The German Money by Lev Raphael

Author:Lev Raphael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2011-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

Suitably enough, I woke in the morning from a bad dream, staring at the large LCD numerals on a dusty alarm clock. It was 8 A.M. and I was surprised I’d slept that long. Also surprised at my dream of being on a winter battlefield at night, barefoot, my legs and arms frozen, struggling to dig a trench in icy ground, but my shovel only striking sparks.

Lying in bed, stunned awake by the cold I’d only dreamt about, I worried at the image of myself shoveling. It felt artificial, melodramatic, almost as if it were borrowed from someone else’s dream. Had I read an anecdote like that somewhere, or had I dreamed this image before?

The din of New York began to hit me, and drove me from bed to the shower, stopping to gaze at the hexagonal white tiles in the bathroom floor that had generations of dirt ground into them, and would never gleam no matter how conscientiously my mother, or one of the less capable cleaning women she could stand for a brief time only, scrubbed them. It was a very New York floor, I thought.

Brushing my teeth, I studied my face in the medicine cabinet mirror, stretched mouth and all, trying to decide whether I looked more like Mom or Dad, but stopped when I realized it was probably “morbid,” in Dina’s assessment. I snarled, recapturing my outrage of last night, but lathering up in the shower and dunking my head in the hot steady stream, my argument with Dina seemed childish. Maybe she did mean well. Maybe in her clumsy loud way she was trying to help. As soon as I soaped my crotch my cock leapt up as stiff as a highway police barrier. Thinking of Val in black, I pulled myself off with both hands as if I were wildly rowing myself to freedom. I came so hard I almost fell. It took a while to get my breath back.

Toweling my hair dry a little later, I felt even more charitable and putting up a pot of coffee to brew buoyed my good mood. When the bell rang, I reacted calmly, knowing that it was unlikely to be who I most wanted to say good morning to: Valerie.

It was Mrs. Gordon, balancing a silver cake plate covered with plastic wrap in her free hand. I took the platter from her and stepped back against the open door to let her in. Today her crinkly track suit was mauve.

“Coffee cake,” she said genially, as if the words meant Good Morning. “Much better than Entenmann’s—you’ll see!” Wielding her cane as if she were a dapper old Edwardian gent, she headed for the kitchen. “Smells strong,” she said approvingly. “I like strong coffee. How people can drink that instant dreck I don’t know. Yech.”

And as she settled into a chair and beamed up at me I thought that with her deeply companionable wrinkled round face—whose outlines were faintly blurred by tiny hairs you only noticed when the

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