Yok (16 page)

I
can tell you how you rot from inside; you consistently refuse to show courage, you piss on yourself, swallow your own desires so many times that at last you suffocate and gasp for air, but the air is polluted by your own stinking resignation and so it's not enough, there's no oxygen left.

A vicious circle, and I've lived in it my whole life, it leads nowhere, not up and not down, not forward and not backward. It's an eternal wandering in the shadow of a life that never became more than a promise, the bitterness tastes like a sour belch and I swallow and swallow but can never be rid of it. I'm a lowlife—the worst kind, because I have enough imagination to visualize a different life, I can't even blame stupidity or narrow-mindedness, it's simply cowardice that paralyzes me, it's simply a need for security so overwhelming that it condemns me to live in degradation, rather than risk experiencing something that I don't know in advance what it will be.

And the circle closes when self-contempt paralyzes and pacifies me and makes me even more afraid than I was before, which disgusts me so much that for a few dizzying moments I think the energy generated by the disgust will be enough to break the pattern, but in some inconceivable manner it doesn't work that way. I know I have to stop cowering under this life, that I have to stop letting myself be exploited by my brothers; but when I think that nothing happens, my dishonesty becomes even clearer and I shake with anxiety before the pitiful wretch that's me, Erik Gecko.

T
oday was Tuesday, so I only had five days left (two of them on the weekend, so the opportunity to prepare before Monday was limited because my chores at home were particularly numerous and difficult on the weekend), so in reality I was very short of time. Instead of going back into the factory I went out onto the street, waited for the bus, and went home to Carrer de Carrera, where I got off, passed our doorway, and went to Sarah Mammoth . . .

“
Hi.

“Yeah, I know. But . . . today it's not like that.

“No, not today.

“May I look at your magazines a little?

“Yes, maybe you could say that.

“If you don't want to, then I can . . .

“Okay.”

Sometimes humor and irony are difficult and as usual I misunderstood the mammoth, who liked to joke. Actually, she had nothing at all against me browsing in the magazines, so I went about my work systematically, starting in the upper left-hand corner of the shelves, and five hours later (true, I got up every time a customer came in, waited on the sidewalk, and then resumed browsing where I'd been interrupted), I was done. By then I'd read about cars and houses, about rugs and yarn, about handbags and dogs, about celebrities and actors, and food and flowers but perhaps above all, I'd read a great deal about politics and business, I browsed through loads of theater magazines and literary journals and architectural magazines, and now my plan was to let all this information sink in during the evening and night, so that I could extract selected portions from my memory tomorrow and make a really, really good news item to read for Sparrow Dahl on Monday. Best of all was that I didn't get home later than usual and so I had time to clean my brothers' room and make their beds before it was time to start dinner. I had read the newspapers in the tobacco shop at the expense of my job, and I also decided to call in sick on Monday, which would be the fourth day in three weeks (because I had taken a “day off” with both Rasmus and Leopold), and to be honest I knew what was waiting, because no one is gone for four days in three weeks and gets to keep their job, least of all someone the polecat doesn't even like to start with; with all due respect to Rasmus and Leopold, there were limits even to what they could accomplish and I assumed my job was lost.

I realize, as I'm writing this, that this sounds irresponsible, sacrificing a permanent job in this way, but that's not true. I have no talent for melancholy or thoughtlessness, I'm a realist, I'm pragmatic, and while I was airing Rasmus's blanket out the window of the top floor, I again realized the obvious: I'm going to lose my job, I'll be forced to look for something new, and the only thing that worries me are my brothers, who are going to wonder and be worried and perhaps be mean to me, but at the same time they are going to be more worried about me being unemployed than about what I've done. And with my work ethic and seriousness and their ability to convince employers about my work ethic and seriousness, it will work out (because even if there aren't many job openings in Yok, there aren't many stuffed animals looking for jobs in Yok).

During dinner the brothers asked how my day went. They almost always ask that, and I told them that a rat burned up at my feet, and they laughed so that the tears ran and I did nothing to get them to understand that the event had been so unpleasant that I had made a life-changing decision afterward, in a way that was not at all typical for me.

