How Was Your Day Dear?
Five walk into a bar. Barman says: “We don’t serve-five here”. He dies in a hail of lead.
What kind of a way is that to start a serious story, I say to myself. It’s fine, I reply tartly, if you’re Etgar Keret. Who the hell is that, I whine, but it’s too late – I’ve lost interest and walked away.
I mention this to the receptionist with the bulging chest, on the way out of the bar, but she obviously thinks I’m too old or too young to speak to. She fingers her iphone. Hating to be bested by technology, I pull out my own phone to show her that I’m not really interested in her. I’m still standing at her desk when my phone emits a squeal and some smoky flames. I drop it on her desk, which at least gets her attention. She looks at me with a passion that I hope is intense lust, but then I am discouraged by her Adam’s apple and hairy chest. Anyway, her lips are too thin. I lose interest as she snarls something disrespectful in a cigaretted voice.
I sense that it’s time to go, and go. On the street, I hear faint shouting from the bar, but that part of my life is behind me now, and I jump quickly into a junk shop just to adjust my junk. As I’m discreetly doing this, a faded cigar store Indian next to me unexpectedly tells me there’s a rest room out back. I can smell the acid in her words; she’s the damn proprietor! There are many ways I could respond, some involving an escalation of my turpitude. I review them quickly and select “Suave Insouciance”, because it sounds French and I‘ve never gone astray with a French fix.
I program a Charles Boyer voice and purr “Vaffanculo a chi t’è morto!”, before I realize with alarm that this is not French but Italian, and I have no idea what I have just said. This may sound unlikely, but in times of great stress, I channel foreign languages which I do not understand. Universities have not yet proved this to be true, and until they do, the judicial system refuses to accept my position. I therefore have to be circumspect.
I ask, in a conversational manner, whether the proprietor speaks Italian. She shouts at me in Yiddish that she hasn’t spoken Italian since Mussolini invaded New York. I am not sure whether I am ignorant or she is confused, but I glimpse a way forward.
I ask her if she knows that Harry Potter was Jewish. She suddenly smiles mysteriously, and whispers: “Of course….he is my son…”.
Losing my grip on the conversation, I hazard: “And you know this…how?…exactly?”
“I saw him burst from my front bottom, waving his wand and speaking in Latin”.
“When was this?” I say, doubtfully. “The second Tuesday in each month” she says, and I realize that this woman is not really the proprietor, but a crazy homeless person pretending to be a customer. Now I notice her shopping trolley piled high with stained clothing and discarded food. I feel foolish and tainted by this conversation. I need a shower, and perhaps an injection or two.
I back away but now the door is a revolving door with all the universal archetypes of the collective unconscious which that imports. Should I bolt through it, or stay and try to analyse this woman? Is she me? Am I rotten? (I suddenly recall my anal worms).
Disoriented, I fumble for a firm handle in this unexpected crisis. I find one. It is on the toilet door, whimsically marked “Kings”. I briefly wonder how the female toilet is marked, before stumbling through into a blindingly white room, which beguilingly fades into a warmly lit Tuscan landscape I saw once in a calendar. I urgently need to walk into that landscape at the other end of the room. I do.
I start to suspect that I am dreaming, but no dream could be so…factual.
I remember that my wife will be getting worried about me; I should be home. She will ring my upper levels of consciousness, and who knows how they will explain my absence; there could be Trouble! I need to get back to things and make sense. I distantly recall a concatenation of words which might guide me: an alchemical formula for daily structure, which will shield me from the creepy stuff which whispers under my bed and at the dark fringes of silence.
This incantation takes the form of a Call and Response. “How are you?”, it begins, and the Response is “Fine thanks. How are you?” At face value, it is a simple greeting ritual, but I understand now that, like chalk pentagrams and garlic, it is in fact a spell, and I invoke it now.
“Hello. How are you?” I ask the police officer holding my arm. He says “Fine thanks. How are you?”
———-
“What’s going on here?” the police officer asks, as the sounds of the city street lacerate my soul. I wonder why he’s interested in me, but then I notice that I am eating a live python which resents it.
I am wearing my office clothes but my pants are around my ankles. A passing child stares at my crotch, and starts to make a remark, but its mother hurries it away.
I have the strange feeling that I have awoken in a dream, but this is too….factual.
I explain to the police officer that I was born prematurely and I was AWOL for much of the seventies, but he is too young to understand. He offers to take me home.
After he explains that he means my home, I acquiesce, though it makes me feel like my aged father.
I get out of the police car, and the young cop takes me to my door. My wife is visibly alarmed by his presence, but I defuse a difficult situation. I ask the policeman how he is, and he says he is fine. I thank him and he goes.
I am relieved to be home.