hotel nights

1

Paul couldn’t believe that she lived in a hotel. Better yet, or worse, he had known it, then forgotten. They talked about her on campus, rumours had preceded her, so much that her body already existed in whispers, but Paul didn’t care about gossip. He cared about girls, and women. Their mouths, their flesh. He was eighteen years old, and living multiple lives. By day he went to university, he stared at huge blackboards or whiteboards, he traded and compared notes with his classmates; it was odd how sometimes they would swear they couldn’t possibly have gone to the same lecture, until they landed on one or two identical sentences and had to concede that they had indeed both been listening to the same professor, but aside from those fixed points each of their notebooks meandered, diverged. The ones who understood best were the ones who understood nothing and, terrified by their own ignorance, had written everything down verbatim.

They spent hours gathered together at the café: girls running their fingers over his scalp and stroking it, cold fingers probing the waves of his hair, exploring the topography of his cranium, light fingers slipping across the back of his head as if momentarily, unwittingly breathing life into long-forgotten theories, as if the bumps they found could reveal the secrets of his personality or his soul through the old, discredited markers of amativeness or acquisitiveness, or benevolence, or adhesiveness – even though the mystery these eighteen-year-old girls ever so gently touching his head were trying to decipher was simply that of their own desire, the desire they felt for this young man in particular or the desire they felt for young men in general. All these fresh-faced students were happy; they talked too much, their breaths forming small clouds in the cold air, they smoked too much, drank coffee in quantities that set their hearts racing. Deep down, they scared as easily as deer, even the boys, especially the boys, and so they shied away from open contact – would never have dared to lock hands, much less lock lips. Yet they were all so close together that just one of them had to catch a cold for all the others to catch it as well.

In the evenings, at night, there were long, drunken, anonymous parties where Paul lost his friends in the crowd, intentionally lost them, because everybody swooned over him with his swimmer’s torso and his long lashes. Nights when people handed him glasses full of clear or cloudy liquids that sometimes plunged him into extraordinary slowness where everything flowed as if underwater and where gestures were never quite completed, where they barely got nine-tenths of the way through. Nights on rooftops or in basements or at mansions or in abandoned métro stations. Nights full of smoke. Nights when he lost sight of his friends then found them again, but sometimes it wasn’t them, sometimes it was just his face, just his own reflection caught here or there. Nights when people tried in vain to get him into bed. Nights when he was obsessed with sex because at that time Paul was under a curse or a spell, he just couldn’t get rid of his virginity, every time, the girl disappeared or he left or someone showed up or they had to go; but stranger still, even when he had sex, and whatever the definition one gave the act, whether it was ordinary or pornographic or legal or none of the above, even when he inserted his genitals into someone else’s, even when he came with an uncontrollable shudder and the deed had finally been done, he thought, finally! – the next day or a few days later, it was as if nothing had happened. He was a virgin again, and resigned to it. It was a nightmare for him.

He slept little but slept well. Wherever he was, at the university or at the café, in an unknown house or at home, most of the time, just a few feet away would be a screen with flickering images of murders and investigations or funerals and tears or collapses and escapes or questions and answers, or only questions. And he, impervious to all these tragedies, slept peacefully. But that was before Amelia Dehr. That was before the hotel.

There wasn’t much money. His father had been blunt: the classes were fine, the rest wasn’t. He took the first job that came his way, distractedly, without even realising what he was agreeing to; indifferent or inattentive, because what he cared about was beginning a new life. Security monitoring – or rather, simply monitoring – during the off-hours at the hotel. In the evening; at night. He got bored there. And he offset that boredom by watching the women. Watching them at a remove. He looked for them. Sometimes he found them, sometimes he lost them. In any case, it was a game he played without any of them knowing. This one leaving her room and immediately disappearing, vanishing. Only to reappear, somewhere he hadn’t expected, as if by magic, slipping from one small window to another, almost at random. There were nine cameras and just as many squares on the monitoring screen, Paul’s screen. He waited for surprises; he could only anticipate their trajectories to a certain degree, because that didn’t account for random stops, sudden about-faces. He stared at all those bodies walking around and thinking thoughts he couldn’t see on the screens. He couldn’t see what had been forgotten in the rooms, on the nightstands, in the bathrooms; and he had no hope of seeing any lingering afterthoughts. And every so often came one of Paul’s favourite moments: rare, unexpected, evasive embraces in the emergency stairwells. All he ever saw was a fire door slowly – lazily – closing.

He couldn’t really say that he enjoyed his job, which he didn’t think of as a job so much as an accident – less than that in fact, an incident, nothing more: a casual thing. But he could say that he enjoyed watching women. That he enjoyed looking down at them, playing at (or so he told himself ) looking down on them – and only at the hotel, only at night, was that possible for him, specifically because of the cameras, aimed so sharply downward that he was positioned high up, like the sun, like some god. If the warmer air – the sighs they exhaled as they redid their make-up in the elevator’s infinite mirrors, the seismic heat their warm flesh exuded as they stood in these empty, thoroughly ventilated spaces – and these exhalations rising up, accumulating beneath the ceiling, could see, then that vapour’s gaze would be the gaze Paul now had. So dreamed Paul.

When the women weren’t going in and out much any more or he wasn’t watching them much any more, he tried to study. He liked university but more than that he liked being a student, it exhilarated him, as did the pride his father felt – which didn’t keep him from being, deep down, a bit jealous of Paul, just a bit, in those little crannies of his heart of which he himself was unaware – actively, insistently unaware, in total denial. He would rather cut off his arm than admit it, because he was a good man, as proud of his goodwill as he was of his son, and a good man doesn’t envy his only child. But, at the construction site, he sometimes thought of that university and spat in the drywall, and sometimes pissed in the drywall, as people have always done – general hygiene notwithstanding – to bind the components, to (this Paul knew, even if his father didn’t) alter the pH, the acidity, the stability; and to (this his father knew, even if Paul didn’t) leave something of oneself in someone else’s space, in walls that construction workers laboured to build with no hope of ever living there. To secretly, silently spit or piss on other people’s comfort.

Their origins were modest and they took nothing for granted, especially not university education; they lived, had lived, Paul thought, as if nothing under their feet was certain. As if they were on water – but that image didn’t occur to him then; he would only think it much later, after finally meeting Amelia Dehr.

He tried to study but needed to take in far more than just his architecture classes, which sectioned off various eras, areas, and approaches. He had cut off – or so he thought – all contact with his past, which he didn’t think of as a past so much as an incident, more than that, an accident. The first eighteen years of his life had given him a particular body, and this body had a particular relationship with space, with others. He sensed that he didn’t quite belong. At the outset, he had observed. And imitated. First the clothes, which he stole. Then the haircut, which he’d had to adopt a whole new language just to describe, to ask for. It was a challenge he had never faced before, as complex as an international expedition, the greatest of conquests. Finally, he mastered the delicate art of talking. But this drained him. Some nights in the dorms he stayed in his bedroom, in the dark. Listening to the noises in the hallway, and all the other students’ chatter made him seasick; and if someone knocked on his door, he wouldn’t answer, the idea that it might be a mistake horrifying him just as much as the idea that it might not. He was terrified that it would never end and, even though it never did quite fade away, not really, still it only lasted two weeks, maybe three, and then it didn’t matter any more. He was already feeling at home, or so he thought. He had closer friends than ever, whom he loved intensely, for whom he sometimes thought he would have given an arm, a kidney, even. But sometimes he forgot their names. Or their faces. At three or four in the morning he would realise that all he retained of this friend, this guy or girl, was just a blurry shape. And sometimes it was just his face, just his own reflection caught here or there. Maybe deep down some part of him still lived in darkness. And maybe, worse still, he had gone on to think of this darkness, in bleak terms – all the bleaker given that he was an eighteen-year-old man with a swimmer’s torso, with long lashes, who now had a new self – as real life.

*

For some people, the Elisse hotel seemed to be not just where but how crimes were committed. It was the kind of place that stood in for reality, if reality was, first and foremost, disappointing. It was, in any case, no place for lovers of literature or even plot. Some member of an older generation might end up there on occasion, and Paul didn’t even try to disguise how he stared at them as worry and sometimes, rarely, death took root in their souls the same (thankfully) brief way they settled in a bedroom exactly like all the others for the night. It was a place that killed not by beauty or ugliness but, really, by indifference. Somehow, this no-man’s-land quality accounted for the chain’s immediate success: it was exactly what people were looking for here when they had some choice of here. It boasted every modern comfort, and the secret to this comfort was its neutrality, its anonymity. Nothing was more like an Elisse hotel than another Elisse hotel and so it was almost possible for someone staying there to wake up as someone else. Or, better still, as no one at all. Yes, in these mid-range spots it was possible to be oneself and someone else, oneself and no one at all. The windows were perfectly square and did not open; the air conditioning circulated microbes and distributed them equitably. All these forms of contagion mixed together. People were so scarcely themselves there that the coughs they coughed were those of strangers. Paul was bored stiff, and after enough time had gone by, gently swivelling his chair in front of the surveillance video screens, all alone in an empty lobby, some sort of trance came over him. The fountain’s unceasing flow did not help. He wasn’t lonely so much as he was feeling the cumulative effect of certain physical phenomena; not so much a state as an environment, like certain altitudes or depths, and eventually he started breathing differently, in a new rhythm. Sometimes his ears buzzed. He waited for something to happen and sometimes, out of sheer isolation, something did, just not in the way he hoped.

For two or three hours, the usual clientele for this type of establishment would come and go: young and not-so-young executives, individuals passing through, here for a function or a mission, for union committees or academic colloquia. Some, oddly enough, seemed to have taken a shine to the place. Paul didn’t care about them, and they cared even less about Paul. This didn’t keep them from polite conversations or the occasional joke, but the moment they turned away, smiles faded from faces and faces faded from memory. Some nights there was a dead calm: nobody walked past for hours on end, Paul’s heel swivelled the chair left and right unthinkingly, no human sound rose above the flowing water which created what the hotel’s architects designated a climate – on those nights, something did happen. Paul didn’t realise it because he was waiting for something to happen in front of him, something he might see with his own eyes. Something outside him. What did happen, however, took place inside him. He sat amongst the monitor screens displaying empty elevators and deserted hallways and the television channel playing the news bulletin on a loop, and time went by, always slower than he liked, and suddenly, at the pinnacle of his boredom, something would happen. The sliding doors, for example, might sigh open, activated by the movement of a body nowhere to be seen. Or someone might walk past one of the nine monitor screens. Or, very specifically, he might suddenly insist that he could see a woman sitting, her hair damp, on the edge of the fountain where she’s just washed her hair. He knows she’s there, just as he knows the door’s just opened and someone’s entered – he’d swear on it, it’s a fact, an indisputable fact – until he looks up. The water dripping from her hair onto her shirt seems to darken her hair and her clothes, her eyes meet his, she takes her time, he does as well. In that moment he could almost foresee exactly where her eyes would be. But he’d look up and, sure enough, see nobody there.

Paul dismissed these impressions as if they were figments of his imagination, the effects of exhaustion, the artificial light. He didn’t think of these moments, these mistakes, as events. He waited. He waited but, one night after the doors were locked – in the wee hours, guests buzzed at the door to be let in – he saw Amelia Dehr on his monitor screen, standing in the street like an apparition, and he panicked. He had never imagined that he might see her there, at two or three in the morning, at the place where he worked.

Honestly, he wasn’t impressed. She struck him as a bit ridiculous. Or rather, what everybody said about her struck him as a bit ridiculous. On campus, he had never said a word to her and saw no reason to. But everybody else there thought differently, it was a thrum of childish delusions: her beauty was bewildering, her soul was black; whenever she walks into a room, someone runs out crying; her father was rich or dead or rich and dead; she was an heiress; she was the Elisse Hotels heiress; she had lovers by the dozen; she was this, she was that, a proliferation of clichés. The first time he saw her, when someone pointed her out in the cafeteria, where she was scanning the room, as if looking for a friend or the emergency exits, Paul wasn’t impressed at all. He found her, unsurprisingly enough, smaller than he’d imagined. Smaller and less symmetrical, her features less legendary. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that, certainly not a redhead. She had the sort of hair that, when it was backlit, seemed to be ablaze – but to actually touch it would be underwhelming, just as it would be for anyone wondering what it would be like to catch a fox, to grab it with their bare hands and stuff it in their coat. But what a silly idea that would be, what strange, dark eroticism, and of course, Paul thought, if this girl had such a reputation it was because liking her, liking her red hair, in fact meant liking a certain sort of danger, a danger that had real teeth; and courting it, and complaining bitterly after about having been bitten. Oh, that’s Amelia Dehr? Paul had said with a rather unconvinced grimace, and his scepticism had made half the table’s occupants quiver with relish and something verging on fear, as if he were questioning something far greater and far more fundamental than that girl right there. As if the uncertainty he had just breathed into this seemingly unambiguous fact – that Amelia Dehr was worthy of being looked at – could spread to other things that everyone at the table would prefer to stay stable and clear-cut.

