Chapter 2 — Too Dark For You

The morning was humid.

The black night had vanished along with its rain, and grey spread across beyond the windows. Hamburger perceived it through his eyelids without opening his eyes. He lay on the bed in the exact same position he had fallen asleep in, with his phone beneath his shoulder blade. His first conscious thought was physical: his back burned right where it had been pressing into him.

He shifted and the phone slid onto the mattress.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was the same. Black, with a single gold stripe where the paint had pulled away from the beam. It annoyed him. He had promised himself he would repaint it, and he hadn't.

Dominique said it looked intentional.

Like a gold line.

Back then, Hamburger didn't know what to say to that. Now he watched that golden line and felt he was looking at it differently. He missed a voice that would name it.

He stood up.

Slower than before, but he got up. Feet on the carpet, hands on his knees, that moment when the body scans itself. His head ached slightly and his first thoughts were like everlasting flowers. A dry memory of yesterday.

He walked to the bathroom, turned the faucet, waited for the warm water and let it run over his hands, over his wrists. He watched the stream.

Then he glanced in the mirror.

His face was tired and a bit too truthful. The kind of face that doesn't want anyone, anyone at all, to see it.

Hamburger left the mirror and went to the kitchen.

Káva.

The kitchen carried the scent of coffee, old wood, and a room where sleep had been poor. Hamburger turned the tap, filled the kettle, and placed it on the stove. On the sideboard sat his mug — dark, with a chipped handle, bought at a flea market in Altona for two euros because he liked it and because it was embarrassing enough to be beautiful.

Next to it stood a second mug.

Lighter. With a straight handle. Something between white and cream, ivory perhaps? Hamburger knew it. He knew the shape of the handle, he knew the way Dominique held it with two fingers instead of the whole palm, because the little handle was thinner than usual.

He looked away.

The cabinet above the sink was still ajar, just like during the night. Inside stood a dark tin can with a gold lid. Espresso that Hamburger didn't drink. Espresso for coffee makers, for luxurious morning rituals, for people who get up and know how the day begins. Hamburger hated those lids because they left a golden trace on his fingers. He always wiped it on his trousers.

He took his mug.

He closed the cabinet.

The kettle whistled.

He poured water into the press, waited, poured it over. Steam was rising and Hamburger watched it. Silence in his head. An unpleasant, empty silence like the aftertaste of yesterday. Like a room someone had left and no other sound had managed to fill yet.

He took the mug and went into the room.

The room looked different in the light.

Night turned it into a dramatic space—black, gold, blue-lit by a phone, with moving shadows and a candle. Now the room was just a room.

If only he had a room like that in his head, too.

Except that a gray morning, faint light through the curtain, the carpet, the sofa, the sideboard, the piles of books, and the motionless carousel were assembling themselves inside him. Every object demanded its redundant story.

At least the shadows were gone, leaving only objects with their true history.

Hamburger sat down on the sofa.

He took the mug in his hands and felt the warmth spreading into his forearms. For a moment he did nothing. The room before him held everything together, unlike his head, which spun the empty hook in the hallway, the second mug on the sideboard, the ajar cabinet, the golden line on the ceiling, the motionless carousel like a child's spinning top.

Dominique had left.

Hamburger had known since yesterday. Since the moment the door clicked in the way only a door clicks once, definitively, in a way that says: I am not coming back. And Hamburger knew with certainty that this was the end of their story.

But in the morning, the story of the doors sounded different.

At night, it was a physical pain. The room tilted, and Hamburger couldn't concentrate on anything, not even on what wasn't physical. Now the room was level. The coffee in the mug was hot. He sat and could think, and that was the problem, because thinking was worse than walking in a tilted room.

What Dominique loved.

Hamburger began to piece it together slowly, like a puzzle where you don't want to see the picture, but you keep building it anyway because you need to know what's there, even though you know you won't like it.

Dominique loved the room.

Not Hamburger in the room. The room itself.

Black apartment, gold and blue.

He loved the way the candle cast long shadows and ordinary things looked beautiful in that light: the old carousel, the mug, the pile of books, Hamburger himself. In that light, he was different. Sharper. More dramatic. More cinematic than real.

Dominique loved the cigarette smoke, the fragrant coffee, the old wood of this apartment, the fabric sofa. He loved how Hamburger paced the room late at night in his briefs, how he chose the music, how he wiped a condensation-beaded bottle with a tissue before pouring into a glass and leaving it to sit. Usually, he didn't even take a sip after that. He just left it there. And so he drank it himself.

