“I thought I solved all your problems.” He looked disappointed.
“You did. I mean, for twenty years you did.”
“What could be the problem now?”
“I need you to translate these letters for me, from Romanian.”
“Romanian?” He took the stack of letters from me, and began to leaf through them. “Is your name Rezvan?” he said.
“He’s a friend of mine.”
“Then you should not read his letters.” He smiled.
“Professor Pine, I really need you to do this for me.”
“Who is Rilia?”
“I don’t know. Look, you don’t even need to read them to me. Just read them to yourself and tell me if the people writing them are married.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“That doesn’t matter. I just do.”
“Why?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Are you being a dirty-girlie?” He smiled — and then a tic, as forked as lightning.
I sighed and looked over at his birds, who were cawing loudly. One was green with black wings, and it was flapping furiously, staring at the letters fluttering in Professor Pine’s hand.
“Fine, Professor Pine. If you don’t want to read them, I’ll take them to somebody else.” I reached for the letters.
He pulled them back, toward his chest. “Okay, okay, girlie,” he said. “You are so stubborn, Margit.”
He read softly, in a lilting voice, as if he were reading me a bedtime story. “Rilia says, ‘Remember how tiny Florian was at his birth? Now he is forty-five kilos, the same as his brother.’ Rilia says, ‘Remember the Black Sea, it is as blue as the first time we went to it.’ Rilia says that Rezvan must be lying when he says there is so much food that sometimes he tosses rotten fruit from the window.”
I interrupted. “Do you think they are married?”
“Well, they are both Balescus.”
“They could be brother and sister?”
He frowned, and leafed through the letters again. “But here she calls him darling. Darling, barling, starling.”
He looked up then. “Oh, no,” he said, “don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” He jumped up, came around the side of the desk, and crouched beside my chair. He looked up at me. His face was close, and the next tic was like slow motion. I saw the path that it followed, curving and winding like a river down his face.
He sat back on the edge of his desk. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We just have to figure out what the girlie wants. If you want Rezvan, the liar face, you can have him. Is that what you want?”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I do, but I can’t. He has kids and everything.”
“Then it sounds like you’ve made up your mind already.”
“Not really,” I said.
“Margit, you need some perspective.”
“Perspective?”
“You know”—he rolled his eyes upward—“Slatland.”
Slatland — I remembered that that was what he’d called it, the drifting up and looking down.
“I’ve tried Slatland. It didn’t work,” I said.
“Slatland always works. Just close your eyes, all right, girlie?”
I started to stand up. “Thanks for your help, Professor Pine. I really have to go now.” But then I felt it, the lift, and my mind started rising, until the caws of Mortalhead and Eagerheart and Quickeye were far below me. I could see the yellow fields surrounding my town, and then even those went out of focus. I hurtled faster and faster until I finally stopped, what seemed like minutes later.
So this is Slatland, I thought. I looked down, and to my left I saw North America, large and jagged, flanked by oceans. Its face was beautiful — craggy, broken, lined with rivers. I found my part of the continent, a flat gold rectangle in the upper middle. I saw what my daily life looked like from this distance: my truck beetling through the prairies, dust rising off its wheels the way desire must rise, thousands of fragments of stone lifting off the earth. And when the truck stopped and I stepped out into the bright, empty fields, my loneliness looked extreme. I could almost see it, my longing and desire for Rezvan rising out of me the way a tree rises out of its trunk. I perceived, in an instant, exactly what I should do to keep him. I saw how simple it all would be, just to keep collecting the letters every morning, one by one, in order that what was between Rezvan and his wife would die slowly and easily and naturally, and what was between him and me would grow in exactly the same proportion.
If I had been able to climb down then, to drop out of Slatland at that moment, everything would have remained simple, and probably Rezvan and I would still be together. But Slatland seemed to have a will of its own. It would not let me go until I looked down to my right. If I was willing to see the simplicity, the purity, of my own desire, then I also had to see the entire landscape — the way desire rises from every corner and intersects, creates a wilderness over the earth.
I stood on Slatland a long time before I looked down to my right. There it was, Eastern Europe, floating above the Mediterranean. I traced with my finger the outline of Romania. I squinted, down through the mist and mountains, down through the thick moss of trees, until I found her. She stood in a long line of people, her forty-five-kilo children hanging on her skirts. She bent to them and broke for them some bread as hard as stone. I hovered a few feet above her and watched. Even so, I might still have been able to return to my own life, my own province, unchanged if she hadn’t turned her face upward right then, as if she had felt some rain, and looked directly at me.
This all happened very fast, in a blink of my eyes. When I opened them, Professor Pine was sitting on his desk, watching me. “You’re a real erky-terk,” he said, with a tic so extreme that it looked like it might swallow his face. He walked me to the door and handed me the letters, which later that night I would give to Rezvan. We would be standing on the balcony in the semidarkness of the moon, and I would be surprised at how easily they passed through my hands, as easily as water.
The birds shrieked. “Birdmen!” Professor Pine said. “Sometimes I feel like saluting them,” he said to me. He shook my hand. “Good luck, girlie-whirl.” Then he went up on his tiptoes and kissed me good-bye.
THE EARLY DEATHS OF LUBECK, BRENNAN, HARP, AND CARR by Jesse Ball
THE FIRST
Four of them were on one side of a dim room.
— I’m going to try it, said the first.
The girl watched herself in the mirror as the young man approached.
— I wonder, he said. I thought perhaps…
He stopped mid-sentence, for tears had begun to well up in the girl’s eyes. She began to cry.
— Please, she said, just leave me alone.
She wore a straight brown dress, buttoned all up the side, and a long tweed coat. Her hair was braided into itself.
— Are you all right? he asked. Can I help you?
— You know, you can’t just speak to people. That’s not how things are anymore. No one wants to just be spoken to.
She rubbed her eyes.
— It’s rather silly of you. Already you look a bit like a fool. The barkeeper, standing just across the bar, nodded.
— There are rules, he said.
And indeed, on the wall, a list of rules.
— I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
— That’s no excuse.
The girl stood up as if to go.
— I’ll take care of this, Myrna, said the bartender. You stay where you are. He came around the bar toward Harp. He was a big man, with thick forearms like a steelworker.
— It’s time for you to go, lad. The others too.