Jürgen

FICTION

by Roger Mensink

        It’s the first week of October in Los Angeles, a little before noon, and Jürgen has not yet gone out. He is on top of his bed, shirtless and without shoes. One could say he has rejected the world as if it were an overexposed photograph and that he has thrown it into the garbage pail. He is thinking, as he so often does, of his ex-wife, Monica, the professional flamenco dancer. This is by no means an exaggeration. Monica is part of a small flamenco group that tours regularly, she teaches flamenco dancing at several community colleges and at a number of dance studios, and she writes a well-read blog on the subject. Inexplicably, a lot of her readers are from the Netherlands and Sweden, young girls mostly, who long to stomp out their frustrations and desires in a way that’s hot and stylish. Many of them are insecure. With their blue eyes and golden hair they wonder if they can ever truly embody the stifled, smoldering rage that is at the heart of flamenco without looking like idiots in the process. In the comments section to Monica’s posts, they ask this question again and again. Monica’s answer is always the same—an unequivocal yes. To think otherwise would be racist, she explains. Flamenco belongs to the world.
         It’s all Jürgen can do to scratch himself. He has neglected to shave or shower, and he has hardly eaten breakfast. Now it’s too late. The window is a square too bright to look at, the dimpled surface of the ceiling stretches to infinity, and Jürgen has fallen so deep into monotony that he can no longer summon the courage to do anything useful.
         Clearly, he is processing grief—though it’s been almost a year since Monica told him she wanted out. At the time the two of them were already in bed, both of them propped up on their pillows, both with a book in their hands, both with their own reading light clipped to the headboard. From anyone else’s perspective, a burglar looking in the window for example, they would have looked like a contented and handsome young couple—she with a dramatic swirl of lustrous black hair framing her downturned face and he, having just undone his ponytail, with a longish mane of blond hair over one shoulder.
         Monica had been the first to put away her book. She told Jürgen she needed to say something important. And without further ado, in the most straightforward manner imaginable, she told him she wanted a divorce. Not a separation, she insisted, but a divorce. The reason being that the relationship was not going anywhere. Not going forward, as she put it. Jürgen stumbled over the words. “Not going forward.” She went on to explain—Jürgen could barely recall the exact words, he had been so stunned—that in life, as in business, there was no standing still, no treading water. One had to continually move forward. Jürgen looked at his wife and thought, “This is what happens when you marry an American,” and then he softly cried himself to sleep. Monica adjusted herself to be a little closer to her side of the bed, and that’s the last night they slept together.

         Hence, the torpor that Jürgen has spun like a cocoon out of the threads of a morning’s useless reveries, and all the more disagreeable when a noise, shocking and final, tears at his isolation and makes him sit abruptly upright. Jürgen begins to snarl, curse, and beat at his pillow with both hands. He’s yelling scheisse, scheisse, but not so that anyone can hear. He’s screaming it into the pillow. He wants to rip his eyes out. It’s as if a deadly illness, the Black Plague for instance, has come to visit. 
         Actually, it’s only Leon, the landlord. But clearly Leon is angry—as he always is—this time at the door that stands between him and the interior of his property. Which is how Jürgen knows it’s Leon. Because of the way he is pounding on the door. Quickly now, for there is no time to lose, Jürgen swings his legs over the bed, stands up, and searches for a shirt to put on. And as he makes his way to the door, half tripping over himself, he is thinking, “I have forgotten something. But what?”

