“Ah, yes, the lovely blond girl you helped study for her citizenship test. How is she? Did her little place fare the storm all right?”
“She’s fine,” Clay whispered, staggered by his father’s tidy repackaging of history and recognizing the necessity of tactical retreat.
Johanna
Her eyes, straining to focus from the bright day to the darker bar, settled on a boy sitting before a bottle of beer. She lifted her gaze to Peter, walking toward him, wanting to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing serving alcohol to a child.
Peter greeted her with a large smile. “Johanna!”
She glanced at the seated figure, seeing the adult clothes, the lined face. Not a child but a very short man, a midget. She sat a few stools away and nodded to Peter’s raised eyebrows, which brought the pencil from behind his ear, caused the scrawl on the paper that would yield her sandwich and a taste of beer. Cause and effect, she thought; at least people like her could trigger small effects in the world, predict trivial aspects of the future.
“I’m a midget,” said the man down the bar, his tone neither belligerent nor playful, “not a dwarf.”
“I didn’t ask,” Johanna said.
“I just like to get that straight because people have a lot of ideas about dwarves from the way they’re represented in movies. A professor at the University of Maryland wrote a whole book: The Cultural History of Dwarves or The Representation of Dwarves in Film and Fiction. Something like that. But I don’t have dwarfism. I’m not ‘a little person.’ I’m just very short.”
Johanna hoped the man wasn’t about to become a regular. Chatty people made her uncomfortable, but at least the man was talking about himself and not asking about her. She gave his face a fraction of her attention: the early lines of middle age, the milky skin of the Irish, blue eyes, long brows. She could leave without eating, but Elizam might come to find her here, and she wanted to see him for interwoven reasons that she did not care to pull apart just now.
“Disaster tourist?” she asked, her tone slightly rude on purpose.
“I’m with the Red Cross. I train the new volunteers as they arrive.”
“Very noble.”
“Wrong.” His smile looked nearly triumphant. “I do it for the paycheck and the retirement benefits. I train volunteers, but I’m not one.”
Peter brought the sandwich, and Johanna lifted one of the halves from its plastic basket.
“Know what the hardest part of my job is?”
She finished chewing her bite, and he waited for her answer, expected one. She considered it and said, “I would guess dealing with the volunteers when their naive idealism meets with real people. Most people who need help are not happy about needing help and don’t always appreciate it when it comes.” She dabbed her mouth with the thin paper napkin. “Or who brings it.”
He laughed a sad snort. “That’s another problem, but I’m good at that part of my job. Having been born into the wrong body — some other guy got the tall, good-looking corpus that was supposed to be mine — I understand what it feels like to believe the world is getting it wrong. Hell, I can actually help with that part of it. That’s a lot of what I do: get the volunteers to stay after it gets hard, to keep working even if they don’t get the kind of immediate reward they’re hoping for. A challenge, yes, but a good one — and definitely not the hardest part.”
Johanna shrugged. “Then I don’t know.” She took another familiar bite, chewing more slowly than usual because she was being watched and also because she was conscious of the door behind her right shoulder, the feeling that it might push open, that Elizam might walk through it.
“The hardest part is that first presentation to a group — and I make one almost every day sometimes — when I have to come out and make a midget joke. You know, be the happy, funny guy, put everyone at ease. I become ‘the cool midget,’ the guy who can laugh at himself. Self-deprecation is a rare enough thing that people really like it.”
“Like you just did with me. The ‘good-looking corpus’ line. And if you don’t like doing it, then you were practicing.” Johanna sipped her beer. “But unless it is your job to make people comfortable, maybe you could skip the joke.”
“It kind of is my job to make them comfortable. But even if it weren’t, it makes things easier later.”
“I never learned that,” Johanna said, but she trained her thoughts on the present, thinking how nice it was to work mostly alone, limiting her conversations with people to the necessary arrangements and requests, the scheduling of pickups, the acceptance of their compliments or, on rare occasion, a complaint, usually that the restored picture just was not that good. To those, Johanna simply shrugged and said, “That is between you and the artist. All I did was restore it to itself.” She felt no compulsion to make her clients comfortable, and she never felt at ease in their company. This was not just because of what had happened to her; she had always been that way, as far back as she could remember, except perhaps with her father, though most of that was behind the veil of memory and so not accessible to her in any direct or useful way.
When the man finished his lunch and his drink he laid down some money and hopped off the bar stool, nodding good-bye.
Johanna finished her sandwich alone, watching Peter make a slow advance through the tall, uneven stack that remained in the corner, sorting the merely water-damaged games from the ruined magazines, separating what could be salvaged from what must be classified as destroyed. “I keep putting this off and then putting it off some more, but today is the day.”
“Don’t you want to just throw it all out, start over?”
Peter turned his head, his torso following only a second later, his expression confused. “Why wouldn’t I want to save whatever I could?”
Having no answer, she took a ten-dollar bill from her pocket and set it on the counter. “I will probably see you tomorrow.”
He nodded. “Hope so, hope so.”
Before crossing Decatur, she looked both ways multiple times — not for cars but for Elizam.
It had been years since she had thought about what she could do with the name that Eli might have, that she might be able to elicit from him. She had been happy finally to let go of her desire for retribution, which she knew was incompatible with the life she wanted, which was the life she had, and which contaminated her fictional history as a resident of this city with her real story. Yet even though she had given it up, and even though she had been relieved to give it up, she had felt robbed when she’d seen Ladislav’s picture in the newspaper — bereft of the possibility of revenge, which as long as Ladislav was out there had at least a faint existence. Having it snatched away had rekindled the desire, and now the means to satisfy that desire might yet be grasped.
She had read about a popular book in which a woman rapes, with a brutal object, the man who had raped her. The symmetry was appealing, it was true, but she knew enough of the art side of her job to know that a balanced composition is rarely created by such straightforward symmetry. No, she wanted the man fully clothed but dead, and she wanted him to know before he died that his death held her signature. Whatever else Eli might have been to her in some other circumstances — in another life, which could only ever be fiction — in these circumstances, he could only be the means to that end.
Her lunch break had coincided with the completion of a project, and it took her some time to decide what to start on next. The unusual sense that she might be interrupted complicated the choice — a realization she found unpleasant. Concentration was generally not a problem for her, which was yet another thing that Clay resented her for, another representation to him of the big thing he resented her for, which was that she did not want to be with him and could not love him.