Nowhere Man

1. Passover

CHICAGO, APRIL 18, 1994

Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest — a recurring nightmare. But I was awake, listening to the mizzle in my pillow, to the furniture furtively sagging, to the house creaking under the wind assaults. I straightened my legs, so the blanket ebbed and my right foot rose out of the sludge of darkness like a squat, extinguished lighthouse. The blinds gibbered for a moment, commenting on my performance, then settled in silence.

I closed the bathroom door and the hooked towels trembled. There was the pungent smell of the plastic shower curtain and disintegrating soap. The toilet bowl was agape, with a dissolving piece of toilet paper in it throbbing like a jellyfish. The faucet was sternly counting off droplets. I took off my underwear and let it lie in a pile, then stepped behind the curtain and let the water run. Wee rainbows locked in bubbles streamed into the inevitable, giddy whirl, as I fantasized about melting under the shower and disappearing into the drain.

I went down the stairs, carrying a mound of dirty laundry, careful not to trip over the inquisitive cat. I put the laundry on top of the washing machine, which shuddered as though delighted, and pulled the rope pending in the darkness — cobwebs sprung into the air around the bulb. I had to wait for the spin to throttle to a stop before I could put my laundry in the machine, so I followed the cat into the other room. There were boxes full of things that must have been left by the tenants — who might they have been? — who used to live in one of the apartments: wallpaper scrolls, a broken-boned umbrella, a soulless football, a bundle of shoes with crescent soles, a pictureless frame, skeins of anonymous dust. Back in the laundry room, I transferred the sodden clothes of the upstairs people to the dryer, then loaded the washing machine. In the other room, the cat was galloping around and producing noises of struggle, pursuing something I could not see.

Today was the interview day. I had called — years ago, it seemed now — and set up an interview for an ESL teaching job, strictly out of despair. I had been laid off from the Art Institute bookstore once the merry Christmas season, including the mad aftermath of the Big Sale, was over. My job there had been to unpack boxes of books, shelve the books, and then smash the boxes and throw them away. Smashing the boxes was my favorite part, the controlled, benign destruction.

Two white eggs roiled in the boiling water, like iris-less eyes. The floor was sticky, so I had to unpeel my bare soles from the floor with every step — I thought of the movies in which people walk on the ceiling, upside down. A cockroach was scuttling across the cutting board, trying to reach the safety behind the stove. I imagined the greasy warmth, the vales of dirt, the wires winding like roads. I imagined getting there, still clutching a crumb of skin, after almost being cut in half by something immense coming down on me.

I had tried other bookstores, but they didn’t want me. I had tried getting a job as a waiter, elaborately lying about my previous waiting experience in the best Sarajevo restaurants, high European class all, and nonexistent on top of that. I had spent my measly savings and was in the furniture-selling phase. I sold, for the total of seventy-four dollars, a decaying futon with a rich cat-barf pattern; a hobbly table with four chairs, inexplicably scarred, as if they had walked through fields of barbed wire. I was late with my rent, and had already looked up the word eviction in the dictionary, hoping that the secondary, obsolete meaning (“The action of conquering a country or of obtaining something by conquest”) would override my landlord’s primary meaning and save my ass.

The frighteningly simple thing was that when I was inside nobody was on the porch: the green plastic chairs convened around nothing; the swing still quaked under invisible weight; the empty flowerpots faced out, like Easter Island heads. A fly buzzed against the windowpane, as though trying to cut through it with a minikin saw. In the house across the street, a bare-chested man, skinny like a camp inmate — his shoulder-bones protruding, his trunk striped with rib shadows — was coming in and out of his house feverishly, only to disappear into it in the end. I was about to lock the door when I saw the cat gnawing on a mouse’s head, patiently exposing its crimson essence.

And it hadn’t been just the money. When I couldn’t smash the boxes, I had obsessively read the papers and watched TV (until I sold it) to see what was happening back home. What was happening was death. I had looked up that word too: “The act or fact of dying; the end of life; the final and irreversible cessation of the vital function of a plant or an animal.”

