Verge

Now would start the process of establishing the foundations of Barry living in Ms White’s apartment, and those foundations rested on a huge lie: he already knew the place, every corner of it. “See, Barry, you will be sleeping here, on this futon, which I have opened for you, and which closes, whenever you feel like turning it back into a sofa. It’s bigger than my bed, as a matter of fact, so you can roll around all you want” he had thrown her a curious eye, “but not anytime soon, ‘cause you are barely holding yourself together, you hear me?” There inside this picture frame you salvaged from the shattered bookshelves, he looked at it on a low cubic ledge located between the two windows, this is a picture of you and your aunt and uncle, they adopted you when your parents died in a car crash, you were just a little baby and they were on their way to picking you up at the daycare. Your dead father and your uncle look a bit Asian, because their grandparents were from Tajikistan.

“If you need more sheets or pillow cases, they are all located under the big drawers at the bottom of the bed in my room, remember those?” He couldn’t remember those, as he had been too busy being in debilitating pain and spellbound and excited at the same time during the two weeks that had gone by. And this new coffee machine, you bought it when you got promoted to your new echelon, because you wanted to quit spending some much money on lattes at the shop. Those wind chimes had been gifted to her by her godmother, this enormous dried plant by her mentor during her first year of teaching. He was also familiar with the LED at the top of her window wall, just below the ceiling, and with how it needed three minutes of red flashing before producing normal light. She thought it was haunted by a ghost, named Lily, who was a Black woman.

He knew all sorts of things. Where the vacuum cleaner was hidden, how to work the washing machine, the inverted stoves in the kitchen, “I bought you some shorts and socks Barry and some uh, some shirts, next door, we have a nice shop, for basic things like that. You can’t continue wearing my socks, you’re destroying them”

“Speaking of destroy” Barry said timidly, grabbing the back of a chair, “what’s that?” In the middle of the room, something resembling a piece of hipster art was throning and drawing all the attention. Ms White had collected the books collapsed from the shelves Barry had wrecked while bolting in her little space, erected four towers with their piles, and topped the whole thing with a huge cardboard box of two meters by two, cleanly angled. Its wacky Scandinavian name faced the ceiling.

She said “our new table, Barry. Maybe when you are feeling better you can build it for us”

Our table, he focused on his blinding pain to repress the smile that was menacing to explode on his face, “I thought you were an independent woman” he joked, gasped –maybe it was too soon.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing, hm. Of course I’ll build it”

Barry looked at Ms White, one of his ears was ringing and the prolonged vertical position was nauseating him, and his stomach hurt, but his eye traveled beyond her and caught sight of the large bed made out of the unfolded couch near one of French door windows, twin to the one where he had initially penetrated into this place. She had covered the mattress part of it and the thick cushions with some sky blue linen and drapes, half concealed by a fluffy blanket. The light was englobing it as if it was itself a piece of sky. She had gathered all her medical supplies of current use into a red box with a white cross on it, stored on the lower level of her glass coffee table. Around the futon and the coffee table, the apartment revealed itself.

It was a strange flat, very narrow, very small, that had been designed to follow a loop. It opened on a long and dark corridor but, there, was also a hidden passage to the only real bedroom of the lodgings near the entrance door. The hallway led to the very open area where kitchen space, dining room and living room were stacked together. Ms White had disposed her furniture, before it broke, in a way that indicated the limits of the various slots of her home, closing the kitchen space with a tall fridge, indicating the start of the living area with her main couch, and color coding the different corners. Bending with the turn of the loop, one could access back to the bedroom through a pocket-sized bathroom.

Barry felt overwhelmed with some next-level bliss. It was like stepping from the wardrobe into Narnia.

“Ill try to remember all this” he lied, I will build your table, re-invent your bookshelves from scratch, I will resurrect your plants, oh my God, those poor plants, he thought. Our table, our plants. She was holding a sticky brush for cat hair in her hand, pointing at everything. Wearing some stretchy jeans, a big jumper, some Halloween slippers, Ms White in her natural element was hard-player super-cozy; she was wearing her hair down, her face without a trace of makeup, her skin pale and droopy from exhaustion but looking like the surface of a peach, her tired eyes still very alive compared to the otherwise fatigued and sleepy state of the rest of her, because of the crazy moves of her eyebrows.

“I go to bed at nine o’clock because I wake up so early, just ‘cause, you know, capitalism” I know, Barry listened to her, “I sleep with special medication, for which you have had a taste, I believe” she smiled a disarming smile at him, surprisingly at ease sharing a lot of intimate details of her existence, but he nodded respectfully, I know, Barry thought, I will not bring dishonor to your secrets, Ms White, I will treat them with respect and cherish them.

She was on a roll “meaning you can renovate the place with a hammer or have a karaoke party, I’ll still sleep through it” She was a creature of the night, her personal space a cocoon flashing feebly out of the softest, most discreet candlelight. The little veins buzzing against the surface of her skin on her temples or underneath her eyes reminded him of a proteus, which was a blind cave-dwelling salamander that was sometimes also called an orm. That animal didn’t need skin pigmentation, nor eyes for that matter, evolving in a light-less world.

