Peter Rabe - The Box

Quinn picked up his fresh glass and Remal said, “I would like to tell you and discuss the news before…”

“Before I get any drunker?” said Quinn, and then he took a good swallow from his glass.

Remal said nothing while Quinn finished. When Quinn had put down his glass Remal said, “If this was meant to offend me, Mister Quinn, you cannot offend me.”

“Like you wouldn’t be offended at a dog that pissed on your rug because that would be just too foolish, to think of the brute as if it were a human being.”

Remal sucked air through his nose. It’s just like he’s sniffing this whole thing out, thought Quinn.

“It’s precisely this kind of remark, Mister Quinn, which keeps me from understanding you. I’ve been wondering whether or not you do it on purpose.

“What’s the good news?” said Quinn.

“Yes. It is better to talk about that.” He smoothed his skirt affair and then he looked up. “I have been on the phone, Mister Quinn, to inform myself and to expedite.”

“Yes, yes?” said Quinn, and thought of the Arab who stank so much and had a donkey face.

“I spoke to your consulate, and a passport has been issued to you!”

Goddammit, thought Quinn. He’s smiling!

“Mister Quinn?” and Remal cocked his head. “I thought you would be pleased.”

Quinn picked up his glass, looked at Bea in the far corner and, for a moment, held his breath. Then he put the glass to his mouth and drank all the liquor down.

I stick the pig and make it, he thought. I stick him good and he’s down!

Then why do I feel like the pig that got stuck. Why now, after making it!

“Mister Quinn. I do not pretend to understand you, but I do understand this. You and I cannot be friends, though there seems some hesitation about our being enemies. I do not pretend to know why. Or you may reverse the sentence and it comes perhaps to the same thing. Under the circumstances, for you and for me, the best has really happened. You now have your papers. You can now leave.”

Quinn still did not answer. Something just went down the drain, he thought. I’m drunk. Or something just opened up and like only once before I can be rid of him. He looked up when he heard the heels on the tile.

“I just told Mister Quinn that he has his papers,” Remal said to Bea.

“Yuh,” said Quinn. “He just gave me my traveling papers.” He watched Bea sit down.

“Yes, as I just said,” Remal added.

“He didn’t mean it that way,” Bea told Remal. “The way he used the phrase, it means you just threw him out.” Then she turned to Quinn and saw how he sat there, as if hiding behind drunkenness. “On the street,” she said, “you told me you couldn’t leave. You had no papers.” She put her hands on the table but didn’t know what to do with them. She put them into her lap. “But now, Quinn, what is there to decide?”

“You don’t even know my first name,” he said and felt really drunk.

“Please-” she said.

Remal coughed. He understood little of this but suspected it was some private language, the kind lovers might have. He got up, smoothed his shirt.

“I will leave you alone,” he said. “I will leave the papers at the desk of the hotel. In addition, I will leave you some money.” And then he added the part which made everything wrong for Quinn, though it made him suddenly sober. “Because I want you out.” He made his bow and left.

Quinn watched him go out and then turned back to the table. He felt small and pushed and he felt he looked ugly sitting there, but that Remal looked large and the woman, Bea, was terribly beautiful.

“I’m thinking,” he mumbled, “that it was easier in the box.”

She got up and took his arm. “Walk with me,” she said.

He got up and they walked out.

With unusual suddenness the white light of day had changed into the yellow light when siesta is over. Okar was no longer quiet, empty-looking, but full of voice sounds, feet sounds and motion. But Quinn heard mostly the sounds inside: indecision like a squeak, anger a noisy scratching getting louder, and the hum, the constant hum, of his tenacity. To stay put and not jump.

But this is the time to decide, he thought, and please, Bea, do not interrupt me. To leave or to stay. And to go with Cipolla means no new change at all.

They walked down to the quay, saying very little.

Once he said, “Maybe I look like a bastard-”

“I think you act like one, yes.”

They walked the length of the quay, away from the warehouse and the town. Quinn remembered having been that way once, with Turk.

“You want to know something, Bea?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I don’t enjoy any of this, you know that?” She nodded, which was enough.

They walked through the rocks and then on the pebbles. He held her arm and said there was a scorpion, she should step around it. They walked around it and when they were by the water the reflections jumped and darted at them and they turned away. There was a rock big enough for a black hood of shade and they went there and sat down. The water had been full of sun flash but on the rocks which tilted away the sunlight seemed gray. Sun-gray, he thought. All day long like a heat death under the light and now everything is ashes. I’m tired.

“Quinn?”

“Yes.”

“You asked me if I thought you were a bastard, you remember? I don’t like the word and feel awkward with it and only used it because you did. And to tell you that I don’t think you are now.”

“I don’t feel like one now.” And he looked at the rocks and they did not remind him of ashes any more. They were just rocks. “And I want to tell you something else,” he said. “Not for apology or anything like that, because what’s done is really done, but that thing I did to Whitfield, using him like that, it happened so smoothly and I did it so well I’m frightened about it.”

“Why frightened?”

“Because I didn’t like it. Not even when I was doing it.”

She looked at him but said nothing.

“I hurt him and didn’t care. All the circuits were set, and then after pressing the button it’s out of my hands, because that’s how I’m set up. You know what I’m talking about?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I’m talking about Remal. I’m set for him, all set up, to get him down and out of my way, and then I press the button and after that nothing can be done about it.”

“And tonight,” she said, “you’ll take the boat to Sicily.”

“Yes,” he said. “For the same reason.”

She saw now that he had never acted from nastiness or because he was stubborn, or from total blindness, but that this was something else.

“You sound like a condemned man,” she said.

He waited a moment, not looking at her, and then he said, “Yes, that fits.”

She said nothing else to that, though she wished she could tell him, there are other ways, even better ones maybe, and why don’t you try-She dropped that, because it made her feel like a hypocrite. How much did she herself try, and still ended up with the same things she had done before, a hundred or more times.

She took his hand and put it over her breast, holding it there. They sat like that and looked at the gray terrain tilt away.

“You know what will happen to you, if you go through with all this?” she said. It was a real question, the way she asked it, not an admonition or a trick introduction for working up to a lesson.

“I probably do,” he said, “because it’s happened before.”

“Back into the box,” she said and gave a small, disconnected laugh.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been out of it.”

He got up and brushed at his pants. Then he held out his hand for her and helped her up. When she stood next to him she put her hands on his arms and her face into the side of his neck. If there were nothing else now but to feel the skin warmth there, she thought, his and mine, and other simple things like that “You’re wrong,” she said. “Once, at one point there, you were out of it.”