“The higher the paralysis goes, the more likely he's impotent.” Slim gestures at his own spine with a long, crooked arm. “Anyway, what about you? You've met the one, haven't you? She's a blonde, right?” His grayish eyes gleam with the pleasure of prodding at my privacy.
“Stop kidding. I ran into some demonstrators this afternoon. You know, the sort of hooligans you see crying out on the news for earthworms' rights.” I shake my head. “Thanks,” I say, taking the plate from the waitress. A meatball sandwich with pickles on the sideâmy dinner, forever and always.
“Kids with too much time.” Slim shakes his head. “Speaking of which, did you know . . . the word âpotato' comes from the Arawak language of Jamaica.”
Dimly, I think his voice sounded strange just then, when he was saying the second half of his sentence, as if something got stuck in his throat or the cold beer caused a relapse of my tinnitus. “No, I didn't know. Not that I'm interested in some language no one speaks anymore.” I stick a slice of pickle in my mouth.
Slim widens his eyes in surprise. “You don't care about this?”
His voice is back to normal. It was tinnitus, then. I should go see a doctor, if I haven't reached my health insurance coverage limit this year. “I don't give a damn,” I say with my mouth full.
“Fine, then.” He lowers his head and toys with his beer glass. The waitress brings his dinner to the table, and passes me my smoked salmon as well.
“Seriously, you two should go out and have some fun. Go to the strip club or something.” The waitress looks at our expressions, frowns, and leaves.
Slim and I wordlessly turn our heads toward the gaudy club front across the street. I take two fries from his plate and stuff them into my mouth, then push my smoked salmon toward him. “Have you felt that we haven't had any interesting topics to talk about lately?” I say.
“You're feeling it too?” Slim exclaims. “Beyond the sex lives I've sniffed out, I can barely find anything to talk about. I've found conversations so boring these last few years.”
“Maybe we're just getting old?” I unhappily retrieve my right hand from the plate of fries. There's a noticeable age spot on the back of my hand. It appeared just recently, awkward like the stain on my trousers the year I was twenty-two.
“I'm only forty-two! Jiménez was forty-one when he won the Wales Open!” Slim cried, waving a french fry wildly. “The drudgery of work is making us this way. It'll all be different once we retire. Don't you agree, old buddy?”
“I sure hope so,” I answer distractedly.
4
I drink two more bottles of cold beer tonight. Waves of dizziness assault me once I'm through my apartment door. I make for my bedroom and collapse on the bed without bothering to shower.
The sheets smell strangely earthy. I don't know if it's because I haven't changed them in so long, but on the bright side, the smell makes me think of the farm when I was littleânot the farm that reeked of my father's animal stench, but from before he started drinking, before he started abusing my mother. I'm thinking of the tranquil, peaceful farm where my mother, my sister, and I lived.
I remember playing with my older sister in the newly built granary, airy and filled with the clean fragrance of earth and fresh-cut wood. Sunlight spilled in through the little loft window, accompanying the smell of the cookies my mother baked.
When we got tired from running, we sat down with our backs against the wall. My sister pulled my right hand over. “Close your eyes,” she told me. I obediently shut my eyes, the sunlight glowing dusky red on the inside of my eyelids. My palm tickled. I giggled and tried to pull my hand back. “Guess what word I'm writing.” My sister was laughing too, her finger scratching around on my palm.
I thought a bit. “I don't know. Write slower!” I complained. My sister wrote the word again, more slowly.
âHorse?' I answered, looking at her.
“That's right!” My sister laughed and ruffled my hair. “Let's play again! If you can get five words right, I'll let you ride my pony for two days.”
“Really?” I excitedly closed my eyes.
My palm started to tickle again. I barely held back my giggles. “It's . . . âcrow' this time?”
“That was âroad,' dumb-butt!” My sister flicked my nose, laughing, and jumped to her feet. “First one there gets the biggest frosting cookie!”
“Wait for meâ”
I stretch out an arm. I open my eyes to fluorescent lighting and the ceiling, one corner stained with water. The family living above me forgot to turn off their bath tap again.
