MOTH

Lunification.

THE THING IS—the clock moves an inch—there is something else.

What do you mean? Another tick.

There was a child born in Paris.

There is no child, I say flatly. The baby died.

Skeet looks into my eyes. A whole lifetime passes back and forth.

It didn’t. I mean, she didn’t. I have the hospital records the museum sent, he says, gesturing to his bag. This is what they would tell unmarried women, he says carefully, when in fact the child had been adopted. That the mother was often heavily drugged for days at a time. That there were always many families that wanted a baby. This child, this girl, was adopted by a childless couple who fled to the south and later settled back in Paris.

A daughter, I say, attempting to move past this word functionally, but agony grips my chest and forces it out, stilted. The horrible sound stuck in the walls.

But, before anything else, I have to tell you. He drops his head. She’s gone now.

When I say nothing, he says, They called her Jeanne.

My heart heavy as water. I swallow several times to regain control of my voice. Oh god, Skeet. I have to just—

I’m sorry Frame. I’m so sorry. I just wanted—

I should be crying, soaking his shirtsleeve. But I am stunned. I had known, somewhere, that this is what the letter meant, but would not, for a moment, let myself think it. The pain I had kept tightly in the heart of my heart, stopped it filling my entire chest. All these years as though a sound, muffled offtime, stayed with me. Another heartbeat faintly beating behind my own. In order to forget one life, you need to live at least one other life. The young can withstand the shock of love because another life is still possible. It is only the old who die of heartbreak.

When the director came from the Volkov Museum, Skeet says, I heard Valentina say she would track you down, as though she hadn’t just received sound files from you. In those deadly goddamn conservancy progress meetings, she began to imply that the dictionary was over, and that your single-mindedness around it was a sign that you really had gone crackers. When the painting sat in her office and she made no move to notify you, I began to wonder if it wasn’t she who was crazy.

Skeet says he radiated with anger. He will confront Valentina. No, he will call the police. No. He will do neither. He once told me that everything he knows he stole. Only he didn’t realize what he was getting into. And still, he couldn’t stop. Not all of life is accumulation. Sometimes a single moment of a single day can determine a life.

He observed when Valentina took her coffee each morning in the small glassed-in eating area with smooth birch tables and a view of the treetops. She would sip from her mug with her notebook and files in her lap and read for a quarter of an hour, sun on her shoulders. He picked a bright cold morning, moved quietly, clicked the door shut. He knew he had only minutes. His heart beat wildly but he was oddly focused. He took the pin from between his teeth. It slipped in his damp fingers as he twisted it into the lock of the drawer underneath her desk. After an excruciating minute of frantic precise movements, it opened. He pulled out the letters and put them in his bag that also contained a hard drive of every single file from the dictionary he wiped clean from the sound lab. The documents and the painting were not where he remembered them in Valentina’s office. He panicked. His eyes scanned the room, tidy and sharp. He opened the filing cabinet. There were steps at the door; he held his breath. His head chases the image of his mother painting her toenails on the metal steps of the fire escape with the glass bottle he had pocketed for her for the first time. He felt so odd because it had both made her happy and violated something. He was probably only six or seven. She saw him looking down at her. Why so glum chum? No harm, she paused. Done. The steps continued along the hall, and he let out air silently. He found the file folder containing faded records from a hospital in Paris, from Spain. There is a report from an internment camp, a pale blue telegram, adoption papers, a letter from an art appraiser. He takes the entire folder and puts it in his bag. His eye catches the edge of a padded grey envelope. He pulls it delicately, slips it under his shirt. The sharp corners prick his chest as he walks out the door and shuts it behind him. He slides his hand along the cool wall, perhaps to steady himself, or to remind himself of where he is, or both. He moves through the hall in long strides, his shoes are silent. He takes the stairs, and then holds his plastic security card underneath the thin red line of the scanner. Hurry, he thinks. No, stay still. Nothing happens. Finally, there is a beep. The turnstile opens and he walks through the doors. The sun flickers onto his face, his back to the building. After all the years spent there, all the hours with Ivory in the sound lab, he understands that he will never see it again. He doesn’t turn around.

Do you want some water Frame?

Thank you. No. Skeet. There is some sherry on the kitchen shelf.

I’ll get it. He stands up, his legs carrying him toward the house.

