Читать книгу In the Blind - Eugene Marten - Страница 11

IBRAHIM said, “I’m looking for someone to trust.” He had long deep scratches on his arm and on his neck, just under the jaw. They looked recent.

“I need someone for up front,” he said. His English wasn’t broken, but sometimes rearranged.

“Spell your last name,” Wanda said. She was Wanda and she wrote it down on a yellow legal pad. She assured me that this was only a temporary measure, that I would be filling out a real application as soon as—it had just been so crazy lately you wouldn’t—they just needed something on paper for now. I nodded. I could see that this was a place where certain things didn’t always get done. I relaxed a little in my madras shirt.

“Someone to make keys,” Ibrahim said. “To cover the drawer, sell locks, track inventory. Someone to clean up.” He sat on one of the stools in front of the counter, his hands moving. I sat on the other one. The man with the newspaper wasn’t there.

“Social security number?” Wanda asked. Address. Date of birth. “You look younger,” she said. I thanked her but I wasn’t sure I was flattered. Maybe she hadn’t looked closely.

“You see what a mess we are here,” Ibrahim said. He gestured at the display over and around the counter, “We need this organize.” Many different kinds of the same few items—key chains, holders, fobs, those colored rubber rings you put on the heads of similar keys to tell them apart. One of the key chains had a rubber pig at the end of it. It farted when you squeezed it.

“Just throw it in the garbage,” Wanda said.

“Reorganize. Fix up.”

“It doesn’t make any money.”

“The phone please, Wadiya.” The phone sounded like a weapon in a video game and once it started it didn’t stop. Wanda wore a headset. She asked someone for a job number. She wrote it down on a slip and gave it to Ibrahim, gave him something to do with his hands.

“Could I see your driver’s license?” she said. I gave her my state ID. “You don’t have a license?”

“I don’t drive.”

Ibrahim looked at me. “Why you don’t drive?”

I improvised some inept jazz about being out of work for a while, about lapsed insurance. Suspension of privileges.

“Hard times.” His eyes wandered. He kept folding the slip of paper, making it smaller. “How you getting to work without a car? You go on the bus?”

“He lives at the Avenue,” Wanda said.

“Around the corner.” Ibrahim nodded. “No excuse, then. And how is Mrs. Ivy?”

I said she seemed to be herself. I looked at him. “She has account with us,” he said. “I know her for years. Every time a tenant leaves I rekey the lock, put on a master system.”

“Work history,” Wanda said. The phone went off. She spoke into the little tube, listened, pushed a button. “He’s calling from a bar . . . locked his keys in his car.”

“It’s early to drink in the morning,” Ibrahim said.

“His engine’s running.”

“I hope is not a baby in the car.”

“The baby in the car,” Wanda said, kind of reverently. “Tell him that one.”

“I don’t touch a drop,” he said.

“How many exemptions do you want to claim?” Wanda asked.

“What you’re talking exemptions? I’m not even hire him yet.” Ibrahim looked at me. “Tell me why I should hire you.”

“You’ll hire him.”

“This is not your say, Wadiya.”

“Don’t call me that.” She looked at me. “A-rabs.” She said the A the long way.

“In Syria,” Ibrahim said, “the woman walk ten steps behind the man.”

“In Syria they eat snakes. We don’t play that shit here.”

“Here you walk only five steps behind.”

“Eat pork.”

She told me she needed three references.

“I need a people person,” Ibrahim said. That could be tricky. It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t like people, I just wasn’t very good with them. They wouldn’t give you your three feet.

“Take your time.”

“When is not busy you can wash the windows, clean the bathroom. Sweep the sidewalk in front.”

“When it’s not busy,” Wanda said. She answered the phone. The door chimed. Ibrahim’s brother came in from a service call and we shook hands. He went back out on another service call and I forgot his name.

“We are a family here,” Ibrahim said. “We are residential. We are commercial, we are safes, we are automotive.”

“Automotive,” Wands said. “That’s Ibrahim’s specialty. He’s the best car man in town.”

“We handle Triple A.”

“What are you going to start him at?”

“We have exclusive account.”

The guy at the bar called again.

