The First Meeting
Roy Lazarus
30 June 2009, 05:52I had been sitting on an old wooden bench, by a bright blue sign post that said in big, white, cheerful letters – “Sjvälmord Väg”, for 10 minutes, waiting, not without some degree of anxiety, for her to show up. All this while, I clutched in the sweaty palm of my right hand, my barely functional, crap of a mobile phone, looking every ten seconds or so, at a text message that read:”Cool. Meet u Sjvälmord road 5 pm 2moro. C ya soon!”, and then contemplating assiduously for the next ten seconds, about all the implicit promises the message was pregnant with, before repeating the whole ritual all over again.
I was almost an hour early, but then it wasn’t like I led a particularly busy existence, or a life of too much productivity, wherein an hour spent idly dreaming on a roadside bench might lead to some global economic crisis. No sir! On the contrary, I looked the exact opposite of such a man, dressed in a pair of hand-ripped jeans, and a grayish-black tee shirt that said in big, bloody letters – “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. I looked to be very much in familiar company with the other two people on the bench; ‘Goldilocks’, a putrid smelling guy, with wild, golden dreadlocks who had the hollow, expressionless eyes of a crack-addict, and an even funnier smelling man, dressed in rags (those looked very real, unlike mine), who was rummaging through a bag of trash, at a pace that seemed to suggest that he had all the time in the world and that he’d rather spend it handling trash, than doing anything else. Looking back, I now realize how ridiculously futile the whole scene looked. Me, in my geeky glasses and a geekier haircut thinking I was looking very ‘indie’ and trying agonizingly hard not to look the typical geeky Indian I knew I actually was, surrounded by my equally deluded entourage.
Goldilocks turned to me and muttered something unintelligible. I smiled and nodded my head. You see, I was playing the role of the ‘polite foreigner’ who smiles at every local, and okays whatever they say, however ridiculous, and is so polite that you begin to suspect that his politeness is motivated not by some inherent predisposition of character but rather by a fear of getting bashed up by a bunch of irate locals. I needn’t have been afraid of Goldilocks though, as I now realize having found some wisdom, he was too busy living out his ‘life’ in the world of his creation to bother with any punitive action in this world.
Tired of my elaborate ritual by now, I fidgeted around for a while, unsure of what to do. The road seemed deserted, except for the three of us. I suppose this wasn’t a very popular street. There was a thin paperback book lying on the bench, between me and Garbage man. I picked it up. It was in poor shape, it looked like it had weathered some rather bad storms in its lifetime, but it still looked pretty readable. Unfortunately, not to me as it was in Swedish. The cover read “Pippi Långstrump”. I flipped through the pages, looking casually at the pictures inside not really making any effort to decipher the story, but flipping mechanically nonetheless simply because I had nothing better to do. As I was indulging in this mindless exercise, I suddenly heard a soft, “Hey!”.
I looked up. Glowing Persian skin against the mellow Scandinavian sun, reddish brown hair cascading in curls over her flimsy shoulders, dressed in a tight pewter colored jacket, she stood in front of me, smiling gaily. What was she so happy about, I wonder. Was it this meeting with me that made her so merry, or had she too been thinking about the night ahead?
I jumped up quite awkwardly with a suddenness of motion that must have given away my trepidation. She had extended her arms, I now realize to give me a hug, but I clumsily shook her hand. In hindsight however, of which I now have aplenty, I wasn’t wholly to blame for this clumsiness as I had spent most of my life growing up in some of the most repressive suburbs of conservative India, and wasn’t exactly used to hugging pretty girls on first sight. Indeed, if one takes into account all the agonizing years I spent jailed in singularly unisex schools I think I carried myself rather well.
We walked into a pub, that had a sign board out in the front, on which was scrawled in small, squalid letters:” Happy Hour from 5-7 pm. Come and Enjoy.” It was surprisingly crowded, considering it was only five in the evening.
“Swedes love to drown their sorrows down a mug of beer”, she said and winked at me.
We took up a table by what appeared to be a relatively lonely corner and ordered two lagers for ourselves. I looked at her and her thick jacket.
“Aren’t you hot?”, I ventured, making my first attempt at conversation.
“Yeah, I think I’ll take this off.”