And now she was once again standing at the threshold of a place where he was sitting; but this was nothing like that day at the university when the presence of his friends had been a bulwark. This time, he was alone, as was she – her outside and him inside. So, he realised, it was true after all: she lived in a hotel. He contemplated not letting her in, leaving her outside all night. Yes, all night if he had to. She buzzed again, and Paul finally pressed the button for the sliding doors, which opened to let in Amelia Dehr. And then Paul did something he had never done before: he hid. He slipped down, calmly, as if his body had lost all form and his clothes were now drifting down, and he huddled beneath the desk. He heard Amelia Dehr’s heels clacking on the black-green marble tile that blurred all the silhouettes reflected in its sheen. He heard her pause at the front desk before walking on to the elevators. All this time, he was crouching beneath his desk, discomfited by how shameful it was to work where she lived, how horribly close that felt to working for her. His pride was so essential to him, so much a vital organ, that he could not accept this; if Amelia Dehr’s gaze ever met his, he and his pride would both burst. In his head, that made sense, but honestly, if anyone was to feel ashamed here, it ought to be those who lived where others worked, it ought to be Amelia Dehr who felt that shame. Paul did not realise this truth, but Amelia, to her credit, did. His sense of shame overpowered him. It wasn’t just that he was poor; he also felt guilty for being so. Yet when he wasn’t at risk of being seen by Amelia Dehr, he felt as if he lacked for nothing; and so he would rather be folded up, curled up, wedged into a crevice, would rather be under the desk than sitting upright in his chair in her line of sight, humiliation eating away at him.

And so a haphazard two-step played out between Paul and Amelia, more specifically between Paul and the Amelia he saw on the screens, the Amelia he imagined, an Amelia who bore little connection to the real one. And young and not-so-young men came and went, waiting in the lobby, on the seats in front of the reception desk and in front of Paul, as he watched Amelia on her floor above leaving her room and coming down, unhurriedly, sometimes running her neat fingernails along the wall, almost gliding. He watched her redo her make-up in the elevators. Her motions seemed unexpected, almost violent to him. But as she peered into the mirror, bit her lips, pinched her cheeks, there was no way for the black-and-white video to show how the blood rose and gave her skin a healthy, attractive flush. And just as the elevator door opened, scarcely a few feet away, Paul would suddenly think up some urgent task he needed to deal with in the back room or he would become absorbed in an apparently lively conversation with one or two of his colleagues. Or he would simply, awkwardly turn his back for as long as it took Amelia to cross the hall and wave to her suitor (where did that word come from, Paul wondered; these men were utterly unsuitable for her). She would leave with him or maybe the man would follow as she turned and led the way upstairs. Paul would then spend far more time than he realised staring at the screen that showed the empty third-floor hallway, waiting for someone there who never did come out. Maybe they’re still all in there, Paul mused as he finished his shift. Maybe it’s one of those rooms you walk into and never leave again.

Sometimes he saw her going down to the basement, to the gym; other times she came to sit in the empty restaurant. He wondered what she was doing in the half-light – there, or in the deserted meeting rooms. He watched as she tried the door handles to see if one was unlocked, which there always was since the staff were often careless, or not so much careless as rushed, and forgot to lock them after business meetings and industry conferences and all those deathly boring talks that went on there. Paul would sometimes go down, and, even though there was no one else to watch the monitor screens, anyone who did look would have thought he was locking all the doors, when in fact he was using the hotel key to make sure that one of them remained unlocked should Amelia Dehr feel the need for a meeting room.

Once or twice there were disturbances, rowdy parties, smoke alarms going off, and once or twice there were screams. I don’t know what’s happening next door, said the worried guest whose name Paul never did learn; I don’t know what’s going on, but it sounds like something being broken. Maybe furniture? There are voices. Paul’s face remained impassive. She wasn’t deterred: what if it’s bones? That night Paul had no choice but to go up, this woman hot on his heels, and knock on Amelia Dehr’s door, even though they couldn’t hear anything from the hallway. He had no choice but to bang on the door, and Amelia finally opened it, slightly breathless yet steady – though her lips, Paul thought, seemed to have been bitten recently, bitten by someone else? As if by tacit agreement, they acted as if they didn’t know each other, as if each had never seen the other before. Is everything all right, miss? Paul asked, and Amelia replied: Thank you, sir, yes, everything is all right. Her eyes were unsmiling. He tried to look past her, into the room. An unmade bed. A lampshade, slightly askew. Nothing.

*

They were nothing to each other and then they were friends. Later on, they would be lovers – or they were lovers, and later on they would be friends. But before all that, before any kind of relationship, Paul and Amelia Dehr were rivals. Secret, stubborn rivals. She came out the victor. Paul saw this as a tragedy; later on, he would see it as a blessing. At the time, the undisputed celebrity of their university, of all universities (or so they thought) was Anton Albers; crowds of students thronged in front of the lecture hall at dawn, long before their class started, in order to snag a spot. The wait, Paul would say much later, was part of the class. The wait, Amelia would say much later, was the class. He disagreed adamantly, but he would come to feel that it was under Anton Albers’s auspices that he had become who he was. Amelia, by all appearances, hadn’t become who she was then. Amelia already was who she was. Paul saw this as a blessing; later on, he would see it as a tragedy. Now, she only had to unbecome herself.

Anton Albers was internationally renowned, but Paul had no idea of that. There was so much he didn’t know when he arrived: he got lost in the streets, in the hallways and even in his own thoughts. It took him two weeks just to find the lecture hall for Albers’s class and when he finally walked in, he walked right back out, because the classroom was packed. The emergency exits were blocked; students sat in the aisles, on the steps, against the doors. They were listening to a woman, when it seemed perfectly clear that this professor he was looking for was a man. This was how deeply ignorant he had been. A wisp of a woman whose age was impossible to guess even though she did not hide it: she had been born in Buenos Aires, right after World War II, the daughter of a German engineer turned Nazi sympathiser, a regular correspondent with the architect Albert Speer and Wernher von Braun, the father of rocket science who had been welcomed to the United States with open arms. Albers’s father went to Argentina, where he met his wife and where their daughter Antonia Albers would be born, then to Chile, where the girl would lead a dreamy childhood, and she soon left on her own, as a minor, for Mexico, and the next chance she got, she was on her way to the United States. She had been a fleeting figure, if not necessarily a fleeing one; and only ever alluded to her earliest years in vague terms which, even though she mentioned no real particulars, made it seem all the more concrete: a father, a mother, sunshine on the patio. A dog. Notwithstanding her family’s past, it was her first name that she changed, lopping off the feminine suffix that was its final syllable. Antonia became Anton; the few photographs of that time showed what appeared to be a slim young man with fine lips and finer hair.

Would you say, Madame Albers, that it was more difficult to have a feminine present, a present as a woman, than a chequered past? was one of the questions she was most frequently asked, and one she never answered. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, she usually replied. It was hard not to admire this commitment to ambiguity. Other people were unimpressed by her refusal, of course, and considered it cowardly or simply unacceptable. Her biography was nebulous and spotty: she seemed to have studied on every continent and in just about every time zone. She had authored theses in history and law and urbanism on the topic of the night – or were they all the same unpublished text that her biographical note always alluded to? By the time she had become the icon she now was, equal parts revered and reviled, the bound manuscript was long gone from the dusty shelves at the University of California, Berkeley. When people asked about it, Albers’s only answer was a shrug and a mischievous smile. Her beauty had left with her youth, but she radiated a particular charm all the same; ever since her early thirties Albers had looked the way she did when Paul shouldered his way into the lecture hall, a sexless, impish, ageless mien reminiscent of a hermit or a nun. When exactly she had stopped trying to pass as a man wasn’t clear; maybe during graduate school, maybe later. In the sixties and in the American Southwest, she had hung out with artists, the sort who dug immense pits in the dust and called it art; the sort who bought craters from which to watch the sky and called it art; and who, without exception, ended badly. ‘Ending badly’ was a running theme amongst Albers’s closest acquaintances, or those who warranted the slightest bit of interest. Then came a surprise of sorts: somewhat late for the time, she gave birth to a daughter whose father’s identity she didn’t disclose. The child did not live.

At that point, Albers’s work had already swerved towards a poetics of risk. The future of cities she believed to be the future of the world. From that point on, her career veered away from the traditional academic path and became something else: a philosophy, a vision. She taught all over the world, she lectured about lost cities and pirates, she delved into emotions that had been relegated to history books as well as those yet to come. She talked about the seal of Tutankhamen’s tomb, a knot that lasted 3,245 years. In the late eighties, she asserted, in answer to a question about the creation of post-war Europe, that the Europe to come would resemble nothing so much as a besieged city. When she was asked how she envisioned the twenty-first century, she responded, in painstakingly precise French, In the twenty-first century, everybody will be in security, which the journalist had relayed as ‘in safety,’ a misinterpretation that would inspire, Anton Albers suggested with her perpetually indecipherable smile, the labour of the next decade.

In and of themselves, her lectures were strange and riveting. Her words were clear yet impenetrable; nobody else could speak such sentences. It was like watching someone foretell the future, not unlike those shows in which some clairvoyant made contact with souls from the hereafter, except Albers seemed to be in direct communion with the West to come, the future of capitalism and industrialism, whereas the people Paul thought of while listening to her were all, to a man, impostors. The semester’s lecture was called ‘The Cities of Tomorrow’, but so far it seemed she had only talked about fear. Hour by hour, week after week, she slowly assembled a history of the feeling. As they got deeper into autumn and icy rain pounded the skylight of the lecture hall, she still hadn’t made any mention of cities, much less of tomorrow, and so the rows thinned out. Paul continued to go, but he was not attending a class so much as a secret ceremony. Every sentence Albers uttered seemed to signify more than the words themselves, but this more, this subtext, kept escaping him. It lay on the tip of his tongue, always just out of reach. He couldn’t shake the feeling that, if he could catch it, it would have made sense of the days and nights and betrayals soon to be inflicted.

Albers spoke of cities now gone, cities of single or double or triple outer walls, with underground tunnels capable of sheltering troops of a hundred knights, and she read out, in Old French, detailed protocols for locking the city’s gates at nightfall, and quarantining travellers who had had the misfortune to arrive at twilight and were left to wait for daybreak in limbo between two barriers of stone. And then she spoke of the city-dwellers’ fears, their fears of wolves, their fears of Turks; she drew bird’s-eye views from the ramparts, diagramming how, as she insisted, terror spiralled outward. What she meant to say, in this vein, about cities and about tomorrow, about the cities of tomorrow, remained unclear, but the first exam took the form of a single question: Can a city die of fear?

The rows thinned out but, in the second term, when it was time to sign up for further seminars, both Amelia Dehr – who only ever seemed to show up on campus for Albers’s lectures, but was at every single one – and Paul were quick to put down their names for Anton Albers. She showed no hint of approval. Whether she simply didn’t know them yet, or whether she knew them better than they realised, there was no change in her demeanour: a vague look of detached contentment, or of contented detachment. She was a woman slowly (very slowly) doing what she had to do. Paul and Amelia jockeyed like precocious schoolchildren. They were besotted with their own intelligence, because it was finally being put to the test. Albers was the reason they were exploring areas that they otherwise might not have considered, or not until much later, excavating dangerous realms despite their dread of what they already knew, or began to sense, of the world – and despite their dread of coming across a sentence or idea that would prove the limits of their intelligence. Not unlike the retrograde fears of those who, believing the earth to be flat, set sail for its edge while terrified they might in fact discover it. They fought to be the first to read something; their intellectual tug-of-war played out through the gaps on library shelves, each missing volume an affront to Paul, a further proof not only of Amelia’s existence but of her potential superiority. All that was straightforward enough, but their simmering rivalry also played out on another battleground – although it was anything but a ground: it was an instability, a dark ocean. When it came to Albers, they competed the way only two motherless children could. And it was perfectly clear that Amelia had the upper hand, which very nearly broke Paul, but he resigned himself to that reality, as if he’d known from the very beginning that disappointment lay in store for him. The two women seemed very close; he tried to grin and bear it in class, but he was genuinely annoyed and kept wondering: why was Albers so taken with that girl? (The answer: Amelia’s intuition for disaster, her instinct for catastrophe.)

One evening, during the February break when everybody seemed to be away, skiing or with their families – or worse still, skiing with their families – and he was stuck in the freezing, damp city, he discovered just how close his beloved professor and Amelia Dehr were. The entire month had been tough; money was so tight that he’d had to sign up with a temp agency and take on some night-watch work. He paced up and down dark warehouses and car parks amidst the echoes of his own footsteps. The uniforms he was given were a failed attempt at semantics, at a language of sorts, drawing inspiration from the gear of riot cops, exuding something almost military but coming up short. Every part was designed to evoke municipal troops, but not quite, and Paul was never more unhappy than when he wore his laced-up combat boots and reinforced nylon jacket, a truncheon swinging against his hip.

