Zary Fekete
The mirror in the airplane bathroom is too small to see my shoulders, so I only look at my eyes.
Outside the window, it is winter, and everything below us is the flat, gray white of Minnesota. The Europe I left is warmer…but there is no healing there. I need something hard and cold to pry me free. I try to imagine a version of me that does not taste like old copper and cold sweat, a version that people will look at without pitying, but the reflection doesn’t change. It just stays there, blinking back at me in the yellow fluorescent light.
The plane touches down, and I am driven to the house. Five floors near Grand Avenue. The wood is beautiful, dark and thick, but it smells like pine cleaner and the damp socks of twelve other men. My job is the vacuuming.
I start at the top, in the attic where the air is thin and dusty, and I pull the heavy machine down the stairs, step by step. The roar of the motor fills my head so I don’t have to listen to the silence of the rooms. Sometimes I catch my reflection in the dark television screen before I switch the vacuum on. It is only there for a second.
In the evenings, some of the men come back with their breath smelling faintly of peppermint and something sharp underneath. Nobody says anything. We just watch the television.
After two weeks, the vacuum cleaner feels too heavy and my hands are still shaking. Smelling the men doesn’t help. This house won’t do.
It is easier in the car. The McDonald’s parking lot is bright at night, the big yellow arches bleeding through the frosted windshield. My face floats faintly in the glass until I lean forward. If I keep the engine off, the cold comes in quickly, stiffening my fingers around the aluminum can. The alcopop is sweet and syrup-thick, but it stops the shaking.
When the policeman knocks on the glass in the morning, his flashlight is blinding. He looks at me with a tired kind of patience.
“You can’t stay here,” he says.
I call my sister from the front seat. I tell her about the other house in the western suburbs…with the stiffer rules and the price I cannot pay. She is merciful and quick. She asks for a name to put on the check. Her voice sounds small, coming from so far away, but it is steady.
The new house has a different philosophy from AA.
We sit around a long table in the mornings with the Bible open, looking at words written thousands of years ago, trying to figure out what it is we love more than our own lives. In the afternoons, we go to the YMCA. We lift weights and run on treadmills, twelve men moving in place, sweat dripping onto rubber mats, all of us trying to outrun the same shadow.
By the third month, the snow outside is beginning to turn to slush.
A new man arrives on a Tuesday.
On Sunday, after the church service downtown, we turn around and he is gone. The streets around the church are gray, and a few blocks away, the blue and green tarps of the tent city flap in the wind.
The house leader doesn’t look surprised. He buttons his coat and looks out at the sidewalk.
“He’s probably already drunk,” he says, like he’s talking about the weather. Just a fact.
And that is when the vacuum cleaner noise in my head finally stops.
I look at the empty space where the new man had been standing a minute ago. It feels strangely like looking into a mirror. I realize how thin the glass is between him and me. It isn’t a great chasm; it’s just a single step. I am still standing on this side of it, but my shoes are muddy from the same street.
When the three months are over, I pack my bag. The zipper makes a sharp, loud sound in the quiet bedroom.
I am going back to my family.
I don’t feel like a cured man, or a hero returning from an assignment.
I just feel like someone who has learned how to sit very still in a room, watching the snow melt off the porch, knowing exactly how cold it is outside.
#
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (The Written Path: A Journey Through Sobriety and Scripture) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films.