Letter From Transylvania
By Hugh Merwin
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| Georganne Deen, Shut the Fuck Up, 2007, oil on muslin |
It is a new job offer for him and they are both unsure what it means, how long it will take, if success is in the cards. This job is prestigious. This job is in a different country, a lower-tech country. The people there don't even have a recipe for bread.
Both of them circle listings for the museums they want to see in the guidebooks, and so on. They pack but pack carefully, weighing everything to predict how it will fit their bags. They model, chart and test different configurations of packaging and narrow down their carry-on choices until they agree they are bringing the most perfectly packed bags they can imagine. He buys small acid-resistant containers to pour the contents of larger containers into; shampoo in one, a coil of dental floss in another, and silver dollar-sized screw top cups for his and hers mega vitamins. He squeezes an iridescent stream of shaving gel into a flask and caps it before it has the chance to turn into foam. He pours mouthwash into a smaller bottle with top-shelf bartender finesse, but over the sink, just in case. He packs mouthwash anyhow, even though she says he never has bad breath, especially garlic breath. He never touches the stuff.
She gets all the magazines and books she's been meaning to read together into a tall, neat pile, and rips out only the articles and chapters she thinks she'll have time for during the ten hour flights. He rolls newly starched shirts into wrinkled balls, pushes them into the side pockets of his half-zipped bag. He bats around the house with the optional shoulder strap attached, tests the weight of the bag. He runs through the bathroom hallway, like a frantic commuter chasing a plane down the tarmac. Their dog follows him confused, ready to go wherever he is going, too. Finally she remembers the last trip they took together, her neatly summarized regrets, and makes sure to pack his clamp-on book light so that he can read his own books without waking disturbing her sleep. It is the one item that does not fit in with the rest of the packed luggage.
This new job, this move, is considered part of their plan. But they don't know much more beyond that. They have never planned ahead. They want to start. Their insurance agent comes over unannounced and says worrisome things like, "Eternity is too long a time to not have good insurance coverage." He has this kind of stuff inscribed on pens, inside naugahyde bibles, even on cinnamon flavored toothpicks. They figure he must really know what he's talking about.
They step off the plane in this new country where the people don't even have a recipe for bread, and it doesn't take much time for them to rise to the occasion, to make friends. The buildings are painted blue like fake sky and some are gilded with onion domes, making the city look solid gold. The vegetables in the market stalls are cheap and gnarly; they seem to have been wilderness-grown by careless lycanthopes. The gypsies hang out in the park by the fountain, would "pickpocket the whole world if they could." That's how his co-workers put it. They warn him to keep his cash tucked in his socks, and promise to supply more helpful tips as time goes on. He decides to go out drinking with these guys, make a night of it. She comes too. They hit the clubs, dance their asses off, and wind down at Local, a private haunt for company employees. It's lamplit and horses are tied together outside, a real "old-fashioned" vibe. All of his immediate bosses are there and he is eager to make a good impression, to suck up. He introduces her to everyone, and everyone is charmed. Everyone laughs and drinks. He tells jokes, makes funny faces. She laughs too, and when he looks over to her, as if to let her know that this was part of the plan, she is making off-color jokes at his new bosses' expense, slapping his shoulders. Her eyes are glazed, and the new boss isn't laughing. She has had too much to drink. The boss is uncomfortable, tilting his head to look at the line for the bathroom, and then down at his watch.
He grabs her waist when the boss is looking at his watch. You're like a monster, she says to him, and she tries to push his hands away. He takes her home and tells her he's going to put her to bed, but she refuses help. They don't look at each other. Finally she undresses. He takes everything off except for his briefs. She turns off the lights like it is any other night, and nothing has happened.
-You're a monster. She says quietly from her bed, talking into her pillow. They've been given these two long single beds, chipped-veneer lacquered boxes that look like coffins. The beds are fitted with stitched cushions, stuffed with things like horsehair and foraged dryer lint. In the mornings all he sees are little shiny wire lengths of hair that tuft through the washed-out bed sheets. Most mornings are hung over and also telltale, inter-office memos stuck between his sheets. He reads in bed and is covered with thin paper cuts that seem to heal in seconds and never bleed. Tonight she is drunk and calling him names, and even though she is only in the next bed, his vision is poor and he can't make her out. It feels like tonight is the longest and darkest night of the year. He can't see anything at all.
- You're a monster. She says again. He doesn't see her. He doesn't see anything without his glasses but he picks up a book with the attached clamp-on booklight, and pretends to read. He can't believe he is on page 274 already. It doesn't seem like anything has happened yet. In the book a girl has died, they really don't know why, and then they all went to Rome to take pictures, and shoot videotapes of werewolf children with their silver cameras. How did it come to this? He goes back to the beginning of the nearest chapter for some kind, any kind of answer, but he can barely make out the words.
- You're a monster. She says, toneless. Little shit. He ate some sleeping pills about twenty minutes before she started in with the insults. The sleeping pills are working, but the insults aren't. The pills generally make him feel just quiet inside, not tired. He doesn't care if she goes to sleep at all, but that's not because of the pills. He knows her side of the room is spinning.