The air was oily and warm, and I stood on the street inhaling. There had been a time when that scent marked the beginning of marble season: the ground would soon be soft and you didn’t have to wear gloves; you could keep your hands in your pockets — waiting for your turn, revolving marbles with the tips of your fingers — until a red line appeared across your palm, marking the border between the part of your palm that was inside and the one that was outside. You would kneel and indent the soil with your knees, imprinting smudges on your trousers, progressing toward an inexorable punishment from your parents. I had a couple of marbles in my pockets, plus an El transfer card, creased and fragile.

A woman with spring freckles, towed by a giant Akita, smiled at me for no apparent reason, and I stepped off the pavement — confused by the smile, scared by the Akita — onto the ground. I let the woman pass, and then walked slowly, as if walking through deep water, because I didn’t want her to think that I was following her. The Akita was sniffing everything, frantically collecting information. The woman turned around and looked at me again. The sun was behind my back, so she squinted, wrinkling the ridge of her nose. She seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but the Akita pulled her away, almost ripping her arm off. I was relieved. I preferred being a vague, pleasant memory to having to explain who I was or telling her that I had no job, and when I had one I was smashing boxes.

A teenager in a window-throbbing car drove by, pointing his finger at me, shooting. I crossed the street to look at a sheet of paper pinned to a tree in front of a building exuding dampness. The sign read in red letters:

LOST DOG

I LOST MASCULINE DOG, THIS COCTAIL SPANIEL AND HIS NAME LUCKY BOY. HE HAS LONG, LONG EARS AND CURVE HAIR GOLD BROWN COLOR WITH SHORT TAIL ALSO HE IS VERY FRIENDLY. LITTLE CRAZY. IF ANYONE FOUND MY DOG PLEASE PLEASE CONTRACT MARIA.

MARIA

Outside the El station, a man with a black bowler hat was rattling his tambourine, out of any recognizable rhythm, singing a song about the spirit in the sky in a flat, disenchanted voice. The man smiled at me, showing dark gaps between his teeth. When I was a boy, spitting between your teeth was considered a great skill, because you could achieve precision, like those snakes in Survival spurting poison at terrified field mice, but my teeth were too close together, and I could never do it — after every attempt there would be some spit dripping off my chin.

The station smelled of urine and petroleum. A dreadlocked woman in a yellow vest rummaged through a closet with metal doors under the stairs, then took out a shovel and looked at it with surprise — she semed to have expected something else. I ascended with the escalator onto the platform, and waited there to see the train lights. The wind was rolling an empty can toward the edge — the can would stop, trying to resist the push, then roll again, until it finally fell over the edge. A mouse scurried between the rails. I expected it to be electrocuted on the third rail: a few sparks, a shrill squeal, a stiff, dun mouse, still surprised by the suddenness of the end.

“All we ask for,” said a young man, with his hands folded over his crotch, “is to give your life to Jesus Christ and follow him to the Kingdom of God.” His companion, wide-shouldered, bearded, walked through the train car offering everyone a brown bag of peanuts and salvation. An old lady with a plastic wrap on her bloated gray hair grinned abruptly, as if a shot of pain went through her body at that very instant. A wizened old man, wearing a grimace of perplexed horror, and a sallow straw fedora, looked up at the peanut man. A young woman in front of me — a pointed tongue of hair touched her collar, and she smelled like cinnamon and milk — was reading the paper. DEFENSES COLLAPSE IN GORAZDE, a headline read. I had been in Goražde only once, only because I had vomited in the car, on our way somewhere, and my parents stopped in Goražde to clean the mess up. All I remembered was being thirsty and shivering on the front seat, as my father retched in the back seat, wiping it with a cloth; and then my father leaving my cloth-wrapped vomit by the road, and hungry, desperate little animals crawling out of the bushes to devour it. The woman gave a neatly creased dollar to the peanut man, took a bag from him and ripped it open, and then started crunching the nuts. I said: “No, thank you.” Granville, Loyola, Morse. The woman flipped the page, a few nutshells pitter-pattered on it. SUNNY SKIES WARM MOST OF NATION. We all disembarked from the train at Howard, leaving behind throngs of peanut shells, and a drunk in a Cubs hat, slumped in the dark corner.

