Echo: Chapter 5

 

“Good morning,” I texted, and received an almost instantaneous phone call as a response, which, after five rings, I answered. I was looking for my glasses, which, of course, one needed glasses for.

“Good morning. You’re up early,” Bjørn said, sipping his coffee and looking distracted, somehow. I squinted my eyes in order to divine why, and, having caught my look, he explained, “I’m looking at your picture, the one where you have a black t-shirt on.”

I was thoroughly confused. And when I am confused, I commit small mistakes, the most common being that I open my mouth.

However, this time, I didn’t do that. This failure further added to the general confusion all around. The reason for not saying anything immediately was I didn’t know which remark to make first: the fact that I have almost twenty of those shirts hanging in my closet, or the fact that what he was staring at on his phone is actually, in a similar yet different way, right there, on his phone.

That threw me in for a loop the third time, but this time I managed to jest, “Oh. You prefer the echo rather than the voice, then?”

“Yes. If we were to meet in real life, I would still look at your pictures while talking to you,” he said with a laugh.

The laugh sufficiently distracted me from intellectually or literarily pursuing the matter any further. Not everything, after all, has a metaphor, or even a principle, behind it. Leave those to fiction writers and to metaphysicians. Sometimes they are the same people.

“Hey. I have an interesting thing to tell you. It’s about anchors. It’s what I think of when I think of a home.” Having lost my nerve, I had asked the question that I had pondered on for three days in a text rather than in a phone call.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“Hm. Where to start. Ah, our ship,” said Bjørn. “The Klovn og Tosk, being a three hundred and sixty-ton boat with a five hundred and ninety-tonnage capacity, has four hot-dip galvanized cast-iron Fisherman anchors. I would have preferred that they be admiralty anchors instead, although that was truly for the aesthetics of the thing rather than anything else.” He continued, “In my second king crab run, I looked at the sea as I have never done before. I don’t have your way with words, so I can’t explain it. It’s like I have fallen in love with it again, but for the final and complete time. I will never forget the feeling.” He took a breath, then. “And, being young then, wanted to immortalize the experience by getting an admiralty anchor tattoo done by Bård Tjelta, arguably the best in Oslo.”

I let him continue. This was easily the most words I heard from him at any given time.

“I did some research and dropped the idea after finding out that at least forty celebrities have admiralty anchors on their skin. Actors. I found the fact disgusting.” I paused at that, knowing that the duplicity required to be a good actor is of the same intensity as the honesty of the sailor when faced with his great love.

“But then I also realized I cannot reduce the sea into a few drops of ink without losing her. Anyway. That’s what I think of when you say home. What about you?”

Torn between matching his just-then word count and having a one-word response, I deferred, like him, to memory. “I have two very different answers to that,” I said. “Can I read them to you? I wrote them a long time ago.”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay.”

The sounds of cars, tricycles, motorcycles, jeepneys, peddlers, garbage trucks, police cars, ambulances, and everything else on wheels, including in all probability some random guy on a unicycle, unceasingly blare through my window. I have no view except for the second-floor apartment right across from mine, with its mismatched curtains and glaring white light that the tenants never seem to turn off. I hear neighbors shout at each other about each other, and always, always, at 4:00 PM I hear a young man shouting "MaAAaa!" outside his gate, as though he always, always forgot the keys to his own house. In the mornings I smell the neighbors roasting fish for breakfast.

Also in the mornings (and sometimes during the night) I hear someone faintly practicing classical piano across the street. It makes me take a break from listening to disembodied voices for a while, and smile, and try to identify which piece they're playing. There was a time when they were playing the national anthem, and I resisted the urge to stand up like some misguided patriotic madman. (I'm still waiting for the aria to the Goldberg Variations. If they do it I will just sit down on their living room and watch, uninvited, like an actual madman.)

I have a neighbor who helped me turn the water to my apartment. He brought out his wrench as we tried to figure out which water meter was my unit's.

I have a neighbor who offered to keep my stuff when I realized I forgot the house keys in the office while I'm on my goddamned doorstep. I had no ma here to call out to for that one.

I have a neighbor who actually conversed with me about internet speeds behind her door because she was breastfeeding her child. I addressed a kind wooden door the entire time.

I have a neighbor who told me what my actual address was.

I have several neighbors who already know that I'm going to buy a pack of cigarettes at 9:00 AM every day without me saying anything.

I don't know any their names. I wish I do.