Rus Like Everyone Else (25 page)

“Hello, hello,” Mr. Lucas said. “This is Mr. Frankfurt speaking. I would like to have some information about the Memorial Service.” Mr. Lucas was calling with a fake name so there would be no document of him making this call. He had always disliked it when there were documents about him.

“Yes,” Mr. Lucas said. “Could you tell me how many meters the Queen will be standing from the Survivor Area, and if there will be guards between the survivors and the Queen?” He rolled out the map he was going to take to the Memorial Service and drew circles and lines on it. “And where exactly will the Queen be standing? I've heard she will be standing under the monument, but will she be on a stage of some sort or on the ground?”

If she was more than fifty meters away he would bring his binoculars, and if she was not on a stage he might even consider making his shoes a little higher.

“Hello?” Mr. Lucas said in the telephone. The person on the other side of the line was taking a very long time to reply.

When he finally got a reply it was from a different, more serious voice.

“Why do you need this information?” the voice said. “I need your address and postal code.”

“It is just Mr. Frankfurt,” Mr. Lucas said, “calling out of personal interest. Never mind. Thank you,” and he hung up again. He drew a large red cross on his map in the place where the Queen was going to be. He folded the map and placed it in his bag for the next day, and also put his binoculars in there, and his Swiss Army knife just in case. Tomorrow he was going to listen to the hypnosis tape one more time and then take the bus at ten
A.M
.

EXCUSE ME

“Ah!” Rus said. “Stop it!”

He put down Ming Rong Heng's file on his desk and looked up at the air vent. It was almost like there was an animal walking through the ventilation pipes, right above Rus's head. The sounds kept interrupting his work flow, and it had distracted him so that he had missed a zero in the check sum, causing all the subsequent numbers in the file to turn out wrong. Around Rus, his colleagues exchanged glances.

Rus shook his head. “I can't work like this,” he said to the others. “How can you work with this noise?”

His colleagues were bent over their papers again, typing in numbers on their keyboards as if they hadn't heard what he said.

Rus leaned over his desk toward Fokuhama, who sat across from him.

“Fokuhama,” he said, touching his arm.

With a sigh, Fokuhama looked up from his papers.

“What is that noise in the air vent?” Rus asked. “I keep hearing something in there. What can we do about it?”

Fokuhama rolled his chair back a bit. “Excuse me. Can I point out that the personal distance as recommended in the guidelines is seventy centimeters. And non-work-related matters cannot be discussed during work hours. Thank you.”

Rus looked at Fokuhama, who raised his eyebrows and tapped on the small pile of files in the inbox on his desk. “Thank you,” he said again.

“You're welcome,” Rus said.

He rolled his chair back to his desk. The white grating of the air vent stared back at him.

Then the phone on Rus's desk rang. It rang a few times until Rus realized he should pick it up. “Desk number thirty-four,” he said in the phone.

“Hi, it's me,” a voice said in Rus's ear.

“Who?” Rus said. He looked up at the ceiling. He was sure he saw a white shape move past the grating.

“It's me,” the voice said, “your sweetie.”

“My what?” Rus said, squinting at the ceiling. “Who?”

“Me! It's me!” the voice said, loud and angry now.

Rus lowered his head suddenly and looked startled at the telephone. “Mama?”

“No, it's Wanda,” Wanda shouted in the telephone. “I wanted to know if you were reaching your target today. Are you working right now?”

“Oh, Wanda,” Rus said. “No, there is a sound here and none of my colleagues seem to hear it. There it is again. Do you hear it?”

He held the telephone up as the scraping sound came from the air vent again.

“Rus,” Wanda's voice shouted softly from the telephone. “What are you doing? Are you reaching your target today?”

“Got to go,” Rus said. It was three o'clock. He pressed the button with the picture of the red telephone on the telephone and walked to the kitchen in the corner of the office, where his coworkers had gathered for the coffee break.

“The hairs in the sink! He just leaves them there for me to clean up.” Rus's female colleagues were chatting by the sink. Fokuhama was pouring their coffees.

