I Called Him Necktie Read Free Page A

them into a bowl. Plip-plop, it sprinkled on him. I was surprised. No salaryman likes to sit out in the rain. The park all around was indistinct and blurry. People scurrying everywhere. Nobody who is healthy sits out in the rain. Completely absorbed, already soaked to the bone, he seemed to experience no greater joy than to get wet like that. I stared transfixed at his happy face. He opened his eyes. He looked at me unexpectedly through the rain. I jumped up. I hadn’t counted on that. Not with this unexpected, knowing look. I am not alone, it said, you are there. Then he closed his eyes again.
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    I had fallen out of my anonymity, out of my cocoon. But that’s not quite right. His glance and the recognition he shined on me had merely illuminated the space around me a little. In the mornings he nodded to me. I nodded back. In the evenings he raised his hand as he left. I raised mine. A silent understanding. You are here. I am here. We both have the right to simply be here.
    What changed between us was just one thing. I guessed it. Since he had seen me, I had become an image within him. Now he had a conception of me, and his daily greeting related to the image he had of me. He regarded it. Quietly. His look was not invasive. It was stored in hismemories. He remembered a day by the sea, with fine sand, rough dune grass; he remembered his father’s beard, hard stubble on his chin, a certain light, how it fell on his wife’s back one morning in late autumn, a smile in a shop window, by chance, the warm fur of a cat that snuggled up against him. He had thousands of memories, thousands of images, and now, since he had noticed me, I was one of them.
    I let it happen. I offered him my profile, held still, so he could absorb it. Looked over at him as well. Absorbed him further within me. So out of our minimal acquaintance grew a minimal friendship.
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    To speak with one another would still at this point in time have been going too far. There was a frontier, the gravel path. Here my bench, there – his. Between them were blades of grass, a rolling ball, a child tumbling after it.
    I had practiced forgetting how to speak for two years. Granted, I had not succeeded. The language I had learned permeated me, and even when I was silent, my silence was eloquent. I spoke inner monologues, spoke incessantly into the void. But the sound of my voice had become alien to me. At night I sometimes woke bathed in sweat from a nightmare, only to find it continuing in the hoarse Aah forced from my belly, my lungs, my throat. Who is that shouting there, I asked myself, and fell asleep again. Wandered through a landscape in which every sound echoed as it was uttered. The last sentence I had spoken had been: I can no longer. Period. A vibrating period. After that something snapped shut. The effort it would cost to go on talking from where I had stopped was outweighed by thefutility of expressing the inexpressible in words.
    My room was like a cave, as always. I had grown up here. I had essentially lost my innocence here. I mean, growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself. I mourned the child I had once been, whom I heard in rare moments pummeling wildly in my heart. At thirteen it was too late. At fourteen. At fifteen. Puberty a battle, I lost myself by the end. I hated my face in the mirror, the growing, the surging within. The scars on my hand all stem from the attempts to make it better. Countless mirrors smashed. I didn’t want to be a man who thinks he is winning. Didn’t want to fit into any suit. Not to be a father who tells his son: You must work. Father’s voice. Mechanical. He worked. When I looked at him I saw a future in which I would slowly, too slowly, lose my life. Nothing works, I replied. And then: I can no longer. This last sentence was my maxim. The motto that defined me.
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    Defined in that way I was sitting on my bench when he suddenly reappeared, exactly at nine. It was a Thursday, I