“I need someone to organize the keyboard,” Ibrahim said. “To help with dispatch. To count this drawer—once in the morning and once at end of the day.”

There were no sick days, no medical.

“I need someone I can trust,” he said.

“You need to get over there, Ibrahim,” she said. She said his name with no trouble.

“I left five minutes ago.”

“I could smell it through the phone. Maybe he shouldn’t drive.”

Maybe, I said, she was right.

Ibrahim shrugged, winked. “So long as he’s not too drunk to pay.”

“He’ll probably start you at seven,” Wanda told me.

“Minimum wage.” Ibrahim got up. “If,” he said, “I take you on.”

“Please,” she said. “Nobody can live on that.”

“Here we learn to pay ourselves,” he said. Commission. Once he started moving, it was hard to remember him sitting. “He has no experience. Anywhere else you train on your own time, buy your own tools . . .” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. He looked around behind the counter, picked up a cell phone and told me how many free minutes he got. I assumed this was a good thing and nodded.

“Wanda.” He wasn’t done looking for things yet. “Where my keys are, Wanda?”

“Use that thing of yours,” she said. “That thing that does everything.” A small showy smile. Ibrahim pressed something on what looked like his wristwatch. A chirping sound. He made his way to it and picked up his keys.

“Ibrahim’s a gadget freak,” Wanda said. “You should see the van.”

I nodded. He stood there with the cell phone and the thing on his wrist and wore a pager. There were two computers behind the counter. More little boxes with buttons and screens. I was not a gadget freak.

He stood there. “Tell me, he said. “Why I should hire you?”

I could not get interested in trying to convey my worth. I said that he would find out he could trust me. That minimum wage would do till he decided I was worth more.

He smiled. “If you don’t want money, then what do you want?”

“A start.”

“I think about it. Maybe Wanda call you in the morning.”

“I told you he doesn’t have a phone.”

“Then you stop by.” We shook hands and he headed out the back. “Wadiya! Give this man something cold to drink.”

Up front there was a mini-fridge like the one I had. I said water was good.

“I know I can get you six,” Wanda said. “He likes you.” She advised me to forget everything I’d ever heard about A-rabs. Really a very generous man. No benefits but they were a family, he’d give you an advance and sometimes even say forget about it. She’d needed a root canal, pointed to her jaw. “Hurt so bad I couldn’t even talk. What a relief, right? Shut up.” A sideways motion of her hand wiped the slate clean for all time. “Never even took it out of my check.” She gave me a preemptive look. “And I’m not sleeping with him.”

That was how you knew she was. Someone needed to say something then and all I could think of were the scratches on Ibrahim’s neck and arms, but she wasn’t finished. He was just so . . . She groped, looked in the air.

The phone made its sound. A customer came in. They definitely needed someone but I was glad to get out of there. Wanda tore off the sheet of long yellow paper and told me to fill in what was missing, bring it back the next day. She told me what she needed. I thought I might hang on to it until someone insisted, or get creative and take my chances. And Ibrahim might decide against me anyway. There was still the beat-up van. There was still fast food, people gone crazy with choice like they could make up for the options life denied them.

SOMEBODY must have made a mistake. I didn’t say anything. I was supposed to go once a week.

It was a ten-minute bus ride but the summer school kids in the back made it a lot longer. I pulled the cord above my head about six blocks before my stop and if it made a sound you couldn’t hear it. When I stepped off the bus I was already there anyway. The Clinic had gotten bigger and was still expanding—The City Within The City, a sign read, as if there were nothing ominous about it. There was no center, no front door, and I finally stumbled across an emergency entrance and went in that way.

Maybe it wasn’t a mistake.

I’d never been there before but I certainly knew about it. Everybody did—the Clinic was famous around the world for its treatments and research, for cutting-edge advances made in the realms of the heart and brain. Celebrities were regular customers. Actors, athletes, heads-of-state who crossed oceans to undergo treatment—even the deposed dictator of a small nation. That one had raised a stink.

An impatient old man in an information booth told me I wanted the Lab, like there was only one. He pointed a shaky finger and I asked one other employee before I found it. A waiting room. A woman working a desk on the other side of a window. She took my name and gave me a seat.

