a rag.
He asked Anna where she’d gotten the idea and she told him how earlier in the day an elderly gentleman had mistaken her for a prostitute and propositioned her while Du was buying gum. This shocked him almost as much as the proposal itself and he looked away, shuffling in a head-bowed, punch-drunk silence.
(Eventually.) ‘You like this place?’
She said, ‘Yeah, why not.’
He tried to speed up his thoughts. ‘Well, I don’t know about all this love of decay and dark dripping warehouses. I mean, you might try to take out your contacts every once in a while if you don’t want to go blind, and you might want to change your clothes every once in a while, and, yeah, this new obsession of yours is really going to help, although, although I think any dirty old man on St-Laurent would lose his erection if he was standing downwind of you and your –’
‘I doubt it.’
2 We weren’t fond of boys ourselves, but our opinion here is not relevant.
‘Sure.’ He deflated. ‘Sure. Me too. Anyway, this place is falling apart. There must be a million squatters living here.’
‘I can’t afford to fix it. I’m warehouse poor.’
‘Oh.’
‘Dumuzi … I’m going to let you sleep with me.’
‘But you want me to pay you, Anna.’
‘So just forget about that part.’
‘Anna, you want me to pay you a lot of money.’
‘Let’s say you don’t have to pay me all that much. I’m only asking you to pay for what most men think they have the god-given right to get for free.’
‘So why shouldn’t I think that too?’
‘Don’t you think that’s a little arrogant?’
‘You think it’s good for men to pay for sex? Wow.’
‘I’m saying it might be good for me to get paid for sex. It might fulfil some sort of destiny.’
‘Oh, I can’t stand it!’
And this is when Dumuzi’s fist hit the pillar, compromising, it would appear, the integrity of the building, and that’s when Runner fell through the ceiling above and landed behind them, among a bunch of cardboard boxes. 3
3 It might be of interest as well to note how, on this day, on the other side of the world from there, everyone who could was getting out of Baghdad, filling the outlying cities of Rawa and Anna. Water was scarce and the American dollar was worth 2700 Iraqi dinars. According to the Blogger of Baghdad. (Aline’s note.)
A new quality Du was beginning to notice about himself was his capacity to be grateful for events that reasonable people might find abhorrent or tragic, as long as these events deflected the attention of his tormentors. The truth is that he would have preferred the whole city to come down on their heads in that moment, but he had to make do with Runner Coghill, falling like debris. He unshouldered his backpack and ran over to the crumpled girl set like a small broken mannequin among the boxes and the stones. She was screaming, though Du realised as he got closer that she was shouting not incoherent pain so much as the name of a boy:
‘NEIL! NEIL! I’M HURT!’
The girl paused to reflect, loud enough for Du to hear, ‘Oh I don’t think a dose of Prozac is going to help this kind of pain.’ She was talking over his head though, aiming her thoughts straight for Anna.
‘Oh. Hi. I guess that came as a shock to you. I seem to have –’ Anna cut in, having forgotten her former business, and was trying to figure out uh what this intruder uh was uh doing here.
‘Well, I don’t really mean to be here. Upstairs is where I –’
Interrupted by Anna again, who meant to say, ‘The uh building. How did you come to be in the uh building?’
‘Cool it, sister. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.’
Now, Runner Coghill was not exactly a looker, not by any stretch of the imagination and certainly not to Dumuzi. Runner was small. She looked like a Grey Nun out on a day pass – you could imagine her in a wimple. She was almost weightless, with translucent skin, a haughty nose – a pig nose she sometimes called it in her own garment-rending arias of despair, which were private and known to us only because they were occasionally gossiped about in fits of envy of which we are not proud. And she let her hair grow more thickly over her bumps, to try and cover them up, though this practice only augmented them. They were called pilar cysts. She insisted that everyone know what they were called even though she was supposedly trying to hide them. That is the way she was. She boasted about her minor ailments while keeping the most prominent one – the actual life-threatening one – entirely to herself. We are still amazed to report that she kept it a secret, though the primary sign, the telltale one, would have been obvious to a medically minded person had there ever been one in the group – this primary sign being that her eyes popped right out of her head, more so with every passing month, so much so that you might think she was staring even when she was not, though she did sometimes stare. It was disconcerting to some, most immediately to Dumuzi, who felt a little Gordian knot of fear every time he caught her eye, even though he was literally twice her size.
So when this wreckage of a girl, crumpled up in a coat, having fallen through the ceiling seconds before, said, to the perfect Anna, ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,’ Du, after a moment’s uncomprehending shock, laughed, a sort of stunned laugh. And that’s when the girl noticed him for the first time.
Being broken in the presence of the male gaze would have made Runner feel overwhelmed under normal circumstances but, beyond a few fleeting thoughts4, she was in too much of a hurry to be overwhelmed at the moment. Still, it was fortunate she’d got some warning, because a second later Du swooped in and was crouched very close to her, examining her, opening her coat, uncovering her, touching her leg. She gasped for air with a little yelp that she hoped sounded like an expression of pain and not its opposite, and squeezed her eyes shut.
‘Anna, I think she’s broken her leg.’
Anna swore. Runner drew a breath and let it exhale without speaking. And then drew another.
And then began to explain patiently to them – well, to Anna, still ignoring Du despite the temperance he’d suddenly inspired in her – about her ailments. She said that she was sorry, that she had a mild form of osteoporosis which, she felt, made a bad combination with her epileptic tendencies (which tendencies she was fabricating for the first time in that very moment), but that she was also really quite grateful for it, her osteoporosis, because it made her a very modern thinker. It forced her to think about the body in art and the world. Like, for instance, how was she going to get her body, broken leg and all, up to the fifth floor of this building, if she had willed herself already up to the second and it had brought her, of its own volition, right back down to the first? How was she going to get this useless shell of a body, this inattentive and ungrateful husk, back up to the second, and beyond to the third, fourth and finally to the fifth, especially when faced with such a pair of uncomprehending and unsympathetic faces as now looked down upon her?
4 His cheeks were stubbled, like the bark of a tree … the hair on his head grew thick as laundry … his beauty was consummate. He was tall! He was magnificent! He was terrible! He would scour [Runner’s]