When Julian lies down next to me, I am able to fall asleep, and the nightmares disappear for a while into the darkness. I do not dream at all, at least I do not remember anything, not even the soothing voice of my grandmother who often comes to me on nights when I am crying. I am not sure if Julian is asleep too, all I know is that he stays beside me long enough for me to forget everything.
At dawn, I see he is gone, leaving before it is even light, without any sound. I listen for him upstairs, for his footsteps or the voices of the televisions or running water. I imagine I can still feel a little of the warmth in my back from him lying next to me during the night. But from upstairs I hear nothing.
I didn’t sleep at all. I waited until Sola’s breathing had been steady for one hundred repetitions, and then in my smallest and quietest movements, I lifted myself away from her back and her bed and her room. On my way back upstairs I felt like a ghost, replaying the scenes of myself going down to her room in response to the call of her grieving. It had happened, and I believed it, but it didn’t seem true.
It is a long day for me: I have two houses, one after the other, and only half an hour of space to rest in the middle. And at the end of the day I am visiting my apartment for the plants and for seeing that the windows are not broken.
Some days I think this cleaning in the middle of other people’s lives makes me feel too tired or too small in the world, but then I watch my hands moving through soap and water, I feel the soft cloth of rags and see the way the surfaces of wood and glass and granite shine. I learn again about breathing, about touching and moving, making beauty in a space. I tell myself it is good when the work is only in my hands and not pulling too hard from the inside. I do not look for my own future, only the shape of each day that is right in front of me.
Paula is returning soon, and that means I go back to my sad apartment again, that place where I am pretending to live in time. In Paula’s apartment I get to feel what it is like living among rooms filled with color and light and beautiful objects to hold in my fingers; I begin spreading myself wider into this open space. But I remember this is not my life, only something borrowed for a little while.
Before I leave for my long day, I write a small note on a piece of paper and leave it folded next to Julian’s door, thanking him for holding back the shadows.
Sola’s note was folded into a triangle, and her handwriting reminded me of ivy, the way it trailed across the white page. I folded it back into its shape and kept it in my pocket.
For a while, I turned up the volume on just one of the sets. I saw a program about children who were saved from drowning and then died when they were given too much oxygen too quickly. The problem was that their brains had been in a kind of hibernation, and needed more time to be brought back to life. There was something too about cellular freezing and something about slowly thawing, charts and graphs that showed how temperatures rising too rapidly produced shock and death.
I thought about the experiments in the camp that measured how long the body could withstand immersion in freezing water, how many times a person could be resurrected. I remembered a voice at our dinner table, saying, “They called themselves doctors. But they were not even human beings.”
On a program about carcinogens, an environmentalist said that in public policy there was a “health risk assessment”: the rating to measure how many people per million will die of cancer from exposure to an air pollutant. “Ten is acceptable,” he said, “although the general factor out in the ‘open air’ is four hundred per million.” I wanted to know who got to decide any of this. I heard about the people who believed that power lines too close to where they lived were causing cancer. I heard about bacteria in tap water that were infecting tens of thousands, no one even knew how many deaths were likely. Someone was suing a Dieters Tea company for the death of his wife. Every time someone mentioned the phrase ethnic cleansing, I thought I might vomit. There was too much horror and it was all too familiar. We were all canaries in a coal mine, and there was not enough oxygen to go around.
I was auditioning in New York City when my father died, and Julian called in the middle of the night with a strange hoarse voice to tell me the news. “Massive heart attack,” he said, and it sounded like the word heartache to me at first.
When I thought of my mother, wishing she were still alive to comfort us, I realized that now Julian and I were alone in the world with one another. And how would my brother cope? Alive, my father had claimed him absolutely, filling his head with science-talk, making Julian a perpetual recording device. What would Julian do with all the silences now?
I made it home just in time for the funeral. My father’s casket was a plain pine box; inside, where we could no longer see him, he was wrapped in a shroud of muslin. Julian and I each poured three handfuls of dirt into the grave. I felt at times like I was watching everything happen on a stage; I only knew I had been crying when I happened to touch my own wet cheeks with my fingertips. My face felt numb, everything was dreamy and blurred. Somehow I was dimly aware of the melody of the Mourner’s Kaddish embedding itself in my memory. Julian stayed at the graveside until all the dirt had been shoveled back in and patted down into a small brown mound by the gravediggers.
