The Question of Bruno (20 page)

But then he saw a sign in the misty window of the ice cream parlor saying COME IN, so he decided to have some ice cream. He greeted the owner (in English), a Russian man who grew his mustache in proportion to the growth of his business.

At this particular moment, it was the thin mustache of a passionate toreador.

Pronek got a large scoop of rainbow sorbet, and began licking it with ardor immediately, careful to devote equal attention to each color, his tongue becoming multicolored in the process. He foolishly glanced at the corner drug dealer, who mad-dogged him for an intense moment. Pronek collected himself enough to look down at the tips of his shoes, which were habitually uncomfortable, while his tormented big toe occasionally wiggled in pain.

As the train was stopping, he licked away the rainbow and munched away the cone. A sliding door opened right before him (“Open Sesame,” he thought). He entered the car and the
door closed behind him. “Twenty-two minutes to downtown,” said a sign. The car was empty, except for the man who talked to his hands. Pronek had seen him before: the man gibbering into his palms, his hands supine in his lap, every now and then poking the center of his left palm with his right index finger, pressing a magic button. The clatter and murmur of the speeding train made Pronek drowsy, so he closed his eyes. He heard the hum of his blood, and for reasons not known to us, a rather meaningless sequence of words reached the spawny surface of his mind: “Split my head like a watermelon.” He opened his eyes and saw the new passengers, just materialized around him, inconspicuously surrounding him. The man who talked to his palms was collecting every piece of paper he could find: he would slide under the seats to retrieve a leaflet saying: “Lord is with you”; he would empty McDonald’s bags on the floor, and then fold them up; he would stuff newspaper pages into his trench coat, covered with different shades of filth. Finally, he sat in front of Pronek and began peeling off a Guardian Angels sticker on the window, as if his job were to collect evidence of a vast crime. The man kept refrowning, waves of worries slamming against the inside of his forehead. Pronek watched his long yellow nails with a crescent of gray dirt clawing the sticker, then he panned to the man’s temple and saw (zoom) a louse crawling through the man’s ashen hair.

Split my head like a watermelon.

Downtown Chicago had streets named after deceased presidents, and Pronek thought that it was built as the presidents played monopoly in heaven (or hell, let us not be presumptuous), and then piled up buildings on their streets after a favorable roll of the dice. Pronek went eastward down Jackson to Michigan Avenue, and then walked north, until he found the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery.

A woman, labeled Dawn Wyman by a little steel name tag on her semitransparent shirt, was waiting for him. Her hair was puffed up, as if there was a steady stream of warm air coming out of her skull. Her eyelids were efficiently blue, echoing the hue of her skirt. She had eyeball-shaped earrings, whose quaking pupils glared at Pronek.

“Where are you from?” Dawn asked.

“Bosnia,” Pronek said.

“That’s in Russia, right?”

“It was in Yugoslavia.”

“Right. Well, tell me why you would like to work for us.”

A man with a white cowboy hat was sitting in the corner, under a picture of the first Boudin Bakery, established in San Francisco in the black-and-white times. He was excavating shit-brown spoonfuls of something from a round loaf of bread. Then he determinedly shoved the plastic spoon into his mouth.

“I like European touch here,” Pronek said.

“Right,” Dawn said and routinely smiled. There was a shade of lipstick on her white teeth. “We like to provide something different, something for the customer with sophisticated taste and international experience.”

“Right,” Pronek said.

“What do you think you can offer to the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery?”

The man in the cowboy hat dropped the spoon in the loaf, smacked his lips, then took off his big hat and wiped his melon, with a bulbous wart above the right eyebrow. He put his hat back on, stood up, pulled his pants to the middle of his belly, then emptied the tray into a garbage bin. The loaf slid into the black gaping orifice of the bin, and Pronek heard the whump.

“I can offer hard work and life experience. I am hard worker and I like to work with people. I used to be journalist and communicated very much,” he said.

“Right,” Dawn said, looking at the application, uninterested. “What do you expect your wage to be?”

“I don’t know. Ten dollars for hour.”

“We can offer you five, and maybe later you can work your way up. Here everyone has a fair chance.”

“Good,” Pronek said.

Thus Pronek became a member of the large Boudin French Sourdough family, and was consequently given the respectable and responsible duty of kitchen help.

