Trader

  I could tell my father was tom between disappointment that I wanted to abandon the family business, and pride that I would continue to work in a demanding woodcraft. He was the one who contacted Janossy, a Hungarian luthier of his acquaintance, and arranged for me to apprentice under him.

  I studied under Janossy for nine years, living on his farm outside the city, surrounded by wood—the forest, the log cabin, the weathered outbuildings, the firewood in winter, the shade trees in summer, the cedar pole fences, the apple orchard, and always the wood underhand in the workshop, sitting at the bench, hickory-handled tools, ryoba saw, slivers of wood curling up from the square blades of the chisels, sawdust underfoot.

  I loved Janossy as I loved my father. They were of a kind, Old World men who took pride in their work, in the details. It was no surprise to me that this large and exuberant instrument-maker should also harbor the soul of a deep thinker, for in that he was like my father, too. But where Janossy shouted his emotions to the world in a voice bigger than life, my father kept his more private, and in that I took after him.

  Now that I am a man myself, those that meet me will often describe me as solemn, thoughtful, even pensive, not realizing that the joy I gain from the details of my life lie inside me, like the smell of fresh-cut wood, instead of manifesting itself in boisterousness the way Janossy’s did. I’m not an unhappy man. I’m not even particularly serious. I’m willing to accept everything at face value, by what it is rather than what it seems to be, which is, perhaps, why I think I’m able to handle my current predicament better than most might.

  So, no. I don’t panic, though panic’s waiting for me just beyond the careful ordering of my thoughts as I finally lift my head to face the stranger in the mirror once more. I don’t panic, though I can feel the hysteria in my chest, a swelling presence that pushes against my hard-held calm. I don’t panic, but once I’ve assured myself again that I am in fact awake and not dreaming, I have to seriously consider the possibility that if I haven’t gone crazy, then the world around me has.

  I try to be objective as I study the stranger I’ve so literally become, but I find objectivity has slipped away. It’s become a capricious fancy dancing just beyond reach, something easy to imagine but impossible to embrace. If this nightmare is real, then the reality I’ve always accepted as the foundation upon which the world is constructed is now proven to be a lie. The principles of what can and can’t be no longer hold. Nothing can be taken at face value again. Nothing can be trusted. Because if this can happen to me, then anything can happen. And it means that fate, god, whatever it is that oversees the running of the world, is not merely unpredictable, but malevolent.

  That realization leaves me unable to do anything but stare at the reflection. It renders me immobile until the panic claws up my throat, a stifled scream finally freed.

  “Wake up, damn you!” I shout.

  I pick up the closest thing at hand—a small Inuit-styled stone sculpture—and throw it at the mirror. The glass shatters, spraying across the top of the dresser and onto the rug on which I’m kneeling. The sculpture bounces once off the mahogany top, then hits the floor and rolls into a corner. I pay no attention to where it goes. All I can do is stare at the scattering of mirror shards closest to hand where my stranger’s features are reflected back at me, ten, twenty times. Dozens of tiny strangers regard me. Their only resemblance to the man I know myself to be is the hysterical terror I can see twisting the features of each of their unfamiliar faces.

  2 ZEFFY LACERDA

  Zeffy didn’t want to get up. The digital glow of her alarm clock told her it was just past four in the morning and while it might be June, you’d never know it by the cool breeze coming in from the window she’d forgotten to close when she went to bed. But after she woke from a second dream of searching desperately for a bathroom, she finally pushed back the covers and slipped out of bed. She fumbled in the dark until she found and put on her slippers and the oversize flannel shirt that served as her housecoat. Hugging herself to keep warm, she opened the door to her bedroom and stepped out into the hall.

  The light coming down the passageway from the kitchen on her right caught her gaze. She blinked at it in surprise, wondering sleepily what Tanya was doing up at this hour.

  But first things first, she told herself. Another few moments and she’d be mopping up the hall.