It was a weirdly beautiful day, and a gentle breeze moved through the leaves of the trees surrounding the cemetery. Nobody spoke all the way back to the house, where some women from the synagogue were serving coffee and cake to the dozen or so mourners. I could still feel my father’s presence, even smell him a little, especially when I sat for a while in his library among his books and his piles of papers. I wondered if he would always be there, floating invisibly above all of our heads, whispering into Julian’s ear, listening to me sing.
That was the first time I imagined I could reach toward the dead with my voice. Maybe all this time my mother had been listening to me too.
squaring the circle : the problem of constructing a square exactly equal in area to a given circle; the exact area of a circle cannot be determined, except in terms of π, which cannot be expressed as an exact fraction or decimal; the problem, therefore, appears to be impossible of solution
I got up to stand at the living room window and caught a glimpse of my own face; beyond it, the playground was empty. Sola was cleaning a house somewhere, perhaps combing the fringes of an elaborate Oriental carpet with her smooth brown fingers. I went back to my wall of televisions and turned up their volumes one set at a time, hoping to see how it was done: laughing, driving a car, baking a cake, brushing teeth, feeding a child. Taking a woman in your arms and touching her cheek with your cheek, holding her there in your steady arms.
At the hospital there is one nun who is always nearby when I open my eyes in the early morning. Sometimes she is sitting in a chair against the wall beside my bed and saying her rosary, rocking a little as she prays. Sometimes she is walking up and down beside the row of hospital beds, her thick dark shoes on the wooden floor. She looks younger than I am, and when she talks with the other nuns, she speaks Spanish with an accent from somewhere else. She has a soft voice that matches her pale skin. They call her Sister Isabella. In the first days I am there, when I am still too shocked to do anything but stare up at the ceiling, she brings a small washbasin to my bed and gently takes my hands one at a time. With a small brush she scrubs beneath my fingernails, taking away the dirt that I am stealing from the earth. I do not tell Sister Isabella about the killing, I do not tell her or anyone about what I see and hear. I let her hold my fingertips in the warm water, and I think about the river.
After I am living in America for more than one year, I decide I want to write her a letter, or send her something to say thank you, but I do not know what to do at first. Then I think I can send some money to the hospital, something they can use for helping other people, children maybe, or they can use it to buy medicine or blankets or instruments for the doctors. I just need to give something. I find out there is a way to send a money order from the post office, and I mail it to Sister Isabella, with a note saying only that I send her blessings. I look at my fingernails when I write to her, I think about the dirt she is washing away. She never writes me back.
In the kitchen I drank a glass of water, washed the glass and replaced it in the cabinet. I counted Paula’s white plates and wondered how many of them I’d used for lunch. I put the bottom plate on the top of the pile, just in case I’d never seen that one. The kitchen gleamed; Sola was keeping everything as clean as if she were working there. I stood at the door of the bedroom but didn’t go inside, just looked at the pillows and Sola’s blue dress folded over the back of a chair. I wanted to touch it but I didn’t.
The rooms smelled faintly like lemons. I couldn’t hear myself walking on the carpets, I couldn’t hear myself breathing. Paula’s voice was caught somewhere in the corners of the high ceiling. I could almost hear her singing to me, to the ginkgo tree outside.
I finish cleaning the first house by noon, and for lunch I eat some black beans and rice on a bench beneath an oak tree. I often sit there, because it gives me a view of the bay and the flecks of white sails on the water, and this picture always brings me a sense of peace. I think about the day I am out there, on one of those boats with Warren; his friend takes us out on a windy clear day a few months after my arrival. The feeling of the sea spray against my skin and the wide stretch of blue water and blue sky lifts me out of myself for a few hours, and everyone smiles at each other all day. We drink white wine and eat cheese and olives and bread, but every so often I remember that this is not really my life, that I do not really belong in this picture.
