Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— Up? Jacob repeated. — The station isn’t open?

— Yes, but you must down by the other side. Come, up!

The banister bisecting the staircase, he realized, was meant to separate upward from downward foot traffic. He had been walking down the up staircase, as yet unlabeled.

— I didn’t know, Jacob apologized. — There are no signs.

— That doesn’t matter. Come!

— I’m almost down already. When I return, I’ll remember. On the next trip. When I return, you’ll have a sign.

— No! No! You may not go this way! Now she was pulling on his arm with a two-handed grip. — Up! Up!

— I won’t! Let go!

— You must! You must do it normally!

— Leave me! Jacob said, shaking his arm as roughly as she was shaking it, a little frenzied by her touch.

— You Russians, the woman said.

— I’m not Russian, Jacob answered, pulling off her hands with his by force, one at a time, and walking down the rest of the stairs to a train that was just coasting up to the platform.

The train carried him smoothly into the dark. He felt the looks of his fellow passengers settle on his sneakers, as they always did on the subway, where the seats faced one another across the aisle. He closed his eyes. He wanted things. He refused to stop wanting them. Maybe he even wanted to write a story about Meredith.

He ate a pizza in the stand-up restaurant at the foot of Wenceslas Square where he and Luboš had eaten the day of Bush’s speech. He stood at the counter in the front of the restaurant, which looked through plate glass into the street, and while his back was turned to the view, it began to snow. An unexplained calm in several faces prompted him to look over his shoulder and discover it. It was the first snow he had seen in Prague. He paid quickly and stepped out into the square.

From the stately shoulders of the National Museum, and from the sword raised by the saint before it, the long square swept down. The flakes continued at millions of separated points the suppressed gray light of the sky, and by attracting the eye to middle distances that an ordinary view collapsed, they gave the square a depth that Jacob had not appreciated before. They sped down toward the paving bricks and into them, like ghosts into walls, along curves that were neatly interrupted by the flakes’ vanishing. He thought it was unfair to Meredith that he had the luck to stare up into the beauty of the square and enjoy his sorrow for her.

He turned away. He remembered a flower shop in , the Little Square. The narrow, crooked street that ran to it was nearly empty of tourists, but for a more perfect solitude he took advantage of a recent discovery and opened a person-size door cut into the carriage-size door of an apartment building, and stepped into a private passage, which wound through the interior of the block in loose parallel to the public street outside. Afraid to call attention to himself, he didn’t click on the passage lights. He could see well enough by the twilight that sifted down from the first-landing windows of the irregularly placed staircases that lined the passage. He heard only his own footfalls. When, at the end of the corridor, he emerged, he found that the snow was falling more heavily. He hadn’t worn his winter coat or brought a hat, and his hair was soon matted with it.

— Do you have roses?

— But it is winter, see? You see what we have.

There was nothing better than red-dyed carnations, so he took them. He considered the First of May Bridge, the one near Café Slavia, which cut across island, because it would be more or less solitary, but then he decided that with such ugly flowers he couldn’t choose anything less than the most beautiful bridge, the Charles, even if it was so beautiful as to be a cliché.

On the bridge itself, standing in what was now sleet, he was miserably cold and wet, and it was difficult to compose himself and find the feeling that he had meant to put into the gesture. It helped to face the river, so he leaned over the thick stone ledge and looked upstream toward the long shining weir, which cut the water into planes. Beneath him, where the river flowed quietly around the piers of the bridge, the water was black, and when he dropped his first flower, it felt more like an experiment than a tribute. The carnation turned gray as it fell, and after it hit the water, it dipped and rose once or twice on the surface like a person turning on a bed to get comfortable, before the current carried it under the bridge, out of sight. As he dropped the rest, singly, he had an incongruous memory, which he could not shut out. It was a story that an older gay man, a professor of French literature, had told him in a taxi in the spring. Though sick, the professor had agreed to come with Jacob’s friends from a dinner party to a bar. In the taxi he had changed his mind about his strength and decided to go home, but not before telling Jacob — who had confided his hopeless crush on…he couldn’t remember now for sure, but it must have been on Carl — a story from the 1970s, of asking a straight friend to undress and lie on the floor, while he, the professor, not then a professor, sat above him on a chair and dropped twelve dozen roses onto his chest, one by one. “This is how beautiful you are to me, that’s what I was telling him,” the professor recalled. “At first he laughed and thought I was ridiculous, but I didn’t say anything, and after the hundredth rose or so, I could see that he saw that I meant it, and then I could see that he was hard, and I kept dropping the roses.”

Jacob flattened and folded up the wrapping paper that had carried the flowers. He wished they had been roses.

* * *

Returned to his apartment, Jacob changed into a dry T-shirt and underwear, and ate some bread and jam. He left the cushions he used for bedding on the couch, because he thought he would be warmer there than on the floor. But he woke up cold nonetheless after what seemed only a few minutes of dozing. He carefully doubled his red blanket so that it would be twice as thick but still cover all of him and tried again. Instead of drifting back over the events of the day, however, his mind fell into a rut, like a heavy lawnmower yanking after it the child who is supposed to be pushing it. First he had to sound out all the letters in the Czech word for “bookstore,” which is a long one, over and over. The task gradually changed into a nonsensical conversation in English about buying a bus ticket, and this too he seemed to rehearse, as if he were preparing in his mind to teach it as a lesson at the language school. He could only stop himself from repeating it by making an effort to come awake. When he did, he recognized in the repetitions the stamp of fever.

As an experiment, he swallowed. The back of his throat pained him. He waited for a while in the almost-dark, hoping the symptoms would subside. The heavy curtains no more than dimmed the light from the street lamps outside, and under the covers he felt a certain security in the room. Those were his books on the shelf, after all. On the floor the lime carpeting was bland and familiar. There was the wardrobe where he hung his shirts. There was the small, circular, white-painted table he used as a desk. He felt that the room was on his side and that it was safe to wait here. He closed his eyes. But the fever continued to force his mind to run through drills.

In the medicine cabinet, he found a thermometer left behind by grandparents, wider and easier to read than the kind he had grown up with. The back of it was a solid forest green. It reminded him of a pen he had owned as a child, a souvenir from a French town, given to him as a gift, which had had a window where a skiff sailed from one side of a bay to another as you turned it upside down and then right side up again. On his way back to the couch, he fetched from the wardrobe his down sleeping bag, which he hadn’t used since buying the red blanket. Under this layer and the others he took his temperature. It was in Celsius, which he couldn’t interpret, but he didn’t think it looked high and so fell once more into an uneasy doze, the glass wand resting in his hand.