The Apartment: A Novel (8 page)

Now Manuela appears. What do you think? I ask. Very stylish, she says. Is it expensive? A little bit, I say. A lot, says Saskia. Maybe, I say, but I don’t plan to buy myself any more coats for a long time. My colleagues wear coats like this, says Manuela, but not as nice. Your colleagues do not wear this coat, says Saskia. That’s what I said, says Manuela. Not as nice. Well, I say, it’s pretty conservative. I’m not trying to stand out. That’s what I mean, says Manuela. You won’t stand out. I stretch my arms to make sure the sleeves are the right length, and they are perfect. I say, How about gloves and a scarf now? Let me pick the scarf, says Manuela. Okay, I say. You need some colour, she says. What’s wrong with grey? I ask. She looks at Saskia and says, Exactly. She departs, and Saskia says she will look for some gloves. Something heavy, I say. I go find a mirror and have a look at myself. It is strange to spend this kind of money on anything that does not move or can’t be lived in. But this is not the beginning of ostentatious spending. This is just the once. Manuela returns with a scarf. I knew it the second I saw it, she says. It is a silk scarf with thin tassels at either end, light blue patterned with large, narrow-lined, orange-pink squares. What do you think? she asks. I love it, I say, but it doesn’t look very warm. No, says Manuela, it doesn’t, but you can’t wear a big wool scarf with that coat. I put it around my neck. You’re probably right, I say. Tie it, says Manuela. Okay, I say, and I make a knot and pull tight, which strangles me. I look at myself. Oh, I say, and untie the knot. Have you worn a scarf before? she asks. I don’t think so, I say. The only coat I would have ever worn, before I arrived here and bought my ugly coat from the Arab, was a pea coat, and you do not need scarves with pea coats. Give it to me, she says. She makes a loop, which she wraps around her neck, and pulls the ends through the loop. She tugs it tight. The tassels dangle over the breast of her dress. See? she says. I see, I say. I take the scarf and tie it in the way she has demonstrated. Much better, she says.

Saskia returns with a few pairs of gloves. We all look them over. Manuela rubs them on her cheek. Then she sniffs them. Try these, she says, and hands me a pair of thick black leather gloves with brown fur lining. Manuela reads the label and says, Beaver, I think. Beaver? says Saskia. Now I’m wearing everything – the coat and the scarf and the gloves. And my boots. I look at myself in the mirror and feel different. Nobody changes himself from the inside. Nobody wills change from the innermost depths of his soul. This is because a person cannot ever look within himself, or search himself, or witness an emotion in himself. A person looks at a chair, and the chair becomes hatred. Or a light bulb flickering in a bathroom. Or a doorway. Or a shelf full of books. Or a house. Or a city. Or a temperature. Or a kind of light in the sky. Or an articulated thought, or a dream – which is where thoughts become externalized facts. Or a reflection of himself. You look at yourself in the mirror, and feel hatred. But you have not felt hatred. Hatred stares back at you. This is what hell will be. A room, without walls or dimension, full of all the objects that hate you. Not fire and cinder, not pain, but mundane views of streets, television sets, and acquaintances.

Some weeks ago, when it was sunny and clear, and not too windy, I took a long journey by train to the uplands just south of the city. It was a weekday, and the train was full of empty seats, and I flipped through a newspaper I couldn’t read. The train blinked out of the suburbs. There were yellow and white houses with sharply angled rooftops sparkling with snow and ice. Smoke rose out of their chimneys and light flashed off their windows. When the houses were all gone and there was nothing but countryside, the train accelerated. There was nobody but me then – everyone else had disembarked at the suburban stations. I fell asleep. It was one of those sudden, accidental sleeps, which I had never been capable of until I arrived here. When I woke, the train had come to its terminus. I had missed my stop. The train was silent. The engine was off, and so were the heaters in the carriages. There were no other trains in the station. I stayed seated for a few minutes. Since I have never felt so calm in my life – or have no memory of a time when I felt this kind of calm – sometimes I like to sit and dwell in it. It’s like floating in the distant wake of a huge ship, a ship you no longer see, which has moved into fog. The open sea smells like nothing you know how to smell, and it makes no noise, though there is a great noise in it, deep beneath you, which carries you even though you cannot feel yourself moving.

Eventually I decided to get off the train and go for a walk. There was no point worrying about having missed my destination, since it was not an important destination. A girl at the tourist office – I had gone to the tourist office to get brochures in English on walking tours – had suggested I go there, a small and pretty village in the mountains, where the children in the city went to learn to ski. Now, as far as I could tell, I was on the other side of the mountains, in the flat and vacant sprawl of the bottom of a huge valley. The station was just two low-lying platforms, with narrow shelters and a hut at the end. There was a guy in an orange high-viz jumpsuit pulling a gas-powered generator on wheels behind him. He saw me get off, and he stopped what he was doing to watch me, amused but also infuriated. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, but I gave him an apologetic smile. I walked the length of the platform, through a gate, and into the small town. There were cars parked on the streets, and the shops were open, but there was nobody walking around. Because of the extreme clarity in the sky and the bright sun near its noontime winter apex, the streets were – as I walked around them – alternately very warm in the light and freezing in shadows. Shadows stretched across empty lots; chimney smoke made shadows too. The shadows of delicate weathervane animals stretched monstrously over the streets. And when you walked from a patch of light into the shadow of a building or a house, your breath appeared. I had never seen anything quite like it, so sudden, so delineated. This was before I had my boots, so my feet quickly became cold and sore, and I wanted to sit. I found a hotel with a view, from its restaurant, of the motionless plains that lay to the south-east. The hotel was old and quaint and a little depressing, and the woman serving me spoke no English. A small fire burned, and I sat close to it.