I'll get the apartment managers to teach them a lesson this time
, I think, realizing that I've woken up from my dream of childhood. My shirt smells sour from alcohol after a day of wear. My neck and back ache from my awkward sleeping position. It takes me five minutes to sit up, look at the alarm clock, and see that it's only one in the morning.
I feel better after a shower and a few glasses of water, but I don't feel like sleeping anymore. I put on pajamas and sit on the living room couch. I flick on the TV; as usual, there's nothing interesting at all on the late-night shows. As I flip through the channels, I notice the ugly blotch on my right hand again. I scrub at it with my left hand, even though I know something like that can never be rubbed off.
The sudden faint itching on my palm makes me shiver.
Wait, what's this feeling? IâI recognize it from the dream, my sister scrawling childish characters on my hand . . .
Today at noon, the stranger in the black hoodie wasn't tracing some mysterious symbols or gang signs on my palm.
He was writing. No,
she
was writing. The stranger was a woman. The black hoodie hid her other features, but that slender finger couldn't have belonged to a man. What did she write?
I frantically dig out pencil and paper and set them on the coffee table. I try with all my might to recall what I felt. The last word had been written by my sister before . . . yes, it was “
ROAD
.”
I write “ROAD” on the sheet of paper.
There was another word in front of it. She wrote it quickly, very quickly. From my long years approving petitions, I've found that people will write words with pleasant associations that way, fast and fluid, words like “smile,” “forever,” “hope,” “fulfillment.” She wrote a short word, standing for something good, with two vowels . . . Aha!
EDEN
. That's right, the garden of paradise.
I write “EDEN” before “ROAD.”
Even before those words came a string of numbers, Arabic numerals. She wrote them twice over for emphasis. I wrinkle my brow, carefully recalling every movement of her fingertip. 7, 2, 9, 5? No, the first number traced the outside edge of my palm, so there should have been another bend at the end. It was 2, then. 2, 8, 9, 5. I check my recollections again. That's it.
I write “2895” on the left.
The paper reads “2895 EDEN ROAD.”
I flop down in front of the computer, open up a map site, and enter “2895 Eden Road.” The page shows Eden Road to be on the other side of the city from me, far from the downtown area and the slums near the financial center. But Eden Road doesn't have a 2895. The building numbers end at 500.
I rub my temple, translating each number back to a sensation on my skin, a tingling line traced on my palm. I stare at my hand. 2, 8, 9, that was right. 5 . . . Oh, of course, it could have been an “S.” I type in 289S Eden Road, and the map site shows me a four-story apartment building halfway down Eden Road. It's at the outskirts of the city, forty-five kilometers from here. “Got it!” I triumphantly smack my keyboard and leap to my feet, only to fall back on my ass, dizzied by the blood rushing into my head.
What would I find there? I haven't a clue. But I do know that in the forty-five years I've lived by the book, I've never had an adventure where a woman in a black hoodie left me a contact address in a cloak-and-dagger mannerâwell, my path never seemed to cross with the ladies at all, loser that I am. Something interesting has finally appeared in my dull and listless life. Whether driven by the urging of my hormones, as sharp-nosed Slim would say, or my aroused curiosity, I decide to put on a windbreaker and go to 289S Eden Road to find something new.
Don't make trouble, kid.
As I prepare to leave, I see my father in the mirror opposite the door, his belly bulging, a bottle of gin in hand.
Oh, fuck you.
I stride out the door like I did twenty-three years ago.
5
I own a motorcycle, long unused. In college, I was as captivated by the latest high-tech toys as all the other young people were: the newest phone, tablet, plasma TV, electricity-generating sneakers, high-horsepower motorbike. Who doesn't love Harley-Davidson and Ducati? But I couldn't afford such expensive brand-name motorcycles. When I was twenty-six, I found a Japanese exchange student about to return home because his visa was expiring, and at last managed to buy this black Kawasaki ZXR400R with only eight thousand miles from him. She was in excellent condition, her brake disks gleaming like new, the roar of her exhaust pipes mesmerizing. I couldn't wait to ride over to my friends and show her off, but they'd long since grown bored of motorcycles. They came to the bars and talked about women with their brand-new Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs parked outside.
