Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“We have to give her up,” said Jacob.

“It is so,” Kaspar agreed.

Jacob felt he hadn’t yet been brutal enough. “We have to give up the whole idea,” Jacob tried again, telling himself that his cruelty was for Kaspar’s sake. “They’re going to find out the hard way.”

“Who?”

“Carl and Melinda,” Jacob answered in a whisper, not wanting them to overhear.

“Ah, do you feel that?” Kaspar was studying Jacob with a look of concern.

Jacob tried to think of a way to explain that Carl and Melinda had chosen to break the old forms; they had chosen the new way; and therefore they had to expect that the new way would try to break them. It was a mistake to think that in the new world they would be able to care in the old way. In the new world you had to find something of value and learn not to care for it. You had to learn how to sell it.

“Are you distressed, Kuba?” Kaspar asked.

Jacob shut himself up. “No. I thought you might be.”

“I am sad,” Kaspar answered. “As I say, I would like to meet you again. Have you a telephone?”

“Not any more. Do you have one?”

“No.” Kaspar chuckled softly at this dead end.

“We could leave notes at the language school,” Jacob suggested.

“Yes, that is so,” Kaspar replied, but he didn’t seem to believe that Jacob would.

“I could stop by your place,” Jacob offered. Jacob’s new apartment was located just on the other side of the war cemeteries from Kaspar’s.

“I hope that you will,” Kaspar said. He took a deep breath, met Jacob’s eye, and then looked past him for a moment into the party that Jacob was about to return to. He smiled finally in farewell. “So, okay,” he said awkwardly, and was gone.

“I need a beer,” said Carl, coming up behind Jacob.

Jacob followed him and took a beer, too. Carl’s shirt, like Jacob’s, was patchy with sweat from dancing. A breeze came through the open window behind Henry’s refrigerator and played on them.

“This won’t cost five crowns in Rome,” said Carl.

“No,” agreed Jacob.

“I wanted to be the one to tell you, you know,” Carl confessed. “I said I’d known you longer. But Melinda said she’d known you longer in Prague and that that was what mattered.”

Jacob shrugged away the implication that the case was a delicate one.

After a swig of beer, Carl continued: “We’re leaving in a few minutes, you know.”

“You are?” Jacob said stupidly.

“Hans invited Jitka to go home with him, so Jitka is offering us her apartment again for tonight.”

Jacob nodded. The glass of the kitchen window behind Carl was dusty, and the dust caught and held a moonish glare thrown up by lights in the courtyard below. He and Carl would never live together again, not in Prague, Somerville, or anywhere else.

“I understand,” said Jacob. This was as close as the two of them would ever be, so he looked at Carl carefully — at his ironic eyes and candid mouth. Carl looked the same but not the same as he always had, as if he were older or younger than he had been the last time Jacob had really looked at him. He was in the flow of time now. He was in a story.

“I’ll probably blow it,” Carl said, “but I’d never in a million years feel I had a right to a chance with Melinda even if I did know what I was doing with my life, so not knowing doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to hold back.”

“It’ll work out,” said Jacob, trying to match Carl’s prosaic tone, and suddenly ashamed of the discouragement that he had tried to convey to Kaspar.

Blinking his eyes, Carl pulled his steel-bead chain out from under his shirt and over his head. He wiped dry the metal pendant on the front of his pants. “I was going to give you this.”

Jacob let Carl place the saint in his palm. It was still warm. “But you’re still traveling,” Jacob protested.

“In a way.”

“Italy’s not traveling?”

“Do you want it or not?

“Of course I want it,” Jacob said.

“Okay, then.”

He could have kissed Carl, but the point, he made himself remember, was that Carl was the one he didn’t kiss. He slipped the chain over his own head.

“I don’t have one to give you in return.”

“That’s okay.”

“Do you want Václav?”

“Hamsters, Italy — doesn’t seem right somehow.”

Václav remained silent and hidden nearby, inside his soup tureen, which had been placed in a cabinet for safekeeping during the party.

In the event, Carl and Melinda stayed for another two hours, at which point, after a fluster of tears and hugs, they fled.

* * *

Annie cried on the sofa and accused anyone who tried to console her of not caring as much as she did. The rest returned to drinking and dancing. They seemed to grow almost angry in their revelry.

“Tonight is the last night,” Jacob told Henry. “After this we can’t live just for living.”

“Then we’re animals,” suggested Henry.

“Animals who eat story.”

“But we’re also the meat,” said Henry. Carl in leaving had taken with him their philosophy, and it was as if Henry and Jacob were casting about for a topic of conversation that Carl though absent might somehow still be taking part in. “We’re meat with cinema,” Henry said. Jacob’s skin prickled. It was a naming like one of Carl’s, the kind of understanding that they had been afraid of losing when they lost him. Henry repeated the words. Then he repeated them again and then kept repeating them, as if he were chanting. Meat with cinema. Meat with cinema. Meat with cinema. The words lost their meaning, as if he were unlocking and emptying them. The words became unfamiliar and abstract, and in this state they could have meant anything, and because of their purity, and because they were being consumed by the saying of them, they began, Jacob noticed with alarm, to seem to mean everything — to mean every aspect of the experience that Jacob was living through. He really was meat with cinema, and so was Henry. It was what they all were. Henry seized Jacob by the arms, and the two of them fell down together, Henry taking most of the blow, but one of Jacob’s elbows flowering in pain, though the pain seemed to be happening to another person. As they fell, Jacob thought: Oh, this is silly and grandiose, and I would never be so taken with it if I weren’t drunk and Henry weren’t my friend, but I am and he is and I understand what he means. His meaning, which he didn’t speak — Jacob intuited it as if a language teacher had acted it out instead of translating it — was that the two of them weren’t in fact falling; they were merely disregarding the world; the accident and pain were incidental to the establishment of an axis between them that was, for the moment, distinct from the world’s and untethered from it, drifting separately. For the moment they were taking a path of their own, and if the floor of the apartment happened to fall up and hit them while Henry was shouting his communication, while he was trying to persuade Jacob to hear it, to really hear what he was trying to say, then it was no more than a sign of the reality of their independence. The pain in Jacob’s elbow seemed far away; the only sensations near him were the words, the repeated words, Henry trembling as he shouted them, Jacob crouching and wincing against them almost in Henry’s arms. This was abandonment, Jacob thought, this feeling right now; this was what it felt like to be cut free.