“Are you happy today?” Warren asks me, and I tell him I am, because I know that is what he needs to hear. And it is true, for a few hours of being washed by the air and held against all of that blue. Warren is wearing a white shirt and gray shorts, and I am also wearing something white, so together I imagine that we look like people that belong together, on this boat on this perfect day. But inside I know better, and I can tell by the way his friends talk to me so carefully and kindly that they have no idea who I really am. The fact that I am new at their language is only a small piece of my strangeness to them and an even smaller piece of my strangeness to myself.
After my lunch, I go to my second house for cleaning that day. On the kitchen table Mrs. Bergman leaves me a pitcher of iced tea and a note asking me to please pay special attention to her daughter’s bedroom, as Stephanie is coming home for a visit the next day. Her handwriting is graceful and flowery, just like the house, which has pale silk-covered furniture and glass cabinets filled with crystal and silver objects that seem to hold light inside their curving shapes. Certain rooms of the house appear to me as if they are never entered except by me with my dust rags and my polish.
I do not know the daughter, Stephanie, but her photographs line one wall of the study; she is the mother of a new baby girl, and pictures of the mother and child are spread out across the desk, waiting to take their place on the wall. I cannot help glancing at the pictures, and feel the familiar stab in my heart when I see something in the baby’s eyes that reminds me of my own little girl, even though they look nothing alike. This baby is pink and blond, with a mouth shaped like a heart and very round cheeks. My Camucha has dark hair and dark eyes, which are always wide open, swallowing everything they see. Even though she is lost to me, I think that she holds the memorized world inside her bones, painting with her eyes the same way that I and my mother and grandmother do it. I never know for certain if she has this gift too, but I feel in my heart that she does. For the thousandth time, I tell myself that wherever she is, she remembers me, even now.
Upstairs I can hear Mr. Bergman coughing in his sickroom, a room I never enter. He has a nurse who lives in the house and takes care of him all day and all night, and that room is under her complete control. She does not like me, I can feel this from the way she never meets my eyes whenever we are in the same room. She has extremely short gray hair and large eyeglasses, which make her head seem too large for her body. I always ask how Mr. Bergman is doing, and she always makes her answers very short, as if it is not my business asking.
“He’s as well as can be expected” is the kind of thing the nurse often says, which never makes much sense to me. Other times she says, “He’s stable,” which I find out means that his condition isn’t getting better or worse. That is when I feel the most pity for Mrs. Bergman, because she is living with this situation of things not changing and not going away either.
This day, like so many other days, she comes home before I am finished cleaning, and once again her arms are filled with large shopping bags from stores whose names are elegantly printed on the sides. She pours herself a glass of iced tea and sits at the kitchen table as she sorts through the mail. On the surface, she looks perfect: every hair in its place and earrings just so and lipstick that is like she puts it on every few minutes. Yet I can tell from the way she turns her head so carefully that inside, she is almost falling into pieces.
On the other side of town, Julian is sitting with his eleven televisions, waiting for his sister. And maybe Paula is longing for her home too, feeling far from everyone who can speak her language. The world is so big, and people become so stretched apart from each other. Even living in the same house, I know, people can be strangers, people who do not know how to talk to each other. When I am living with Warren, there are days I have no words at all, nothing to help him understand me. He tries so hard to listen, but on the day he finds me with my arms covered with blood he knows not to ask and only brings me to the hospital. All night he stays with me and even most of the next day when they say they have to keep me and observe. Warren sees into me so deeply, and he covers my open cuts with his own hands, but in the end he is still only a doctor for the body.
perturbations : deviations in the motions of the planets from their true elliptical orbits, as a result of their gravitational attractions for each other
The Laundromat was six blocks away, four to the south and two to the west; there was one traffic light and one four-lane road to cross, and I had to pass a place called Burger Depot that never had more than one customer inside at a time. The signs on its windows were all handwritten, promoting things like extra creamy milkshakes and homemade French fries. Inside, above the counter, I had seen a huge sign listing at least two dozen varieties of burgers, each with a name of a movie star or a city. I had never eaten there, but once I went inside thinking I might buy a milkshake; a man with a black baseball cap was sitting at the counter and with both hands was feeding himself an enormous hamburger. The feeling of grease and smoke in the air combined with the smells of ketchup and what must have been recently fried bacon kept me from ordering a shake or anything else. Stick with Frank’s, I told myself. Stick with the kosher deli.