-You're an asshole. He is mad now and gets up to face her, to turn her over and look her in the eye, to calm her down and get forgiven. Her face is swollen and looks welted. She is biting her lip but it shakes out from under her teeth and he looks at it like it's a bruise that has sprouted on her face. He feels really old and useless, and she won't stop crying. He puts his hand over her hair, in her hair, and falls asleep like someone unlucky in a myth. Someone who ate a cursed bug they weren't supposed to or accidentally married the daughter of Hell. The upper part of his body cares and holds her, is human and all, but his legs are twisted off the bedside and his feet are planted firmly in the economy carpet, fastened with little tadpoles of sleep into this new country. This is not who he is supposed to be, he thinks for the first time in his life, and he falls asleep there, holding her.
He wakes up a few minutes later. She is staring at him. A cautionary look spreads on his face. He is thinking about the things they wanted together, and the things they talked about. All of it is so in the past that it's not even funny. He thinks about the skinny anemia boys with the hasty Tyrolese haircuts they used unsuccessfully as couriers for their love letters when they first met, the bike messengers carrying their courtship on their endless supply of skinned knees and reflector tape. They had wanted a lot of things as a young couple:
They wanted empire beds, sleigh beds, day beds, moon beds, and all the other kinds of beds they didn't have the names for. All their rooms that they couldn't fit beds into they wanted filled with sateen and bespoke pillows. They wanted, and had even made blueprints for, a giant walk-in closet filled with pugs. They wanted to be within walking distance of good Mexican food.
He thinks the sleeping pill is working because odd details and remote things are occurring to him, like the birthstones and zodiacs of the children they didn't have. Everything floats though his field of vision; everything out loud. He's up to five, five of something or another.
-Stop counting, she says, and he falls asleep.
The next day, she has made the decision to leave. She spends the rest of her time in this country going to operas and cemeteries, and none of it with him. She gets a special discount flight and is home by the end of the week. Right away he is asked to start working full time so he does, and he loses time thinking about her, so her stops. He is left with artifacts. She wanted to bring home the lightest bag possible, and so there's a note asking him that if he could just give her travel coat to a homeless shelter, or just to leave it beside the church with the onion domes. The coat is made out of white fleece, and it is folded on top of the mini-fridge by the door. She also leaves film, a box of crackers, and lip-gloss in the drawer by her empty bed. He throws those things away. The coat stays on the mini-fridge.
He doesn't miss her when she leaves. He goes to his job and home. He spends his entire first paycheck on fancy dinners and bottles of old wine wrapped in woven straw. He files reports and sends memos, and is given a crystal apple on his desk for luck. It is also a paperweight. He hangs a poster above it that has a picture of a crackly iceberg and the word, "ENDURANCE- A ONE MAN JOURNEY THROUGH THE ARTERIES OF COURAGE" in rusty caps. They start calling him "The Impaler" at work because of his knack for dispatching paperwork to the "completed orders" spike. By now he no longer needs sleeping pills to get by; he could sleep all day if he wanted to. He is comfortable. He even gets his pocket picked one day and doesn't mind. He celebrates this milestone by going back to the bar they went on their first night, Local. He has no beer money of course, but has a company tab. The few pennies he does have buy him a cone of flavorless ice cream to savor on his drunken walk home.
One day he is slathering Grecian Formula on his comb and sharpening his widow's peak in the mirror by the door. In the reflection he sees her coat, still folded on top of the mini-fridge. For a moment, everything else disappears from his sight, including his very own reflection. It's just her coat he sees. These are your dirty feathers, he says to himself, thinking he can smell the coat. You flew home without them. Still folded, he goes to the bed and takes a long nap with it, using it as a pillow.
He wakes up later. It feels like a few dozen years have passed, but he rushes to work and finds out that he only missed one appointment, and that's alright because it wasn't booked in accordance to procedure to begin with. His secretary is always ready with profuse apology, like she is scared of him. It will be a long time before he realizes that almost everyone in the world is scared of him. By that time it is too late.
That weekend, the first chance he gets, he calls her at her mother's house. He had heard from a friend that she was staying there. She sounds older when she gets on the phone, and he can't quite put his finger on it. He tells her that he misses her, but just as he does this the phone card runs out and his voice is replaced by a gurgle of long distance noise.
He is still sleeping with her coat. There is a persistence of dusk so he decides to take her coat to the park, to leave it on a bench for whoever wants it. He can't go near the church because it reminds him of wishes.
He enters the park and places the coat on the first empty bench he sees, one in the shady cool by the fountain. He strokes it with his palm before he leaves; this is what he feels he's supposed to do. She has told him that she has sent a letter, and that he should think very carefully about it before responding. He doesn't know what the letter says, it will be bad, definitely, but he feels only odd excitement because he has started talking to her again. He plans on writing her back, something flowery, no matter what. He walks out of the park, past the gypsies and the skinny girls who walk their dogs that are bigger than them, with leashes made of braided strings from onion bags, past a girl who plays a flute by herself. He turns to look at her abandoned coat one final time there on the bench, and it is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Her folded white fleece coat. There is proof that love can make history go any way it wants to go. After this, the gypsies stop picking his pocket. The gypsies turn and wash their feet in the fountain. The gypsies invent a recipe for bread.