The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,34

down at the stairs, the ovals are burnt on her eyes. She can see the shape of the skylight on the stairs, black spots like silverfish.”

“Like silverfish?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, that’s good. I should be taking notes on all this.” Benjamin poured himself another shot of Unicum, and then one for Margaret. She drank it down. “What else?” he said.

“Actually, there is something else.” Margaret swallowed. “Maybe it’s a different dream. Sometimes I think it’s a different dream. Or maybe it’s later. It’s probably a different dream. But in any case, on the same stairs, while the girl is still climbing, something actually crashes through the skylight. It crashes a hole in the glass up there in the roof and it drops down. Down past the fifth- and fourth-floor landings, all the way down to the bottom. Once it’s down on the floor in the cellar, the girl knows something. Nothing will ever be the same. And the reason: she’s lost the fight.”

“What fight?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what’s going on. I don’t even know if it’s in her mind. Maybe it’s a narrator saying it in the background, or some music playing those lyrics.”

“Okay.”

“Well, anyway, the thing, whatever it is, it falls all the way down to the bottom floor, way down below, onto this blue-and-white-checkered floor down there. There’s a mosaic on the underground level, and it falls onto those tiles. But it doesn’t make a crashing sound. It lands silently. And the girl looks over the banister, looks down, and sees whatever it is, maybe something the size of a fist, a little red and grey on the blue-and-white tiles.”

All of this Margaret had remembered that very afternoon, while she was fretful in bed.

“You have no idea where this came from?” Benjamin asked.

Margaret considered. “I think I probably made it up.” Her eyes were closed, she felt like sleeping now. Benjamin spoke again, but his tone had changed.

“Margaret,” he said, “there’s someone I want you to meet.”

Margaret opened her eyes. There was a movement at the doorway. She roused herself to standing, feeling much more drunk than she had known. She held on to the chair for support. She peered. A young woman at the entrance to the kitchen. The newcomer was barefoot and wore only a T-shirt and underwear. Her hair was in disarray, her cheeks pink with sleep. And the funny and terrible thing was that Margaret was looking at herself. The woman had the same wide-set eyes, the same long bones, the same skin dotted with moles. Her legs had the same sparse hair, the same narrow kneecaps, her veins the same streaking presence through her freckles. Her hair was like Margaret’s, long and fine and curly.

“Hello,” Margaret said.

“Hello,” the woman said.

Looking at her, Margaret felt a change. Warm curtains closed around her eyes. Through the diaphanous fabric she could see alternating shadows, a correspondence between prisms. She heard a radio far away playing a tin melody she already knew.

There was something else, Margaret thought, something else she was meant to remember. What was it? Margaret put her hands over her eyes, and sat down at the table again.

The young woman went over to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and slammed the door. She left the kitchen.

Benjamin turned to Margaret and said with embarrassment that could still not mask his excitement. “What do you think of her?”

“She looks exactly like me,” Margaret said.

Benjamin looked at Margaret a long time. “Not really,” he finally said. “I found her at the King Kong Klub last night.”

“Is she German?”

“She’s Czech,” Benjamin said.

Margaret gave a cry and tried to get up to leave. She did not know what was coming, but again, as after meeting the doctor, she felt a creeping sensation of rot, as of having found by chance some terrible thing for which she was partly at fault. She stumbled and caught herself on the table, but in the process she knocked Benjamin’s beer onto the floor. He went to get a rag, she poured herself another glass of Unicum and drank it down.

In the end she was so drunk he had to carry her into the bedroom. She felt like a sea creature with arms gushed on the currents. She fought back a little: she told him she did not want to stay; she told him sleepily that she would go home. Benjamin said not to worry. He said he and Lenka, as the girl was called, were going out anyway, the bed was free.