Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

“You really are a comical lassie — I haven’t heard that word since primary school!”

“Honestly?”

“Yep,” he said.

“Well, that’s not very honorable of you, then,” I said.

On his dark arms there is golden summer fur, silver on the bar, inner side of his forearm, veins and moles, small scratches and scars, skin like the map of a secret country, strong bones in his hands, slender thief’s fingers.

I have to lean my face on your belly, touch your tip with the tops of my fingers, and kiss you where it hurts most.

“Okay, okay, well done, you won,” he picks up the game, his eyes, teeth, and smile sparkle, he pulls me by the fingers a bit closer still, to himself.

“So, who’ll do the honors?”

Barefoot like that, beside each other, we are the same height. That unruly blotch of sun, the badge on his Adam’s apple, jiggles in his throat.

“You do the honors,” I laugh. “And I am deeply honored.”

One night, just one single night in the world, we tenaciously bent and opened one another till morning, and our destinies intertwined like the dreadlocks of a little she-devil. Afterward we were no longer sure whose hand and whose word was whose. I was to twist that night, which would not be repeated, a thousand times in myself, like a needle in flesh.

When the first light began to creep into the room, he said, “Sleep, Rusty,” turned onto his side, and flung his arm closer toward me.

Over a chair in the corner of the room he’d thrown his funny blue tuxedo — you could see it in the dark. It had taken on the shape of his shoulders and arms and when I glanced through my eyelashes in that direction, it seemed as if a wounded animal was breathing at the back of the room.

It’s the third evening that I’ve been going down to the house that watches me over the ramparts, through dozens of invisible vantage points. The hot wind that has managed to seep through the tightly crammed walls raises a flutter from the courtyard and there’s no other sound apart from the noise of my blood in my ears.

“Perhaps it will appear strange, dear Dada, but your brother was my best, perhaps even my only friend,” said Karlo Šain.

“The only radiant thing in my life was my friendship with Daniel. He was a radiant person. And a brilliant, talented young man,” he said. “I would never have hurt him,” he said.

“Do you think an evil person is a sick person, that all his organs are sick? That he has an evil kidney and an evil nail and an evil complexion?” I asked my sister.

My sister made a Nietzsche-meets-Jesus face and said: “Even such a person loves someone.”

But Herr Professor is not even evil, I reflected furiously. Just pathetic, I reflected. Pathetic, pathetic, I reflected furiously.

I don’t have weapons, strength or power, I just have black mail, black post, a black USB stick.

“Megabytes of shame,” said Henry George, pushing the stick across the table.

I can aim this at the Professor, I can press the stick against his temple, blackmail him.

And what if Karlo starts laughing? What if he doesn’t care? What does he have to lose? And what if this, and what if that?

“Cold as snow, you have nerves of steel and you’re not afraid,” said an implacable superhero.

“You really could be seventeen,” said a man, placing his wife’s pillow under my back.

“I don’t know what it is, Dada, but something’s not right here,” said my brother Daniel.

“Did you know it’s been proved that at the moment of death the brain screams?” I asked the vet Karlo Šain, then, rhetorically, in his garden, between two mouthfuls of cake. And I scream, like a fucked-up puppet that has been exposed for too long to a house of horrors, until it turns bad. I scream, noiselessly and suddenly. Screaming in my head happens to me like hiccups or belching does to other people.

Blackmail, black mail, black post, a black stick, and black clefts in the manhole under my feet.

And what if this, and what if that?

“A pistol is good or bad, like the man who carries it,” said Shane in my head. Oh, Shane, get lost, I think. I crouch down and throw it in: the DataTraveler with its peeling label travels along the smelly underground channel out of which — thanks to the intervention of Henry George — it had also emerged.

* * *

Should I call my sister and tell her, I wondered, making my way down Long Road toward the port. Tell her it’s all over, time for life to take a leap forward, unstoppable as in a self-help manual, not to stand still and keep coming back, nonstop, but, in fact, to disappear. But who could say where and when it all came to a standstill. When they called me in Zagreb and told me that Daniel had gone. Or the moment I dropped the candle in the procession. Or when the war started. When Ma started stuffing herself with medicines. The first time I went into the dingo-man’s Ikea apartment. Or, even — perhaps not crucial, but for me nevertheless important, the moment I suspected that Ned Montgomery had become like every other bastard who would, in the end, make a rubbish film.

There’s a storm out at sea and perhaps all the houses and trees in the town will be destroyed, perhaps a real catastrophe will occur, something important and elemental, that will spin me round like a forceful slap, but not even that would shake me out of my inability to turn something round in myself, to make a quite small movement, like breathing, without collapsing. I could call her, my sister, and tell her that.

Her answer would be something I didn’t want to hear, as usual. She’d say something about the fact that I shouldn’t be so affected and idiotic, because life simply isn’t fair, and therefore, bla bla bla, and grow up.

I hate you, sister, I thought, sometimes on Mondays, sometimes on Fridays, and sometimes all week long, but you’re all I have to hold on to.

On the waterfront the south wind was destroying the palms and tamarisks, rocking the buildings and tearing out satellite dishes and air conditioners. Tin cockerels danced on the roofs, cranes, the skeletons of mammoths, could be heard roaring above the urban skyscrapers. Their metallic roar, full of an elephantine grudge, was broken through by a feeble mouse’s cry in my ear: the sudden high scream of a child that has just sustained its first injury.

Perhaps that’s the same pain with which we yell out at the end.

An object, shiny and polished, a fairly serious thing, lay on the crocheted tablecloth, between the cups for milk.

“Have you been spyin’ on people, Dada?”

My sister had burst through the door, upset, I could see, although she behaved quite calmly to start with. She had come late, with no makeup and her hair not done, as though someone had just hauled her out of bed. And she had thrown that box down on the table. My sister.

“Have you really been spyin’ on people, Dada?”

“I haven’t done anything, I just sat outside his house, on the wall.”

I hadn’t done anything, really. That was the worst of it. What would she say if she knew about that whole failed sex, lies, and USB mission. She’d kill me, I thought. She’d kill me even though I’d chucked the film down the drain.

She pushed the box toward me. Something for you.

“Oh, he told me everything — that you sit on the wall every night. Now see where it’s got us. Look inside. I hope you’ll calm. down now. That you’ll leave us all in peace — both the living and the dead,” she said.

Herr Šain had gone to her. To her, not to me, I thought.

The box he had sent her, cardboard, probably a shoe box, was stuck down round the edges.

Ma came into the kitchen like a ghost behind the green curtain, we had woken her.

“You’re all we needed,” muttered my sister.