From then on, I didn't really have friends anymore. When I put on my tie and rode my Kawasaki to work, everyone would look askance at me and my ride, smacking of youthful rebellion. In the end, I gave up and locked my beloved motorbike away in storage. There she stayed as I grew older and met one failure after another in my career. In the blink of an eye, I'd turned into a forty-five-year-old single alcoholic. Sometimes, on a sunny day, I'd ask my beloved Kawasaki as I cleaned her:
Old buddy, when do you want to go out for a ride again?
She never answered me. Every time I thought I could work up the courage to take her out for a ride, the grotesque mental picture of a balding middle-aged man hunched over the sleek motorcycle turned my stomach. It reminded me of the sickening way my drunken father would self-assuredly hit on every woman he saw.
I make my way down the battered apartment stairwell and unlock the dusty doors to the public storage room. I find my motorbike half buried in empty beer cans and pull the tarp aside. The Kawasaki 400R's jet-black paintwork is covered with dust, but the tires are still full of air, and all the gears still gleam with oil. I uncap a small spare gas can and pour the contents into the tank, then turn the key, testing the ignition. The four-cylinder four-stroke engine howls to life without hesitation. My old buddy hasn't let me down.
“Asshole, do you know what time it is?” When I walk my motorbike out of the storage room, a beer bottle smashes to pieces at my feet. I look up and see the landlady yelling from the second-story window, a nightcap on her head. I don't apologize like I would usually do. I just get on my motorcycle and rev the engine, the roar reverberating up and down the street. I loose the clutch at her shouts of, “Are you crazy?” Amidst the squeal of tires and the smell of burning rubber, I whoop with excitement, and my apartment and the strip club retreat from me at breakneck speed.
The wind howls. I'm not wearing a helmet; I feel the air resistance mold the flabby flesh of my face into comical shapes, and the hair I grow long for my comb-over whips behind me. But I don't care how many people might be around at one in the morning to see an ugly middle-aged man racing by on a motorcycle. At this moment, the endless monotony of my life has at least been broken by thirst for the pursuit of happiness.
The ride is over too quickly. The sign for Eden Road appears before I've had my fill of racing through the empty city streets. I decelerate and shift to second gear, turning my head to read the numbers on the doors. Looking at the map, I see that the subway and light-rail stations closest to Eden Road are two kilometers away; this is a place forgotten by the city's development. The street isn't wide, and dingy old cars line both sides of the road. The run-down three- and four-story buildings beyond them are crammed against each other, the majority looking more dilapidated than my own apartment building. Most of the streetlights are dark, and the Kawasaki 400R's headlamps sketch an orange halo against the black street. A feral cat jumps out of a trash bin, eyes me, and pads off.
At this point, I've calmed down enough to wonder whether crossing the city at night for an unfamiliar district in search of a stranger's cryptic address was a rational decision. Every telephone pole could conceal a knife-wielding mugger, maybe even a black-market doctor in search of organs to steal. I want to escape my dreary life, but I definitely don't want to escape it only to end up as a gory crime-scene photo in tomorrow's newspaper.
I decelerate as much as I can, but it's too quiet here, and the rumble of the Kawasaki's engine sounds louder than a B-52 pressed back into active duty. Luckily, at this point, a bronze doorplate appears in the headlights:
289A/B/C/D/S EDEN ROAD
.
I stop by the roadside, kill the engine, and turn off the headlights. A deathly silence instantly engulfs me. On either side, Eden Road has fallen into darkness. In front of the door to the apartment building at 289 is the only light, a weak incandescent lamp; its shade wobbles in the wind, making muffled metallic scraping noises.
Dammit, I should have brought a flashlight.
Cold sweat seeps from my back.
Right, my cell phone. My cell phone.
I pat my windbreaker all over and finally find my old-fashioned phone in an inner pocket. I turn on the flash; the football-sized spot of white light comforts me somewhat.
I walk up and gently pull open the doors to 289 Eden Road. The doors aren't locked. The glass pane in one door is broken, but there's no glass on the floor.