BAT

Mammal (not bird); uses polarity compass;
can sense the direction of the magnetic field vector. Knows which side the arrow is located.

I FIND MY WAY BACK to the car at the foot of the plane tree. I see the bluelit town in my rearview mirror and wonder how it is I am here, by this place I don’t even like. Everyone shuttered in and then tomorrow it all starts again. One might die, another might be born. There might be a boy who thinks he can fly and ends up in the salle des urgences for stitches. There might be a woman who as a girl sprayed her wrists with perfume and wore a flower in her hair when she thought she might see the man who would become her husband. And now they might sit silently with their dinner on their laps, light from the television blinking across their faces. The clock will chime each hour, they will do it all over again. Routine lures you, it makes you feel your own identity. Though I often think the opposite. That in repetition, you can lose sight of yourself. Like women imprisoned in housework. Isn’t the very definition of insanity repeating the same thing over and over again in the same way, expecting a different result?

Out of the black there is a flash of bright. Two low fixed stars. I swerve. A pair of eyes. A dull thud, then the squeal of brakes. My heart pounds. My palms slip on the leather grip. I turn off the engine. My heart racing. I brace one hand on the wheel, the other on the car door, and slowly hoist myself up. My legs unreliable, as when I was small and broke the left one falling off a horse. The X-ray terrified me. A skeleton, no different from all the other skeletons. I had a plaster cast and had to scratch my knee with a pencil. When the cast was sawed off it exposed a strange leg, bony and brushed with blue. It looked dead. Not my own. I realized, after limping around trying to walk the way I had before, that your mind is part of what makes you walk. It also made me realize how easily things could break.

There is a thick dent and a bright star of red with a few coarse brown hairs on the far right of the bumper. Tapetum lucidum. I’ve learned about the membrane behind the deer’s retina that increases their ability to see in the dark. It also makes their eyes shine in headlights. The body went down, I am sure of it, bent at an odd angle. I know that I cannot walk in the tall grasses that join the blacktop. The slivermoon casts little light. In the almost eerie silence I hear the scraping of dry sunflower fronds against one another in the wind. I see nothing but the endless flat fields and a solitary tree. There is no body.

Deer sleep in beds of deep vegetation they press down with their quick bodies, tangled thin legs, in order to hide from predators. They never lie down in the same bed twice, but the imprints can remain for several days. Years ago I followed the whorls of grass. Each time I came upon a deerbed, it felt as if the deer had just departed, leaving a warm impression in the grass. I remember taking a documentary photo of the first bed I saw, the smell of sun still on the lens cap. My hand touched the grass. Before I knew I was doing it, I got down and lay on the imprint. My body curling into the existing form. First aware of their proximity, and then the quiet embodiment of absence. It made me think of my own mortality. I closed my eyes though the light came through my eyelids. Grass prickled my cheek, poked my back where my coat had ridden up. Lying down, I was struck by the hard band of loneliness that encircled me. Everything crystallizes over time. Like deer who begin with soft velvet antlers and then they calcify underneath, eventually turning to bone.

After the engine fan cuts out, there is a hot wind and the quiet buzzing of cicadas. I run my hand over the dent and lean against the warm metal of the car. My eyes burn with tiredness. I feel the trace of Valentina’s voice telling me it’s time to stop working. But I want to do it because I want to do it. I am not happy when I am not working. We let some people continue, I think. Painters don’t retire—they die. Though I have read what the critics say. They say in the history of art, late works are catastrophes.

I look out at the silent fields. A bat jags into view. Its webbed wings misshapen and black, like a broken umbrella. Its movements jerky, the only mammal with the ability to fly. And I think, It’s never the grand spectacles, but always the small intimate moments that hold me rapt. I look up and see part of the moon weakly illuminating the grass. Another bat. There must be a cave nearby.

When I open my eyes again, I can see Lev’s shoulders. My feet finding depressions. I clamber down slowly over stone rubble, my back lit by the sun. Through a little vestibule and a densely mudded floor. Caves are not to be entered lightly, I hear his voice say.

Why?

