In the spring they tore down two buildings across from his. They dumped all the debris in a heap, and that same day two twenty-year-old vans full of dark-skinned people began circling. These collectors of secondary waste made daily rounds through his neighborhood with the nonchalance of vultures. Matija had the impression that every retiree within a six-block radius had befriended them as if by collective agreement. They found one, whose name was Pajdo, to be particularly appealing. He’d gesture to every passerby with a thumbs-up and shout, “Giff me fife.” One day he shouted this to Matija, and Matija had no idea what to answer, so he said, “Good morning.” They repeated this exchange every time they met. Giff me fife. Good morning. Matija found Pajdo disgusting. He didn’t want to be infected by the man’s aura of failure.
With the construction project, the dust in his apartment became increasingly onerous. He often felt the need to blow his nose really hard, so with his left hand (because his right was on the keyboard, poised to write down the next ingenious thought to come to him, any minute now) he’d pull a T-shirt or sweatshirt from his laundry basket and blow his nose into it. He was sure the snot would vanish in the washing machine, until one day in the middle of a meeting—around the table were seated Coffee, Monday, Toothpaste Smell, and Suppressed Morning Erection—he noticed a glob on the sleeve of a shirt that had been washed and ironed, living proof that his nasal buddies were resistant to laundry detergent and wouldn’t be so easily forgotten.
Most of the time he was furious, and he soothed himself by walking. He spent several nights wandering through the city instead of sleeping. He peered through the windows of a house in Cvjetno naselje because he thought he’d lived in a home a little like it when he was small, in Međimurje. It had dark-red roof tiles and a gray-yellow facade; he could tell, though only a streetlamp kept the form of the house on this side of wakefulness. He stood for a while because he seemed to recall a game with a string and a ball, but suddenly a white hand appeared from the gloom behind a window and, fingers splayed, rested on the pane. There was no way to see who it belonged to, but behind the phantom hand flitted a throng of white shadows. Matija stood transfixed for a few more seconds before he ran back to the well-lit street. He saw the hand again with perfect clarity when he shut his eyes in bed. It was milky-white and blue, cold, like the hand of a dead child.
Summer neared. He read and fitfully copied passages out of Houellebecq, Walter Benjamin, Franzen, Updike, Frisch, Murakami, and Pamuk. He wasn’t particularly interested in how they wrote, but he read them because he could no longer bear being unable to drop their names at fancy-schmancy receptions.
He despised every cunning plot twist, every perfectly original observation. When he read the passage from Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart about a girl who loses her tram tickets, he thought he might be able to tweak it a little and use it himself, and then later swear he hadn’t plagiarized it if anyone asked. He persuaded himself that no one would ask anyway, and it could be presented as the sort of cunning intertextual game that might entrance a beautiful student of anthropology and Czech and motivate her to talk about it with her well-endowed girlfriends.
He gave that up quickly. He observed himself becoming a scavenger, a collector of secondary waste. He was even prepared to steal if it would get him writing. He thought this was similar to what Pajdo and his crew had been doing over the last months around the neighborhood. Like them, he didn’t care about the people from whom he was taking everything. Damn the collectors of secondary waste. Their passive disregard, their carefree brashness.
One morning he kept tightening his tie until he could no longer breathe. He watched his face change without blinking. The veins popped out on his forehead, and his mouth sagged open because he couldn’t swallow the saliva pooling around his tongue. He began blacking out and loosened his grip, but the tie didn’t loosen. He fell to his knees, coughing hard, and had to yank with both hands to pull apart the knot. All the next week, he was reminded of this incident by heart palpitations, pain when he swallowed, and red scratch marks on his neck from the scrape of the collar. He had a terrible feeling that this hadn’t happened of his own free will, that something was driving him from a hidden place.
For several days when he left work, he ran into a faceless man, always dressed the same way, who said Matija’s name while walking by him. The man was fat and short, shaped like three large cube-like lumps that had been tossed together by an unskillful hand. The first few times, Matija turned, but the man just kept walking. On the fifth day, in the same spot, Matija asked where he was from. The man stopped, shoved his dull gaze into Matija’s face, and in an odd dialect full of open, lazy vowels, he calmly answered he was from a place where you could see lights in the forest at night. Matija never saw him again.
At some point in August of 2009, he finally gave up. After months of insomnia, he was totally disoriented. He’d walk into a room and forget why he’d come. Although he couldn’t prove it, he was certain he had not sent the relatively young, feminine department head an email with his notes for the novel about the gay soccer player. How could he have? Matija stored his notes in a separate account linked to his private email. But there it was, from his work address, and on the document, under Properties, Matija was listed as the file’s author and owner. The whole thing became more dramatic because the department head saw this as an insult and reacted accordingly. After Matija carefully explained (never mentioning the words gay, provocative, or sensitive) that he was a published author who, in his spare time, was always looking for a good story, the department head chose to reduce his salary by 10 percent for a year and placed him on a two-year probation for bullying.
As he slipped off his shoes at home that day, he admitted his life had long since fallen hopelessly to pieces and that he had to snap out of it, no matter what. His conclusion was reasonable enough, but he’d misunderstood the cause. He gave himself an ultimatum: if he didn’t get himself together within a month, he’d seek professional help, and, if need be, stop writing. He thought up the story about the Roma man and the Croatian woman. Only a small part of him believed he’d succeed.
For the next year, until Gita’s conclusive assertion that the novel was a bust, Matija’s fears were contained in the realm of reason. The unusual encounters and bad dreams were less frequent, but he carefully concealed how he was slowly being devoured by what he saw when he was alone.
It would be wrong to say he’d had a change of spirit. He’d changed shape. For a time, he joked about his every fart to his colleagues, certain he was so beloved that they’d only love him all the more for it. He came up with cruel nicknames for people, and lied about how much he was cooking for himself at home. When he was with friends, he pretended to be someone who was forever commenting on world events, an overbearing know-it-all. His companions simpered politely.
And, finally, sometimes, only sometimes, just before he shut his laptop, feeling pleased he’d done something useful that day, he’d read the last words he’d written backward. He didn’t mean to do any of those things, and this last one he did as if being compelled by a fierce invisible force. Ecreif. Elbisivni. Ecrof.