If it wasn’t a mistake, maybe they didn’t think it mattered. I picked up a Reader’s Digest and took the vocabulary test. I wasn’t sure about ferule and ziggurat, so I was excellent but not superior. I wasn’t sure if I would see her. As far as I knew, I hadn’t been formally restrained, not even by her family, but I wasn’t sure. At the time certain things were beside the point.

A small, pleasant old lady opened a door next to the window and invited me in. She took me into a small white room with cupboards and a counter, put on blue rubber gloves and had me empty my pockets. I wrote my name on a label, washed my hands. She told me not to flush. The water was blue. The lid on the toilet tank was locked and above it a set of instructions told you how to ensure a “clean catch.” There was no sink.

When I could wash my hands again I asked her about patients who were in a particular condition. She gave me directions. Another new building.

I let myself get lost. Skyways, escalators, tunnels, as in an airport or a shopping mall. After a while it was impossible not to glide. Attendants pushed machines on wheels that made no sound, men and women in billowing lab coats or surgical scrubs, paper shoes, a red-faced administrator in a black suit saying, “I don’t let myself have bad days.” Everyone else looked out of place—you hardly saw any patients. Families huddled in waiting rooms, asleep on benches or in their chairs like stranded travelers. Announcements, a sexy voice incapable of bad news, preceded by a soft bell. The building devoted to disorders of sleep brought to you by a name I’d seen affiliated with a sports franchise, steel. Wings, concourses, annexes, each a different color, another familiar name. A hotel, a McDonald’s. A map. You are here.

But I knew any way I went would lead to her.

The skilled-care facility was housed in a tall round building, a silo with windows. You had to take a sky bridge so high and long it was supported by pylons and looked like a tourist attraction. I walked above a ravine I hadn’t even known existed in this part of town, a creek at the bottom. People stopped at the sides and looked down to their shiny trickling death. Signs encouraged them not to. I didn’t stop but I went slowly, because I needed to know what I was going to say if someone asked if they could help me, and because I wanted it to last. You could feel the air you were walking on.

I came to an elevator and took it down and stepped out into a circle. A round ward with a round desk in the middle. No one was there, and that was some kind of luck. I moved along the outer rim of the circle, looking into rooms I was not entitled to, heard machine-breathing and beeping. No bustle called for here, the calm of a museum, of a place made for the display of objects. I had to go around twice. The first time was to find out she was there, the second to find out if I was going back to the elevator or into the room.

Her eyes were taped shut. Her arms were at her sides, bent at the elbows. Hands clenched into tight fists resting on the sides of her chest. From the shape beneath the blanket it seemed her legs were crossed at the ankles. She had no color. Her hair looked lank and unreal, like doll’s hair, but somebody had brushed it and put a white bow in it. There were tubes. One was screwed into a hole in her head, another went into her throat. It was connected to something that looked like a kitchen appliance, and in a dark window you saw waveforms rising and falling, glowing, fading. Numbers that changed accordingly. Her body, the blanket, even the gown, looked so tense and rigid it seemed everything would feel like wood if you touched it, but I wasn’t going to find out. I was afraid of her.

She wasn’t alone. There was another bed in the room, the curtain drawn around it. I heard a voice murmuring. No one answered and I didn’t know if it was the patient or a visitor.

They’d fixed her face but it looked like a hasty job, like whoever had done it decided this was the least of her problems. A slant to her features now, one side of her mouth trying to be happy, the other confused. Another tube disappeared under the blanket. I saw what it came from and realized she was feeding.

I looked up. A mobile suspended above her bed, dangling five-pointed stars and a crescent moon like something you would hang over a crib. Either somebody thought it made a difference to her, or it was there to comfort everyone else. A birthday card, plastic flowers, the bend of her wrists. I touched one of the stars and the whole thing started moving.

The TV was on, a talk show. The voice with the curtain around it rose and fell.

I heard the elevator. I looked out the door but I couldn’t see anything. I looked at the birthday card. She was younger than me but she was on a different clock. She looked smaller—not just like she’d lost weight but like she was diminishing in some other way. Dwindling to a kind of essence.

The voice behind the curtain sang.