Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“You have some pretty good friends. They could teach you a thing or two about manners.”

“Huh, imagine that,” I thought. “Someone who slept with Vadyk Salmonella is giving me pointers on etiquette.”

“Don’t get so defensive,” I said.

“I’m not,” she answered, and headed back in to warm up.

Hustav got some job on the mayor’s PR team. Then he got fired a little while after that and sold his camera and his apartment, too. Life robs us of more than our illusions.

Eight years ago, she started going to night school. My professor friends griped that she didn’t know the first thing about finance—not that they had a very firm grasp of the discipline they were supposed to be teaching either. “Nobody knows anything,” they griped. “Nobody really knows what they’re talking about. We’re all faking it, pretending to know something, pretending to feel something; we live by illusions. But the problem is we have to pay good money to keep it going.”

We wound up at the same concert a couple times, and we crossed paths on the metro once—she was with a pack of Hasidic Jews. As far as I could gather, she was giving them a tour of the city. They looked like a big family that had bought an apartment downtown and were disappointed to learn that it was still infested with cockroaches. She had long hair again, which made her look more experienced and grown up. Nevertheless, she was still resorting to the same mistrustful and confrontational tone, as though she were trying to prove something to the adults around her, as though she were attempting to convince all the Hasidic Jews in the whole wide world that the transaction she was facilitating was necessary and appropriate.

Seven years ago, I changed stations. This was a big step for me; it took me a while to pull the trigger. The new station could have easily tanked a few months after it went on the air, but this was a real job. It was time to make a move. I wouldn’t even have considered something like that a few years back. But then one day, out of the blue, I started asking myself some tough questions—Do you really want to keep wasting away doing something you don’t enjoy? Do you really want to keep breaking your back for some boss? How much longer can you be dependent on someone else and change yourself to accommodate them? “C’mon,” I said to myself, “go for it. You’re not some twenty-year-old punk. You’re as old as Jesus was—it’s time to work miracles and raise lepers from their graves.”

I bumped into her downtown one May morning. She was sitting on the steps of a bank, still closed at such an early hour. There she sat, looking a bit lost, though she wasn’t crying or anything, her head propped up on her fist, staring off into space. She had a tiny little watch dangling from her wrist, but I’m absolutely certain she wouldn’t be able to tell you the time. She simply wouldn’t process the question. She saw me and gave a weak, forced nod. Something compelled me to stop—it may have been that she nodded first. I didn’t hesitate, sitting down beside her and asking her about her life, her studies, and our mutual friends. She nodded in reply and talked a little, quite reluctantly. Then she went silent.

“What’s up? Did something happen?”

“Nah, not really. It’s just that I was getting my brains fucked out all night.”

“All night, really?” I asked incredulously.

“Yep, all night.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I waited for a bit. She wasn’t saying anything either, though. I reached into my bag, pulled out a carton of milk, and handed it to her. She ripped it open and started sucking it down greedily. “Fucking all night must be pretty exhausting,” I thought. I noticed that her fingers were trembling, as if she’d just done an intense workout at the gym. I noticed the veins bulging in her neck when she flung her head back to drink. I noticed dark circles under her eyes—the kind women only get when they’re in labor… or when they haven’t gotten enough sleep, I suppose. Well, at any rate, only women who are emotionally invested in what they do and afraid of slipping up can have those deep, translucent circles under their eyes. The weary and distant expression on her face indicated that last night had been nice, yet hard on her, that she was concerned about what happened, yet she didn’t have the slightest regret. She smelled of warm shower water, morning cigarettes, and someone else’s soap. It seemed as though the blood had deserted her fingers, flowing away to a safe distance. But those lips of hers—­bitten and puffy—blazed darkly under the morning sun; she kept nibbling on them, as if she were thinking back to what had transpired that night, as if it had still not ended in her mind. It even seemed like she wanted that night to keep going, like something very important had withdrawn from her, something that she started to lament the instant that the dark of the night retreated—she’d been sitting there for God knows how long, for no apparent reason, lamenting the loss of something she’d just acquired. I must have been gawking at her lips—maybe that was why she choked on the milk. It ran down her chin. She quickly wiped it away, covered her lips with her hand, and started speaking, seemingly not even addressing me, talking in muffled and disjointed spurts, touching the wounds on her thin, vulnerable skin, stopping the blood that rushed to them after every outburst and question, growing anxious, and realizing that I could see it. She tried changing the subject; I kept the conversation going, trying not to look at her and feigning a casual and carefree attitude, yet constantly thinking to myself, “She was getting fucked all night! All night! She was willing to give love and understanding all night; she didn’t sleep all night, she forced herself to stay awake all night, making utterances, listening to confessions, remembering promises, and screaming words of ecstasy. She was feelin’ good all night—they kept her up all night—they kept her hot and bothered all night. She slipped into the dream world and was plucked out of it again, into the black air; she caught someone’s breathing, felt someone’s caressing fingers, tried to adjust to someone’s movements, listened to someone else’s heart beating, and got used to someone else’s smell, someone else’s voice, and someone else’s love.”

I took the milk out of her hands and started gulping it down too.

“You know anyone that’s hiring?” she asked suddenly.

“I’ll ask my boss,” I promised.

I tried to pass the carton back to her, but she shook her head as if to say, “I’ve had enough for today.” I got to my feet, said goodbye, and headed home, throwing the rest of the milk in a trash can along the way.

For some reason, my boss agreed to give her a job immediately. Now we were working in the same building. She sat in the next room over, copying out news stories from the internet so we could use them for our broadcasts. She hit it off with everyone, settled in quickly, and seemed to enjoy the company of her many new gal pals. She had a nice personality and a bad memory, almost never got angry, and almost never griped about anything. I’m not sure if she actually liked her job. I’m not sure if she even considered it a real job—endlessly surfing the internet, constant smoke breaks and phone conversations, soaking up the bright sun flooding through the wide-open windows, and hearing voices on the steps and car alarms erupting in the fresh morning air. She always seemed to be expressing a certain degree of appreciation for what I’d done for her, which I found pretty exasperating, because it rendered whatever prospects of getting with her I might have had nonexistent. We’d say hello in the morning, drink knock-off cognac at corporate birthday parties, and then she’d disappear again, and I’d pretend that was how things were supposed to go. I’d invite her out, suggest grabbing a drink together, and try talking about something besides work, and she’d agree in such an aloof and dejected tone that my desire to take her out would disappear.