I sit huddled in this cave, little animal that I am. I had never thought ahead to what would happen once the baby was born. Lev was unreachable. There was, eventually, no post. No news, good or bad. He knew nothing of me. He was dead in the eyes of everyone.

Skeet comes back in what seems like an instant. Youth. The distinct thud of his gait, sun-swung into the cave carrying a bottle and glasses. He pours the sherry into a cheap tumbler and passes it to me, putting the bottle down on my desk. He hesitates—it is morning still, or perhaps because it is a woman’s liquor—and then pours a glass for himself.

We sit, joined in thinned silence.

How, I finally say, did she die, Skeet?

He braces himself, sitting up higher on his elbows. It said— He chooses the word carefully, letting all the other ones fall away. Fire.

But Frame, she too had— He shifts so quickly on the desk edge that he spills his glass.

Jeanne had a daughter, he announces slowly. Lou. He pauses. Feeling the need to add something, says, She lives in New York.

Loup? I say in disbelief.

Lou. No “p.”

History shifts underfoot. Unreliable ground. I’ve no idea where to take refuge. Everything built around love ruptured, a child who died. This information trips up my plodding rhythm. Like the composers who insert a scherzo two-thirds into a piece. A joke. But here it comes out dark and heavy, savage almost.

There is a roar of an engine swinging into the drive. I am filling with pain and exhaustion. The physical miseries setting in as they reliably do. I can tell by the urgency and economy of Skeet’s movements that he thinks it is to do with the conservatory.

We hear the crunching of gravel up above. Skeet and I sit huddled in pitch-black silence. He folds his hands behind his skull, his frame long against the rounded walls. With his arcane knowledge and renegade bloodline, it strikes me that he makes the perfect criminal. He told me once that when he was small, he had seen his mother take a bottle from the shelf at the liquor store and put it under her coat. She told him it isn’t stealing if you really don’t have the money to pay. He said he realized in that moment that thieves are never made later in life. It only comes easy when you have always done it. He won scholarships that were never quite enough to live on. He told me when we first met that he was so broke at university he’d sold his blood for a doughnut. And now here he is with me. And I think, As with animals, association with anything weaker foreshadows doom. Lawlessness demands synchronous agility of mind and body. Like that French-Algerian writer and her lover who broke the same bone in their foot escaping from different prisons.

The gravity of the situation just now flickers through. I’ve had grief and joy in my life but nothing like this.

I don’t know who I am, I say.

I’ve said it out loud. Everything dislocated in my mind. What a person does is who they are. The work accesses the deepest part of me. Which is not a part.

Skeet, I say slowly, it’s just— I’ve survived such a long time. It can’t end with a witless falling-off.

Then don’t let it.

Dread fills the space.

You’ve never spoken about Lev. About your past.

You might be the only one who knew not to ask.

It is there. It is always there. Offered up on these delicate documents thin as cigarette paper. Documents with signatures and stamps that have crossed vast spaces. It is all recorded. It is not a mystery. Things don’t just slip away.

He hands me the file, but I have no need for these coloured papers, pale and small, covered in elegant script and silver type, beautiful and inaccurate. Written out in languages I do and do not speak. How could something so neat and thin possibly tell of life, so huge and hard and wild.

Prénoms: Jeanne Albertine. Sexe: Feminin. Née à l’Hôpital Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, le 10 février 1941. Mère naturelle: Ivory Frame. Père naturel: Inconnu.Parents adoptifs: Gilles et Marie Archimbault du Souillac, France.

Nombre: Ivory Frame. Género: Femenino. Años: Aproximadamente veinte. Cabello: Marrón. Ojos: Marrón. Altura: 170 centímetros. Peso: 43 kilogramos. Nacionalidad: Británica. Observaciones: Rechazó el examen físico. No responde a castigos por parte de las enfermeras. Es incapaz de caminar en línea recta. Es incapaz de subir escaleras. No come. No puede dormir por la noche. Su sentido moral es cuestionable. Solitaria. Delirios: 1. Cree que la institución es ‘Un Inframundo’. 2. Asegura que puede comunicarse con animales. Diagnosis: posible psicosis, delirios, reacciones de ansiedad.

