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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780720618402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Peter Owen Publishers |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The Black Box
By Alek Popov, Daniella Gill de Mayol de Lupe, Charles Edward Gill de Mayol d Lupe
Peter Owen Publishers
Copyright © 2014 Alek PopovAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1842-6
CHAPTER 1
ANGEL
Eighty-six kilometres to the final destination, the monitors above the seats informed us. Temperature, minus 15 degrees Celsius; altitude, 3,500 metres. On the screens the map of the western hemisphere emerged. The plane's trajectory was marked by a white arrow starting in Central Europe, passing over Scotland, crossing the North Atlantic over Iceland, turning towards Labrador and entering the USA at a steep angle similar to that of a ballistic missile. Its point is almost touching the spot labelled New York.
I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. I hadn't slept a wink the whole trip. The luggage racks above my head were loose – it rained bags, clothes, plastic bags. I didn't understand all the rush. America isn't going anywhere. It'll continue to sit on the other side of the ocean and soak up waves of individuals driven by the idea of personal happiness for at least another twenty years. Without noticing, I had dozed off. When I opened my eyes the queue between the seats hadn't moved. I had no idea how much time had passed. Sullen, sweaty people, bags between their legs, were complaining loudly.
'What's going on? Why aren't they letting us out?'
'Ladies and gentlemen, there is a minor medical problem on board.' The pilot's voice sounded dispirited, like a guy whose plans for the evening have fallen through irreversibly. 'We ask you to be patient until we have clarification of the circumstances surrounding the incident. We apologize for any inconvenience.'
A minor medical problem! The passengers slumped into seats with glum expressions and began to take out their mobile phones. At the front end of the plane people dressed in brightly coloured biohazard protection suits and gas masks started to appear.
Now we were in for it!
The guilty party behind the commotion was the snotty brat who hadn't stopped throwing up for the last few hours. Clearly that had aroused suspicions of biological attack. The team milled around the boy feverishly, checking his pulse, his heart, taking blood samples. The mother was sobbing. The father, a Middle Eastern type with a thin greasy lump of hair stuck to his pate, was nervously crushing an empty crisp packet. Beneath the surface of this minimalist gesture however, lay the terror of an ordinary man thrown into the heart of global chaos. From time to time the commander of the flight said something to calm people's nerves. The guys with gas masks carried suitcases full of equipment back and forth. But things were taking their time. We sat cooling our heels, stress having already given way to bored indifference.
I hadn't set foot in America since the thing with my father. (I catch myself always referring to 'the thing with my father' instead of 'he died', 'passed on' or 'kicked the bucket', as if any word for 'dead' would be taboo.) The excitement surrounding my desire to travel across the Atlantic popped like a bubble-gum bubble, sealing my daydreams of emigration within its sticky pink stamp. It took years before I could think of it again. Even then, it was as if some invisible prohibition continued to loom over that part of the world. That didn't apply to my brother, who had accepted my father's death with no questions asked. Nedko went to study in the States several months after the tragic accident. He did an MBA, and naturally he stayed there, except for holidays. Then he stopped coming back even for those. Now he worked on Wall Street, and I supposed he had every reason to be pleased with himself. Actually, in some way we both stayed: one in the States, one in Bulgaria. Not that I was complaining. That was the situation. Nobody forced me to stay. I chose for myself.
I had just finished my English degree, and there was a place for me at the university, but I preferred to dedicate myself to business. Times were such. Anyone and everyone was registering firms, buying, selling ... At the beginning of the 1990s publishing looked like a way to get rich. There was a hunger for books unavailable until now. People still had money; they were grabbing whatever crossed their path. We sold an inherited property. Half went on my brother's studies, and the other half I invested in business. I released about a dozen not-bad crime novels, money flowed; I bought myself a secondhand Opel and married young. But the business climate went down the drain, and I ended up in the shit, big time. I continued to churn out a title or two, just to keep up the façade, but I felt it wasn't going to last. I was also fed up with chasing warehouses and printers or going after various distributors to collect my miserable dues. I was making ends meet translating for other agencies, mainly thrillers and science fiction, which I liked.
The family climate wasn't all that sunny either. My wife and I didn't get along, although we'd gone out for a whole year before we took our vows (what a phrase) and got married solemnly in a church with various important people and promises of till death us do part. It is as though that screwed the whole thing up from the start. The box we stuffed ourselves into, that of a happy young couple from a mattress catalogue. In the end the realities of such a life took over. Utter banality. Sex going downhill. She was an artist, but she was bread-winning in some advertising agency where, for no particular reason, they gave her only sausages to draw. She tried to do some covers, but it didn't work out. But sausages she could do. She even won an award for them once, at some international exhibition, after which she was invited to go to Italy. Let's get divorced – I don't remember who said it, but neither party made an attempt to counter it. We didn't have children, nothing to divide – apart from the opel, and its wheels had been stolen. She gave it to me. And left. Now she's most likely drawing salami – but for a lot more money.