—

There was something exhilarating and unsettling about going in the same direction with a mass of people. We gathered at the top of the escalator and then all descended; we went through sundry revolving bars, which patted us on the back, as if we had just come back from a dangerous mission. In the urine-scented shade of the station, buses were lined up in perfect perspective, sucking in passengers through the front doors. A weather-beaten sign on a Coke machine read NO WORKING; a torn poster on the wall behind it announced the yesteryear arrival of a circus with a half grin of a hysterical clown and an erect elephant trunk holding a wand with a bright star on its tip. I had never taught anything in my life, let alone English, but despair was my loyal ally.

I put my hands in the jacket pockets: a couple of marbles, a taper of lint, a coin, a transfer. I remember this trivial handful because I can recall looking at an old black lady: a peppered coat, a bell hat, her knuckles coiled around a cane handle, leaning slightly forward. To be able to put your hands in your pockets, I thought, was not such a bad thing, your pockets are your hands’ home.

There was a bench nobody was sitting on, encrusted with blotches. I looked up, and on a steel beam high up above perched a jury of pigeons, cooing peevishly. They bloated and deflated, blinking down on us, effortlessly releasing feces. When I was a kid, I thought that snow came from God shitting on us. The Touhy bus arrived, and we lined up at the bus door. I experienced an intense sneeze of happiness, simply because I had managed not to lose my transfer.

The bus smelled of an unknown disinfecting potion, a trace of sausagey sweat, and nondescript dust dryness. The jury of pigeons fluttered up as the bus moved forward, pressing us against our seats, until we all dutifully jerked forward. I used to have a friend — he was killed by an accelerating piece of shrapnel — who liked to think that there was a quiet part of the universe where a body could have a steady velocity, going in the same direction, at the same speed, never stopping or entering a gravitational field. This bus, for instance, would have moved with smooth, pleasant velocity, down Touhy, not stopping at the lights, on to Lincolnwood, Park Ridge, Elk Grove Village, Schaumburg, Hanover Park, and onward through Iowa and whatever there was beyond Iowa, all the way to California, and then over the Pacific, gliding across the endless water until we reached Shanghai — we would have all got to know one another on this ship, we would have gone all the way together.

The bus stopped abruptly at Western, the driver honking violently, then glancing at us in the rearview mirror. A man crossed the street in front of the bus, carrying a rolled-up carpet, which was breaking on his shoulder, its ends touching the ground. The man was sagging under the burden, his neck bent, his knees stooping, as if he were carrying a weighty cross.

We moved on, passed Inner Light Hair Sanctuary, AutoZone PartsWorld, Wultan Monuments, Land of Submarines; crossed California, gliding by Barnaby & Scribner Family Dining, Mt. Sinai Medical Center, Eastern Style Pizza — I got off the bus across the street from a Chinese restaurant. New World, it was called, and it was empty, only a sign in the window saying FOR LEASE.

I had a few more minutes before the interview, and I was not ready to go in and get a job (How could I teach anyone anything?), so I lingered in front of the photo shop next to New World. A sign in the window — thick black letters — read:

OLD PHOTOS COPIED

ANY SIZE

COLOR

OR

BLACK AND WHITE.

There was a photo of black-and-white miners, their eyes twinkling behind a mask of gray dust. They held their pickaxes solemnly, their helmets pressing down their faces. In another photo, three kids in knickers and jackets with sleeves that could not reach their wrists stood a step away from one another, with the same tenebrous eyes, shorn hair, and large ears spreading out like little wings.

There was a Before photo and an After photo: the Before photo showed a man with a long curly beard slowly swallowing his face and dark wrinkles above his murky eyes. He sat with his hands coiled in his lap. A younger man stood on his left, his right hand cautiously touching the old man’s shoulder. The upper right-hand corner of the photo was missing, including half of the young man’s yarmulke. Both men were cut by a jagged white line (the old man across his chest, the young man across his waist), with a trail of white blots spreading toward the old man’s beard — a crease and its offspring, created in somebody’s pocket. The After photo had no blots, had no crease, and the yarmulke was restored. Their faces were whiter, and the young man’s hand firmly grasped the old man’s shoulder — wherever they were now, they were in it together. If only I could afford to succumb to this depleting sorrow, to stop walking with my chin up, and just collapse, like a smashed box, things would be much simpler. There was a photo of the Lake-in-the-Hills Mall at night, all glaring neon blue, neon yellow, and neon pink.

