The tattoo parlor’s warm, and so I hustle there inside
And the grinding of the buzz saw, ‘what do you want that thing to say?‘
I says, ‘Just don’t misspell her name, buddy, she’s the one that got away.“
- Tom Waits, The One That Got Away, (Small Change, 1976)
It’s sometimes the case in a moment of surrealism that the truth finally comes to life.
I’d encountered a friendly female guide in the course of a dream, followed that dream without knowing why and found myself deranged by infatuation in its place. Had the dream been meant as an encouraging sign or simply another crossroad down another avenue of aching? On the long train home I asked myself if in fact this little chanteuse had always been a figment of my imagination, a dream that until that day, continued in a prolonged exercise of excruciating delusion.
She existed, of course and would continue to do so irrespective of whether I continued to dream about her. The pain of that infatuation had now dissolved into a comforting numbness, a return to the empty, hollow but nonetheless welcomed inability to feel.
There was always that vague possibility of course that she would turn up at my door again some day but this was nothing to count on. The decision had been to turn around again, leave, abandon her before she abandoned me. A simple exercise of self-protection. It was not a resolution but a surrender to a perceived truth far stronger than any dream. I was miserable and there was no rope to pull myself up out this hole or, if I’d chosen, to hang myself with. As the train pulled into Prague’s main station I braced myself for that emptiness to become all-encompassing.
Hello? I’m home, I announced to any empty flat.
There was no sign of Albert anywhere. No lingering smoke clouds, no loud music booming from the speakers, nothing. Dead silence. His bass was propped up in the corner and the ashtray was filled with butts but none still smouldering. I twitched around in the flat for awhile trying to figure out what to do with myself. I’d spent the train ride girding for a nice long conversation of I-told-you-so with Albert, sitting around drinking beer, discussing our next move and now that I was here and he wasn’t, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
So naturally the first thing that came to mind was the Shot Out Eye. It was the most likely place Albert would have been if he wasn’t in the flat. It was the most likely place for either of us.
When I arrived there I found the usual, familiar faces. None of them were Albert’s. I asked around, had he even been around today? No. They hadn’t seen him in a few days. That hardly seemed possible. Hardly seemed like Albert. Not unless he was on his budget in which case he’d have been home anyway.
But you see there was nothing to concern myself about, anything was possible. He might have gone on a little bender of his own somewhere with his rehearsal partner dangling himself like a pinata in Bratislava.
It did cross my mind that he’d simply left Prague altogether but he wouldn’t have left his bass. I had a beer while I mulled over the possibilities. If he was off somewhere why wouldn’t he have left a note? Why of course, because he had no idea when I’d be back. The last time I said I was leaving for a few days I was gone two weeks in Paris so perhaps for all he knew the reunion with Anastasia had been a successful one and I’d decided to join her on the road, touring. Not that it could be reasonably extrapolated that my horn playing merited a slot in whatever band she’d be singing with on the road, even if it changed every night from one city to the next, so he probably wouldn’t have imagined that one.
I finished my beer and headed out to make the rounds, hitting each of the usual spots that Albert and I frequented and in each place, finding no Albert, having a pint and moving on again. By midnight I stumbled home, still not having found Albert and expecting he’d at least be in the flat by then with an easy explanation that had eluded me.
But as I approached I noticed no light was on. I entered the flat, flipped on the lights and inspected the miserable, empty space, inch by inch. No clues. Everything I could imagine he might have needed had he left the city, for good or on a short trip, was right there in the flat. Had he found a woman? Was he curled up in someone’s arms in their flat, muttering sweet nothings in the dark? The notion made me laugh aloud. A romantic Albert, indeed. Fat chance.
Of course my anxiety about his disappearance grew by the hour when he still hadn’t come home after three more days. Not a word. I tried to convince myself that had he known I’d returned he would certainly have gotten in touch with me. So I allowed myself a little space to worry. Worrying about Albert took my mind off the absence of Anastasia and the realisation, also growing day by day, much like my concern for Albert, that she’d decided on the contract or at the very least, decided not to bother keeping me entertained with my delusions any longer.