So saying, she took off her jacket and rolled it up, revealing in the process a pair of thin, creamy white hands, a floral top, and a hint of cleavage.
“Is that the tattoo you told me about?”, I asked, pointing at the tattoo she had on the wrist of her left hand. It was small and circular, about three to four centimeters in diameter, with another smaller circle inside of it and a design inside that looked like a hybrid between a cross and a swastika.
“Yup. The symbol of Crass. This here depicts how this society will ultimately destroy itself”, she said, moving her hand closer to me and pointing with her right hand at a design between the two circles that vaguely resembled an Ouroboros.
“Ahh…looks good on you”, I said sincerely.
She smiled and brushed away a strand of hair that seemed to be taking a cantankerous pleasure in placing itself between her mouth and her beer mug. I smiled back. Suddenly I found myself back in time to the day when we had first ‘met’ on that internet chat room. The forum that promised to ‘deliver’ to each and every one of us that special someone that we had been searching for so long but were unable to find because we had been too afraid to venture out into the real world and look for ourselves. Bits and pieces of our conversations floated around in my head, like numerous colorful streamers dropping slowly to the ground.
We had started out talking about ourselves – who we were and who we wanted to be. She told me her story, how she was born in Iran but her family moved to Sweden when she was 10. How her father left her mother and her two years later for a blue-eyed, blond haired Swedish ‘skank’. How she had foolishly made a show of hating everything Iranian ever since in the hopes of winning back her father’s affection and approval with no visible results yet. How she had turned to punk music as a window to salvation from her despair and anger, and how she got molested by a bunch of drunk, jeering skinheads, while returning from a Black Flag concert.
She told me all and I felt like I knew her life, as well as my own. I on my part, told her my story, which wasn’t much and was pretty straight-forward but by no means too happy or fruitful. We moved on to talking about random things and people that interested us then; Kafka, Trakl, klezmer, veganism, Rimbaud, LSD, Warhol, and Ian Curtis. We argued late into the nights and sometimes right till dawn about the meanings of the weirdest movies we had seen; Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Metropolis, Salo, and Stroszek, we discussed it all. Finally we came full circle, back to talking about ourselves, who we were and who we would never be.
“Beer for your thoughts?”, she said, holding up her beer mug breaking my reverie.
“Hmm…Oh, I was just thinking how wonderful it is to finally meet you…face to face”, I said slowly, and tried to smile.
“Ahh…”, her voiced trailed.
I looked at her. She had been drinking steadily all this time while I was lost in the past and her beer was now almost over. Her left hand was at her hair making tiny ringlets with her delicate fingers further curling her already curly hair. I noticed that she had glassy eyes with a faint hint of a green in them. At that moment I felt an overbearing desire to sit down next to her, hold her tight in my arms, and to never let go. But all I could manage then, was a lame, “You look tired…are you OK?”
She told me she was fine. It’s just that she’d been too excited to sleep properly looking forward to this meeting and thinking about it, she said. I nodded my head and sipped my beer. I told her I understood. I was not lying. I really did. Had I not been doing the same thing all this time? Thinking day and night about this day, agonizing over all the details planning all that I would do. Indeed, torturing myself so much with it now that the day had finally come I was too tired to do all the things I had thought about.
We sat in the pub till around nine drinking pint after pint of beer making familiar conversationand looking at some of the people that came and went. There was an ugly old man with a ruddy, unshaven face and a rotund frame who was our unacknowledged favorite. He kept falling off his bar-stool which seemed too tiny for him, and his pants kept falling off his waist so that when he would get up on the stool again we were treated to the sight of his pink, flabby buttocks. We watched him for quite sometime, looking at how he subjected himself to the fruitless exercise of trying to sit on the stool long enough to order his drink and we raised a toast to the ‘momentous’ occasion when he finally did get his glass of Spitfire. Finally, we got tired of sitting and decided to walk back to her place. It was a bit far away, she said, but we both wanted to walk.
As we stepped outside of the dark, shady, interior of the pub, both of us immediately and instinctively shielded our eyes. The sun was still out in the Scandinavian sky. I guess one never really did get used to the little absurdities of life however long one had been living them. As we started walking, she slipped her hands into mine. They were cold, but incredibly soft, and the feeling on the whole was very enjoyable.
