The Extra Room
by Cristian Leata
The Muji phase had begun in summer. She’d go there on Saturday mornings, study each object, and fill her basket with shirts, notebooks, lamps, anything she’d, by some undisclosed decision tree, deemed worth buying. The people at the store knew her, though they never showed it overtly – she could tell from how they followed her with their eyes through the store, or from the smile at the cashier when they packed her purchases in brown paper bags with the store’s red logo. She assumed, correctly, that they cared little, that all high-street employees grow routinised by the daily contact with the city’s eccentricities. So Muji emerged as a safe house, a place that was always the same, with its calming music and bleached concrete walls. She felt safer here than at home.
By autumn, she’d come daily after work and shop until the store closed, often being the last to leave and bidding farewell to the employees as if they were close acquaintances. From there, she’d take the tram, sometimes a taxi, to her flat in Charlottenburg. She wouldn’t listen to music on these rides, yet she’d look isolated from her surroundings, her gaze lost out the window, tracing everything and yet nothing. She’d arrive home, carefully place her shoes and jacket in the cupboard, then walk straight to the extra room, bare aside from the Muji bags. She’d place the new brown bag next to the others, perfectly aligned in a row, so balanced that one could judge them as an art installation. She’d smile to herself, close the door, lock it, and continue with her day in the predictable yet soothing way she was accustomed to.
Now it was late December, a period she did not enjoy for the obvious reasons, and also because Muji was either packed with casual shoppers and tourists or, worse, closed. Her firm had asked her to take time off as part of a company-wide tax-burden-reduction initiative to ensure employees do not carry over too many vacation days, so she found herself absolutely bereft of occupation. On these cold, wet days, she’d walk from Charlottenburg all the way to Hackescher Markt, pace the few blocks around Muji, hoping the rain would turn to snow and bring with it some celebratory essence of life. It eventually did, on the night of the 31st.
There was no question of parties or get-togethers. New Year’s night would pass like any other. On the 1st, she would clean and make a list of everything she would need to buy once the shops opened. Work would start on the 2nd, and Muji would assume regular working hours on the 3rd. With that in mind, she prepared a pot of mi noodles – the broth, the soluble sort – fried a mushroom mix with a spoonful of vinegar, made toast with honey, and drank the remaining quarter bottle of soju. At eight-thirty, she was in bed reading a collection of letters from John Fowles to his editor, Maschler, pausing at times to gaze at the snow outside. At ten, it was lights out. And at quarter to midnight, she woke from what she expected to be fireworks, only to find a violent knocking at the door.
She sat and listened closely.
The flat was silent. Had there been a knock? Outside, fireworks were being lit, machine-gunning and crackling in the street. The sweat on her back turned cold. She shook her head, sipped from her glass on the bedside table, and as her muscles uncoiled and she stretched back into bed, the knock shook the door again. So there was a knock! Harder this time, so insistent in its call that her door chain rang against the wooden frame, its presence calming her for a second, then immediately amplifying her anxiety once she remembered why it had been installed there in the first place. She got up and pushed her feet into a pair of woollen slippers, her heart throbbing at the base of her neck.
Someone needs help, she told herself. An emergency.
But even as she thought this, she knew it was an effort to soothe herself. Nobody who needs help knocks like this, pauses between knocks, or carries that hardness in their demand. More fireworks whistled close to her window, and she winced, shielding herself with her shoulder as if they were about to pass through the window. A loud chuckle came from what must’ve been a group of youths around her building. She straightened, judging her reaction silly for what was most certainly a non-problem, and went to the door. As she was about to grab the handle, the madness outside, amplifying with the passing of the year, she saw her door rammed with a heavy thud. Slivers of light shone in at the edge of the door, and dust particles floated in. Her mouth parted in a scream, but no sound followed. Instead, the noise grew wilder, and she froze. Thud! The sound of wood splinters cracking. A large body was forcing the door. From the young neighbours two floors up, she heard music, a countdown, then enthusiastic, frivolous clapping.
The phone!
As she commanded her body to turn, amid the sound of wood cracking, she saw the curved head of a crowbar coming in at the edges of her door, crushing through the timber, the door bending at the lock, then snapping out of its place with an elastic swing, stopping only at the extension of the chain. A hammer came in between the door and the frame, sliding down and snapping the chain from its bearings. She watched this as if pulled outside her body, a spectator. Two large figures entered her home, closing the door after them.
***
Sara was a collector. She never described herself this way or spoke to others about it, but if anyone knew her history, they would conclude that this was her most exciting feature, before moving on and forgetting about her. Sara liked certain things, and when she did, she entered a feverish period of acquisition, each acquisition bringing a sense of calm, progress, and completeness. That’s how she would spend all her money, without remorse or second thought, and fortunately, there were not many other things she needed or wanted to spend money on.