         Less than a week after Monica’s awful announcement, after the “dissolution of marriage” box had been checked and the papers signed—yes, Monica had prepared everything in advance—Jürgen had needed a place to live. For nearly a month he had stayed in a motel on Sunset Boulevard. Every night, after coming home from work, he parked his 1970s Ford Bronco II, which he had lovingly restored and which Monica had never liked very much—maybe at first she had found Jürgen’s antiquated idea of America kind of charming, but in the end what kind of flamenco dancer wants to be driven around in a Ford Bronco?—under a giant sign that read “Motel” in a Brody Standard font. Jürgen knew that’s what the font was called because he had spent a good part of a Saturday afternoon looking it up on the internet—probably to distract himself from the existential horror of living in the place.
         Good for him then that one of his few friends—a poet who’d decided to follow his dreams by working on an oyster farm in Oregon—had offered him his apartment, one half of a duplex. There was only one problem, his friend had carefully revealed, and that was Leon.
         The very Leon who is now standing outside as Jürgen tries to open the door. There are two locks for Jürgen to undo, and they turn in opposing directions. It’s simple, but dyslexic Jürgen gets it wrong every time. He fumbles with the locks and tries to remember. Ideally, this is when he would have liked to stop in his tracks and consider, if only for a moment, his current state of affairs. But there’s no time. At last the locks turn, and Jürgen opens the door. He squints against the light—ghastly, a vast blinding glut of it, thrown down by the sun and reflected off an endless expanse of cement and freshly cut lawn. Leon is dressed in khakis and a too tight tee shirt. Heat refracts from the pavement. From behind his sunglasses Leon neither frowns nor smiles.
         “What’s going on?” he asks.
         This is the sum total of his greeting. 
         Before Jürgen has a chance to reply, Leon brings up his forearm, cocks it forward, and points to something above Jürgen’s head. Jürgen notices the copper bracelet on the wrist.
         “I don’t understand,” Leon says. He is speaking in a painfully slow manner. Then he waits.
         Jürgen makes an effort to see what the finger is pointing at. He doesn’t understand either.
         “The porch light is out,” Leon tells him.
         “My God.” Jürgen is at a loss for what else to say. 
         “I thought I had asked for it to remain on.”
         “I turned it off?”
         “Well, yes. Obviously. Who else? I didn’t turn it off.” Leon removes his sunglasses with a military precision and steps through the doorway. “Excuse me,” he says as he pushes his way by Jürgen and into the hallway. “Where’s the switch?” His eyes sweep the walls. “Where’s the goddamn switch?”
         Jürgen reaches around him to flip it on.
         “Jesus!” Leon says, stepping back. Leon does not like to be touched. “What did I tell you about leaving the light on?”
         Jürgen groans. He’s fortunate to have the sublet, but this landlord is driving him crazy. Jürgen doesn’t know how much more he can take of the guy, even though Jürgen’s friend had explained that in spite of being a complete pain Leon was actually quite harmless. In reality, he doesn’t even own the building. His father, Max, who doesn’t feel like making the rounds himself anymore and who has given his son more or less free rein, is the one who owns the building, among many others. Jürgen’s friend had once called Max to complain about Leon’s behavior, but the old man had tamped him down with a chuckle and some kindly delivered words. “Go easy on my son. He’s just had half his guts torn out because of the cancer. It’s all from worrying,” he said.
         The idea therefore is to remember that the rent is cheap, that neither Leon nor Max has a problem with Jürgen being a subtenant, and to take Leon with a grain of salt, the last being easier said than done.
         Case in point: Leon is devoted to details in a way that is, as often as not, completely insane. The light above the door is one such detail. It is to be left on at all times so that no one can sue because it was too dark to see when they tripped and fell. As in night and day. As in the middle of the day.
         Probably the best thing for Jürgen to do now is apologize so as to water down the milk of emotions beginning to boil in the brain of Leon. But he waits, long enough to see Leon’s anger evolve into something else, into terror.
         Suddenly Jürgen remembers what he has forgotten. 
         Leon wrinkles his nose. He flashes a smile only to make it disappear. “What is it I’m smelling?” he asks. “Hello? Anyone home?”
         Jürgen shakes his head. “I don’t smell anything.”
         Leon proceeds to make his way down the hall. He gives Jürgen the last desperate look of a man going over a cliff. His nose leads him directly to the bedroom.
         Jürgen follows, hands in his pockets. Leon is staring at something on the floor, in front of the bed.
         “No way,” Leon says, shaking his head. 
         Jürgen thinks, It must be terrible to live in such fear.

