Prague (65 page)

and all their shitty little half-baked corruptions and lazinesses and this attitude they teach their kids from birth that the world owes them salvation, because history has beat up on them so bad and they are always betrayed and all the rest of it. The whininess of these people just kills me. Hungarians are—to the last man—a pack of—"

"You're Hungarian. You. Are. Hungarian." "That's not very nice, John. After I just tried to help you." John remained strapped to the van when they pulled into the Swiss-air cargo area, and Charles bounded out to begin his special brand of labor negotiations: He placed ten-dollar bill after ten-dollar bill into one of the aproned handlers' open palms, sternly instructing as he paid. After a sufficient amount of cash filled the worker's hand (the man even moved it up and down as if gauging the weight), all other work in the area was temporarily abandoned; the full team of four beefy luggage men (in scarlet aprons with white crosses on their chests) cracked open the van and gently cradled Charles's possessions onto a wheeled cart. Labels were lovingly affixed and paperwork quickly processed. Handshakes all around. A few more Hamiltons,

"You know what 1 will look back on fondly?" Charles asked as the orange van, much lighter now, squealed a U-turn and galloped down the frontage road lo the passenger terminal. "Because you're right. I will have one lasting memory of my time here. A memory that encompasses, oh, everything for me—my personal experiences, but also a symbolic meaning, what this country was going through while 1 was here. Even more, a picture of a whole era for my generation. The moment that summed up all of this"—his hands gestured grandly, vaguely—"what I will tell my children about, if 1 can do it justice. I mean, I know I'm not a great communicator. I'm just a businessman. But do you know what that moment was for me, John? It's funny—to see it happen and to know that this is the moment you will hold dear, in your heart, forever. Do you know what it was for me? It was when those two incredibly ugly girls were cattighting over you. I'd never seen ugly women fight before. It was refreshing."

John twisted the radio knob in a vain hunt for a clear signal. An Austrian DJ's voice cut through the fog, talking over a song. Charles tapped the steering wheel in rhythm as the van slowed and took its purring place in line. "I was considering not telling my parents I was moving back to New York. I was thinking about paying you to write them letters from me here, telling them how much 1 love it. That I'd decided to apply for citizenship. Marry a nice Hun girl.

Settle into my dad's childhood apartment up in the First. Send them fake pictures your bald friend could do of me and my Hun children picnicking on Margaret Island. All the while I'd really be home, lined up at Zabar's like a normal person. Unfortunately, you made me famous and so now they're going to sit on my couch and go on about all the glories of 1938 Budapest." He drove a few feet, took the parking ticket, stuffed it behind the sun visor. He laughed oddly, sadly. "Did I ever, tell you 1 was their second child? 1 was born after they had a boy who died. Matyas. He was four when he died of leukemia, which is a long and hideous thing. There are still pictures of him all over the house. 1 grew up with that. I always felt like, 1 don't know . . . like I was expected to ..." Charles sucked his lip and pulled into the short-term parking lot, between twoTrabants. He sat still, stared out the windshield.

"You're lying," John said.

"Yeah well, true. But still." They walked toward the terminal. "I was a twin, though, and the other one, a boy, was stillborn—that is true."

"No, it's not."

"No. I guess it's not."

Advertising posters papered the terminal walls: for consulting firms, accounting firms, public relations firms, computer networking firms, bilingual temporary placement firms, German condoms. The public address poured Hungarian onto comprehending and uncomprehending heads alike. The two Americans slouched in plastic seats. Charles's boarding card flapped like a feathered tail from the back pouch of an extravagantly made black leather monogrammed briefcase (a sly sign that one shouldn't judge the passenger in his T-shirt and jeans too soon). They swirled their espresso in Styrofoam cups, and Charles offered pensively, "You know, a case could be made that Imre got the best of this deal."

"Naturally. In that he's almost entirely paralyzed."

"Funny, but no. There are those who would say he got more than he deserved."

"What does that mean?"

"Oh nothing. Forget it. T don't agree with that old implication—slur— anyhow, so I shouldn't spread it. He's a good man. our Imre. He is. And he gave me a great opportunity. I'm glad I was able to make something of it, for both of us. And for my investors."

"Is this what he wanted?" John asked quietly, only slightly embarrassed.

"To have a stroke? Yeah, I think so."

"Is this what he wanted?"

"You do understand he was the biggest shareholder, don't you? I made him more money than he'd ever imagined. I made Imre Horvath a multimillionaire after he couldn't even run his own company. You do understand that, don't you?"

Out of earshot, Charles said something that made the Swissair hostess laugh before taking his ticket. He turned and sort of waved to John, a gesture that pointed out the silliness of waving farewell at airports. He stepped into the little wooden tunnel that led to New York. And he was gone. There were no windows to watch the plane taxi or take off. The whole thing could have been a hastily constructed soundstagc. John shuffled outside, past the surly taxi ranks, paid for parking with the cash Charles had stuffed in his hand prior to hoarding. Is that all? Is that how an era ends?

