Sigrid bangs the crap out of the door and hollers in Norwegian.
“Marcus, wake up. It’s Sigrid.”
She stands back and waits for the door to open.
It doesn’t.
Leaving the suitcase on the doorstep, she hops down the steps and crawls over browning bushes and around the corner of the house to see inside the first window she can reach.
There is some kind of steel mesh in front of the window—something she’s never seen before. It makes it very hard to look inside. Through its rust and the crust of cobwebs she half expects to see gangsters, drug mules, and cockroaches playing cards while sipping Budweiser.
Sigrid has raided places like this before. Nothing good has ever opened the door.
He isn’t inside. Nor is anyone else. No need to loiter in the bushes anymore.
Turning to pull herself out of there, Sigrid accidentally snags her purse on a branch. Had she been in a more forgiving mood she might have stepped forward to remove the strap from the twig and better navigated the minor inconvenience. But this is not what she does, because her mood does not permit it. That mood has been shaped by the house itself and its surroundings, by Marcus and his choices, by the bad breakfast that has left her fat and greasy, by the jet lag, by China’s trial-and-error approach to the manufacturing of consumer goods. And in such a mood, she tugs at the bag to teach the twig who is boss.
The twig proves stronger than expected and the purse more slippery. This transforms the twig into a catapult and her purse into a missile. In flight it glides through the air with a sleek Italian elegance; on impact, though, the fancy is ended and the bag splits like a severed head, splattering its contents all over the road.
Sigrid surveys the results of her choices and swears in the choice language of a seafaring nation.
As Sigrid continues her auto-rant, a woman from across the street emerges from the shadow of the off-ramp. Sigrid, on seeing her, stops swearing.
“He ain’t here, ya know,” she says in an accent that seems more southern than northern, but Sigrid is no real judge of these things.
“Who?” Sigrid asks.
“Marcus? You said Marcus like twenty times. I’m saying: He. Ain’t. Here.”
She is a hooker. She has to be. No matter the country, hookers dress the same. The only logic Sigrid can find to this universality is that they are meeting men’s expectations of what hookers are supposed to look like. But men have learned this from the hookers themselves. Could it be that everyone wants it to stop but no one can turn it off?
Her miniskirt is made of purple sequins. Her stomach is exposed to no positive effect. Her tank-top presses so tightly against her enormous chest that the wires of her bra have become smiles beneath her boobs—each with an unblinking eye above; they sit there, together, like demented cyclops twins.
“Who are you and how do you know that Marcus isn’t here?” Sigrid asks.
“I’m just sayin’,” the woman says.
Sigrid says nothing and the woman—being American—fills the lull:
“He hasn’t been here since he moved out. He’s gone. He ain’t comin’ back.”
“What do you know about it?”
The woman crosses her arms and takes a defiant stance. “Who the hell are ya, anyway?”
“I’m his sister.”
“Oh yeah? Where you from?”
“Earth,” Sigrid’s mood answers. She regrets it the moment she says it, but the pleasure was undeniable.
“He’s foreign. If you’re his sister, you’d know.”
That is true. The woman has made a valid point.
“Norway,” says Sigrid as a reward for reason.
The prostitute’s face softens through the industrial putty of her makeup.
“Look,” she says, defensively. “He gave me his key. Said I could stay there when he was gone. I asked when he was coming back and he said he wasn’t sure if he was ever coming back and I said, Well, what about your shit? He said none of it was worth a damn but the guitar and books. He said I could keep the books and I made a face like he was fuckin’ with me—cuz, what? I’m gonna read ’em?—and he said I could burn ’em in winter if I wanted, but I ain’t burnin’ no books whether I’m gonna read ’em or not and I asked if he wanted to fuck and he said no and I asked if it was on account of that woman who died. He said it was, which seemed kinda sad. In my experience, fucking is the sixth stage of grief but no one ever asks me about it, though I am an expert. Now I’m staying here, which is totally legal and aboveboard and I don’t want any crap about it, OK? But if you’ve come for his stuff you can have it. I ain’t no thief.”
“Died? Who died?”
“That fancy woman he was seeing. Talked about her all time. Loved her something fierce.”
“The woman Marcus loved died?”
“You’ve got that echolalia or something? I seen a woman like you on Oprah. Kept repeating the last thing anybody said. Echolalia.”
“Echolalia?”
“Yeah, you got it bad,” the woman says. “You a little retarded? Autistic or such?”
“I’m foreign,” says Sigrid, refilling her purse.
The woman seemed to accept this as a reasonable synonym. “Yeah. Marcus’s girl. She up and died.”
“Died?”
“Yes, died,” she says, starting to laugh. “Fuck me, how do you get through your day? Say this: ‘Dude, where’s my car?’”
“How did she die?” asks Sigrid.
“Oh well . . . yeah, I don’t know. He didn’t say. But it broke his heart and he decided to pack it all up and take off. And now . . .” she says, opening her arms for dramatic emphasis, “here we are.”
“I need to get in and look around.”
The woman looks at her wristwatch. It’s sized for a man and made of gold-colored plastic.
“I don’t have much time,” the woman says.
With her purse full again, Sigrid walks around the corner of the house