Then, unannounced and unprompted, the passion would dissipate, like the memory of an intense dream, and she would make an urgent effort to dispose of whatever she had collected as quickly as possible. There were a couple of success stories, such as when she sold her entire collection of Safari figures from the Dragon Collection (forty-two items) and HappyZoo (one hundred and twelve items) to an Asian collector for an amount that covered her rent for the next two years. Then she went through a quiet, empty period until a new flame arose – alpaca sweaters. Six months and thirty-seven sweaters later, in the middle of summer, her passion melted, and the clothes were donated anonymously to a very fortunate home for assisted living. Her life was a collection of intense phases centred on physical objects she would fall for and then dispense of without much concern for the resources she had poured into them. She was, in that sense, a lover who had matured into a collector. Her current and growing collection was a curated assortment of Muji’s all-white products. The night those men entered her house, she was approaching the end of the cycle.
***
When she came around, with no sense of how long she’d been out, she was immobile, cocooned in something that must’ve been tape, her mouth gagged, a searing pain radiating from the back of her head. As her senses returned, she heard heavy footsteps on the wooden floors, saw beams of light cutting through the darkness, and felt the faint, rhythmic thud of music from above. She heard whispers – impatient, dissatisfied – a door handle refusing entry, another thud against a door, the same body presumably forcing it. The pain was sharp. She closed her eyes, and the sounds faded. She woke again to the tight grip of someone on her jaw. A torch seared her retinas, amplifying the splitting pain at the back of her neck.
Where is the key to that door?
The coarse voice, belonging to whoever had that grip on her, lowered closer to her ear. Another voice called to the man holding her. Their tones rose, one urging the other to leave immediately.
She opened her mouth, and the man pulled out the gag. Her gums were dry and irritated. She whispered.
Keyring. At the door.
The other rushed to look for them. She heard his steps and the metallic jingle of keys. Once the door clicked open, the gag was fitted back into her mouth, and the man holding her jaw dropped her head, letting it fall onto the same bruise he had earlier inflicted with the crowbar. Darkness followed.
***
The extra room had stored many collections over the years, resembling a gallery without an audience to enjoy them. In fact, the only person to see the inside of the extra room was a man she had tentatively dated two years earlier. At that time, she was diligently working to complete her historical progression of Underwood typewriters, which had proved the most complex of her acquisition quests. Underwoods were no longer being produced. The first models were over a century old. Finding them required extensive research, expensive shipping fees and prohibitive prices – so much so that she took out a loan she was still paying back years later. Plus, there was the whole element of validating whether the specimens were real, which required reading complex technical manuals and ensuring the machines were fully functional. She realised soon after starting that this collection, more sophisticated than prior ones, was ultimately a pain. Not to mention that each typewriter, cast from iron, weighed close to a quarter of her body weight. But she knew, once she had begun, that she had an obligation to herself to complete her collection. Then she would be free.
Arthur, the man who saw the typewriters in the extra room, was someone she met online, allegedly interested in typewriters. He was younger than her, of uncertain origins, and shared very little about himself. He slept with her, his movements more desperate than passionate – she, absent, studying the feelings in her body with a sort of academic curiosity – then left. But not before taking with him a six-thousand-euro typewriter whose rail she complained needed fixing, which he claimed could easily be mended. Needless to say, Arthur evaporated with the Underwood, taking her a step further from completion and leaving her instead with an irritation that escalated into a full-blown STD, eventually requiring local antibiotics. Nobody visited the extra room afterwards, and four months later, once the sixty-eight Underwoods were lined up in historical sequence on the floor, she promised herself to pursue lighter collections, in substance and in spirit.
***
She woke to the cold air blowing in around the door frame. It was light in the flat and absolutely silent – the whole world slept and recovered after the previous night. She blinked and tried to move, her body stiff all over. She wriggled until she spat out the gag, then freed one hand. Then the other. She peeled off the tape that had coiled around her body and crawled to the door, staggering to lock it. Then she shuffled to the bathroom. She drank for a long time, leaning under the tap, then took off her clothes and sat in the tub, urinating as the scalding shower washed her all over. The water turned pink, and when she touched the back of her head, she could feel the caked blood liquefying. She towelled herself off, swallowed two Ibuprofen, got dressed, and went to inspect the house. As expected, the two had lifted everything remotely of value – the little jewellery she had, the cash, the electronics, even her mobile. She paced slowly to the extra room, where the key stood jammed in the lock – only hours ago, there had been forty-two Muji bags here; now, the empty floor. She entered and locked herself inside, turned the heating on max, and curled up in the middle of the room. She slept.
