Free Thirst by Ken Kalfus Page A

Side, he was struck by a clever idea. A collection of business cards that others had placed to advertise their services covered the wall by the polish and shoelace display. Harrah thumbtacked his own card there.
    On his way to work from the West Side the next morning, he returned to the train station. He was surprised—and even disturbed—to find that his card was still there at the shoeshine stand, with his Seventh Avenue office and East Side home telephone numbers. He removed the card. When he reached the office, he called his East Side apartment. There was no answer. He tried several times during the day. That night he went to sleep on the West Side and awakened immediately in the East Side’s bright morning sunshine, uncomfortably aware that a ringing telephone had been disturbing him, on and off, for the past several hours.
    One evening a few weeks later, he was cooking pasta in his East Side apartment and couldn’t find his colander. After searching in vain through his cabinets and even the hall closet, he was forced to drain the water by tipping the pot over the sink and holding the spaghetti back with a fork. Several strands went down the drain and the spaghetti remained wet and became soggy. A few days later the colander turned up—in Harrah’s Columbus Avenue apartment, neatly stacked beneath the Columbus Avenue colander. He pulled the two colanders apart and stared at them for a long while, almost afraid to put them down.

    Nothing like this had ever happened before. It was an impossibility; of course, this whole business was impossible, but he had come to accept it and the various rules that consistently applied to it. The colander violated those rules, putting everything else in doubt. And although he was at first pleased to have found the colander, he soon realized that he had no way of returning it to his East Side apartment and would have to buy a new one anyway.
    Other objects began to misplace themselves and turn up in the other apartment: a tie, a felt-tip pen, an unread book by an Argentine author he had never heard of, a supermarket-bought bag of cookies, and, most maddeningly, the television remote control, which, missing from the East Side, was totally useless on Columbus Avenue. Lillian asked him about the cookies.
    “Pathmark brand?”
    She wrinkled her face in incredulous disgust, an unattractive gesture. Harrah normally stocked this, his East Side refrigerator, with David’s Cookies—the shop was only a block away. Because there was no such shop near his place on Columbus, he occasionally bought cookies in the supermarket there. They would sit in his West Side refrigerator for months. He hadn’t even missed them.
    Harrah shrugged, but perceived that she now harbored certain unflattering suspicions about him and his taste, though there was nothing she said and no change in her manner. Anna left her umbrella one night in his Columbus Avenue apartment and it too turned up on the East Side, in his hall closet. It was an ordinary black
umbrella, one that men and women could carry with the same inconspicuousness, but Harrah thought Lil took unusual interest in the article, stopping just short of inquiring how he had obtained it.
    One day he had a lunchtime errand down in the financial district, where, as he was stepping from a cab, he saw Anna cross a street. He hurriedly straightened out the tip with the driver. Anna disappeared around the corner of a building. As Harrah rushed to catch her, dodging several pedestrians rushing in exactly the opposite direction, he realized that he had awakened that morning on the East Side—in other words, that it was a Lillian day; he even had a date with her that evening. He stopped and considered the implications. Before this, he had assumed neither woman existed in the other’s world. For the first time he felt ashamed about maintaining two romances at once. But perhaps this woman wasn’t Anna at all; did Anna really wear her hair like that?
    Harrah began