Lonely and cold, he saw them coming down the underground ramp of a car park, a spiral burrowing into the city’s core. Really, he saw their silhouettes on a monitor screen. He panicked. A German car. Albers in the passenger seat, perfectly recognisable, her black bangs just starting to turn grey – although he couldn’t see that – and, slamming the driver’s door shut, a willowy woman a full head taller than her. They made an almost comical pair; one tall and one small, one young and one not so much. They could have been fox and hen. He watched with dread as the two women headed towards the exit and towards him. He had never contemplated what Albers might do with her spare time, outside those two hours during which she gently addressed Paul’s own fears, led him ever so patiently through deep-rooted, embarrassing anxieties, until she could show that he was in good company, demonstrating that these feelings were not his alone, were in fact shared by all – and a worthy object of study. Fear of the dark, fear of others, as well as the murky, abstract memories of widespread plagues, widespread purges retained in his bones and marrow – memories of things his body hadn’t experienced but which all the same had shaped him. People huddled in the dark, a communal terror circulating amongst them, through points of contact, shoulder against shoulder, palm against palm, hand against mouth – a huge, collective body of fear. Never had it occurred to him that the woman tracing the genealogy of this feeling might some day end up eliciting it in him.

He heard their footsteps long before he saw them. It took them forever to reach his booth, like in some drawn-out horror flick, although one of the least horrible parts. The two women were talking, Amelia was carrying a cardboard office-supply box, the kind made to hold five reams of copy paper. Twenty-five hundred blank sheets that had meaning, or perhaps none – in a box rather like the ones some teachers filled with class materials, booklets, photocopies. Paul felt a sudden urge to yank the box out of her hands and run with it, as if digging through its contents could offer him some hint of the future that might otherwise remain painfully out of reach. Impulsively he hid (not again! he thought), sliding down in the sentry booth, and waited ages, pins and needles in his legs, until he was sure they were gone. Mercifully, they hadn’t seen him.

Yet that night, at the hotel, the front-desk phone rang, late but not that late, some time around ten or eleven, and it was Amelia Dehr, suggesting that he come up and eat with her. At first, Paul said nothing. His instinct was to hang up. Then he found his words and said that he was sorry, but he couldn’t leave the desk. Amelia said, Of course, gracious but not fooled, perfectly aware that, in fact, he left his desk all the time for any excuse at all and sometimes even without one. In that case, she said, I’ll come on down.

And in this way Paul and Amelia became friends – if that’s what they were.

2

After that, Paul kept waiting in the underground car park for the German car to reappear. He didn’t really expect to see it again, and when he did, he suspected it had appeared by sheer force of will, of desire. Once she was done parking, Amelia Dehr stayed in the car for a long while. Far too long, really. The camera’s angle kept him from seeing much, but he sensed that she was crying. He suspected that she was punching the steering wheel, struggling, trying to escape something inescapable. Staring through his small screen at the car no one had got out of, Paul felt a growing fear that he thought he had buried for good. A childish fear that rose up in him like sap. His world was now reduced to a rectangle that Amelia Dehr, by not stepping out of the car, stayed within; a frozen image on the screen that stayed unchanged. When the car door finally opened partway, he knew his weakness. He couldn’t look at the person stepping out of the car, the person who would be his Amelia but would not be; would be some other version of her; and he knew just as well that he could not look away. He had no choice but to look and not to look at the same time. My heart’s going to explode, Paul thought. My eyes are going to burst. She stepped out of the car, one long leg following the other. And then nothing. There was nothing to see on her face, nothing but a closed-off, sullen expression that would become familiar to him but which, for the moment, he considered unpleasant. This time, he did not hide. He stayed at his desk. She did not look at him and he decided that she was trying not to see him, that her indifference was feigned. He did as she did. But when he saw her later at the hotel, she was herself again, or rather she was that version of herself that he considered more consistent with her own nature (or with his own desire), and they ate popcorn together while watching the news on a loop, watched until the short bulletin began again, then a third time, until they knew it by heart and could recite it from memory. She did not mention the car park, and he did not ask.

In the seminar, Albers’s digressions continued – the digressions, Paul would say much later, were the class, his eyes brimming with tears at her funeral; those words supplanted the flesh that no longer lived. Her meandering meditations on the cities of tomorrow led to a single end point: even though space can’t be extended infinitely, night can and does create many cities within one. Paul was transported. He was a disciple of Albers, and at eighteen, he saw very clearly the three or four or five decades to come: he would be at Albers’s side. He would become the architect of nights, of their light. His life’s work would amount to a footnote, an appendix to his professor’s missing thesis: he would shed light on the night. He would enshrine the night, and the night, he realised, would enshrine him in turn.

At some point in the class, each of them seized on something destined for him or her alone, something that sparked their deepest obsessions. For Paul, it was cities in darkness – a particular strain of darkness that now only existed, in the cities, to be eradicated. He was especially drawn to Albers’s digressions on night-time, and when he had to give a presentation, having never spoken in front of an audience before, he did so on the topic of urban lighting. The rise of gas and then, later on, electric street lamps; light as a new tool in the fight against crime. However, he said, inequalities remained. The nation’s unification in light might never come about. In the nineties, blue lights had been installed in his hometown; they were meant to look futuristic, although the future they sought to usher in was already outdated – a thing of the past. Like everything else in that city, a former industrial hub that was trying and constantly failing to rebuild itself, it had proven to be a dead end. Besides, he’d always heard – and still remembered, so well and vividly that it had become the very reason for his interest in these issues – that the blue light of the city centre kept junkies from finding their veins. They would pull up their sleeves to inject themselves – and nothing: turning their arms uniformly blue was how to clean a neighbourhood up and clear it out.

Light was a wordless language that the body understood. There are as many neurons in the human stomach as in a cat’s cortex, Paul said; evidently he wanted to convey the intelligence of feeling something in your gut – a saying that science was only just starting to verify, as if the most hackneyed clichés were in fact mechanisms for sidestepping appearances and getting to the root of reality. There were a few laughs but he felt Albers’s benevolent eyes upon him, he knew that she understood, which to him was intoxicating. Amelia Dehr, sitting at the end of the first row, did not laugh either. She peered at him as if she were assessing their chances in bare-knuckled combat.

Amelia was more reticent, or rather, her passion manifested itself in a more nuanced, strained way. She never missed a class, never skipped a sentence, but she refused to simply go along: the passion she felt for Albers was the sort a swimmer feels for the current against which she swims. Her resistance was proof that she understood. And what she understood was that fear extends the city. Doubles it. A city is forged out of its struggle against fear but fear seeps in, and so the city becomes the site of what it is supposed to keep at bay, outside its walls. There won’t be any fear in the cities of tomorrow, Paul replied, fear is to be eradicated, just as darkness has been. There hasn’t been real darkness since the nineteenth century. Amelia said: fear adapts. She pronounced that phrase once, distinctly, but never said it again; either she was too proud to repeat herself, or she wasn’t as self-assured as she claimed to be. Often, Paul realised, Amelia’s vehemence disguised a secret wish to be proven wrong. Often, Amelia Dehr was sorry to be right.

Soon, without any apparent discussion, they started sitting together in class, not looking at each other, slipping each other pens and sheets of paper. For lack of money, Paul couldn’t buy all the books, and so he read with her, turning the pages as one might for a musician, sensing instinctively when she had finished. There was almost nothing to see there, but what there was to see was beautiful. That was how it was, at the beginning: almost nothing. One day, as Paul’s friends, the friends he was slowly abandoning, watched on in collective disbelief, Amelia, without turning her head to Paul, without showing any sign of particular attachment, nonchalantly draped her own coat across his too-wide shoulders. She apparently knew without looking at him that he was cold – and he knotted the sleeves around his neck without a word or a look, confirming her intuition, but not showing any kind of gratitude. This icy, blind consideration being invented there and then was rather erotic. In public they never touched each other, but this curt vigilance, amongst young people who played at brushing up against one another, was so effective as to be almost obscene, almost pornographic; and all the same they themselves almost weren’t even aware of it. They experienced this, of course, in a wholly contrary way: paralysed by timidity. But for someone with more experience than them, say, Albers – even if Albers never let on that she had the least opinion here – it was clear that they would be perfect lovers for one another. And this more experienced someone, whether Albers or somebody else, would have also foreseen something worrying, that their pleasure would inevitably grow almost mechanical and would, at some point, for the two of them or at least one of them, turn nightmarish.

But at the hotel things were different. The hotel was where they could be together, where they could look at each other, walk up to one another, shy and aloof, until they could sense, before even touching, the radiant heat of the other’s skin, eager to be stroked. In the beginning it was Amelia who came down. They ate side by side at the front desk. Nobody in room service had ever seen such a thing; Paul was putting his job on the line and pretending not to know it. They watched the monitor screens and the hallway screens that played the news bulletin on a loop. After a while, a few weeks, a month or two – Paul was stubborn – he finally came upstairs. This room that he had imagined and obsessed over for so long – a room where things were breaking – turned out, when she finally opened the door for him, to be a room where everything was in its proper place. The blackout curtains. The bedspread, which she claimed (lying on it, propped up on her elbows, gazing at him sleepily or suggestively) emitted chemical vapours, having been sprayed with flame retardants – in case of fire, she said – and he nodded at her though he had never heard of such practices at the hotel. Their conversations moved circuitously from the most prosaic things to the most intimate, and so what was impersonal entwined with what was profound – all questions of favourite beverages or films or songs now freighted with vital importance. All the two of them needed of this ritual, this esoteric language, was for it to bring them closer together. Maybe, as they lay on the bed, they were each already holding the other’s hand, or maybe one of them brushed a leg against the other’s by sly accident: not yet a caressing gesture but still an act of bravery. The television was off, they didn’t talk, their minds were empty of everything except the other’s warmth – nothing to remind them of time’s passage. For them, the world had momentarily stopped, or rather it was pretending to pause. A moment of grace, perhaps, or the quiet before a storm. Soon one of them, the boy or the girl, would get up on an elbow, kiss the other; kiss the other until they couldn’t feel the arm they were leaning on, and they’d keep doing so anyway, one hovering above the other still lying on their back, until a limb gave way and their bodies realigned, but in the moment, time would be frozen. It was an unexpected blessing to be there, simply there, wholly ensconced in the anticipation, like the smallest animals in their sleep. All was now motionless. For once, they were outside the evil that flows in and permeates the heart of everything.

*

They loved each other. Paul would have said that. He did say that; his world hadn’t been defined by fiction. In his world nobody read books, and so he had been protected from novels and what novels did to young hearts in search of reflections. He was swayed by imagination, of course, by an intuition of the unreal, but the thoughts he had in this realm were wayward, frenetic, almost instinctual; what he saw was at odds with the trappings of grand sagas and as such, at twenty, he saw himself on equal footing with Amelia Dehr. The commonalities they shared were yet to be discovered. She, of course, concealed herself behind an aura, a kind of glow, of romance. She embodied all the clichés: dead mother, absent father, money, all this money that so often turns out to be the true subject of books, its subtext – the money between the lines, the money one misses and covets, the money that puts the words on the page – the money that kept people from being so quick to insist she was insane.

Paul, however, wouldn’t have come to the conclusion that she was insane. Their minds were too similar for that, even if their thoughts and the products of their thoughts were wholly dissimilar. He put words together painstakingly, like a young man who knows that the language he’s speaking isn’t the one he actually dreams in; she more fluidly, due to the excellent education she had received and which led her to disdain any lines that came to her effortlessly. Her sentences were swift and perfect and elegant; form and content were inseparable. Paul was left in awe. Everyone was. She herself saw that grace as the result of violence, of being tamed and trained like a circus animal, her spirit demeaned and tamped down. I’m a little monkey, she said sometimes, a clever little monkey. He laughed. She bounced on the bed, letting out small inarticulate shrieks, a language beyond words that spoke to him.

They loved each other. All the other men disappeared, at least from the hotel. He cast off his friends with relief, the way he might have pulled off clothes that were now too small or too heavy or soaked from a long run in the torrential rain, clothes so wet they would never be dry again, their fibres utterly ruined. What Amelia hated about herself – being domesticated, being subjugated – he now saw everywhere except within her.

The curse was lifted, the nightmare was over. So Paul believed. He wasn’t a virgin any more. Sex entered another phase, one that better suited him. It was simply that so far he hadn’t had the chance to learn what a woman liked, nor – back then this seemed like a minor consideration but it was clear now that it mattered – what he himself liked. They had sex all the time. She didn’t say have sex, she said fuck. He didn’t say anything, he would just look at her in a particular way, and she would understand immediately. They didn’t hold back, or rather the way they held back was in the moment, of the moment: there was always a screen somewhere, a screen turned on somewhere. He fell asleep while in her, or he came on her, on her stomach or her breasts, and then carried her to the bathtub, where he washed her scrupulously, and the faith he felt in his own gestures aroused him anew, and she laughed and sucked him off or he stepped into the water with her. Sex defined everything about their relationship. Even when they read side by side or face to face, it was sexual, even when he was stuck pacing warehouses or car parks or darkened stores for the night and she was having dinner with her father.

