How long, I asked Istvan, do we have to wait for an appointment to visit the city morgue?
It is the times, he told me. Most of the city works staggered hours. People are talking about blackouts too, which can’t be good.
For a morgue? I asked him, and he smiled.
Morgue will have its own generator. Meanwhile, there are government ministers need protection, paranoid billionaires, party bosses, is good time for security in general.
I didn’t get the connection, but let it go.
I am making list, expanded list of possible clients. In times like these, protectors need protection.
Protectors of what?
Government buildings, power plants, TV stations. You are well acquainted with war zones?
He knew that I was.
Security is stretched, private enterprise fills the gap.
Is this a war zone?
Not yet. But we – how you say – live in hope. Work for everybody.
I had to admire his quite insane optimism.
Besides, he said, you have appointment.
And I had, I remembered. With our bushy-eyebrowed therapist. So I walked back out on to those hot, deceptive streets. If I was to believe him, this sweet, baking tranquillity was just a crust that hid a boiling magma of volcanic chaos, just about to erupt. But I couldn’t quite make the leap. Boomboxes and transgendered protest do not a revolution make. At least not traditionally. And when I made it to the Viennese’s office, Sarah was already sitting at her chosen spot by the open window.
She dove right in.
I received a call, she told us, and thought I had better discuss it here rather than in that alpine house we rented, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in that glassy place they call the bathroom. In the car, even. Our domestic circumstances, I couldn’t call them fraught, doctor – are you a doctor by the way? No? Sweet Jesus, why not? Well our domestic circumstances aren’t what you would call fraught, since so little comes to the surface, so little is spoken. we’re walking on what we both know is thin ice and how I hate that phrase, doctor, why do we need metaphors, anyway? The ice is thin; it covers a lake or a river and is about to crack and the walkers sink in and maybe drown and that’s the metaphor, isn’t it? But it’s a bad one, doctor, because if the ice is thin and about to crack, it’s not from any pressure from above, but the volcanic possibilities below, about to erupt, and another metaphor, I’m mixing them but they only work if you mix them. Anyway, I thought I’d discuss it here rather than in that brittle ice palace we live in, but that doesn’t work either, doctor, it’s nothing to do with ice, it’s the heat that gets me, the humidity, it seems to be presaging a thunderclap or a lightning strike, or if nothing as dramatic as that, definitely a migraine. Yes, I get headaches in the heat, doctor, and lately more of them when at home. And you ask again, did I get a call, yes I did, I got a call and halfway through the call I remembered something I had noticed but never allowed myself become aware of, if you know what I mean, I had noticed it but filed it away under troubling, to be dealt with later. My husband hasn’t been wearing his ring of late, and the call brought it all into perspective, gave me, if not an explanation, at least a reason. Who called, Jonathan? Visa called, that’s who. They wanted to check a rather large purchase from a jeweller’s. And at first I had a tiny flutter around what I still persist in thinking of as the heart. Yes, my heart positively leapt, Jonathan, at the thought that you might have bought me a gift. But then they had to spoil it all and mention the date, and I realised that whomever it was bought for, it was not bought for me. He cooked a fish on that day, doctor, and I remember that because it was unusual, a gesture of some weird scaly kind, so I received a portion of baked zander, I think he called it, and someone else received a bracelet of – what were they, darling? Pearls, of course, you always bought the best gifts, I remember that, your taste was immediate and generally impeccable, you had that talent for surprise that used to take my breath away. So there must be someone else out there who’s deserving of a trinket that cost two hundred and fifty dollars, a number which must become astronomical in that currency you use here. And they are hard to handle, I will admit that, and maybe Jonathan didn’t have enough of them, couldn’t make his way to the hole in the wall to get a wad of those smudgy, sweaty bills. Or maybe she was with him at the time, the deserving one let’s call her, so he was foolish enough to use his plastic, forgetting that at the very least a bill would arrive at the home of the undeserving one, and in the worst-case scenario, a phone call. That’s how it works, doctor, I remember it well, in the first flush of what’s-it-called – romance, maybe – you forget all sorts of things. So I was in the kitchen at the time, doctor, and Jenny was finishing her cereal and the heat, my God the heat, it was hardly nine o’clock and my brain was already beginning to congeal, so I dealt with it, doctor, I was rather proud of my demeanour, I am getting good, I told myself, at dealing with things, so I drove Jenny to her school – and it was only on the drive, through those god-awful fields with the nondescript towns whose names I can never remember, the air conditioning had time to work and the humidity reached a level that was bearable, it was only then – I was passing a big grain elevator and a system of overhead pipes that seemed to go on for ever – that the full import of the call sank in. I tried to think of explanations – had he bought it for me and subsequently lost it? – had it been stolen? – was there a significant date coming up? – my birthday is in February, doctor, and our anniversary in May – was he keeping the gift in abeyance, so to speak? – but I know my husband, doctor, when he surprises you he does it immediately, he is an immediate sort of man – and none of the explanations, doctor, could cover what I knew to be the dismal truth – that he had bought it for and given it to the deserving one. Has she a name, Jonathan? She must, but I don’t want to know it. And then over the fields of that yellow stuff they grow here – what’s it called? Rape? – I could see the line of police and the protesters already in place and I could hear the chant already – I’m on a dig, doctor, of a site that’s causing some controversy – and I thought I can’t go on with this for very much longer, I need an out, an exit, there was a reason we three came here, but I’m finding it very hard to remember what it was . . .
She left then, and we both sat there. His eyebrows were furrowed and silent for once. I almost felt sorry for him, his predicament, his chosen profession, the patience one would need for it, the mental endurance. There was a fly buzzing in the room and the sound of traffic through the open window.
I bought it for her, I explained.
Ah. Well, that’s hopeful. And you mislaid it?
No. A woman took it. She presumed it was hers.
Ah. That’s not hopeful. Not hopeful at all.
He sighed, regretfully, I thought. And remember being surprised that he felt so much for us.
She has a name?
I don’t know it.
There is or has been a relationship? An intimacy?
Of course.
The plot thickens.
Yes, I said. That’s what plots do. Like gravy.
Gravy?
It thickens. Or one thickens it.
You thickened it?
The plot? Yes, perhaps I did. It was interesting what she said about metaphor, doctor. How we can’t live without it.
Can’t we?
Live without – even that’s a metaphor, isn’t it? We won’t die without it, but we can’t explain ourselves, anything about us, without it.
And the metaphor here is?
A plot that thickens. Like gravy before cooking. But it never thickens of its own accord. It is thickened, doctor, by whoever cooks. And she was right, you know. With her cooking metaphor. I bought her pearls. But I gave her a zander.
A zander? he asked.
A pike-perch.
And, he said, you thickened the thing – deliberately – yourself—
Accidentally, doctor. I saved a woman from drowning.
Admirable.
At the beginning, perhaps.
And now you are stuck, so to speak, in the gravy.
More like treacle, doctor.
I do not know treacle.
A cloying, sugary substance that tends to stick to whatever it encounters.
Treacle, then. Another metaphor.
We can’t do without them, it seems.
And her? Can you do without her?
I am definitely willing to try.