I needed the job. I calculated: if I got a thousand dollars a month, I could pay the March rent, and a part of the April rent right off, and then buy a mattress for fifty dollars or so. I had butterflies in my stomach, ripping off one another’s wings, biting viciously through one another’s abdomens. The lawn in front of Ort Institute had spring sores. Over the bushes a fleet of gnats hovered, still dizzy from a long slumber, deciding what to do: settle for the lumpengreenness of the bushes, or fly into a windshield and end it all with a splatter.

The receptionist was a slender woman, thickly made up, as if she had never unmade herself up, had just kept adding layers and layers. “Take seat,” she said, pouted and narrowed her eyes, as if suspicious of me. I sat on an ochre sofa, and as I landed a nickel leapt up at me from the other end of the sofa, so I pocketed it. The receptionist talked over the phone, her lips so close to the mouthpiece that she smudged it with lipstick, glancing at me all along, as if she were describing me: he was tall and chunky, a cubical head, not very well dressed, spoke with an Eastern European accent, a scar stretching across his throat. Across the hall, there was a menorah on a pedestal, at the foot of which there was an inscription in Hebrew. From somewhere beyond the menorah, I could hear a discordant choir chanting, I could hear rigid consonants and willowy vowels:

I have never read Moby-Dick.

I have never seen the Grand Canyon

I have never been in New York.

I have never been rich.

The walls were pale brown, and the carpets were dispirited brown, and the woman who walked toward me was leaning forward, moving fast. She briskly halted, stretching an invisible leash to the end. “Hi!” she said. “I am Robin.” She spoke in a belabored warbly way, eager to be liked, but sensing that the chances were slim. I introduced myself, and then got off the sofa quickly, so I could catch up with her. We passed an announcement board with leaflets in Russian and handwritten notes. There were doors suggesting dark basements, and there were chaotic footprints, as if somebody had danced drunk in muddy boots. Robin flew down the hall and flung open a door, then stood waiting for me to enter it. Her eyes were one size too big for her face, which was embroidered with gullies filled to the brim with powder. In a flash, I recognized how ludicrous my hope was, how comfortably everything was beyond the reach of my will. “Come on in, and take a seat,” she said. “I am going to get Marcus.”

I did not know who Marcus was, but I walked into the room; it smelled of sharpened pencils and paper glue and Robin’s perfume and burnt coffee and chalk. On a round table there was a nightmarish chain of cup rings and a coffee cup (the possible culprit) next to an abandoned dictionary.

There was a pile of newspapers on the table, the front page facing me: DEFENSES COLLAPSE IN GORAZDE. When I was thirteen I had spent the summer at a seaside resort for Tito’s pioneers and fallen in love with a girl from Goražde. Her name was Emina, and she taught me to kiss using my tongue, and she let me touch her breasts — she was the first girl I had ever touched who wore a bra. U.S. SEIZES BOAT CARRYING 111 IMMIGRANTS, a headline read. My palms were sweating, my fingertips moist, and the paper smudged up my whorls, making them visible. I had once read a pulp novel in which there was a genius criminal, the notorious King of Midnight, who had altered his fingertips, but the master detective recognized him by his distinctive voice. The ceiling fan revolved on the coffee surface, slightly curved. Someone named Ronald “Ron Rogers” Michalak had died — he was the beloved husband of the late Patricia. Sunny skies warmed most of the nation. The Bulls bowed, but did not look back. Chicago Jews celebrated Passover.

A woman opened the door and stepped in, still holding the door with her left hand, as if ready to escape. “Is Robin around?” she asked. The sleeves of her blue shirt were rolled up and I could see the sinews on her forearms tighten, fighting off the weight of the door.

“No,” I said. “She went to find Marcus. I am waiting for her too.”

“I’ll just come back later,” she said, and turned around, and I recognized the back of her head: the edge of her blue collar, and a lean neck with a feathery vine growing toward the mainland of her hair and the gentle twirl on her pate — she had been on the train too, sitting in front of me. I could see the wings of her earrings on the insides of her earlobes, and stray hairs touching the tips of her ears as she slipped out. MASSACRES RAGE ON, a headline read. BODIES PILE UP IN RWANDA.