This was an absent father, whose name rarely crossed her lips, a man who only ever existed when she, putting on makeup for the occasion, applied lipstick to the mouth that formed those words. Afterwards she and Paul came back to each other; he was exhausted and sad, and she consoled him, sucked him off again. She washed the crud of his night shift off his body and the red of her lipstick off his cock, and he wondered if it was the same lipstick she’d had on the night before, when she’d gone out, or if she’d redone her make-up some time that evening or early in the morning. How she’d redone it, in which reflective surface, in front of whom.

Their teachers (Albers excepted) resented her for anything and everything, for being provocative or aloof, sarcastic or indifferent, or simply difficult. At the hotel, however, things were different. At the hotel (which, to Paul, meant where they could be together), Amelia was passionate and attentive and funny. She was also reclusive, but she still welcomed his company eagerly, gratefully, as only children did. Until they’d had enough and absolutely had to get away, out of sight. This did not bother Paul in the least, because nothing about Amelia bothered Paul in the least.

She hid her books and papers under the bed, as it was the one spot the maid service always skipped; Paul knew, however, that they were perfectly aware of this habit, and expected it. She drove her professors crazy. They were exasperated by how she could look at anything and see exactly where that thing stopped being itself and shifted into another state, another realm. She upended the concepts they tried to instil just as unintentionally as someone might knock over a glass of water. Paul believed her intentions were pure. Yet, she wasn’t clumsy. She was something else; she seemed to detect limits and sense shortcomings, she craved instability, and had a vaguely destructive streak that no one but Albers managed to see properly for what it was: a fascination with catastrophe.

Her brief stint in higher education was a long run of debacles. One revolved around monuments: from under her bed, Amelia pulled out a stack of Soviet photographs in which specific individuals had been removed and more or less successfully replaced with walls or plants; she presented these before-and-afters as examples of future monuments: not edifices but erasures, disappearances that had been wilfully planned out and executed. A history that erased people. A history that itself was erased. This was the truly monumental aspect that monuments – cast-iron pedestals, statues, commemorative plaques – hid from us. This was the architecture that she insisted be noticed. Not the way power makes itself seen, but the way it makes itself unseen.

In this presentation, titled ‘The Astronaut in the Rosebush and the University in the Forest,’ she started by projecting retouched photographs, lingering on the one that Paul liked best, from around 1960, commemorating the seven applicants who had gone through a rigorous selection process to be named the pioneers of the Soviet space programme. Seven candidates, Amelia insisted, her hair blazing in the projector’s backlight, yet only six were visible. They stood in more or less triangular tiers like school sports-team photos, and maybe this vague, headless triangle hinted at the trajectory of a pilot’s career, akin to ‘climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep.’ In this photograph of the Sochi Six, incidentally, there was indeed a staircase, a rather insignificant one – although, Amelia said, architecture should never be purely a matter of scale – and in fact, the staircase turned out to have actually been a man. Disappeared as thoroughly as comrades Trotsky or Kamenev had been; he had vanished outright. It took fifteen years to identify the missing man, Grigori Nelyubov, who had been assigned to an orbital flight but was exiled to Siberia after a drunken brawl by the space centre. To add insult to injury, he was subsequently erased, pure and simple, from the first class of cosmonauts. In this way the delicate art of dematerialisation had (in Amelia’s words) counterbalanced the monumentality asserted by Soviet architecture; in another version of this same photograph (an image that further proved her point), the unloved Nelyubov had been turned into a rosebush. We imagine, Amelia said – and this simple word, imagine, was so alien to academia that all her listeners shivered – we imagine that the second censor told to doctor this photo, the one who chose flowers over stairs, loved the unloved Nelyubov, or poetry, or both. We imagine that in disappearing the astronaut, in obeying the order to retouch the image, he added his own twist by choosing to incarnate one of the saddest, stubbornest lines of Ronsard: that in death as in life thy body may be roses.

She paused theatrically and without any segue turned to a photograph of the Bois de Vincennes that Paul distinctly remembered her having taken during one of their walks. Trees, grass. This is what’s left of free revolutionary discourse, she said. This is what’s left of another way of thinking. There’s nothing left: it is by design that we have been circumscribed within what is, as if only what has already come to be could ever exist in the future. It is by design that such possibilities have been erased. What we see here, this outgrowth, this rewilding, is what we need to reach for. This alone will free us. These oaks here. That cedar there. Soon the forest will descend upon us. Soon the forest will meet our minds.

And Amelia left the room. Everyone wondered what to do now. Nothing, apparently. The lights were turned on, and the photograph of the forest that she had left up went on haunting the class, the harsh fluorescent lights leaving it just barely visible.

At an oral exam, she decided to recite a list of car bombings, and was given a fail. It didn’t bother her; she wasn’t like Paul, she didn’t want a diploma; she didn’t seek recognition or stability. She didn’t need to convince anyone, she didn’t need to earn money, she didn’t need to secure a future. Paul, on the other hand, played by the rules and wanted to win; she didn’t hold that against him. He was too young to wonder who these defiances were supposed to impress, what language these monuments of disappearance were meant to articulate, these cars on fire, what aphorisms and poems these restrained acts that were not yet events were meant to express.

*

They loved each other and time went by and several things came about. Slowly, without meaning to or even realising it, Paul became a rumour. This might have made him smile, or even laugh, had he been the least bit aware of it. It began at the hotel, since the comings and goings between room 313 and his desk were widely, almost collectively known – and yet this knowledge was fragmented, short-lived, just as fleeting as the seasonal hires. Paul, being in the flush of first love, did not consider how risky this – the nightwatchman with a hotel guest – might be. Both consenting adults, yes, but so young. The way his colleagues talked to him shifted, as though a rift in space and time had opened up and he was now so invisible that he could only be found in what people said about him.

Another thing happened over time: Paul’s relationship with Albers deepened. He thought Amelia Dehr had won over Albers while he hadn’t; in fact Albers’s heart was capacious enough for both of them. He and Amelia would go to dinner at their professor’s, and he had never imagined, never dreamed of such a connection. Still pedagogical, yes, but in a different way: Albers stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheeks (hovering, barely touching his skin); she brought out heaps of books, which she handed them with a few well-chosen, charming lines that gave them both the desire to read them all there and then as well as the impression, somehow, of having already read them; she offered them wine and laughed at Amelia’s jokes, or what she called Amelia’s jokes, and maybe she shouldn’t have. Maybe later on she regretted doing so. Paul, who wasn’t afraid of authority so much as aware and respectful of it – or so he thought – was perplexed that, after what would come to be known as the car-bombing incident, Albers wasn’t angry; on the contrary, she seemed to have been fully aware, before the fact, of the twist the exam would take. She simply shook her head, smiling, ever so amused, while Amelia, in a pale tunic with blue embroidery, a tunic that made her eyes sparkle and that gave Paul, who knew each inch of her veined body, the impression that she was not only naked but more than naked, that she was vitally there, bared, gorgeously so, snickered as she recited the list she had regaled the jury with. The rue Saint-Nicaise attack on 24 December 1800 that was intended to bring down General Bonaparte; the farmer Andrew Kehoe’s dynamiting of the Bath School in 1927; the Stern Gang’s booby-trapped trucks in Haifa in January 1947 and those of the National Liberation Front in Algeria, followed by the gory attacks the reactionary OAS carried out. In the 1950s, in Vietnam, the booby-trapped vehicles of choice were motorbikes; in August 1970, a van exploded in front of the physics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, its target being the Army Mathematics Research Center. They cut me off right around then, Amelia explained. She had taken off her shoes and her foot was nestled between Paul’s legs, under his thigh, right by his crotch and arousing wholly unambiguous thoughts.

Before leaving, they went into Albers’s room to grab their things. Paul had been wearing a duffel coat, Amelia a dark-red raincoat and, in the street, he had been too hot and she too cold. Amelia lingered in Albers’s dim room, looking at the art on the walls, at the photograph above the bed of a woman and a bird, the woman holding the bird to her lips for a kiss. It was a photograph that the artist had given Albers. It had never been reproduced anywhere so it existed solely in this room, a strange and warm and, come to think of it, perhaps even threatening image. It looks like you and me, Amelia said, not bothering to say who was the woman and who the parakeet. The smile on her face was a teasing one, but maybe there was something to her words, considering that one day Albers would gift the artwork to Paul. That night they didn’t dwell on it; instead Amelia turned to the green marble mantelpiece – a sickly, repulsive colour, Paul thought – and pointed at a slightly overexposed photograph in a frame noticeably older than the print, older even than the people in it: a young man in a badly tailored tuxedo and a young woman in Mountbatten pink. The young man was not a man but Albers, and as for the other, Amelia said almost unthinkingly, That’s my mother.

It’s always about dead mothers, thought Paul, who had a crude, forceful notion of what fiction was, and whose mother was dead. But he didn’t take it personally, since, at some point, the statement would be true of all mothers. At some point all mothers were dead, and lived in the stories that young lovers told each other in rented rooms. But this wasn’t the beginning that Amelia Dehr, being more cunning, creative or simply more wounded than him, had chosen for her story. It’s always about misunderstandings, Amelia said later, sprawled on the bed, Paul around her – it was hard to say which of them was supporting the other. Maybe they had slipped into a pact, Paul thought, ready to welcome this prospect, a shared space of sorts, almost an extension of the bed they lived in. What a tragedy misunderstandings are, she said, while his fingers traced the hand-sewn blue embroidery on her tunic. Even he could sense its delicacy, its complexity, he tried to convert the stitched thread into hours of work, into fingers numbed by holding needles and dioptres lost by straining eye muscles – was this how people became near-sighted, he wondered, was this how they went blind, by toiling away for women like Amelia? But he lost track of those calculations. The threads’ loop-de-loops along Amelia’s collarbones and arms, radiating around her solar plexus, oddly enough avoiding the outlines of her breasts, which could be glimpsed beneath the white, almost transparent cloth, and needed no elaboration – these patterns transformed, in his mind, into strange scenes that accompanied her voice, violent yet beautiful scenes that he had no hope of escaping, not even by shutting his eyes, the blue embroidery now seeming to be inked on the underside of his eyelids.

Mountbatten pink was an invention of Admiral Mountbatten. A grey tint, verging on mauve, that was developed during World War II for strategic purposes – the admiral was interested in camouflage, in invisibility; he thought that the British Royal Navy fleet would be able to avoid being sighted by the Germans as a result, especially at those delicate hours of dawn and dusk; but in terms of disappearing its success was only relative. The ships actually seemed to be more vulnerable. Not to mention that they were, of course, pink. My mother and Albers decided to try their hand at the matter, but they had no luck. Or maybe they did. Or maybe one of them did and the other didn’t. In any case they were friends, better than friends, Amelia said; Paul was slightly dismayed by that declaration, and right then he couldn’t make sense of his feeling of having been let down. He moved even closer to the body he loved, but later on it dawned on him how profoundly it had hurt him. Amelia’s outlandish ideas, the disappearances and monuments yet to come, notions he considered quite original – he understood the extent to which all that had also been inherited. He understood just how alone he was in this world where his father had nothing to pass on to him, no actual or intellectual wealth, not even a vague nostalgia for better days. The legacy he did have would only become clear to him much later. Amelia told him the rest that night, above the retouched Soviet photographs, beneath the bedspread sprayed, or not, with flame retardants; between the sheets, deep within the particular world she lived in and into which Paul, without really realising it, had followed her.

3

Some ten years earlier, at the end of the twentieth century, her mother had tried to stave off a war, and then to stop it, and it had been the death of her. Amelia could have left it at that and nearly did. That sentence said it all, it was grammatically and factually correct, but even though the sentence said it all, it also said nothing, it wasn’t the language she spoke, the one she’d been taught, so she continued. Is it possible to be contaminated by a story, Paul wondered later. Are there tales that kill? But slowly, gnawing away, like those unusual martial-arts holds that appear to be nothing but a light touch, barely any pressure – but then, a year later, the heart suddenly stops. Could a story carry out such a perfect crime?

This woman, her mother, was a peace activist: that was her calling, maybe her vocation, and so we can grant her the kindness of glossing over the enormity of her personal failure amongst the hundreds of thousands who died or disappeared. A city shelled for nearly four years, snipers on the roofs, blood in the streets, and, ten years later, cemeteries everywhere, in the stadiums, in the parks; cemeteries and oddly healed wounds; children who would become adults unable to sleep with windows open, or with windows shut. And the children of those children, who would inherit strange rituals despite not having lived through the war, the siege, so many perilous street crossings; who would sometimes keep their shoulders pressed close to walls, would sometimes raise their eyes, unsure what they were looking for – their eyes flicking up, checking for snipers lying in wait whose salvos they wouldn’t have actually endured. These ubiquitous realities: precision shots, mortar rounds, blackouts, tap handles turned only for no water to come – these sorts of experiences would be passed down in strange ways, from generation to generation. Some would go so far as to say that the fears in one era carry over to the next, or haunt the reptilian, most primal part of the brain, where I does not exist, or barely does, or only as a body in danger, gnawed at by hunger yet determined to survive; I believe, personally, that it’s a matter of language. A matter of stories – inoculated, as with viruses, by what people say, and also by what they don’t say. Paul, huddled against Amelia, had the distinct feeling that she was reading his thoughts, or rather that she anticipated them, and gave them a form that he could only blindly sense.

