Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

He lobbed them toward her anyway. She stepped back, and he heard them ping off the concrete and scuffle as they were knocked into the dusty planting beside the walkway. She was wearing her oversize, boxy glasses because spring had made her contact lenses impossible, and when she crouched to look for the keys she raised the glasses and rested them in her rust-gold hair. She gave no cry when she found the keys because it did not occur to her that Jacob would still be watching her and merely proceeded inside without a word.

Henry met her at the door in his apron and kissed her on both cheeks in greeting.

“You look quite dashing,” she told him.

“Just doing a spot of washing up.”

“Is all this yours, then?”

“Have you not seen it before?”

“No one ever invites me anywhere. Ehm, listen, Henry, I brought a few of me things, and I thought perhaps I might stay a few days, if it’s no trouble.”

“There may still be a corner left in the next room, if you hurry.”

“That’ll be grand,” she thanked him. “And I’ll be bringing half a dozen friends with me from the as well.”

“The more the merrier.”

While Henry washed and Jacob dried, she gave herself a tour.

“And you prefer this squalor to the ,” she resumed, upon returning.

“Say,” Henry objected.

“But it is squalor.”

“I found a place, actually,” Jacob volunteered.

“Did you?”

“In Žižkov. The landlord doesn’t live in the building this time.”

She drifted away into the living room, perhaps looking for somewhere to set down her little canvas backpack. “Are you going to leave your laundry all about like this, during the party?” came her voice. “I don’t mind, for myself.”

“I hadn’t given it any thought,” said Henry.

“Quite intimate, isn’t it,” she said when they joined her to make an appraisal. “There isn’t a closet, perhaps, where it could be stashed.”

“Hang on,” said Henry, checking one. “No.” The closet was filled by Jacob’s and Carl’s luggage.

“Perhaps the shower. Have you taken your showers, the two of you?” Carl had left for a Vietnamese dinner with Melinda several hours before.

“If we take this rubbish down the tip,” suggested Henry, pulling a crate out from beneath the sink, “perhaps we could put the old togs in here.”

“You can’t possibly put your things in there. You do mean to wear them again some day, don’t you?”

“If Jacob has left us any washing powder.”

“I heard that it was epic, your laundering,” Annie told Jacob with admiration.

As a last resort, they piled the laundry onto the far side of Henry’s bed, covered it with a blanket, and topped it with his pillows, with the intention that the ensemble should pass for a sofa, though the lumpy result instead gave the impression of an undisposed-of body, imperfectly disguised.

There was no time to improve on the arrangement, however. The buzzer was soon rung by three Czech women who taught at the language school, each bearing a white plastic shopping bag held sideways, artfully tented, with the hand clasp snapped-to and folded under. One, who in the course of the year had become friendly with Annie, exchanged kisses with her, but they were Melinda’s friends for the most part, and in her absence they fussed awkwardly over Henry in his capacity as host, wishing to make themselves busy and useful. They pronounced the refrigerator that Henry and Jacob had packed full of bottled beer excellent and daunting. They knew to set an empty ashtray over the full one when they lifted it off of Henry’s coffee table to dump its contents. One slid her shopping bag into the refrigerator atop the bottles that had been laid in parallel across a shelf like rollers in an assembly line, but the other two immediately extracted from their bags plates of , afterward inspecting the bags to confirm that no topping had touched the interiors and folding them in a way that did not compromise the handles.

“Peas and ham, I dare say,” Annie observed.

“In mayonnaise,” Jacob added quietly.

“Do you not fancy mayonnaise then?” Annie asked with dismay.

The last dish rinsed, Henry fetched a boom box from his bedroom, propped it on a pedestal of paperbacks in the living room, and plugged it in. “Now the party starts,” said Henry.

“Without the guest of honor?”

“Bugger him.” From a short row of cassettes Henry chose one with a handwritten label and shut it into the machine. The rotors began to turn. It was something punk, which even Jacob recognized though he couldn’t have named it. Henry turned the volume up so high that they all stepped away.

“Henry,” remonstrated Annie.

It was, as Henry said, the start of the party. The light inside the rooms had become more interesting than the light outside, Jacob saw, when at the next buzz he threw the keys down to Thom, who had appeared not with Jana but with Hans. Outside there were now only the evenly spaced orange glows of the street lamps, partly obscured at the height of Henry’s window by the dark leaves of the street’s lindens, which wavered unmeaningly, like fans loosely held in the hands of people who have become abstracted by music. Thom and Hans entered the building, but Jacob continued to lean out into the evening. Behind him the noise of the boom box was brittle. Before him the evening was rich and gentle, as it had been when he had sat with Kaspar under the shadow of the Charles Bridge. As he enjoyed its contrast with the bright, loud room that his feet, at least, were in, he heard approaching footsteps on pavement and the songlike sound of people speaking in English cadences. Carl and Melinda were walking arm in arm. They had brought Kaspar, who was limping slightly.

“Stand and unfold yourself,” Jacob hailed them.

Startled, they looked up. “Nay, answer me,” replied Melinda. Her face shone in the darkness.

“Thom has the keys and he hasn’t got upstairs yet,” Jacob explained.

They nodded. “Wild party?” asked Carl, as they waited.

“Pretty wild,” Jacob answered. “ .”

“Psych.”

The distance between them was too great to have a proper conversation across it, and they fell silent. Melinda and Carl murmured to each other; Kaspar looked away down the street, in the direction that they hadn’t come from. What was Jacob going to search for now, Jacob wondered of himself as he watched them. Now that this was ending. No, that wasn’t the question. He knew what he was searching for, as well as he ever had. It was a feeling about the world: an answering quality. What he had lost track of was a sense of where to search for it — where he might be likely to hear it, if it could still be heard anywhere.

Behind him he recognized Thom’s brogue and turned to retrieve the keys. Tossed into the darkness, they were caught by Carl overhand. “Hey,” Carl said, as if inviting compliments on his catch, before unlocking the door. Jacob lingered for a few moments more, still leaning out into the empty night.

The partygoers crowded into the narrow vestibule, and Jacob saw Carl and Melinda at first only over the heads and in the interstices between his friends. The vestibule was lit by a bare light bulb, which hit the couple bluntly and made their brows shadow their eyes and their chins shadow their necks, but the revealed color of their complexions was so full of life that it had the effect of subtilizing and softening the light. Walking through the spring night had left them fresh and careless; they had brought the air of the night indoors with them. Even Kaspar, quietly fastening the bolt behind them, seemed pink and happy as he blinked against the glare.