Binaries

I see the familiar café and push the button on my stopwatch. It’s called MishMash even though it’s just a typical café with cakes, tea, and coffee. Though it does serve Guinness carrot cake, and that’s a mishmash of sorts. As I turn the corner where my building is, I hear a loud noise that’s somewhere between a canon and very close thunder.

For a second, I can’t take it in. I can’t make out what I’m seeing like when you’re driving and you’re sure the blob ahead is a dog and then a rock and then a dog. There’s smoke on the side of the building that faces the street. The side where I can watch people enter and exit the antique shop empty-handed and watch a cat in an above apartment watching mine. It’s different. Pockets are empty like a gnawed-on hunk of cheese. There’s people’s stuff on the sidewalk. It looks like a yardsale after a tornado.

I always wondered what I’d do in this type of situation. Turns out, I’d do nothing. I can’t move. I can’t hear. I can’t scream.

I wonder how my flowers are that I put out on the tiny balcony, a balcony that you can’t even stand on, that you can’t even access because only the top part of the window opens. The tiny balconies are a slap in the face, they'll remind you that you’re too poor for a real one. Unless you hang some pots with flowers on its rusting bars. That’ll shut it up and block out the view of the crazies below.

I’m thinking about my flowers and my laptop and the pot of Bolognese (yes, I know it’s “ragu”) I spent seven hours cooking. Patience, low heat, and a bit of sugar are the keys, anyone will tell you.

But of course, what I’m really thinking about in a separate part of my brain is my husband. He’s either in the apartment or he’s running in the park. It’s Saturday morning and these are the only two options. This is the essence of the binary code, how everything works nowadays, a series of 1s and 0s. Inside the apartment. Inside the park.

Saturday mornings are a ritual designed to ensure we can soak up the juices of freedom. We wake early, do all our chores before noon. We have 36 hours of unstructured, unclaimed time. For us.

I open the door. He says, “Have a good run.” I say, “You too.”. He hoovers. He likes the repetitive motion. He especially likes it if there’s some powder to put down first. He likes seeing the powder disappear, each clean rectangular patch is something accomplished. I hate hoovering. The noise knocks around in my head like a frantic fly. It hurts my back and I secretly know it can’t suck up everything.

So he hoovers, I run. Then he runs, and I take a bath. Sometimes our paths cross, he at the beginning of his run, me at the end. We smile and wordlessly high-five, laughing inside at the people who must think it’s a secret runners’ code. Or that we’re crazy.

I didn’t see him today. We didn’t high-five. Our sweaty palms didn’t meet. But again, we don’t always. Sometimes our paths don’t cross. And sometimes he doesn’t feel like running. Sometimes he goes to the gym. And sometimes he just stays inside and reads the internet.

A girl is pulling on my arm. She’s Chinese. Her parents always speak to her in English. Some people think parents should only talk to their children in the language of the country they’re living in, but I feel sad for the mom who probably can’t express herself perfectly.

This girl is yelling in English for me to help her. I know what happened. Her parents went on the lift with the baby and she went down the stairs, delighted with herself that she could beat them. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times before. We all live on the first floor, or second, as I would call it if I were in my own country.

We and the Indian family, the Brazilian students, the Polish bodybuilder, and a family with two children who have the biggest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. Their mother wears a hijab but I couldn’t tell you which country they come from. Not by looking.

My watch is beeping at me “Do you want to continue?”. I haven’t turned it off. After 90 seconds of inactivity, it threatens to do so if I don’t start moving.

There’s a group of people below the right side of the building. I can’t see my apartment because of the way the street curves. But they’re looking in unison, like at a rock concert, except their arms are stiffly at their sides and not in the air. The people who live on the left side are in a separate group to my left, looking back and forth between their pristine side of the building and the right side, which is bellowing smoke and screams.

People are running in and out of the building. The girl tells me her mommy and daddy are in the elevator and I tell her it’s ok. I walk her to the left-side group. I don’t know what we might see if we go the other way. Body parts? People jumping from the 5^th floor? My flowers blown to smithereens?

Two minutes. He’s either in the apartment or he’s running in the park. Apartment. Park. Apartment. Park. I’m talking out loud. The girl looks at me strangely but holds my hand tighter.

I hear other binary conversations. Gas explosion. Terrorism. Right side. Left side. We’re ok. They’re not. I hear sirens and I hear wailing. They are not the same, but it isn’t the first time figures of speech got it wrong.

He’s usually back 30 minutes after me. He’ll find me with the Chinese girl. We’ll live better. A new binary. Before this. And after.