The Dinner Guest Read online

  VII

  I never thought of them as having faces or passions. I always imagined them with bodies and no heads; with a blur where their heads should be. I didn’t even picture them with covered faces because I assumed that under the masks they sometimes wore on television there was something else. I imagined that they were interchangeable, like Lego figures with swappable torsos and legs. I couldn’t imagine them playing cards or going to the market, though now that I’ve written this, I see them carrying bags of apples. As a girl, I called them Harry, and sometimes in traffic jams I shook a fist at the lights, saying: ‘Turn green or I’m calling Harry.’ It was many years later when I began to dream that my father was being killed or that I was their main target. The second nightmare was worse because of the loneliness, because I couldn’t share my fears with anybody.

  *

  The name of the man who ordered the package bomb to be sent to my father was Miguel. I found this out by typing his nickname into Google. He’s probably only called that by his family, or maybe not even by them. He’s ten years older than me and he was born on the exact same day as my twin sisters, 6 July. I search for his nickname on a newspaper website and a few articles pop up. Many are illustrated with an image of his trial in early summer 2011 for sending a package bomb to my father in 2002. In the photograph he is raising one arm and biting his tongue as if trying to get my attention.

  Nine years had gone by. In my family we no longer knelt by the car with a little mirror to check whether there was some explosive device wired to it. That time felt far away and hazy, like a movie from which one remembers only random details.

  The day of the trial, some friends of my parents brought a bag of fresh fish to the apartment hotel across from the UN where my mother was staying. We wanted to make baked sea bass with white wine and lemon. Someone said in passing: ‘Have you seen the picture in the paper?’ and we said we had while we continued with the dinner preparations. My mother was tired. The effects of the chemo sessions were cumulative and she needed more sleep than usual. She could only have proteins for dinner and we had to work hard to come up with new things for her to eat. ‘It was caught this morning,’ my parents’ friend said. I went down to the hotel café to borrow a few forks. The building was art deco and it must have had a glorious past, but now the rugs were frayed and the furniture was encrusted with dust. Still, it was cosy. Almost everyone who stayed there had some connection to the UN. Each week most of the guests were of a single nationality. One Monday they were all Italian, the next they were all Chinese, the next all Indian. We often ate fish and seafood, because Pisacane, the best fish market in Manhattan, was just a block from the hotel. There was good shopping in the area: rather expensive, but high quality. We bought our vegetables and fruit at the Amish Market, though my mother could hardly eat any of it. Her diet consisted of homemade hummus, hamburgers from P.J. Clarke’s, lacquered duck from Peking Duck House, ravioli from Caffé Linda, and boiled lobster at ten dollars apiece from Pisacane.

  *

  17 January, 2002

  It was my father’s name on the package, but the address was my uncle’s in Getxo. The postman reached the building around noon. The concierge looked through the mail, and when he saw who the package was for he said there was no one in the building by that name. The postman took the package, found a pen and was about to check the box for ‘addressee unknown’. My cousin had just come into the lobby holding her nanny’s hand. She was seven, blonde, and she stopped at the concierge’s desk to watch the sorting of the mail. ‘That package is for my uncle,’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’ asked the mailman. ‘Yes, that’s his name,’ she answered. My cousin stood waiting by the elevator with the package under her arm. The nanny was next to her. A neighbour on the second floor had taken her shopping up and was unloading the bags slowly.

  A policeman came into the lobby and shouted: ‘There’s a bomb!’ My cousin threw up her arms and dropped the package. The postman tossed the mail in the air; the letters hit the box with the bomb in it while my cousin’s arms were still raised. Or at least that’s how I imagine it.

  For the following eight hours, I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t hear from my parents. Later I would find out that they were at the opera. When the phone rang, I was preparing a presentation for an economics class at the university. At the other end of the line a woman spoke: ‘The Minister of the Interior would like to offer your father his condolences.’ ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. The woman pretended not to have heard me and asked in a kind voice, ‘Can your father come to the phone?’ I told her that he wasn’t home and hung up, not knowing what to make of the conversation. I searched for the name of the interior minister on the Internet and then my father’s name. I saw the news. No one was answering the phone. As I finished the assignment, I reread the story on the computer. My parents got home around midnight. They came into the hall talking about Rigoletto and they told me what had happened that morning. ‘If my number is up, it’s up,’ said my father. The next day, the bodyguard he would have from then on brought him a list of activities that he should avoid for safety’s sake. These included: taking out money from cash machines, using public transportation, going to the news stand or the book store on our block, paying for parking, and walking anywhere.

  The next morning I got up early to make it to class at eight. I took the Metro, and when I came out of the exit closest to the university, something happened that may have been real or that I may have dreamed. A young man in a leather jacket passed me and said: ‘You were lucky.’ Now, rereading the newspapers, I’m not sure whether my cousin’s story is true, either. In front of me is an article that says that the package bomb was found in the post van.