We reached her place at around eleven. We had deviated from the straight route to walk along the canal road, and had sat for sometime by the canal side watching ships come and go. It was beautiful, watching ships come and go. I mean, when I say it aloud now, ‘watching ships come and go’, it sounds very mundane, even boring, but I cannot describe in words, the serenity it gave me then. When even the stubborn Scandinavian sun began to set, we finally rose and resumed our walking. It had been a soothing walk, and an even more soothing detour, and all the nervousness I had felt when we started out for her place had disappeared by the time we were at her doorstep.
She told me to sit down and make myself comfortable while she would be back from the bathroom in a minute. I sat down on the bed, with a Daffy duck bed sheet on it, and looked around. It was a small, one bedroom, student apartment. The walls were a pristine white and covered with several posters; P J Harvey, Crass, Jim Morrison and Joy Division. Her desk was cluttered with books and CDs. I got up, and picked up the pile of CDs. Penis Envy, The Idiot, Waiting For The Sun, and Unknown Pleasures. Ah, Unknown Pleasures! There it was! Finally, something that I had planned on, I thought to myself.
Just as I had finished inserting the CD in her music player, she walked in. She had changed into a flimsy black night gown; her face looked moist and her hair glistened like it had just been washed. In her hand she held two glasses of red wine. She walked up very close to me and my fingers brushed against hers as I silently took the glass from her. They were shaking – her fingers. Was she nervous? I suppose it was natural given the circumstances. She sat down next down to me and leaning into me slowly sipped her wine in silence. As I took in long sips of the wine, and swirled it around in my mouth moving my tongue in circles trying to savor and feel every ounce of taste of that cheap wine, I could feel her breathing get heavier and heavier. The room was dimly lit but I didn’t need any light to imagine, nay see her bosom go up and down in tandem with her breathing. After sometime though, she stopped heaving, and finished the remaining wine in her glass in one big gulp, and got up.
“Are you ready?”, she asked smiling.
I was quivering, and had not my wine glass been empty, I would certainly have spilled some of it on my jeans. I tried to nod my head, I think. She wrapped her arms around my head and pulled me close to the warmth and softness of her breasts and whispered into my left ear.
”Don’t worry. It’ll be alright. Don’t you worry.”
I remained there, in that position for a full five minutes, while she lowered her head onto mine. Various thoughts flooded my head, in some kind of a violent, nostalgic whirlpool, while I tried to swim and extricate myself out of it, holding onto just her warmth for support. Finally when the train of useless thoughts stopped, I asked her in a hoarse voice, “Do you have it?”
She rubbed her curly, wet hair, one last time against my head, and released me from her embrace. Those had been the best five minutes of my life and I was disappointed when it was over, though I tried not to show it.
“Yes, and I have one extra, just in case one of them breaks or something”.
She went up to her desk and took them out one by one and laid them on the bed. I got on all fours and went over to that side of the bed and peered at them. There was something perversely beautiful about them. Each one of them was long, quite long, and almost a centimeter thick. I remembered thinking to myself –‘So these are the very doors that lead to a whole new exciting world?’
I looked up at her. She was smiling contentedly. Maybe it was the dim light but her eyes didn’t look so glassy anymore. She kissed me lightly on my lips, and set about completing the rest of the ritual with nimble, steady hands. In two minutes, we were all set. Everything was ready.
“So this is it?”, I asked, looking deep into her green eyes, my hands on her bare shoulders.
“This is it”, she said, after what seemed like a lifetime of a pause, during which time the whole world stood still; we stood still, peering into each others eyes, feeling each others souls unite in one sorrowful, understanding communion.
It was pretty easy after that. I just had to follow her lead without thinking.
One final glance, one silent goodbye, one last smile. I do not remember who went first. Me or her. I was too scared to look in her direction, for the fear that I might see something horrible and frighteningly painful that would make me change my mind.
As I kicked the white, plastic chair away, and bid farewell to the white plastic world and let my body go limp, the only thing I was aware of was the sound of water running from a tap and a pain-tinged voice singing gloomily, somewhere in the distance:
“This is the room, the start of it all,
Through childhood, through youth, I remember it all,
Oh I’ve seen the night filled with bloodsport and pain.
And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained.
Where will it end? Where will it end?
Where will it end? Where will it end?”
