t h i r t e e n
I have been told many times to get a cell-phone, ever since it became a fad to carry one of those damned things a few years ago. Things were less complicated in the 90s for fuck’s sake. You had a landline and an answering machine and if you didn’t pick up there was a message for you and people just left you the hell alone. Now everyone’s got this thing in their hand and it rings and rings and you gotta pick it up because it’s just there all the time, it’s a mobile phone, it sticks to you like a leech. And it’s a complicated little shit with flipping things and buttons and all that. Mikaela has one. She told me to get one too so that we could reach other easily but I hated the idea of people being able to talk to me and hear me anywhere I was at any time. On a morning like this I feel thankful that I don’t have one because if I did it would be blowing up.
When I wake, my face is pressed into the smell of Tide and a slightly salty scent. I know where I am. I look to my left and there’s a long, flattened stretch of sheet, empty. I stretch out my hand and touch it. It’s still warm. I look around the room and see clothes on the floor; grey track pants in a pool as if Dexter dropped them, stepped out of them and just left them there. For a moment I’m confused – I look under the sheets to check if I still have my clothes on. I do.
I step onto the floor; it is cold, the cement making it feel damp. My mouth has a bad taste in it. As usual I probe my mind for glimpses of my dreams last night, but I come up with nothing. I realize that I slept dreamlessly.
The bedroom door is open. When I walk out, it’s unbearably bright in the apartment, the balcony doors thrown wide open, but somehow the flooding illumination makes things clearer, the warmth travels up the soles of my feet and somehow I feel clean and I feel awake. Ahead of me I see Lola standing at the counter, shaking a box, which rattles noisily. I think she hears me, because she tops and turns around. She puts a box of All-Bran Wheat Flakes down and smiles at me. She’s not wearing her hooker clothes anymore – she’s in boxers with a Donald Duck print on them and a camisole.
“Hey. How’d you sleep?”
“Alright,” I say, walking over to her.
“Water?”
“Please.”
She goes to the fridge, takes out a bottle of Jack Daniels with the label half peeled off, full of water, and pours some into a blue plastic glass. I recognize the glass; it comes free with Chocos. I start wonder who eats Chocos in this house. I don’t like Chocos. It’s another feeble attempt to romanticize something that isn’t romantic – it’s cereal, literally sugarcoated. Add a chocolate flavour to flakes of wheat and everyone loves it – but after a while the sweetness gets tiring because it’s artificial, and then we realize that it is after all just cereal.
I drain the glass of water. Lola takes the glass from me then.
“So listen,” she says, putting the glass in the sink and taking out a bowl from one of the cabinets.
“I’m listening.”
“I have two things to ask you.”
She shakes a healthy amount of cereal into the bowl (I guess sex works up an appetite). I lean against the counter and say, “Go ahead.”
She opens the fridge again, rummages around. Straightening up, she asks, “Apple?”
“No thanks. Was that one of the questions?”
She chuckles. “No. Sit down.”
I sit at the table with her opposite me. She’s eating her cereal dry, shoveling it into her mouth and crunching noisily. After she swallows, she says, “I wanted to ask you, and you don’t have to answer, but what happened last night?”