“Why don’t you keep the table as it is, its legs of books and the Ikea box as a top”

“What”

“I mean” he went for the chair on which he had been clinging, drained by bipedalism. One hand tight on his abdomen, he braced for the change of altitude and the landing on his butt, inhaled sharply “aiille I’m j j joking”

“I thought about it” the lint brush went from her left to her right hand, then back to the left.

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s… hygge” Hygge. It was a word from where Eugenie White’s ancestors came from, the Norse lands, Torneälven, to be more exact. And there was a tall poster with the definition of hygge nailed next to the coat hanger of her entrance door, providing the newly arrived guests with the tone of the whole place. Ms White might as well have displayed a life-size cardboard model of herself and what she was wearing on a daily basis, with the caption underneath, This is what hygge is, motherfuckers.

It meant, cultivating a pleasant and snug ambiance inside, or something like that, in order to recharge and to find strength from the core, from within. Grounding, rooting. The fact that it was spoken hugga in Swedish would never prevent Barry from pronouncing it hijj. He had to be faithful to his longest-running joke about refusing to memorize which country she was from, after all. She kept shaking her head at the sound, hiding her smile, pretending to shiver under the wrong vowels.

“And that” she went on, discarding the brush for her television remote control, “is my PlayStation”

“Oh shit” Barry hadn’t seen that coming. Now, that was something new. His eyes grew as wide as the vinyls she couldn’t play anymore since he had sent her to crash against her old record player. Ms White pushed a couple of keys on the controller and wrote down the login pin on a piece of paper, and then the big screen above the fireplace popped on, opening on an interface, “last time you use that console was” he squinted his eyes searching for the date in the bottom right corner, “two years ago?”

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That was when his daily missions into the city had started and when he had begun stalking her, therefore, there was a gap of three or four years with some unknown events that had come after she had rebuilt her life solo with her cat following the end of her marriage, as well as between his high school graduation and now. At that turning point in Barry’s existence, he had amassed a lot of random details about Eugenie White as in, randomly specific and biographically picky, such as the genetic heritage of her aunt, the age she was when her family moved across the ocean, the place where she had gotten married, the number of cars she had owned through time, but in contrast, he was missing some more banal information.

“Yeah it was my husband’s… my former husband’s PlayStation. I fetched it from an old box at the bottom of my closet, for you”

“He left it to you?”

“I guess he was in a rush to move out and forgot it behind” Ms White said enigmatically. She started browsing the library, “I’m sure you can find some games to install that are better than…” she frowned, her hand as a visor on top of her eyes, “GTA, some Hogwarts bullshit, wait, what’s that? Rayman? Oh my god” Who the fuck would ever leave you, Ms White, Barry wondered, who would ever leave you AND a PlayStation, for fuck’s sake? She continued scrolling down, “Formula One”

“Uuu I like Formula One”

“You do?”

“Yes, I played many race car games before”

“So did I” she replied with great animation of her eyebrows, “like what?”

“Motorfest mainly, when it came out, some old games like Grand Prix 2001”

“Old”

“Yeah like, super old” he realized his mishap too late, “no I mean, oh lord—”

“BARRY”

“I’m sorryyy iii I’m sorry” he buried his face in his hand.

“It’s okay, those games are actually ancient, when you think about it”

“Why did you stop playing like, two years ago” He tried to change the subject. Damn the hygge sound, he really needed to start being careful with his use of the word old.

Ms White looked at her feet, “I don’t know I felt… stupid”

“If only your students knew”

“My students?”

“Yeah if, they knew you are a… a gamer” they both laughed at the word, which was an exaggeration.

“They should never know, Barry, obviously” she kept smiling at him, finding the idea wild.

“But it’s cool” he said

“Jesus” she stared at him, perplexed, “you’re still not getting it, are you? I don’t want my students to think I’m cool, I want them to obey me!”

“You mean respect you”

“Obey me”

“You mean esteem you”

“Obey me!!” they burst out laughing again.

“I keep forgetting that” Barry held himself tightly through the chuckles, then froze. He noticed a pair of crutches next to Ms White, their metal part sparkling under the sun, “now what is that”

She gazed back casually, pretending to look intensely at something on the PlayStation channel, replied, “some canes, for your transportation”

“You must be kidding”

“I got them at the pharmacy”

“Thhat pharmacy?” he stretched his neck to point at the window with his head, “that disgusting place that does apothecary too?”

“I sanitized them, don’t worry” she acted unbothered, “you seem to be quite familiar with the neighborhood!”