But this time my route was blocked by signs for MEN WORKING; there was a hole in the street and a sidewalk gaped open, huge pieces torn up. I had to go around, go across to the other sidewalk, no other choice. The picture in my head tilted, cracked apart. I thought I might even get lost; this was not the way I knew in my sleep, with my eyes closed.
My bag felt heavier, I couldn’t watch my feet to make sure they went straight. The noise didn’t help, a drill at the side of my skull, the earth vibrating up through my bones. I thought the man at the wheel of the machine must have been crazy, even with the canary-yellow ear protectors and heavy boots. Could a body be expected to take that kind of pounding? Even the street looked distressed, stones broken against their will. Someone was working inside the hole of the street, his hard hat at the level of a parked car’s tires. It confused me, a face down so low, his legs invisible underground. Like burying someone standing up. Like people in the camp who died standing up at roll call, like people in cattle cars who died standing up because there was no room to fall down.
A garage door opened by an unseen hand, the car approaching. The driver had pushed a button, activated the gears inside her house. I waited for her silver Buick to steer into its shadowy berth, a ship into calmer water. She nodded to me, a thank-you for letting her pass, and I waited for the engine to turn off before I continued walking. Red parking lights clicking to blank, the muffled mutter of a car radio. Behind me, the garage door hummed into action again, closing her Buick inside. We all could be safe from each other, doors could close without hands, like eyelids.
cycle : a series of events that is regularly repeated, e.g., a single orbit, rotation, vibration, oscillation, or wave; a cycle is a complete single set of changes, starting from one point and returning to the same point in the same way
There were two sets of four-unit orange molded-plastic seats along the window side of the Laundromat; since the seats were bolted together, when I sat down on one they all rocked in unison. I liked the soothing hum of machinery in motion and the smell of soap in the air, I liked that everyone there had a purpose: folding or sorting or waiting for the final spin cycle to stop. A pile of free newspapers provided me with reading material. Usually I studied the latest copy of the Flea Market, reviewing every ad while I waited.
But this time, I kept thinking about Sola, about the way her weeping had pulled me downstairs in the dark. My skin prickled at the thought of lying so close to her.
I needed to do something with my hands, so I stood at the long table down the center of the room for sorting and folding. I spread out my seven dark blue T-shirts, one gray cotton sweater (a gift from Paula), seven pairs of navy socks, seven pairs of blue jeans, 30 × 36.
I liked that people here seemed to pay little attention to one another; they calmly pushed their baskets on wheels and watched their wet clothes slap against the portholes of the machines. There was a dispenser for laundry soap, one for hot chocolate, and another for cold drinks. A pay phone by the front door rang three times, but nobody picked it up. There was a faint layer of gray lint on all of the surfaces, and between the machines years of buildup had been trapped. The periodic rush of traffic out on the street was punctuated by jangling coins and the occasional metallic spank of a button or zipper against the tumblers. Soak, rinse, spin. Everything had its own cycle.
“Somebody been lookin’ fo’ you,” a voice says from outside my apartment door. I am finally finished with my cleaning and am stopping here to look at the mail and check the windows. When I open the door, I see that the voice belongs to one of my neighbors, a small Asian woman whose back curves like a hill behind her shoulders.
“Excuse me?” I say, opening the door wider to invite her inside.
“Somebody come lookin’ aroun’ fo’ you,” she repeats, and shakes her head at my invitation. We do not know each other’s names. She lifts her hand in the air as high as she can reach. “Dis big, maybe bigga,” she says, waving upward. “A man wid sunglasses.”
“I am living somewhere else for a while,” I explain, even though she is not asking any questions.
“He was heah thwee, fo’ time last week,” she says, turning away and heading for the stairs. “Nobody talk to him, but I see out my window.”
“Thank you,” I say to her curved back as she begins to climb the concrete steps. I want to ask her name, but it is too late.
“Neva min’,” she says, waving her hand again. She is already up on the second floor, and I hear her voice echo in the stairwell. “No warry,” she says.