After about an hour an American man came into the dining room. He had a laptop, a wireless modem, a mobile phone and a sat phone. He found a table as far away as possible, but the restaurant wasn’t large, and when he spoke on the phone he spoke as though he were shouting across the Atlantic. He talked about energy, and drilling, and also about sustainability and diversification. He was ex-military. Even if he hadn’t looked ex-military, being in the military creates a way of speaking. I placed him from the South – North Carolina, maybe Tennessee, though it gets harder and harder to tell. After a few long conversations he closed his computer and put everything in his bag and leaned into his chair, really sank into it, and pulled his baseball cap down, the way a cowboy pulls his hat down to go to sleep, and crossed his arms, and he looked out the window, just as I had been doing. He was probably my age, maybe a little older. He had closely cropped grey hair. I considered it too strange that two American men had come all this way to stare out the same window, so I got up and started to leave. Nice view, he said. Sure is, I said, and kept walking.

I went back to the train station and checked the time for the next train back to the city. I couldn’t make sense of the timetable. The man in the high-viz jacket was gone and there was nobody else around. I sat on the kerb and smoked a cigarette. I figured another train would come along soon. I finished my cigarette and walked over to the hut to look for somebody, but it was padlocked. I went back outside the gate and started to light another cigarette when the American man drove up in a black Range Rover and rolled down the window. I could hear country music playing in the car. It was a weird thing to hear. You trying to get back? he said. Affirmative, I said – I wanted him to know that I knew he was military; I wanted him to know that he did not blend in. Army? he asked. Navy, I said. What the hell are you doing out here? he asked. I missed my stop on the train, I said, and I figured I’d have a look around. I’m just here visiting. He wore silver-framed, square sunglasses, and he mostly spoke to me while staring straight ahead, or into his rear-view mirror. The next train isn’t until the evening, he said. People come and go once a day. What’s out here? I asked. A power plant, he said. A big motherfucking power plant. You live out here? I asked. Hell no, he said. I’m leaving tomorrow, back to the States. So, Army? I asked. Yeah, he said. Retired. Oh yeah, I said, me too. Forty-second infantry, he said. No shit, I said. I told him what I did, and that my FDE worked with the Forty-second. Hey, he said, now that is some crazy-ass shit. Then he said, Listen, you got hours to kill, and I don’t have shit to do. I’ve been wanting to drive out to some ruins since I got here. You want to join me? I looked up and down the deserted street. I thought of my cold feet. So I walked around the other side, opened the door, and climbed inside. The seats were of soft leather, and I had endless leg space. My God, I said, this is a sweet fucking vehicle. I was worried he might go on about Iraq, or talk about his work, or ask me a hundred questions, or pointlessly chat about weather, but instead he cranked up the country music and said, All right, and jammed the gas down and we were screaming through the desolate and icy countryside. He took out some Kodiak and filled his gums with it. Want some? he asked. But he pronounced it, ’awnt sum. Sure, I said. He handed me an old white polystyrene coffee cup, the kind you drink out of on construction sites while wearing hard hats, and we were spitting and sucking and I was starting to feel a bit fucked up and queasy. I couldn’t believe he was driving fast when there were patches of ice and compacted snow everywhere, but I placed great trust in him immediately, and assumed he knew what he was doing. The tremendous white and yellow light was everywhere, and warm.

