High Tide (18 page)

January 15
th

 

 

There's
nothing good about a 200-plus-pound black guy emerging suddenly from the shadows and jumping you. Ieva's happy for anyone who hasn't had to experience that.

At first Ieva doesn't understand what he wants, he just comes at them. In the moment his heavy hand comes to rest on Ieva's shoulder, when she catches a whiff of his hot breath, acrid from eating Latvian garlic toast, and when she understands the true consequence of trouble—this is the moment he first sees Aksels. Aksels stands next to her in the biting December wind, and the white light by the entrance of Polārs Bar sways, pulling his face from the framework of the night. The black guy immediately shoves Ieva to the side and lunges for Aksels.

Ieva lets them fight. She senses that something awful could happen right then, but god dammit, she can't do anything about it. Ieva screams out something, but her voice drowns among the sounds of the slush-covered street.

The black guy throws Aksels down onto the ice. The puddles on the sidewalk are frozen over, dark as onyx. Shit, Ieva says to Ningela, the gypsy or Indian woman who materializes in the Polārs doorway. Shit, Ieva says, see what the Āgenskalns neighborhood has become! Blacks and Indians! But Ningela doesn't understand. Ieva's speaking Latvian, but Ningela only knows a few words of the language.

Ningela pushes back a few nosy people who flicker like shadows in the bar's entrance, and then slams the door. Enough, Ningela shouts out at them in Russian, enough!—but the black guy doesn't hear her. Tell him to stop, tell him that's enough, Ningela screams, hoping Ieva will put an end to it. The black guy's boot flashes in the light of the weak lamp. Aksels is there, in the dark, on the ground, on the ice, or who knows where. Ieva grabs a board leaning against the wall and hits the black guy across the back. It stops him for a second, and Aksels manages to get away. It's what Ieva has been hoping for this entire time, that Aksels would run if anything ever happened. Ieva doesn't know why he didn't run when he had the chance that night. Maybe his pride was at fault. Ieva had underestimated him—Aksels, it turns out, isn't someone who runs.

It's only when Ieva slams the board into the black guy's back that Aksels clambers awkwardly across the ice and into the darkness. Right then his fate was already sealed, he just didn't know it yet. Ieva takes off after him.

Then she yells at Ningela for a while longer from the darkness at a safe distance, while Ningela stands on the steps of the bar, her white slippers reflecting a weak glow in the never-ending curtain of snow. Ieva understands enough of what Ningela is saying to know people think Ieva and Aksels snitched to the cops. That the cops busted them for 30 grams of marijuana. That Ningela's daughter was arrested and that they now blame Ieva and Aksels. Ieva doesn't know who told them that bullshit. While Ieva and Ningela are shouting at each other, Aksels stands behind Ieva, she feels him against her back—his mute presence, his support. The black guy leans against the front of the bar, short of breath and seething, spitting dark drops of blood from his split lip onto the white snow. He pulls a joint out of his shirt pocket. A third of it has already been smoked, and he slowly and calmly lights it up again. He's even blacker against the falling snow and the cold glare from the bar. Ieva can smell the heavy scent of weed, even through the mush of snow and rain. Son of a bitch! Where did he come from! Fuck! Ieva and Aksels leave. Empty-handed.

 

Nothing changes much after the night that black guy kicked Aksels. Ieva goes to work, but Aksels sits around at home. A friend pays back a debt—homegrown marijuana from the countryside, and a bit of cash. Aksels jokes that you can't have the bad without the good. Every cloud has its silver lining. He says this, Ieva's pigeon-grey love with a silver lining. This lining shines all around him—in his hair, his skin, fingertips. A glimmering vein around his dark rainbows.

That's how they spend the last night of the year—pressed close together on a mattress. The first morning of the New Year arrives and Ieva looks intently at his eyes when they open. At how they move, his eyes, at what they look like. It's so wonderful, life. Liveliness. The life, the liveliness that hides in Aksels.

Aksels doesn't contemplate life.

 

Ieva is the first to wake up and watches Aksels closely, resting on her right elbow as he lies half awake. He rubs his forehead, then his face contorts as he untangles himself from his dreams, and his eyes fly open. His eyes search, they're in the moment, they find Ieva, and they clear. Ieva freezes, afraid to breathe. He looks at her silently for a moment, then smiles and reaches for a cigarette. Nothing out of the ordinary. This is how their mornings start. For two years Ieva has had no greater secret than the man next to her.