At first, I do not worry, like she says not to. I think it has to be Warren coming to see what is happening to me. We are not seeing each other for almost a year, ever since I tell him I need to try to have a life on my own, without his help anymore. He says he understands, and I am grateful even more than before for his knowing when it is the right time to leave me alone.
“Don’t go too far away,” he says. “Okay?”
I do not give him the address of the apartment I find for myself, because I want to make a space between us, at least for a while. Now, after what my neighbor says, I think he somehow finds me anyway. But the more I think about how this could happen, the more it seems to make no sense. My phone number is not listed and he does not know any of the people I work for. And so I start to think about who else it might be that is looking for me at my apartment.
I am legal: Warren has a lawyer who arranges for me to have political asylum. A month of interviews and many pages of documents prove I am in danger of being killed if I return to my country, so the American government agrees I have to be protected. The lawyer tells me that after one year I get a green card, and I can even apply for citizenship if I want, after living in the United States for another five years.
He winks at Warren and says, “Everything would be that much easier if you got married right away,” and laughs like he is making a big joke.
We do not laugh. Warren says many times he is in love with me. He is a good man, a wonderful person, and he deserves for someone to love him completely, but it is not me.
“Forgive me,” I say to him the night I get my legal papers. We are drinking champagne to celebrate my asylum, and I am trying to be happy. The bubbles catch in my throat.
“For what?” he asks me.
I want to say, “Forgive me for letting you save my life,” but instead I say, “For not marrying you.”
We are sitting on a couch near a vase full of different kinds of flowers. I concentrate on smelling them, to see if I can tell one from another. He places one hand on my cheek, so gently, and looks at me for a long time, like he wants to stop the time and keep everything frozen. “I’m not sorry I love you,” he says.
I close my eyes because I cannot look at him. Tears begin to spill out of me. I am crying onto his hands, and that is all I can give.
I thought about my father’s suits, how they made no sense in my life. I kept my jeans in rotation, date of purchase inscribed with indelible ink on the inside of the left front pocket. One pair for each day of the week, and khakis to wear to the Laundromat. Every year on my birthday, I bought a new pair, and the oldest pair was retired, delivered to the Salvation Army. For the first three months, the newest pair got washed with all the others before ever being worn, to break down its edges, make it approachable.
I liked wearing the newest pair of jeans on Monday, stiffest at the start of the week, retreating into softer paler indigo as the weekend approached. Like dye fading out of the days, my limbs loosest on Sunday. Like aging toward gray hair in the whitening patches of denim on my knees and backside. I would fade like that too, lose my color and my sturdiness in time. It was okay with me.
I washed my hair every morning in the shower, shaved with a handheld razor. I flossed my teeth twice a day, kept my nails short and clean. When I needed parts for the televisions, I used mail order and UPS. I kept things alive by taking good care of them. I wanted to die with my original teeth, that didn’t seem unreasonable.
Behind me, someone banged a machine to shake loose a stubborn packet of detergent; I heard coins in his pocket as he bent down to collect his prize. Everything felt lighter now: my own detergent nestled into the pack on my back, my embraceable bag of clean laundry. I headed for the corner of the street, where the light had just turned to green, and I walked all six blocks without waiting for anything.
As I drive back to Paula’s apartment, I try to think about who is at my apartment in sunglasses if it is not Warren. Maybe he knows someone who is an expert in finding lost people, and does not trust that I can tell him in the end where I am and what is happening to me.
But what if it is not him or anyone who knows him? When they do all the interviews for my asylum papers, they ask me so many times if anyone from my village is still alive besides me. I have to say over and over that I am the only one, that every person is murdered but me, that I have to listen to all of them being killed by the soldiers. The murderers keep screaming that my village is protecting the rebels, that we are helping them fight against the government.
“I am the only one,” I tell them. “The one who has to listen to the killing. So I can tell it to you.”
They want to know if I am ever in contact with the rebels. As if maybe I am telling this story to help them, even now! It is so crazy I almost start laughing.