Lev Aleksander Volkov. Feind ukrainischer Herkunft. Camp des Milles. Entkommen, April 1940. Nähere Umstände unbekannt. Verhaftet und inhaftiert, August 1941. Ausweispapiere: nicht vorhanden. Einweisung in Drancy 11.Juni.1942. Morgenappell bei Gewitter: Häftling abwesend. Flucht des Häftling bestätigt, 14 Uhr. Nähere Umstände unbekannt.

When Lev escaped to Paris, no one was there. It seemed the city had been boarded up, emptied out. Their flags snapped overhead. The streets quiet, dark, and foul-smelling as though there had been an epidemic. He didn’t know of anything. He didn’t know that Istvan had moved to work out of the south. That Tacita was gone. That I had gone. That somewhere along the way to the coast, I broke. Was given drugs, injected into my spine, that created such terror the doctors thought they could shake me sane.

In the clinic, I had gone to hell. At least that is what I felt. Food administered through a tube in my arm. The door in my room has bars. I feel like a wild animal caught. I don’t know where I am or why I am here. There is a mattress scarcely covering the slats on my cot like a whale skeleton. Starched-collared nurses with their clanging keys and coloured pills, thin lips telling me I am here for a rest, their voices moving at terrifying speeds, never looking at me, instead picking up the chart at the end of the cot. Reduced to a white rectangle. I am given one dirty sheet and a pencil. There is the smack of the little explosion of the gas lamps turning on. The milky light. The smell of blood and urine and ammonia coming from the black and white diamond tiles. Long empty days full of terror for simply being somewhere where no one else is.

At night, I twist in my sheet. I examine the details of my captivity: the cheap varnished wardrobe, the objects they eventually give back to me—a jar of face cream, centimes, a small mirror. I hold them carefully. In my hands, they bristle with meaning. I arrange them as though they might contain the answer to escape but when I wake up each morning nothing is coming off them. They have lost their significance. One day, through a window in the hall, I hear the click of horse hooves on the stones, followed by the low call of a pigeon on the grubby windowpane. Glimmers of sound that make me desperate for the outside world. I catch my mind looking for Lev’s face and feel such sharp pain I erase the memory of him. My mind is not right. I am not yet well. There is a doctor who offers to help, occasionally putting his cigarette in my mouth, but when he slides his hand up my thigh, I understand what kind of help.

Eventually they give me books but I have no interest in them, no desire to read. The head nurse is often followed by a black dog. Medium-sized, soft-hearted, with wiry hair and large wet eyes. I feel desperate to read his inner resources. I can hear vibrations of beings and feel no need to communicate in the normal way. Spanish words bullet off the walls, needing no translation. My body is always burning hot. I wipe it with the nightdress worn all day, all night, and far too large. There is no monthly bleeding because I am neither woman nor person, just eyes and skin and organs. But when asleep in the windowless room, I am in my body. I dream I am pregnant. When I wake there is no stomach, no baby. Foolishly alone. I sink into a deep panic. Lying on my narrow mattress, I become the child. I stretch my arms or move my fingers, and, for a moment, I feel I am the baby. The one robbed of childhood, never to experience its sorrow or its magic. I wonder if dying is harder than being dead. I can’t seem to walk properly. My mind tries desperately to unite with my body, but everything is jammed.

After a stretch of silent weeks, I see parts of myself flicker in, all my senses quickened. A moth flutters into my room, its wings jerk and catch the light from the exposed bulb and flash bright and precise as paper. There is an inch of hope. The wings say: tragedy will be burned, nothing more can die.

I discover that I am not in a mysterious place. It is a madhouse. I draw maps of escape and then one day, miraculously, I do. My parents want me further away so as not to bring further disgrace. It puts an end to speculation as to how I got here. The institution isn’t what they object to. It’s the other things I have done. They send their housekeeper to take me to a new clinic. We drive along the highway beside a lorry crammed with sheep. Their braying is fierce. But my mind feels clear and sharp in the outside air, enlivened at leaving behind the dirty, sordid world of the institution. The feeling of moving toward a precise, mathematical existence. In town, we stop to eat at a restaurant. The housekeeper eyes me nervously. I realize that she is hesitating to give me a knife, which suddenly strikes me as uncontrollably funny though I don’t dare laugh. I excuse myself, go to the washroom, and am thankful I have calculated correctly. I crawl out the window and eventually make my way to the port. I wait and wait for passage.

Months later, on the street in Lisbon, I see a figure in the distance. A man walks toward me. The man is Lev.