  She turned away from the light and made her way to the bathroom. Afterward, she walked back past her bedroom door, down the hall to the kitchen. Tanya was slouched at the kitchen table, facing her own reflection in the darkened window across from her. She didn’t appear to be looking at it or anything else in particular. Her dark eyes had an unfocused, distant aspect about them.

  Zeffy paused in the doorway to study her, struck as always by just how pretty her roommate was. For all her diminutive size, Tanya had the elegant beauty of the fashion model and actress she’d once been, a delicate, waifish quality that in no way diminished her womanly attributes. Zeffy was a slender, five-two herself, an inch taller than Tanya, but beside Tanya she always felt overweight—a little too top-heavy, a little too wide in the hips—even though she weighed slightly less than she should for her height.

  It didn’t help that Tanya could wear anything and look good in it. Adding insult to injury, or perhaps it was the real reason for her inherent appeal, Tanya had also been naturally blessed with traits that most women had to struggle to attain: a glowing complexion, luminous dark brown eyes and silky hair that was always perfect and never lost its shine. Looking at her, you’d never know that she’d once been a junkie.

  Zeffy herself had to put up with the odd mix made by the coppery cast of her skin set against violet eyes and a tousled blaze of thick red hair that fell in corkscrew curls past her shoulders. She was sure that her heart-shaped face, combined with the wide set of her eyes and her slight overbite, had cosmeticians wanting to throw their hands up in helplessness whenever she came for advice to a makeup counter—if only in their minds.

  But tonight Tanya’s glow was diminished, swallowed by the obvious downturn of her mood, and she was smoking—something she only did when she was upset or depressed. She didn’t even seem to be aware of Zeffy’s presence until Zeffy finally pushed a stubborn lock of red hair out of her face and stepped into the kitchen.

  “Hey,” Zeffy said, taking one of the empty chairs.

  “Hey, yourself,” Tanya replied, looking up. “You can’t sleep either?”

  “Actually,” Zeffy said, “I was pleasantly lost in dreamland except I had a cup of tea before going to bed and the curse of the Lacerda bladder did the rest. I was actually considering having a pee in an alley off Lee Street at one point.” Tanya’s eyebrows rose. “When was this?”

  “In my dream,” Zeffy explained.

  Tanya smiled. “Oh, one of those.”

  “What about you?”

  “Just thinking,” Tanya told her.

  “Deep thoughts?”

  “Weepy thoughts.”

  “Johnny call you again?”

  Tanya shook her head. “No. That’s just the problem.”

  “You’ve got to put him behind you,” Zeffy told her. “All he’s ever brought you is trouble.”

  “I know that.” Tanya sighed. A stream of blue-grey smoke escaped from between her lips. “At least my head knows it. The message just hasn’t got through to my heart yet.”

  “He told you he’d call?”

  Tanya nodded. “But it’s not like you’re thinking.” She got a rueful look. “Though maybe you’ll think this is worse. I lent him some money and—”

  “Tanya!”

  “His rent was due and he was going to pay me back this weekend. What was I supposed to do?”

  Zeffy got a sinking feeling. “How much did you lend him?”

  “Three hundred dollars. He said he’d pay me back.”

  “Tanya, our rent is due on Wednesday.”

  Tanya looked so miserable that, as soon as she’d spoken, Zeffy w
ished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  “I know,” Tanya said.

  “Do you have any money?”

  Tanya shook her head. “Not till payday.”

  Well, wasn’t that just perfect, Zeffy thought. Johnny Devlin gets to keep his apartment while they were probably going to be out on the street in his place. She did a quick mental calculation, but already knew that she couldn’t cover Tanya’s share as well as her own.

  “I’m so sorry,” Tanya told her. “I really thought he’d pay me back.”

  “It’s okay,” Zeffy said. “You meant well. I’m not mad at you, but if I had Johnny’s neck in my hands right now...”

  Zeffy had often cursed the day that Johnny Devlin walked into Kathryn’s Cafe, where she and Tanya worked as waitresses. They’d both been there for a few years now, ever since they’d finished college, appreciating the flexible hours which allowed them to have a little more freedom in their lives than they could find in the normal nine-to-five that most people had to face every day. It allowed them to “follow their own muses,” as Wendy, one of the other waitresses, put it.