***
The following morning, she was back at work. She arrived early, enough to avoid the chatting crowds catching up on the holiday break, and retreated into the corner of the open-plan office. Nobody approached her all day – she wore her large noise-cancelling headphones over a beanie, mostly to cover the swelling at the back of her head. From the outside, she looked busy, totally immersed, but she wasn’t. She had been working in this graphic design role at the same media agency for six years, and the core benefit, aside from the steady and rather generous pay, was her ability to appear hard at work even when she was doing absolutely nothing.
At lunchtime, she grabbed a tuna sandwich from the tuck shop at the corner and crossed the street towards Tiergarten. She walked for ten minutes into the park until she reached a fountain. Here, she sat on one of the benches around a marble group of child figures playing and spraying water. She watched the thin, perfect stream of liquid emerging from one child’s mouth, carving a perfect arc over the pool and splashing on the face of another boy. The latter turned his head, attempting to shield himself, but, frozen in that position, he was eternally subjected to this humiliation. There was nothing this boy could do. In that sense, there was nothing the other could do to stop. They were blocked by design in perpetual antagonism.
The more she watched the scene, the more unsettled she felt. She tried to look away, but the spluttering of water drew her gaze back. When she got off the bench, her sandwich untouched, she realised her lunch break was already over. Back at the office, she completed a few tasks she could point to as output for the day’s work, and as the office began to empty, she followed, successfully avoiding everyone on the way out.
***
Sara arrived home that day and carried on as usual. The next day, the same. And so passed the entire first week of the year. She hired a handyman to fix the door and the lock, paying privately so she wouldn’t have to inform the landlord of what had happened. She also didn’t notify the police or anyone else, nor any of the few people she connected with on rare occasions. She tried not to think about it. She let it all settle on its own, a fact of life. Only at night did she struggle to sleep. To give herself some comfort, she moved her bed into the extra room and locked herself inside. It was only her there: no active collection, just the bare walls, the bare floor, her simple bed, and her regular breathing.
Then, on Saturday morning, she woke up and dressed, and her feet led her to Muji. It was just after opening hours. Only a couple of employees were inside, straightening items on the shelves, and none of them seemed to notice her.
Miss, she heard a few minutes later while she was studying a set of plates.
She turned to see a thirty-year-old man she had often met at the till. The way he held one hand balled into the other, with his back straight, gave the faint impression of recently assigned authority.
Apologies. We kindly request that you no longer visit our store.
His eyes darted to the side, and he took a deep breath as she stood there, immobile, watching him.
We reserve the right to choose our clients, he said, as a means of clarification.
When she asked why, her voice was guttural, heavy, as if drowned in spittle. She hadn’t spoken for days. The man hesitated, turning on his heel towards the door as if to usher her out.
Please, he said, but she insisted.
He told her she had returned forty-two bags of purchases. Highly unusual. This creates additional stress and labour for the employees, and they are legally entitled to prevent similar situations from arising in the future.
Show me, she said.
That directness in her voice was unfamiliar to her. The man sighed and asked her to follow him. At the cash register, he showed her the forty-two returned invoices. He explained that she was legally entitled to do so, which was why they accepted the refunds, but he again mentioned the additional stress this was causing the employees, which was why they were forced to ban her from both store locations in Berlin. The ban was temporary, one year, the man added in a lower voice, now seeming more embarrassed than irritated.
Is there a camera filming the till? Do you have a recording of the bags being returned?
Of course, the man said.
She thanked him and left the store. Around the corner, she entered the Polizeidirektion 5 – Abschnitt 56, where she filed an official declaration and complaint. The police took over the investigation and retrieved video footage showing two men entering Muji and demanding a cash refund. All the invoices were in the original bags. The men had refused to give a reason for the returns, but one of the employees had identified the purchases as belonging to Sara based on their frequency.
The following Saturday, she entered Muji and approached the employee she had spoken with the previous week. Before she could even address him, he told her the ban had been lifted and apologised. She thanked him and left without buying anything.
***
Sara flew via Munich to Haneda and arrived in time for the cherry blossoms. On her first day there, a windy Friday, she walked the streets of Chuo around the Central Station, then had lunch on a bench in the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace. The profile of Mount Fuji sat like a splintered triangle in the distance. Late afternoon, she took the Ginza line from Otemachi to Gaiemmae station in Aoyama, planning to return to her hotel. Instead, she wandered on until it grew dark and the streets grew agitated, as if the twilight had called out the crowds.
She sat at a café in Shibuya, sipping bubble milk tea and watching the passing figures. A noise began to grow from down the street, and she leaned forward to observe it. Its origin was too far to tell. So she waited, listening to the drums, their vibration deep, moving in and through her, giving birth to a foreign shiver. When they approached, she could see them now: a marching band of children, holding round drums on their bellies, their faces glowing with joy. They all wore red uniforms and cylindrical hats with golden tassels. She smiled and stood up.
Cristian Leata is now a student on the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. His fiction and non-fiction work has been published in Litro, The Frogmore Papers and others. You can read more of his writing on Substack.