Aleksandar Hemon - Nowhere Man

CHICAGO, APRIL 199 7-

MARCH 1998

THE DOLPHINS

So I kissed Pronek’s foreheadfor good luck and sent him up.

Stage fright made his elbows shiver, but he ascended a long narrow staircase and stopped at the top. He looked down, visualizing himself tumbling, big head over small heels. He flexed his back, as if appreciating the unbrokenness of his spine. He opened the door that had a picture of a pretty green-and-blue globe — SAVE OUR MOTHER, the poster demanded. He thought of his mother and recalled her sitting with her feet propped on the coffee table, tufts of cotton between her toes, the arches of her feet symmetrical. The office smelled like ocean and pines and perspiration. He walked to the reception desk and a black woman with shorn hair told him to sit down and wait. In the corner there was a wizened palm of an uncertain green color, its flaccid leaves looking down at the pot. He looked at his hands, and they appeared bleached.

“My name is John,” the man said, “but everybody calls me JFK.” The Handbook of Good English was on someone’s desk. “Here is fine,” JFK said, and offered him the only chair, squatting in front of him, grasping a clipboard. In a whisper, he asked him why he wanted to work for Greenpeace, and Pronek delivered the mantra he repeated in many an unsuccessful interview: he had communication skills; he liked working with people; he thought this was the right invyromint for him, where he could develop to his full potential. JFK was rocking in his squat, and Pronek imagined pushing him over. A clot of tenebrous panic started forming in his stomach, as he realized he might not get the job, even though he was afraid that he might get the job. “Here is fine,” he repeated to himself. “ Here is fine.” It was a demanding job, JFK said, canvassing door to door — he would have to talk to between twenty and forty people per night. Was he sure he could do it? Was he comfortable speaking English?

“I am evil,” she said.

“She is Rachel,” JFK said. “She will train you tonight.”

“E-V-O-L. Love in reverse.”

She wore a T-shirt with a tranquil candle below which DAYDREAM NATION was written.

“I am Jozef,” Pronek said. “Nothing in reverse.”

JFK tightened his lips and opened his eyes wide, arching his eyebrows, then vanished. Pronek did not know what to do with his hands — they overlapped over his genitals for a moment, then he deposited them on his hips and stood akimbo, as if reprimanding Rachel.

“Where are you from?” she asked him.

“Bosnia.”

“I am sorry.”

“But I live here now, for five years.”

“I am still sorry.”

“It is not your fault.”

She had short spiky hair, with a crest heaving over her forehead, above her sparkling eyes. Her upper lip, dark cherry red, had the shape of a musketeer mustache. She had a dimple in her chin. She had cheek apples Pronek wanted to touch.

“When you’re done staring at my face, I can show you my tits too.”

“I am sorry,” he said, looking toward a remote corner of the ceiling, where, he noticed, there was absolutely nothing.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I like your face too.”

“Can you turn that shit down?” Rachel snarled.

“It. Is. Radiohead,” Dallas slowly said, as if nobody could speak his language. “Black Star, man. It is awesome. It is rock ‘n’ roll.”

“It. Is. Stupid,” Rachel said.

Pronek sat in the back seat, next to Rachel, their thighs rubbing. He furtively glanced at her — her right earlobe was beautiful: the mazy curves inside it were perfect. He imagined himself curled and snug, pinkie-nail-sized, resting at the mouth of the ear funnel, singing a sweet song.

“Did you have rock ‘n’ roll in Yugoslavia?” Dallas shouted over Radiohead. The van was the slowest vehicle on the highway, overtaken by coffin-like Cadillacs steered by old ladies sunk in the front seat, passed by garbage trucks with black bags stuck between the rear-end teeth. Monster trucks honked at them furiously.

“Jesus, JFK,” Rachel said. “It’s like you’re pulling us in a Radio Flyer. Step on it.”

“Why are they calling you JFK?” Pronek asked. JFK was a large man, his meaty back spilling over the edges of the seat, hair sprouting from his neck.

“He’s the size of an airport,” Rachel said.

“’Cause my name is John Francis Kirkpatrick.”

“Did you?” Dallas shouted again. His arms were tattooed with dragons licking naked women, some of them singed by flames.

“See, there are many ways to get the money at the door,” Rachel said. “You can appeal to the sexual frustration of suburban housewives, flirting like a crass cowboy, as Dallas does. You. .”

“Fuck you,” Dallas said.

“Hey, hey, hey!” JFK said.

”. . can exhaust them with facts and moralistic appeals, until they pay you to go away, as JFK does. Or you can look at them with big, beautiful eyes, dazzle them with a smile, then strike like a cobra, as Vince does.”

Vince was sitting in front of Rachel, grasping a small red bag with Chip and Dale pictured on it. Pronek wanted to be nice to Vince, because Vince was black, but didn’t quite know what nice things to say, so he only smiled vaguely.

“I like blues,” he said, finally, but no one responded to his statement: Vince continued looking out the window; Dallas was using his knees as a snare-drum; JFK was slowing down, because half a mile ahead of him, there was a truck with an American flag spreading across its rear end. Only Rachel glanced at him, perplexed, then put her left foot on her right knee, exhibiting her boot sole to Pronek — there was pink chewing gum on the heel.

“Schaumburg is tough,” Rachel said. Pronek looked down a row of houses bending around an empty street. “This town has an ordinance prohibiting straight streets, because they want it to be more interesting, they say, more diversified.”

The houses were identical — pale plastic-blue walls; a white porch; a lattice with a nascent crawler; a figure on the lawn: a dwarf; a black jockey; a Virgin Mary.

“This, my friend, is called devo.”

“Devo,” Pronek repeated. The sky was car-commercial blue, with a lonely plane here and there, like a gnat without a swarm. The air was warm; spring buds on the trees exuded a syrupy smell.

“Just watch what I do first.”

Rachel touched his elbow tenderly, as if it were the source of his pain. There was a steel ball grinding Pronek’s bowels, and a tingle of paralyzing fear scurrying across his skin to his head, where it stopped to throb. He needed a cigarette. He imagined good Americans opening their doors, hating him for his foreign stupidity, for his silly accent, for his childish grammar errors. He imagined them swinging baseball bats at his elbows and smashing them, bone splinters flying around.

“I hate baseball,” he informed Rachel, but she was already pressing the bell button.

“Hi, I’m Rachel, and this is Joseph. We’re from Greenpeace.” Rachel beamed at the woman, pressing her clipboard against her chest, the Save-the-Whales leaflet facing out. The woman was skinny, her hair wet and hanging in springy curls. She was clasping the collars of her white robe, looking at Rachel, then cautiously glancing at Pronek, as if his presence there were secret.

“How are you today?” Rachel asked her, nodding.

“Who’s that?” a man hollered from somewhere inside the house. The house smelled of something familiar to Pronek — it contained paprika, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He could see a carpet with flat panthers gazing upward at him with their yellow eyes. A huge bowl of brownish popcorn stood on a glass-top table. A python was gulping down a mouse on the TV.