  Even if Johnny had simply come in to have a meal, it would have been all right. They’d seen him out and about in the clubs, hanging around the Market and Grade Street, just another good-looking guy with big dreams and not enough energy to actually do anything about them. He hadn’t paid much attention to them, nor they to him. Same social circles, but a different coterie of friends. If he’d come in, had something to eat and then left, everything would have been different. Except he’d wanted to order something from the specials board and then he had to know who’d written it up.

  There was a running joke at Kathryn’s with the specials board. When they’d first started working at the café, Tanya had gotten stuck with the job of writing up the day’s specials and bright though she was, she’d always been an atrocious speller. The joke had started with her “crab sandwishes” and degenerated from there to “pee soup” and the like. At first Kitty, the owner, had made an effort to proof the boards before they went up, but everyone got such a kick out of them, from the staff to the customers, that Tanya’s misspellings had become a part of the café’s tradition. It had gotten to the point where they’d sit around during breaks and after hours, thinking up deliberately funny variations on the next day’s specials.

  Tanya had gotten a lot of teasing about it at first, though not from Zeffy. After all, who was she to ridicule somebody else’s spelling when her own father, in a moment of hippie bliss, had decided to name his daughter Zeffer after what he thought was the spelling for the literary term for the west wind? But it could have been worse. He could have named her after the French word for seal.

  The night Johnny came in they’d been offering “breaded soul and Trench fries” for the day’s special. After Tanya owned up to it, she and Johnny got to talking. Johnny was so taken by her that he poured on the charm as only he could and they were an item within a week. The honeymoon lasted for a couple of weeks after that and then their relationship went into the first of its many downward spirals. Johnny was never abusive, so far as Zeffy could tell; his main crime was inconsideration. Not being where he said he’d be. Not calling when he said he would. Shamelessly running after girls who, god knew why, mistook his innate cunning for intelligence, his ability to always land on his feet for charm.

  “What are we going to do?” Tanya said.

  “Besides thump him on the side of the head?”

  “No, seriously.”

  “I am being serious.”

  “I mean about our rent.”

  Zeffy sighed. “I don’t know. We’ll think of something.”

  “I really screwed up this time, didn’t I?”

  “You’re just too trusting,” Zeffy told her. “Especially when it comes to him.”

  “I always think, This time he really means it. This time he’s going to change.”

  Well, guess again, Zeffy thought. She watched Tanya light up yet another cigarette. She hated to see Tanya smoking, but it sure beat having her cranking junk into her veins again.

  “We’ll work something out,” she said. “Maybe we can even get the money back from him. When was his rent due?”

  “Last week.”

  “Well, scratch that idea. But we’re not going to let him get away with this. We’ll go by his place first thing in the morning—you’re working the breakfast shift this week, aren’t you?” When Tanya nodded, Zeffy went on. “Me, too. So well stop by on the way to work.”

  “You’re not going to get all pissed off at him, are you?”

  How someone could be as intelligent as Tanya, yet so blind when it came to Johnny Devlin, Zeffy just couldn’t understand.

  “What can you still see in him?” she asked. “What’s he ever done for you but bring you grief?”

  “I know. I guess I just feel sorry for him.”

  “That is not a good basis for a relationship,” Zeffy said.

  “I don’t think there is such a thing as a good relationship.”

  “Sure there is. We just haven’t found one yet, that’s all. The thing to do is to be happy with yourself, with what’s in your own life; then if a relationship comes along it’s a bonus, something to enjoy instead of the thing your life revolves around.”

  “Easier said than done,” Tanya said.

  She lit a new cigarette from the one she was smoking, stubbing the old butt out in an already overflowing ashtray. Zeffy watched a thin thread of smoke rise from the old butt. By the time the top of the thread reached the light overhanging the table, the bottom of it had already come apart, disappearing like an unfulfilled dream.

