Rus Like Everyone Else (23 page)

When Rus got home Wanda talked about her work at the tax office while she warmed up the lasagna she'd made for him. She was very
happy when he told her he finished the two hundred files and that he talked to the colleagues in the coffee corner. She watched him as he ate and asked him questions like “Maybe you could do even more files tomorrow?” and “Did you make a good impression on your coworkers?” and “Do you agree we should get a new car when you have a full-time contract?” and “What color should the car be?”

“Yes, I will try, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know,” Rus answered as he got up from the table. The numbers on the screen were still there every time he blinked, and the scraping sound coming from the air vent was still sounding in his ears. He took his plate to the kitchen, as Wanda had explained to him, and held it under the tap as she'd said before putting it in the machine that did the dishes for them. Then it was nine and they moved to the couch where they sat under the blanket. Rus stared at the white wall above the television.

Wanda looked at him sideways. “When Barry came home, he used to chase me down the hallway,” she said, “and tickled me against the wall.”

Rus nodded. He remembered how Modu sometimes came home late at night singing “I Shot the Sheriff,” and you could already hear him when he was on the stairs outside.

“I'll just switch on the television,” Wanda said. “For some background sound.”

As the show played Rus kept his gaze fixed on the white wall above the television. The screen was too busy for him, and Wanda was talking about cars and how they could tell you where to go nowadays and you did not even need a map, and the people on the screen were talking, and the lights flashed and colored the wall. The windows at the office had some kind of screen that was supposed to block out the sunlight, he thought, and the metro was under the ground.

Outside the streetlights have switched on again, the buildings are black rectangles with a few yellow squares where the lights are still on. Over there, at Mr. Lucas's house, you see the television light up his curtains. He is watching the news about the Memorial Service; there is a special monument designed for the square. On the screen a large crane lifts a huge rock of two thousand kilograms on top of a hundred thin steel pins. The monument symbolizes the weight that is too heavy for one person to carry, but possible to carry if everyone helps.

Mr. Lucas nods as he watches the television, taking notes as the newscasters explain where the Queen will stand and how long she will speak for.

If you look in the distance, past the roofs of the houses on Low Street, you can even catch a glimpse of the monument from our window. There, to the left of the hospital, you see its black shape illuminated by a shaft of light.

Much farther in that direction, all the way on the West side of the city, in a newly built neighborhood, Rus sleeps in Wanda's bed. He sleeps with his shoulders up and his nails pressing into his hands. Instead of his usual tossing and turning, he sleeps like he is standing at attention tonight, and he wakes up every few minutes, opening his eyes to see if the first sunlight has reached the window yet, indicating seven
A.M
.

And here, right across from us, at Mrs. Blue's house, you've noticed that nothing has changed for a while now. We have not seen the light switching on or off, or the curtains open or close. We see only the television in her living room, the continuing flicker of that snowy screen. Mrs. Blue is lying on the couch in front of the television. Her face is colorless—no pink lipstick, no eye shadow—her wrinkled eyes closed in resistance. She's hardly moved in quite some time now, but no one has noticed. No one but you and me.

GRACE IN THE STORY

Grace ran her fingers over the engraved letters on the gun. “What should I do, Mr. Blue?” she whispered, folding her finger around the trigger and pressing it lightly.

She imagined a bullet shooting out of the gun, penetrating the mist in front of her, creating a tunnel to another world. She longed for something to happen: she had no idea how long she had been walking for, nothing had happened, nothing had changed, no one moment stood out from any other. It felt like she was not really going forward at all, but that the world was just moving under her, like a treadmill.

Grace lowered the gun. The world in front of her was so similar to the world behind her it seemed that if she propelled the bullet into the mist in front of her then, after ten minutes or so, it would hit her in the back.

Grace weighed the gun in her hands. It was the first gun she had ever held, and somehow it felt more real than anything she'd ever touched before. A shiver ran down her spine.

Something had changed in the landscape. The mist was rising, and in the distance thick vertical lines had appeared, running over the ground toward one vanishing point on the horizon.

MR. WHEELBARROW

Mr. Wheelbarrow stood on the gravel path outside his house, the cold morning air cooling the tears on his cheeks. The hospital had just called about Freddy, telling him there was no progress at all. He was in a very deep coma and it was unclear what was keeping him there.

Mr. Wheelbarrow thought of the back of Freddy's neck, the way he used to watch his neck when he sat in the backseat of the car and Freddy was driving, that broad neck bulging over his collar, soft but strong. Sometimes Mr. Wheelbarrow had mouthed the words to his neck, but he had never said them out loud, because it wasn't necessary.

Mr. Wheelbarrow wrote all the layers of his love into the soap
opera: the passion, the jealousy, the worries, the faith, and the trust he felt resonated through the characters and the plotlines, knowing that Freddy was watching this love letter every night on the couch with a bag of crisps.

