Ramunas Jaras

THERAPY WAS DANCING

    Good morning! What an early morning!
    That morning he wakes up broadly and yawns. His name is Steponas, he boils water in the kitchen.
    He opens the window, notices a piece of skirt disappearing behind the corner and, down on the street, a dog the size of a man.
    Steponas turns handles of the stove - why should it boil for so long - and staggers to the bathroom where he looks up, then looks down and starts brushing his teeth.
    Water runs down his hand and drops to the ground.
    Steponas gives a speech to himself in the bathroom. The words barely make their way from his mouth through the toothbrush, but he forces them out like pellets.
    A fragment from Steponas` monologue:
    “I know this much - they will lie helplessly but my teeth will only  be covered again with a dirty film! Later they will look for lightning strong as the thunder and I will only take a brush out of my pocket! This is the difference between me and them,” Steponas stabs his finger into the mirror. A strange light flashes.
    Steponas remembered what he would do now, his sudden morning mood cleared like a wind, Steponas frowned.
    He heard how the elevator creaked and passed behind the wall.
    “One man,” he said slowly, “one man.” And these were the last words of his speech.
    Water soundlessly slipped into the sink’s hole, and the night had long passed - this was morning. What an early morning!
    “I will go to the city!” he exclaimed, grinning. “Where I have a date with Therapy!” Steponas said and went.
    All around the stroked windows of the buildings were fading out, antennas stack up from the roofs, several trees grew around but these were leafless, naked - it was winter, the end of the twentieth century.
    Cars were rolling nearby - nice car, perfect wheels - those sitting behind the steering-wheel shook their heads joyfully and waved flags. Heavy-set limos speeded jingling, spreading gusts of smoke and balls. It was becoming harder to breathe on the street, the tapping of pedestrians` steps was heard, only clinging of their glances remained unheard.
    “What a fortune,” Steponas said, “what a fortune, soon I will meet Therapy.”
    Steponas climbed over the fence, took a bus, and came to the look-out tower.
    He entered a glass elevator, trimmed with mud, and pressed the handles. The elevator rumbled, started going up. Steponas tossed his head back. Therapy was already there – he could see her down here, Steponas lowered his eyes. The elevator stopped, slid to the side, and started to go up again.
    “Hello, Therapy,” he said.
    “Hi, Fire-boy,” she answered.
    He asked:
    “Why Fire-boy?”
    Therapy pointed to the emblem on his coat - with the city and a flying, gawking, red cock who had fire instead of a tail. The letters under the emblem said: “SAVE THE CITY FROM FIRE!”
    Steponas asked:
    “How are you?”
    “Fine,” Therapy answered.
    “What would you say if we look around the city?” Steponas suggested.
    “You can see everything from here as well,” Therapy poked her finger towards the buildings sunk in the fog.
    “Seems I cannot see anything,” Steponas said.
    Therapy stood and waited.
    To tell the truth, she desperately wanted to do something new, to experience something new. (She never succeeded in doing this. After she came home from some “meat-grinder”, she would hit the walls menacingly with her fists and would shout:
    “Why haven’t I done anything new, experienced anything new?!”)
    This was Therapy.
    Steponas looked at her face and blinked.
    As a matter of fact, this was all he could do - look and blink.
    This was Steponas.
    A bell sounded in the highest building of the city attached to the mechanism of the clock. People heard it and said:
    “It`s noon already. From now on we’ll say “good afternoon” to each other.”
    But the day was misty.
    “You know, baby,” Steponas, a monologue-lover, said, “we`ll go to the cafe, drink hot boiling tea, look how its smoke scatters at the ceiling and let it run down our throats. We will talk about love, eternal as the Earth. Like the planet Earth and mines, diving into it. But these mines are not so bad. To the Earth they are only small needles - and nothing more.”
    Therapy shrugged. As a matter of fact, she was proud. Loose hair was falling down her shoulders... This was Therapy.
    The elevator jingled and descended. The panoramic field - honored by people’s feet in some places - was moving away from them to the sky.
    They came down and went along the street. Steponas slipped. This was Steponas.
    The cafe was noisy, the coffee fluid showed black everywhere. People sat at the tables and enjoyed this fluid, that’s why this place was called a cafe.
    “Finally, Therapy, we are sitting at the same table,” Steponas said sitting at the same table with Therapy. “Finally, we can take each other by the hands and blink secret signs to each other as the candle flickers.”
    The waiter approached:
    “Good afternoon. I wish you a good time. What would you like?”
    “Tea, please,” Steponas ordered. Therapy remained silent.
    “Tea?” the waiter asked again, annoyed, making strange movements with his fingers, “look, this is a cafe.”
    “I am sorry,” Steponas apologized, “but tea costs less.”
    The waiter disappeared.
    “Therapy,” Steponas said, “one more thing...”
    At this moment the waiter, taking vengeance, suddenly turned the handle of a tape-recorder up, the cafe roared.
    “CHA-A!” the loudspeakers screamed. “CHA, ANA-A, CHA!!!”
    The music became quieter but Steponas had already been deprived of speech.
    “Yeah,” he murmured, “yeah.”
    Therapy sat and waited. Steponas became sullen, put his chin on his fists.
    “Therapy,” he said. “I will tell you a story-thought that came to me this morning. People - the thought came to me - are complicated. They have two legs and, while climbing a mountain along its dirty slopes, they put down one leg and it stays firm, they put down the second and, if this one slides down and the first as well, they clutch the ground rolling down dirty gravel having been irrepressibly grand creatures once - and lie. How can they move in such a primitive way - one two, one two - when there is so much mud around? It doesn’t add honor to them.”