“I did a ll lot of missions here”

“I don’t remember seeing or hearing of any of them”

“You must have been at work” one bead of sweat came out on the top of his forehead, “I’m uh… a superhero, I’m not handicapped, I’m just a little stiff”

“Let me tell you what’s happening to you right now, why you can’t walk straight”

“No need to exp—”

“That bullet that hit you in the middle of your stomach, it was not in the middle per se, it went sideways” she bent her index finger and Barry shuddered at the thought, “and in a normal clinic, with some real doctors, you would have an operation that would, I don’t know, I’m not an expert” she held on through his skeptical stare, “reconnect, I don’t know, decrease the pressure from the nerves of your abdomen to your left leg, you see? There must be a pinch there, that keeps you from putting one foot after the other like a normal human” She sounded so much like her old teacher self at the moment, thrown into her lecture, that Barry stopped listening and just reminisced, and he only heard, “no surgery” and then “feet” and then “exercises, like a lot” He didn’t care. Ms White’s past and present auras were mingling in front of his very eyes, singing a mingling song into his ears. There was magic in the air.

“I’m not walking with a cane” he became aware he was covered with sweat.

He had succeeded in annoying her, he could see and rejoice about it “And how will you get around” she questioned

The song of a siren, he thought “I have you”

“Well Barry, sorry to break it to you but I have to get back to work, on Monday. I have taken too much time off to watch over you and I can’t stay just to carry you around”

“How in the world did you manage to take all this time off by the way” Pain pain pain. Torment torment torment.

“It was… easy” Ms White said, in a manner that betrayed that it had been anything but easy. A mad flash appeared in her eyes. What did she have to do in order to escape from work one weekend to another? Some chills the size of apples dropped along his spine. The teaching world was savage and inhumane.

“What if.. a mouse crosses on your floor and I accidentally step on it with the cane”

Ms White tilted her head patiently, “what the fuck are you talking about”

“You don’t have mice here, in this downtown apartment?” When in doubt, he knew.

“My cat killed a mouse once” she agreed with him

“Are you” a pang of agony darted from the middle of his abdomen, blurring his sight ,”sss sure”

Ms White’s splendid eyebrows went their separate ways, one of them circumflexed and the other sitting straight. The plain paralyzed him for a second, so white iron infused that he had to hold himself to the table, “you’re okay, Barry?”

“When next will you give me something to uh” he breathed deeply, “sleep”

“In an hour. That’s why I wanted to switch you rooms. Barry, listen to me, I’m going back to work on Monday”

“When’s m m Monday?”

“The day after tomorrow. You need to be at this new place of residence, here, tonight, and use the canes, so you can be mobile”

“I can’t” he saw, “sit like this anymore, it’s too agonizing, sorry, can you help me”

“Barryy, try to focus for a second”

“I’m serious, can you uh… help me up” A vague taste of vomit reached his molars.

Ms White exhaled deeply, smiled at him with all the imperturbability in the world, something she could accomplish thanks to her lengthy experience with youngsters who couldn’t concentrate beyond six minutes and requested most things out of an intergalactic feeling of entitlement. She had a hearty smile, which could transform into a smile with way too many teeth inside it, something entrancing. She got up and placed her head under his elbow, pulled him up with her. “Soo heavy, you are as heavy as an elephant” she complained, but she was still smiling. A benevolent smile.

“An el… el el elephant”

Ms White scoffed, directing their path to traverse towards the bed corner, her legs curving under his weight “a hippopotamus, come on, lower, now sit, Barry” He clenched his teeth, touching down so brutally that the piece of concrete inside his stomach was pushed up against his sternum, cramped into too tight a space. “Look, success” she dropped him on the mattress “it’s alright Barry” she said softly, “in about an hour, you will sleep again”

“Maybe even ff fifty minutes”

“No sir” she sighed, grabbed the remote control and started inspecting it, ill at ease, “I have to be careful and not accidentally turn you into a drug addict. One hour is one hour”

He rested his head on the pillow and closed his eyes, “you don’t know much about my superabitilies, I guess, Ms White. Addiction isn’t possible for me” Like any time he struggled against the torture in his guts, she sat next to him and held his hand. It was something habitual now that didn’t trigger any perceivable hesitation nor nervousness in her anymore. Barry knew that she was felt doubtful and adrift a vastness of unknowns that were not hygge at all, but once more, he admired that she was doing her best just to be a nurse, a watchful eye and a presence to him through his ordeal.

It seemed that she proceeded out of an automatism, which was a reassuring structure for her. He was cold? She would raise the temperature of her heater. He was hot? She was bring him some ice cubes. She would feed him if he was hungry and hydrate him if he was thirsty. She would clean him up to avoid infections within the exposed and inflamed shreds of his skin. If he was in pain, she would give him a sleeping pill. If he was fighting painful hours, she would sit him and hold his hand encouragingly.

She later on would paint a clearer picture of her autism to him, with the months to come, and describe her need for a repetitive system, for a precedent to base herself on in order to carry on. She would say that it made her feel like she never knew if the world approved of her way to respond to situations, that she just hoped for the best, that she rarely followed her heart in novel situations. He wondered if he would ever manage to poke that bubble and get to the real Ms White. He swore himself that he would try with all his might.

“So why can you get hurt from being shot but not from falling off a building?”

“I don’t know” he chuckled, “aiille fuuck”

“You actually don’t know your own superabilities yourself!” she teased him

“Once I was also hit by a train”

“YOU WERE?”

“It was going slow, but still, it smashed right into me”

“And then?”

“Not a scratch”