Robin seemed to have oversized glass marbles instead of eyeballs, like a doll — she was either not blinking or she was blinking when I was blinking. Her eyelashes bent abruptly upward, like little scythes. Marcus was puckering his upper lip so his mustache hair could touch his abundant nostril hair, as if forcing them to couple. He looked at me cautiously, his hands comfortably placed on his belly ledge.

“Do you have any previous teaching experience?” Robin asked.

“No,” I said. “But I have huge learning experience.”

“These people can be demanding,” she said. An ambulance passed down the street chirruping hysterically.

“This job,” Marcus said, with a scrupulously nasal voice, “requires patience. Petulance just would not do it.”

Robin glanced at him, frowned and blinked, but then restored her grimace of befuddled doll. I had no idea what “petulance” meant, and the dictionary was beyond my reach.

“What is your point of origin?” Marcus asked.

“Sarajevo, Bosnia,” I said.

“Oh, man,” Robin said. “That is so neat.”

“I spent years studying other cultures,” Marcus said. He stood up and walked toward me; he had a squash-shaped body, with the small, narrow feet of a ballet dancer. He leaned toward me and whispered: “I used to work for the government.”

“Really,” I said. Robin’s perplexion was flaming now — her cheeks ruddy, burning through the blanket of makeup.

“Yes. In the NSA, the DLI, the Slavic languages section, translating all kinds—all kinds—of information,” Marcus said. “I can peruse seventeen languages.”

“Wow!” Robin said.

“Dobar dan!” Marcus said.

“Dobar dan!” I replied.

“Da li je ovo zoološki vrt?”

“Holy moly!” Robin said. “What does that mean?”

“Good day. Good day,” I translated. “Is this the zoo?”

Someone knocked and peeked through the door and said: “Teacher, I can talk to you?”

“Not now, Mihalka,” Robin said. “Wait outside.”

“It is a must,” Mihalka said.

I turned around and looked at him: his head was ascetically shaved, his scull scarred, and his face punched in by an immense force, as if he had been a boxer. A mountain ridge of wrinkles rose across his forehead. He reminded me of my uncle, who lived in Canada now, working as an exterminator.

“Just wait outside, Mihalka,” Robin said.

“Some of them possess scintillating minds, and some have rather perplexing personalities,” Marcus said.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I do not understand everything that you say.”

“He is from Czechoslovakia,” Robin said. “You are from Czechoslovakia too, right?”

“He is from Yugoslavia,” Marcus said. “It’s a wartorn country.”

“I am from Bosnia,” I said.

“You know,” Marcus said, “I was on a mission in Bosnia once. I met some brave men and beautiful women there.”

“When was that?” Robin asked, and rubbed her temple. The skin on it wrinkled and unwrinkled under her finger, the pain still untouched. It must have been taking a lot of strength to maintain the expression of permanent bafflement.

“Long time ago,” Marcus said. “I fell in love with a majestic, passionate woman, but circumstances too-fatuous-to-detail took me elsewhere.”

Mihalka’s head popped in again without knocking and Robin’s face changed into a grimace of mild annoyance.

“Teacher,” Mihalka said. “I must tell you.”

Robin got up, rolled her eyes to the tilt, and went out. Marcus surveilled my face, trying to get into my eyes, then nodded, having found the expected evidence.

“You know a lot about hardship, don’t you?” he said.

“I do not know,” I said, uncomfortably. “Which hardship?”

“You look like someone who knows a lot.” He sighed, as if recalling a host of pleasant memories, and turned toward the window.

Robin walked back in, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, as if she had just heard the strangest confession.

“Why don’t we visit a few classrooms,” Marcus said, “so you can see what takes place in them.”

“All right,” I said.

“I do not understand these people,” Robin said, still shaking her head. “I simply do not.”

We walked up the stairs, awkwardly careful not to be too far from or too close to one another. The back pocket of Marcus’s pants gaped open as he tiptoed delicately upward, and a bundle of envelopes was about to fall out. I ascended in the wake of Robin’s sugary perfume and the wet-bandage smell of her armpits. We stopped in front of one of the classroom doors, Robin conspiratorially whispering to me:

“This is level two, pretty basic. You might be teaching a lower level, so this could be interesting to you.”

“Do not be vexed by the student body,” Marcus said. “They are a little sedate occasionally.”

“Okay,” I said. Robin opened the door, and we walked in.

“Hi, guys!” the teacher said, the moment she saw us. “I am Jennifer.”

