Zhanna Slor - At the End of the World, Turn Left

Once I drink a cup of coffee and finish the apple, I’m digging through a crate of old shoes, looking for some gym clothes—I’d feel ten times better if I could get a run in later—when the doorbell starts ringing. Already I have my suspicions it won’t be Anastasia. She’s never been early for anything, and it’s not ten a.m. yet.

It’s also possible I was only projecting when I saw that police photo. Similarly possible is that Liam’s friend was wrong about her getting involved with a sketchy thief, or that Rose was wrong about his addictions. Maybe I was too quick to assume how easily Anastasia could turn to drugs for some sort of solace. It’s not like addiction runs in the family, besides maybe smoking. Sure they like to drink at parties. (What can you expect from a language with more than ten words for hungover and even more for drinking, but no present-tense word for “to be?”) But my grandparents have been alive a pretty long time, all things considered. Anna barely even snuck a taste of wine at our house, when it would have been easy to do so. She was a kid then, but still. She couldn’t have changed that much, right?

By the time I open the door, I’ve worked myself up into such a state I don’t know what I will say if it’s Anastasia standing there. But it doesn’t matter. Because it’s not her face at the door; it’s a man’s.

Tristan—if this is Tristan—is old. He’s older than me, for sure; maybe closer to thirty than twenty. I’m surprised by this; I don’t know why. He is also tall, like everyone mentioned; but what they failed to mention was that his hair is bright blue, and so long it passes his shoulders. He also has blue eyes and is skinny enough to be a model, if not for the acne pockets around the chin and cheeks, along with a pretty effective above-it-all attitude. If he’s supposed to be pretending to be a student, he is doing a pretty poor job of it. His jeans aren’t torn to shreds or Carharrts, like all the crust punks in Riverwest, but they’re still pretty faded. Plus, he’s got tiny wrinkles near his eyes; challenging to detect, typically, but it’s so bright out I can see them. Probably because under all that blue dye he’s a redhead. Freckles pool in dark circles around his nose and forehead.

Tristan clears his throat. He looks equally as confused to see my face there. “You’re not Chinese,” he says.

“And you’re not a woman,” I say.

He narrows his eyes at me. “What made you think I was?”

I pause, thinking. There’s no great way to answer that question. And if this is Tristan, and not some random person, he might have some information to help me, so I can’t go scaring him off right away. I hadn’t even considered the option of someone else showing up, and I expend a lot of effort trying not to panic. I remind myself this isn’t my house, these aren’t my things, that none of it is of any value anyway. “Are you coming in?” I ask, eventually. I try to relax my body language into a laissez-faire sluggishness instead of standing up straight like I usually do these days.

He hesitates, looking around the street, then at me; I can tell that in his mind, he is labeling me as a non-threat. I start up the stairs, and not long after, I hear his steps following mine. Once we’re inside, I reach into my pack of cigarettes and offer him one. He looks a little thrown back but takes it anyway. “Oh, thanks.”

“So. You want me to show you around? For the… uh, cleaning thing?” I ask, then without a response start the tour. I want to get it over with. Quickly, I show him the messy kitchen, its windows framed with large, overflowing plants; the living room’s assorted secondhand couches. Even Rose’s bike, a purple Schwinn with a metal basket, both its wheels flat, isn’t worth anything. It’s almost sad. Rose is a couple years older than me. At twenty-seven, you want to be able to afford a few valuable things, don’t you? Otherwise, what’s the point of working at all?

It’s clear Tristan is realizing this too, half-checked out before the tour is even over. “Cool, thanks,” he says, heading toward the door. “I’ll email you about dates and stuff later. I have somewhere to be.” Is this really how they play it? Or does Anna usually do this part and Tristan is just really bad at it? It seems easy to figure out something isn’t it right. Although, I suppose a new immigrant would never imagine what kind of nonsense crime people in Milwaukee are capable of. If I still lived here, I would probably not let any strangers into my house ever. I guess that’s what happens as you get older. Not only do you become less trusting, but you also acquire things you’d rather not lose. You procure more locks, both real and metaphorical. More reasons to keep people out than invite them in. But you also, hopefully, gain some confidence? Once you look around and discover that almost no one knows what they’re doing, that they’re all figuring it out as they go, the world becomes a slightly easier place to navigate—especially if you happen to truly be good at something. This knowledge has made me far more brazen than I once was. My high school self would be too scared of looking like a fool to ever try any martial arts. Now, I can’t imagine how helpless I’d feel without it. How powerless. I wonder if this feeling is what changed Anna so much; maybe stealing made her feel powerful, at least for a moment. Knowledge and intelligence could be used as a tool almost as much as a body. But where had her moral compass gone? If I could convince her to join me in Israel, I know for sure she wouldn’t be acting this way. But every time I’d tried, she laughed me off like I was some crazy person in a cult. It wasn’t long before she stopped responding to my messages at all; as if my new religious beliefs could somehow rub off on her, thousands of miles away in Milwaukee.

Tristan walks slowly back to the door. For the first time I notice he’s walking with a slight limp. “What happened to your leg?” I ask.

He turns around. His eyes dart away from mine, narrowing sheepishly at the floor. “Oh. Dog bite,” he shrugs. “Had to get a lot of stitches, and it got infected… it’s whatever.” He takes a long drag of the cigarette, then takes another look around the apartment and asks, “Isn’t this where that girl—”

“No, it’s not,” I interrupt.

He looks back down the hall, towards the bedrooms. The first one once belonged to me; there’s a window that opens out to the roof, and I used to go out there to drink and watch people walk from bar to bar. Sometimes Emily and I would take these giant hula hoops up there to spin two or three at a time, and we’d throw them to each other like circus people. And June. June was also there, of course. It was always the three of us, even though I’d erased her out of my memory of those years.

“No, it is,” Tristan is saying. “I’m just putting it together. Yeah. I was around that summer, I remember the news. I remember that odd-shaped balcony. It’s the place where that girl hung herself from her bedroom doorknob.”

My stomach falls, like I’ve been dropped from the highest point of a rollercoaster without warning. I swallow, hard. “It isn’t.”

“I wonder if she haunts the place,” Tristan says, rubbing his chin.

I clench my fists until my nails are digging into my skin.

“That was so fucked up,” Tristan is saying. Backpfeifengesicht is also a good word I wish we had in English. It’s German for a face badly in need of a fist. Looks like gibberish but somehow isn’t. “Didn’t it take her roommates three days to find her body?”

“Shut up,” I say, furious now and unable to control myself. “Where did you even hear that?”