Everybody scrambled to save themselves, like rats in the bilges of a sinking ship. Most of my friends moved to Ireland, Spain and Germany, even to Portugal, from where, as a rule, the Portuguese themselves are trying to get away. In the end my mother shifted herself, too. She had just retired from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where she had worked for over twenty years, with the fabulous pension of about a hundred euros. She went away to take care of some old guy all the way over in Wales. It was set up by some former colleague of hers, who had developed a whole network of carers for old folks in the UK. She's been there for three years now, in some small town I always forget the name of, famous for its amazing natural beauty and Celtic monuments strewn across the landscape. I'll stay, she says, as long as I can. She even sent me money after that fiasco with the little penguins. I never had a good feel for children's literature. But the agent persuaded me that those penguins were a huge hit right across Europe. Ten series with pictures. The rights cost me a fortune, and the printing expenses even more. I printed ten thousand of them, but hardly sold a single one. That was the end of my publishing career. Wherever I looked, only dust, idiocy, stray mongrels and hopelessness ...
Then I asked myself why I didn't shift my ass somewhere. I mean seriously, not like half the Bulgarian population who like the idea after they puncture a tyre in one of the countless craters in the roads. It took me almost a year to motivate myself. Maybe because I wasn't dying from hunger – after all, I had a roof over my head, when I felt like a screw I always found someone, and when I felt like a drink I was never left dry. I often lied to myself that things weren't all that bad. But I knew that path only leads further and further down the road to physical and mental degeneration, and I wasn't even forty, and my whole life was ahead of me.
At least that's what they say.
And, yes, I played the lottery with at least a million fellow potatoes looking for more fertile ground. I didn't believe anything would come of it, bearing in mind my brother's experience. He would send envelopes like a madman until finally the company he worked for sorted the work permit for him. But the lottery is a national sport in Bulgaria. Play, it might happen. When you do win, though, everything goes to hell. One powerful imperative sweeps away your former life: you've been chosen. Here fate gets involved. You've been given a chance, the door has been left ajar for you and whether you go in is entirely up to you. Everyone deserves happiness. And now there's no way out. If you don't answer Uncle Sam's bugle you'll be whinging to the grave. The ulcer of doubt will eat away inside you even if everything turns out fine. And if, God forbid, your life takes a downturn, you'll be pulling your hair out thinking of your wasted chance. The clash with domestic reality, so routine and unavoidable until now, suddenly acquires tragic dimensions. You screwed up again, you idiot will ring in your head like the echo of a nail being hammered. You screwed up again.
My brother was frequently away on some project, and his apartment sits empty for most of the year. So it's no problem for him to accommodate me, at least to begin with. If I could get myself out of here, of course ...
The air-conditioning and air-purification systems had been switched off to slow the spread of the suspected infection. The air inside the plane was hot and heavy, saturated with the smell of bodily vapours. Some of the passengers held napkins to their faces. Just my luck. When the gates are finally opening for you, the Green Card is in your pocket and you, so to speak, are in the full pocket of America; some sneaky virus could be breaking down the walls of your cells to remind you that the lottery of life and the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program have nothing in common.
I imagined how I'd be spending the following months in quarantine in some secret camp, outside US borders, behind electrified barbed wire. Under the pretext of curing us, some murky department of the CIA that deals with biological investigation conducts macabre experiments on some of the detainees from the more second-rate countries. My body is covered with ulcers, and I'm dying in unbelievable agony. Victim of international terror. As far as I know, in this case insurance policies generally don't apply. They quickly cremate my remains to cover the traces. One fine day my brother receives my ashes in a black plastic box like the one in which my father arrived.
Welcome to America, dude.
CHAPTER 2NED
For a long time I thought I was happy – or, if not exactly happy, then at least content with my life. Objectively speaking, I am not lacking for anything. I am officially in the category of Successful Bulgarians Abroad, SBA. Unofficially, though, things are slightly different. Happy I am not; neither am I particularly content. The only consolation left is that I am an SBA – which, unfortunately, is not enough. In this life one needs something more than the jealousy of the NSAB, the Non-Successful Asses stuck in Bulgaria.
And that something more is what I lack.
