Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  The guests had such a good time that they suggested coming over the next night to do it all again. This time more people brought wine, and some even brought pizza and salads, and again they had a rousing good time. “You see,” the woman said to her husband afterward, “you can throw a good party without giving people anything.”

  A few weeks later, when they had just been to the market and had plenty of food in the house, the man said, “How about calling everyone up and having them over for a party? Since this time we have plenty of food around.”

  “No,” his wife said.

  “But why not? We had such a good time before, and now it would be even better.”

  “This time,” she said, “we have too much to lose.”

  There are people who cannot a resist a mirror, and vanity is not the only or even the principal reason why. They look to make sure they are still there: this is widely known, though not always to those with the mirror habit. For one such person, glancing in mirrors had become an obsession. He was not vain and didn’t seek to admire or assess himself. But he had no one to reflect or acknowledge him, and so he sought and found acknowledgment in mirrors. He would look first thing in the morning, greeting himself after sleep’s prolonged and pathless exile, and then while shaving and dressing, and then just before leaving the house. On the way to work, he checked in shop windows, where his reflection was shadowy and transparent but still reassuring. Certain windows provided real mirrors, for instance the drugstore with the tall narrow one that he passed morning and evening, and at these places he would slacken his pace ever so slightly and sometimes give a furtive nod of recognition.

  His office, where he was known generically but not individually reflected, had no wall mirrors but it did have a plate-glass window in which he could steal glances, and in the top drawer of his desk he kept a small hand mirror facing upward, which he could glance at by opening the drawer a few inches; this he could do even while conducting a meeting or an interview from his desk.

  There was always the briefest instant of panic before he confronted a mirror, and then the briefest instant of relief at the same reliable image. He had never much dwelt on what he was panicked or relieved about; a habit is a habit and takes possession like a parasite, the host often compliant until forced to take notice. One day he was forced. It happened as he was passing the drugstore with the tall narrow mirror, not far from his apartment. He checked, as always, and he was not there. Instead he saw a display of colognes and aftershave lotions. In that terrible instant of not finding himself, before he grasped that the mirror had been replaced by a display case, he understood the meaning of his fear. That he could see and feel his own body did not ease the panic. His physical existence was not in doubt—he was its witness—but his own testimony did not answer the larger question of whether others could see him. What if he cast no reflection in the world? Only mirrors could say for sure. What good was having a physical existence if he was its only witness?

  And yet that moment of seeking and not finding himself in the drugstore mirror was so profoundly unsettling that he was reluctant to look in mirrors anymore for fear he would find nothing. Even if his absence turned out to have a simple, rational cause like the replacement of the drugstore mirror, the instant of panic at that nothingness, which was the precise shape of his fear, was too dreadful to risk again.

  He stopped looking in mirrors. He trained himself to walk down the street looking straight ahead, avoiding all the familiar store windows. He removed the hand mirror from his desk drawer and avoided the plate-glass window of his office, and at home he dressed and shaved as best he could without the aid of mirrors. This was difficult and often impossible; when now and then he had to consult the mirror or inadvertently glimpsed himself—unfailingly present—the minuscule instant of terror was almost too much to bear.

  Now he no longer had his peculiar habit. Now, outwardly, he was like everyone else, except for his peculiar habit of avoiding mirrors. He tried to trust his own testimony as others seemed to do, and sometimes he succeeded; still, for the rest of his life he would feel an outlandish surge of gratitude when strangers on the street stepped out of the way to avoid bumping into him.

  A certain woman never felt entirely comfortable speaking her native tongue. She spoke ably enough, her vocabulary and grammar were adequate to say all she needed to say, but she didn’t feel at home either in her mind or in her mouth. Since she had never spoken any other language and couldn’t know what degree of comfort others felt, her discomfort was vague and amorphous; she knew only that she had to search uneasily for words and phrases as if they came from a second language and not a first, that the contours her mouth formed and the paths her tongue traveled did not take shape as readily as she imagined they should. She even suspected she might speak differently were her tongue more at ease. She would express herself with richer and more subtle nuances, and in the process her opinions and attitudes themselves might change and grow more subtle. In other words she might be a different person, or more precisely, a self waiting inside her, speechless, would find speech.

  One day while riding on a bus she overheard a conversation in an unknown tongue between a man and woman sitting behind her. Though she couldn’t understand what they were saying, the sounds of the language seemed familiar, like the features of a distant relative. The broad, lingering vowels, like amber deserts or rose-tinged skies, called up dormant affinities in her vocal cords and in the pathways of her brain; the harsh, craggy consonants suggested jagged cliffs or surf hitting rocks, unlike her native language whose vowels sounded like cream and custard, the consonants like pastry crusts.

  From the strangers’ tones she could distinguish questions and answers, interjections and phrases of surprise or dismay. After a while she could make out the shapes of sentences, syntactical groupings that fell into patterns. She felt she was starting to grasp the curves and the trajectory of their conversation—she lacked only the subject matter. The more she listened, the more she had the uncanny sense that at any moment she would understand what was being said, as if what barred her from understanding was not her total ignorance of the language but rather a thin veil she could almost, but not quite, see through. She had the excited feeling that at any moment the veil would be lifted, or else she would penetrate it. Before the couple got off she turned around to ask—in her native tongue, the only one she knew—what language they were speaking. It was the language of her ancestors; she had never heard it spoken because her grandparents had died before she was born and her parents either could not speak it or didn’t wish to.