  I spend the morning googling Miguel, but hardly find anything. Apart from the photographs of the trial, there’s a YouTube channel under his name and a feature in the magazine Interviú about his childhood and family.

  The Miguel I find on the Internet doesn’t scare me. I’m not frightened by the place where he seems to have lived for many years: ‘The seventh floor of an apartment block with a view of the church of San Francisquito de Santutxu.’

  Nor am I troubled by his parents, Ana and Josu, divorced in ’98, when my family had been living in Madrid for three years. My grandfather Ricardo died that summer, so I guess ’98 wasn’t a good year for either family. Miguel’s father worked for an electric company, his mother was an assistant at different shops. He also has a sister about whom I haven’t been able to discover anything.

  I find a YouTube account created by someone with the same name as him. I don’t know whether it’s real or fake. There are videos of Basque dancers and flamenco singers, Justin Bieber, Kraftwerk, the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids, some Muppets sketches; clips of The Art of Noise, The Smiths, some reggae groups I don’t recognise, a girl screaming, Luciano Pavarotti, video games, surfing videos, instructional videos showing how to play Metallica on the guitar and how to light a barbecue, gunmen, guerrillas, Adolf Hitler, Latin singers, and a comedy sketch in which two hooded figures fire three shots into a broken computer. None of the videos that I see scare me, but then I imagine Miguel in front of the computer and I can’t describe what I feel. Looking at pictures of him, I feel the same way I do when I look at images of cancer cells. I don’t think about the threat, but about the story conjured up. The images of the tumours look like galaxies, and when I look at them, I tell myself stories about space. When I see Miguel sticking out his tongue and raising his arm at the trial for the package bomb he sent my father, I sense it isn’t me whose attention he’s trying to get.

  VIII

  When my mother came to New York for treatment, I was living in South Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, getting a master’s degree in marketing from NYU, and I worked in the Times Square MTV building. Despite the overdose of neon outside the building, my office was a windowless, LED-less box. I remember that on my second day of work I googled ‘no natural light in my office’ and found a link to an Amazon
listing for a little lamp that promised to solve my problem. According to the product description, thirty-five million Americans suffer from something called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, and a University of Idaho study had revealed that in patients exposed to light for thirty to forty-five minutes a day, progress had been observed in the treatment of chronic depression, bipolar disorder, insomnia, bulimia, PMS and dementia. At the same university, another study had been conducted in which patients were divided into two groups, one given Prozac and the other exposed to forty minutes of light a day for a week. At this point in the article I wasn’t surprised to read that it was the second group that had obtained better results.

  The Friday after I found out about my mother’s illness, I spent the day at home. I didn’t work on Fridays, and I didn’t have class, either. I usually managed to sleep until eleven and read in my pyjamas until lunchtime. That morning, however, the doorbell woke me up early. At the door, a messenger in a grey shirt handed me a package. I took it, signed a slip and thanked him. In the kitchen I got scissors and cut the tape. I stuck my hand into the styrofoam pellets and pulled out the lamp. It was an ugly, garish thing, three times bigger than I had imagined it would be. I plugged it in to check the quality of the light, which struck me as white and unpleasant. ‘No returns’, the box said.

  I set the lamp on the floor, at the foot of the bed, and picked up my book again. That morning I was reading Walser’s The Walk. As I was plumping my pillow, an image of the writer dead in the snow came into my head. I typed ‘robert walser’ into Google and clicked on Images; the first photograph in the second row was of his dead body. Footsteps in the snow led to the spot where he lay. His mouth was open and he had one hand on his belly and the other outstretched, reaching towards a hat. I began to read the first paragraph, looking up from the page to the photograph at each comma.

  One morning, as the desire to take a walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street.

  Robert Walser, 15 April, 1878–25 December, 1956. Buried in 2011 with three hundred thousand other photographs of himself in Google Images.

  In his book the writer goes out for a walk one morning in 1917. He must have done the same thing that Christmas Day, almost four decades later. Perhaps he was sitting in his room at the Herisau asylum, and though it had been years since he gave up writing, he was projecting stories onto the white wall of his room; sitting in bed with his back to the window and stuck on some of his imaginary projections, he must have closed his eyes and wondered whether it would do him good to take a walk.

  What I notice most about this photograph is the naive way in which it was taken. Some children playing in the woods come across the body. They circle the writer a few times and decide to call the police. The police arrive a few minutes later and proceed to photograph the body. I imagine a man putting film in the camera, turning the reel and backing up through the snow while looking through the viewfinder. Three or four steps away, the full complement of legs, arm and hat are inside the frame. The man presses the button and immortalises the body.

  Today, almost a year and a half after reading the book, I’m still living in Brooklyn and still working in an office with no natural light, though not at the same company. Nor do I live in the same place, though I still have the lamp and the styrofoam pellets on the top shelf of a closet. Today is Sunday, 2 September, 2012. Normally on Sundays I write until I’m exhausted or until I run out of ideas. When it gets dark, I usually go to the cinema or take a walk. This afternoon the sound of glass breaking got me up from my desk. The bookcase in the living room had toppled over. On it there were some books, now scattered on the floor amid shards of glass and a wrecked record player.

