The elevator rumbles in its shaft, pauses. Keys jingle in the hollow corridor and it has to be Krys. Rhonda and Janka are still down at the cafe, drinking and flirting with boys who are no doubt hoping a better looking pair will come along soon.
I emerge from my room and find Krys slouched and exhausted, a boxer lumbering back to the catacombs after losing the split decision. He drops his shoulder bag, then himself into a hard plastic chair and crosses a look at me.
His look. An empty stare that bears no malice or appreciation, curiosity or contempt. Rather, his is a soulless expression, a physical state of having one's eyes open and head inclined in a particular direction. More alive than wax figure, but only by the wisps of pain and exhaustion that sweep across that gaze like coal black ravens against charcoal shadows.
I smile, more of a pinch of the lips without vigor or cheer, but Krys registers it. He lights a cigarette. We listen to one another through moments of silence and this is sometimes the nature of conversation with Krys, a language that few people understand. And if someone doesn't get it, moments like these make them intolerable.
Krys just endured the final session for the tattoo that now covers his back, the Torment of Saint Anthony. Demons claw at the old man's shroud and tug at his limbs, his penalty for resisting their temptations.
If the message seems overt, if emblazoning the entirety of one's back with such symbology strikes you as blunt, consider the conditions of its rendering.
When I arrived in Prague, Krys wore only the sketchy outlines of the piece. He's since had three more sessions, four hours each, hardly allowing enough time to lapse between for the needle's wound to heal. This cadence was his demand and against the advice of the artist. One need only to imagine for an instant the sensation of the needle scoring raw and inflamed flesh to understand this was not mere impatience. In the second session, Krys withstood that instant of pain, like a fingernail scraping the blisters of a third degree sunburn, then he endured four more hours of such timeless moments. Masochistic doesn't begin to describe it. Now, two weeks later, he's spent more than a calendar day in such pain, sometimes at the compromise of the subcutaneous illustration, and he accepts the flaws of shading and line as evidence of his suffering.
Whereas other tattoo artists would refuse this exercise, turning Krys away until the swelling abated, this guy is a friend. He understands Krys, admires him even, and he appreciates the baggie of speed Krys brings to each session as gratuity.
So time after time, Krys lay on the black vinyl bed and the artist peeled back the bandages and went to work on the fringes of the great, weeping wound.
The latest session was shading, the most painful process under the best of circumstances. Krys passed out ten minutes in, his first sleep in two days, only to awaken twenty minutes later to endure the remainder of the session in silent agony.
Hence the look.
He goes into his room and closes the door, then calls through the wall.
—Food's coming.
This means Anita. Spanish name, Czech girl. Anita is the only woman who talks about loving Krys. Songbird perched on an alligator spine. She sees the game in his romantic bullying. A neutral hand extended and cradling some treat or another, vulnerability or truth. And she approaches. She knows the hand will be yanked away but she refuses to surrender the hope that this time will be different. This is her innocence, that persistent willingness to hope. And this interaction, this prank, is still some kind of attention, and it acts as a surrogate for so many of the little things. Like a butler that tends to your base needs and even offers a hug when you leave for work each day.
Anita pairs well with Krys' castaway physique. Especially after one of their speed binges.
She wants a life beyond Prague, thinks maybe one day Krys will come to his senses and want to settle down in Barcelona or Paris, but for now she barters her beauty for companionship with wealthy men, who need a statue for their crooked elbows. Under the guise of modeling she travels to Athens, Dubai, Paris, all jet-set, never settling for first class.
Just two days earlier, what would have been a meaningless detail about a forthcoming absence became something else entirely.
—I'm going to Milan!
She was speaking with Rhonda and Krys sat across the table, smoking as ever. Anita didn't offer the reason, and no one asked. She simply placed the news on a fence rail, and in this company, she could expect no one to question such a peculiar placement for a porcelain egg.
The egg is insignificant. It's nothing more than a found object.
But Milan! The city of fashion! Surely the upward lilt of her voice was to kindle Rhonda's envy. And if it was Milan, it had to be Pietro. From the early days, when Krys had not even reached the couldn't-care-less phase, we knew that Pietro was some sort of powerbroker from Sicily and, as a matter of fact, painfully handsome.
