Inga Abele - High Tide

Nothing changes much after the night that black guy kicked Aksels. Ieva goes to work, but Aksels sits around at home. A friend pays back a debt — homegrown marijuana from the countryside, and a bit of cash. Aksels jokes that you can’t have the bad without the good. Every cloud has its silver lining. He says this, Ieva’s pigeon-grey love with a silver lining. This lining shines all around him — in his hair, his skin, fingertips. A glimmering vein around his dark rainbows.

That’s how they spend the last night of the year — pressed close together on a mattress. The first morning of the New Year arrives and Ieva looks intently at his eyes when they open. At how they move, his eyes, at what they look like. It’s so wonderful, life. Liveliness. The life, the liveliness that hides in Aksels.

Aksels doesn’t contemplate life.

Ieva is the first to wake up and watches Aksels closely, resting on her right elbow as he lies half awake. He rubs his forehead, then his face contorts as he untangles himself from his dreams, and his eyes fly open. His eyes search, they’re in the moment, they find Ieva, and they clear. Ieva freezes, afraid to breathe. He looks at her silently for a moment, then smiles and reaches for a cigarette. Nothing out of the ordinary. This is how their mornings start. For two years Ieva has had no greater secret than the man next to her.

A week later he can’t even get up if he’s sitting, or sit down if he’s standing. He says Ieva’s being ridiculous and has her go buy weed. Ieva smokes less so that he can have twice as much. The usual kindness toward everyone and everything that comes from smoking up. The thrilling generosity. Ieva doesn’t say a single negative thing to Aksels. They almost stop talking completely. When they eat dinner, Ieva knows to go get a fork, or glass, or knife, even if he just looks at her. Until he tells her — enough. He’s sick of seeing this warmhearted nurse everywhere, stop it, Ieva! And she stops. And just looks at him with wide, frightened eyes.

She’s scared of how shivers run through her bones when she looks at Aksels. She can’t avoid it. Countless times she’ll go to kiss him, to simply and lightly touch her lips to his; Ieva does this every time he starts to say something, or when he watches TV, or when he quietly smiles to himself. And he’ll impatiently wave her off, but not reprimand her. Aksels knows — if he reprimands her at a moment like that, he’d cut her to the depths of her heart. But he also knows that when Ieva kisses him, she’s trying to hold onto a part of him, and that cuts him a hundred times deeper. I haven’t even gone anywhere yet, he thinks, hope dies last, don’t you know that, dear Ieva? He can’t bring himself to say it out loud.

Ieva looks at him and now and then runs a hand through his hair. Touches her lips to his eyebrows, eyelashes, ears. Ieva loves Aksels. In this exact moment. In this exact moment.

That black guy wrecked Aksels’s hip while they were fighting on the ice. One night Ieva wakes up to a stifled cry in the pitch-black room. Terrified, she feels for the lamp. When the light bursts harsh and bare into the room, she sees that Aksels’s face is covered in sweat and he’s barely able to catch his breath from the pain. In the kitchen, the refrigerator lets out a loud whir and falls silent. Ieva rummages in the shelves for all the stashes of weed she can find. Aksels asks her to turn off the light, it’s hurting him. Ieva opens the curtains and turns out the light. They lie in the reddish glow of the city. Hold each other by the hand and wait for the drugs to kick in. They don’t. Ieva carefully frees her fingers from his and feels along his side downwards, even though he tries to stop her, pushes her hand away. But Ieva keeps going, even forcefully, while she stares unblinkingly out the window where the evening wind ferries light and shining clouds. Aksels’s hip is hot and swollen like a chestnut about to burst.

For a second Ieva pulls her hand away; she sees the true extent of misfortune.

The following morning they go to the clinic. Ieva sends Als a text message saying he shouldn’t expect her at work. Als answers she shouldn’t expect to have a job tomorrow. And if that wasn’t enough, the eggs burn in the pan, and Aksels starts making excuses. Says he doesn’t want to go to the clinic, Ieva should just go buy more weed. Like a geezer asking his old lady for his morning dose of vodka. Then Ieva flares up. A few plates shatter against the peeling kitchen wallpaper. White shards rain down on the strange and silent rusty fragments that lay about their kitchen like sleeping goliaths, these things that barely resemble an old gas stove, small propane tanks, and cast iron radiators. It’s a new January morning outside — a chilled aquarium bubbling with the icy greens, reds, and blues of the sky.

To get weed, Ieva screams, to get weed! She snatches the lit cigarette from Aksels’s fingers and smashes it into the sink. Always with this disgusting smoke, I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe, Ieva screams, but Aksels smirks in confusion. You dick around here day after day, or go drinking downtown, but I have to work in the market and freeze while I watch picky old women paw mandarins with their chubby fingers and ask — Where are these from? From Latvia, I tell them, from across the river in Mārupe! They puff up like pigeons and swear at me, then go away. Als writes down everything I say behind my back, in a black notebook. He hates it when I upset the customers. Then he docks my pay, sneering with his stupid Chechen — or whatever he is — face. Minus ten lats, he says, or minus five. Depends on the day. But all the while Aksels sits around in front of the TV and smokes the weed bought with the money Ieva earned! How do you think Ieva likes that!

But all she really wants to say is that he needs to go to the clinic. He gets it and pulls on his jacket. And for that she loves him. For often respecting her seriousness. For the simultaneously simple and painful gesture with which he finally gets to his feet and pulls on his old leather jacket.

Ieva looks in every possible place for her passport, finally finds it in the hallway under some dusty bicycle parts. Aksels, it turns out, has a different name written in his passport. Ieva decides the name Aksels suits him much better. He looks at his passport as if in wonder. He’s sweating just from waiting. The stairwell reeks of piss. They’re both twenty-one years old.

Ieva remembers — they’re taking the tram. She doesn’t remember which line. Aksels stands opposite her and looks out the window. He’s dealing with the pain. His face glassy and his eyes steel.

They sit next to each other at the clinic. Rest their hands on each others’ knee in this strange world; the background whines with the sound of a dentist’s drill and the foreground is full of patients struggling to find a seat on the long benches lining the halls.

Aksels is called in and Ieva goes with him. He doesn’t have a patient card, he’s not registered and has never been to this clinic. They’re sent from one office to another until they find the right one. A good amount of money is spent to get him registered somewhere. Destruction whimpers quietly in every corner: pensioners sputter and curse, sweating mothers sigh heavily as they hold their babies.

They need to X-ray Aksels’s side. He undresses and lies down on the table. Ieva stands back a bit like his escaped shadow and watches silently. The nurses try to position Aksels’s hips in the right angle. He digs his mouth into Ieva’s palm and screams noiselessly in this dark, warm abyss. Ieva glances fondly at his hips. They’re as beautiful as they always are, so slim. The skin of his groin like light velvet. His penis darker, regal, and haloed by golden hairs. She’s happy the nurses get to see it, too. She cries out of pride. Everything happens at once and doesn’t want to stop. They can’t X-ray his hip. He screams through her hand, bites her fingers until they bleed. The doctor decides to administer anesthesia. A needle sinks into Aksels’s vein, and his body instantly goes slack, as obedient as a ragdoll. His hips are positioned into the right angle. The lens moves toward the only place on his body that is void of beauty, the place that has opened the door to chaos.