  Some time later, in a taxi, she heard the dispatcher on the intercom instructing his drivers in what she recognized as the same foreign yet familiar tongue. Now and again she distinguished the name of a local street, and perhaps because of these intermittent known words and because the subject was obvious—where to pick up and discharge passengers—she felt even more strongly that at any moment the veil would lift and she would understand everything. When she reached her destination she told the driver she’d changed her mind and wished to be taken elsewhere, just so she might keep listening. She tried to fix certain syllables in her ear—rough and pebbly, yet musical—repeating them under her breath to see how they felt on her tongue, wondering what as-yet-unknown nuances of herself they might be made to articulate and who she would be as a result. This pleased her, yet the pleasure was frustrating: the veil did not lift or become transparent. Still, if she listened long enough, maybe it would happen. Or if the veil did not lift, she would burst through it.

  She yearned for the feel of words coming instinctively to her tongue and for the new self that would emerge along with them. Meanwhile, her native language was feeling more and more cumbersome. Rather than study the alluring language in books, she decided to go to the country where it was spoken. Once there, she acquired the most essential words and phrases and picked up others from signs or shop windows, as strangers do. But she resisted studying the language in any meth
odical way. She felt it was already wholly inside her, and once the veil had lifted, the words would spring instantaneously to her tongue.

  She wandered through streets and shops and parks, her ear taking pleasure everywhere in the sounds it had longed for. Always she felt that the veil was about to lift. And she did begin to grasp fragments here and there, but simply as strangers do, not in the instantaneous way she expected and thought she merited.

  She stayed a long time, learning to shape the craggy consonants and the broad amber vowels. The language required that her mouth take new positions, more open and flexible ones, and that her tongue, moving in new patterns and at different speeds, strike against her teeth and palate at new angles and with different degrees of force and subtlety. All this she did well; her accent was good, and over time her vocabulary increased and her grammar improved. She was able to say most of what she needed to say, although she was not aware of saying anything she might not have said in her native tongue.

  After some years she was fluent, and her mouth and the pathways of her mind felt comfortable as they had not with her native tongue, which she remembered but rarely used: that felt like a foreign language now. She even began to think and to dream in the new language. And the nuances of her manner of expression did change somewhat—but she could never be sure whether this came about through the new language on her tongue or simply through the passage of time and the effects of leading a new life in a new place.

  In the end she came to speak the language of her ancestors as ably as she had wished, but she never had the satisfaction of seeing the veil lift and understanding everything instantaneously. Now, when she overheard conversations on the bus, she understood perfectly, but without the sense of wonder she had anticipated. Nor did the self she now was strike her as wondrous either, since she had been present at its gradual evolution—as she would have been in any language. So while she was contented speaking her adopted language, her contentment was marred by uncertainty: had she learned to express herself so well because of an ancestral affinity in the pathways of her brain, or had she simply mastered a new language by proximity and long residence as any stranger might? Perhaps it was a mistake to have come. If she had remained at home, listening to occasional random snatches of the ancestral tongue, waiting and trusting, perhaps the veil might one day have lifted to reveal its entire lexicon and structure. And if so, then she had spent years earning what would have been hers effortlessly, and laboring to become the person she would naturally have become in time.

  Referred Pain

  These may seem dramatic effects for such a tiny cause, but each person knows how much it hurts and where.

  —JOSÉ SARAMAGO,

  THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS

  IN DECEMBER OF HIS thirty-second year, sturdy Richard Koslowski, musician and computer wizard, attended a party in a downtown loft. His girlfriend, Lisa, a red-haired, studious beauty, was home with a bad cold and Koslowski missed her. He would miss her more if there were dancing later. Others would be willing, sure, but Lisa was the best, sinuous and lithe as a mermaid blessed with legs. Meanwhile there was food; most of the guests had contributed a dish. Even Koslowski and the members of his band, arriving straight from a gig at an East Village club, had stopped off for six-packs and barbecued chickens. He was hungry and helped himself to a colorful spaghetti dish with green and black olives.

  Balancing his plate and his beer, he spied an empty chair and found himself listening to the woman on his left, a human rights attorney, tell appalling tales of torture and abuse; she had just returned from an investigative trip to China. “Hi, I’m Cara,” she said briskly when he sat down, then resumed her narrative. Koslowski was all for human rights, in China as anywhere else, yet was not overjoyed at the conversation he’d stumbled into. He had heard such stories all his life, in more pungent language. Human rights abuse, he could have told the attorney, was a euphemism. Still, he paid polite attention, not only out of innate civility, but for Lisa’s sake as well. Her focus in law school was women’s issues, but maybe he could pick up some useful information, even make a contact, while she lay coughing and sneezing in bed.

