The Hemingway Game

1 I woke up in the morning and immediately thought that I was sick. Not felt, but thought. The thought was exactly the same one you have when you wake up on the first day of the vacation, one you’ve been waiting for, for so long. So you wake up and think: “Why am I not having fun, why aren’t I glad, where is the long-awaited joy? I must be sick!” I woke up as if I’d been switched on. I didn’t shudder, didn’t stretch, didn’t make any sound, I just opened my eyes. Actually just one eye, the other was pressed against the pillow. Also, I began to hear. I saw and heard… I saw the edge of the pillow, the fabric of the pillow case, so close to the open eye. The pillow was barely lit by a bluish light. It was early, it was winter. In fact, it was still quite dark, but through the window fell an ordinary bluish morning light of the city – a mixture of white street lamps and already snowed-in yellow windows of the building across and… that of my own home. For some reason this mixture is always bluish; pleasant in the evening, but in the morning… unbearable. I heard many sounds. They were the sounds of the city. An immense city. Obviously, I didn’t hear the entire city, nor were these the sounds of some “urban pulse” or anything like that. They weren’t even the sounds of the rising city – the city had long been awake. I heard how people living in my building were exiting it. They were going to work or pulling their children somewhere: the sound of steps on the stairs, the drone of the elevator, the minute-by-minute repetitive groan and knock of the building’s front door. I heard how, as if with hesitation at first, and then in hopeless surrender, cars started outside, in the building courtyard. And serving as the background to all this, somewhere… a bit farther away… was the sound of the street. I woke up. I did not feel my body, no. My head woke up. I sensed only my head. And I was inside that head. One of my eyes opened, I began to hear, and that didn’t make me happy. I so much wanted to return to dreaming. Not in a sense that I had dreamed something wonderful, but to go back to sleep. I so wanted to lose heart and call all of them, everybody, to tell them that I was sick, to lie, and cancel everything… everything! But mostly to not get up, to not turn on the bright light, to not wash or shave, to not put on socks, or anything else, to not leave the apartment jingling the keys, to not turn off the light in my hallway before leaving, to not press “1” inside the elevator, to not walk outside, to not take that first cold morning breath, to not get into the rigid, cold car… to not drive to the airport to pick up Max. But Max, my friend Max, couldn’t possibly be canceled. And that meant I had to do it ALL! And now, of all times, Max had bad timing. The kind of bad timing only an old friend of mine can have, the one who lives far, far away, who you look forward to seeing so sincerely, but who arrives or flies in, as always, at the wrong time. And those couple of days, like it or not – you give up to him. Meaning: cancel all business, whatever it may be, and get ready to talk a lot, to laugh, drink and drink some more… and talk. Sleep, of course, won’t be happening for a couple of nights. This is all a good thing, just bad timing. Completely! Especially now. Because I’ve fallen in love. Very much! So much that it hasn’t happened to me quite like this before. Never! So yes, Max had bad timing!