Now Mr. Wheelbarrow stared out over the fields surrounding his house, the black ditches between them. Normally he would be writing at this hour, steering Grace, the main character of his show, into new moral dilemmas with secret admirers and forbidden love. But he couldn't care for Grace in this moment. He'd let go of her it seemed, and he realized he could not even find her anymore in his thoughts.

THE BOSS'S SON

The boss's son was in the Queen's chamber. She had given him bandages to wrap up his feet.

“One night,” the Queen said, looking down at him as he sat on the floor, bandaging his feet, “during a dinner with my speech-writers for the Memorial Service, I went to the bathroom to freshen up. When I inspected my teeth for red wine stains, a thought occurred to me. I thought: I am the Queen. It was a thought I'd had a thousand times before, but now it exploded in my head, like a firecracker.”

“I am the Queen. And I looked at my face, my upper lip curled up to display my teeth, the wave they had put in my hair that morning. I am the Queen.”

The Queen looked in the mirror of her makeup table and touched her face distractedly.

“I am the Queen. It was such an absurd idea, such an utterly absurd idea, that I suddenly realized how unrealistic it all is. The people who'll look up to me when I stand there at Memorial Square, the speechwriters who'll help me find the right tone, dignified and yet caring. It seemed like I had just made it all up, some strange fantasy.”

The Queen shook her head. “I went back to the dining room and I thought: How do I know these people exist? How do I know they are real? How do I know they don't disappear when I turn my back
to them? What evidence do I have?” She shook her head. “I asked the writers to provide me with evidence that they truly exist. But no one could. No one could!” She shook her head.

The Queen covered her mouth with her hands. “I fired all of them,” she whispered. “I'll just make something up on the spot. They'll never even notice.”

She looked like she was going to throw up. The boss's son kneeled down beside her and stroked her hand, the first time she allowed something like that, because she was too distracted to notice it.

THE CAR PARK

Right when the birds started singing, Rus walked out the door of Wanda's apartment to go to the office. In the street it was still very empty. The bus driver yawned as he pulled up to the bus stop, and the metro was only half full. People who had just woken up and people who had not been to sleep yet avoided each other. Rus sat in the metro the way the manager had taught him to sit, focusing on the empty space in front of his nose, causing the face of the person in front of him to look like a blur. He walked headfirst through the streets of the business district, keeping his eyes on the Overall sign in the distance that towered high above the other buildings.

Yesterday the manager had read him a sentence from the chapter “Eyes on the Target” from the Company Guidelines so he could repeat it in his head while he walked. The sentence was: “The deer will only get past the snake if it keeps its eyes on the well.”

The well in this scenario, the manager had explained, was the office; the deer was Rus, who was trying to get there; and the snake was the traffic, the passersby, the noise.

Rus had asked if the snake wouldn't attack from behind if the deer wasn't paying attention, but the manager had explained that that was against the rules of the story, and the snake would be convicted in court. Rus wondered who the court was in the story and the manager said, “The owl of course,” and that's how Rus had learned and learned.

Thinking about the well and the owl and the snake and how wise it all sounded, Rus walked up to the office car park. The building was still dark and the doors were still closed.

A few meters away from Rus two lights flashed on and off in the half-dark.

It was the manager, signaling to him from his car.

“I like to see the building fill up with employees,” the manager said as Rus sat down next to him in the BMW. “Everybody taking their place, lights switching on. It is like the office comes to life, so to speak.”

In silence they sat there while the sun came up over the Overall Company building. The manager was quietly smoking his cigarette, studying the Company Guidelines book in his lap. The sun made an orange line around the roof of the building. Rus looked at the departments, stacked on top of one another, the windows dark squares in black walls. Only on the top floor was a light on. A silhouette moved slowly behind the window, putting his hand on the glass.

“Who is that?” Rus asked, but the manager shook his head without looking up.

“That is not important to you,” he said, tapping on the Company Guidelines book. “You should read this—this is important.” He gave Rus the book.

“Chapter seven,” he said, “my personal favorite.”

The manager lay back in his chair and closed his eyes as Rus started reading.

“‘The beauty of the company,'” Rus read, “‘lies in the ability to work together as one organism. Thousands of cells working together toward one goal: growth. Each cell has its own task to complete and focuses on nothing but that, while the head of the company steers it all on. In that sense, the company is a creature, with arms and legs and a head with a vision, a creature that is always trying to grow and to move. Sometimes it crawls slowly forward, and sometimes it catapults out of a dark corner across the room. It is a colonial organism, which means the different particles could survive on their own. But within the company you are with thousands, outside the company you are alone.'”

The manager sighed contently. “It sounds a bit dramatic,” he said, “but that is the poetry of it.”

He nodded at the office building. It was nine o'clock. Rus looked at the sliding doors, how they opened and closed, letting the employees into the building. The logo of the company, the beetle, was hanging above the entrance hall. It was holding its front claws over the doorway, as if it was shielding it.

“What do we do exactly?” Rus asked after a while. “How does the company work?”

“We import and export both material and immaterial products,” the manager said.