A week later he can't even get up if he's sitting, or sit down if he's standing. He says Ieva's being ridiculous and has her go buy weed. Ieva smokes less so that he can have twice as much. The usual kindness toward everyone and everything that comes from smoking up. The thrilling generosity. Ieva doesn't say a single negative thing to Aksels. They almost stop talking completely. When they eat dinner, Ieva knows to go get a fork, or glass, or knife, even if he just looks at her. Until he tells her—enough. He's sick of seeing this warmhearted nurse everywhere, stop it, Ieva! And she stops. And just looks at him with wide, frightened eyes.

 

She's scared of how shivers run through her bones when she looks at Aksels. She can't avoid it. Countless times she'll go to kiss him, to simply and lightly touch her lips to his; Ieva does this every time he starts to say something, or when he watches TV, or when he quietly smiles to himself. And he'll impatiently wave her off, but not reprimand her. Aksels knows—if he reprimands her at a moment like that, he'd cut her to the depths of her heart. But he also knows that when Ieva kisses him, she's trying to hold onto a part of him, and that cuts him a hundred times deeper. I haven't even gone anywhere yet, he thinks, hope dies last, don't you know that, dear Ieva? He can't bring himself to say it out loud.

Ieva looks at him and now and then runs a hand through his hair. Touches her lips to his eyebrows, eyelashes, ears. Ieva loves Aksels. In this exact moment. In this exact moment.

 

That black guy wrecked Aksels's hip while they were fighting on the ice. One night Ieva wakes up to a stifled cry in the pitch-black room. Terrified, she feels for the lamp. When the light bursts harsh and bare into the room, she sees that Aksels's face is covered in sweat and he's barely able to catch his breath from the pain. In the kitchen, the refrigerator lets out a loud whir and falls silent. Ieva rummages in the shelves for all the stashes of weed she can find. Aksels asks her to turn off the light, it's hurting him. Ieva opens the curtains and turns out the light. They lie in the reddish glow of the city. Hold each other by the hand and wait for the drugs to kick in. They don't. Ieva carefully frees her fingers from his and feels along his side downwards, even though he tries to stop her, pushes her hand away. But Ieva keeps going, even forcefully, while she stares unblinkingly out the window where the evening wind ferries light and shining clouds. Aksels's hip is hot and swollen like a chestnut about to burst.

For a second Ieva pulls her hand away; she sees the true extent of misfortune.

 

The following morning they go to the clinic. Ieva sends Als a text message saying he shouldn't expect her at work. Als answers she shouldn't expect to have a job tomorrow. And if that wasn't enough, the eggs burn in the pan, and Aksels starts making excuses. Says he doesn't want to go to the clinic, Ieva should just go buy more weed. Like a geezer asking his old lady for his morning dose of vodka. Then Ieva flares up. A few plates shatter against the peeling kitchen wallpaper. White shards rain down on the strange and silent rusty fragments that lay about their kitchen like sleeping goliaths, these things that barely resemble an old gas stove, small propane tanks, and cast iron radiators. It's a new January morning outside—a chilled aquarium bubbling with the icy greens, reds, and blues of the sky.

To get weed, Ieva screams, to get weed! She snatches the lit cigarette from Aksels's fingers and smashes it into the sink. Always with this disgusting smoke, I can't breathe! I can't breathe, Ieva screams, but Aksels smirks in confusion. You dick around here day after day, or go drinking downtown, but I have to work in the market and freeze while I watch picky old women paw mandarins with their chubby fingers and ask—Where are these from? From Latvia, I tell them, from across the river in Mārupe! They puff up like pigeons and swear at me, then go away. Als writes down everything I say behind my back, in a black notebook. He hates it when I upset the customers. Then he docks my pay, sneering with his stupid Chechen—or whatever he is—face. Minus ten lats, he says, or minus five. Depends on the day. But all the while Aksels sits around in front of the TV and smokes the weed bought with the money Ieva earned! How do you think Ieva likes that!

But all she really wants to say is that he needs to go to the clinic. He gets it and pulls on his jacket. And for that she loves him. For often respecting her seriousness. For the simultaneously simple and painful gesture with which he finally gets to his feet and pulls on his old leather jacket.

