The journey from my front room to the street below ... again

The television set in the other room was showing, naturally, a French film. The volume was as quiet as it was thin – I would have had to concentrate hard to understand anything that was being said, but it certainly created an appropriate atmosphere. It was late in the afternoon, just as the rush of traffic was starting to fill the roads and pedestrians were beginning to thicken out on the pavements. I looked out from my window to the cars and mopeds swarming through Pigale and then squeezed my eyes shut. I turned away, looked through to the doorway and watched the light from the television set flicker against the white wall opposite. I shuddered slightly. I didn’t want have to go and meet E at this time. She knew I wouldn’t want to meet her at this time, when it would be impossible to navigate the streets at a respectable speed and the Metro was full, and yet she had still asked. This could mean several things, I thought, and while just one year ago the apprehension would have excited me, now it only caused me worry. Things were, in fact, not getting any better. I cleared those thoughts from my mind.

The journey from my front room to the street below was interrupted three times; the first interruption came from Madame Jasmine, my landlady, who stopped me on the stairway to ask me for the third time that week if the triple-x neon sign outside my window was keeping me awake at night. “I try to get them to take damn thing down,” she said to me as she waved her arms around her head, “but still they refuse. You must go talk to them Mister Wunderman.” I gave her the same answer I had on the previous two occasions, speaking fast, and as ever she didn’t understand a word of it. “You need to talk slowly to me, Mister Wunderman,” she said with a wrinkly smile as she tapped her left ear. I smiled back, squeezing her arm on my way past. The next interruption was as unnecessary. It came from my telephone.

“J.”

“What is it Ken?”

“Rachel said something interesting.”

“Interesting? Are you sure it was Rachel?”

“Oh yes, we were still in bed. It was this morning.”

“Uh huh.” There was a long pause. “Are you going to tell me what it was Ken? I am about to go out into the street, I wont be able to hear you. I don’t want to be late … uh, meeting E.”

“Yeah well she said the reason I won’t ever leave this city is because I am immature and can’t face the realities of the world outside the peripheral road. She says that’s why you won’t leave either. She said that living here prevents us from feeling any real responsibility for events which take place in the world outside. We deny ourselves any social responsibility.”

“Kenneth, Rachel is just a walk-on part in your life. Don’t listen to her. We have everything we need here, all within that road. That road is important. I don’t even want to know what goes on outside of it anymore. Don’t listen to her, she talks to much.”

“Well, that’s what she said anyhow. What do you think I should say in response?”

“What? Ken, I don’t know. Ask Stepek.”

“Stepek? She says that’s why he won’t ever leave either.”

“Yeah? Well, who knows Ken? Maybe she’s right. In fact, just tell her she’s right. I need to go now Ken, I’m in the street,” I lied. I listened to him begin a sentence which I knew wasn’t going to end with him saying goodbye, and so I snapped the telephone closed and dropped it into my coat pocket without a second thought. My hand had barely reached out for the handle of the main door when I felt the phone vibrate inside my pocket once again. This third interruption was a call from the man himself; our friend Stepek. I looked at the display, and then, in one well practiced movement, I slid the phone open, snapped it shut and dropped it back inside my pocket. I knew exactly what he wanted to talk to me about, and I wasn’t at all interested.

The meeting with E could not have been more bizarre, even if I had made it all up.

continues tomorrow