Naja Aidt - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Tuesday morning is like gold flowing through the streets: a new warmth in the air, dust floating in the sunbeams, it’s as if the sky has expanded overnight. The sounds of the city seem more cheerful, their resonance deeper. People seem happier, lighter. Look, a woman smiles broadly, a young man waits for an old woman with a walker, a child’s brown eyes shine like chestnuts in the backlight. Spring’s on its way, Thomas thinks, walking from home all the way to the store, because who wants to take the train on a day like this? How fitting that spring arrives today, the day the old man burns in hell. That works for me, there’s hope, a new path to forge, free of old grudges. Free of old grudges is a strophe in one of the old man’s favorite songs, a schlager from his youth, and Thomas can’t help but smile, a kind of schadenfreude. Because he , Thomas, is the free one and not the deceased; that’ll teach him (but what can a dead man learn?). These are the energies that buzz through Thomas O’Mally Lindström, who for the occasion is wearing a blue suit. He won’t bury his father wearing black. He buys coffee in a grungy deli and smokes a few cigarettes. He crosses the street and takes a pleasant detour through a lush park, where mimes and young musicians are already performing, where people soak up sun on benches, where dogs yap and cavort on the triangular lawn. Jenny sends him a text: “remember, 1:00 P.M.” And he responds: “why did you visit maloney sunday?” She answers: “mind your own business.” Very much against his wishes, Jenny had an obituary printed. He discovers this when he’s sitting in his office absentmindedly perusing the newspaper : “Jacques O’Mally departed us suddenly. May his soul find peace. Children and grandchildren.” Grandchildren? But there’s only Alice.

“She must’ve thought it sounded better in plural,” Maloney says, his entire head stuffed inside the filing cabinet. “And it does, too. Children and grandchild — you can’t write that.”

“May his soul find peace. What the fuck is that?” Thomas snaps, shoving the newspaper aside. “She is nuts.”

Maloney pops red-faced out of the cabinet and straightens himself up. “She’s a drama queen, Thomas. Jenny loves drama. A funeral is an incredible drama. Think about it.” Thomas groans. “I’m guessing it’ll be a pretty entertaining afternoon,” Maloney says, dropping into the boss’s chair. Annie enters the office and says they’re out of thumbtacks. But they were in the delivery yesterday. She can’t find them. Send Peter to the basement. He’s not at work. He’s not at work? He had to go to the doctor, something about a rash. A rash? Annie doesn’t know anything more than that.

Thomas wanders about the store for a few hours and assists some customers. He talks to the accountant, mails some documents, checks the ledger from last week. Patricia calls and asks for the chapel’s address. Peter comes back from the doctor’s; he has ringworm. This little nugget of news gets Maloney going. He slaps his thighs, howling with laughter.

“Ringworm is contagious,” Annie whispers. “Did the doctor say anything about that?”

“We’re not exactly in the habit of fondling Peter’s torso, are we? Or maybe we are?” Peter looks down. Maloney bursts into laughter again. “Does it itch?” Annie says worriedly. Peter nods. “Go get some lunch, Peter, and order something for the worm. Put it on my tab! It can have whatever it wants. Oh, that’s classic. Ringworm!”

Thomas sighs. “I apologize on Maloney’s behalf, Peter.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Maloney chuckles, ruffling his own hair. “I’d like a large turkey sandwich with extra bacon and pickles. Cranberries, but no tomatoes, please. They just make the bread soggy.”

Peter leaves, and Annie washes her hands at the little sink in the hallway. Thomas gets her attention in the mirror. “We need to leave for a few hours this afternoon. We have to go to an interment.” She nods, drying her hands thoroughly on a paper towel.

“I thought he was going to be cremated,” Maloney says.

“He is.”

“Then it’s not an interment, Thomas. Loosen up, man!” Maloney shouts. “Jesus Christ, I’m hungry!”

They eat, and in no time the office smells like a classroom, boiled egg, sweating salami. The store is quiet. “Must be the good weather,” Peter remarks, cautiously.

“We need to do a spring cleaning,” Maloney says, food smacking in his mouth, “is that something you’d all be interested in?”

No reaction.

“We’ll pay you, of course.”

“You didn’t last year,” Annie says firmly.

“But we will this year.”

“No thanks, I’d rather not,” Peter says quietly.

“Me neither.” Annie looks at Maloney, defiant, but Maloney’s focused on holding his sandwich, which threatens to fall apart. “Why the hell didn’t you ask them to put a toothpick in it, Peter? Look at this shit.” He leans forward to snatch up a piece of greasy bread from the floor.

Peter slurps his cola. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down with each gulp. “Well, I’m going back to work,” Annie says, tossing her crumpled sandwich paper in the trash on the way out. Maloney belches and says: “We’re off in ten minutes. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Thomas opens the window and sucks a pleasant breath of fresh, mild air into his lungs. “Did you order a new coffee automat?” he asks Maloney.

“Haven’t ordered shit. Who would I call? I don’t give a flying fuck about ordering so much as a glow-in-the-dark turd from that company, let me tell you.”

“A glow-in-the-dark turd?”

Maloney begins to whistle. “What do you think we’ll sing today? Jenny’s got some tearjerkers in store for us, no doubt. Will there be a wake?”

“I hope not,” Thomas replies, suddenly nervous. He expressly told her that he wouldn’t spend a dime on this service. The city’s covering it. They’ve refused to pay for the funeral director and the burial plot — Jenny because she can’t, and he because it makes him happy. The old man’s ashes will be heaped in the cheapest wooden urn they could find, and then dumped in an unmarked grave. But a wake? He hadn’t considered that. He figured it was completely out of the question, that in the very least they would agree on that . And since Jenny doesn’t have any money, he convinces himself that the probability of her arranging anything behind his back is minimal.

They take a cab, and Maloney’s remarkably silent the whole way, as if he’s told himself that the situation calls for it. Thomas glances at him, but he’s pretending to be deep in concentration, his attention firmly and piously focused out the window. The city floats, still bathed in light, a kind of sunshine-rain, and they pass all the old haunts: Here he once sat with Patricia on his lap (the green bench under the linden trees); here he and Jenny picked up their father at a bar one morning; here the department store and his faint recollections of standing with their mother on the escalator, on the way up to buy a new dress for Jenny; here their grandfather’s nursing home, which their old man referred to as the End Station (“Are you going out to the End Station to visit the old psychopath?”); and here the soccer fields, the big library, the music venues, the garages where one of their father’s friends sold “used cars,” the speakeasy in the back room, outside of which Thomas and Jenny hopped in puddles one interminable autumn day. Then the hospital emerges with its attractive, old central building and the newer additions of gray concrete. The network of trails and moss-covered lawns. Now they’re close. The car slows on the smaller streets, with their row houses and simple one-story villas, and there’s the cemetery with its headstones and crosses, with its evergreens and weeping willows and copper beech, half-rotten bouquets of flowers, the recently dug graves and their fresh wreaths. The car swings through a gate and follows the gravel road to the chapel. The crematorium is in the far back of the cemetery, as though hidden from the road. Thomas catches a glimpse of it behind some small, whitewashed office buildings, and he can’t help but look for smoke furling over the bricks. But there’s no smoke. Not yet, he thinks. The driver stops the car. One of the chapel’s wing doors has been flung open, leading into the darkness. Jenny stands on the stairs wearing a dark-blue jacket. And a hat. “She’s wearing a hat!” Maloney says, stifling a laugh. “Wow. .”