“Then you stop going to the Starbucks. Then you stop eating. Then you sell your kidneys. We don’t care about your life, Mr. Rus. We care about the boundaries of the law and what is possible for us within them.”
“But I need to eat,” Rus said. “I need the Starbucks.”
“A kidney does around fifteen hundred,” the debt collector said. He lowered his voice. “I could, perhaps, even introduce you to some people. A heart, of course, sells for much, much more.”
“But if I sell my heart, I die.”
“But you will have paid,” the man said. He smiled—a real smile, which grew wider and wider.
Rus stared at the man, who was now laughing with his mouth wide open. “Your tongue,” Rus said. “It’s black!”
The man stopped laughing. He covered his mouth with his papers. “It’s not,” the man said. “Do I understand you refuse to pay the amount you owe in taxes? We have the right to sell everything you own, you know.”
Rus didn’t answer. He stared at the man’s nostrils, which were also black on the inside. He took a few steps back up the stairs.
The debt collector moved up toward Rus, hiding his mouth in his collar. “We’ll take everything, Mr. Rus. Think about the kidneys.”
In one move Rus yanked his arm from the debt collector’s grip and jumped past him, down the stairs. Outside, Rus saw another man in a long coat coming toward him, carrying papers. Rus turned around and started running in the opposite direction, around the corner and over the bridge. He ran as fast as he could. For minutes and maybe even hours he ran without thinking, past the market square and the harbor, past the girls behind the windows, past the shops and the station, only listening to the sound of his feet getting him away from there.
When he finally came to a halt in a far end of the Eastern borough, he had made up his mind. With sweaty palms, he inserted his mother’s old debit card in the cash machine and pressed the button that said everything.
MR. LUCAS
“Dear Mr. Lucas. You are invited by the Queen...” For the tenth time, Mr. Lucas read the letter the post girl had delivered that morning. His heart started pounding again. “Easy,” he whispered to himself, “easy does it.” He brought the letter close to his eyes and continued. “... to stand alongside Her Majesty in the special Survivor Area of the War Memorial Service, taking place on Memorial Square, and attend the subsequent reception.”
It said that, it really said that. Mr. Lucas folded the letter and carefully placed it in the middle of his black plastic table. “To think that I, Mr. Lucas, who has achieved nothing but failure in my life, am invited to attend a ceremony where the Queen is present too!” Mr. Lucas whispered. “In less than a week from now I will be mingling with the most important people—politicians and people from television—all wearing formal dress.”
Mr. Lucas sighed. He imagined entering the reception: a solemn, sophisticated, atmosphere; women wearing long dresses, men in suits or uniforms. Maybe there would even be someone who would take his coat from him. He shivered with joy. “If only someone would take my coat!” he exclaimed. “That is my biggest dream! To just for once in my life have someone take my coat! It is a small dream, a modest dream, but if it could come true, then I would be the happiest man in the world!”
Mr. Lucas squeezed his eyes shut. “But,” he said, “it would not show. No, I would be like a true businessman. Someone who is used to having someone take his coat. Someone who would be surprised if there was no one to take his coat. ‘That Mr. Lucas,’ they will say, ‘is a true businessman.’” He started mumbling now, Mr. Lucas, as he did so often, about his dream, about being a true businessman, until the mumbling faded and he sat still with his fingers pressed against his eyelids.
“Unless,” he said, while slowly sitting up, “unless... I was a true gentleman. While all the others let the porter take their coats and let the poor man be buried in felt and fur while they chat and mingle, I will refuse! Yes, yes, that is my biggest dream, to keep someone from taking my coat, out of sheer goodness!” Mr. Lucas suddenly felt a rush of energy, the kind of rush you get when you have a truly good idea.
“My good man,” Mr. Lucas practiced, “dare you not take my coat.” Mr. Lucas turned to the other guests at the banquet. “Shan’t you be ashamed? For thy are drinking champagne while this good man needs to take coats and stand here like a weary cloth!”
Although Mr. Lucas wasn’t sure yet about the “weary cloth” part, the people at the banquet applauded him. Mr. Lucas smiled a trembling smile as he envisioned Her Majesty the Queen standing across the room, giving him a reserved but approving nod.
With that, Mr. Lucas opened his eyes on the couch. He nodded slowly. This single day with the Queen would form a counterweight to all the bad things that had ever happened to him.
ALL THE MONEY
Rus wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his fur coat. He was sitting on a bench in Memorial Square in the business district, hidden behind the cranes and the machines that were there to build the new war monument, holding all the notes the cash machine gave him on his lap.
He was adding up the numbers on his calculator. “50,” he typed, “+ 10 + 10 + 20 + 10 + 5,” his fingers trembling. The notes he’d counted he placed on a neat pile next to him on the bench. He had to do it very carefully because his hands were shaking.
His mother had left him that debit card the day after his sixteenth birthday, the day she and Modu left him without saying anything, only leaving him a note and the card. He had never touched that debit card, aside from withdrawing a ten from it every morning of course, for groceries and things, but aside from that he never touched it.
Finally, Rus placed the last note on the pile. “There is probably a fortune on that card,” he mumbled. He had never really thought about how much money there was on the card; he had always just assumed it was there to take care of him. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have left me like that.” He closed his eyes and pressed the sum button on the calculator. Then he opened his eyes—and closed them again.
“No.”
He opened his eyes again.
“No, no.”
The reason Rus was saying “no, no” was because the number wasn’t right, it wasn’t right at all. He collected the notes and started recounting, faster this time, slamming the buttons on the calculator, adding the coins from his pocket this time as well.
Three hundred forty-one, the calculator said again, and forty-five cents.
Rus’s throat was dry. He stared at the number on the screen. “How can that be? How can that be?”
The machines on the square started slamming a pole into the ground. Deng.
The sound startled Rus, and the letter from the tax office fell off his lap, next to his trainers in the sand. The black words were staring accusingly up at him from the white paper, threatening to take his house and sell all his things. Rus swallowed. Three hundred forty-one and forty-five cents to pay three thousand two hundred sixty-one. Today.
Deng.
Rus started perspiring. The sweat on his forehead felt cold, very cold. He stood up, pressing the money to his chest, and it was as if he saw the whole world for the first time at that moment: he suddenly saw all those people walking down the streets, on their way to something, carrying bags and suitcases, talking on phones; the cars driving along the square, the trucks; the builders on the machines shouting