         After Monica had divorced him, Jürgen had been extra lonely and vulnerable, probably because Monica had plucked Jürgen from his life in Germany and brought him to live in Los Angeles, where he existed like a fish out of water. He missed his old friends and his family and clouds and drizzle, but he loved Monica and was determined to make a new life by using his God-given ability to work with his hands and keep numbers in his head. He found an excellent job building crates for the shipping of fine art objects. Nevertheless, after the divorce there wasn’t much reason for Jürgen not to return to Germany, other than pride. But pride is a big deal. Jürgen would have found it intolerable to face his friends and their “we told you so’s.” Because they had told him so, plenty of times. None of them had liked Monica very much.
         And yet, by remaining in Los Angeles Jürgen has become lost to himself. He lives by putting one foot in front of the other, demanding little more than survival and the protection of his pride. But like one of those stubborn little weeds that takes root in the crack between two slabs of concrete, something has of late become alive in Jürgen. He has taken to imagining himself hiking in the mountains. He’s gone so far as to consider bagging peaks in the High Sierra.
         Naturally, this new desire has not translated into anything meaningful. Not yet. Jürgen does, however, like to remind himself of what life in the mountains would be like and has therefore begun making tea on his newly bought WhisperLite camping stove, which he has placed on the floor in front of his bed. He sits before it and makes tea, as if he were already in the mountains. And that’s what the landlord is looking at now. He had smelled the white gas right away, even though Jürgen has not made tea since the night before. 
         “No way,” Leon says again, still looking down at the little WhisperLite camping stove. “No way am I going to have this building burn down.”
         When Leon finally looks up, Jürgen sees how very hurt the man is. “I was cleaning it,” he offers. “It was in the kitchen. That’s why you smelled the gas. I let what little there was out.”
         Leon surrenders a long, mournful sigh and turns his head toward the window. “Could you do me just one favor?” he asks, in a substantially reduced tone of voice. 
         Jürgen answers, “Of course.”
         Leon continues to stare out the window—as if there is something to see out there.
         Jürgen waits for whatever Leon wants to ask of him. He takes his hands out of his pockets and clasps them behind his back. He wishes for something, anything, to break the silence. At last, he clears his throat, and Leon, abruptly stirred to life, marches out of the bedroom, down the hall, and out the front door.
         Alone again, Jürgen is reluctant to move. He doesn’t want to know that much more, but something draws him nearer the window. Outside, Leon is standing on the lawn. The sunglasses are back on. He is smoking a cigarette. By now Jürgen is completely aware of what an unreal situation this is. He whispers to himself, “Who’s the weirdo now?”
         Leon throws a quick glance in the direction of the window, then stubs out the cigarette and puts it in his back pocket. Jürgen prepares himself. He has every reason to believe Leon is now going to storm back into the house. Instead, Leon says something unintelligible and waves his arms over his head, back and forth, like a referee in a football game, the kind of American football game Jürgen doesn’t yet quite understand.
         It’s moments like this that threaten to obliterate Jürgen’s already shaky grasp of American reality. They have been arriving with alarming frequency lately. To dispel them, Jürgen has found it necessary to hold onto certain things. Ergo, once a week he makes the long drive over the freeway to the German market in Alpine Village, where he buys muesli bread, sliced ham, tins of herring fillets, quarts of sauerkraut, red beets, and precooked sausages. He talks at length in German to the stout women who work the deli counter. These women are of an older generation. All the same, he sees in their eyes a measure of pity, which goes a long way toward preventing him from feeling like a weather balloon that has ascended too quickly into the stratosphere.
         In other words, these women tether Jürgen. Ditto for the umlaut over his first name. Monica had wanted him to remove it, but Jürgen, usually so amenable to Monica’s wishes, had in this case been unwilling to comply.
         “Jürgen, forget the dots,” Monica had pleaded with him one evening as he drove her home from a performance at the Fountain Theater. She’d made that Arabic trilling sound, an ululation, recently learned from a friend who taught belly dancing. Her hands had fluttered at him, rings on all fingers, briefly eclipsing his view of the road. “Take them out!” she’d commanded.

