Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

Enver was lonely in Brooklyn. His brother came home late from Manhattan. His cousin in Staten Island hated Brooklyn. His cousin in New Jersey hated Staten Island. Enver understood no relevant geography. Across the way was a hair and nail salon. That’s it. No other fact or germane sensation.

He tried to make friends. Like when that one time he was allowed to work the register he didn’t charge three kids for three slices plus diet grape sodas.

They looked hungry, Boss, he said to his boss, a taciturn elderly American with an erratic scar across his neck in the shape of a dollar sign who was the only employee permitted to make the pies and the next time Enver was in back watching the monitor and the minivan pulled up, when he opened the door Arben smacked him in the mouth and said, You looked hungry.

Arben said that in this language.

One night Enver spun home, spread himself like a fine crust on the couch and started watching — the TV, like the fraternal oven, was always on.

Appropriately disappointing: it was a cookingshow, the woman in it was cooking.

Liridona, wrung from the shower, sat next to him.

The recipe was just some simple stirfry.

Peel your vegetables but lose your nutrients.

By the time the show had cut to commercial Liridona’s robe was floored.

Next morning he left for Jersey, pawning himself off on a cousin. His brother never found out, that’s why Enver was still alive with intact knees.

Enver said to his brother, Time for you to have babies, as if that explained his abandonment of the couch.

He went to sit for that test at a security company his cousin’s friend moonlit for, went to a stripmall themed Early American Grange, sat at a desk exposed to a recently foreclosed storefront’s glass — a former florist’s still perfumed — and pondered the questions.

They could use him, they explained, as store security — that was the best job, requiring some sort of intelligence and special training — with the worst being crowd control: bars and nightclubs, live events. Almost everyone was retired law enforcement. The proctor, a tubby Hispanic kid who taught communication skills at a community college (a frustrated standup comic), kept calling him “Erven,” then “Mile High” because the corrected Enver sounded like Denver. They laughed through the exam. “Juan will be back ______ fifteen minutes.” (A) in; (B) on; (C) with; (D) about.

Freshly flowering bushes and trees went out of their ways to impress beauty on the youth — the scads of polished khaki kids stalking the kempt paths, groping in the topiary. A frisbee flew overhead. Birds high up enough resembled frisbees. Another class earning credit by punting at soccer. Extraneous jackets were laid out for impromptu picnics. Water bottles wafting clarifying alcohol. A girl smoked a cigarette wedged between her girlfriend’s toes.

She came out of Reading Freud PSY 23090, unbound from Green Hall and onto the green, headed toward Chancellor for a coffee. Did she want it iced? Indubitably. Anything to go with that? No that will be all. It was like a phrasebook come to life. What a terrifically executed textbook exchange, why thank you.

Emmanuelle wore mosquitoeye sunglasses, a tshirt whose logo read Brand, her skirt never showed lines, no underwear map.

While she waited for change her phone rang, she took the call (from friend R., poli sci major, public health minor, in the midst of a shaming crawl back from a date the night before with a 33 year old iBanker in the city), skimmed milk into her coffee and half a packet of artificial sweetener without bothering to stir.

At the testudinal traffic light she crossed.

College students driving adult cars, vehicles actually too fancy for any adult and perhaps better never driven. They drove them impulsively, alternately absent then reckless as if they already had jobs to get to.

Nassau Street laid the boundary of campus.

Em caffeinated while walking, hollowing her cheeks, pursing for suction then chatty again. Such oversize overactive labials. Let’s imagine the waves radiating from her phone — what if they were visible? what if they were colored by her mood? Rainbows, refractive rainbows. Wavelets of talk coursing through the air, coursing daily through our own ears and mouths and minds — yet we’re never privy to that talk. Or we’ll become privy only when it develops into tumors on the brain.

Retail gave purchase to the quieter suburban.

At a corner with a receptacle she stopped, sipped her last, tossed the coffee inside — not a trashcan but an empty newspaper vending machine.

The day was warming, still not warm enough for flipflops — Em’s thongs to soles athwack.

She took two more blocks then rounded the corner: Victorians — two floors, three floors — windows that hadn’t been cleaned in failed semesters, porches in a slump. Stoops stooped. The lawns diseased.

Em stopped to tuck phone between ear and shoulder, scratched in her handbag for keys.

Enver crossed the street and waited at the bottom of the stoop until Em turned the key in the lock then he took the stoop in two steps and once on the porch gave her a smile of glittering fillings.

She kept the door open for him with a flipflop. Thinking he was the roofer?

She was still on the phone but on hold. (Her friend’s banker date had called, the slut beeped over.)

Enver entered, held the door.

She had a teensy stud in the left naris, a diamond pimple.

He waited for her to check mail.

Yes? Em turned to say, flicking hair into a quote behind the uphoned ear.

Enver closed his eyes.

He couldn’t talk while looking at her sunglasses.

What do you want?

She flipped shut her phone.

He said, I want you to change your blogs — opening his eyes only after remembering what Marjorie had told him — I want you to take what you say on your blogs about Mono Man down.

Excuse me?

She dropped the coupons received to the vestibular rug.

And then, he said, to send email saying this was wrong and made up by you to everywhere also.

Also?

Linked, he was straining, posted.

That’s impossible! flipping open the maw of her phone, with hardbitten pink polish pressing three buttons then the most commodious, Send — and when she repeated, I want you to know how impossible that is! Enver knew she was stalling, for time, to call, the police.

He swiped at her phone, knocking it to fade its ring through the air as she kicked him with a flipper all gawky, sending her off balance — tricky this kicking in a skirt — and though he put out a hand and caught her before she fell, which must’ve been his attraction to her, which must’ve been his, he knew the word from the only other language he knew besides this minimal language and Albanian, tendresse (there was so much his brother didn’t know that came to light in court: he’d labored a full year in Marseille), with his other hand he made a fist and punched her, driving his knucks into her skull cradled by his hand.

From the floor the ringing continued.

A CCTV camera awning a deli two blocks east caught him on the run — add that to the testimony of Em’s neighbor, a spooked Korean grad student Enver thrashed past on the stoop, spilling the kid’s bachelor cold groceries: fruit and cereals, sprouts, soy yogurt.

Ludicrous to go back to campus — cameras, everywhere, had him everywhere, running between surveillances. Cutting between frames.

He was as big as a movie to the cops, who had him in custody within three hours (picked up hiding in a basement playpen at his cousin’s in Plainsboro).

At the Biergarten I paid for Mono’s beers then checked my phone. I’d missed a few calls, had a few messages. Parents, delete. My landlord wanting to make a final Prussian inspection of the premises once my duffels had been shipped then get my keys. Girls, including one Amsterdam video artist with whom I had one unfilmable night. Do not del. The more attractive waitress, the Turk, was attempting Russian with the Russian, saying their do svidaniya. A foosball careered across its tabled pitch. A slot machine clanked from the interior dank.