He loved the atmosphere.

Hamburger had felt it for months. Only, months get covered over by ordinary presence. By moments when Dominique was truly there and looked at him in a way that was easy to read as love.

And it was close to love.

More than an interest in a room.

But not enough.

Because when Hamburger started talking about real things — not music, not light, not how the city looked from the window at night — Dominique began to slip away.

When he spoke of fear. Of the feeling that he was too much of something for people. Too dark. Too true. Too motionless in places where others knew how to move on. About the things he carried and didn't know how to put down anywhere other than the middle of the room, out loud.

That was when Dominique drifted away.

Not all at once. Gradually. Like an image fading from a photograph left out in the light.

Hamburger saw it and did nothing, because he didn't know what to do. He couldn't stop speaking the truth. He couldn't just turn himself into an atmosphere, into smoke, golden reflections, and a beautiful cutout in the dark. Maybe he could have kept it up for a little while. Then he would have been a different person. And he didn't know that other person, nor did he want to be him.

So he remained silent.

And he saw Dominique walking away.

Too dark for you.

That sentence felt to him like a chorus repeating in his head because it wanted to settle there for good.

Too dark for you.

Hamburger didn't perceive it as an accusation or as self-pity. It really was like that damned gold line on the ceiling! Like that empty hook in the hallway…

He was too dark for Dominique.

The mug was half-empty and the coffee lukewarm.

Hamburger got up, went to the kitchen, and tripped over the edge of the small rug by the threshold. He didn't fall. He just stopped for a moment. He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the tiles.

That's how it goes.

No one is elegant in pain – he hissed, gritting his teeth and hunching his shoulders. You trip over your own rug on a morning when you definitely don't need it, don't want it – probably so the world is sharper and your head clears up.

He poured the rest of the coffee into the sink. He washed the mug. He left it on the drying rack.

Then he returned and stood in the middle of the room.

The room was silent. Grey light. The carousel stood still. Hamburger looked at it — at the small metal object, slightly rusty, with horses and trains, bought because of the line that it looked like something out of a fairytale.

He picked it up.

He carried it over to the cabinet.

He shoved it into the back of the display case, behind the books, behind a box of unused things. The little horses and trains were gone. The shelf looked like a shelf again.

Hamburger closed the door.

Then he turned to the wardrobe.

It stood against the wall, large, dark, with rickety doors grinning open. One handle was higher than the other. The kind of detail Hamburger had long since stopped focusing on.

He opened it.

Inside was clothing. A lot of clothing. Hamburger bought it the way some people bought books. Not because he needed a new piece, but because it caught his eye. Or because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and that piece was hanging behind glass and had something about it that couldn't just be brushed aside.

Dark items. Light items. Textures that weren't entirely ordinary. High-waisted trousers. A coat a little too long. A jacket with an asymmetrical zipper. A gold detail on the collar.

Things you don't buy for your own mom's peace of mind.

Behind him was a room—gray, quiet, empty of Dominique, with a warm memory that was slowly fading.

Before him on the floor lay his clothes. His morning decision on what he would go out in. He could have chosen dark, flowing clothes. The kind where people look right through you. Where you don't have a face for them to remember.

Instead, he pulled out a dark jacket with an asymmetric zipper.

A big jacket. Bigger than he needed. He bought it that way on purpose, because a big jacket looks different. As if a person in a big jacket knows what they're doing. This one defied everything he had ever thought about big jackets.

He threw it over his shoulder.

Then he kept searching.

Trousers—dark, with a glossy stripe along the seams, a detail visible only in the light. A belt. A gold belt buckle, a bit overdone, a flash that rings louder in the room than on the street.

Then the shoes.

He stopped by them. Three pairs in the closet, two pairs by the door. Choosing shoes was always a delicate matter, because what space did he want to take up on the sidewalk?

He took the thick-soled shoes.

Nothing that would make people stop. Just a few centimeters more than necessary. The toe a little pointed. A sole that sounded sharper on the pavement.

The scarf. Dark and long. The kind you wrap twice and leave the ends loose.

A gold hoop for his ear.

Then the glasses.

Clear frames, slightly larger than his face. A little overly serious. Glasses that do not say: please, do not look at me.

They say: I am looking at you.

Of course without diopters. It was about supremacy.

He got dressed.

He did it slowly. Every piece had the weight of a decision. He zipped up his jacket. Belted himself. Wrapped his scarf. Put on his glasses. Slipped a golden hoop into his ear.