Ieva looks in every possible place for her passport, finally finds it in the hallway under some dusty bicycle parts. Aksels, it turns out, has a different name written in his passport. Ieva decides the name Aksels suits him much better. He looks at his passport as if in wonder. He's sweating just from waiting. The stairwell reeks of piss. They're both twenty-one years old.

 

Ieva remembers—they're taking the tram. She doesn't remember which line. Aksels stands opposite her and looks out the window. He's dealing with the pain. His face glassy and his eyes steel.

They sit next to each other at the clinic. Rest their hands on each others' knee in this strange world; the background whines with the sound of a dentist's drill and the foreground is full of patients struggling to find a seat on the long benches lining the halls.

Aksels is called in and Ieva goes with him. He doesn't have a patient card, he's not registered and has never been to this clinic. They're sent from one office to another until they find the right one. A good amount of money is spent to get him registered somewhere. Destruction whimpers quietly in every corner: pensioners sputter and curse, sweating mothers sigh heavily as they hold their babies.

They need to X-ray Aksels's side. He undresses and lies down on the table. Ieva stands back a bit like his escaped shadow and watches silently. The nurses try to position Aksels's hips in the right angle. He digs his mouth into Ieva's palm and screams noiselessly in this dark, warm abyss. Ieva glances fondly at his hips. They're as beautiful as they always are, so slim. The skin of his groin like light velvet. His penis darker, regal, and haloed by golden hairs. She's happy the nurses get to see it, too. She cries out of pride. Everything happens at once and doesn't want to stop. They can't X-ray his hip. He screams through her hand, bites her fingers until they bleed. The doctor decides to administer anesthesia. A needle sinks into Aksels's vein, and his body instantly goes slack, as obedient as a ragdoll. His hips are positioned into the right angle. The lens moves toward the only place on his body that is void of beauty, the place that has opened the door to chaos.

 

He's out of it for a long time, laid out on a brown, pleather couch. His body is wracked by chills, he's freezing. Ieva covers him, wraps him in a blanket. She sits next to him on a white stool, motionless, while Aksels is broken by the nightmares of narcosis. It's hell for both of them—Aksels's convulsions and Ieva's motionlessness, their mutual isolation. Finally they both come to in the same world; Aksels opens his eyes, but they're not his own. They've switched him out from where he used to be.

Ieva helps him dress. The nurse comes in and hands Ieva his hip X-rays and a referral to the hospital, then anxiously asks them if Aksels doesn't want to wait here longer for the anesthetic to wear off. They shake their heads “no” almost in unison.

 

Outside the city has snowed over, ice crystals crunch underfoot, children run around with red cheeks and lips shiny from sucking on icicles. Tires creak, the tram tracks sing, street sweepers clear snow with silver shovels. The sun burns the piles of snow along the sides of the street like fire. No road has ever, nor will it ever, seemed so long as those few hundred meters to the tram stop. Now and then the wind pushes loose bricks of snow from the clubbed branches of the linden trees. Aksels supports himself on Ieva's shoulder—rather, he's slumped against it. He feels so heavy, waterlogged. A few times he falls onto a pile of snow and wants to rest there. Ieva doesn't let him. C'mon, let's go, she says, c'mon, c'mon! Ieva isn't thinking of anything, not even the tiniest thought. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon.

 

In truth, Ieva has nothing more to say. She asks Andrejs to take them to the hospital tomorrow. The sun shines brightly as Ieva smokes at the gate of Andrejs's mechanic shop, and he looks at her with lazy, half-lidded eyes. Of course I'll help, he says, when have I ever not helped you…

The icy wind blows the smoke back into her face, the contours of her lips are red and raw. You've totally wasted away, Andrejs says. Of course, Ieva says and looks away, it's from the stress.

Andrejs asks:

“Why are you smoking?”

Ieva answers:

“To calm my nerves.”

Andrejs smirks.

 

Andrejs shows up on time. They're already waiting in the courtyard. Aksels gets in the back, stretches his leg out on the seat. Ieva sits up front next to Andrejs. She shows him the X-rays—a couple of dark and mysterious landscapes—and the long bones of Aksels's legs through the fog of flesh. As they drive they pass cars, high-rises, bridges, and streetlamps. The sun is shining again and the fields of snow glitter blue and violet.