The lower world. A doorway between our world and the otherworld.

We lie on our backs and stare up at the smooth, pale rock. I see something glint. Jewel-encrusted. A bat wrapped in itself. The condensation droplets on its wings glittering. The still-warm sun on our shoulders goes cold in the compressed dirt, the dampness of the cave seeping into skin and holding it there. I stay still, listening to the sounds for a long time until it feels as though I am inside a hallucination, not my own. I start to hear something. Who is there?

When there is a spring in a cave, Lev says, it sounds like voices.

Ever since, it is his voice I hear when I enter a cave. For a period when I am deep into recording bats, it is often. I never get used to the feeling that I should not be there. I remember in the southwest, moving through with the recording equipment. The cave begins to narrow until I am crawling on my hands and knees. Then flat on my stomach. It gets so tight my arms become pinned in front of me. I cannot move them back to my sides. I try not to panic. There is the familiar acrid ammonia scent. It reminds me of the shock when I first started life drawing at the academy. I had pictured the painters during the Renaissance who worked in palatial ateliers with velvet and sun streaming through the high windows. What I found were dark little packed studios with models, sometimes taken from the street, unwashed and looking entirely out of their element. The rooms were overheated and stifling and the models would perspire heavily under the electric lights, making the air sour with sweat sharpened by the scent of turpentine and tobacco.

If I squirm and wiggle, there has to be a way out. Despite our prejudices bats are essential to the balance of nature. To our foodchain. To whole economies. They are in peril. Hanging by their feet with their gnomic faces and leathery wings and ultrasonic cries, the little licks of echolocation. They might be one of the most reviled groups of animals on earth.

My knees are shredded and I have cuts all down my arms when I finally come to the cave mouth. I put the earphones on and play back the tape. All I hear is the sound of my shallow breathing.

Later, in Paris, I will hand Ondine the earphones. She says she wants to listen to what noise pollution destroying bat populations in southern France sounds like. Little clicks and a low hum like a vacuum cleaner running, it turns out. I look around at the city that after all this time in the field seems full of barricades. Buildings, gutters, pigeon spikes, exhaust fumes, barred windows, sirens, pavement mottled with gum and spit. We sit and drink café crèmes at the Café de Flore where the waiters with their starched white shirts seem to be frozen in time. Though I wish I could walk all the way through the Marais, over the other side of Canal Saint-Martin, we take a taxi across the river. We pass the Palais Royal, and then a street of beauty parlours with coarse hair extensions inexplicably strewn on the sidewalk like horsetails. I see a man who holds a hamburger grinding out a cigarette with his foot like a chicken scratching at the dirt under a red and white Quick Burger sign. Paris can be both ancient and garishly new, never going through the awkward jerky passage of adolescence, just existing in two different times, one running under the other.

Ondine’s flat is near the oldest hospital in the city. She has sculptures and books and neoclassical French chairs, silk dresses in the closet. She believes in working for people who pay. I scan the photos on the wall, mostly of her and her son, Lucien. Ondine never takes pictures of places, only people. Always get a person in the shot or it will look like a postcard, she has told me. There is a photo of us in Lapland. We are laughing, wrapped in enormous coats, huge hats, snow everywhere. We look happy. Younger. Every photograph has a bit of death in it, Barthes said. But here they seem like life to me. A child in a garden. Ondine standing beside her plane squinting into the sun, Ondine lying in sand with Lucien as a meaty baby in her lap. It occurs to me that I’ve never been surrounded with artifacts. I’ve never had a framed photograph of anything. I’ve always felt that life runs dry in a house, with its traditions and accumulated objects on display. But here I see how they can bring you into existence. She turns on the radio in her kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse is playing. She immediately snaps it off. I can’t listen to that. He was such a dog, she says and then laughs, uncorking a bottle.

Isn’t he just like any other man who thinks he can cheat death by having mistresses? I mean you of all people should understand, I say teasingly.

I suppose living hidden lives makes it seem like you’ve outwitted all the poor sods that get only one.

Seem like?