She had a dear-blue sweater and a lacy collar, a narrow waist and a wide skirt. She had pink lips, a pair of glasses that magnified her eyes, and a willow-tree crown of hair. There was a map of the world on the wall behind her — North America was at its center and the oceans of the world were the same hue as Jennifer’s sweater.

“Do not be surprised,” Marcus said, slowly, to the class. “We are just visiting different classes, exposing him”—he pointed at me—“to the trials and tribulations of language acquisition.”

As Marcus was speaking, the people in the class tightened, as if the classroom had contracted: the older women in the first row, the veteran mothers, sporting gigantic amber brooches on their bosoms, gripped their pencils; the men behind them, with tuber noses and the yellowish faces of chain-smokers, sunk in their chairs; a young man in the corner with a long, unkempt beard bent over his notebook. I could see a herd of distorted pyramids in the margins.

“All rightie,” Jennifer said. “We don’t mind guests, do we?”

She beamed at the class, expecting them to beam back, but they didn’t.

“Do we?” she said with a tinge of threat in her voice.

“Yes, we do,” the class chanted back.

“You mean: No, we don’t,” Jennifer said.

“No, we don’t,” the first row, only, responded.

“Okie dokie,” she said, went to the chalk board, erased “Simple Present Tense,” and wrote “Passover.” We hovered near the door, ready to escape. Marcus knotted up his arms on his chest, while Robin blinked incessantly.

“What is Passover?” Jennifer asked, and with an optimistic face panned over the class. They stared at her, not moving, congealed in collective silence.

“What is Passover? Sergei?”

Sergei — a man in his forties, with a collection of warts sprouting randomly all over his face, with the greenest eyes I had ever seen — scowled at Jennifer.

“What is Passover, Sergei?”

Sergei tightened his lips, and straightened up in his chair, clearly determined not to say a word.

“What is Passover?”

“Jewish vacation,” said a woman in the first row, in a voice like whistling steam.

“A Jewish holiday. Great!” Jennifer said. “And what do Jewish people do for Passover?”

A chair screeched in the back. The veteran mothers flipped through their books languidly. The young man in the back looked out the window. The raindrops began crawling down the pane.

“What do Jewish people do for Passover?” Jennifer asked again, not giving up on her smile, but glancing at Marcus warily.

They said nothing.

“How many of you are Jewish?” she asked, and stepped away from the chalkboard and toward them.

“Don’t be frightened,” Marcus said.

Two first-row women raised their hands, and then another half a dozen.

“Okay,” Jennifer said. “Sofya, can you tell us?”

Sofya took her glasses off — her eyes were blue and she had a crescent scar under her left eye.

“Jewish people run from Egypt,” she said, reluctantly, as if it were a well-kept secret.

“But what do they do today?” Jennifer asked.

The silence filled up every corner of the classroom. We could hear the staccato rain against the windows and the swooshing of trees, the anger and the sorrow.

“We must depart,” Marcus announced, without waiting for an answer, as Sofya’s words stopped at the edge of her lips.

“Dosvidanya!” Sergei said.

So we departed, and as we did I could hear Jennifer saying to her class: “Oh, guys, you can do better than that.”

“This is level seven,” Marcus said. “A rather demanding body of knowledge.”

He opened the door without knocking and we burst into a small room, startling the teacher and four students. Robin slowly closed the door behind me. On the board, “Siamese twins” was written, along with “abdomen,” “ache,” “dysfunction,” “solitude.”

“You may proceed,” Marcus said. The teacher was the woman from the train, and I realized how pretty she was. She feebly smiled at us and said: “We are reading an article about Ronnie and Donnie, the Siamese twins.” She had a pointed chin: fair, boyish hair; dark eyes with two delicate eyebrow horizons. She gave us photocopies of the article. Ronnie and Donnie were facing the camera, their abdomens attached, their faces identical: large glasses, big jutted jaws, torturous smiles. They had four legs, and only one torso.

“Ugh, gross!” Robin said, and ardently widened her nostrils.

“Pretty bad,” Marcus said.

“I must say,” the man whom I recognized as Mihalka said, “that it is not perfectly pleasant when I watch them.”

“They are monsters,” said a woman in a dark, stern suit. She had long, immaculately combed white hair that tenuously touched her shoulders.