T
he strangeness continued, because I can't describe it any other way and when I look back on those days I don't understand how I dared (because in most cases I don't dare anything) or where I got the energy from (because after work and then with everything that has to be done at home in most cases I don't have energy for anything), but down in the cellar, next to the storeroom where my brothers sometimes locked me in, was our linen closet of heavily patched and mended sheets, pillowcases, and towels, and on the way to the brewery the next morning I went past the linen closet and took one of my bottom sheets and one of my pillowcases, the blue-and-white-striped one, that I decided to turn into a jacket. That was what Leopold had said, and Rasmus, too, without saying it: If you wanted to be in the game and compete for a place on
New Mornings
, you had to dress for it, and I could sew, that was no problem, I had made almost all my brothers' clothes.

When I got to work I changed as usual (being in the brewery without overalls was a sign that something was off), but I didn't go down to the cellar because it was too dark to sew straight seams down there, and besides the odor of burning wood chips was so strong that the fabric would get all smoky. No, instead I sneaked into the large drying cabinet in the dressing room, which complied with a union demand that there should be a drying cabinet that size for the workers. I don't know why, maybe working hours were different before?

The cabinet was so large that there was a ceiling lamp inside and a bench to sit on, and like all drying cabinets it was well-insulated, which meant that after I'd climbed in and closed it no one could see or hear me unless they opened the door. I remained in the drying cabinet all day Thursday and Friday instead of going down to my place by the oven, and because the time clock is in the dressing room I clocked in and clocked out and changed, so I admit that a hope was born that I might still be able to keep the job, because the question was whether anyone actually missed me on the team. At least, I had never felt that I was more than yet another shovel, yet another pair of arms among a number of shovels and arms.

The jacket turned out elegant, if I may say so myself, with the sheet as lining and the blue-striped pillowcase transverse in the sleeves and lapel, which gave a striking but not pretentious impression. For buttons I used bottle caps, which I realize sounds cheap, but at the brewery there was a whole room of bottle caps and by no means were all of them used on the bottles Carlsweis currently produced. It wasn't hard to find a pair of small, white, nice-looking caps for the sleeves and another pair, blue and a little bigger, for buttoning.

O
ver the weekend there were several times I thought I would give myself away in front of my brothers and reveal my secret, but I can thank alcohol that it didn't happen: On Friday and Saturday Rasmus and Leopold got drunk and disappeared out in the city to find females to hug, and on Saturday and Sunday the hangover made them sluggish and irritable so they didn't want to have anything to do with me. My life continued on the surface exactly as usual: I scrubbed floors, did laundry, and prepared food. I took the opportunity to scrape and paint the window moldings on the top floor—which I should have done years ago—and I filled out and sent in all the forms, for myself as well as for Rasmus and Leopold, that the social service authorities required every month. But the whole time I was rehearsing the invented news items in my head, so that even if physically I was doing what I should, I was absent in every thought and moment and if either of my brothers had spoken to me, I probably would have started to ramble on about how a church is being built in postmodern style in north Tourquai, or that a (made-up) hostage drama was playing out at the Concert House on Pfaffendorfer Tor in Lanceheim.

I swear that when I went to bed on Sunday evening I was empty inside, exhausted from the mental overdrive I'd been in since Friday, and at the same time on tenterhooks from nervousness about the next day. Although I was so tired I felt ill, I didn't fall asleep until it was basically time to wake up again, so you may question whether I gave myself the best possible chance before the test that awaited me.