“I am not political,” I explain. “I only hear rumors about groups of men and women who live in mountain caves and fight against the soldiers. They do not come near my village, at least I never know about it, we are all too frightened to get involved.” And still the end is the same: everyone dead.
“Did anyone know you survived?” they ask me.
“No one,” I say. “I am all alone.”
But now that question begins to echo in my head. I do not feel so certain. I am staying in the forest for maybe a day or two after the killing. I am in shock, they tell me, the ones who take care of me in the hospital.
“But who were the ones who found you in the forest, who brought you to the hospital?”
I cannot remember. I tell them I think they are farmers, people who live outside of the village. “How many?” they ask me.
“I am in shock,” I say, repeating what they tell me in the hospital, trying to make them understand. “I do not know them. I do not know who I am even.”
Now I begin to doubt everything. The nuns and hospital nurses and even Warren never tell me who brings me there, they never care to know. I am almost dead myself, they tell me, covered with dirt and leaves and my eyes like a wild animal.
“We thought you were a madwoman at first,” Warren says. “Someone crazy from living in the forest by herself.”
Who is looking for me? Who knows where I live?
Madame le Fleur always said “Don’t look back.” She said it every time I left her house, threatening me with those words. For a long time I used to think she meant for me not to turn around to look at her as I was leaving, but eventually I learned it was much more than that. She wanted me to keep my gaze on the future and not to be afraid of having left my family behind, leaving Julian especially. “You can’t hold his hand,” she would say, and it was true, he wouldn’t let me touch him. But also I had to live my own life, save the only life I could save.
I think when I sang as a child I was practicing leaving, practicing my flight into my own life. It took so much separateness to be able to sing. In that basement I imagined I was on a stage in a field of light and I didn’t care if people were watching me or if there was no one. Just the image of a dark cave and one circle of light for me to stand in, my voice rising and filling the air.
I thought I had to forget about all of them so I could sing.
The heat under my skin slowly faded when I realized with relief that it was time to collect the mail by the front door. For Paula: three promotions for credit cards, along with Opera News and Time and a bank statement. Among my own pile, I found a letter from Paula addressed to Sola Luz Ordonio, in care of me. She had written my name in solid black letters, extra large, to get my attention. There was no postcard for me that day, but I remembered what she’d written the last time about needing to ask Sola to stay longer in the apartment. For a wild moment I thought about hiding the letter, not showing it to Sola. If she never read it, she would leave at the end of the month. I would cure myself of this terrible desire and return to my ordered world.
I held the letter in my hand, studying the stamp. There was a portrait of flowers, blurry shapes of yellow and red and purple, and some kind of ancient-looking church in the distance. Except for my name, the rest of the address was full of Paula’s flourishes and stretched-out loops. Sola Luz Ordonio. In care of Julian Perel. I returned to my living room and sat down to think things over. My wall flickered back to life, and a room full of people began to laugh.
“I’m not that kind of person,” a woman was explaining to the audience. She looked like an enormous bag of flour, packed too tightly into a blue and white dress, a white bow at her throat. There were eleven of her on my wall, and in each one she waved a hand to tell the people to stop and listen.
“It’s not like I’m a paranoid,” she said. “I’m not like that.”
The camera turned to the host for her reaction. “Oh, but I think you are,” she said. There was a joyous burst of applause and laughter. The host held her microphone even closer to her mouth, and whispered into it. “I really think you are,” she said.
A series of commercials paraded by, multiplied eleven times. A woman with a hairstyle from my childhood was tormented by two ghostly versions of herself, until she was finally saved by a box of diet capsules. An avuncular voice spoke lovingly and confessionally about a recipe for baked beans: “Our secret is in the brown sugar.” A zoo of dancing blue geese and red teddy bears was held hostage by a seemingly innocent roll of paper towels. In a vast expanse of turquoise water, a dazzling white cruise ship floated serenely. The message WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? sailed across eleven screens, hovering even after the ship had vanished.
The letter in my lap weighed nothing; inside was probably some filmy airmail paper, the kind that you could see through if you held it up to the light. Why did she write open postcards to me and a sealed letter to Sola? Was there something she didn’t want me to see?
