Number (from the Munich Tales)

NUMBER
By Michael Kroetch

He brought people the news with his face. He was used to being on television, used to seeing his face there. It wasn´t a completely handsome face, but it was not ugly. People trusted it. People trusted him. He was reliable. He liked having people count on him. He liked also that people counted how many people watched him. The number made him comfortable in the same way a down blanket might on a cold night. He held the number in his mind when he visited his parents and they needled him with questions about why he didn´t have a family yet. There was no way he could or would possibly explain to them that this number was his family. They would not understand. They would tell him to get off his high horse and live a little bit in the world of people. They liked using this phrase “live in the world of people.” What was the number except a record of how much he was alive in the hearts and minds of people? How could you live more fully and completely in the world of people than with this kind of number? But such questions were useless. He knew this. He knew his parents lived outside of logic. It was a place they visited sometimes, but rarely stayed very long, prefering instead the security of their own belief system. He didn´t need their beliefs. He was a man of the news. He was known anywhere he went. He lived in TV. The number was with him there and kept him there. He liked being in the news room. It felt more real to be in that chair behind that desk than almost anywhere else—certainly more than being home watching himself, which he sometimes did if there was nothing else on TV. It was not that he minded at all seeing himself on the screen, which he had heard some people from television did. More than dislike, he felt a different feeling, a feeling closer to jealousy. He didn´t want to be home in his flat, he wanted to be there where it was real in front of the cameras and where what he said mattered and made a difference. At home his words lacked purpose. He had the same feeling when he was at parties. He felt confused, as if he were impersonating the person he was on TV and never doing a very good job of it. He knew if he made his parents´ dream come true of having a family, things would only be worse. He´d become even more of a shadowy version of the strong, confident TV news personality. He had no trouble meeting women. None whatsoever. They all came straight towad him and jumped into the palm of his hand. But once they were there, he didn´t know what to say or what to do. He was always afraid he was lit badly and too sweaty. He needed to practice ahead of time what he was going to say so it would seem as smart as what was written for him to say on the news, but he usually forgot where he was in the planned speeches and what was supposed to come next. So usually what came out was chaos with him ending things abruptly and rushing home to see the better version of himself recap the day´s headlines. How could he be a father to anyone when he was so afraid the number might change, get smaller and smaller? Every day it didn´t, he felt relief. He was still here, still the one everyone loved to tell them which plane just exploded on the runway.