Well, so often the first thing people do with their freedom is to just exchange it for another version of the thing that imprisoned them. Besides, we all know how it turns out in the end. Here, she hands me a glass.

Oh, it’s good.

It’s Greek, she says, showing me the label, though I find it hard to read with my minimum-efficiency eyes.

It tastes like pine needles.

Let’s sit on the balcony.

Slowly night comes. There are people walking hurriedly home, a couple holding hands, a white Vespa zooms by. A teenager walks a small dog. An older man who looks like a playboy from a bygone era, the pomaded kind with a thin moustache and mahogany tan, buys a lottery ticket from the tabac. A young man eating a banana jumps off the bus at his stop and I am reminded of the fierceness of youth. The physicality of it. Everything they do is beautiful, every moment full of what is to come. How utterly sick of the body you become when you grow old. And conversely, how protective of your own thinking. Uninterested in fictions, I have no tolerance for novels now. I look to things for my own imagination to work through. Romantic slush holds the least appeal. I want information, things that are real. There are voices and laughter from nearby cafés, the honking cars, the tap tap tap of metal clinking down, closing the boulangerie below, the butter pastry smell still in the air. I think of how rarely I set foot in this arrondissement when I lived here. Where Tacita and Istvan first met, decades ago. How Paris can be different but still so much the same. The long colonnades of wet chestnut trees. The silver rooftops. The patisseries with names and interiors that haven’t changed in three hundred years. Everyone revering a different era, always from a time that came before. I have never felt of this time. Not of any time. Why here? Why now? It is just an improbable series of events.

I’m going to Iceland next week for work, Ondine says.

Have you been?

She shakes her head.

It is like a fairy tale with all those fjords and volcanoes.

I always picture it covered in ice. Like that book you lent me.

Which one?

About that big flood in Italy when millions of important books and masterpieces were underwater. And while they flew in all the experts and desperately raced against time trying to decide how to save them, they realized the answer was to freeze everything until they figured out what to do. Ivory?

Yes?

She looks at me, uncertain. Tell me. She takes a big sip from her glass. Are you happy?

Oh, Ondine, I say, not you.

Well I know you don’t give anything away easily.

What about you? I say flatly.

She tucks her legs under her and takes another sip. Me? I don’t know. I love to fly. There is Lucien. My boyfriend. All my boyfriends, she laughs. It’s just. I see you, alone in your Spartan accommodation wherever you go, stooped over your work. And yet when I am with you, I always see the heart of another woman. One who likes to laugh. Enjoy herself. A strange expression on your face sometimes when you are in Paris, a smile that contains such warmth and then suddenly it goes out, like a match.

Don’t you find, she says after a moment, that even when you’re not working, you are always at work?

I don’t separate the two.

So often I never hear back from you. Sometimes I worry.

About what?

You.

Don’t. I am not grounded to this livelihood you know. We grant men a right to solitude, why can’t we do the same for women? I exist more completely in it, I say. Though I suddenly wonder how she sees me. I remember reading about Nikola Tesla. Old and alone, living in a rundown hotel with a wounded pigeon he dragged back from Central Park. He never had a relationship his entire life but was said to have feelings for the pigeon. He said he loved her, like a man loves a woman.

I look down at my glass. You ask about happiness and I think, I am not really interested in happiness. Happy people have nothing to tell. They have been happy and that is— perfectly unproductive.

Well, she says, reaching over for the bottle. I have seen you working in Lapland when you came in with your face red from the cold, grinning. Playing me the reindeer sounds, madly drawing your ruled parabolas all over sheets of graph paper. Or when you figured out that foxes have that system of twenty vocalizations or whatever it was. She laughs. You know you are like the veery birds you have recorded. A songbird able to harmonize with itself. It’s just that— She hesitates. I wonder sometimes. You wear your work like a shield. You have no—attachments. You resist mightily any talk of the past.

We sit in uncomfortable silence.

And— She hesitates again. I think that, for instance, you’ve probably always known that Eudoxie, my sculptor friend whom you’ve met before, was friends with Volkov’s wife, the French writer. The one after the short-lived American—

Ondine, please.

