Around Seven

A short story by JK Ghillis

Late afternoon, around six, Karol opened the wooden case and took out a deck of cards with the idea of building a little house. Solitaire bored him stiff, yet he kept doing one daily since his eyesight got worse. He had gotten himself bifocal glasses, but the split focus gave him a headache, so he covered the top part of the lenses with black tape and used just the bottom to see. The distance remained blurred and he couldn’t care less. What mattered was what was in front.

What was in front was the deck of cards and a desire to build. No solitaire today, maybe not ever again, he thought. One by one, Karol placed all the cards suit-side up on the table, side by side, in rows of eight. His fingers were thick and rough from his lathe operating days and he could barely feel the edge of the cards. But the fingers were swift and assured and didn’t tremble, which he acknowledged with pride. He was also proud of his body, which he has maintained well with regular exercise since his vocational school days, when he’d discovered weightlifting. In the army, he held a division record in deadlift.

He was finishing the second row of cards when the first Joker appeared. Karol set it aside and continued. The second Joker showed up in row five, and he took this one away, too. Now, he proceeded to organize his building materials according to rank. He stacked all cards from 2 to 10 in neat piles of four each. Next came the four Jacks, four Queens, four Kings, and the Aces, also in the magic number of four, which Karol considered better than three or five, as odd numbers made him nervous. You can’t put odd numbers in pairs, he reasoned. Someone is always left behind to play solitaire, he cracked wise.

Karol put all the card bricks together into one pile, with the 2s on top, where they deserved to be, and Aces on the bottom. The ground floor of his house must start with the lowest number. It only makes sense.

He had built most of the furniture in the apartment with his own two hands. When his child was born, he partitioned the living room so the kid would have his own space. He was happy it was a boy and spent most of his free time playing with him. Krystyna, his wife, was a good woman, a homemaker, who kept it all running smooth. When the money was tight, she would pick up an odd job or two, like that washer-making gig. Somebody has hired her to make rubber washers in bulk. A mechanical contraption was brought in, the size of a sewing machine, with a lever. Krystyna would sit by it, pressing down on the lever which punched through a never-ending strip of India rubber fed out a big spool. The round washers, three-millimeters thick, would drop into a bin. She was paid by the bin, not per item, as it would be impossible for anyone to count those thousands of pieces. The machine wasn’t noisy, just made a soft, squishy sound when his wife worked it at night, and Karol slept through it without a glitch.

Karol evened out the edges of his deck. He didn’t like any cards sticking out. The deck felt nice and smooth now. He set it aside. He grabbed the two Jokers, flushed them together, and ripped into halves. Two Jokers ripped in half make four half-Jokers, he chuckled.

One of the pieces slipped through his fingers. It was the Joker’s head. If you rip any other card, Karol thought, you still get two identical halves. But not with the Joker. So special. The Joker was grinning at him now, so he put the four torn pieces together and tried to rip them into eight, but he couldn’t. That surprised him. So, he just ripped the two faces, one at a time, and that was that.

Karol began his construction by placing a dish rag on the table. The rag was rough and sticky with grease, and made for a perfect non-sliding foundation. For the ground floor, he used the lower-number cards, making six triangular supports in a row. None fell over. He decided to keep the front of the cards on the outside. No secrets here. A triangle of 2s of clubs and diamonds formed the far-left brace. The brace on the right was 4s of hearts and spades.

He picked up a single card and dropped it horizontally on top of the left two supports. He followed it with four more cards and the first base layer was done. All lower, wage-earning numbers, he mused.

Karol was not good at playing cards. Or maybe he has never had time for frivolities. At the machine shop, they would play poker sometimes, at break time, but he preferred to read the sports page instead. At home, he played War with his son, a game of pure chance, which he liked because the suits didn’t matter, and because it was nearly impossible to cheat. When Janek was five, Karol tricked him into doing pushups for every battle lost. If Karol lost, he did twice as many pushups as Janek. Fair is far. It worked for a few years, but Janek started to read books at six and slowly lost interest in games.

By the time Janek finished his elementary school, he was already taller than Karol, and fat. For several years, Karol would force his son to a daily exercise regimen, dragging him off the bed at six in the morning to do drills. Janek could not go to the bathroom until a hundred jumping jacks, squats, and pushups were finished. Sometimes he sweated so much, he would lose any desire to pee.

Karol’s wife had begged him to ease up on the kid, and he eventually relented. Janek’s grades were tops and he didn’t have any problems getting into a good high school, which made Karol proud regardless of his son’s lack of physical grace.

Karol ran out of the number cards in the middle of the third floor. He finished it with three Jacks. The fourth Jack and two Queens formed the base of the fourth floor. And still not a single fall. No collapse. Karol was feeling good, but his forehead was sweaty. He rubbed his sleeves all over his face. Even his neck was damp. He inhaled, dried off his palms on the pants, and began to set the next floor.

Queens and Kings only. The hierarchy must go on. But even Kings have someone on top.

Ace of clubs and Ace of diamonds formed the last base. Plenty of room there, he confirmed, for the final two cards to make a penthouse triangle. Ace of hearts on the left, Ace of spades on the right. Lean them in gently, slowly, hold your breath, you’re almost there. Without the slightest quiver, Karol put the last two Aces on top of his pyramid in a perfectly symmetrical wedge and leaned back. The bottom part of his glasses fogged over.

Karol took off his bifocals, cleaned them with his shirt, and put them back on. There it was, his magnificent structure. With all the suits facing out. It startled him how lively the house looked in its full five-story glory. Hmm, he mumbled.

Janek had never worn glasses. He would never get sick. Even for such a fat boy. Karol was sure it was due to those early workouts. And to the always-open windows at night, even in winter. Maybe if he had gotten Krystyna to exercise, she would’ve made it. But the good woman didn’t make it, she didn’t even make it to her son’s high school graduation. At least she did learn that Janek had been accepted to the Polytechnic, and she’s got some joy out of that. At least.

Karol got up and walked toward the window. He was sweating a lot again. The window was closed. Why? Then he remembered that he had closed it to avoid a draft. That would be disastrous for his construction.

Karol never remarried. Janek had received his architecture degree and moved abroad to Berlin. He hadn’t really spoken much to his father since high school, and now there was nothing between them anymore, not even the phone. Karol received one Christmas package from Janek in twenty two years, but with no letter. It was a card game with the name he couldn’t pronounce or understand. Tod und Leben. He threw it away as the deck had only thirty-two cards.

He had a hard time reaching for the window handle. How strange, he thought. Opening the latch was even harder. He couldn’t rotate his wrist, so he turned the whole arm with his torso and it worked. The air felt good on his wet face. He didn’t care if the draft would collapse his building. The work was already done and done well.

Karol looked in the distance but the distance was blurry. Of course it was. He reached to his bifocals and felt the black tape on top of the lens. He tried to peel it off with his fingernail but it was stuck solid. Aah. Forget it. A stronger gust of wind hit him and a massive pain cut through his chest. How odd.