Asunder Read Free Page A

eyes and tongues, the mentally impaired guards at one of Munich’s painting collections, and the custodians at Pompeii who flicked ash from their cigarettes into the ruins.
    After he’d brought up some of these details yet again that evening, reminding me of the great yet for the most part untapped range of variables in our profession, I returned the conversation to poor Leighton Crooke, whose fading pulse I could still feel between my fingers, but as I spoke I could see Daniel’s attention beginning to drift.
    The girl at the bar was calling out—with a rather pronounced lisp that didn’t match her looks—to a man who was walking away without collecting his change. But for a few degrees her face was nearly turned in our direction. Daniel made himself taller in his chair, straining to enter her line of vision.
    Most of the time, like me, he did not care to draw notice to himself and was similarly content to carry out life at low volume. There was an abundance of loud people in the world, we agreed, and someone had to compensate, bring the dial down halfway. We preferred to stand back, cross our arms, and observe. The world was full of people rushing around trying to change things or make themselves seen. So it fell to the rest of us to withdraw from the foreground, just like those distant bluish landscapes in old paintings, so discreet you only notice them later. I liked to imagine our kind as thinkers in training, a flow of indefinite blue that deepens over time.
    Ships in bottles steered by one tiny captain, Daniel liked to say. He too enjoyed the invisibility, of having gazes wash over him with indifference. But there at the pub that night he was desperate to have his presence acknowledged.
     
    His first glimpse of her had been a profile, as she’d held a goblet to the tap of Leffe and waited for it to fill, and he’d stood at the bar transfixed, longing to see up close the face within the bob, the kind of cut-glass bob that in silent films framed a whole catalogue of faces. A new employee, he assumed, or the publican’s daughter home from somewhere. He had never seen her before.
    ‘She kind of looks like you but with a wonky eye,’ he’d later said, and I remember being half flattered, half aghast, at the thought of looking like anyone or anyone looking like me, yet was intrigued by the wandering eye Daniel mentioned, wired up to its own puppeteer. From where I was sitting I could see there was indeed a resemblance, and when he returned, emboldened, to the bar for another round, he commented on her jagged black fringe, like that of a cabaret singer whose hair had been trimmed in the dark.
    ‘Kind of like yours,’ he’d added, with which again I had to agree, though I had my flatmate Jane to thank for that; she was the one in charge of trimming my fringe and also did it in the dark, in the darkness of self-absorption.
     
    Daniel and I each had our collections, private and public, and beyond their horizons all we required was one solid friend. Neither of us had anyone else of significance in our lives, though every now and then he would fall prey to an obsession, for the most part unrequited, and I would have a brief encounter, usually with someone I dimly knew from my past, that didn’t threaten the peace.
    After meeting, ours had quickly settled into a friendship with thankfully little ambiguity, and though I was drawn to his face and found myself studying it from different angles, even having faintly erotic dreams about him once or twice a year, I could never imagine getting close.
    At thirty-three my romantic past was far from populated—a modest list of names with few pangs attached, perhaps one or two vague regrets but certainly no one for whom I longed to rewind time. As for Daniel, he’d been married in his early twenties to a Japanese nurse, and the only lasting result of those three years, he said, was a twenty-eight-line poem, ‘False Door to the Tomb’. He still occasionally dreamt of