You know she said you are the only one who ever left him.

I stare fixedly ahead. A woman waters her plants on the balcony across the narrow street. We are both silent. Ondine doesn’t know what’s going on inside of me, and I don’t know what’s going on inside of her, and the woman watering plants has started to talk to a baby two storeys below. I know that Eudoxie knew Lev’s wife. Istvan did too. His letters always in their architect writing, in perfect French learned from Tacita. Lev’s exhibitions. His images, fame, his name everywhere. These bright hard little facts recede against my own beliefs. The belief in what I chose. In wanting what I chose. I don’t really know how people whose lives have a clear before and after can possibly continue to live the same life and still survive. For me it was necessary to alter everything. And speak of nothing. Of all the countries I have been to, conducting research in the field, the gold-eyed creatures darting through foliage, the conferences in cities scattered across the globe, the labs, and sound rooms, the whole world dropping away while I am filled with these sonorities, this opalescence. All of this against the ridiculous fact that we could never get very far from each other. These places and moments in time on which we have been caught. Of course I am not unaware that most people observe holidays, and fill their lives with firelit rooms, children running through—with laughter and meals. Children cast your life wider, you get to live beyond your own generation. It’s so obvious why we domesticate. But these things to me are both dreamlike and dull. I would never have allowed myself to want them, let alone go near them. I have always traded on the notion that I did the right thing. But how does anyone know for certain that they have done the right thing?

Ivory, I can hear Ondine say, I don’t mean to upset you. I only bring it up because sometimes I think that you might one day want to talk about it but not know how. Or find that it’s too late, after all this time, she says, resting her chin on her hand. She gets up, putting her hand on my arm, and fills my glass.

I know she feels genuine concern. But my entire life I’ve scarcely been the object of it, and have no idea what to do with it now. I know that Eudoxie was friends with Lev’s wife. The French writer whom I could never bear to read, though I heard she was good. He had wives, children, exhibitions, all of it. With him it was always a widening beauty. Nothing could be changed by an irreversible act, because that would be admitting the darkest version of life. I am not that different except in my work. I know I have been strict with myself in an unforgiving way. But I needed something more durable than love, more subterranean.

She takes the thin clip from her teeth and repins it in her hair. You want food?

I nod. I thought I was having a heart attack but I think I’m just hungry.

Don’t joke about these things.

You know people give women bad advice, I call after her. She is inside for a few moments and comes back from the kitchen with cheese and olives and small red tomatoes on the vine, and two triangles of cake from the shop below. We eat with plates resting on our laps.

How do you mean?

We are so rarely left alone to love what we want to love, I say. Happiness comes from accepting the world the way it is. I’ve worked against this notion my whole life.

You seem to have no need to transmit anything to anyone. You know that’s odd don’t you? Maybe it’s from all your time alone. Unlike someone like Eudoxie. I find her madly absorbing but also overstimulating. I always have to lie down right after seeing her. She holds the cake to her lips. But are you not worried that as you get older—

I am older, Ondine.

For most people, she ventures, work is utilitarian. Or I suppose, in some cases, decoration.

I don’t know, I only think about what I’m going to do tomorrow. And what I want to do tomorrow is my work. Most times I am so interested in what I’m working on that I can hardly wait to get up and get at it in the morning.

That makes you a child, she laughs. Only children can’t wait to get up in the morning to get at what they want to do.

Well isn’t that the goal?

I guess because you’re always on your own I just want to make sure you have what you need, what you want. I don’t know, she sighs. What does anyone live for?

These are questions you don’t really ask if you are truly occupied.

Most people never seem to have the time to consider it, she says, brushing her fingers on the parts of the geraniums that are dried out, the stiff petals scattering over the balcony.

Most people dull their wits, Ondine. They don’t stop to think about just what it is that’s disappointing them about their own lives. And they spend even less time on what to do about it. Though if they do, it is always something inconsequential, like a new town or a new job. It’s at the end, when it is all running out, that people finally feel the weight of their own lives. And then they die leaving their plates and books and closets full of old clothes, and hearts blank as walls.