Moving Parts

In the meantime the train is moving further and further away from the point of departure, to which the narrator will have to return while he still remembers how many stops he has to go back — for the moment only one. It may be enough to cross to the opposite platform when the time comes. Unfortunately they, too, wish to get out, the hobo with the earring and the old man in the red dressing gown. The narrator walks at a brisk pace; his shoes get wet in puddles. In his haste he splashes through mud, determined to lose the other two — the tramp with the earring dogging his footsteps, and the out-of-breath professor, who every so often catches up at a trot. It may be that in his pocket the hobo carries his own bunch of keys from all the cellars he knows and all his favorite heating vents; and that he is sticking to his own route. He probably uses the gift of omniscience to find the best morsels in garbage dumps. The scruffy old man, on the other hand, undoubtedly appears as an episodic character in both stories whose plots have become entangled. Here then is a run-down neighborhood situated goodness knows how far below the level of the hotel foyer, that indifferent paradise in which the body scarcely suffers at all and has no need of sympathy, and another few floors below the beautiful gardens of summer, where structures built of expectations and imaginings come crashing down. Here is a bar on the corner, the scene of the action of unknown stories that are just as good or as bad as any others. A battered signboard bears letters in a familiar angular script. Inside there is a hum of voices; the television is on, and the local unemployed are watching a soccer game. There is a sudden hubbub in the bar: goal! A few fans spill out onto the street; one of them gives a yodeling cry and waves a betting slip. The narrator will not hesitate for long; he’ll enter the bar and mingle with the crowd. It’s three to nothing. All around, people are making a racket and clinking mugs. He stands at the counter, but the other two are right by him already, and he has to order beers for them as well. He’d most like to slip away before they finish their drinks. But they guzzle their beer quickly, glancing at the TV screen out of the corner of their eye, very pleased with themselves. They may well be aware that they would have been ejected even from this bar had they not previously attached themselves to the narrator.