it rest, could you?” Rick said, his voice strange and mechanic. He was standing in front of Grace, the baseball bat raised above his head. He did not seem to see her, the gun she was holding in her shaking hands. He did not seem to hear her when she said, “I will shoot.”

The bat crashed onto the dresser, splintering the wood. Grace ducked right in time. With her back pressed against the wall she watched how Rick pulled the bat from the wood and started speaking to the empty space in front of him, as if she were lying there.

“I'm sorry, Gracie,” Rick said. “But you left me no choice.” Sweat glistened on his forehead and his face looked gray and exhausted, as though he had been awake for days on end.

Grace folded her finger around the trigger of the metal gun and aimed at Rick's legs.

MR. LUCAS AND THE HEADLIGHTS

Mr. Lucas was sitting on the chair next to his window. The girl had told him green might not be appropriate for a Memorial Service, and the yellow shirt might be a little bit too cheerful as well. She tried to tell him kindly, Mr. Lucas was aware of that, rambling about her own first day at the office, when her manager had told her that her skirts were much longer than those his previous secretary used to have, but Mr. Lucas had been so acutely nervous and ashamed of getting it wrong again that he had stammered, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and shut the window while she talked.

Now Mr. Lucas was sitting by the window with his head bent, his chin on his chest, but he was not sleeping. He was reprimanding himself. “You cannot even understand a simple thing like wearing black to a memorial. Must always be at the forefront, always get the attention, always think too much of yourself.”

In his hands he was holding the small scissors. He used those to cut up the yellow shirt, cutting it into tiny pieces so he would never consider wearing it again. The suit he placed in a tub filled with water and ink, to color it darker. He watched the fabric sink in the water.

In the background the news was playing. “I have received threats to my life from these people,” a politician said. “I can't say too much, but it proves they are violent by nature.”

By the time the evening fell Mr. Lucas was breathing in and breathing out normally again. He took the suit out of the tub and held it up in the air in front of the window. The moonlight showed its modest dark green color, almost black; nobody would be able to tell the difference.

Mr. Lucas was almost feeling completely calm and certain again, until he saw two familiar headlights approach his house through the thin fabric of the curtain.

ASHRAF AND THE CELLS OF THE BODY

Ashraf lay down in the passenger seat of his white van, the back of his chair reclined. He had parked it in a quiet street on the corner of the canal. He was going to sleep in the van tonight, because his aunt Nadia had found out he'd quit his job at City Statistics and they were all being hysterical about it. His uncle kept going on about the van, how it would be broken in a week. His mother was worrying about the payments on the mortgage and that his savings were gone.

Ashraf pulled the sleeping bag up over his chin and looked at the boats rocking back and forth in the canal. He wondered if there were fish in the canal and whether they could look above the water, and if they could, what they would think about what they saw. Fish don't think of course, he corrected himself. Fish do not know they exist at all. They just are, hanging in the water, eating plankton or something. Some fish did not even have a brain, like certain jellyfish. They were a collection of organisms that moved in the way that plants grew, not steered by the mind but more like pulled toward something: sunlight, food, mating. Ashraf looked at his face in the side mirror. He was the captain of his collection of cells, or at least his brain cells were. And all the cells renewed all the time, so the Ashraf he knew yesterday was not the Ashraf he was today. He was held together by his memories and his plans.

His first memory was of his mother, trying to tie a bow tie around his neck for the first day of school. They had put a wet cloth on his face because he was crying too much. Was that him? There was a teacher called Swan, he remembered, whom he planned to marry back then. Then he remembered his father's funeral; the memory always came back to him as a soundless black-and-white movie, him throwing up behind the bushes. He always had that eerie feeling that he was still there, stuck in that day forever, slowly progressing down the graveyard lane, throwing up when he saw the casket, carrying the casket, putting it down, lifting it back out again, back up the lane, and up again, over and over endlessly.

“Your father never had a problem with hard work,” his mother said today.

“And he died of a heart attack when he was forty-five,” he said.

He had made his mother cry. His mother cried very easily, but he still felt bad. He missed his father too, but he did not want to be like him, getting up every morning at six to work for some boss, making profit for some people he had never even met and not getting a step further himself. The problem with work was not work; he did not mind work, he liked work, he liked thinking and building things. He did not like what was expected of him. He did not like Nina at City Statistics putting her arm around his shoulders, saying, “You're not going to marry someone you've never met, are you, Ashraf?” And he would have to say, “No, of course not,” and dismiss the kind of living that he did not have anything to do with in the first place but was always associated with. Distance himself.

Ashraf looked out the window. There was an old man staring at him from behind a curtain. Ashraf raised his hand, but then he realized the man couldn't see him through the tinted windows. Ashraf pulled the sleeping bag tightly around him. With the radio playing he fell asleep.

RUS AT WANDA'S HOUSE