“Monsters,” repeated the young man sitting next to her. It was obvious that he was her son: the same stout apple cheeks: the same oval nostrils, the same pierogi-shaped ears; the same intense frown, as if the cheeks and the forehead conspired to squeeze the eyes out.

“They are humans,” Mihalka said, then lifted his index finger, annunciating an important statement. “When I had been a little child, I had had a friend who had had a big head.”

He made a vast circle around his head with his index finger, suggesting the immense circumference.

“Every child had told him about his big head and had kicked him with a big stick on his head. I had been very sad,” Mihalka said, nodding, as if to show the painful recoil of the big head.

“We are learning Past Perfect,” the teacher said to us, and smiled benevolently — I readily smiled back. She had chalk smudges all over her denimed thighs. The white-haired woman and her son exchanged glances.

“I must know Past Perfect,” Mihalka said, and shrugged resignedly, as if Past Perfect were death and he were ready for it.

“The Nazis,” the fourth man said, “killed all people like that.”

He had a square, large head, and his face was familiar, with the grimaces of someone from former Yugoslavia: generous facial movements and oscillating eyebrows. He shaped and then sliced obscure objects in front of him with his hands, as if angry at the molecules of air.

“They cooked them and tooked their bones and put them in museum,” he said. “They wanted German people to watch monsters.”

“Ugh, gross,” Robin said, and shook her head, with her tongue out.

“Yes,” the teacher said pensively, with her index finger touching her chin. Her wrist was dainty, with two slightly asymmetrical knobs. I imagined stroking that wrist, then her forearm, then her shoulder, and, finally, her neck. She continued: “They would show the skeletons of midgets and Siamese twins in public exhibitions, in order to convince the German people they were superior.”

The fourth man was watching the storm, jerking his left knee.

“There had been one scientist who had gathered human heads, and he had wrote one book for Himmler and his soldiers must have read it to think Jews had been monsters,” Mihalka said.

“I think you use Past Perfect too many times,” the woman with the son scoffed.

“Excuse me,” Mihalka said. “But I must know Past Perfect.”

The fourth man smiled wistfully at Mihalka, and I suddenly recognized the smile: the raising of the left side of the upper lip: the exposing of teeth, which had evenly wide, spitting-conducive gaps between them, the toy-dog nodding; the narrowing of the eyes. I knew that man, but had no memory of him. I stared at him intently, waiting for more familiar signals.

“Okay,” the teacher said. “Let’s read on. Paul, why don’t you read the paragraph beginning with: It is true — they often have. .”

“It is true,” Mihalka began, “they often have — the same — dreams. They also feel the same pain, which is not surprising—surprising—since they share a few internal—internal—organs. The pain, they like to say, is usually—evenly—disturbuted—distributed, or sometimes even—doubled.”

The fourth man propped his chin on his left hand. His Adam’s apple flexed a little, like a Ping-Pong ball. He stroked his chin with the back of his hand, occasionally looking out the window. His ears were small, like a child’s.

“Thank you, Paul,” the teacher said. “Do we understand this?”

“Doubled means two times. Yes?” the son said.

“Yes,” his mother said.

“Okay. Joseph, why don’t you go on?” the teacher said.

The fourth man began reading in a very low voice, as if confessing:

“Ronnie and Donnie give a new meaning to the word insep—inseparable. ‘A lot of people think that the worst thing is the lack of — privacy,’ Ronnie says, ‘but they don’t understand what is it like — what it is like — to share not only your life, but your body as well, with someone that you love. Donnie is me, and I am Donnie.’”

A boy kneeling on the soft ground over a constellation of marbles, brushing away pebbles and twigs and litter between the two marbles a foot apart: one of those two marbles was small with three orange fins inside the glass globe; the other one was solid marble white. He picked up the orange marble, got his knees off the ground, and squatted. He wrapped his index finger around the marble, put his thumbnail behind it. The fist contracted, ready to launch the marble. He aimed at the white marble, closing his left eye, squinting with his right one, then released it. His marble flew low over the dirt, and then hit the white one — ping! — and the boy smiled. The white marble was mine and I lost it, and the boy was Jozef Pronek, the man reading about Ronnie and Donnie. I remembered him, there he was, out of nowhere. I was bedazzled by the clarity of the memory.

