The rest of us watched silently as the guru pranced around him with a packet of tissues, a glass of water, and a dropper bottle of Bach’s Rescue Remedy. It was the first time I saw something like uncertainty on the guru’s face. Now you know what it’s like, I thought to myself with mean-spirited glee — maybe you should have trained to become a yoga instructor instead, or learned to lead shamanic journeys or something.
The doughboy had fully intact face, arms, and legs, and he could see, hear, and talk. His name was Friedrich.
I stood aside to let him go ahead of me so he could finally head home and I wouldn’t have to look at him anymore. But he did the same thing and smiled up at me. How valiant.
“What kind of a name is Marek?” he asked.
“Polish.”
“Are you Polish?”
“No. The only thing East European about me is my father’s new wife.”
“And who did that?” he asked, gesturing first at my face and then at my hand.
“A Rottweiler,” I said.
“But you can see?”
“No,” I said, peering past him.
Then I turned quickly away so he didn’t somehow think I wanted to chat with him. I went out the damn door and started to run down the hall.
A woman was coming in the opposite direction — not yet old, dollish, and somehow familiar. When she saw me running down the hall she dropped her purse and tried to step out of my way. I had the same impulse and as I tried to avoid her we ended up running into each other. My hat flew off. I picked it up and heard her shriek in horror.
“Please excuse me, I’m so clumsy today,” she said and smiled past me. Her chin was trembling.
I wanted to say something nasty to her. But then I realized why she looked familiar: she had Janne’s face, or rather, the face Janne would have in twenty or thirty years. I said nothing and ran off.
On the S-bahn train I sat in a window seat and pulled the hat even farther down my face. The car filled up quickly. But as always, nobody sat next to me or opposite me in the four-seat banquette.
I kept thinking I saw Friedrich’s tuft of red hair behind everyone who got on the train. Then he would disappear again and I didn’t look around to see where he was. If we ever ran into each other again somewhere, I had no plans to say hello. As if I ever went wandering through markets or parks or museums or clubs or gyms anymore.
For once I didn’t want to go straight home. I was going to go see Claudia at her office. I wanted to ruin her day as payback.
First I had to get past Marietta, whom Claudia always called her right hand. Even though she, like me, was left-handed. Marietta stood up when I walked in and braced herself against the edge of the table as if she needed extra strength.
“Marek.” She looked up at me and her bright red lower lip quivered a little. I wondered for a second what it would feel like to sink into her lips. I hadn’t kissed anyone since the Rottweiler attack. For that alone, every Rottweiler on earth deserved to be skinned alive.
I sighed and took a quick glance at Marietta’s cleavage. I liked her because she started talking to me like an adult before I was even a teenager. And because she treated me as if I were her boss, too. Not to mention the hint of red nipple I could see through her not-quite-opaque white blouse.
“It’s nice of you to drop by. Your mother is in a meeting right now. Would you like a coffee?”
“I’m in a hurry,” I said. She stepped determinedly into my path. I shoved her gently but equally determinedly to the side. I didn’t want to hurt her.
“Claudia!” I yelled.
The office was hideous, and I always wondered whether Claudia had purposefully decorated it that way to make clear that she was about work, not window dressing. The hall was long and narrow like an obstructed bowel, the floor covered with ugly gray carpeting; and frosted glass doors rose to the left and right. Between the doors, in square frames, hung paintings that were nothing more than gloomy splotches.
Behind one of the doors Claudia’s voice thundered. I had to smile. A Godzilla-like shadow fell across the frosted glass, and then the door sprang open. Claudia swept out wearing a custom-tailored suit. The skirt was way too short for a fifty-year-old. Her makeup was sloppy, her mouth was scrunched up, and sparks flew from her eyes.
“Do we have a problem?”
“I don’t. But you? You lied to me.” I didn’t care whether her client could hear me or not. “It’s not a private tutorial on getting my high school equivalency. It’s a goddamn support group for cripples with some pathetic wannabe showman in charge.”
“Sounds perfect for you.” She put the palm of her hand on my chest and shoved me away from the partially open door. Behind the door it was awkwardly silent. Even so, Claudia refused to lower her voice. “I am with a client, so it’s not a good time to get hysterical. Take your meds and settle down.”
“I only took that medicine for a week — and only because they said it would help with the pain. And that was a year ago!” I raised my voice a bit more. Didn’t want the client to have to strain to overhear us.
“Oh, right. Well, then, let Marietta make you a coffee and then go home.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“Why did you lie to me, why did you lie to me! Why do you always say that?”
“Tell me why.”
“Would you have gone otherwise?”
By this point I’d allowed myself to be shuffled into the screened-off waiting area, where there was a coffee table with little sparkling bottles of mineral water and orderly stacks of magazines about outdoor living. I slumped down into one of the chairs next to a box of toy blocks. The chair gave a feeble groan.
“I’m not going to go back, just so you know.”
“Fine. Just rot away at home.”
She yanked painfully on my one undamaged ear and then disappeared again behind the frosted glass. The door clanged noisily shut and vibrated, causing the adjacent doors to vibrate as well. Claudia’s apology echoed in the hallway.
With an understanding smile, Marietta offered me a cup of coffee. I sloshed about half of it onto my pants. I still couldn’t smile properly — my lips hurt and the skin strained across my entire cheek as if it had been stitched together too tightly.
*
In the car she held the hand with the cigarette out the window and flicked the ash in the wind. The wind blew it back onto her arm and it clung there looking like dandruff. I was waiting for her to pepper me with questions about the cripple support group. And for her to pretend to be interested in the disabilities of the others and then to say that I should count myself lucky because I could walk, see, and hear, that the world offered so much more opportunity for me. She hadn’t gone through that routine in a long time.
“Claudia,” I said. She looked over at me, surprised at my tone. “If you were a girl, would you run away from me screaming?”
“I am a girl.” She turned the radio off and put a CD into the slot in the dashboard.
“That’s why I asked.”
“You know the old fairy tale.” It must have been one of her yoga CDs. The car filled with a strange kind of groaning sound. Claudia turned down the volume until it was just a quiet hum.
“What fairy tale?”
“Beauty and the Beast.”
I bit down on my lower lip until it tasted salty and still I couldn’t feel a thing. There was a time when Claudia kept saying that I didn’t look bad at all, that I was almost as good looking as before, that I didn’t need to hide myself. That my problem was only in my head. That I had just convinced myself that I was deformed. “Look at yourself in the mirror — you’re not ugly at all,” she’d said time and time again, trying to hold my head still when I turned away from my reflection. “Life is not over because of a few scars, Marek.” She said it so often that I began to think I might actually believe her if she repeated it another ten times. Or fifteen. Or a hundred.