Tor Ulven - Replacement

You make faces in the mirror, all by your lonesome inside the vacant warehouse inside a vacant industrial complex surrounded by a dark spring night (the scene unfolds before your inner eye like a film would, like a film shot from an airplane, a bird’s-eye view: first there are rooftops and roads, street lamps, the whole district spread out before you like a map, then the lens zooms in, closer and closer, until finally the camera pierces the warehouse’s ceiling, the office’s ceiling, and finds you standing there in front of the mirror, and there’s not a creature stirring); of course, no one in the world can actually see or know what you’re doing here, you’re alone with your reflection. The thing is, however, you really, really don’t want to be alone right now, you wish that she were lying awake and thinking of you now, right now, no, you wish that she’d walk in now, right now, right this second, that she’d miraculously walk in and say hello and say your name, because now, right now she couldn’t help but see you, and not just see you, but talk to you, since it’d just be the two of you alone in the little barracks-office right in the middle of the vacant hall, then you could talk to her uninterrupted, face to face, and not just talk, no, you could take her hand, tenderly lift it and say, Oh look, you’ve got a scratch, this is no place for you, you’d take her hand and she’d smile ruefully as you did it, and you’d pull her close, and you’d put your arms around her and kiss her, gently, gentlemanly at first, but then harder, and she wouldn’t pull away, no, you’d stroke her neck, stroke the hairline at the base of her neck while you kissed her mouth (at this point you couldn’t use your wretched voice, not even if you wanted to), you’d dig your fingers into her hair and kiss her, just a cautious peck on the lips at first, but then with your tongue, harder and harder, and. You’re embarrassing yourself. You break off your own fantasy. You think that there are too many people in the world, people overshadowing one another, tripping each other up; in the huge, uninviting cafeteria or in the institute’s break room, she can talk to anyone she wants, look at anyone (any man, that is) she wants, but here, here in this warehouse, if she’d actually been here, she’d be forced to talk to you and you alone.

You have a really odd voice. She had hardly ever said a word to you, but then she’d said that , the thing about your voice, and she’d blushed when she realized what she’d said, because what she’d actually said was, You have an awful voice, an unbearable, squeaky, whiny voice, it’s like a saw, like a hacksaw cleaving straight through the listener’s skull, and you know it’s true, unfortunately, you’ve had to endure your own voice on tape, it’s dogged you since you were small, that squeaky, whiny voice that forced all the adults around you to cover their ears whenever you threw a tantrum, and later, when you were all grown up, your (few) girlfriends made a Herculean effort, you saw it, not to stick their fingers into their ears and scream Shut up shut up whenever you got irritated or excited or nervous, all because of your stupid, whiny voice, a hysterical woman’s voice trapped in a man’s body. Maybe you should’ve been a mute reflection, the reflection of a tall and powerfully built man in his early twenties, maybe everyone should just be mute reflections so they could avoid hearing the awful voices trapped inside.

It’s like the sound of a thumb paging rapidly and nervously through a phone book. You tense your body and strain your ears, as if the auditory sense were a muscle too, though at first you figure that you must’ve heard wrong (being a night watchman has taught you that darkness and silence can transform the most insignificant, harmless little sounds into terrifying giants), but then you hear it again, almost exactly the same sound, and it even lasts longer this time, you still can’t pinpoint its location, and you feel a vein begin to pulse against the sweatband on the inside of your helmet. (We had three burglars last winter and they all got away scot-free; if you look close, you can still see the crowbar marks (he’d pointed at the door and sure enough there were some small, rectilinear marks chipped into the light wood around the lock), one of them was always skulking around nearby, anyway he came in through that window there (he’d pointed) but since I always have my dog with me now I hope I run into him again someday I’ll just say Get ’em King and King’ll be on him and he’ll take a hunk out of his arm and if the guy puts up a fight he’ll take a hunk out of his other arm and I bet the thief’ll thank God when the cops finally come to haul him away (he’d chuckled in enjoyment at the thought, the night watchman, that is, who’d trained you on your rounds)). You finger the barrel of your gas pistol, but you leave it holstered, perhaps out of pride (or perhaps because your fear of looking like a stupid coward is greater at the moment than your fear of the unidentified sound, or perhaps because you’re trying to keep calm by underreacting), but still you walk at something resembling a hurried pace toward the sound (which you can’t hear anymore). Narrowing your eyes, you focus on the conical beam of light cast by your flashlight as it darts here and there at a staccato pace, tapping its way forward like a blind man’s elongated cane, though not tapping at random, since you already know the location of all the different machinery, as well as all the cabinets and doors; you fumble your light over the cabs of the big trucks parked in front of the garage doors, and you catch a glimpse of fuzzy dice hanging from a rearview mirror, but otherwise you find nothing out of the ordinary. Then you hear it again, a steady fluttering sound, and then you see it, a shadow that transforms from a vague dark clump to a circling body, when it takes off from a steel beam and begins to fly, a dark silhouette against the transparent fiberglass panels way up on the ceiling (dawn is apparently underway), you search with your light and, finally, you find the bird, which immediately (you even catch a gleam off its beady black eyes) flies off into the half-dark.

If you wanted to you could flip a switch and open all the big, electric garage doors at once. Instead, it’ll stay trapped behind closed doors until the day after next, while the hours pass away and the early summer light, filtering down through the fiberglass panels overhead, reveals the room in more and more detail, and it’ll be forced to navigate in a closed space, like a fly trapped in a shed, you think, as you ride your bike (and watch for stray scraps of iron in your path) toward the last station key, which you turn in a clockwise direction (and which results in the ubiquitous creakcreak). You open the heavy metal door (it’s almost identical to the one you entered by, although this one is located at the far end of the hall), and lift your bike (with difficulty) over the threshold. The door slams shut (it’s a loud sound in the silence, but not quite as loud as it’ll be inside the building itself: you imagine the trapped bird fluttering back and forth in terror as the thunderous echo rolls away and dies). You’re outside, the weather is mild, you smell wet grass, the day will be cloudy, but even so you can still tell that, during the short time you were in the warehouse, it’s gotten lighter out, the artificial lights are in the process of weakening, it’s gotten so that beneath the streetlamps you and your bike cast sharp shadows across the asphalt; you forgot to turn it off. That’s a bad sign. Once again, you’ve left the light on while you slept, and once again, you’ve managed to sleep with your eyes open part of the time, part of the time with your eyelids drooping, but in any case with eyes that are swollen, heavy, and exhausted, though the minute you close them the room will begin to spin like a wheel of fortune (no, like a wheel of misfortune), it’ll spin uncontrollably with the lights on, the curtains drawn, the closet door half open, your socks strewn about, the whole room a centrifuge with you in the middle, and bile rises in your throat like water being pumped, or rather regurgitated, out of a washing machine, that’s exactly how it is, you think, and it’s only by keeping the light on and forcing your eyes to stay open that the spinning can be stopped, or rather braked, held at bay anyway, though as usual you’ve somehow managed to sleep, so to speak, with your eyes wide open, starring stiffly out into space like a manikin.