“‘What people often don’t realize,’ Ronnie says, ‘is that if one of us dies, the other one is going to die too,’” Pronek read.

He had lived in the building across the street from mine, which had displaced a set of decrepit houses with overgrown gardens. My friends and I used to roam the gardens, as if they were unexplored continents. We would eat cabbage as if it were exotic fruit; we would burn cabbage snails in sacrificial pyres; we would protect our territory from intruders, other kids. We found a stray, scabby dog and imagined it to be our guard dog and we patrolled the gardens. So when they built a fence around the gardens and started digging them up, the world went askew. They built an ugly high-rise, which we hated along with its tenants. So we would throw stones into the windows of the building and set their garbage on fire. We would corner a kid from the building and beat him up viciously. Pronek lived in the building and when we cornered him, he would never put up a fight — his nose would bleed, and he would look at us with scorching fury, and then he would just walk away. Eventually, the war against the building withered away, and we ended up playing with those kids. They were not our enemies any longer, but they were not our friends either. They were still newcomers, some of them spoke with strange non-Sarajevan accents, and we were the natives. We let them settle, but they were still in our land, and we never failed to let them know that.

And there he was, reading in heavily accented English, not looking up.

“When they were children, they were known for being good at climbing trees, where they would — hid — hide from other kids and watch them play. ‘It was strange,’ Will Senson, a childhood friend, says. ‘You would look up and there would be four eyes—star—staring at you from above.’”

“Thank you, Joseph!” the teacher said.

Pronek looked up straight at me. I didn’t know if he could recognize me — I had changed a lot, having gone through a long and debilitating illness — but he was staring at me. I looked away, my heart thundering inside. How did he get here? Was he in Sarajevo under siege? Or was he besieging it? I hadn’t talked to him in years, if ever. He leaned back in his chair, but my gaze was avoiding his. What should I say to him? What was his story? What was his life like?

“This is morbid,” Robin whispered to Marcus.

“Saturnine indeed,” Marcus said, and got up to leave, so I obediently stood up. As I was leaving the classroom, I glanced one more time at Pronek and he looked straight back at me, perhaps — and perhaps not — recognizing me. He still seemed angry.

We went back to the office. I said: “I would really like to work here.”

“We could use you here,” Robin said.

“We will call you by the end of the week,” Marcus said.

Outside, dark umbrellas were weighing down on people. The wind side of tree trunks was soaked; the lee-side branches shivered in anticipation of cold rain, wagging their twiggy ends at me as if saying, no, no, I wouldn’t do that. But I did, I walked through the rain — it was cold. I passed a dingy building: A cat was perched in the window of an apartment, watching me somberly, in complete control.

And I remembered cornering a mouse — this had happened a long time ago — in the hall of my building, after it had made the mistake of leaving its tunnels. I tried to grab it by its tail, as it trembled in fearful rage. With the tips of my fingers I managed to grasp its tail — a rubbery tentacle — and lift it off the ground. I remembered Pronek being there, watching me, hating me for what I was doing. The mouse twitched in my hand, desperate, and I giggled, enjoying my power — there must have been some girls around too — until the mouse somehow swung itself upward and bit my palm, two little needles piercing my skin. Pronek was watching me with a smirk, as if he knew all along what would happen. I screamed and let the mouse go, and it scurried away, happy to be alive. I was gripping my right hand, trying to prevent the pain from spreading.

“You find my dog,” a dark-skinned woman asked me. She accosted me in front of my building, as if she’d been waiting for me. “I losed my dog.”

“No, I am sorry,” I said.

“You sure? Little dog.”

“I am sure.”

She went on down the street, looking between and under the cars and into the narrow spaces between buildings, yelling, “Lucky Boy!” all along. I could hear the storm rumbling away.

I walked into my apartment, the floors creaked me a welcome, and I suddenly felt a tide of warm giddiness overwhelming me, dewing my neck. I sat down on the floor, where the futon used to be, in my jacket, with a frightening premonition that most of the things in this world would go on existing whether I lived or died. There was a hole in the world, and I fit right into it; if I perished, the hole would just close, like a scar healing. I should have told Pronek who I was, I needed him to know. “Lucky Boy!” I heard the woman shouting. “Where are you? Where you go?”