Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

The rush of water, the roaring that had woken Fluxman that morning, continued unabated. He scanned the surface, looking as much for the source of this sound as for signs of survivors. Just beyond the carport, a stream of bubbles was boiling to the surface. Burst mains. Was the water level rising?

What difference did it make? Let the catastrophe go on without him.

Tucking his pencil behind his ear, he turned away from the window and drew on his dressing-gown. He went from room to room in his house. Everything seemed to be in order. He scrutinized it all in passing, to make sure it stayed that way, as he worked his passage to the kitchen. Enough excitement for one day; he needed toast, and coffee, and quiet columns of print. He looked through the window into the backyard. That also seemed to be under control. A slight agitation in the swimming-pool water, perhaps, a sympathetic stirring, an excess of bubbles.

He switched on the kettle, and its hiss soon drowned out the faint cries skipping shorewards over the lake outside.

*

Breakfast had no bulk without the newspaper. Fluxman dusted the crumbs off his plate into the sink and ran the tap to wash them away. Suddenly, he remembered the long-handled net for skimming leaves from the pool, lying in its brackets against the garage wall. It might just reach the letter box. He fetched the net and carried it through the house.

The breath of the wetlands enveloped him as he opened the front door. The water had stopped running and the silence smelt sour. On the far shore, the capsized Muscovy had been grappled to the quay. A man in leather shorts and an alpine hat was preparing to abseil down.

Fluxman weighed the net in his hand and measured the gap with his eye. He was still pondering his next step, when something stirred in the shallows and a body floated to the surface. For God’s sake! Would it never end? A filthy swell as green as soup ran over the slasto and swirled around his feet. He recoiled, but could not bring himself to withdraw. The body was floating face down in the water. He snared it with the net and dragged it in, until it bumped against the stoep, rising and falling with the wrack. He took a grip on one of the body’s rubber handles, felt the distasteful fret of it against his palm, waited for the swell to rise, and heaved it onto the slasto.

He was prepared for savaged flesh, for puncture holes and lacerations, but not for the chaos that met his practised eye, the jumble of sprockets and yellow vinyl and rubbery connective tissue, the ooze of blood and lubricating gels, the tangle of wiring beaded with solder. He rolled the bobber over, shuddering at the touch of gizzard flesh and bristles, the crab apple of the eye, the broken springs, the oily feathers, the webbed fingers, the shattered lenses, the sockets filled with ground glass and riverweeds. Beyond repair, he thought desperately. A cacophony of categories, a jumble of kinds, an elemental disorder, wanton and fatal. With the soggy end of his slipper, he thrust the body back into the water and watched it drift away. Beyond repair! Not once in all his long career had such an unholy perception entered his mind. His heart sank sickeningly and he willed it back into place with a cry. He felt peculiarly loose and disconnected. He gazed in alarm at the backs of his hands, at the palms and the wrists, at his arms, his chest, his thighs. Even as he was proofreading himself, he was walking back into the house, his knees and ankles buckling and squeaking like dislocated hinges. He shut the door behind him, stuffing newsprint into the crack beneath it, and walked again, leaving a trail of slimy footprints on the parquet — from the right foot only, like a one-legged man — to his study.

For an hour he sat at his desk, gazing at his papers without seeing them, turning things over in his mind. Several times he picked up the jar of buttons he used as a paperweight and absently stirred the contents with his forefinger. Then he took down the last official street guide to Alibia and opened it to Astra Vista, where he lived. He put his finger down on his neighbourhood. The error glared out at him. Where once there had been neat and orderly rows of houses just like his own, there was the Zoological Gardens. Or a chunk of it anyway. Gar … the map said. Gar. The rest seemed to have been left behind on the other side of the city. He paged to the place in the book where the Zoo was supposed to be, and found it occupied by several blocks of Astra Vista. His old neighbours the Armstrongs, from Number 93 across the way, had come off badly: in its new position, their front door opened onto the elephants’ enclosure. What else had been carelessly left behind in the relocation? The penguin house, several rows of cages belonging to the smaller primates, aviaries. Parrots, parrots.

He should speak to Munnery. He picked up the telephone, but there was no dialling tone. Was he too late? Had Munnery finally been wiped off the map? He dared not think it. Through the window, he saw the telephone line from his roof slanting down into the water like an anchor chain. There was no time to lose; he had vacillated far too long as it was. He must go to Munnery at once. He fetched his rucksack from behind the bathroom door and began to pack: maps, spare pencils, sharpeners, the Phone Book, an apple or two, a packet of trail mix, a bag of pistachio nuts, a month’s supply of notepads, a torch, a flask of fresh water, a loaf of rye bread. He donned khakis and boots.

When he was finished, he gave his house the once-over, swiftly and thoroughly, focusing so intensely, his head began to throb. Then he took his alpenstock from the stand at the door and went out into the disjointed city.

*

The golf course at the Royal Alibian Country Club had once been the pride of the sporting gentry, but there was not much left of it now: spite and neglect had scattered most of the links to the four corners of the city. On any outing, one was bound to stumble across a bit of it somewhere, and so Fluxman was hardly surprised when the service lane behind his house gave onto one of the more scenic sections of the front nine. Rather, he was delighted. He was not a sportsman himself (although he was often taken for one, with his youthful physique and fine head of hair), but he liked to walk, and in the old days, when the Alibian landscape was more set in its ways, he had always resented the hold the sports clubs had on the city’s scenic parkland. The RACC had been the main culprit. It was one of the rare delights of the new disorder, he reasoned now, that he should find the property of the Royal, the long dog-leg fairway of the fourth, to be precise, seen and envied so often on the television during the Alibian Open, flung down here in his own backyard. It was pleasing for this reason too: another bit of the Royal, the celebrated eighteenth no less, had wound up at Munnery’s place, which was his destination, and it would be an auspicious symmetry to begin and end his journey on the course.

He set off down the fairway with an unaccustomed spring in his step, swinging his alpenstock at the sprinkling of copper-bottomed pots and pans he espied in the rough. Up ahead, in the crook of the dog-leg, among the pale trunks of bluegum and beech, the sun glinted on sheet metal. The corner of an office block or a shanty town, he surmised. On the other side of the fairway, kudu cows stretched their necks between the palisades of an iron fence to reach the greener kikuyu and spicy dandelions, and dropped their steaming pats among the dewy kitchenware. A pastoral idyll. It was a long time since Fluxman had worked up a sweat. He gazed about him curiously and began to whistle. I love to go a - wandering …

The grass beneath his feet, succulent and overgrown, the sky above, himself between, footloose and debonair … it brought back the proofreading rambles of his youth. Then it had been his pleasure to go out into the world to find respite from the imperfections of the page, to rest the rods and cones. I spy with my little eye … How things had changed. The world had become a perilous place, full of pitfalls and eyesores.