She just lay there. Her hair had exploded, now taking up ten times the usual space. It reached through the cracks, as if growing in the damp darkness between planks. If she sensed a presence over her, she didn’t stir. He came around, pushed her bare feet in to make some space, and sat. She made a few adjustments, found a more comfortable position, and was motionless again. For a moment Levik felt insane, as if something horrible were happening, but if he didn’t move everything could seem like the height of normalcy, as if he were a child wandering a department store after getting separated from his mother, attaching himself to any serviceable hem. Then he realized everything was fine, no one had died, he was still very close to home, even closer than before by approximately thirteen meters. The night was warm, and he could take this moment to breathe, maybe even contemplate something peaceful while directing his gaze into the distance, though there still wasn’t much of it.
He clapped Marina’s knee. Time to go, he said.
Don’t touch me, she said. Her voice was inviting, supple. Yet again she demonstrated mastery of the contradictory tone/content maneuver, which was spiderlike and had a paralyzing effect on the victim. She inhaled deeply. You know what I’d like to be? she said.
How could he know?
Homeless.
Maybe one day, said Levik. Not tonight.
This is so much better than being inside, so much more serene, don’t you think? And such a sense of freedom. I’d do well as a street lady — I think I’d have a knack for it. For one thing, I’ve never had trouble obtaining free food. I have enough imagination. You know that I never register temperature change. Hot, cold, it’s all the same to me. And it’s not like I’m particularly hygienic. In fact, there must be homeless people out there more hygienic than me. Forget the street. I’d stay on this very bench. Lie under the stars. Listen to the ocean. Do you think it’s saying something? Do you think it’s communicating?
No.
Listen, she said.
The ocean isn’t saying anything.
Marina’s head popped up, her mouth already twisted by an idea. Here goes, thought Levik, wincing in preparation.
We never decided — Paris or Rome?
Levik shuddered. If the ocean is communicating, he said, it’s saying, Go home, drink some tea, lock your doors. It’s unhappy with us and making it very clear. As long as we’re here, there’s no telling what will happen. Maybe that Cumbre volcano in the Canary Islands finally erupted and caused a massive landslide. A tsunami is headed our way as we speak.
What difference does it make where we are, then? said Marina.
Don’t you want to see your daughter one last time?
She said she had plans.
• • •
FRIDA HADN’T LIED — she had plans. She went to her parents’ bedroom and rummaged in her mother’s makeup case as if in a decorative bowl of rocks. This failed — her bones didn’t tingle. She applied lipstick the color of Chinese eggplant and thought about where she could go, then called Gabe, who did a round of verbal cartwheels before admitting he was scouring the internet for men — tonight potential, not life potential, he said, though either would work and the end result would be a new pair of sneakers. I stayed out late yesterday and feel sick, he said. That’s fine, said Frida, who anyway didn’t feel up to dealing with the train. She turned on the TV and traveled through channels, not letting her thumb rest even if the colors or poses intrigued. She usually guessed wrong as to what interested her. She made her bed, neatly tucking the corners, then got into it, then left it but didn’t bother to make it again, knowing that the urge to get in would only strike once it was made. She wasn’t hungry, which was tragic.
Marina’s perfume and Levik’s cologne lingered in the corridor until the downstairs neighbors began their supper preparations. What the Hedonovs ate nightly was a mystery, but a consistent one. Even Robert with his dulled olfactory sense timed his boardwalk outings to their hour of dining. The Hedonovs were always jumping and shouting. They took naps in shifts, on the principle that it was easier to join in the revelry than start anew. Devotion to merriment on such a scale meant only one thing: They jumped not only for the thrill of jumping but to keep something terrifying, so terrifying it couldn’t be acknowledged, at bay. Of course, after so much bouncing, one couldn’t rule out brain damage. As to how many of them there were, it was hard to keep track. The pillars could be counted — the patriarch, Uzh; his two spinster sisters, Bo and El; the matriarch, Klysma; and her deranged brother, Grad — but Klysma’s children accrued imperceptibly, blink and there were two more, and relatives in need of convalescence were always arriving for two-week stays — they considered the sea air therapeutic, and America generally lacked for sanatoria.
Before the Hedonovs a man lived there, a Refrigeration Institute friend of Levik’s (they’d bonded because their fathers were big-shot factory bosses and huge assholes, Marina had explained). The apartment had witnessed his downfall, as had Frida, whose bedroom was directly above his in a building with no sound insulation. He’d done his best with the place — wallpaper stripped, walls partially gutted, floorboards dug out, doors torn from hinges, ceiling destroyed by water damage. After he’d been taken away (mental institution? prison?), the apartment stood empty for many months. At first it was a shock, a collective shame, a disgrace; residents tried to make use of the building’s other wing. Then, simply by not relenting, by remaining destroyed and abandoned, the apartment began the transformation into abstraction, becoming a symbol of something. For a moment it was the building’s core, establishing a grid of intimacy around itself. Then the Hedonovs bought the place. It was almost a move against nature, a tempting of fate. Renovation took a year and was rather an exorcism.
But why was Frida still thinking about that man, who’d owned a shriveled-olive Chihuahua with such pure fear in its eyes that, stranded in the elevator with it, Frida would become afraid of herself, as if some force in her might awaken and make her do horrible things to that dog? It hid behind the metal cart without which the man never left home. Of that trio — the man, the cart, and the Chihuahua — only the cart’s fate was known. The blue-haired old lady who tended the lobby plants had claimed it for herself, insisting she’d been its rightful owner all along. Four years had already passed, and yet the day of his disappearance grew no less vivid. Frida had been staring at the large swirling snowflakes in her organic chemistry textbook when her mother barged in, screaming, The downstairs apartment is empty, Pasha’s gone!
That was it! His name had fallen through the cracks, perhaps not unintentionally. And now it was a simple mistake, confusing the two Pashas. Trying to break through to the surface was the other Pasha, her uncle, but instead she’d slipped out of habit on her old downstairs neighbor. Freud would’ve been pleased.
But what about her uncle? She had so little to go on, practically nothing of any substance, and yet he loomed so large over the household. He was a mythic creature, a legend. It was impossible to imagine him as the father at a wedding. Dancing? Rejoicing? He slipped out of all the scenarios her mind conjured up for him. Sitting in a dentist’s chair, ordering from a menu, stretching a hamstring, filing taxes, trailing a tour guide — not Pasha. Her uncle didn’t tie shoelaces or own a cell phone. There was no laundry in his life, though a checkered, yellowed ironing board leaned against the wall behind his desk. The legs of the desk were as crooked as those of his landlady, who had three white hairs sprouting from her chin and at midnight hovered over the charcoal-smudged city astride her broomstick.