“I know,” another woman said, “don't you just want to kill him?”

“I know,” the other woman said, and another woman also said, “I know.”

Rus recognized this situation from Wanda's TV show.

He joined in the conversation: “Yes, sometimes Wanda bites her nails and it makes a horrible sound.”

“Ah,” one of the women said.

“Speaking of sounds,” Rus said, “I would like to ask about that awful sound coming from the air vent. Does anyone know what that sound is and when it is going to be fixed? It really takes me out of my concentration and I have a hundred files left.”

The women did not say anything. They stirred their coffees. Fokuhama coughed loudly.

“Sometimes I hear something hard scratch the iron, something like claws,” Rus continued. “I think there could be a bird in there. I used to have a bird that lived in the drainpipe when I still lived on Low Street, before the debt collectors auctioned everything.”

“Ah,” one of the women said. The others looked away.

“I find it very hard to work like this,” Rus repeated. “When will someone do something about it?”

Nobody said anything. Fokuhama coughed again.

Not understanding what was going on, Rus looked about him. The situation reminded him of what happened when his mother made him approach the other kids in his street for his birthday party. His knees were shaking a bit.

Then the noise began again. It was audible all the way over in the coffee corner.

“Does anyone know anything about that sound?” Rus asked again. “Could you please answer my question?”

Finally, Fokuhama turned around toward Rus. “I think the coffee break is over.”

ASHRAF IN THE PARKING LOT

Ashraf was carrying the boxes to the van. He had once seen a documentary about tribes in the jungle that had to catch their food every day. They ate monkeys.

“The monkeys are becoming rare, and there are more and more cases of native tribes reporting to the city borders,” the voice-over had said, “asking to take part in modernity.”

Ashraf wondered why he was never thankful, like the man in the police station said he should be. He thought about the people in poor countries, the hours they worked, the low wages they got, so he could live here working only fifty hours a week and own a television and a washing machine.

It must have been nice to live in a time when they did not know yet that communism didn't work, he thought, as he waited for Richie to finish his coffee and get in the van.

THE SECONDS

The secretary lay on her back on the tiles of the bathroom. The frozen faces of her parents were looking at her from their picture frames on the white wall. The room was silent except for the loud
and continuing ticking of the clock. The secretary registered every minute. Like the views from a train window the seconds passed her by, approaching her fast and inescapable from the distance, but when they were finally there she could not hold on to them because they were already gone.

The secretary curled up her knees to her chin. She thought about what she had said to Fokuhama, about something sitting inside of her, waiting to come out. Inside of her was nothing, she knew now. She was empty like the apartment around her, and nothing would happen there unless she made it.

She looked up at her parents' pictures. Her father looked down on her, posing with his visitor face. “How are you, darling?” his eyes seemed to say. “Good?” Her mother was smiling, immobile and inaccessible in her frame.

The secretary thought of all the plans she'd had, all her dreams: images of someone whose face would light up as she entered the room, a ring in a box, a group of people saying how charming she was.

It was all the same dream: one person who would choose her, one person who would be the proof that she was somebody. That she too had the right to exist.

She closed her eyes again. The clock ticked loudly in her ear. She counted the seconds. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.

THE BOSS'S SON

The Queen guided the boss's son to the middle of the room. “Stay here,” she said. Then she turned around and walked out of the chamber into the corridors of the palace. After a few minutes she came back.

“Well?” she said.

“I was still there,” the boss's son said. “I am pretty sure I did not disappear.”

“Pretty sure?” the Queen said. “Or completely sure?”

“Completely,” the boss's son said. “Completely sure.”

“You're just saying that,” the Queen said, squinting her eyes. “I'd
say that too if I were my own make-believe. I'd say exactly that.”

With one sweep she threw the crown she was supposed to wear at the Memorial Service in the corner and sat down on the floor. The boss's son had never seen her look so sad. He did not know what to say and looked down at his bandaged feet.

“If I am the only one who is real,” the Queen said, “then I am all alone. Do you understand that?”

BARRY'S PARTY