Checker and the Derailleurs. Lionel Shriver

      Syria laughed, uneasily at first, but soon with real humor, and she tied her apron under her eyes like a hajab. They went upstairs to the club, closed in the afternoon, and drank beer out of plastic champagne glasses. Syria belly-danced to the refrain “Never gonna do it without the fez on” with Rahim, then to “The Sultans of Swing” with Checker, until, abruptly, she stopped in the middle of the song, untied the apron, and announced coldly that she had to get to work. She was such a strange combination of flamboyance and rigidity, Checker couldn’t figure her. Rahim called forlornly after her, “Don stay with husband?” but already he was making entreaties rather than firm Muslim demands. The two of them watched Syria stride away, her hair shooting by the yard behind her like a train, her big work shirt billowing like a gown, both wondering whether any bride in white lace could be more splendid.

      Why are you so angry?”

      Syria threw the punty halfway across the studio like a javelin; it landed in the barrel with a clang. “I’m not angry,” she said, tossing the pieces she’d just made crashing into the trash. “I’m normal.”

      “Why are you normally so angry?”

      “Why aren’t you?”

      There was more tinkling and clattering; Syria slid the door of the furnace fully aside, the gas up high; it roared so that Checker couldn’t answer her question, which was fine—he didn’t understand it. When she’d finished swinging her glass around the shop, wielding punties in the big turns of a baton twirler, she reluctantly rolled the door shut again. He’d never seen her motions more graceful or more dreadful, either.

      “So,” she turned to him. “This is my wedding night.” She whipped off her apron and threw it up so it looped around a pipe over the ceiling. “Tell me,” she said, with the dark glasses still on, “you did everything for the license, didn’t you?” Checker shrugged. “And that kid isn’t going to know how to apply for a green card by himself, is he?”

      “Maybe not.”

      “But of course you’ve already found out how it’s done.”

      “Federal Plaza.”

      “That’ll take days, you know that. All the forms?”

      “Yes.”

      “Why?”

      “I don’t understand.”

      “Why all this? Why everything?”

      “Why not?”

      He’d never seen her look so disgusted. The emotion suited her. The only thing he could imagine as more flattering was full-fledged disdain. “Are you always so good? Because it’s gross to be around. You still use that word, ‘gross’?”

      “Not much.”

      She couldn’t stand still, and kept ranging around the studio, throwing her coffee cup in the sink so the last sip splotched over the counter. She drank it strong and black. “Don’t know if I can stand you around here five nights a week. You annoy me.”

      “Sorry,” said Check, and a quiver ran through him, a ripple of distortion like a wave of heat.

      She turned fast enough to catch it. “Don’t wilt! Say, Fuck you! You’re a mess, you know that?”

      Another ripple.

      “Say, I am not. Say, Leave me alone. Say, I do my work and this is none of your business.”

      “It’s your business if I annoy you.”

      “God!” She looked around the studio and, finding nothing to smash, turned on Checker—he would learn not to clean up so well. “Those friends of yours,” she said. “They’re sickening.”

      “Why?”

      “The way they coo and prate over you. Really, it makes me want to puke. But they ever do anything for you, mister?”

      “They’re good musicians. They make me laugh—”

      “I’m not impressed.” She cut him off. “And what’s this about your being so happy all the time?”

      “I get pretty—worked up. They like it.”

      “You don’t seem that happy to me.”

      “At the moment I’m having trouble.”

      Checker was sitting on a bench; she glared down at him. “Why don’t you tell me to cram it? Why don’t you say, Leave my friends out of this?”

      Checker was frantically sifting through everything he’d done in the last few hours for what could possibly have offended her. “I’m sorry I got you involved with Hijack—”

      “You damned well better be. And sorry now? Just you wait.”

      “I’ll do what I can to make it easy—”

      Syria pushed the bench with her boot and it toppled over, Check with it. He picked himself up and dusted his hands of glass slivers. “You’ll do what you can! Tell me, You said you’d marry him, no one forced you! Say, You accepted, it’s not my problem!”

      “You did say yes,” Check conceded.

      “Oh, that’s powerful,” she taunted him. “And do you have anything to say about being thrown on the floor just now? That was fine, you just pick yourself up and clear your throat?”

      Checker decided that doing anything she told him to do, saying anything she told him to say, would drive her all the more into a rage from his sheer obedience. He stood, then, quietly. She breathed at him, and if there had been fire shooting from her nostrils, not hard to imagine, it would have been in the ensuing silence gradually reduced to smoke.

      “Do you,” said Check with perfect gentleness, “ever do anything else at night? Anything but glass?”

      “Why?”

      “Answer me.”

      “… No.”

      “Do you ever wish you did something else, once in a while?”

      “Like what?”

      “Just go to a bar. To a movie. Go dancing.”

      “I’ve done those things before,” she said warily. “I need glass now.”