The Sad Part Was Read online

As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait until I got home. By the powers that be, Miss Wondee and I took the same bus again. Although space was tight on the bus this time, meaning we had to chat while standing and hanging on to the rail, the overall atmosphere was not very different from the previous day. The tune playing softly on the radio was different, but it was still about a country girl who’d come to the city only to shed tears and lose heart working the bathtub at a massage parlour. You can’t help but be moved when you listen to that song. You want to be the hero who marches in and liberates these girls from the depths of hell. It’s like freeing living things from a zoo.

  Miss Wondee was rather surprised to see me again. But this time she smiled. Her expression and the downward curvature of her eyes made her the spitting image of a laughing Buddha, albeit a female one.

  “It must be tricky to write in your diary when you have to hold on to the rail like this.”

  She laughed, just enough to be polite.

  “So, will you tell me why you space so strangely?”

  “It’s quite a waste of paper.”

  “But that’s not the point.” My academic side reared its head once more.

  “Whether or not it’s a waste of paper is an issue of conflict between capitalism and the environment. I don’t care about that. That’s a persistent issue that’s never going to disappear as long as the exchange system continues to hold sway among societies. What I’m interested in is the influence of the system of collective psychology on the structure of individual psychology, namely, a person’s psyche, which is shaped by external forces. For example, let’s say I’m A, and I obsessively rub my palms together when I’m not paying attention. When you investigate the cause of this compulsion, you discover that I was an active child, that I used to run into things and break all kinds of stuff on a daily basis. My behavior was judged by external forces, a.k.a. society, to be annoying and exasperating: What an unmindful little monkey! The group of external people called society (‘external’ here meaning external to my conscious mind) – or one could call them the adults at home – therefore punished me by slapping my hands – pap! pap! – until they were red and swollen as a pair of boxing gloves. With such punishment inflicted on a regular basis, the hand-rubbing habit automatically sunk into the structure of my psyche. Out of habit, the former child continues to rub his palms into adulthood, and may keep doing so until his life is over.”

  The bus jerked. Every part of my body above the belt leaned forward, almost bumping into every part of Miss Wondee’s body above the skirt. Alas, the bus pulled itself together in time, so the collision between two warm-blooded animals didn’t happen. But at least the part of me called the nose got close enough to sniff Miss Wondee’s jet-black hair. My candid review: it smelled nice.

  “Now, back to your spacing. I’m dying to know the history of your behavior, your way of forming spaces – which I shall henceforth call ‘waiting periods.’ Did something happen to you when you were a child? Or are you intentionally projecting a certain image of yourself? Are you acting odd to attract attention?”

  Miss Wondee blinked helplessly at me as the bus decelerated.

  “I missed my stop again. Excuse me.”

  Then she wedged her way through the crowd, liberating herself from the oppression of the public transportation machinery and leaving me standing there with my tongue as dry as the Sahara.

  “Ticket check, please.”

  A small-framed woman in a blue uniform, who had a gift for wriggling smoothly through the push and shove, looked up at me with pity.

  I didn’t have the nerve to call Miss Wondee again, but I must admit that I learned the seven digits of her phone number by heart.

  Sometimes, when things were slow at work and I was just sitting at my desk, I would stare at the buttons on my phone and dial Miss Wondee’s number in my head. It was such pathetic behavior, probably with complex origins dating back to my early infancy. I hadn’t found time to analyse it yet. All my free time was devoted to this funny feeling that distracted me.

  Was I being brainwashed? Was Miss Wondee’s spacing an ingenious mechanism for staging a psychological coup? Or were her spaces really waiting periods? I myself was certainly in a fever of anticipation!

  —

  About three weeks – the individual units of which were two million four hundred fourteen thousand and four hundred seconds – later, which to me was a rather long time, the wind from the bus’s air conditioner blew Miss Wondee my way again. I saw her even before I placed my left foot up onto the bus. She was sitting by the window, looking down. Her hair, as shiny as if she’d put shoe polish on it, looked almost unrecognizably long. Time tends to make all kinds of things expand. If you leave them alone, things can stretch, lengthen, heighten, widen, swell and puff up.

  I tried to muffle the excited boom of my heartbeat, but the pulse in my feet didn’t cooperate. As soon as I boarded the bus, I made a beeline for the space by the window. A glum-looking middle-aged woman was sitting next to Miss Wondee, so I had to perform some minor gymnastics, getting up on my tiptoes and leaning over the woman’s head, to make myself conspicuous. But Miss Wondee still didn’t notice me. She was writing in her yellow-paper diary with the concentration of a meditating hermit. The waiting periods on the page were still as odd and interesting as when they first caught my eye.

  Surprisingly, the glum-looking woman didn’t pay the slightest attention to Miss Wondee’s spacing. What can you do? Some people, even when a miracle appears right in front of their nose, remain perfectly oblivious. What a shame.

  I craned my neck awkwardly for several seconds without any reaction before I took the liberty of stretching my left hand out to tap Miss Wondee on the shoulder. I almost hit Glum Face on the temple, but curved away just in time. Miss Wondee looked up from the yellow paper, and the female laughing Buddha was back.