I think I always knew this but stubbornly hid my head in the sand. I tried to look at the situation positively, like they taught us at university. When your salary jumps around 10 per cent a year that's not particularly difficult. You progress through the hierarchy. You learn new things. You travel. Until one day things start to repeat themselves. As do the destinations. The lavish evenings on your company's credit don't do it for you any more. Neither do the luxury hotels. Nor the flights in first class. Imperceptibly, but irreversibly, you begin to understand.
You've reached the peak of your possibilities.
The ceiling is as transparent as a glass floor. You see the people walking above you clearly, you even hear the squeak of their two-thousand-dollar shoes, you can look up their wives' skirts as much as you like, but you can't join them up there. I don't fool myself any longer. The ladder I was climbing ends beneath their soles. When you understand that at fifty it probably doesn't matter. You've already flowed through the system's sewers, and you float around the edges until the tide erases the memory of you like it would an oil spill.
'Do you feel successful?'
The question is launched by a Bulgarian journalist, who is making a series of 'portraits' dedicated to the phenomenon of SBAs for a big Bulgarian newspaper. I have no idea how she got my details. She mentions the name of an old acquaintance of mine who went back two years ago to become a big shot. But I reckon her hidden agenda is to grab some desperately lonely office zombie and get a ring on her finger. It's not gonna be me, even though she's a looker. Success, I hold forth, is relative. There are different levels of success. And things of that sort ...
This year, for the first time, I didn't get a pay rise. Actually, to be completely honest, they even cut half a per cent. That's a measly fifteen hundred less a year, but it's the principle that counts. Of course, I'm not the only one who's been hit. Most senior employees received lighter wage packets. Official explanation: we are overpaid. And the worsened economic climate. We all know that. I don't see how my half a per cent will help a company with an annual turnover of two billion, though. More like they're testing us. Won't we give in to our anger and disappointment? Won't someone slam the door behind him? Nothing of the sort happens. We drag our sour faces around, swear through our teeth, but actually we are all dead happy, me included, that we haven't been given the push. The murky waters of unemployment are rising daily. Nobody's ready to throw himself in to save his amour propre.
Yuppie sounds glamorous, but only while you can pay your rent. Unfortunately it's too late to persuade my brother that now is not the most appropriate time to come to America. Any comment in that direction will be seen as an attempt to avoid my familial responsibilities. Angel, or Ango as everyone calls him, has won the Green Card lottery. He played; he won. I took part, too, and not just once. Didn't have any luck, though. Whatever. Ango-boy has to hang around here at least a few months a year otherwise he will lose his status. A Green Card can't make anyone's problems disappear like waving some magic wand, but to lose it would be just as crazy as believing it could.
Ango-boy also wants to be an SBA. I can't blame him, of course. Essentially, Bulgarians can be divided into three categories: SBAs and NSABs, as mentioned earlier, and TBAs, Thieving Bulgarian Asses, who cause the misery and exile of the other two groups. Any attempt to formulate subgroups or in-between categories smells to me of opportunism. But a logical question crops up: aren't there any unsuccessful Bulgarians abroad? Well, none that I know of. All of them boast that they are successful, even hyper-successful – how they gorge great handfuls from the cornucopia and drink directly from the fountains of heaven. The rest end up quietly back in Bulgaria. So they are NSABs again. Following the same logic there are no successful Bulgarians in Bulgaria. If you believe their stories, even those who enjoy relative abundance are actually balancing on the edge of misery; their existence is woven from insecurities and mishaps. As for the future, there is no such thing. The truly successful do not hang around for long; they go abroad to join the ranks of SBAs. Those of them who still stay often prove to be the stupidest TBAs.
My brother's arrival fills me with joy and worry at the same time. I've been living alone for three years now, and I'm starting to get fed up with it. On the other hand, it's not that bad. I don't have to accommodate anyone. Most of my friends got married ages ago, some are already divorced and remarried, others cohabit ... There's no reason to rush. Women are, as a rule, like leeches, so I believe. To get together with a woman just because that's expected is a guaranteed recipe for headaches. That's one of the reasons I avoid going back to Bulgaria. The moment they see you're an SBA, in good shape and single, something happens to them. It's like they go crazy and fly at you from all sides; they show their goods and try to snare you emotionally. They wait for you to put a foot wrong and, bang, they put you in harness amid the victorious howls of the entire horde of NSABs, all jumping around you with their wooden wine vessels and traditionally made towels, like Native Americans dancing around the cadaver of a noble deer.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Black Box by Alek Popov, Daniella Gill de Mayol de Lupe, Charles Edward Gill de Mayol d Lupe. Copyright © 2014 Alek Popov. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.
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