I managed to return to work if for no other reason that it provided me a modicum of distraction for a few hours every day between long walks back and forth to and from the school’s dilapidated building. I had a beer and goulash in the train station with Marshall, voicing for the first time, my concern that Albert appeared to have simply disappeared. Did you ever consider that something might have happened to him, Marshall offered as a form of consolation. He might be in a hospital or a morgue. You should check the Municipal Hospital or perhaps your local police station, see if you can find anything out. I don’t mean to be morbid, but it’s certainly a possibility
it doesn’t appear that you’ve considered.
I didn’t want to consider anything, to be honest. I was at my lowest point.
I headed straight for the Shot Out Eye after class with the idea of placating myself with a stupefying session of intoxication, the All-Time Drunk of Serial Drinking, it was distraction of sorts, mulling over with a vaguely schadenfreudesque satisfaction at how completely out of my senses I was going to be when I finished; a pure, cathartic cleansing, chasing away any last vestiges of the memory of Anastasia as well as my growing concerns about the fate of Albert.
When I arrived at the Shot Out Eye however, Kazimir immediately headed me off and sat me down. A woman was here looking for you, he said and for a second, my heart skipped a beat - Anastasia had finally come to her senses! But before I could carry the fantasy any further, Kazimir was putting his hand on my shoulder. She’s a nurse at the University Hospital. She didn’t tell me much out of respect for your own privacy but she did give me a number for you to call. She said she has some information for you.
I sat there, dumbfounded. A beer was brought to me and I drank it but I certainly never tasted or noticed it. What the fuck, I thought to myself. This can’t be happening. It had to be about Albert. If it was about Anastasia, how would the nurse have known that a message in the Shot Out Eye would meet me? Of course. I wasn’t a hard man to track down, simple habits. But it was Albert who was missing, not Anastasia. Or maybe Anastasia had intended on returning to me but was injured in an accident or something? Fuck, I couldn’t figure but either way there was not going to be good news at the end of that conversation.
I went out to the pay phone across the road and rang the number that the nurse had left for me. General Reception. I gave my name in the unrealistic hope they would be expecting my call. Then it dawned on me. I gave the nurse’s name instead. After several earth quaking moments of waiting, a woman finally picked up.
Is this Witold, she asked. Yes, it is. More delays.
So my message in the pub has reached you? Yes, of course, I muttered, spit it out already. Witold, I’m afraid your friend Albert is here in the hospital. He’s not in very good condition. He was hit by a car and if I’m honest, I cannot say for certain how much time he has left.
I hung up and stood motionless in the phone booth. It simply couldn’t be possible, could it?
I rode the tram to the hospital, asked for Albert and after turning down endless hallways, finally reached his room. Tepidly, I stuck my head in, you in there, I shouted.
And I saw him in his hospital gown, looking thin and weak, not Albert, but what seemed instantly like Albert’s ghost. His eyes were closed and it was not difficult to imagine standing there looking down into a casket. His face was bruised and bloodied, cleansed and then stitched but the head injury, it was explained to me, was not one he was likely to recover from.
What am I supposed to do, I wondered aloud. The nurse put her hand on my arm and led me to a chair where I sat in a stupor.
I began to panic, thinking how it might be possible to get him moved to another hospital somewhere, a place where they could actually do something. Could the end be avoided by taking him out this third world hospital? Surely, if he was getting care in New York or somewhere else, anywhere else, there would be something that could be done other than simply resigning oneself to what had always seemed an impossible fate.
I watched his uneven breathing. He’s close to unconscious, the nurse added helpfully as I probed around the bed attempting to find an answer, a way to see his eyes opened, to confirm that this was simply another bad dream in what was turning into a series of bad dreams none of which I could wake myself from despite the terror with which I watched it helplessly.