Even though Anita is practiced in the invisible lie, that's an irrelevant skill in this tribe. Red herrings were everywhere among these women who live on the fringe of the sex industry. Everything about what they do is veiled with a cloak of legitimacy. Janka works at a video chat studio, but she claims her days are spent at an NGO that serves West African refugees. So noble, so false. Krista was a secretary in a legal office. Or had been. The title stayed with her well after she pursued a more lucrative position in porn. These occupational tokens were jolly good fun, for those in on the lie. Every now and then, someone would change jobs, like when Lily got an internship at the Georgian embassy.
It would be easy to dismiss them as compulsive liars incapable of intimacy. But this dishonesty is a necessity for a sex worker who also wants to have a normal day-to-day life. They enjoy an afternoon at the spa, just like you. And their favorite cake in mid-afternoon with a cup of tea delights them just as it might you. And they adore their parents, and their friends' kids and their Nanna, just as you likely do. But to navigate all of those areas without resistance or worse, they employ a subtle and harmless cloaking device. They lie. And like spooks or superheroes, their artificial pleasantries are thorough and well-rehearsed, as familiar as their private worlds.
But in a place as insular as our smoky Dejvicke flat, such fabrications have no purpose. Still, when the company you keep is comprised of people who lie compulsively, whether about minor happenstance or entire chapters of their life, you can imagine what complicated terrain intimate discourse surely is.
But Krys is an anomaly. His mind is a Turing machine spinning in real time so he can spot a lie while the tail end of a sentence is still forming in the speaker's brain.
Communication is a multi-layered affair, words spoken and not, and the sparkles of truth that spill into the room from an unpracticed eye. Those damn sparkles are next to impossible to control.
And the poor thing, Anita could do nothing to dampen the twinkle that lights her eye when she announces her trip. No one receives this sparkle more acutely than Krys, and he destroys it just as imperceptibly. With nothing more than his look, a blunt and unmistakable energy that comes from somewhere behind his eyes, his maternal Sikh lineage, centuries of concern and wisdom, somehow corrupted in this compromised vessel.
It was a remarkable thing to witness, truth be told. One might consider this tribe to be degenerate and unrefined by virtue of their profession, but this ability to wage psycho-emotional combat merely by governing the light in their eyes? That skill is elusive even among the most elite minds, be they diplomats or samurai.
The woman who could survive Krys could read him clearly enough. If you observed him from a safe distance and from a vantage point forged by life experiences, it was apparent that his disdain and pettiness was nothing more than the sharp end of his pain that ran so deep that its distal end was saturated with marrow.
I wasn't sure yet if Anita could survive Krys, and it would be several weeks before I met a woman who had, on the 4th floor of a squat in Berlin, and sweet mercy what a creature!
Anita arrives thirty minutes later. I haven't moved from the couch and Krys has yet to emerge from his room. She's carrying two bags of Indian takeout, saag paneer and shrimp something in a ruddy sauce. She always brings food and we move on it with the tact of vultures, eating light portions, patient but determined, waiting until she's had her own songbird fill before upending the containers onto our plates.
A joy fills the room when Anita smiles and she smiles often, and when she becomes confused or distracted and her face falls blank, you can see that her left eye tracks ever-so slightly higher than the right. Hers is a face meant for smiling.
She's more intelligent than this asymmetry might suggest. When her mood is good she is buoyant, flitting across a busy sidewalk, peering in shop windows at her desires, patting the backs of café chairs, one after the other, like a dancy child. She makes you want to scoop her up like a handful of autumn leaves and release them to shower around you. It's sometimes hard to imagine that torment could ever find its way into the heart of such a creature.
Then her phone rings and she mindlessly checks the display and her face falls and the crooked eye emerges. She walks to the balcony, answering the call as she goes. She says few words and listens as her face dissolves into a mask of perfect sadness.
She hangs up.
—He says he is going to change the locks.
Her dark passenger is a man she refers to as her ex. And their lives are still entwined such that a threat to call the locksmith knocks her off kilter.
—Most of his threats are empty, she says.
And an awkward and dismissive smile flickers and is gone. Then as casually as one might comment on the shape of a passing cloud, she says he does not beat her very often.
Anita gave Krys an engraved Zippo for his birthday and plans to buy him some cologne, as well.
I see something in Anita because I want to, so I make the effort. Somewhere between the blank slant of her fallen face and her contagious and radiant joy is a sincerity that's difficult to pin down. It moves quickly, but its evasiveness betrays her vulnerability. Unlike anything attached to her hidden work life, this sincerity carries the weight of lintel stones.
