The Apartment A Novel(26)

The walls of the tunnel go bright suddenly. We whoosh into the open air, the city. It is snowing again, or maybe snow is blowing off rooftops. Everywhere, there are gleaming red and white and orange billboards. There are high-rise hotels and office blocks of green glass and blue glass. Behind the billboards and the high-rises lies the stone maze of buildings stretching back for crowded miles. Manuela asks what Saskia and I have planned for later. Dinner, I think, I say. Yes, says Saskia, definitely, if you’d like. We have to eat, I say. Saskia looks at Manuela, pauses, considers whether to speak, then speaks: Do you want to join us? Manuela says, I’m going to dinner at Anton’s. Oh yeah, says Saskia, I forgot about that. Manuela says, You should come. I hate Anton’s dinner parties, says Saskia. Manuela crosses and uncrosses her arms, a gesture I interpret as a sign that she hates them too. The train is slowing down. We’re coming to the stop for the city park. It’s one of the biggest parks in Europe, right in the middle of the city. Manuela tells us that afterwards they’re all going to Chambinsky, a bar that used to be an old theatre. Oh yeah? I say. Saskia says, It’s huge. Sometimes they have live music on the old stage. They have lots and lots of billiard tables. Anton and Janos think they are professionals. They take themselves very seriously. Could you beat them? I don’t know, I say, it depends on how good they are. I haven’t played for a long time. Saskia and Manuela take a break from English to share a joke, which I presume is at the expense of Anton and Janos. Then Manuela says, Please, please come and beat them.

My father played a lot of pool, and he was very good. In fact, he was a three-cushion billiards champion. Three-cushion or carom billiards is, at least everywhere I know of in America, so unknown by ordinary pool players that it might as well be obsolete. You have a cue ball and two object balls. To score a point you must hit both object balls and at least three cushions with the cue ball; at least one of the object balls may be hit only after the cue ball has hit the cushions. It is a difficult game to play, and if you score a point once for every time you miss, then you can quit your job and play the game for the rest of your life. The average pool player who takes himself seriously – even guys who can run tables, on the rare occasion, in eight-ball and nine-ball – could play for an hour straight and never score a single point, except accidentally. A person who plays carom billiards always plays pool differently than a person who has never, or rarely, played carom billiards, and this is because a carom billiards player has a different concept of the ballistic space of a pool table. The rails are not something to avoid or use in emergencies; they are theoretical extensions of space. When I was a teenager, my father used to play me in eight-ball. To keep it close, he required himself to hit two cushions with the cue ball before potting a ball. Other times he played one-handed, or with a bottle of beer on his head. I practised a lot, and though I was never as good as my father, not even close, eventually he had to stop hitting cushions, stop playing one-handed, and stop balancing things on his head. A good billiards player – and even a very good pool player – has an affinity for, or perhaps a natural understanding of, ballistics – internal, transition, exterior, and terminal ballistics. I used to say this to people I played pool with, and they looked at me the way you’d look at a person who says something very obvious while believing it to be profound. And yet none of them could appreciate the irony of the fact that the guy who won a straight pool tournament in Camp Victory, a nerdy Air Force guy who beat me in the semi-finals of that tournament, was killed by a mortar while on the can a few days after his big win. The mortar had cleared the high Alaska walls and dropped squarely on him.

The train stops at the city park station. A woman with a stroller and a sleeping baby gets off, and the cold comes through the carriage and right through my nose and into my brain. I say to Saskia and Manuela, I wish those doors would close. They don’t seem too bothered by it. Then there is some beeping and the doors begin to close, and I hear a shout. A man, running from the stairwell, making huge white clouds of breath around his head, is waving at the train, telling it to wait. He’s wearing a black trench coat and a black winter hat. He seems like an unstable fissure in the fabric of reality, a wild blackness, expanding in the way that paper burns if you light a piece of it in the middle, and through which, if it reached us, the whole weight of time in the universe would crash in upon us, and burn and pulverize us, and the powder that remained would drift slowly into the stars. The doors close almost as soon as he jumps from the stairs to the platform, but he keeps running anyway. He runs straight to our carriage, straight at us, and slaps his hand on the window by the seats in front of us, where nobody is sitting. What’s he running for? I ask. Maybe he’s being chased by a tiger, Saskia says. Manuela gives Saskia a funny look. From the zoo in the park, Saskia clarifies. The train pulls away, and we pass by the man, who has already turned to find a seat to wait nine minutes for the next one. And the mystery of his hurry goes with him, silently, with the steam that comes off his head when he takes off his hat.