He cut croissants open, spread Dijon mustard all over their insides (“Not too much,” Dawn would suggest in passing), and then pass them on to the sandwich person (“This is the sandwich person. This is the kitchen help,” Dawn introduced them to each other). He was taken off that job, after he nearly sliced off his left thumb and passed on a sequence of blood-soaked croissants to the sandwich person. He would cut tomatoes into thin slices (“Thinner,” Dawn would suggest in passing), and he would sprinkle cheese crumbles over a platoon of mini-pizzas. He would fill up styrofoam bowls with the reduced-sodium, fat-free Cajun gumbo soup, and pass them on to the soup person, until he dipped his incised thumb into a scorching jumbo gumbo (“Small bowl—large gumbo. Big bowl—jumbo gumbo,” Dawn succinctly explained the essence of the gumbo situation), whereupon he dropped the bowl on the floor, earning a couple of burns on his ankles. He would cut off the top of a sourdough loaf, and then disembowel it, throwing the soft yeast-smelling viscera into a garbage can, feeling dreadfully guilty for some reason, so he ate a lot of it the first
day, and received gut-wrenching cramps as a punishment. Then he would fill up the hollow with reduced-fat chili.

The first time he went to the safe-like Frigidaire to get a lettuce head, the doors closed slowly behind him and he found himself in the midst of an immutable gelid hum, feebly lit by a solitary bulb. He imagined freezing to death, being found frosted, his eyes wide open, minuscule icicles on his eyelashes, lying with his pate stuck in a crate of lettuce. He began pounding the door, yelping for help, but no one was out there, no one could hear him. He leaned his head against the door in moribund desperation, and his forehead stuck to the icy surface. He tried to peel it off, but it was painful and he was overwhelmed by fatalistic weakness.

So when Dawn opened the door, he stumbled out, his forehead pulled by the force of Dawn, and then stood before her with a scarlet mark across his forehead.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her plucked eyebrows rising into two symmetrical nail clips.

“I was closed there,” Pronek said.

“You can open the door from the inside, you just have to push it a little,” she said.

“Oh, I know,” Pronek said and hastened toward the safety of dish-washing duties.

From that point on in his food-service career, Pronek was firmly in charge of garbage disposal. He became an apprentice to a man named Hemon. Pronek didn’t know whether Hemon was the man’s first or the man’s last name, but he was from the Dominican Republic, and came to the United States to become a professional soccer player. Pronek inferred Hemon’s soccer dream, after he pointed at himself and kept repeating: “McMannaman,” and then made the motion of kicking a soccer
ball. Hemon was tall and, Pronek thought, not particularly intelligent, although he would say nothing, since he spoke no English. They would empty abandoned trays with hollowed-out loaves, mauled croissants, desiccated bowls, into garbage bins; they would pull out loaded garbage bags, tie a knot around the bag’s throat and drag them like corpses (“Hurry,” Dawn would suggest in passing) to the garbage cart in a back nook of the kitchen. Pronek would push the cart with Hemon, who did it with habitual despondency, down the hall beyond the kitchen, through the mean swinging doors that would always slam their backs or heels, then wait for the elevator. There was a little camera above the door, glaring down at them. They would stare at the elevator door in silence, waiting for it to slide open. They would press the lowest button and stand by the garbage, separated by the cart, as if they were honorary guards saluting an important casket. They would go all the way to the bottom, sinking into the molasses of silence, and when the door would slide open, a billow of cold, putrescent air would slap their faces. They would push the cart into a low-ceilinged grotto with a humongous garbage container, often brimming over with the black garbage bags, in its center.

To their simple minds, this was the supreme garbage bin, to which they were compelled to offer daily oblations.

They would push the cart onto an altar-like lift, hook up the axle of the cart, then raise it to the edge of the container. One of them would push a red button that would make the altar flip over and empty out the cart. Often, the cart would just maliciously drop in, and they would have to enter the supreme garbage bin, which would groan with pleasure. They would have to lift the cart above their heads, up to their knees in rotting food, and midwife it out of the bin, as a mixture of mayo, Dijon mustard, vinegar, gumbo, and reduced-fat chili
crawled down their forearms. They would wash the garbage remnants out of the cart, wash their hands (“Employees must wash their hands,” the sign over the sink said) never being able to wash thin lines of dirt out of the furrows of their palms.