He pulled off the frontage road and saw Charles walk again to the boarding tunnel, again offer his pass to the pretty Swiss stewardess at the gate, but this time John adds sense and proper closure: There is a noise, a booming rupture in the firmament, the frustration of a deity who will not tolerate events to fizzle out without meaning. And Kris/lina Toidy—a glowing, pulsing, sexless archangel of retribution—screams his name, just his family name, as if she invokes with it all his ancestors, his nation, his Danube tribe: Gdbor! He turns in the midst of priority boarding. His left hand holds his monogrammed black briefcase; his right hand holds one end of his boarding envelope. Out of its other end the stewardess is withdrawing his boarding pass, but now that stewardess is propelled backward against the dirty wooden door of the boarding gate, and her white, ruffled blouse is rapidly blossoming red, like the outline of a cartoon rose deftly filled in by an animator. As her head strikes the door, her pillbox hat falls over her eyes. The hat props comically against her nose as her convulsing form slumps to the floor, and the breasts that John was just admiring heave with a strange and shallow stuttering. Again the cracking, ripping blast of an angry God, again the smashing-glass sound of his name shrieked by the blood-gargling harpy, and now Charles's T-shirt spreads red at the shoulder, the phallic tip of a guitar obliterated in the process, and at last a pure and unironic emotion flashes on the face of Charles Gabon witnessed by dozens. People scream and hide under plastic seats, will remember forever the internal-organ look of the dried old gum they saw in that moment when reality burst through the artifice and irrelevance of every day and everything. The remains

of Charles Gabor have no time to plead, to maneuver for position: The next shot tears the cheek from his face. He falls, and his last view in this life is of her standing above him. She tires twice into his neck, then, sobbing, turns the gun upon herself.

John pulled into the lot behind the Median warehouse, where Imre Horvath had swept the floor the evening of October 2 3,19 5 6. He waited for his song to finish playing on the radio, which he had finally coaxed into FM. He asked at the rolling door for Ferenc, an office assistant, and tossed him the keys. He took the subway home. He was strangely exhausted. Sleep would not wait another minute. His head bounced against the plastic scat back.

HE
   
LAY
   
ON
   
HIS
   
SOFA
   
BED.
   
A
   
BREEZE
   
DANCED
  
WITH
   
THE
   
ILLUMINATED

leaves outside, then with his thin curtain. Motors rattled the air. The remote control fit perfectly, crgonomically, into the line of his forearm and wrist, an extension of his will.

If he could explain to her in real time everything that had happened to him—every single feeling and misunderstood action and distorted, grotesquely misconstrued intention—then in the passion and tears and apologies that must certainly follow there would come at last their connection, and she would be his and there would be a we. I walk all night long and think only of bc.ing us. She would fall asleep in his arms after, and he would stroke the soft skin under her chin and the curving line of bone that made her jaw such a splendor. He would spread her hair out behind her on the blinding white and convex pillow. He would slowly parachute a billowing, cool sheet over her body, each of her limbs relaxed but perfectly straight, and her body would press against the shroud, outline itself in the merest hints. Rolled onto her side now: The line from the bottom of her rib cage to the top of her hip would curve through three dimensions like a living force, the dream line that haunted the troubled, unsatisfying sleeps of animators, automotive engineers, kitchen appliance designers, desperately lonely cellists.

Young American males, dressed in the style of five years earlier, spoke German to one another through awkward lips and were rewarded with overwhelming laughter. He recognized the American sitcom, popular when he had been in high school and college, now dubbed and redelivered to German cable.

He remembered with ease the characters' names: Mitch, Chuck, Jake, and Clam. The four men—now Fritz, Klaus, Jakob, and Klamm—wisecracked auf Hochdeutsch in a TriBeCa loft apartment, in a SoHo bar, in Kafkacsque offices in midtown Manhattan, in Brooklyn parks, until John recognized this very episode. He dimly remembered a couch iiihis freshman dormitory, remembered slouching with three slouching friends (one whose name escaped him entirely). They had watched this very episode. The four characters had made a bet, he recalled: The first of them to meet a girl and manipulate events so that she invited him to her apartment to prepare him a "good home-cooked meal" would win one hundred dollars from each of the other three.

Five years later, in German, John could hardly believe how dated the men's outfits and hairstyles appeared. Nineteen eighty-six had not been so long ago, but there—with their lips forming words entirely different from the ones coming from the television's speaker—they seemed as antique as hippies, greasers. G.I.s, flappers, doughboys, Edwardians, Elizabethans. He remembered the episode's last scene several minutes before it came on, remembered sitting on the couch with his three friends, enumerating and berating the show's absurdities and insults to their intelligence: The four defeated characters sat on their own sagging couch, watching their television, glumly but wittily mocking an overdrawn romantic film from the 1930s in which a woman prepares her average-Joe beau a good home-cooked meal.

John held his thumb to the appropriate rubber pimple and the channels each flashed a frame or two for him in desperate pleas for attention—a race car changing la, a billiards ball ricocheting off the near bumpe, an occluded front moving in from the Atla, Hungar, ungari, Ger, erma, erman, Germa, Fren, in the execution of unconventional warf—until a series of electrical stimuli moving faster than thought pulled his thumb off the rubber pimple and four buxom, beautiful, blond German women moaned and pleasured a very fat middle-aged man with a shaggy horseshoe of greasy, gray hair and no clothes but a monocle.

The remote control escaped to the floor and he grew too occupied to retrieve it. His eyes narrowed and his thoughts disconnected as the blood evacuated his brain. A car stopped outside and honked to summon a passenger, and as its door opened, its stereo was so loud that even up three stories floated the sounds of that one song. The four women courteously and efficiently took turns and John imagined himself in their midst, imagined their faces under

their blond hair, the faces of Emily Oliver and Nicky M, of Karen Whitley and the speed skater and the two girls who had thought he was a movie star, and— his thoughts slithered free of all censorship—even old Nadja and Krisztina Toldy: and synapses buzzed and even Charles Gabor's face appeared for a moment before it was replaced by another Emily Oliver and another, four times over, from every direction, equipped with extra arms and hands, four heads and faces, a hydra of Emily, who smiled and snarled upon him from every direction and serviced him in ways that no earth gravity would ever allow.