Sunday, February 21, 2016
Saskia wakes from a nightmare about Benigno Aquino.
She was twelve when he was assassinated in Manila. She didn’t know anything about politics in the Philippines, but Bill sometimes watched news on a portable TV sequestered in a dark corner of the living room, and over his shoulder she saw the footage. The interior of a plane, soldiers swarming around a man. The news report explained that Aquino was returning to Manila from political exile, and had been aware that he might be killed. The moment that stuck in her head ever afterward occurred in his last moments on camera. Trying to smile, he took hold of a seat belt strap near the cabin door and pulled on it as the soldiers bustled him out. It was probably unconscious. Of course he was frightened. He held on to the strap for maybe one second while they propelled him forward, then he dropped it and disappeared through the door. Moments later, out on the tarmac, one of the soldiers shot him in the back of the head.
Her dream was of that one second, that strap between the seat and the scared man, lengthening out straight like a lifeline, then falling.
She gets up, showers, dresses.
How easy it is, how effective, to kill troublesome people. Joan of Arc was propelled to her death with the same speed. The law required that she be handed over to the secular arm for punishment, but instead she was hurried straight from the ecclesiastical tribunal down to the marketplace where the wood was heaped and waiting. How stunning it is that once you kill a person, that person never comes back.
She locks her apartment, goes downstairs to the street. Eight o’clock, the tops of the buildings in sunlight, close to 50 degrees already. Back to the kind of climate change she likes. May as well enjoy what you can. She walks to a deli on Manhattan Avenue, grabs an empty seat along the counter, asks for a cup of coffee. She needs some people around her for a few minutes. Bad night. Mark called her Friday morning to relay Mette’s text message to him: Don’t worry. Taking time to think. Life choices. It was typical of him, and it annoyed her, that he seemed to believe her message meant they shouldn’t worry. It also annoyed her that Mette had texted him, while ignoring all but one of Saskia’s messages. Okay, maybe “hurt her” is a more accurate characterization. But there she goes again, right? Focusing on her own feelings.
Silas is on shift this morning, wiping down tables. A good way into a role is to decide how the character inhabits her body, so Saskia often watches the way other people move, later imitating them in her apartment. Silas is great. He looks like he’s maybe twelve, slender and small for his age, all his accessories conspiring to make him look even smaller—the thick black frames on his windshield glasses, his inflated Nikes, his attenuated Afro like a peacock spray. His never-changing facial expression might be called a) dreamy, b) spacy, or c) catatonic. Think Shelley Duvall in Three Women. He bobs up and down as he walks in those clodhopper shoes, taking longer strides than you would expect, all in slow motion, as though he’s in a weaker gravitational field than everyone else. After two or three steps, the rhythm of his walk sets his right hand to undulating at the wrist, in toward the hip, then out. After a couple more steps, his fingers start to snap at the end of the outward swing, seemingly of their own accord.
Of course she’s trying to distract herself. What else can she do, since Mette won’t answer her? Did she say it annoyed her? She raised Mette more or less entirely on her own, yet the girl is so much like her father it drives her crazy, the two of them seem to understand each other in some spatiotemporal hyper-dimension to which ordinary humans have no access. And to make things worse, it feels like karmic payback for Saskia’s ignoring of her own mother. At least it gives her some sympathetic insight into her mother’s burden, though of course too late to do either of them any good. And at least Mark, unlike her own father, seems to be a decent enough human being, if of no help nor clue.
Mette has never told Saskia a thing about her life outside the apartment. Saskia doesn’t know whether she’s satisfied with her programming job, or her private projects, or whether she’s ever dated anyone, ever had sex, what her orientation is. She assumes Mark doesn’t know any of this either. If she wants us to know, she’ll tell us, she can hear him saying with that tone of If A = B, then B = A. Saskia called Mette’s workplace again yesterday, and no one who happened to be there—a lot of them seem to work remotely a lot of the time, and she’s never met any of them, and doesn’t know any of their names—could tell her a fucking thing. Okay, it’s only been five days. And Mette has plenty of money (Saskia’s fairly sure, though she doesn’t exactly know this, either), so she could be holed up in a decent hotel somewhere if she wanted, and it’s not like she’s not used to being alone. And since she and Mark are alike, maybe Mark has been right all along and if she were in a bad emotional place and were contemplating