It was the start of the European Union and in an odd way it was already the end of it, revealing to those who wanted to see it – or who had no choice but to see it – an absurdist performance of orchestrated powerlessness, arguments, and rhetorical questions – was this, properly speaking, a civil war or not; had there, properly speaking, been a genocide? Who knew what? Who did what, let what happen? The British knew but didn’t do anything. The French had acted, but hadn’t known anything. Or the other way around. A long chain of responsibilities that were interchangeable, power and powerlessness both leading back to the same thing; words that signified nothing. The mere mention of Americans sent a shiver down everyone’s spines that was either hope or dread, was a sickly gleam that flashed in everyone’s eyes. At the time everyone who had – or felt they had – some stake in this war had to read the signs, learn the secret language, master an alphabet of symptoms, delusions, pathologies.

Amelia’s mother was what some might call an adventurer, or an explorer, or at least a traveller. She’d left her hometown at the end of the sixties as easily as discarding a dress she’d outgrown. She’d cut short her hair and her name alike before going to discover the world. In fact, all she did was cross the border into Switzerland. She was a poet, which now seems ridiculous to say, almost obscene; but she very much was. (I barely remember anything of this: I was ten years old when she went off, she left me with Albers, Albers took me to my father, everything I know I’ve had to piece together.) She was a twenty-year-old hanging around Geneva, around Locarno, effortlessly witty, draping her long arms just so along the armrests; someone saw she was bored, handed her the keys to an apartment in Paris, one of those hideouts that no longer exist, not as far as I can tell. It was a place with huge rooms and barely anything in them, and nobody cared whose name was actually on the lease; it was already lost in the haze of the past. People were invited over or simply dropped by unannounced, they scrounged up what coins they had to get extra keys cut, and then they loaned them out, lost them, or just gave them away; people stayed there for nights or weeks or years; it was an ecosystem of artists and intellectuals and revolutionaries and, like any ecosystem, it was self-regulated. At some point someone changed the locks, or the police broke down the door, looking for someone nobody knew or had ever heard of; once the place was all but empty, the whole process began anew, quietly at first, then gaining momentum. Places like it could be found in every city – those sorts of places were where Albers wrote her thesis. Those sorts of places were where they met each other. Two women looking for figures in the haze – the haze of tear gas. And so my mother, with her ridiculous belief in words, took up or made up a particular form that she called documentary poetry and was meant to be, or was, or should have been, an alternative to the journalistic language that had ground down our way of thinking and living to the point that we’d been hollowed out, in the face of reality (that’s what she wrote; personally I’m not even sure I understand what she means), to being starved outlines in a cave. That’s your so-called objectivity, she lamented. It’s in her first collection, you could read it if you wanted to, part of it was written in Mexico and something in the way it reads, the rhythm of the lines and the spaces between them, makes me think that she composed it not necessarily with Albers, but at the very least in her presence.

In a way it’s a history book and in a way it’s a book specifically on vision. They were in Mexico in 1969. They might have met that man, the one who installed mirrors in the land, buried them halfway, or hung them in trees, and they reflected the sky, the leaves, and called it art; Albers saw in those acts of displacement a strange attempt to mend the wrongs the Americans had committed in Yucatán. A sort of white magic that was meant to restore what had been stolen: temples, innocence, sight. It was in the jungle that my mother wrote her book, which was also a manifesto, and told of the Americans who were there in 1840 in order to dismantle the old Mayan cities and send them, piece by piece, back to the East Coast – the rising centre of power, the one that would swallow everything. There was also a doctor amongst them, a man who was considered a practitioner of the surgical arts although he had no sample of his skill with him, and who decided to operate on the Indians of Merida for their inward squint, the strabismus that he interpreted as the embodiment of their inability to distinguish between meum and tuum. The book read like a report, or an essay, everything in it was true, but unlike reports or essays it wasn’t situated outside the surgical operation, on the contrary, it pulled you into it, you felt the knife in your hand and at the same time on your eye (there was no mention anywhere of anaesthesia) and gradually this became unbearable to read, physically unbearable because you could feel it from both viewpoints – that of the one operating and that of the one operated upon. It was drenched in blood, it was a nightmare, spoke to a primal fear. The theory of information, according to my mother.

Did she really believe she could revolutionise reportage? That’s what Albers claimed, but I don’t think so, or maybe she, my mother, was out of her mind. Stark raving mad. But I don’t think she was. At least not at the beginning, and I hardly know anything about the end. Amongst the intelligentsia she remained something of a mystery. Even if Albers insisted that she was the point everyone strained towards but never touched. A vanishing point. I don’t know.

When the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, she took refuge in the Sarajevo Elisse (my god, Paul thought, who for the first time felt he was only just starting to understand and now mourned his ignorance). The hotel where, in short, the conflict had broken out. The roof on which two snipers had opened fire on a row of peaceful protesters. The hotel was made the headquarters of the international press and several intellectuals who, like Nadia Dehr, felt as though that was where they were meant to be, the exact location where the ideals of the twentieth century and its Realpolitik had culminated: in carnage. Drawn-out carnage. One of those places where violence was both extreme – bodies exploding in front of a water fountain, in a market – and sustained over time. The war drove my mother mad, Amelia said, because she was convinced she needed to find the right words to describe it and at that stage, there would be no option but to cease fire. She needed to find an artistic means to stop it, so that the scales would finally fall from the eyes of onlookers the world over. And she thought that was her task. The task of poetry. To find a way to transport this reality somewhere else. Beyond its limits, into the heart of the West, into the heart of those who read it and who, after reading and experiencing it, would no longer be able to ignore it. She wrote. Sometimes she ate with the others, the journalists, the intellectuals; sometimes they found Italian pasta and cooked and that, in their eyes, at that time, amounted to a banquet. Sometimes she’d call me on the phone. I’d cry; she wouldn’t. She was just writing. She was convinced that the breakdown in the peace process was her own fault, a failure of her own poetry. Of all poetry. After three years, she finally faced up to the facts: everything she wanted to show the world, the world already knew. Had known from the start. And didn’t care about. It wasn’t the fault of words, or of those who used them; it was the fault of human nature, of those who refused to listen. I suppose it was at that moment that she lost her mind. She stopped writing, she stopped calling. I have no idea what she was doing. I suppose she was digging tunnels. Literally or figuratively. I suppose she started working in the black market, that she put all her energy into trafficking food, trafficking arms, so that the besieged city could keep on going. Nobody knows what happened to her. Nobody ever found her body. After the war, I inherited a box. A cardboard box, like for printer paper. It was full of her fragments, full of all her attempts at documentary poetry, all her failures. That’s all I have of my mother, said Amelia. All I had, to be exact.

I’ve only opened this box once. I pulled out a poem at random, a poem about a man being tortured. They had set a pigeon in his mouth. A live pigeon. He didn’t mean to, but he ended up grinding his teeth. His body itself played a part in the grinding. Someone laughed and one couldn’t be sure if it was one person, or two, or the whole world. When I slid the paper back in the box, I realised that I was laughing, too.

Paul was at a loss for words. Then, in horror, after a minute, he started laughing. It was uncontrollable, sharp, like a cough: a bodily revolt. He couldn’t stop. A nightmare.

Exactly, said Amelia.

She had sold the box to the highest bidder. Albers had helped arrange the sale. There were still people who remembered Nadia Dehr, who felt she had a particular position in a particular context, in a particular era, and it hadn’t been hard to get rid of it, for a tidy sum, far tidier than she could have imagined. Not so much to make money, in any case, as to protect herself from what it contained, the naked truth. And to spite a mother who had abandoned her. She would never know what she had written during nearly four years of war but the very thought of it was unbearable. She herself could never have endured it. She was convinced that abstaining – her form of revenge – was the wise thing to do. She was convinced that would be how she’d save her own skin.

She was starting to doubt it.

*

And all that while, all those months, those years when her mother and others like Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo were digging themselves deeper into the hell of a besieged city, into the hell of words that nobody wanted to hear – during this time when her mother was slipping scribbled lines into her box, or tending to victims, or, on the airport runway, pulling white sheets over hunks of meat that hid contraband arms, flouting embargoes right under the noses of the blue helmets not seeing anything or pretending not to see anything, the blood slowly soaking the sheets, a universal code for wounded or dead, a fully formed language everyone shared – during those months, those years when her mother was slowly ceasing to write and beginning to act, or perhaps lying limbs akimbo, head blown apart, in a pit – where was she, little Amelia, with flyaway hair and wide-gapped front teeth? Sometimes she was with her father, but their relationship had always been strained. He was an impatient man. I loved him but he never seemed to care whether I loved him or not. He wasn’t bringing me up to be his wife, Amelia said, a line that would lodge itself uncomfortably in Paul’s memory until he got to meet the man many years later – a line he would finally feel like he understood, only to realise, later, after coming across a particular novel, that he was wrong. Those words, coming out of Amelia’s mouth, didn’t mean what he’d presumed. Rather, having nothing to say about her father, or not wanting to say anything about her father, she had simply relied on one of her tricks, one of her sleights of hand: a quotation.

Yes, where was she as a child? The simplicity of the question belied the difficulty of its answers. Paul knew exactly where he had been – always in the same place, waiting to be done, planning his way out, the most logical and realistic one being the one that scared him most (studying), but as usual with Amelia a few words were never enough, silence was never enough, images had to be invented to pull together something that had always been scattered. Everything and nothing. Amelia remembered her childhood as a story in which some parts, important ones, might have been told to her in a foreign language or in her sleep. Cause and effect erased – whispered into her ear while she was dozing in her bed or sitting in a guest room waiting for her father to come get her, or stretched out on a long velvet bench, in a pile of coats.

She remembered long nights when people forgot her and long afternoons spent staring at a piano, a chess problem, or worse, a puzzle: it was a lonely existence that drove her insane, drove her to stuff one or two jigsaw pieces into her mouth, to chew on them methodically before spitting the unrecognisable things into her hand just to avoid having to complete the picture; she remembered being so alone that when she went to school on Mondays her head felt in another place, she felt like an outcast, greeting her friends in a hushed voice and feeling almost surprised that they said hello back. I’m actually here, she realised. Now the week can start. She became most present on Fridays, she reached a sort of maximum density of being, but then dissolved so thoroughly over the weekend that she would start questioning her own existence. She had to start existing again two days later. She was an only child.

She was a child amongst adults, whose only reason for being was to see and remember things that otherwise would have been forgotten. The names of birds, of mammals, of trees; of stars and minerals and their properties; the sentences whispered over the phone so she wouldn’t hear them; lines and stanzas and entire poems even if she didn’t understand what they meant at all; the names of medicines and their side effects, the ingredients of lipstick tubes, the agglomerations of syllables that were not so much names as designators of the food dyes, preservatives, acidulants, and artificial flavourings of candies which deteriorated into doubtlessly poisonous numbers and letters. She got horribly bored, to the point of insanity, and all the same she never stopped taking in these memories. There was no worse loneliness than that of a child kept in a world of adults.

She was obsessed with children. Everywhere she went, she insisted on asking if there would be children – how many, who they were, what they were like. The moment she entered one of those huge apartments her family always visited, she started searching for them, hunting them down, greedy for contact – finally, a counterpart, someone like her. Held hostage in a world not meant for their size, where door handles were too high, countertops out of reach, books too heavy, glasses too large – finally, there would be someone she could look in the eye, with skin as soft and perfect as her own, skin that wasn’t even ten years old – incredible, when she came to think of it now. We fought wars and suffered impossible loves. When we were together, everything shifted slightly and started to make sense. I was obsessed with other children, drawn to them. I got very upset when it was time to leave, like I was an animal that couldn’t migrate with all the others.

When there were no children and she was alone, a horrible torpor came over her, and she fought against it by exploring these apartments of vast darkness and bursts of laughter, as she darted into unknown lands, forbidden rooms in which she discovered jewellery boxes, lingerie drawers, relics of every sort gleaming in the shadows. Everything was ethereal, everything was the scene of a past crime that had never been noticed, much less solved. She was naive enough, unthinking enough, that she started getting high. Sniffed acetone and stain removers and nail polish, permanent-marker ink and pens, and even some mineral spirits since she liked the name; she breathed it all in deep, until her head was spinning. Huffed paints in the artists’ studios, especially the metallic tones, and turpentine as well, never mind that she had never been shown how to do so; being lonely forced her to learn. Sat down on the icy rims of bathtubs as the vapours of solvents and removers carved walkways and emergency exits within her brain, passageways by which she could escape the mortal boredom of a childhood without other children.

Sometimes she started small fires on the tiles, in the bathtub. She tried on fancy lipsticks and then attempted to melt down the lipstick bullet so she could erase all trace of her crime; she broke open thermometers so she could watch the mercury swirling in the sink, swirling, then escaping into the city. She set small puddles of antiseptic on fire, got high, glided though these wild laboratories, wallowed in this chilly voluptuousness, this supreme eroticism, these enamel surfaces and mirrors that ensnared her, as in some modernised myth where the divine lover would appear in the form, in the features of an impeccable bathroom, in smooth, hard, unchangeable beauty – in appearance. I still carry these neutral spaces within me – but as soon as I try to revisit them, that neutrality I’m reaching for turns into anguish, mute terror. Steel-jaw traps, love-children of what is human and what isn’t, what is human and its opposite, a new stage of the species, dissipating in the impersonality this had forged out of nothing – and now there’s nothing left but a faint whiff of medicine and smoke, a young girl asleep in a bathtub.