What she wants is not so unusual. And the manner of her wanting is common among the young people who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, coveting the material tokens of the West. But when she applies her Slavic stubbornness to realizing such dreams, while lacking the acumen for its acquisition, a life springs up that becomes a journey that will take her everywhere but where she wants to be.
Just as we move to the couch to settle into the afterglow of the fatty Indian meal, Rhonda and Janka burst into the flat.
Rhonda is the domineering Napoleon of Blake's Prague operation. She regards Anita as another of Krys' playthings and she treats her like a thrift store teddy bear. She's pleasant in Anita's presence, but is quick to crow about her when she's not around. Rhonda wears her book smarts like a rented commencement gown, and when it comes to human insight, she is a nincompoop. She hurls disdain at any woman more beautiful than she, which in this part of the world and in the profession we'd chosen, is most of them. Rhonda stands scarcely five feet tall, and carries just enough pudge to seem dollish.
Her choice of Janka as an elbow-locked companion is no accident. Below the clavicle, Janka is something to see, but her face is adorned with a pert, bulbous nose that pops out over a small mouth that purses when she thinks. Her hair is bobbed and spiky, a style that looks good in the magazine.
Their time at the café turns up nothing more than an afternoon drunk and by the air about them they have stalled out in a bog of blood sugar deficit. The smell of the food enlivens them.
Janka smiles and looks for a cigarette.
—Good da see you guys, she says. Hey, Charles.
Rhonda makes a bee line for the scatter of takeout containers littering the table. One by one, she finds them empty.
—You guys just sitting here? It's fucking beautiful outside.
Krys shrugs. Anita watches them without lifting her head from Krys' lap, content as she is to finish her cigarette. Her pedicured feet are nestled against my thigh for warmth and it is a pleasant sensation to have such lovely toes wiggling there. I'm not going anywhere.
That we didn't leave them any of Anita's food is a betrayal, which Rhonda communicates by picking up the final container and regarding it as if the residue at its bottom were milky dog shit.
She rummages through a kitchen drawer and retrieves a handful of takeout menus.
—Why didn't you eat at the café?
—Their food is awful. Gave me the shits last time.
Krys tunes in an Italian Western and no one questions his choice, never mind that none of us speak Italian and the subtitles are in German. This is a strange and welcome pastime that reminds me how many millions of miles I am from home.
Midway through the film a pizza arrives and is devoured, then a round of cigarettes clouds the flat.
With Krys and Anita now constrictor-coiled on the loveseat, Rhonda takes the far end of the couch and Janka nestles in next to her. Then, Janka yawns and with the entitlement of a house cat falls sideways on the couch and lets her head rest in my lap. Her awkward timing conjures up the tropey movie theater yawn that lands an arm around an unsuspecting date's shoulder. Transparent.
To backtrack a bit. While these maniacs were devouring the pizza, I'd had a quick shower. Best to wash off the residue from the first eight hours of cigarettes to provide a clean slate for the next. I emerged wearing only a thin sarong, bound about my waist.
So now here I am, pinned on the couch and wearing a garment no more substantial than a facial tissue. Pinned by Janka's head, warm and heavy, resting in a place normally reserved for lovers.
I begin to struggle with the sensation. It's nothing voluntary, you must agree. My mind blasts me with images of her button nose, the deeply creased philtrum offset by a chin dimple that could rival the great Kirk Douglas. Then her hand wriggles under her head, as if to alleviate a kink in her faultless neck. And it doesn't stop there, but moves over the crest of my leg and onto that place on the inside of the thigh which, when touched, sends shivers through your middle parts. Suddenly her little pursed mouth doesn't seem quite so grotesque.
There is nothing I can do, short of casting her head aside and springing to my feet. And what a disruption to the darkened calm that everyone else seems to be enjoying that would be.
And the hand moves further on, privately so, and grazes the arching something beneath the fabric of my sarong. It is a fine conundrum.
A reel plays in my head for no reason but to temper the temptation: the Sunday prior, a warm afternoon in the orchards of Petřínské sady. She and Rhonda were well into their second bottle of cider, singing an Avril Lavigne song, horribly off key.
But the hand is clearly winning, now creeping down my thigh to the fringes of the sarong, then back up against my skin. Mother of god, I'm going to let her do it, and just like that, as a high desert town somewhere on the Santa Fe plateau is going up in flames, so does my three months of monkly celibacy.