I
betray myself, again and again, daily and hourly, I hate myself, I despise myself, I loathe myself, and all these feelings make my steps so heavy I don't have any oomph left. I'm finished. I'm nobody. What does integrity look like? Is it about standing by your thoughts, or standing by your actions, or standing up for yourself, and is it possible to distinguish one from the other: Shouldn't my thoughts lead to actions that add up to who I am? Can I call an insight that remains an intellectual seed an insight, even if it never develops into anything more than a fantasy, a stupid and childish and irresponsible and romantic idea that hovers freely by itself and has nothing to do with my identity? The sum of my fantasies is not me, the sum of my dreams is a taunt that makes me doubt, and only cynicism can raise me up from my anxiety, while the sum of my actions is just as pathetic as the spineless stuffed animal who every day is stuck in deadlock that inhibits and holds him back, and that must be the way I want it to be, on a deeply unconscious level, but this is impossible to understand rationally, because I am ashamed to my stuffing about my helplessness, and all the beatings I get from my brothers are exactly what I'm worth, all the work they force me to do is only a small repayment that has to happen daily so that I can put up with the quivering, evasive stuffed animal that is me. Integrity, I ask myself again: What does it look like? It strikes me that this very question is one that someone like me can never answer, because if I could, I never would have needed to ask it.

T
hey ask me to begin, but it's as if the voice is coming from nowhere, that I'm hearing it through a filter that makes it impossible to place, the same fog that keeps the world at a distance, that makes reality diffuse. I look down at my short claws on the table before me and I think that it's not my toes they're attached to, not my toes that are moving, even though I've chosen to move them. It's as if I've taken some kind of drug that isolates me from experiences, from feelings—physical as well as mental—and they are asking me to begin. At first I don't feel my tongue moving in my mouth and after a while it feels much too tangible, it's moving out of sync with the words.

Just a few minutes ago I was quivering with nervousness; every movement, every sound made me jump, on tenterhooks, the slightest vibration transmitted through the floor and up into the chair I was sitting in, waiting for my name to be called, the smells from the stuffed animals sitting alongside, the colors of their clothes, I registered everything with an acuity that I'd never experienced before, and no matter how much water I drank my mouth and throat dried up again the next moment. I didn't rehearse my speech because I was much too nervous to remember so many sentences in a row, and then they called out my name and I got up and went straight into this fog.

They ask me to start, and I start, I let the words run out of my mouth without understanding what I'm saying, I hardly hear my voice, I stare right in front of me because there somewhere I think I see a camera lens staring back, but I'm still unsure, I stare and talk and talk and stare and nothing seems to happen, no one reacts to anything I'm saying, and deep down in my closed-off brain panic is sneaking around looking for a door. What if what I'm saying isn't coherent, what if it's just nonsense, what if I'm not looking into the camera, and once my brain has started to formulate these questions there are more and more: What if my jacket split, what if I have milk on my chin, what if I stutter?

They ask me to start, and I don't know how or why I know that I'm finished, but when I'm finished I get up right when the words come to an end and leave the room. I run out of there, and when I feel someone take hold of my shoulder I tear myself loose, a button in my jacket comes unfastened, and when I get home several hours later I discover it's gone, the button must have fallen off.

Back home on Monday afternoon on my honey yellow Carrer de Carrera, I can't say I regret it, for even if the experience of having lost all control feels horrible, deep inside the discomfort a little kernel of joy is hiding. It's strange how it works, and I can't explain it better than that, even though it was horrible and I landed in a black hole of terror and performance anxiety, I'm longing to go back, and I know that I take with me a memory, a blurred memory, of a great moment in life.

It's almost as if I'm not afraid when I step into the hall and carefully call to my brothers who aren't home, thank goodness, and I go to make dinner as usual and wonder what the polecat will say tomorrow at work and whether it's over now, if I'll be forced to look for something new.

O
n the bus on Tuesday nothing has happened yet, even though I woke up and thought that now something has to happen, something else, now the brothers have uncovered me, now the polecat has uncovered me, I've been talking in my sleep. I ought to throw away the jacket, to remove evidence, and my plan was to slip it into a half-full Dumpster that I've seen on my way from the bus stop to the brewery, and which day after day is filled with trash and rubbish from stuffed animals who come during the night and (probably just like me) dump some kind of evidence. But I can't do it; there's too much care and struggle behind every seam in my blue-striped jacket, it carries the memory of My Great Experience, so even if it does sound a little pathetic I've hidden it in the storeroom in the cellar, wadded it up so it looks like all the other worn-out linens we have down there.