Read Online Munich Airport by Greg Baxter - Free Book Online Page A

can do nothing about. I close my eyes. I try to concentrate on something that pleases me. A single memory of comfort and pacification.
    The line for the urinals moves swiftly, but the line for the stalls is stagnant. There is a bushy-haired man in a pin-striped suit who has just filled a newly empty spot at the urinal. I look at him for a long time, and I do not know why I look at him, until I realize that I recognize him, I know him. His name is Richard and he is, or was, the VP of marketing at one of the big banks. I know him because his wife was a friend of my ex-wife’s. He’s a tall, handsome man whom I remember always smiling and always a little tipsy. Though we always got along fine, I don’t think we ever liked each other enough to be friends independent of everybody else. His suit is tailored. I have a suit a lot like his suit, a similar shade of blue. And I wear it with shoes that are nearly the same as his shoes, a light saddle-brown. I recognize him because of his hair and because of his height and the fact that one of his shoulders is slightly sloped. I am standing by the sinks. He finishes, zips up, turns around, and sees me. I smile and he gives me an uncomfortable smile back. He doesn’t recognize me. The men along the wall of urinals, all of them, finish all at once, and everybody, including Richard, walks to the sinks, which sends them right through us, the line for the stalls, osmotically. As Richard washes his hands, I sense that he’s looking at me through the mirrors. He dries his hands. He takes a while, and I know now that he has, at last, recognized me, and has to decide whether he will stop and say hello. Perhaps I don’t look well enough. He passes. He goes right by, and he does not slow down or lift his head. The time that elapses after that, between his departure and my turn in one of the stalls, is a kind of infinity, and when I shut the door behind me and am finally ready to throw up, I feel, surprisingly, fine. The nausea is gone. I do not sit. I just stand and close my eyes and put my forehead against the door. I cannot imagine the fatigue Miriam must have experienced, without any bodyweight to burn. It makes, of course, perfect sense that her apartment was, by the end, such a mess, so untidy. Over the past few days, I have thought often of the stillness that must have inhabited that apartment at times, when she was very tired and lying in bed. I presume, or at least I hope, that the nausea and the headaches and everything else are something your body absorbs after weeks or months or years of malnutrition, and that the hunger, especially at the very end, the last days, didn’t cause her a huge amount of pain, and didn’t add any more madness to the madness that allowed her to decide to die from this.
    The place where we stayed during our first week in Berlin—the week before we briefly upgraded to a private apartment, then got a rental car and drove to the Rhineland—was a grubby little hotel that had, in each room, a tiny single bed pressed up against one corner. I didn’t fit on mine, and so my father, who is the same height as me, could not have fit on his. On each bed was a thin duvet that was half as narrow as the mattress, and made you sleep completely straight, like a plank, as well as a thin pillow that I had to fold up many times. Sleep was stressful and unrefreshing. There was an orange chair in my room and a yellow chair in my father’s room. They were tulip chairs. Beside the chairs were little round tables. The bathrooms were green, entirely green, from the sinks to the tubs to the toilets to the towels to the toilet paper. The walls of the room were brown, the brown of fresh, strong coffee. The rooms had light, white, cloth curtains for privacy during the day, and at night, to shut out light, you pulled down metal shutters. I did this the first night without thinking and had an anxiety attack when I woke in the middle of the night in