         The final straw is the sprinkler that has come to life on the lawn. It pushes Leon onto the sidewalk, where he tightens into the stance of someone who has been trained to kill with bare hands. But as galaxies of tremulous droplets are thrown into the air, creating not one but two rainbows, Leon slumps. A one-two punch. It’s not hard to guess why—the middle of the day is never the time for a sprinkler—though Jürgen has nothing to do with how the thing is timed.
         A sick tiredness comes over Jürgen then, like a wave of nausea. At the same time, an unwelcome sense of obligation tugs at his soul, strong enough to pull him from the house and into the flat, blazing light. He stands just out of range of the sprinkler, one hand cupped over his eyes.
         “Leon, how can I help you?” he shouts.
         “The sprinkler is not your fault,” Leon shouts back.
         It’s the kind of sprinkler that shoots out twin pulsating streams of water in a half circle. Thwack, thwack, thwack! Then back again.
         “Where’s the controller?”
         Leon’s question includes the possibility of an answer. Some of the hysteria has sloughed off, as if Jürgen might actually know where the controller is. But of course he has no idea. Leon makes a sudden move toward the sprinkler nozzle as if to attack it but is foiled by the pulsating streams of water, which he can’t quite time. Vexed, he takes on the appearance of a man trying to reenter a burning apartment but held back by the flames. The desperation of someone trying to rescue what has been left behind.
         “Damn you, Hector!” he shouts.
         Hector is the gardener, but of course the gardener is nowhere in sight. It’s up to Jürgen now. He notices a car parked across the street—a turbo-charged monstrosity, a cherry-red convertible, the kind of car that in Jürgen’s opinion only an imbecile would drive. A labradoodle sits in the passenger seat.
         Jürgen recognizes the breed. “You have one of those dogs, Leon!”
         Leon spins around. “Stay, Caesar,” he shouts. “Stay!”
         Obediently sitting, Caesar now can’t help but be toggled into understanding the opposite. In one flouncing leap he is onto the pavement. Then he is across the street and onto the lawn, bounding around Leon in a fit of great, irrepressible joy.
         “He’s a service dog!” Leon shouts to Jürgen.
         Caesar begins snapping at the streams of water, close to the nozzle. His rump is in the air. His tail wags madly.
         “Yes, he’s a good one,” Jürgen answers, aware that in America, as in Germany, service dogs play a variety of roles. He has recognized the dog’s breed because Monica had once called him a labradoodle. They had been sitting across from each other in the cozy confines of one of Los Angeles’s oldest flamenco restaurants. They had just finished their flamenco dinner—a package that included preferred seating—and were now enjoying their second carafe of sangria while listening to one of Monica’s friends perform what Monica explained were a series of soleás and bulerías.
         “You’re like a labradoodle,” she had then added.
         “Like your labradoodle,” Jürgen had answered, fooled by the lurid red glow of the restaurant’s lighting and the mellowing influence of the sangria into seeing a twinkle in Monica’s eyes.
         When the guitarist finished his set he stood and bowed, then shifted his guitar to a steep, dramatic angle and strummed one last, furious chord. He tilted his head and left the stage, smiling a coy farewell.
         Jürgen thought this a somewhat ridiculous means of egress. He made a show of giggling behind his hand. “That’s so totally fucked up,” he said.
         Monica smiled, then looked at him thoughtfully.
         “By the way, what’s a labradoodle?” Jürgen asked.
         “A dog,” Monica answered. “Part poodle, part Labrador retriever.”

         From under his shirt, Leon has produced a whistle, attached to the end of a lanyard worn around his neck. He holds the whistle near his mouth, but something prevents him from blowing into it. Leon has allowed himself an extravagance—a wavering, gun-shy smile. It gives him the look of having become empty-headed, or in love.
         Caesar, meanwhile, continues to run into and out of the sprinkler.
         He is so funny, Jürgen thinks. He is like a dog in a dog suit!
         “Go and get him,” Leon commands. He points to where Jürgen is standing. “Go and get Jürgen!”
         This unexpected intimacy troubles Jürgen. He is surprised the landlord even knows his name. On the other hand, Leon has not judged him, not really. Therefore, Jürgen consents. He slaps his knees with the palms of both hands and calls out for Caesar, the way people do when they want a dog to leap into their arms and give their face a big lick.
         Caesar, for his part, looks back at Leon for final approval. Then he’s on his way, speeding over the grass like an enormous wet mop.
         “Go and get Jürgen,” Leon yells again. Suddenly an overpowering certainty pervades Jürgen, so much so that he feels himself recklessly expanding, like a sausage. His head feels like a sausage, and his fingers feel like little sausages.
         “The grass is always greener on the other side,” his friends in Germany had warned him. But now, as then, Jürgen disagrees. Because sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side. Take this lawn, for instance, so green it burns Jürgen’s eyes. Where else could such a lawn exist? Certainly not in Germany. Perhaps, not even on earth. Perhaps it should exist only under a biosphere on the moon, or on another planet. The sun is high overhead, and Jürgen at last feels himself along for the ride. He opens his eyes as wide as he can. Caesar is nearly upon him, and as if welcoming a new child into the world, Jürgen holds out his arms and braces for impact.