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“Come along.” With a curt motion of his head, the guy motioned to me to follow him.
I grabbed my backpack, sleeping pad, and sleeping bag, the few belongings I had left, and groped numbly after theSleepy Hollowcopycat.
A few streets away, he steered me through an archway, across a tree-lined yard to the back house. Gray and dreary in the drizzle, but still somehow… neat. Homey.
I gasped when we finally reached the top floor. Shit, the hard weeks on the street had completely eaten away at my modest fitness.
Ichabodgave me a dismissive look that struck me to the core. Then he unlocked the door and let me step forward into the spacious hallway of a light-filled rooftop apartment. “Put your shit down there.” With another curt motion of his head, he directed me to place my modest belongings in the corner on the floorboard.
He frowned as he scanned me again from top to bottom.
“Don’t get me wrong…” he continued as if in apology. “But… Here’s the bathroom.” He opened a frosted glass door and pointed to a spacious floor-level shower, a shelf of fluffy towels and countless shampoo, and shower gel bottles beside it. “Make yourself right at home,” he invited me. “I’ll see about getting you some clean clothes, okay?”
Huh? What was I supposed to do? Take a shower? Change my clothes? Why?I looked down at myself, noticing for the first time in weeks my filthy clothes, my dirt-stained shoes, and the black edges under my fingernails. Embarrassed, I tugged at my sweater, which I had been wearing continuously for three weeks, and made the mistake to sniff it. I felt nauseated, and shook involuntarily because I now realized a few things:
“Sure, my john…” I pause to let the word take effect. “…didn’t want to get a stinking rat like me in his bed.”
“Oh my God!” Celine gasps. She presses her hands in front of her mouth. “Your… john?” Her innocent, baby-blue irises are devoured by the black of her pupils. “Did you…? Did he…? Oh my God!”
“Nothing is as bad as it looks. The part about the trick preferring his hustle clean was just what I was thinking at that moment.” I stand up and walk over to the kitchenette. Over my shoulder, I look back at her. “I felt dead sick. Feeling like a sentenced man on his way to execution…” Alongside, I put a skillet on the stovetop and lay out strips of bacon in it. As they begin to sizzle, I cut open four ciabatta rolls and top them with romaine lettuce leaves.
“I don’t even like to think about that.” Celine shakes her head.
“It took me so long in the shower…” I turn the bacon and grab a Tupperware container from the fridge. “…like never before in my life.” With pointed fingers, I hold the lettuce leaves in place as I spread some of the cheese spread on them. Then I prop my knuckles up on the countertop. Because a belated realization has just hit me: “It wasn’t about stalling tactics in the first place.” Meanwhile, I thinly slice ripe Roma tomatoes and red pointed peppers, layer first the crispy fried bacon, then tomatoes and peppers on top of the cheese spread.
“It wasn’t about it?” Celine watches me intently.
“No.” Jab. Upper parts on the buns, then the first two into the preheated panini grill. “Before anything else, it was about giving me back my self-respect.” I gently push the lever of the grill down a little further, peering over my shoulder at myself. “If I’m honest, I found myself disgusting. As dirty as I was.”
“Uh-huh.” Celine doesn’t really make the impression of being convinced.
Behind her gruffly drawn-together eyebrows, you can literally see the cogs in her brain turning. Apparently, she doesn’t like the idea of what must have followed the shower…
“What are you actually doing there?” she finally asks me, incoherently.
The scent rising from the contact grill indicates the end of the roasting. I open it, push the two buns onto a plate each, and refill the second portion. Then I balance the dishes, along with a bottle of beer each, over to the sofa. “Jalapeño pimento cheese sandwich,” I explain as I slide a plate over to Celine. “If there’s anything edible that means to me being home, feeling safe, and not having to be afraid anymore, it’s this. Because these sandwiches were waiting for me onBig Hammer’s table when I finally dared to get out of the shower.” With a nod, I encourage Celine to take a bite. “Don’t worry, I adjusted the spiciness level to suit European taste.” It had nearly burned my mucous membranes off at the time.
With undisguised skepticism, she follows my instruction, and in a split second, a spectacular movie plays out on her face. Surprise, pleasure. And then the familiar mimic reaction to hellish hotness: reddened skin, tears in the corners of her eyes, and gasping for air.
Fuck. The adjustment thing went awry.I put down my already half-eaten sandwich, then use the second bottle to uncork and slide her beer over to her.
She drinks eagerly, fanning herself with her hands. “What was that again?” she finally gasps. “Adjusted spiciness? How spicy is that, usually?”
“Absolute hell,” I smirk, but then get serious. “But the spiciness of food was the onlyhellthere was atBig Hammer. Not a hint of the real hell I had experienced.”
As we finish eating, I tell her about my five years of living withBig Hammer. In some ways, he didn’t just resemble theSleepy Hollowcharacter visually. He had his own… ideas about a lot of things. The fact that I was actually still of school age didn’t interest him. Fortunately, I passed visually as an adult, after he had given me a military short haircut.
But he did not neglect my education at all. Apart from communicating with me only in English until I spoke it fluently, he lugged mountains of books from the library. On any subject that interested me.
“And it was out of my interests,” I conclude, “that my training with him arose.”
By now, it’s time to turn on the TV for the press conference.
I hesitate. “Do you think it’s really a good idea to watch this?”
“Well, I think what you don’t know often seems more threatening than the truth.” Celine takes a big gulp of the milk she’s bravely fighting the pepperiness with. “But of course, I could be wrong.”
“Well…” Before I can reconsider, I press the power button on the remote and we wind up in the middle of the broadcast, which is already in progress.
