from being skewered by a large shard, but smaller fragments cut me in over a dozen places. My cat likes to sit on top of the chair, near my head. If he’d been there, he might have been killed.
I forced myself to stand up, to keep from getting blood on the chair, hobbled with my cane over to the foyer and put some sneakers on. I worried about Katt cutting his paws and locked him in the bedroom. I looked around, at a loss. Broken glass requires meticulous cleaning, which entails bending and squatting to the floor, and those movements were near impossible in my condition. No way I could get it all up.
I picked up the brick. “There are ten million ways you could die” was written on it with a black felt-tip marker. A reference to the ten million euros Milo, Sweetness and I had liberated from a faked blackmail scheme involving everyone from a psychotic billionaire to people in the highest levels of government.
I did the best I could, got a waste can from the kitchen, pushed the big shards into a pile with my good foot and put them in it. Because of my knee’s limited range of motion, I had to lie on one side, propped up on an elbow, and pick them up with one hand.
Then I took out the vacuum cleaner and made some awkward attempts at pushing it around. I used the attachment designed for such things and vacuumed my chair with thoroughness. After bungling long enough, although I still saw the glint of tiny fragments, almost all the glass was cleaned up, and I felt I’d done the best I could for the evening. I redid the floors with parquet when we bought the apartment. The glass left deep scars in it. That irritated me more than anything.
My cuts were all superficial and stopped bleeding on their own. Still, I covered the chair with an old blanket in case they opened up again. Exhausted, I got a beer and poured another kossu. I sat down and thought it through, narrowed down the suspects of who might be harassing me. There were too many to even make an educated guess.
Cleaning up the mess caused me to mistime the drug-alcohol combination. I fell asleep in my chair with the pizza uneaten.
3
Katt’s favorite spot, when I was in my armchair and in a reclining position, was to lie with his ass in my lap and his torso sprawled on my chest, staring up at me. He wanted to be petted, or for me to at least keep a hand on his back. He hated it when I slept. It interfered with his receiving attention. When he could no longer stand the boredom, he woke me each morning by climbing to the top of the chair and used the back of my head and neck as a scratching post. I looked like a pack of small, angry rodents had mauled me. That morning was no different.
When he was convinced I was awake, he grew content and took up his second-favorite position. From atop the chair, he placed his front paws so that they hung over my shoulders, as if to choke me, nuzzled his head against my neck and napped. I considered teaching him to stop scratching me by doing what he hates worst, squirting him with a spray bottle of water, but couldn’t do it. After all, he’s my best friend. Besides, he’s too stupid and obstinate to learn much of anything.
I let Katt snooze for a few minutes, then got up, limped to the kitchen with the aid of my cane and made coffee. Then hobbled back the way I had come, went out to the balcony and smoked a couple cigarettes while I drank a cup. I wanted to maintain some semblance of dignity and refused to smoke inside and stink up my home, so I tended to chain-smoke when I went to the trouble of making it outside. I came back in and looked around. Tufts of cat fur and glass fragments were in corners and under furniture. The place needed a thorough cleaning. I couldn’t push the vacuum cleaner around well enough to get under furniture, in corners, against baseboards, the places where most of the dirt collects.
I needed to make a call and get the window replaced. I promised myself I would call a cleaning service and get the place back into shape again, too.
I turned the radio on