  “Hi. Writing in your diary again? At a quick glance, from where I’m standing, your waiting periods are still adept at keeping their special distance.”

  The glum-faced woman probably couldn’t take it anymore, or maybe the word “period” had offended her female sensibilities. In any case, she got up and surrendered her seat to me, despite the fact that I was neither a pregnant woman, a child, an elderly or disabled person, a monk or a novice.

  “I’ve spent the three weeks since I last saw you constructively. I’ve been analysing it in my head.

  “And referring to the textbooks I had on hand. Even Sigmund Freud wasn’t much help. Carl Jung was none at all. But don’t worry, I used my own judgment and common sense to analyse this meticulously. I believe I’ve come to some pretty decent preliminary conclusions regarding your special behavior. First, let me say, your manner of spacing must surely relate to your family fundamentals. Even when they’re not the dominant cause, fundamentals inevitably affect secondary factors, which may be more visible.

  “I venture to say that you have a lot of siblings, all born rather far apart. The sibling relations, therefore, developed abnormally. Even worse, I speculate that either your mother or father passed away when you were still quite young. But as I hinted earlier, these things may not be the main determinant. That, I believe, can be traced to your respiratory system. This is a bold speculation on my part given that it has to do with your anatomy, which I have no knowledge of. But let me guess first – please don’t reveal whether I’m right or wrong until afterwards. My guess is that your circulation system is peculiar: your heart doesn’t keep the same beat as normal people’s, and that makes your inhalation and exhalation peculiar, too. The frequency with which you expel carbon dioxide and draw in oxygen probably forms a graph with peaks and troughs that resemble a series of elongated hills. This gives you more distance for reflection, ie, space for thought, than the average person – about ten seconds’ worth. Hence the spaces in your writing, which leave room for reflection.”

  Miss Wondee appear
ed to be listening more intently than on the previous occasions, but when I reached that point in my discussion, she shifted, seemingly to get up from her seat.

  “We’re almost at my stop. I’m sorry.”

  I leaned aside to let her pass.

  Before she slipped out of my radius, I couldn’t suppress a final point of interrogation.

  “Wondee, are you wearing perfume today?”

  Miss Wondee turned back and smiled. The bus was slowing down. Passengers were flocking to the doors.

  “See you.”

  And then she left.

  I sat still for another seven waiting periods.

  And then I got off.

  —

  NB: The last sentence is not a conclusion. Rather, it is a waiting period that doesn’t yet have a thought to succeed it.

  — With Miss Wondee’s seal of approval.

  Something in the Air

  A cluster of dusky gray clumps hung in the sky above the capital, converging there from all points of the compass. This confluence of water vapour created a state of swollen saturation, a stifling swelter and a rumbling roar. Lightning ripped through the curtain of wind, forking like tree roots, threatening to transform night into day. The sky alternated between light bright enough to expose every nook and cranny of human civilisation, and darkness dredged up from primitive dungeons.

  The wind was so strong that the first batch of drops wrung from the clouds couldn’t steer a straight path, sending its front guard swerving and skimming the target.

  Those that reached the finish line scattered down over satellite dishes, mounted on top of high-rise buildings.

  One of the remaining battalions of rain poured down on the roof deck of a four-story townhouse. The open-air space was walled in with the same streaked and stained white cement from which the entire structure had been constructed. A young man stood there, his legs wide apart. Soaking wet clothes clung to his skin. He wore only an orange T-shirt, black underpants, and nothing on his feet.

  Five minutes earlier, while this man was taking in the boom-bang, rumble-tumble, and drip-drop noise coming from outside, and delighting in the moaning and groaning, tossing and turning, nestling and nuzzling action indoors with a smooth-skinned young lady, a curious clash suddenly came from above. His libido interrupted, the man exclaimed in his head: Shit! Has a plane crashed into my house? A new world war wouldn’t make such a din.

  But what materialised before him was not the remnants of an airborne vehicle. Rather, they were two giant red English letters that, before the rain had begun to douse the city, had spelled part of a camera brand name on a thick metal sign on the roof of the building next door. Now they were piled on top of each other in the middle of the rain, on the roof deck of the man who did not wish to disclose his name.

  One of the letters was an O; the other was an N. The N was sitting on top of the O.

  The man struggled to see through the sheet of rain. When the flash in the sky revealed that one of the letters was an O, his mouth formed a similar ring.

  Shortly thereafter, the woman who had been lying spread-eagled, soaked in sweat, in the bedroom on the second floor, emerged at the top of the staircase. She was wearing a white T-shirt and dark blue shorts. Her feet, along with several other bits under the fabric of these items, were naked.

  “What happened here?” she said in a high-pitched tone. “There appears to be two large-scale foreign objects piled on top of each other.”

  The man was still stunned by what had transpired. “Indeed. My theory is that these two English letters received such a blow from the storm that they fell off the metal support and flew down to the spot that you see before you. The crash sounded as if a giant fell off a chair, and that’s what startled us in the heat of our domestic activities a moment ago.”