So what am I supposed to do, I finally demanded, just wait for him lying here to die?
The trauma to the head makes the recovery quite improbable and even if he were to come to there’s the very likelihood that is brain, deprived as it was of oxygen, will not recover fully. Even if he were to live he might do so only in some vegetative state.
I left the hospital after a few hours in order to try and find sanctuary, away from my thoughts. I tried to go to a cinema to forget about it, distract myself with some stupid age old comedy but halfway through it I simply stood up and left, headed back for the flat.
In the miserable days that followed I found irony in staying dry, off the piss as the drinking through the trauma seemed an unlikely solution. Instead, I tried to consider what I was going to do, what possible scenarios still existed if now, not only was Anastasia gone but so too would Albert be leaving me alone again, as I’d been from the beginning.
There was nothing I could do for Albert by staying put in Prague.
I couldn’t speak to him for assistance. I sat at his bedside talking to him, trying to get him to answer me - what the fuck should I do, stay here, watch you die and then what? What would I do with your body? Would you want it interned here in Prague or returned to New York? It was impossible to know because, the realisation dawned again, painfully, that I didn’t know enough about him, enough about what he’d wanted, to know what next step to take. Would he have wanted me to simply leave, get on with my life, affix a certain memory to existence and move on? Would he want me sitting here, trying to care for him when there was nothing I could do to fix the situation?
In the end, I decided to leave. I know that you might think this to have been a despicable act of abandonment. The idea crossed my mind over and over again. What the fuck is wrong with me that I can’t make the simple sacrificial act, to stay on for the duration, deal with whatever fate awaited him and of course, me.
Yet equally, what was the point of my staying? To be with him in final moments he couldn’t even be aware existed?
Of what I knew of Albert, the nihilism, the apathy, I couldn’t imagine he’d have cared one way or the other. Not unless like me, the façade was simply a way of protecting the heart. Was he afraid or even aware of dying? I racked my brain trying to recall even the slightest, subtle hint from our incessant conversations about nothing in particular, nothing of importance, what he might have thought, what he would have expected. Surely he would have expected nothing of me but my own self-preservation.
And so, without allowing myself to become paralysed by indecision, I called the shot.
***********
EPILOGUE
Tamara is still busy providing me with forensic detail about her fascination with European cities. She may have taken a brief break, allowed me the opportunity to
nod my head in agreement or sigh in disbelief, but the break wasn’t long. Long enough to draw another breath and begin again on another monologue.
I can tell this match making is a disaster. We aren’t going anywhere after this afternoon. Oh, we might end up getting drunk and maybe even end up sleeping with each other at night, wake up next to each other with that shit taste in your mouth of stale alcohol and stale sex, that odour of resignation. But we won’t be going anywhere else. We’ll be going through the motions.
I suppose you might be wondering what happened.
I haven’t told any body before.
I’m not even sure I’ve told myself. Just experienced it. Took the blows as they came without wincing. Save the pain to feel another day because that’s what I realised, opening myself up like I did, not just to Anastasia but to Albert as well. You open yourself up like a little blossom just so somebody, some stranger can come by and without even realising it, step on that blossom, crush it. And all that’s left is pain. You see, I’d taught myself all those years that feeling nothing at all was preferable to feeling pain, a non-stop drip of pain through the muscles, the bones, the head, the heart, everywhere, on every street, at the beginning and ending of every day and all the long succession of minutes in between. Pain.
What I wondered, abstractly, as I was fading in and out of Tamara’s torrent of words was how others adapted to that pain. I have no delusion that I’m the only one, that each of us isn’t fighting in our own ways, that incessant defence against pain. It might be said that defeating pain is merely living itself in defiance, refusing to succumb.
But I am not that strong. I’ve never been that strong. Eventually I return to that same protective shell, feigning the motions of emotion, struggling not to think that every step will be my last or their last and finding a tidal emptiness in the wake of failing time and again, to let myself go, to blossom again for someone else.
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