Page 169 of Two Marlboros

“What did I tell you? Satanic Beasts.”

“Yes, well, I thought you were joking.”

Nathan nodded with his finger. “I never joke with descriptions of my neighbors.”

We looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, both of us with breathlessness sprouting from who knows where, until we laughed heartily. He laughed more than I did and let the laughter shake his torso, bringing a hand in front of his mouth, as if to contain the hilarity that the situation was arousing in him. He did not fail to cast an occasional glance at the window, but there was no one there; so, he went back to laughing even more as he let his gaze wander to the ketchup stain on the window. Slowly the sobbing diminished, and his laughter was reduced to little more than an amused grin on his face; I continued to giggle even when the trigger had worn off.

Nathan turned toward the window and approached it but did not open it. He lowered himself to the height of the ketchup and looked at it with a grimace, then sighed.

“I won’t clean it before Monday. I’ll wait until the little beasts are in school.”

“That seems like a wise choice.”

Judging by the condition of those windows, I thought it very likely that the cleaning would not happen the following Monday, or even Tuesday or Wednesday; perhaps there was more hope that they would be cleaned in another lifetime. It was not difficult to glimpse the now-dried patches of rain on the glass, surrounded by a brown halo, perhaps of soil brought from who knows where; many had trickled down to the bottom, streaking the glass on the surface. Moreover, in the middle, that circle of ketchup had also been added, not too dissimilar to some representation of modern art on canvas.

Soon after, we heard cackling again coming from the inner courtyard. Nathan and I exchanged a glance and, in the general silence that meandered through that instant, burst out laughing again.

Soon after, however, his smile disappeared. Scrutinizing him more closely, I realized that he had a serious, almost frowning look on his face and that, as he often did, his eyes were lost in a reality that only he knew. He was not there with me, in his studio apartment, staring at ketchup; he was in his own world, in a time that did not exist, surely rethinking his existence.

“We talked.”

He caught me off guard and I looked at him quizzically.

“My mother and I, I mean. You wanted to know why I called you, right?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets, and I remembered the fight with his family, how much it bothered him, certain that nothing would ever be the same again.

He told me how things had gone. Sitting on the couch, his gaze turned toward the room (and only occasionally toward the French doors), he began to speak. His voice cracked with emotion on a couple of occasions; at other times he lowered hisgaze and began to fiddle with the hem of his shirt, over which he ran a finger as if to scrape off an annoying crust, but he managed to get to the bottom of it without giving in to the lump in his throat. He folded his legs and brought them close to his chest, encircling them with his arms, then plunged into a long silence. He hid his face between his knees, staring into the void, still saying nothing. He sighed, then his eyes started moving again, as viscous as ever. He directed his gaze toward me.

“So, I never really asked you how you were. I’m sorry.”

He did not expect a real answer, because he was actually still intent on processing his inner drama. It was the kind of change that can displace you in half a day, make you see the world in a completely different light. Nathan had just entered this process and was realizing that he was not the only one with his own dramas.

“Don’t say that.” I reassured him. “There are different ways to worry about people.”

“I’ve never worried about anyone.”

He loosened from the embrace and brought his legs back to the floor, rested his head on the back of the sofa and began to stare at the ceiling.

His exploratory gaze at life reminded me of myself, back in the days when I too was searching for answers. A person stops being an appendage and begins to be a self, perpetually searching for a shape to mold oneself into and ideals to hold onto for the rest of one’s life. Nathan was trying to mold himself, now uncomfortable in the form he had given himself, looking for one that better fit his content. Watching him there, on the couch, I could see him trying to reorganize his priorities, to find a new way of relating to the world. He felt that everything he had done in his life up to that point was wrong, and he was trying to destroy it, in what represented an obligatory step: in order to pick up the pieces, in fact, something must be broken first.

“So how are you?” he asked.

I settled myself better on the couch, until my back adhered to the backrest; but when I landed back on the seat, in addition to the hole in that battered couch, I felt something else under my butt. It could very well have been the frame structure that had peeped out at an unpleasant moment, but my mind immediately flew to the cell phone of the anonymous caller.

Nathan turned his head toward me, who was trying to disguise calmness. That hard ledge I would think about later; all I had to do was make an excuse.

“I’m better than you think, don’t worry. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, but I’m learning to stay afloat.”

I shifted on the couch again and felt something hard and square-shaped under my bottom. I realized at that moment that the answer given to Nathan might have seemed perfunctory on my part, but he still had his gaze lost on the ceiling; perhaps he hadn’t even heard me. He nodded a few times in the silence of his mind but did not utter a word.

On that couch I became restless. I barely moved to give a concrete outline to that object, fearing each time that my impressions would find confirmation. Suddenly, Nathan exhaled noisily, and his eyes returned to observing the real world. After another sigh, he pulled his back forward and turned toward me. His eyebrows were just contracted upward, his gaze wistful and guilty; after which he brought his hands to the couch and forced himself on them to move in my direction. He moved just a little, while I was leaning on my side, one elbow resting on the top of the backrest, as if I were ready to receive him. I stiffened unwillingly, but he did not notice. He forced his hands together again and I found him as close as he had been on the fire escape.

I allowed myself to be embraced by the silence, punctuated only by the sound of his breathing, and I glimpsed the desirein his eyes to be cradled by the affection my arms tightly around him could give him. There was no malice in that request, no underlying romanticism; I was his friend and he needed comfort. His gaze brushed over me, as if he were asking me to tiptoe in; and as I continued to breathe in fits and starts, letting the air out little by little, my right arm took life on its own and slowly began to pull away from the back of the couch. Nathan’s gaze let a sketchy smile shine through, a sign of a fading hope that was being rekindled; he brought his hands to the seat again and forced himself up one last time, until our distance took on the contours of frightening intimacy.

The doorbell rang. I gasped. Nathan stepped back in response, and I felt whatever had been there until a moment before break. He intercepted my gaze for a moment almost wondering what to do, but the insistence of the peal forced him to get up from the couch to open the door. My view returned to the French window, and for a moment I wondered if on the other side of the door were not the very two children from whom we had escaped moments before. I turned sharply toward Nathan, but he already had his fingers around the handle, ready to pull it down. I did not have time to say anything that the doorway was already open.

A man in his thirties appeared in the doorway, a thread of beard a little more than sketchy, small, beady eyes looking down at Nathan and a bundle of newspapers in his hand like a schoolboy. The guy mumbled something, pointing with his eyes to what he was holding, grabbed one of the newspapers and handed it to Nathan. He tried to refuse a couple of times, but as he tried to give the paper back to the stocky fellow, the other immediately pushed him away with his hand, as if to indicate to him to keep it.

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