A woman screamed.
She sounded as though she were directly beneath the window. A car pulled away, engine straining. Doors slammed. He lay rigid. Voices. Men. Swearing.
He had heard the stories and believed them well enough—London, the European capital of organized crime: the Albanians, the Turks, the Croats and the Serbs, the Jamaicans, the triads, the Irish, the Islamic cells, other Russians, the Nigerians, the Colombians, the plain old-fashioned mafia; people smugglers, drug smugglers, weapon smugglers; prostitutes, heroin, explosives. The whole world liked to squat right down and do its nastiest possible shit in London. He was not afraid for his well-being or even his life (if only they would take it quickly, get the fucking thing out of the way), but he feared the police, he feared robbery, and most of all he feared violence.
Blue lights came swirling across the ceiling, sweeping from one side of the room to the other, then stopping directly above him, as if spotlighting him for some provincial nightclub’s amateur dance competition. The Moldavians were awake now. They would all be arrested as part of the raid or fight or whatever it was that was happening out there. He would be sent back. Before he had his chance. All three floors of the hostel, he knew, were heaving with people that even a blind Gypsy cocksucker would recognize as illegal—construction workers, cooks, waitresses, cleaners. He could not understand why the police did not raid it every night.
There was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs, but going down, not coming up. He did not know whether to rise and dress or lie still. Where would he go? More voices outside—a man and a woman’s, raised. Another, quieter voice answering. The older Moldavian got up from the bottom bunk. The sirens had stopped, but the blue continued to swirl.
Now there were footsteps coming up. If the money went, he would have to steal. If his passport went, he would never be able to prove he was the man he was pretending to be. But even that he could survive. It was physical violence that scared him to a tight and silent shiver. Not because he was physically afraid—he had faced a gun, preferred a gun—but because of his lifelong curse: he had to protect his hands. Simply, he could not fight back. He could not lift a single finger to defend himself. He could not risk anything. As long as he held to the identity of musician, he was as vulnerable as a limbless cripple. Oftentimes in his dreams he had hoped for some knife slash to sever the tendons, some hammer to crush his fingers, some axe to separate a joint, so that it would be over, the stupid hope, so that he could ball his fist just once.
The Moldavian spoke in his heavy accent, the sound of Russian comforting all the same. “The police are taking the woman away. It’s okay, Mikhail, lie down. Just filthy British motherfuckers again. Cannot take their drink.”
37
The Subtle Logic of Desire
Monday. Worst day of the week the wage-slavery world over. But at least the wind had dropped And at least the next magazine—“You Meets You”—was a good while away yet. He looked idly through some of the putative cover questions:
“If you met yourself, would you like yourself?”
No.
“If you met yourself, what would you say?”
Fuck off, asshole, and sort your life out while you’re about it.
“If you met yourself, where would you go for a romantic mini-break?”
Palestine. Rwanda. Or maybe East Timor.
“Why?”
Teach myself a lesson.
Aside from the worst piece he had ever read—“How to Be Single and Satisfied”—this was the entirety of the “You Meets You” issue thus far.
He did have an idea that he would like to commission: “How to Laugh about Everything in Your Life When It’s Not Funny at All.” But for this to work, it would have to be a spread, a good read, and that would require him to find a knowledgeable writer capable of an engaging style and a sophisticated grasp of tone and register. Fat chance. Anyway, bollocks to it—the deadline wasn’t for two weeks and he was ahead of himself: he’d got the issue title, which was more than he usually had at this stage. He clicked on one of the news pages he kept as a favorite… Another day here on Earth. Another day of attrition, murder, beauty, and birth. Another day of six billion soloists at full lung, all hoping for some miracle of harmony.
And for him, sitting there, drifting through all this on screen after screen… For him, another day of thinking in ever tighter circles. And no doubt about it, he was as implicated as anyone else. His world, his time, his life. Agreed, nobody expects meaningful every day or even every week, but intermittently worthwhile must surely be possible, right? How to make something of his life while he still had a chance, though? How to weigh in on the right side, whichever side that was? Before it all tapered down to feed, clothe, pay for, look after the children, hang on to the wife, get through it. Hey, Ma, you’ll be proud: I got through it! I worked. I had some kids. Made some money! Yep, I really followed my own path out there. I’m a granddad! Anyway, it’s over. Coming, ready or not. And how had he arrived in this position? (His hypocrisy he imagined like a mucous membrane around everything—everything he thought, said, did.) How had he become so very faithless and unfaithful? Hey, Ma, help me: what what what what do I really believe?
Phew, lunchtime.
He called Connie.
One good thing: eagerly, before he left, he replied to the e-mail from his mother’s Russian friend suggesting that if this suited, Arkady Alexandrovitch should come around to his home this Sunday, for lunch—Gabriel’s sister would be around then, and she would love to say hello too. He wanted a proper afternoon with the guy. Not some quick after-work thing. He wanted to hear stories of his mother.
The six o’clock call to Stockholm revealed all to be well, but on nights like these, when he wasn’t supposed to be here, there, or anywhere, the corners of his eyes swarmed with dangerous people: unexpected encounters with long-lost friends (“It is you. I thought so. How are you? I must give Lina a buzz…”); chance escalator passings-by of her colleagues (puzzled faces, recognition, belated wave); yet another of her half-brothers covertly spotting him on the platform at Swiss Cottage. It was a slim chance that he’d run into anyone while out with Connie, but then, slim chances were the entire story thus far—Homo sapiens, evolution, gravity, the universe itself, one overwhelmingly slim chance after another.
Eight, and they were locked into yet one more urgent conversation in the bar at the end of her street in West Hampstead: lovers trying to be friends trying to be sensible trying to be good trying to be anything but lovers trying to be friends.
Midnight. And oh, but how the subtle logic of desire mocks the plodding reason of the mind.
Tuesday morning. He awoke beside her. Instantly he knew he wasn’t going in to work.
They drank tea and talked and ate sweet pears with broken pieces of chocolate. And he watched her kneeling on the floor in her white sweater and nothing else as she watered her plants—all brought inside to protect them from the frost and placed on the money pages of the weekend papers, side by side, in their little pots beneath her bedroom windowsill.