  I swept up the glass and stacked everything behind the sofa. While I was picking up the books I found Walser’s The Walk. A small volume, ninety pages at most, with a plain white cover. I opened the book and read a paragraph that I had underlined in pencil.

  To lie here inconspicuous in the cool forest earth must be sweet. That one might still sense and enjoy death even in death! To have a grave in the forest would be lovely. Perhaps I should hear the birds singing and the rustling above me. I would like such a thing as that.

  It occurred to me that perhaps Walser had stopped writing to focus his energy on making his wish come true. He must have chosen an asylum with a forest nearby, and each morning, before going out for a stroll, he must have put on his hat and taken an umbrella even if the sky was cloudless. On his walks he must have studied the lie of the land, paying special attention to the shape of the clearings and the height of the firs. I imagine Walser sitting on a stump, closing his eyes to listen to the branches rustling. Then he must have cleared the leaves from the ground with his umbrella and marked an X. Maybe that was where his body was found, I thought.

  *

  That summer I had learned to do a backwards dive into the pool. My toes were on the edge and my heels in the air, my back to the water and my eyes on a hedge growing through the cracks in the fence. I swung my arms a few times and pushed off, my spine arching and sending me into the pool fingertips first. I must have kept my eyes open, because as my body turned in the water I saw the upside-down image of a man sinking in a white cloud. My body kept turning. Stroking centimetres from the bottom and the west wall of the pool, I finally came up. Outside of the pool, people were crowding along the edge. A woman in a black bathing suit had jumped into the cloud. Now she emerged from it with her face dirty, hauling the body of the drowning man, who still had white stuff coming out of his mouth. The man had a gold crucifix around his neck that swung each time his head lost its perch and fell sideways.

  I climbed up the stairs out of the water and saw the man lying in the grass. Next to him, a kid from the Red Cross was trying to revive him by pounding on his chest. But the man didn’t move. He just lay there with his mouth open. Meanwhile, the woman in the black bathing suit was rinsing off in one of the showers by the changing rooms. Soon the pool was cordoned off with yellow tape. People had scattered, and near the body a woman and two girls stood holding each other. One of them was shivering and the other put a towel around her. The one who seemed to be the mother stared at the body, her lips parted in the same way as the man’s. She stood there with her mouth open until the ambulance arrived. Some paramedics took the man away, covering him in a silver blanket, and the three women stood for a while longer by the pool, watching as the cloud dispersed.

  *

  I’d been trying to remember my mother, but I couldn’t. For a few minutes I tried to reconstruct her face, but all I saw was black. Since the computer was in front of me, I searched her name on the Internet.

  This appeared:

  The first picture is her as a young woman, her hair parted on the side and falling over her shoulders. The rest of the pictures are images of gravestones. Marble, granite, flowers, no flowers, statuary. One is engraved with the shape of a heart and another with her last name, PASCH, in capital letters.

  Suddenly I began to talk. I described my morning. The bookcase, the damage and the Walser book. ‘Do you remember how much I liked my record player? Well, it’s broken now.’ Then I spent an hour staring at the screen trying to memorise her face.

  It was then that I remembered the lamp. I took it down from the shelf and set it on my desk. When I plugged it in, the four LED tubes lit up and cast an ugly white light on my face.

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  IX

  It wasn’t long before my mother was trying to hide her illness. When we walked around Manhattan on days when she didn’t have an appointment, she always tried
to walk faster than me. If I told her that I needed to stop to rest, she insisted that we keep going. I don’t think she did it consciously. If anyone had asked her whether she had cancer, she would have said yes. Still, each time someone asked ‘How are you?’ her answer was always ‘Great.’ It didn’t matter that she might have spent the morning in the bathroom vomiting, or that the radiation therapy had made her sterile. Her reaction to illness was resistance. Nothing’s wrong here. This isn’t killing me. Look how well I am. Sometimes I even believed it myself.

  Halfway through the treatment, she announced that she wanted to buy an apartment in Brooklyn. There was nothing I could do to stop her. The week that she had the chemo pump attached, she was already wandering around the neighbourhood where the apartment was and checking the price. She had visited the place twice with a friend and she couldn’t stop talking about the views of Manhattan and the river from every room. We went back together to see it a few weeks later. During the subway ride she talked nonstop about the apartment and about family dinners overlooking the East River. Meanwhile, I couldn’t forget her illness. We visited the apartment. From the living room you could see all of Manhattan and the river full of cargo ships travelling up and down the waterway. A seaplane landed on the surface like a seagull, filled its tank with water and vanished. The girl from the real estate agency showed us around, but I could only look out. Then she started to talk about contracts. My mother wanted to close the deal as soon as possible and she asked me to help her with the paperwork. During the negotiations, no one mentioned her health. The closing day was the first time I thought my mother could die.