At their lunch breaks, Pronek and Hemon would sit in bilingual silence, gawking at the people occupying Boudin tables: a man with a dragon spewing fire on his forearm and a patch over his eye, slurping jumbo gumbo, meticulously unshaven; a lone, slender, black woman reading
Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth
, having bitten off only the tip of her crescent croissant; an obese four-member family, with the same pumpkin heads, round girths and oblong calves, as if they belonged to a species that reproduced by fission; a gentleman in a austere navy-blue suit, with standard CEO gray hair and rimless glasses, reading a surfing magazine, while several leaves of romaine lettuce lay neatly stacked next to his styrofoam plate; two teenage boys sporting facial cobwebs and “Smashing Pumpkins” T-shirts, walled off by a parapet of shopping bags, rating breasts (referring to them as “doves”) available in the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery; a bespectacled, perspiring, bald, scrawny man talking to a virgin bag of potato chips (“Do you think I’m afraid of you? Well, you’re wrong!”), which Pronek afterward quickly and warily dumped into a bin.

“What kind of evolutional soup did these people’s lives emerge from?” Pronek wondered (not in quite so many words and in his native language). “How did they become who they are and not someone else?” He would (wrongly) assume that Hemon might understand him, because of the labor experience they had shared, and he would try to talk to him about the tortuous questions of the randomness of life and death, about how easy it was to become someone else, a complete stranger to oneself, once one lost control of “the river of life.”
But Hemon did not understand a word of Pronek’s pondering—he would just wearily smile, point at himself with his thumb bent backward and say: “McMannaman!”

Pronek would ride the El back to his (well, Andrea’s) place, standing, with the pain in his legs as solid as steel rods, the car full of exhausted people, exuding sweaty fragrances, bunched together, like asparagus in the supermarket.

Andrea went to Ukraine (“I need some space,” she said to Pronek. “But you can stay here”), and the apartment was being renovated, since Andrea’s parents wanted to sell it. Carwin moved in with Chad, so there were only four Polish construction workers waiting for Pronek, stripping off walls, ripping out door posts, and digging up the floor tiles. There was a nylon path leading to Andrea’s room, weighed down with paint cans. Pronek had to go under the ladder, which kept changing its position every day, and then stumbled through the jungle of wet brushes, obscure tools, strewn crooked nails, and paint smudges to get to the room, which now looked like a monk’s cell: only the bed, a little tower of books, hollow suitcases, a TV, and a mound of filthy, moist clothes decaying in the corner. He would enter it as if it were a submarine that would take him to the placidity of the ocean bottom: nameless fish, flattened by the incomprehensible pressure of the great water, glimmering plankton and evanescent protozoa floating slowly by his window in absolute, mesmerizing silence. He would stay in the room until the workers were gone and then, disregarding the skinned walls and distended door cavities, he would heat up a can of tomato soup, sprinkle it with some oregano redolent of hay. The sink was empty now, all the plates and mold were gone, except for a single fork, which he used to empty a can of soggy tuna. He would slurp the soup in Andrea’s bed, the tuna waiting its turn, watching
Headline
News:
Sarajevo was besieged, there was a severe lack of food, there were rumors of Serbian concentration camps, but he only watched the images to recognize the people in them. Once he thought he saw his father, running down Sniper’s Alley, but he couldn’t be sure, because the man hid his head behind a folded-up newspaper. The man’s gait looked familiar though: big strides, the man slightly bent forward, his right arm swaying like a pendulum.

He would then go to sleep. He stopped turning the light off after he had seen footage of Sarajevo at night, in complete, endless darkness, with bullets and rockets incising and illuminating the sky. His sleep would be well short of restful, marred by nightmares and an anxious bladder.

In the morning, the Polish workers would wake him up with their diligent chitter-chatter. When they began taking the ceiling down they exposed the rib-like beams, and Pronek would have a feeling of waking up inside a whale. The Poles would try to communicate with him, but he couldn’t understand them—even though all the words and sounds were disturbingly familiar, as if he were coming back, and very slowly at that, from an abyss of amnesia. He would sit in the kitchen sipping feculent coffee and gnawing on a sapless Twinkie, watching them busting the ceiling, dust coating their bushy eyebrows and basketball-shaped bellies. They held the hammers in their sturdy hands with wide thumbs and flat, broad nails, slamming the ceiling above them with ease.