  Zeffy sighed. “This is true. I guess it’s one of those things that only sound good in theory.”

  “Like being in love.”

  “Are you really in love with him?” Zeffy asked.

  Tanya took a moment to consider the question.

  “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “It’s more like the equation’s incomplete. It’s not exactly over, but it’s not really on anymore either.”

  “You know what I think?” Zeffy said.

  Tanya shook her head.

  “I think you should try to get some sleep and we’ll work this all out tomorrow.”

  “You think I’m being stupid, don’t you?”

  Zeffy smiled. “Stupid’s such a harsh word. I think confused is more the way I’d describe you right now.”

  “I can be such an ass.”

  Zeffy’s smile faded. “Don’t beat up on yourself, Tanya. There’s only one person to blame for this mess and we’ll deal with him tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay.” Tanya butted out her cigarette. “I’ll try. But don’t expect any miracles.”

  “No miracles,” Zeffy agreed. “Just your money. And maybe an apology.” Tanya started to hum the old Buddy Holly hit “That’ll Be the Day.” When Zeffy flung a napkin at her and headed off to bed, she launched into the lyrics as only Tanya could—lines out of order, melody slightly off-key. Lying in her bed once more, Zeffy could still hear the song as Tanya washed up in the bathroom. She folded her pillow over her ears and tried in vain to get to sleep, but it was only when Tanya finally broke off singing and went into her own bedroom that Zeffy thought she could. She burrowed deeper under the covers, then sat up in frustration.

  “Damn,” she muttered.

  She had to go to the bathroom again.

  3 MAX

  I don’t wake up.

  I don’t wake up because I’m not dreaming. I know for sure when I finally get up from the floor. Using the dresser as leverage, I push myself to my feet and immediately cut my foot on one of the mirror shards that scattered across the rug earlier. I sit down on the edge of the bed to assess the damage, lifting my foot to my knee. The cut’s on my instep and doesn’t appear to be deep, but I have trouble concentrating on it. Everything’s wrong: the unfamiliar shape of the foot, its toes, the ankles, the calf resting on a knee bonier than I know mine t
o be, the fingers of the hand holding the foot in place.

  Don’t, I tell myself. Don’t look at the differences, don’t even think about them.

  But it’s impossible not to. I force myself to study the cut, wiping blood away from it with my finger. A drop falls free, staining the beige carpet underfoot. I don’t look at it. Instead, I lift my finger to my lips. The faint metallic taste of the blood and the ebbing pain of the cut are what convince me to accept that this is real. That I’m not dreaming. That impossible though it might be, I’m inhabiting someone else’s body, bleeding somebody else’s blood onto the carpet.

  I get up and go looking for a bathroom. Avoiding the mirror, I find a box of bandages in the medicine cabinet and take one out of it. I lower the toilet seat cover and sit down, wash the cut, dry it with toilet paper, cover it with the bandage. When I finally dare a look at the mirror, the stranger is still there on the other side of the glass, putting a lie to who I think I am.

  Maybe my memories are the lie, I find myself thinking. Maybe I have a mental disorder, some sort of schizophrenia. Maybe I suffer from multiple personalities and live any number of different lives.

  Then I study my hands. These aren’t the hands of a woodworker. There are no calluses on these hands from using tools, no cuts or scrapes from all the little unavoidable accidents that happen in even the most organized workshop. They aren’t even the hands of a musician—at least not one who plays a stringed instrument. The tips of the fingers are as devoid of calluses as the rest of the hands are.

  But I know how to work wood and play an instrument. The memories, the knowledge of my craft and tools, are too clear for me to be imagining them. No one could construct an entire lifetime the way I hold the past in my head. No one could make that much up, with so much detail.

  “I can’t deal with this,” I say.

  I put a hand to my mouth, startled by the sound, by the stranger’s voice that echoes in the confines of the bathroom. Panic arises again, shortening my breath, tightening my chest, making me dizzy, but this time I fight it off successfully.