    “Nonsense”, Therapy thought.
    Steponas started drinking tea. Therapy sat with her lips twisted and looked at him.  But he looked only at his tea. Steponas felt uncomfortable, he did not dare to raise his eyes and look at Therapy. “Why is she acting like this”, he thought. But a lot of thoughts began to appear in his mind about telling fortunes from tea leaves.
    Suddenly one more visitor entered the cafe. She looked around with her reddish eyes and saw Therapy.
    “Thera,” she said and turned towards Therapy.
    “Asta!” Therapy became active. “What are you doing here?”
    Asta sat down next to Therapy. She was shorter than Therapy and had a samurai face. Steponas coughed, smartly as it looked to him, and said, smiling:
    “Do you call her Thera or Therra?”
    They both looked at him with bad eyes. Asta wanted to say something but Therapy outran her:
    “Don’t pay attention to this idiot,” Therapy took Asta’s hand, “you’d better tell me how you’re doing.”
    Steponas was shocked by Therapy’s epithet. He leaned back, his cheekbone hung down. If Steponas had had no lips, everybody would have seen that his upper teeth didn’t touch the lower ones. Steponas observed this scene dizzily:
    “Ayh, Therapy,” Asta said, taking Therapy’s second hand and looking into her eyes, “everything’s going wrong.”
    Therapy comforted Asta, that maybe not.
    Asta continued:
    “ I... I was fired, I won’t go back there, practically,” she raised her left hand to her eyes, her lips twisted.
    “So many things have gathered inside me!” Asta said in a breaking voice and cut into Therapy’s shoulder with a sudden movement.
    “Moreover,” she said from the shoulder, “He left me!”
    Therapy hugged her and looked bitterly somewhere to the corner with a look full of experience.
    Asta wept, Therapy sat.
    It lasted for a long time.
    Steponas glanced to one side, then to the other, and remembered the bathroom where he brushed his teeth this morning, the movement with a stretched finger to the mirror pretending that an invisible listener was sitting there. Steponas turned over this event in his mind for a while, then widened his eyes and began to understand something.
    Steponas examined his finger.
    This end of the finger, Steponas understood, has pricked through the mirror this morning.
    There, behind the glass, another Steponas was standing, and when the mirror was pricked, Steponas behind the mirror became alive. He began to move independently from Steponas who was on this side, and only from the first glance it seemed that they both move synchronically. This was only illusion. Firstly, their thoughts differed, then - glances, and finally - their movements. Yes, Steponas on this side of the mirror could not notice this. But Steponas on the other side of the mirror - on the contrary. Everybody knows that being on that side, you can understand a lot more.
    ... That moment when the mirror became pricked through, when the end of the finger was not here for a short time, which has changed everything, that moment has meant a lot in Steponas’ life.
    He got scared - what will happen now?
    The waiter appeared once more and switched on music of remarkable beauty.
    “Lally, lally,” loudspeakers shrieked.
    Asta reacted to it. Suddenly she raised her head and looked straight into Therapy’s eyes.
    “The-ra-py!” she screamed with tearful lips, “do you remember, Therapy!”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Therapy answered.
    “We always danced when it played!” Asta shouted.
    “I remember,” Therapy said.
    “The-ra-py!” Asta shouted, “we always danced!.. Always!.. A!”
    Should Asta buried herself into Therapy again, holding her by her lapels and shouting that they dance. Music from the loudspeakers roared calmly and quietly. Therapy stirred, looked up to Steponas and got up slowly. Asta bumped her head on the table. Therapy went to the middle of the cafe and - started to dance moving her hips.
    Therapy was dancing.
    The day was a failure.
    Steponas got up slowly like a piece of mist.
    “I am getting out of here,” he told himself.
    And Steponas went.
    He walked along the street frowning as if he were trying to recall something. He found himself by the elevator, pulled its door, but the door did not open.
    The shreded posters just waved at him from it.
    Let’s go further, Steponas said.
    He approached a bath-tub shop. A man stood there and said something to passers-by who did not bother to listen to him. Probably he was the owner of the shop who invited people to come in. (Nobody’s interested in bath-tubs these days).
    Steponas walked inside the shop looking at various bath-tubs. Some were simple, another - colored, yet a third - with motors. A beautiful girl was standing by every bath-tub and wearing an ear-to-ear smile. (Someone had spitted into the one of the bath-tubs).
    Steponas began to breathe hard, left the shop got onto the street, and started walking along it. As years passed, it became harder and harder to breathe in the city, and now it was almost impossible.
    He pretended he was standing in a field - outside the city. Not in the city, he don’t need the city, no, not in the city!
    He was standing in the field breathing.
    Then Steponas cast a glance to his watch! He shrugged!
    “Already half past two!” he said and shrugged again.
    The half past two span around Steponas like mad. Steponas stamped around impatiently.
    Steponas took to his heels. He turned around the corner, then another and another. Then turned around the other corner, then one more and one more. Then he tried to turn around all the corners at once – the corners turned around to him and fixed their eyes on him. Steponas reached a bus stop. A pole stood nearby with a tin rectangle on it that swung wildly in the wind caused by cars. Steponas did not even looked at it.
    “Hurry, hurry up”, he repeated, stepping into the bus.