A narrow, long mirror hung in the hallway, slightly tilted so that the figure in it always looked a little thinner. Hamburger stood in it and looked at himself.

He was seen.

That was the right word.

He was visible. A gaze lands on the surface and doesn't immediately find a hole to get inside.

The mirror showed the jacket, the belt, the golden detail, the glasses, the scarf, the shoes.

It revealed a costume.

Hamburger knew it was a costume. He didn't mince euphemisms in his head. He didn't tell himself he was just dressing how he liked, nor that he was choosing a style. It was a layer. Precise and deliberate. A decision to make a surface out of himself where a stranger's gaze could stop, before reaching the place where emptiness had shape and boundaries.

If they're going to look at you anyway, let them see this.

He went back to the room for his phone.

The phone was lying on the mattress screen down, just as he'd left it at night. He picked it up, turned it over. The display was off. He turned it on.

Messages.

A few messages from people who knew nothing and were asking various things. Hamburger read them without replying and put the phone in his pocket.

Then he made the bed. An unmade bed in an empty apartment is hard to look at with pain inside. He pulled the blanket up, straightened the pillow.

He left the room.

In the kitchen, his mug was sitting on the drainer. Next to it was the other one, lighter in color, with a straight handle.

Hamburger took it.

He placed it in the back of the cupboard. Behind the mugs he used. Behind the large mug for fruit tea. Behind the small one for espresso, which he didn't drink. The light-colored mug went behind them all.

Hidden.

Not thrown away.

Hamburger closed the cabinet.

He took the keys from the tray by the entrance. From the empty tray where now only his keys lay and nothing else. He reached for the jacket on the hook.

Then he stopped.

He already had his jacket on.

He smiled at himself, but rather crookedly. No time for smiles. He took his keys and walked to the door.

Hamburg outside was still gray, routinely cold. November chill mixed with damp air from the port, a bit of salt, a pinch of exhaust fumes, and low clouds on top that obscured the planes. Hamburger left the house, the pavement was wet from the night rain, the tiles shiny like his belt.

He took a few steps and stopped by a bollard. He pulled out his phone and stared aimlessly at the map: where to go, he didn't know. That he had to go, he knew. That he had to get out of the apartment, he knew for sure.

A person with a dog passed him. Then two people with paper cups of coffee in their hands. Then a girl in a jacket too thin for that morning; she was smoking and glanced at Christmas a Hamburger out of the corner of her eye.

Christmas a Hamburger inhaled the smoke. The white stream of her cigarette drifted on and dissolved in the grey air.

You liked the smoke.

The thought came uninvited.

Smoke.

Dominique loved the way Hamburger smoked. Or to be precise: he loved the aesthetics of smoking. The way Hamburger held the cigarette. How the smoke behaved in the candlelight. How rings of smoke rose toward the ceiling in the room.

It wasn't about the cigarette.

It was about the image.

Hamburger quit smoking half a year ago.

Dominique didn't notice for a month.

That was one of the moments when Hamburger first felt that Dominique wasn't watching him. He was watching his image. The image went ahead and Hamburger followed behind. Dominique loved the image and Hamburger thought to himself: maybe that's enough. Maybe the image is enough. Maybe a person doesn't have to be whole to be loved.

But it wasn't enough.

Because when things came that weren't nice—fear, fatigue, pain that didn't know how to be dramatic, just crushing, mundane, without golden highlights—Dominique didn't know what to do with them. Not because he was bad. He just hadn't come for this.

He had come for the black-and-gold apartment, smoke, light, and the painting.

You liked the view.

Hamburger slipped his phone into his pocket and walked away.

It was a fifteen-minute walk to the harbor.

He went there because the harbor air was heavier, more humid, smelling of oil, old wood, and seawater. And also because water thinks differently than land. Standing by the water and looking at it anchored him in a way he couldn't describe.

The water moved, without reason, wildly, unpredictably.

And that was enough. At least for his inner peace.

He walked along the quay wall.

A worker in a reflective vest was repairing a cart cable. A few ships were moored in the dock, quiet and tied up. The sky hung low. Blue-gray. Hamburg was like that that year — blue-gray, quiet, with water underfoot, with the awareness that you were in a place from which people depart.

Hamburger leaned against the railing.

The water beneath him was dark and calm. It carried the sky on its surface like a matte, moving imprint. Hamburger looked at it and wondered what Dominique actually knew about him.

He knew the room. He knew the clothes — and that was the joke, because clothes were always a layer. Dominique loved the layer and thought he loved Hamburger. He knew the way he chose music. That was more real; there was more in the music. But even the music was safe. It transcended them both. Loving the music in another person is easier than loving their fear.