Where were they? Where? Some of these apartments, some of these houses had a child’s bedroom. But the children were nowhere to be found, and she wandered through what, in their absence, had become just as forbidding as it was welcoming. The teddy bears watched her, the floral-pattern quilts watched her, the tiny slippers and the doll’s houses watched her – as did the dolls, their eyes constantly fixed on hers, ravenous for her hide. The styrofoam solar systems trembled in a draft that she didn’t feel, the spheres turning slowly until Jupiter’s red spot, its one round eye, zeroed in on her forehead, her face. No children anywhere, and everything stared at her until she beat a hasty retreat. She backed out of these rooms without any idea of whether they were empty for the night or forever – where were the children? Mysteriously gone, but none of the grown-ups seemed to care, she heard their gales of laughter and their conversations about art, money, the ups and downs of the stock market which for some of them were the ups and downs of their own lives; then they lowered their voices and they talked about the non-aligned countries, about dissents and wars. She, having retreated to the bathroom, regained her composure. On her knees under a sink, her nose in a bottle of detergent, she took her revenge for the absence of children on herself.

The summer of the first conflicts, which would lead less than a year later to the longest siege of a major city in the modern world, her mother had taken her on vacation (on vacation, Amelia had repeated incredulously) to this land that was soon to break apart, a fracturing that her mother would soon internalise, a fracturing that would in turn engulf her. A few months later, Yugoslavia as it had been known no longer existed. They stayed on the Adriatic coast, in one of those chain hotels that was all the rage at the time, a hotel with hallways tiled in a green verging on black, where she was especially charmed to see how the lights made her cast at least three shadows. The room overlooked the swimming pool, which itself overlooked the sea. Everything was identical, endlessly reproduced empty cubes.

It was obvious her mother wasn’t very happy. The reason wasn’t entirely clear to Amelia, considering that the two of them had the entire hotel to themselves – it felt like her father had booked the whole place for them, as if to apologise for his absence. Around noon, that time of day when she was forbidden to go outside, she took the elevator to the top floor and tried all the door handles, from the first room to the last, a bit disappointed that all of them resisted her efforts. She didn’t understand how they had the run of the hotel but, somehow, not the rooms themselves. She didn’t understand how the hotel could be anything other than the sum of its spaces; as she floated all alone in the pool, she counted the balconies, every one identical, to figure out where she was sleeping, and she always lost track unless she saw her mother come out. In the afternoons she loved watching the increasingly sharp, increasingly long angles of the railings’ shadows along the walls. Her mother barely smiled. But she had promised Amelia that children would come, that children were on the way, and so she waited and did not protest, did not complain, out of fear that her mother might change her mind and tell them all to turn back.

That summer, Nadia Dehr had three dresses that were identical in every way except for their colour: pink, powder blue, pistachio green. She changed between them on a whim: sometimes she left the table between one course and the next, abandoning her daughter and her plate in the huge, deserted restaurant, only to come back in a different dress – different and yet the same – leaving her to wonder if this wasn’t some sort of code, not unlike signal flags on naval ships. But a code for who, for what? The hotel was preternaturally empty. As I splashed about, the sun reflecting on the water created hypnotic shapes, rings, sideways figure-of-eights. I heard, Get out of that water, there’s so much chlorine, you’re going to poison yourself. I was heatsick and lonely, seized by sudden fits of terror and frustration, and my mother tried to calm me down by telling me, flatly, as though addressing the idea of her daughter rather than a real girl: Be patient, the children will come soon. The children did not come. She spent long hours on the front-desk phone, her brow furrowed; she didn’t speak much, sometimes didn’t speak at all, as if she was waiting for the person on the other end of the line to pick up a receiver hanging off its hook, forgotten, as the sun went down.

Amelia caught a fever, the balconies multiplied, their railings seemed to dissolve. Still no children anywhere. She sometimes glimpsed them here or there, hiding when she got close, disappearing up stairwells, through doorways. Her mother tried to say something with her pink or blue or green dresses, which sometimes seemed to be all three colours at once. That was how she communicated with the children, how she instructed them to avoid Amelia – and now I have to deal with this, too, Nadia Dehr complained as she poured aspirin packets into the tap water. Amelia was hallucinating. A secret was being kept from her – a secret she couldn’t solve in the ever-changing number of balconies, in the sun’s reflections on the water, in her mother’s dress and the way her earrings sparkled, which had to be a sign, too, rather than mere chance. Was the deserted hotel really empty? The infinite sequence of vacant rooms, their beds, their pillows, their black screens of unplugged televisions. I heard or thought I could hear the pounding of music upstairs or the creaking of footsteps downstairs.

One night she woke up, terrified by voices. Was she scared that she had somehow managed to conjure them up? But I wasn’t dreaming, there was no question it was my mother next door, laughing, for the first time that week or that summer or maybe both. Fevers have always dilated time, and blurred all points of reference for me – or was that simply an effect of childhood?

She was laughing with a young, brown-haired man, then she thanked him for the assistance he had offered (she declared it as if she were a nation unto herself ). He replied with something Amelia didn’t understand, and her mother said, The worst is yet to come. He seemed unconvinced, seemed to be waving away her words, and my mother kept going, Next time? There won’t be a next time, you’re coming with me to Paris. She was right, there wouldn’t be a next time, but she was wrong, he didn’t come with us to Paris. He woke me up at dawn, took me in his arms and carried me to the balcony. I’m trying to remember his face and I can’t, at best I can see a version of my own, of my mother’s, some sort of family resemblance. Don’t say anything, don’t scare them away – the children are here, I thought – the sun hadn’t risen and the light was new and grey, for the first time that week or that summer. Down below, a doe and a fawn, both of them pinkish brown, about the same colour as the sandstone slabs, were drinking from the pool, their heads lowered, gently and earnestly. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t scare them off, but my heart did twinge at the thought that they were going to die from it, from this chlorine-poisoned water, this water poisoned just for my swims, since nobody else had been in the pool that summer.

That day, they began arriving. The refugees – women and children, displaced by something that was happening up north. The hotel had been requisitioned. War was what she thought she had glimpsed through doorways, in stairwells. And war was what had slept in the empty beds.

Her mother, on that last day, finally started playing. She checked every room, from the top floor down, dragging Amelia behind. Some doors opened, others didn’t: the war was only just starting. The ones that did open revealed suitcases packed in haste, their contents spilling out on the beds, and glassy-eyed women frozen mid-gesture as if they had been stricken by sudden amnesia and were now wondering what it was they were holding – in this case, a coat hanger – and why they were holding it. Sullen children who didn’t look at Amelia or her mother gripping her arm as she looked for this man who had come, who had been so helpful, whom she had bought a plane ticket for on an airline that soon would no longer exist or perhaps had already stopped existing. Amelia didn’t care, she wanted to meet the children who, all together, it seemed, had made their way down and were now jumping into the pool. A torrent of displaced children pelting down on the water’s surface in underwear and shorts – nobody had actual swimsuits, there hadn’t been time for that. Ten, twenty, fifty children cannonballing like small birds with a death wish, impelled by a herd instinct, then climbing back out only to dive in again with such violence that huge waves slopped over the pool’s sides; children of different ages, boys and girls, who just hopped joylessly on top of each other, their bodily impacts muffled by the water, splatters across the pinkish slabs, a streak of blood on wet skin. Her mother hadn’t been playing, after all; she barged into the rooms the same way the children hurtled into the water, looking for a man she would never see again. She filled her suitcase with those three dresses that had done their duty. Amelia didn’t care. She was looking for her swimsuit as the children had finally come, and she absolutely had to go and play with them, right now, while there was still water in the pool, otherwise she would never be able to – but her mother, already in her travelling outfit, navy trousers and twotone shoes, yanked away her swimsuit and towel.

The officer overseeing the hotel’s requisition greeted her with a deep bow, his back ramrod-straight, and her mother rolled her eyes. Nothing annoyed her more than the refined elegance of war’s beginnings, before everything came undone and one finally saw the world for what it was: a realm of recklessness and unremitting cruelty. He also thought (maybe rightly) that she was annoyed at the hubbub of those young bodies splashing in the water. I’m going to empty the pool tonight, he said. The sea isn’t far off, after all. No, the sea isn’t far off, she repeated, her mind on someone else. He must have left right after the deer, which was not the plan at all. She looked for him on the drive to the airport, she looked for him in the terminal, she never said his name but I could see quite clearly that all she now saw was his absence.

At the airport, all the phones were busy or maybe already disconnected. Amelia and Nadia were the only people on the flight back to France, and Amelia didn’t dare to turn around and face all those unoccupied seats. Nadia never saw this man again. Amelia never saw the children again. I never talked to them, the whole time there had been a balcony between us, a window; she was sure she would never forgive her mother, yet before long she found herself burdened with yet more resentments, bitterer ones.

Upon their return, her father was so beside himself that he marshalled an army of lawyers, some formidable experts in their field and others doing their best to bend family law to their will, as if families could be handled like the entities her father’s company sold abroad. He locked Amelia in a room and wouldn’t even allow her pathetic mother to say goodbye. She had already decided to leave again; he assumed that she wanted to take me with her, and was taken aback that she didn’t so much as suggest it. She didn’t want anything from him, anything at all. That autumn, her mother plunged back into the war and Amelia was sent to a boarding school in the mountains, in Switzerland or thereabouts, amongst other young girls – one of those places where they played tennis, where they all sold their souls to the devil, but she was too young for the devil, for him to be interested in her or her in him. Later on, she decided that the photos of her at eleven, in a leotard, were compromising – so she destroyed them, unaware that she was, in her own way, helping to erase her biographical materials. It had never occurred to her that these might be finite, and she had acted like any organism unwittingly working towards its own disappearance. No other photos of herself as a child would ever come to light. She had taken part in this extinction; it would soon become difficult to convince others of her existence.

She had few memories of this boarding school; the ones she retained mostly blurred into scenes from a notorious horror flick, although one of the least frightening parts. Her father had decided to send her away, and she didn’t think it was because he needed to get her out of his hair, but she wasn’t any more convinced that it was out of any kind of love. She never saw her mother again, she only stayed with her father for short stretches. She came to feel, at moments, like she was nobody’s daughter, even though she never stopped being their child. The very idea of family lost its solidity; it flickered off then on again, and at some point she stopped thinking about it at all. In any case – in Switzerland or thereabouts, at boarding school in a small school-uniform jacket – I came to understand that my father just couldn’t resist the idea of trying to hide or camouflage me – and as always Paul found himself wondering about the money, how much there had been, where it had come from, and where it was now. As for the school, Amelia believed that she had entered it willingly – and left it willingly as well. She had been expelled for some reason no one quite understood, something about her having had unwarranted male visitors – but, for crying out loud, her father said, she’s just eleven years old! By which he meant, of course, that she was too young to be interested in such devious activities. There was no use arguing, however; she had to say goodbye to her friends in the crisp mountain air and go home. She could still remember the excitement, verging on hysteria, she felt upon finding herself amongst other children, young girls like her. Other children at long last, other children everywhere. She had been like aspirin in a glass of water: reacting and fizzing and dissolving.

She had made up a friend; that was why she had been expelled. An imaginary friend, nothing unusual there, who embodied everything she was homesick for. We can call him Paul, if you want, she said. Later, he wondered how many times she’d told this story, in bed, under the shower, how many times she had changed the name of this non-existent man to suit her or someone else’s fancy. The other Paul (the first Paul, thought Paul, this is unreal) had appeared in the train station, a young man older than her. The moving trains and her rising anxiety had conjured into being, so she believed, exactly the kind of companion she needed as a little girl travelling alone. He was strong and considerate; with him, every danger turned into a game. She had invented him, she thought, out of nothing, an imaginary friend like so many others, but they had become so attached to each other that, even after she was settled in at the school, he stayed. She saw him once or twice a day, no more, and ended up telling her new friends about this brown-haired Paul. She told them about his doings, skiing, shooting, and how he’d saved a tiny animal. They clustered around her, clamoured for more stories of this mythical man, all these girls around her, awestruck, all dressed identically, with pleated skirts, white blouses, knee-high socks (if my father came, she thought, foolishly, he wouldn’t know me from the others, he wouldn’t know which one to take with him: I’m safe here, she thought). To meet their demands, and satisfy their ravenous appetites, she started telling her tales in the present tense, and the humdrum lives of these rootless little girls took on a new shine. Copy down this geometry problem, Paul’s solved it. He was always right around the corner – he was there not a second ago, you’ve just missed him – he was a nice way to kill time; and then, one night, something odd happened. Milena walked into the dormitory wearing an oversized T-shirt, a souvenir of the Olympic Games that had taken place several winters earlier in the land where her mother had gone as a peace activist, a T-shirt that nearly came down to Milena’s knees like a dress, and blithely said that Paul had given it to her.