  The woman nodded, in part to communicate her comprehension and in part to shake a drop of water loose from the tip of her chin. She folded her arms. Every inch of her, from the ends of her hair to the tips of her toenails, was shivering. She tried to shelter under the eaves that jutted out from the doorway leading to the stairs; her white T-shirt was getting splattered nevertheless. Even in the dark, the flesh-coloured mounds of her chest were noticeably protruding. Her dark hair, jet-black in the night, made the radiant skin on her round face glow like the moon.

  The light in the sky electrified once more.

  Through her wet lips, the woman produced the following: “We were frightened to no small extent, but now that you’ve done an inspection and determined the sequence of events, you should be satisfied. Why stand exposed to heaven’s mood this way? It behooves us to hurry back into the house lest we disturb our bodies’ respiratory and immune systems. Have you forgotten that there’s a certain business waiting to be resumed? The pores on a human body do not take at all kindly to temperatures such as these.”

  The young man averted his eyes from the giant letters to consider his female companion through the blanket of rain.

  “True. Normally, moments like these are not conducive for a visit to the roof deck, but today is a rather special day. Out of nowhere, two large red letters, an N and an O, came crashing down and caused us to act in a way we never would had said incident not occurred – namely, to stand on the roof deck in the middle of a rainstorm, notwithstanding the light and the sound coming from the sky, and during such dark hours. The cold, soggy sensation is passing; the beat of the heart is quickening; the pores are adjusting to the weather. It would be a real shame if we turned our backs on the out-of-bounds experience on this occasion. Why not enjoy each other right here on this roof deck, right under this pounding deluge of water, right next to these two red letters, right at this very moment?”

  The woman wore a stupefied expression but was listening closely. She had yet to budge from her spot beneath the eaves. Her shirt was becoming skin-colored, and her dark blue shorts clung to her thighs and the bits between her legs.

  The sky flashed once again.

  The man walked steadily towards her and, when he got close, pried open the arms that were wrapped across her chest. She surrendered to his every move. Her rain-sprinkled lips were pursed tight and showed no sign of initiating a sentence of any sort. But before long, on receiving tender contact from the corresponding part of the man, these pink pieces of flesh pulled apart. From there, organs of another kind tasted one another, sheltering beneath the roof of each other’s mouth.

  And then several other parts belonging to the two of them stroked one another, stuck, squeezed and squashed together, and scraped and scrubbed against each other until they were raw.

  The rumbling and the roaring from above provided the soundtrack for the deed, appropriate for both offence and the defence.

  The flickers in the sky manifested the rhythm of the mood.

  From there, drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-drop, drip, drip, drip, drip… drip…

  The last drop landed in a dark region, without witness.

  The rain continued to fall from the sky, but the storm inside the couple’s bodies had subsided.

  The man stood up on his fatigued legs and left his companion’s body lying still, steeped in a shallow pool of water that had collected on the concrete surface. A flash from the sky illuminated a certain body part of his, dangling beneath a tuft of thick, black hair. The rain trickled down over his body to the rounded head of the organ, then streamed onto the woman’s left thigh like water from a tap. An instant later, he bent over to pull his underwear back up and cover the appropriate region.

  Likewise, the woman took the opportunity to pull her shorts back on. She propped herself up on the flat surface, and the man held out his right hand for her to pull herself up.

  The two stood side by side in the middle of the pouring rain, as though taunting the skies by their presence. They were face to face with the N and the O.

  “There�
��s something under the O,” the woman remarked.

  The man studied the black mass at the end of her line of vision.

  “I think that something is a human body.” Her voice quivered as she wrapped her arms around her torso once again.

  “I agree with you. It appears to have arms and legs. It’s probably a person, as you said. Why is there an inanimate body on my roof deck – and buried under not one but two giant red letters in such a cursed manner? The weight on the poor soul’s body is not likely to be inconsiderable,” the man reflected.

  “What state is the person in? Approach and inspect.”

  The man broke the line of contact between the lovers, slowly moving his shivering body in the direction of the newly-discovered object. When the spark from above illuminated the nocturnal skies once again, he became certain that the object lying inert under the letter O was a male human being.

  “The object lying inert under the letter O is certainly a male human being,” he shouted, reiterating his thoughts to the woman.

  The organ in her chest pounding, she followed her companion’s footsteps.

  “Is that unfortunate gentleman still breathing?” The woman’s voice slipped through the curtain of rain.

  “I’m unable to say as of yet. Patience, please.”

  The man tiptoed towards the outline of the body under the O. He squatted close to the ground and reached out to feel for an area on the stranger’s body that might indicate some measure of life.

  The sky’s rod stabbed at the earth with a resounding boom.

  The man under the O was lying facedown. His plaid shirt and jeans were soaked. His rubber flip flops had fallen off his feet, lying upside down not far from his body. The young man who did not wish to be named stuck the tips of his right middle and index fingers on the pulse point under the jaw bone of the prone body.

  “No heartbeat is apparent. It’s possible that this body is lifeless.” He looked up at the woman, who had just joined his side.