His name, this ex-Army guy, was Early. That’s what he went by. It could have been a last name or a nickname, or it could have been a first name. Early said, I love the Oak Ridge Boys. And he did seem to love them. They made him want to drive fast and say nothing. But what I really love, he said, is playing the Oak Ridge Boys out here, driving this goddamn machine. That’s what I’m going to miss. I’ll be happy to get home. I go abroad for six months, then I’m home for six months and play golf and take the kids to swim practice. I love that shit. You’ve been all over? I asked. All over, he said. Oil in Nigeria, Venezuela. Renewables in China, Ireland, fucking
Antarctica
once. You believe that shit? Antarctica, I said, holy shit. And obviously the Gulf. And I blast the motherfucking Oak Ridge Boys wherever I go. For a moment I became entirely lost in the beauty and mystery of blasting the Oak Ridge Boys from some massive ATV with a hundred headlights driving at night around the South Pole – a Sno-Cat or a Mars Humvee screwing recklessly into the black force of an Antarctic blizzard. I’m only messing with you, he said. I don’t have kids. And he turned the music down. This is actually on the motherfucking radio, he said, without the accent. Can you believe that? We drove for a little while longer in the quiet discomfort his joke had created. I didn’t know what was the truth, and I guessed he liked it that way. He changed the radio to a classical station and we were listening to strange violin music. He said, the minute he heard it: Alban Berg, fucking genius. Then he told me a story – by way of explaining his sense of humour – about a time, maybe ten years ago, he had put on a hat and some ragged clothes and sunglasses and fake redneck teeth and hopped on a bicycle and rode around his neighbourhood. He called his girlfriend, who was at home, on his cell phone – while he was riding the bike – and said he’d heard on the news that a man fitting his description had raped and murdered some women and was last seen in their neighbourhood. He told her to go to the window and see if the man was there. She saw him – this figure he described, himself, exactly, down to the colour of his shorts – and she became so frightened that she started sobbing and hyperventilating and trying to scream. He told her to calm down and get a gun. Then he knocked on the door and ran away, and she shot the door to pieces with his .357. He smiled after he told me that. That was pretty damn funny, he said. Well, I said, what did your girlfriend say when you told her it was you? How the hell would it still be funny if I told her? he said.

He saw a sign on the road and slowed down to read it. This is us, he said. And we turned right, onto a road that was narrower and more overgrown at its edges. This is the first time you’ve been here? I asked. Yep, he said. He was lying, but I didn’t take the lie as an insult. He thought of himself, I guessed, as a kind of entertainer, a magician of human responses. What he wanted, perhaps, was for me to feel that this place was unscathed by his own memories, and we could experience it for the first time together. He had lied out of politeness, in a way. We stayed on the new road for about five kilometres – I was keeping close watch of the way we travelled, and the distance, in case I had to make it back on my own, in case this whole thing was an epic joke – then turned left onto an even narrower road, hardly wide enough to hold the Range Rover. Then there was a little blue-and-white sign with a P on it, for parking. Nothing else, at that moment, but the sign. Early slowed down and pointed. See it? he asked. I sat up high in my seat. Not really, I said. Okay, he said. He turned into the parking lot. There was nobody else there, not a single car, but there were spaces for five hundred cars and for dozens of tour buses. He parked roughly in the middle of the lot, which gave us an unnecessarily long distance to walk. And he had initially parked outside the lines, so he hopped back in and reparked. He tried a few times, but the Range Rover would not fit inside a space. When he got out he said, This ain’t a fucking Fiat Punto. We walked together across the lot, then straight onto the grass, which was brittle and slippery with frost. I had to walk in short steps. There was a strong smell of silage, and faraway clanking noises that echoed in the limitless distances. Early, who had heavy boots, walked without difficulty. I veered onto a gravel footpath, where the walking was easier. Ahead and below I could see that the earth was depressed, and in that depression I could see little mounds of bricks. Standing just in front of the excavated area was a large wall with a bird’s-eye illustration of the site. I stopped at it, and read some of the information about it in English – there were five or six different languages, including, oddly, Portuguese, unless I don’t know my flags. Anything interesting? Early shouted over. But he didn’t wait for the answer, and I felt it had been less a question than a good-natured reminder that there are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who go see the ruins first, and the ones who read about them first. The site was a Roman military outpost, and the only structures that remained, though ruined, were the walls of a small barracks. The Romans had come here around 5
BC
, and these walls were from the century after that. Early – every time I say that name in my memory I see him riding that bicycle, in sunglasses, and wearing those teeth, and I feel both joy and uneasiness – had stepped over the ankle-high wire divider that visitors were not supposed to cross and was standing in the site, spitting tobacco juice. I joined him. No shit, he said, couple of guys like us, over here, standing
in this spot
. I know very little about Rome, I said. In the
Aeneid
, said Early, Virgil declares that Rome came out of the ashes of Troy. The half-god Aeneas led his people to Italy. There he defeated Turnus, King of the Rutulians. Early then recited these lines: The giant Turnus, struck, falls to earth; his knees bend under him. All the Rutulians leap up with a groan, and the mountain slopes around re-echo, tall forests, far and near, return that voice. Early spoke this as a kind of country funeral prayer, looking up instead of down. Then he paused and coughed, and spat into his cup. And, well, he said, this is as far as they got in this direction. We looked out, across the plains, at nothing, at wind. I thanked him for bringing me along. You bet, he said. Tomorrow, he said, all this will be a memory. I’ll be on some United flight drinking Scotch and talking to some idiot from Boeing who wants to tell me about efficiency and some conference I ought to attend, because his keynote will be about the very challenges I face every day. I nodded. It was obvious to me that he’d been to that place often. The spot he stood in seemed precise. He did not move from it until we left. I walked around and examined some of the old walls. I got down on my knees and touched them. I put my hands in dirt and grass. Early just stood there, like a man who knew it well enough to just stand there. I never thought it was odd that he’d taken me to that place. Everybody I was meeting – I can’t remember now if I met Early before I met Fritz, but they were not the only ones – was taking me to sacred places.