For a long while, Amelia kissed Paul, the real one (or maybe, Paul thought, the substitute one), and then she continued: So they all started seeing him when I wasn’t there, they started to meet up with him behind my back, this tall brown-haired boy was made into their idea, they all adapted him to their needs. Miranda, the precocious one (at twelve years old she already seemed to be fifteen), kissed him while going round and round in the huge revolving door. Carlotta (twelve years old but terrified of men and bras) reported all this to the headmistress, who started investigating the rumours, discovering with horror that a young man had insinuated himself amongst her little girls, coming and going quite freely in spite of all the locks and bars and other safety precautions. Nonsense, said her father, glaring at her, you do know he’s completely made-up. But the headmistress, who was wary of the devil’s wiles and unnerved by the sway this Paul had over her charges, would brook no argument. Don’t you see that only makes matters worse, she said. And so Amelia had to say goodbye to her friends and come back to Paris. All that remained of that time was a school notebook with a geometry problem in it that had been solved in a handwriting that wasn’t hers – although the distance of all those years had made it clear, abundantly clear, that of course it was her own, its telling details knit deep within the less-awkward cursive that would be her handwriting as a grown-up, set down with an insistence, a speed she hadn’t had then, and this final paragraph had been like a triangular self-portrait that, she felt, was worth just as much as a photograph.

After the fiasco in Switzerland or thereabouts, her father had sent her to the United States. She never did understand this drive to send her far away. She was welcomed to upstate New York by Albers, who drove a ’70 Ford Thunderbird with no regard whatsoever for safety recommendations – Albers was the sort for whom grace was meaningless without risk – and took her to see Niagara Falls half-hidden in the snow. She no longer dressed like a man but her artfulness was still evident in her cuffs and lapels – there was a certain je-ne-sais-quoi in every outfit she wore. On the plane over, Amelia lied to the woman beside her about her last name, her first name, where she was headed and why. She would never see her mother again, her father had decided she was inconvenient, but of course she didn’t touch on any of that. The woman spent a night in the air beside a complete fiction.

She missed her mother, she talked to her every so often on the phone, across great distances, or distances made all the greater by bad reception. The line broke up often – she didn’t remember their conversations so much as the interruptions that made them lose each other, drove them apart – a metallic clinking sound would drown out their voices, reverberating in the earpiece, like Morse code. My mother would crack a joke – why, hello there, my dear eavesdroppers! – but her voice hollowed out more and more each week, as if she was being drained away. The noises were as harsh as cleavers; they came from our devices, from the network, they made what had been abstract all of a sudden concrete: distance, electricity, the fact that all progress carries its own dysfunction.

She had never believed that they were being listened to, any more than she had ever believed that her mother might have dabbled in espionage, but she often thought back to those noises that impeded their conversations, the darkness and abstraction creeping into their relationship, poltergeists summoned both by practically nothing and by everything across the miles upon miles of submarine cables that had been laid down.

It was while living with Albers in America that she learned English, that she became a teenager, although from then on she’d always feel much younger than she was, as if the bone-chilling winter of upstate New York, with its unrelenting snow and its unfamiliar language, had halted her growth. Far off, the war, no doubt, would end. Albers told me about the snow, the phone lines, meeting my mother in Paris, the tear-gas canisters. She talked to me about architecture: we were driving to Buffalo while dreaming about houses that grew like living organisms. Even though I didn’t say it I was thinking about a place that might come into my life the way my imaginary friend did. To console me, Albers gave me science, art, the world – or, at least, its dominant language at the time, which was neutral and soothed me; and then a capacity not to be bound solely to here, to now, to oneself. Secret passageways in the depths, miles upon miles of submarine cables, forming the greater part of global communications – how could these immense distances, the crushing weight of the ocean, not be felt in some of our conversations? The cables could be damaged by earthquakes, by shark bites, we forget so easily what a mad adventure it is to communicate between one continent and another. They emerge on the coast or directly within secured buildings, all the humdrum backwash of our conversations, all these overlapping voices, and I think that above all Albers conjured these ideas to try to create or recreate relationships that didn’t seem to exist, or at least not any more. I shut my eyes and, through these oceanic depths, I followed the cables to what had been my parents’ living room, in what had been my home.

The rest of the time I looked for girls my age who would become my friends, my confidantes in this new country. But in this area along the Canadian border, that winter – perennially harsh and interminable – girls disappeared, teenagers sublimated. One night they had been asleep in bed; the next morning, they were gone. Sometimes there was an open window. Snow fell into pink-and-white bedrooms, soaking the carpets – that was the first thing their mothers noticed – this fatal yet beautiful blurring between inside and outside. It was as if the girls themselves had turned into snow. Snow covered everything. Curfews were instituted, with little effect on my life with Albers, while in Rochester, in Buffalo, in all of upstate New York, girls were disappearing – an epidemic of kidnappings – but more likely they were runaways. Rarely were their personal belongings missing. They left with nothing but their coats.

These were suburbs with borders lost in the snow, with streets that abruptly ended in a vast white expanse. No horizon, no depth; visibility stopped after thirty feet. Winter was a geographical region. The most ordinary landscapes sank into abstraction, entire towns ran the risk of being forgotten. The snow came up to their knees, then their thighs. Amelia wore legwarmers, fur boots; she’d never been so cold or friendless, but she’d never felt so safe as during those long, hazy months spent with Albers. The suburb’s other houses were shaken by a rumour that weakened their foundations and fissured their walls: talk that a man or several men were watching the girls sleeping. But Amelia was protected from that gossip by her loneliness and Albers’s common sense, even when she found herself thinking, My friend is here and he’s looking for me. In the schools, it was all anyone talked about, frantically, to the point of near-hysteria. The blonde girls down the street mentioned it, yes, a man, sometimes outside, sometimes inside – how he gets in, nobody knows – he’s there, he doesn’t do anything, he just watches you sleeping until, if we’re to believe it, you disappear.

She waited, and waited, but the few times someone did come, it turned out to be a dream.

They were found in the spring, all these girls who had fled. Often they turned up in Portland or Denver; those most afraid of the cold in California – teenagers now perfectly accustomed to perpetual sunshine, to living easy, to specific drugs. Others, however, hadn’t gone far, they’d walked at night in the snow to the end of their street then the edge of the suburb, and into this strange expanse where they had ended up falling down or falling asleep. They were found in the spring as well, small blonde creatures curled up in balls, as if an inner force had driven them there, as if there had been an imperative to forget themselves, to cast themselves out. The human race seemed so cruel in its demands, in insisting that an entire category erase itself: that year, several young American girls, perhaps too quiet but seemingly of sound mind and body, were forced out of themselves, out of this world by all this white. Everyone knew that these wintry lands could drive people mad, that nature abhors a vacuum and that this vacuum where vision became blindness was sometimes full of unspoken, dangerous ideas. Or maybe, Amelia thought, she had been the one to trigger this instinct to flee. Maybe, because she had finally stopped moving, some act of transference had made her the cause of their own flight. Or maybe they, too, were victims of some distant war in a land they might never have heard of. As vast as the world is, there’s still no escaping it.

4

Time passed. They loved each other. Paul wanted all of Amelia: her mind, her spirit, her body, its radiant warmth which he could feel inches away, and which, if he fixated on it, felt like immediate contact. Alone and together, apart and embracing became false binaries. She was always with him. He wanted to see what she saw, to know what she knew. At his insistence they went to museums, to those venues of a culture foreign to him and deeply familiar to her. As a guide, she was both wonderful and terrible; she knew the artworks on the walls like the back of her hand but she had no patience; she raced through the rooms without pausing to look, talking as she charged ahead. As they hurtled past so many masterpieces, Paul wondered what made them masterpieces – it wasn’t obvious, he wasn’t sure he saw or understood what gave them that particular quality – while Amelia was obsessed with talking about paintings that weren’t there, missing images. He wanted to understand, to learn how to look at Cézanne’s paintings, for example, and she talked to him about the Mont Sainte-Victoire done by an American who had decided to reproduce the master’s paintings freehand, in charcoal, from memory, in thirty seconds, with his eyes shut tight. An act of regression, of sorts, a return to blindness, a way of showing how art could be inscribed in one’s memory – always imperfectly, a child’s fumbling, a barbarian’s muddling. So that Paul, in front of this:

was supposed to see this:

She walked with him, rolling her eyes – she was unconvinced and made a show of it. Why are you wasting your time with these relics? You’re worth so much more than this, she told him, you’ve got a positively feral intelligence, you’re the only panther I know – and I’m lucky enough to have you in my bed, she whispered right into his mouth, biting his lips gently, I’d give everything in the world to be like you, I’d give it all to be you. Paul, on the other hand, knew that unlearning something was nothing like never having been aware of it in the first place. His own ignorance bewildered him. Deep down, he was experiencing his first love as keen suffering; he mourned everything he had never known about, everything he could not have known was missing from his life – a nostalgia that Amelia would never comprehend. She kept going, the two of them still wholly unaware at twenty years old that the derailments defining her life were not merely a series of ruptures but, in fact, her fate; or rather that these fracturings themselves traced an inexorable, straight line that would be her ruin, her downfall; they would drive her, much later, to meet the ground five storeys beneath her.

*

Paul never talked about where he came from. He wasn’t aware, at that time, that people could be defined just as much by what they left behind as what they strove for. But what could he have said, anyway? He didn’t have the words he needed. He came from a place defined just as much by its geographical location, its per capita income, its unemployment rate, as by its lack of a story. It did have its history, an accumulation of anecdotes such as the one about the sickly blue street lamps that kept junkies from finding their veins, or the one about how Paul’s father first arrived and was wise enough to change his name as soon as he could to make it more French, calling Paul Paul – but maybe he had been more naive than he thought. After all, there were other ways to find out about someone’s origins, as if they weren’t implied in the dense, slightly bluish-black curls of his hair, in his long, thick eyelashes, in his sharply arched eyebrows and the intense, pleasing orderliness of the expressions that resulted; not to mention all the rest that was beyond sight: blood, genes, patterns and figures on a screen. An entire history of which Paul was mostly ignorant, that had not been relayed to him – and so what could he have shared of it, especially with Amelia, a woman like Amelia, who had crossed oceans more often than she’d crossed the motorway ringing Paris? He came from a place that he both was and wasn’t surprised to hear regularly invoked as an example of an urban disaster; he wasn’t surprised because he knew deep down just how ugly, how dangerous, how dysfunctional it was; but he was surprised because, even so, it was his home, his ground zero – it just was. He was more ashamed of the way this place lingered within him than of the actual place, which already felt distant, far away, almost off the map; and yet its essence seemed to have defined Paul inside and out – his way of moving, his way of reacting to any threat, real or imaginary, he might sense. And it took Paul, who had grown up within a certain degree of risk and fear, some time to see that fear was now something his own body aroused. It was only when he gestured in frustration, at the cafeteria between classes, and noticed everyone’s reactions, that he saw it. He was astonished. Deeply ashamed of it, as if he had betrayed his new self. He had exposed himself and it was a breach of etiquette. And so, when the city that was no longer really his was plastered across every screen, he did not say anything. Numbly, he watched the news bulletin. A kid barely younger than him was dead. There had been a manhunt and he’d hidden in an electrical substation, because he was so scared of the police – it wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last – and he’d been electrocuted. In a single second, probably the moment he’d trespassed, the entire city had been plunged into darkness, a pause that was temporary for most people but not this boy or his family. Paul, sitting on the edge of the bed in room 313 as his mind was elsewhere, took in the images on the screen, Amelia behind him, her chin on his shoulder, her legs crossed around his waist, her arms wrapped around his torso – they didn’t talk, but something passed between them, something circulated, not the image on the screen, which bore no connection to it – something internal, murky, secret. Paul’s body retained some memory of the perimeter wall, of having scaled it, then of crouching down, holding his breath, feeling sheer terror at being betrayed by the inevitable breath of air escaping his lungs; and there was something else, maybe, not a memory but maybe a feeling that got harder and harder to shake; the speed of electricity running through a teenage body, the smell of flesh burning, jaws clenching to the point of teeth shattering, a nightmare that, Paul told himself, might well have been drawn from Nadia Dehr’s box – a nightmare that amounted to documentary poetry. Maybe Amelia was thinking the same thing as she stroked the tensed muscles that she still loved, or believed she did. Maybe it was then that her greatest fear took shape: since she hadn’t opened her mother’s box, everything seemed to be coming out of it; every horror, every injustice. It was the origin of the modern world – the world according to Amelia Dehr. She thought she had rid herself of that box, but instead it had engulfed all she knew.

