“I see, you’ve got amnesia. I’ve read about that. Serial killers and politicians pull that out as their excuse all the time. What’ve I gotten myself into… Who are you, damn it? A man with no past?”
“That would make you a woman with no present—damn you and your police investigation.”
“Did something happen when you were little?”
“Sure, aliens abducted me and experimented on me. Does that line up with what you read in My Secret, or whatever? Why the fuck’re you doing this?”
Dina went to the bathroom and retrieved her toothbrush, deodorant, perfume, and the emergency tampons she’d stored there. Then she went into the bedroom. Matija was still staring at the fake photographs, hoping he’d find a detail that would by some miracle prove he hadn’t lied after all, but he could hear her opening the drawers with rough, brusque movements—heartfelt movements—and packing her belongings into a cloth bag.
She came back into the kitchen, steadied herself for a few minutes, and, without a trace of a quaver, said, “Why did you lie to me? Why is it so damned difficult for you to tell the truth, even though you see how much I love you?! You idiot, whatever you’d said, if you’d told me you’d stolen, begged, been abused—if it had been the truth—I’d have loved you even more. Why can’t you understand this? What could that six-year-old child have gone through that was so terrible you can’t tell me about it, even when you see me leaving?!” She waited another ten seconds, saw that Matija wasn’t going to say anything, then took her bags and opened the door.
“You’re leaving,” said Matija, plainly, with the hollow realization of finality.
“I’m leaving you. You can put it that way. But you were only halfway here.”
6.
That autumn marked the beginning of his slow decline into everything painful, dirty, and shameful. From the outside, he appeared to be holding up well. He explained the breakup to Miljac as a result of incompatibility. “She was from the corporate world, you know.” Matija’s voice cracked, and he stared at the ceiling.
Deeper down, things looked different. His heart skipped a beat when he found a forgotten can of anchovies, he became a bumbling mess when he ran into someone from her circle, and sometimes he drove himself mad with thoughts of someone else fucking her. A better man than him, with a hairy chest, who knew his way around cars and wines, who remembered absolutely everything. He thought of her often. He jerked off with his left hand while imagining that in his right he was cupping one of her big lazy-eyed tits. Sometimes he loved her with true desperation. He tried to convince himself that he merely loved the memory of her and wouldn’t desire her so intensely if she’d stayed.
At first everything seemed under control because he had the perfect chic dodge. That summer, he could finally give himself over to writing. He couldn’t have anticipated the hell that awaited him. Summer stretched into fall, and he spent the next year looking for a story worth writing, then the year after that telling himself he’d found it.
Although he’d initially decided to write a moving story about a soccer player who realized he was gay, by Christmas he had only a half a page of notes.
THE GAY SOCCER PLAYER—POSSIBLE TITLES:
Bend It, Bench, Score: “Bend it” suggesting a soccer pass, possibly the protagonist’s nickname; bench for the second-string players—also a metaphor for social outsiders. The bench will be where his first caress is exchanged with a fan. Show how tough Bender is getting some—no one will expect that.
Dropping Out of the League: When a soccer club ends the season at the bottom of the league; also suggests when the penis slips out during anal sex—that keeps happening to the protagonist because of his lack of experience.
Fistful of Balls: The courage needed in a repressive society to come out of the closet; also when, during missionary sex, the one on his back (Bender) has to lift his balls so his partner can penetrate him.
Epilogue title: Referee Overtime. This, like… are we as readers capable of judging his decisions and shit like that?
He didn’t get much further because of numerous and welcome distractions. On his way home from a late beer, he’d rail at himself and go to sleep promising that the next day he’d definitely write a full page. One Sunday morning he downed a bottle of wine before noon and started writing, though he knew he couldn’t handle more than three glasses. He got going. He stopped returning to the beginning of each paragraph and erasing all the stupid sentences; he stopped wandering off into endless tedious digressions. The next morning before work, he read what he’d written, his stomach clenched, still tipsy from the night before, and it wasn’t half bad. It was something people who wore hipster glasses and bragged about how well-read they were might actually read. This was the voice of someone angry. It was like he was watching someone else’s dream. And since it was morning, he felt he might slip back into his reverie, so he sat at the computer and tried to continue. If it began to really take off, he thought, he’d call in sick and write all day. A dream should be so powerful that it sucks you in. But it didn’t.
In early 2009, his old friend Korina persuaded him to have a professional photographer take headshots and make an album for him like the ones actors and models had. He agreed, hoping this would get his creative juices flowing, and spent 4,500 kunas on clothes and tattoos before the session. He didn’t really understand what was so cool about being the millionth person in the world to wear an olive-drab T-shirt with a red five-pointed star and Che Guevara’s profile, or get your name tattooed on your arm in Chinese.
His regular physical masturbation was soon joined by the mental equivalent. He held imaginary interviews with himself and came up with all sorts of incisive repartees to questions about life, the world, politics, and art; he had fantasies about how, when his magnificent book came out, buxom journalists would ask him for his opinion on some inanity. He wrote out quotes from his not-yet-existent book and imagined how one day they would appear on news websites, alongside other quotes from famous people. He imagined Dolenčec in alphabetical order among other famous names (Dickinson, Doderer, Dolenčec, Donizetti, Dostoevsky, Dumas). He pored over biographies of famous and successful writers, especially the parts where they were miserable. Supposedly Balzac drank forty cups of coffee a day and could work for fifteen hours straight on the vast Human Comedy. He’d eat something around five or six, sleep until midnight, then get up and write for hours. Sometimes he wrote naked. Schiller pulled the curtains, soaked his feet in cold water, and stored rotten apples in his desk drawer.
Matija was certain an idiosyncratic detail would tilt the scales, a particular way of writing that his future biographer would offer as a curiosity from the life of the magnificent Dolenčec. He began writing barefoot, as if to keep himself awake and focused. For two days, he wrote a moving story, barefoot, about a porn star from Vratišinec. Actually, he spent two days in front of the computer going from one porn site to another, all the way down to the darkest parts of the information superhighway. On the fifth day writing barefoot, just when he’d finished revising the first paragraph, he noticed it stung when he peed. He’d gotten a urinary tract infection. Several nights in a row, he woke thinking he’d heard someone call his name from the street. Half asleep, he was afraid to see if there was anyone actually out there at that hour.