Rus Like Everyone Else (16 page)

MR. WHEELBARROW

Mr. Wheelbarrow sat by his desk, staring at his computer. The screen was blank. He couldn't write anymore, not while Freddy was in the hospital, he couldn't. He could not start his day when he did not see those large, soft hands gliding over the leather of the steering wheel. The moment Freddy pulled up in his driveway was what he looked forward to most in the morning; it was for him that he ironed his linen suit and put on a tiny bit of cologne behind his left ear—because it was close to Freddy's nose when he opened the car door for him.

Mr. Wheelbarrow stared at the screen. His head was filled with nothing but mist, a thick white mist, clouding all his thoughts, ideas, and memories.

GRACE IN THE STORY

The garden gate slammed closed behind Grace. With the gun still feeling warm in her hand, she ran out onto her street. The main road was quiet, quieter than she ever remembered it to be. There was a strange, thick mist hanging above the ground, and she couldn't see if it was morning, evening, or night—no moon, no sun, no stars.

There was something chilly and empty in her body, as if she had just stepped out of a warm bath into the cold air.

EVERYTHING WAS GONE

“I had a carpet,” Rus said. “And a bed. And a tap that dripped.”

He stepped over the threshold of his empty apartment. His footsteps echoed a bit.

Wanda placed her hand on Rus's shoulder.

“Well...” she said, and “look at it this way,” but Rus didn't listen. He walked around the empty apartment, over the large white square on the floor where his kitchen used to be, over the empty space by the window where his bed always stood.

“Everything is gone,” he said. “Not everything,” Wanda said. She pointed at the bottle of lemonade in the corner. “The law does not allow them to take food. To protect people.”

Rus sat down by the window. His eyes fell on a bright white envelope, lying in the corner of the apartment on the floor. “More bad news,” he moaned, and he was right, of course. The letter came from the Department of City Planning, who had come very early that morning to Rus's door.

             
Dear Mr. Rus
,

                 
Very early this morning a representative of the City Planning Department came to your door. The apartment inspection carried out by this representative has revealed that, first of all, there is no bed in this apartment and, secondly, no television. These
are both indications that this house is no longer inhabited (see Book 3, Signs of Habitation, Article 2).

                 
Not that it would be habitable anyway, by normal standards at least (see Book 10, Normal Standards, Article 4), with its poor structure and ridiculous walls. Just look at how those plywood walls are constructed, the chinks in between them, the crooked nails that stick out of the wood. Not to mention the leak stains all over the ceiling, the color it's all painted, that ill-fitting door.

Rus looked at the wallboards and the chinks in between them. He had looked at them every day for as long as he could remember; he knew their shape and he knew the way the draft coming in through the chinks would stroke his knees when he stepped out of bed in the mornings. He used to watch the water stains on the wall from his bed in the afternoon, and to him they looked like a map of a light brown world.

                 
Obviously, the rules of aesthetics have never seeped into the brain of the person who once lived here, the person who wrote “395 bananas” and drew his own silhouette on the wall. To make a long story short, the house will soon be demolished. Not only because it is abandoned and illegal but also because its shape and color do not correspond with the shapes and colors that we like in this area, which are more serious and straight. Now that the house is abandoned, there is nothing to prevent us from wiping this stain from the skyline, and soon the long arm of the law will come and do just that. Kind regards.

Rus dropped the letter on the floor of the apartment. He did not speak or look up at Wanda, who took his hand and said, “Shush shush shush,” in his ear.

“Come,” she said after a minute, as she took his arm and led him to the door.

IT WAS NOT REALLY A HOUSE

“It was not really a house anyway, was it,” Wanda said as they sat in her car on Low Street, looking out at the canal and the tall glass building across it.

Rus did not reply. The words did not come.

“You are better off without it, in my opinion,” she said. “And you can stay at my place, if you want. You probably want that, don't you?”

Rus was quiet. There were no words in his head. He heard Wanda, but he did not feel like he could respond.

“That was my house,” he said finally. “It was mine.”

“To be fair,” Wanda said, “it was not your house. It was an illegal construction that your mother decided to inhabit. If everyone just started inhabiting whatever place they felt like, imagine what the city would be like.”

They sat silently in the car. On the pavement an old lady in a fur hat passed them by, pushing a rolling walker. She wasn't walking as fast as all the other people, and she pulled her upper body to the right every time she had to lift her left leg, swaying from side to side as she made her way down the street.

“Bad things are going to happen to everyone,” Wanda said. “The government is not there to be nice to you. Even your friends and the person you are in love with will choose themselves if they want to. The only thing you can do is build as much security for yourself as possible. You get all your papers sorted, you get insurance and a house where things are in the places where they should be, you have a schedule and a stable job and savings for when the roof leaks, and a partner who will not leave you for your best friend. Then you have regularities and stabilities, and they become like a shield, a shield lying around you.”

Wanda's eyes glowed as she talked about the shield.

“If you listen to me, Rus, and do as I tell you, your life will be a line going up. I will get you a job interview, and you can stay in my house and we will have dinner together and go to a restaurant every Thursday and I will take care of all the letters that come in. All you have to do is cooperate.”

She looked up.

“What do you think about that, Rus?”

“I don't know,” Rus said. He'd never been to a restaurant; he'd never seen a reason to go anywhere other than the Starbucks. “Francisco said that people like him and me...”

“Francisco disappeared. Stole your money and disappeared,” Wanda said sharply. “Think about it.”

MR. LUCAS HAS A PLAN

“Test, test,” Mr. Lucas said in the tape recorder. He had replaced the old leaking batteries with new ones and put a new tape in it. Mr. Lucas cleared his throat. “Test, test,” he tested again.

“Test, test,” the machine spoke back.

Mr. Lucas smiled delightedly. The recorder made his voice sound a bit weaker than it really was but, more important, it worked. He placed the recorder carefully on the table by the couch and went to the book chest, purposely keeping his back to the window at all times. He had resolved not to look out of it anymore.

Mr. Lucas had a plan. It was a brilliant plan, if he could say so himself, brilliant. He'd come up with the plan halfway through the night, while he was looking out the window, hidden behind the back of his chair. He told himself it was all in his mind, and that if only he could control his mind it would go away. And that was when the plan dawned on him. If he could not control his mind from the inside out, then he would try to control it from the outside in.

Mr. Lucas looked through his book chest and the piles of books that he had thrown on the floor when he was searching for the suit. He pulled
The Guide to Psychotherapy
out from the pile and opened it to page eighty-three, self-hypnosis.

RUS THE BUSINESSMAN

Rus was standing outside a store in the shopping district. Wanda told him to wait outside, to calm down and to think about what she had asked of him, but Rus couldn't think. In his head there was a silence. There were only a few images floating in his mind:
his duvet, his curtains, his calculator. He was not even talking to himself at that moment, which was very unusual for him, but also understandable, because he had lost everything he had in a matter of days, everything except for the fur coat he had on.