She wanted to take part in the protests that ensued; that teenage boy shouldn’t have been hunted down like an animal. It drove him crazy that she – who claimed to know everything about the world – should suddenly be so naive; it awoke the worst in him. He told her not to go. He said out loud, I forbid you, furious that he should have to say it. She didn’t stoop so low as to break the silence; instead she looked at him with an unreadable smile – it wasn’t quite disdainful, but amused. Of course, she went, she was arrested, she came back with ugly bruises on her face that terrified Paul, who couldn’t stand the idea of anyone raising a hand against her, much less of her body being marked by what he had been determined to escape – the sickly blue public lights of those ugly, inhospitable nights. Now, those origins he had detested and fled were imprinted upon her face, the holiest thing in his world. He was sick with rage and (although he wouldn’t have admitted it) fear.

So they didn’t always see eye to eye. Of course they didn’t, despite it all – but only at moments. Paul only realised it later, in the stark hindsight that made a bleak landscape of the past. They kept to themselves at the hotel, or at Albers’s, as Amelia had left the university’s lecture halls for good. What was she doing while on her own? Nothing, clearly. Paul lived for the two of them. The light bulb in front of room 313 kept burning out, and he kept changing it. Once, he met her father, who had come to pick her up. The man was nothing like his own father: he had green eyes, a cashmere overcoat, he looked around the place worriedly and nearly didn’t shake the hand Paul proffered as he introduced himself. Another time he met Amelia’s old friends (or old acquaintances, rather, she said). They were all that remained of her disjointed childhood: between Swiss boarding school and upper-tier prep schools, between long American winters and tennis courts, swimming pools she could have floated across for months and played at drowning in. It was a life Paul couldn’t picture, having never seen anything like it, not in books, not even on screens, as that particular echelon of society prided itself on its discretion, its aloofness, and hardly needed to be seen to feel that it existed: the world was its oyster. Huge apartments, glass doors, polished wood floors, long hallways that twisted and turned, a certain way of carrying oneself: Paul was more curious than impressed; he seemed to be there incognito, disguised by wearing the right shirt and holding the right cigarettes; but someone outside the kitchens (because in these immense apartments everything was multiple, multiplied: the kitchens, the stairs, the doors, the windows) distinctly referred to him as the handyman, which resulted in amused laughter, and Paul felt attacked, he felt both seen and dismissed. Unmasked, he thought, and an icy panic came over him because for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what had given him away.

Towards the end (though he had no way of knowing it would be the end), Amelia insisted that they go stay at a particularly fancy hotel, nothing like the Elisse chain. The impish look on her face was one he’d seen once or twice before, and he loved it. The place had survived successive eras; its name alone commanded respect. After many delays, the decision had finally been made to revamp its legendary interior completely. And, just as the months-long closure was about to begin, some PR pro had had a genius idea: before the renovations crew arrived, a group of carefully hand-picked guests – young, rich, photogenic, overwhelmingly white – would be let loose on all the hotel’s floors, with endless magnums of champagne and full licence to blow off some steam, to unwind, to demolish the royal bedrooms and the presidential suites, knock down wall after wall, yank out draperies and tapestries, rip open mattresses upon which a number of them had actually been conceived. That would be the first time he saw Amelia’s fury, her rage – finally she was finishing what she started, following through on her lazy gestures that barely got nine-tenths of the way, because the final tenth, the missing tenth, was outright destruction. Amelia ripping out beaded crystal chandeliers. Amelia throwing bottles, empty and full, at the tall mirrors that seemed to contort at first, then actually caved in. The expanding rings of cracks reflected a fractured, multiplied image of Paul and Amelia. He had never seen her like that – nothing, not even sex, aroused such passion, such radiance. She was in her element there, seemingly at home; and for the first time he felt slightly afraid of her.

In the memory he would have of that evening and the demolition party, Paul was nothing more than an onlooker, watching this orgy of annihilation in a daze. But there were other memories apart from his own, and one in particular is collective, unmoored from any one single mind, in the form of a short, slightly shaky video. It shows young brutes, their eyes set blazing by drugs, alcohol, and their own unbridled strength, amongst them a tall, hulking, dark-haired, almost wolf-like man, and if he ever saw the clip Paul wouldn’t have recognised himself, not immediately, even though it’s him all right, kicking down a door and dragging a willowy redhead in before kissing her against a wall. He slips his hand under her skirt, pushes it up. It’s impossible to make out their faces which seem to be welded, fused together – if they pulled apart at that moment or someone pulled them apart, their features might well have been scrambled, jumbled together forever. She holds a hammer, her stiletto digging into the wall, and then the scions and socialites break into the penthouse and run amok. The guy isn’t just kissing her any more, and her leg is wrapped around his hip. He absentmindedly slides his hand up the wall, as if putting his weight on it – and instinctively, without even looking, yanks a sconce light out, a blunt gesture inherited from a long lineage of neck-breakers. And then there’s nothing in the room, nothing but shadows.

*

And then came the end. It was calm: Paul was studying for his finals, Amelia seemed to have given up all pretence of wanting to learn anything, and was watching (Paul thought) porn while eating crisps, staring straight ahead, her mind somewhere else, although Paul couldn’t really be sure where; he hardly had time to think about it. After finals, he told himself, I’ll talk to her. His ambition or his fear of failure, which amounted to the same thing, had shifted his mental focus back on himself for the moment. A few days during which the world wouldn’t be revolving around Amelia, who was perfectly capable (Paul thought) of accommodating this revolution.

He was back at his job, at the front desk, and sometimes everything blurred together; he looked at the monitor screen like a textbook and at the textbook like a monitor screen. But he was getting better. Albers had told him that she wasn’t worried about him, using those exact words, and he was flattered but also saddened, as if she were abandoning him – deep down, he wanted his beloved professor to care. His work at the Elisse hotel exhausted and desensitised him in a particular way. There were moments when he wasn’t sure whether he was asleep or awake, and everything became muddled: theory and practice, classroom abstractions and first-hand experiences, here, now, the present coming away, floating a little.

*

Architecture from another, bygone century, which was never meant to last. Despite the emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene, the very proliferation of hotels made their growth parasitic. And just as any single termite or flea has no more distinct an identity than any other termite or flea, so was any single Elisse hotel just as good as another. Species could have a history, but individuals – if it was even really possible to talk about individuality in this case – couldn’t. Apart from the encroaching, all-encompassing history of how they spread from one continent to another, of air conditioning or electronic locks – using white cards that Paul, with a casual swipe, keyed and rekeyed for each newcomer, and which opened the rooms and the elevators, for renewable yet always finite lengths of time. All the Elisse hotels were built on the same model; only the scale changed. The front desk always facing the elevators, always to the left upon entering, past the revolving door that a motion detector set spinning, the door’s glass panes sweeping across the floor with a soft, pneumatic sigh; identical marble floors, each one weathered an almost other-worldly greenish-black.

The number of rooms varied from location to location, of course; each one bore the Elisse trademark – a double bed topped by a sideways figure-of-eight, shrewdly alluding to the helices behind the hotel’s name; a sideways figure-of-eight, a small chain of minuscule stars akin to asterisks, as if each one corresponded to a footnote, a contractual stipulation in such fine print that no eye could even see it – no way to know what, exactly, one might be agreeing to here, and the motto We won’t sleep You’ll sleep better imprinted on every tenth door. In this way each location, no matter its size, was a cell within the Elisse Collection, a network growing as exponentially as a mathematical sequence or a viral outbreak. If Paul had perfected one skill, however, it was that of filtering out his immediate environment; and all this, he thought, ought to have practically no effect upon him.

In purely statistical terms, night drivers will fall asleep without realising it for several minutes per hour – a fact corroborated by the data for car accidents. What goes for these drivers ought to go for Paul in front of his screen. By definition, he has no way of knowing, in the moment, that he’s fallen asleep – one of the advantages of his job being that he’s hardly risking losing control of his vehicle. Unless the vehicle in question is his own head, which might grow heavy, might shift this way or that, might sag on his shoulders. And maybe that’s what’s happening, he thinks he’s awake but he isn’t, he thinks he’s awake but he’s dreaming and his dream is an exact replica of what he’s seeing, of what he’s paid to see and what has been broken up over the night, has crumbled apart without his noticing it to become another world; maybe that’s why Mariam is suddenly there and calling his name, touching him, tapping his shoulder, but as soon as he comes to, she’s a couple of feet away, her arms flat against her torso, as if to underscore that everything is as it should be again, Paul awake and Mariam not touching him. Nobody ever touches Paul, unless he falls asleep, and he always, at least the overwhelming majority of the time, sleeps with Amelia.

For a while, at the very beginning, it would have been quite possible, quite easy, for him to sleep with Mariam, but they didn’t work the same shifts: she did housekeeping very early in the morning, right when he was clocking out. He admired her long, toned arms, her striking skin, her face with its singular features – her cheekbones, her Cupid’s bow lips, the hollows of her eyes on either side of her nose – all gleaming, as if polished by an expert hand. They had had a moment, as people say (as Paul said); they had flirted a little, barely, but no one had done anything untoward, and so they could act as if nothing had happened. Ever since he’d taken up with Amelia, Mariam had looked at him every time they saw each other as if she were trying to hold back an uncontrollable laugh. But not today. Today she seemed concerned. Paul, there’s a problem in 313, she said. Mariam never called Amelia by her name, maybe she didn’t even know it, she said 313 the way everyone else did; but in her voice he could actually hear the capital Ts of Three-Thirteen, the only trace of irony she allowed herself, as she otherwise considered such derision beneath her.

What do you mean, a problem? Paul was visibly disoriented. Mariam usually looked him over as though holding back a contemptuous laugh, a wild laugh, which if released would never have stopped, but this time was different. She was wearing a white uniform that was stretched tight, as well as small white tennis shoes perfectly suited to her bounding footsteps. Paul wiped his face, met her gaze; Mariam was always wearing some crazy new get-up, and this time it was coloured contact lenses, lifeless green things that slid around her deep black pupils, shifting slightly with every blink of her eye, and the next time he saw her again, an hour or two later, she had thrown them away. It had to be four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning. What do you mean, a problem, Paul repeated. Mariam shrugged pointedly, and he got up.

Strange how something so banal, so common as a hotel room can suddenly become troubling. All it takes is for a door to be ajar in the middle of the night, for the light in the hallway to be slightly dimmer around it – Paul cursed the bulb that always went out in front of 313, plunging the doorway into shadow. All it takes is for the cracked-open door to reveal total darkness, perfect blackness; this slight variation, a oneinch strip of night – it doesn’t take anything more than that for Paul, hovering on the threshold of the room where, for weeks, for months, he’d fucked, showered, eaten, read – to be seized by a sort of anguish not unlike the sort Mariam was feeling, the two of them thinking of things they had never come across: bodies hanging in a closet, bathtubs full of blood, gruesome deaths, equal parts unreal and plain as day, in other rooms identical to these ones, in other Elisse locations. These second-hand memories flow from one place to another in the minds of those who clean hotel rooms, wipe down windows and change sheets, impersonal memories whirling through the vents, seeping into the carpet and its synthetic fibres, into the paintings on the walls, waiting to inhabit a body or two again. Paul and Mariam looked at each other and neither of them was entirely sure where this sinister premonition had come from, if not from the space itself.

What are you going to do, Mariam whispered, a sentence that left him standing alone in front of the ajar door to 313. No, she didn’t want to laugh any more, she actually seemed to feel sorry for him, the front-desk guy who was utterly compromised, who had gone to the dark side and now had to pay the price, was already paying it without his realising it. Mariam had seen him ransack a palace, kick down a door violently, she had seen him screw an heiress against a wall, pull out a crystal wall sconce, she had seen him act like he was one of them, like he was part of their world. He had gorged on this dream like a wild animal might on blood. From these shaky images she had deduced what he wanted to be and never would, and that made her laugh as only a woman scorned could. It now gave her pleasure to see him asleep, unshaven, without even realising he was asleep, in an uncomfortable chair, under fluorescent lights that accentuated the dark circles under his eyes and made him look even more tired. She saw the love he had for a rich girl, a mad love; she also saw that this rich girl, like all rich girls, believed that being loved was the natural state of things but was incapable of returning the sentiment, and she had other problems besides. Amelia was insane, and Mariam knew it. She laughed at Paul’s failure. At all his present and forthcoming failures. She laughed, but tonight was different, it was different as she stood at four or five in the morning in front of Paul whose heart was only a minute or two away from breaking.

Amelia? he called out softly. He pushed the door with his fingertips. It’s like a gruesome horror flick, Mariam thought, although one of the least gory parts. Paul was afraid, and it was because of the tension created by the fact that he already knew and at the same time still didn’t know.

Amelia? He reached out to turn on the light.

The room was empty. Completely empty. No clothes on the chairs, no piles on the desk, no books under the bed, nothing. Nothing at all. Paul stood helplessly in the place where he had experienced the most intense moments of his life so far. The place was stripped of the slightest trace of anyone’s presence, as if nobody had ever lived there, as if nobody had fallen onto the bed, had jumped under the shower or into the bathtub alongside him, had fogged over the sealed window with her breath while he’d held her from behind, while they’d had sex looking out on the city. Nothing. Or rather, worse than nothing. He finally found something – almost an outright subtraction. The bathroom waste bin was full of red. Long, silky hair – one year, two years, five years of red hair; a mass that slipped through his fingers like water, that seemed to be still alive, but likely no longer was.