Did he know his fear?

Hamburger smiled slightly. Not cheerfully.

Fear.

He was afraid of a specific thing: that he was too much for people. Not that he was too loud, demanding, or complicated.

Too dark.

Too willing to look at things that others prefer not to name. Too incapable of pretending that everything is fine when it isn't. Too truthful in moments when truth is not welcome.

Dominique saw that as a threat.

Not because he was bad. He just loved the image. And an image is always prettier than the thing itself.

Too dark for you, too dark to stay.

Hamburger repeated that sentence in his head like a diagnosis. Like something you have to live with. Dominique left because Hamburger was too dark. That was a fact. And Hamburger couldn't — or wouldn't — betray his darkness.

Facts?

One room.

An empty hook.

He stood there for a long time. For a while leaning against the railing, for a while pacing back and forth along the wall, hands in the pockets of his large jacket. The gold detail on the belt shimmered faintly in the gray light. He thought in images, as always. They were born from the prickly energy under his skin, turned into heavy clumps, and stripped away inside his body until they were completely laid bare into a true image.

Dominique in the room.

Dominique with coffee.

Dominique once late at night saying: I love this atmosphere.

Not: I love you.

The atmosphere.

Hamburger remembered it. He stored it away. He knew what she was telling him, but he let it be.

To hide in the atmosphere, in striking, unusual outfits—that's how you protect yourself. How else could you do it? People calculate every single scrap you offer. And Hamburger knew that, doing exactly this all these years. He dressed distinctively, furnished his room in dark and gold tones, and chose music complex enough to stand behind. He created a world around himself that people fell in love with, and then he waited to see if anyone would fall in love with what lay beyond that world.

Dominique couldn't do it.

Hamburger knew it before he could admit it to himself. He had known it for many months, yet he stayed, because closeness—even imperfect closeness, even closeness that sees only the surface—is warmer than nothingness.

And the room was warm.

The room was warm.

The memory of that night came back to him. The first hours after the door clicked shut for good. That unbearable warmth, worse than the cold, because it said: someone was here, and the space doesn't know it yet.

Now it knew.

In the morning, the room was cooling down. Hamburger stood by the water, feeling this as an unquestionable fact that had settled in during his walk, his standing, and his gazing at the dark surface. The room would keep cooling down. That is the natural order of things. And Hamburger could not stay in a cooling room forever.

He turned away from the harbor.

He walked back up the street. His step had a slightly different purpose. It was still a step tired from an unpleasant night, but it was somewhat more precise. The harbor air stayed behind him. Hamburg was grey, wet, the orange streetlamps shining to no purpose at all.

He stopped by the window of a sporting goods store. It reflected the street behind him, and in it Hamburger briefly saw himself in the passage: the jacket, the belt, the scarf, the glasses, the gold ring.

A costume.

An image.

Exaggerated? Maybe.

Ridiculous? Maybe that too.

Fine. The atmosphere belonged to Hamburger. The room, the smoke, the carousel of shadows, the air temperature, the way the light fell—all of that was beautiful and Dominique was allowed to love it. Hamburger didn't know how to regret it, because that atmosphere wasn't a lie. It was a real world he had created, and he was truly at home in it.

Dominique was wrong about only one thing.

He thought the atmosphere was everything.

He didn't know — or didn't want to know — that behind the atmosphere there is a person. Specific. Heavy. Dark. Messy in a way that golden light cannot fix because it's not Japanese ceramics. A person who wanders around the room at night without alcohol, trips over the rug, holds a second mug, and doesn't know whether to throw it away or keep it.

Hamburger kept it.

That was the most honest decision of the morning. The mug goes in the back, behind the others. Throwing it away is too much. Leaving it on the drying rack is too much. So it goes in the back, where it isn't in sight, yet exists.

That was right.

He walked on.

The street. People passing him by. A car. A tram in the distance. Silence sat in his head — not oppressive, rather simple. The silence after accepting things as they are.

He existed himself in a dark jacket with a gold detail, in glasses that are a bit too much, in shoes that sound a bit too bright on the pavement, with a scarf wrapped twice.

Tma nebyla chyba.

Darkness was not a luxury one could afford only in solitude.

Tma byla existence, se kterou se chodí.

Která se nosí.

And when Dominique couldn't carry her inside, Hamburger will carry her outside. On the surface. In the clothes, in the shoes, in the gold detail, in the way she takes up space on the sidewalk.

Glances can land right here.

Not inside.