The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel Read Free

market stalls for the cashier. Some time after the start of the last show, she came out. So as not to frighten her by coming at her from between the stalls, he sat there on a crate until she got to the more brightly lit part of the Naschmarkt. Behind the lowered shutter in one of the stalls, a telephone was ringing; the stand’s phone number was written in large numerals on the metal sheet. “No score,” Bloch thought at once. He followed the cashier without actually catching up with her. As she got on the bus, he strolled up and stepped aboard after her. He took a seat facing her but left several rows of seats between them. Not until new passengers blocked his view after the next stop was Bloch able to think again. She had certainly looked at him but obviously hadn’t recognized him; had the mugging changed his looks that much? Bloch ran his fingers over his face. The idea of glancing at the window to check what she was doing struck him as foolish. He pulled the newspaper from the inside pocket of his jacket and looked down at the letters but didn’t read. Then, suddenly, he found
himself reading. An eyewitness was testifying about the murder of a pimp who’d been shot in the eye at close range. “A bat flew out of the back of his head and slammed against the wallpaper. My heart skipped a beat.” When the sentences went right on about something else, about an entirely different person, with no paragraph, Bloch was startled. “But they should have put a paragraph there,” thought Bloch. After his abrupt shock, he was furious. He walked down the aisle toward the cashier and sat diagonally across from her, so that he could look at her; but he did not look at her.
    When they got off the bus, Bloch realized that they were far outside the city, near the airport. At this time of night, it was a very quiet area. Bloch walked along beside the girl but not as if he was escorting her or even as if he wanted to. After a while he touched her. The girl stopped, turned, and touched him too, so fiercely that he was startled. For a moment the purse in her other hand seemed more familiar to him than she did.
    They walked along together a while, but keeping their distance, not touching. Only when they were on the stairs did he touch her again. She started to run; he walked more slowly. When he got upstairs, he recognized her apartment by the wide-open door. She attracted his attention in the dark; he walked to her and they started in right away.
    In the morning, wakened by a noise, he looked out the window and saw a plane coming in for a landing. The blinking lights made him close the curtain. Because they hadn’t turned on any lights, the curtain had stayed open. Bloch lay down and closed his eyes.
    With his eyes closed, he was overcome by a strange inability to visualize anything. He tried to tell himself the names he knew for each thing in the room, but he couldn’t picture anything; not even the plane he had just seen landing, though he might have recognized in his mind, probably from earlier experience, the screeching of its brakes on the runway. He opened his eyes and looked for a while at the corner where the kitchen was: he concentrated on the tea kettle and the wilted flowers drooping in the sink. He had barely closed his eyes again when the flowers and the tea kettle were unimaginable. He resorted to thinking up sentences about the things instead of words for them, in the belief that a story made up of such sentences would help him visualize things. The tea kettle whistled. The flowers were given to the girl by a friend. Nobody took the kettle off the hot plate. “Would you like some tea?” asked the girl. It was no use: Bloch opened his eyes when he couldn’t stand it any more. The girl was asleep beside him.
    Bloch grew nervous. If the pressure of everything around him when his eyes were open was bad, the pressure of the words for everything out there when
his eyes were closed was even worse. “Maybe it’s because