  Not only in China but all over the world, people were suffering unjustly, and Koslowski’s neighbor was doing her best to help them. He nodded and chewed absently. What did she mean, suffering unjustly? Is any suffering just? Well, maybe criminals, torturers … Something in his head exploded. Koslowski raised a hand reflexively to his cheek and a moment later spit pieces of crushed olive pit mixed with human tooth into his napkin. The room around him, furniture, walls, the laden table, grew dim and receded into a gray mist.

  “I think,” he murmured, “I cracked a tooth.”

  There was a sudden hush. Everyone stared. An outlandish pain bloomed in the upper right side of his mouth. His heart pounded and he trembled as with the aftershocks of a quake. He had never shaken this violently, even in the subway accident three years ago, and that was more from shock than pain—he had suffered only minor bruises.

  “I’m going to pass out.”

  He was led to a couch where he lay prone with his head hanging over the edge. Through the mist penetrated the deep voice of the human rights attorney’s husband, Jeff, a man somewhat older than the rest: “I heard that crunch. I thought it was my own bridge breaking.”

  Bridge? Wasn’t that something engineers built over a river? Koslowski thought as darkness swallowed the mist. His final thought: This must be the darkness his father meant when he described his recent blinding headaches.

  The next thing he knew, Hal, the band’s singer and guitarist, was waving a bottle of Top Job under his nose; there was no brandy around, only wine and beer.

  As soon as he had revived, Koslowski excused himself and took the subway home to Brooklyn. Every now and then he poked his tongue around the injured tooth, its edge sharp and ragged as splintered wood. When he poked, a pain for which he could find no words shot through his head. It reminded him of the sound made by the unwilling trumpeter in his high-school orchestra years ago. Koslowski, quite the contrary, had practiced the piano happily in his parents’ Brighton Beach apartment, gazing out at the rhythmic waves far below.

  Despite the indescribable pain, he couldn’t resist poking: the sensation was so rare, so eerily alluring, a glimpse of the legendary realm he had heard about but never before been invited to enter. So this was pain. A small dose was more illuminating than a lifetime of secondhand stories. But for this pain, so small in the scheme of things, there was a remedy. Tomorrow he’d go to the old family dentist in Brighton Beach. No, tomorrow was Sunday. Monday then. Mild, white-haired Dr. Blebanoff, with his long pink fingers, would know what to do. He had filled three cavities in Koslowski’s mouth over the years. Koslowski had excellent teeth, as did his parents, which in their case was miraculous considering the malnutrition and deprivations suffered in their youth. Dr. Blebanoff used to joke that if all his patients were like the Koslowski’s he could never make a living.

  At home, he found Lisa sitting up in bed with her law books. “Feeling better?”

  “A little. What’s the matter? You look terrible.”

  He told her about the chewing accident.

  “Oh no! That’s awful! Does it hurt a lot?”

  “Mostly when I poke it.” Having been reared to stoicism, he offered amusing details about Hal and the Top Job, and Cara, whose narrative had distracted him from chewing more attentively. Lisa picked up on his levity and suggested he might sue the maker of the spaghetti for negligence, since he or she had not pitted that one olive on which Koslowski had had the misfortune to bite.

  “I don’t even know who brought it.”

  “You could find out. Maybe hire an investigator?”

  “But whoever it was didn’t do it intentionally.”

  True, the case would be ambiguous, she said: he couldn’t prove the spaghetti maker had willfully caused harm; with so many olives to pit—this was clearly a gourmet cook who wouldn’t stoop to ca
nned olives—it was conceivable to miss one. Nonetheless the perpetrator might still be found liable.

  “How so?”

  “If you could successfully demonstrate that he or she didn’t take the routine precautions against danger that a reasonable person would take.”

  “I see,” said Koslowski, who had meanwhile undressed, moving his head as little as possible, and now crawled into bed beside her. “Maybe you could handle the case. No, don’t touch. At least not there.”

  “It’ll be all right, Richie. It’s just a tooth.”

  Of course Koslowski had no intention of suing anybody, much as he enjoyed hearing Lisa show off her new legal savvy. But with no evidence at all he suspected Cara, the human rights attorney, of bringing the spaghetti and olive dish, even though she hadn’t owned up to it or shown regret, as one might expect. Maybe guilt kept her silent. Or an educated sense of proportion. After all, this was trivial compared to what she had on her mind.

  Koslowski spent the snowy Sunday holed up in the apartment, trying not to lick his wound. Huddled in an armchair, drinking warm broth. Hot hurt. He was in shock, a parallel universe, a state of prolonged amazement, his every move determined by the pain.

  “Go to the emergency room,” Lisa advised. “They must have emergency dental care.”

  No, he was atavistic; he would wait for Dr. Blebanoff. It was only a tooth. It was not like having one’s father carried off by the KGB in the middle of the night, or having one’s house looted, then being enslaved and starved and beaten and worked half to death, the kinds of calamities that Koslowski had heard so much about in childhood and that Cara (who surely had not—she had the zeal of a convert, not one to the manner born) had described with indignation. At some point he roused himself to call his parents.

  “How’s Dad? The headaches any better?”

  “The same.” His mother paused. “He gets these spells—he forgets where he is, I think he blacks out for a minute. But he insists it’s nothing. What’s wrong? You sound funny.”