I crossed the street, past all the lit-up shops and bars, and my eyes burned. It happened all the time and it was annoying. I wiped my eyes with a finger without removing my sunglasses but the burning didn’t stop. What I really needed was to take off the glasses and dry my face with a tissue, but there were people all around. A class of babbling and giggling elementary school kids passed me. Most of them only came up to my belly button.
They didn’t look at me because I was outside their field of vision and thus outside their world, but I could still sense it.
Whenever I went anywhere people altered their course to avoid me. The more crowded a place was the easier it was to recognize. Where once there had been chaos, suddenly organized lanes appeared, all seemingly regulated by the same cosmic diagram that had as its goal to get people past me unharmed and with as much clearance as possible. I felt like a clove of garlic in the middle of a stream of ants. People probably didn’t even realize they were doing it — their subconscious altered their course in a way that soothed their mind without their ever recognizing what had caused the agitation or what hazard they had sidestepped.
I changed course as well. I went into the first ice cream shop I saw. I’d never particularly cared for ice cream but the bathroom was right at the front of the shop. I slipped in and locked the door. I turned off the light and took off my sunglasses. I felt around for the sink. I thought about Marlon and his question: Before or after?
I braced myself on the sink and tears fell on my hands. Crying was ridiculous but when my eyes itched and burned like this there was no stopping the tears. I felt for the faucet, turned it on, and splashed cold water on my face. Somebody knocked on the door.
“Just a second,” I shouted and let myself slump onto the toilet seat cover.
One eye itched worse than the other. They probably screwed up and stitched one of the tear ducts closed. Claudia cried a lot at first, always when she thought I wouldn’t pick up on it. But of course I picked up on everything. She walked around with a splotchy, puffy face, her eyes squinting, irregular spots of cover cream smeared on, and thought nobody would notice.
And then suddenly she was happy again. Just like that, though I didn’t notice exactly when it happened. Like a switch had been thrown. She got used to everything much faster than I expected. She could look me in the face without batting an eye. At first she touched the scars with her fingertips a lot and asked whether it hurt and assured me that I wasn’t ugly. She didn’t do that anymore.
The bathroom door shook as a fist banged on it.
I stood up, put my sunglasses on, and threw open the door. I saw a young waiter wearing a vest, bow tie, and pants all in black. His mouth opened in a silent scream but something about the shape of his mouth was off. Lip and tongue impairment, I thought to myself. Must have had to go to a speech therapist as a kid. Probably still slurs his speech.
“Boo!” I said and went past him and back out of the shop.
The next morning I discovered that somebody had taken my Pschyrembel Clinical Dictionary.
It was my only copy; I’d bought it a half-year earlier at a shop that specialized in medical books. It sat on my bookshelf alongside an atlas of human anatomy, an early-twentieth century book on gynecology and obstetrics passed down to me by my grandfather, and another historical but utterly useless tome with the romantic title The Art of Healing, that I’d spared from the recycling bin only because of its beautiful jacket. Claudia had given it to me for my birthday two months before in the hope that my interest in medical reference books might lead to something good and improve our chances of successfully living together.
“See,” she’d said approvingly as I unwrapped the book. “It’s totally normal for people to discover new horizons after a serious injury. Happy birthday, my beautiful boy.”
“Amen,” I’d said folding the wrapping paper up nicely. A quick leaf through the tome confirmed my suspicion that Claudia was completely off the mark with this gift. I wasn’t interested in the history of medicine. And I didn’t want to help anyone. “Thanks for the beautiful book,” I said. “Please feel free to borrow it anytime you’d like, for instance if you need a paperweight.” She didn’t bat an eye.
The history of the art of healing was still there, as was the book on gynecology and obstetrics; Plastic Surgery: Vol. 1 Basics Procedures Techniques, an out-of-pocket expense of 229 euros; everything right where it belonged.
But Pschyrembel was gone.
I ran down to the kitchen and pulled the plug of the vacuum cleaner, the business end of which our cleaning lady was holding. Frau Hermann was severely nearsighted and also very sickly. She must have been healthier at some point, but I couldn’t remember it. The day before yesterday a cobweb fell from the kitchen lamp into my minestrone.
Frau Hermann turned to me. She was very shaky, and her few grayish-white tufts of hair were pulled up on top of her head with the kind of hair clip you expected to see on a Chihuahua.
“Would you like a coffee?” I asked. Her gaze wandered indifferently over my face. She had problems of her own and as a result I felt relaxed in her presence.
“Yes, maybe so,” she said.
“On the way.” I drew a rectangle in the air. “Have you seen my thick green book?”
“The one with all that nastiness in it?”
“No, the other one. Though it wasn’t on the most palatable of topics either.”
“Green?”
I nodded.
“It’s on your mother’s nightstand,” she said and turned her back to me. As she turned she made a gesture with two raised fingers. I understood and plugged the vacuum back in.
I hadn’t been in Claudia’s bedroom since Dirk wormed his way in. Lately I hadn’t been talking to anyone; during the day I lowered the shades and napped or flipped through my Pschyrembel, and at night I took walks, sometimes even without my sunglasses, and felt the velvety cool air on my skin.
It didn’t seem to bother Claudia. She was always in a rush in the morning and Dirk was there in the evening. In between she worked like an animal. Dirk was at least ten years younger than her and he looked slightly stupid though Claudia claimed he was intellectually gifted. I wondered what an adult was supposed to do with his intellectual gifts. Whether perhaps other qualities might slowly become more important, qualities like a spacious apartment with wood floors and a fireplace, for instance. Claudia said I didn’t need to worry about Dirk.
That was our last conversation about the topic for the time being.
“My son is in a bad mood,” Claudia had said to Dirk just a little too loudly the evening the three of us spent together. In response Dirk asked what I was doing about my depression. I slammed my door shut. I figured he me might as well think I was not only depressed but also violent.
The Pschyrembel dictionary was sitting on Claudia’s nightstand next to another thick book with a woman with big hair and a beautiful neck on the cover. Beneath the Pschyrembel was another book, a thin one that I picked up. It was about post-traumatic stress disorder in adolescents. I put it back down. Then I checked to make sure my bookmarks were still in the right spots in the Pschyrembel. It wasn’t Claudia’s style to rummage around in my things without asking. I was willing to be open-minded: maybe she just wanted to check whether one of her moles looked like melanoma.
I put the Pschyrembel back on my shelf and Googled the guru. I would like to have forgotten his name, but unfortunately it was burned into my brain, so I Googled him. I wanted to see whether he happened to be a child murderer on the run for years. But I didn’t find any evidence of it. He’d played Puss in Boots at an independent theater and written a book about self-enlightenment through hiking. In the short biography in his book it said he’d been a kindergarten teacher and had survived a life-threatening illness. His Facebook profile wasn’t visible to the public. His teaching career didn’t show up much, and I couldn’t even find our self-help group on the schedule of the family services center.