The situation was ambiguous. Wasn’t the letter addressed to me too, as the caretaker? Wasn’t it my responsibility to read the contents and then pass them along to Sola? I studied the stamp again, in search of clues. Three flowers and a church. Splatters of red, yellow, and purple. The canceled stamp said Budapest, although some of the letters were smudged. I tried to imagine Paula mailing it, maybe handing it to some concierge who spoke no English, smiling the way she did so easily. “A float down the Danube,” that was what she wrote to me before. And now she was in Hungary, singing. In the land of my father’s secrets.
I was auditioning in my sleep, Isaac reprimanding me over and over about the smallness of my voice, the way it would never be able to reach the back rows of the concert hall, his baton raised as if to strike me. I could not hear the music from the orchestra, kept missing my cues, my first note arriving too late. The faces of the judges frowning in disappointment, my heart falling to the stage floor and shattering at my feet.
It was because of Isaac that I went to look for a place in Europe, as if my own country was declared off-limits, he had sealed all the entrances behind my back. He had come from there but wouldn’t go back, choosing the refuge of America for the rest of his life. I needed to see if there was more room for me in the smaller halls, if my voice could fill a different space farther from my home. Between the agent and Madame, I chose my targets, made plans to reach into distant landscapes. When anyone said “in bocca al lupo,” I thought of my wolf-mother Madame, and the way she would have carried me in her mouth if I’d been her infant, the way she shaped my mouth with her fingers when I was learning how to open the sound, training my spine to straightness. I was looking for a place where my voice could live and grow, like the plants inside Julian’s head. To make music out of nothing, out of air.
semipermeable membrane : a membrane allowing the passage of some substances and not of others
The voice belonged to Sola. “Julian? Is that you?”
“Of course.” My heartbeat stayed fast, a drumbeat.
“Oh, good,” she sighed into the phone. “I need to ask you to do something.”
I heard traffic in the background, maybe a truck turning a corner. I took deep breaths. “Where are you?”
“A gas station. But listen, I need you to look out the front window and see if there is a car on the street.”
I waited, listening to the faint echo of another conversation trapped in the phone line with ours. “There are always cars on the street,” I said.
“But a car parked in front. With someone inside.”
Her voice sounded strange, too tight in her throat.
“Julian?”
“Yes.”
“Are you looking?”
“Is someone waiting here for you, is that it?”
“Please look,” she said. “Please.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, putting down the phone. I went to stand at the window for a few seconds, long enough to see that the only cars were moving past the building, no one parking at all. The playground had three children and two mothers, two strollers, no cars.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You are sure?”
“Okay. Thank you,” she sighed again.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. I think so. I can call you later.”
She hung up without saying good-bye, and I held the phone for another few seconds, listening to the dead connection.
After I call Julian, I call Warren to see if he knows what is happening, but all I hear is his machine. “I’ll be out of town the rest of the week, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If this is an emergency, please try my pager at 415 861 2328.” I do not say anything. I am not an emergency. His gentle voice calms me for a moment, until I remember it is just a ghost, and he is far away.
I remember how Warren makes me drink warm milk at night when I cannot sleep; he says it is what his mother always does for him as a child, and he drinks it with me for company. My own mother rubs my feet with oil, smoothing and pressing my skin with her strong hands. The warmth spreads through my whole body and makes me so sleepy I do not dream of anything.
One of those nights when sleep is not coming to me, as we sit at the kitchen table and hold the warm cups of milk, Warren says, “I keep thinking about having children with you.”
I do not tell him again about my daughter, about everything that happens to me. He knows as much as he needs to know. It is still impossible for me to imagine starting over, creating a child with anyone. Especially in this strange world where everything is so fast and loud and electric.
“These kitchen lights are too bright for me, in the middle of the night,” I say. “Can we talk in the bedroom?”
Warren is wearing a pale green T-shirt that makes his eyes look like pools of water. “We don’t have to decide anything now,” he says. “I just want you to know I think about it, about our children. Teaching them Spanish. Taking them to see the ocean. Wanting them to look like you.”
We go into the bedroom, get beneath the covers and hold hands. He lets me be in my silence. The bed is wide and white and full of pillows; over our heads there is a window to the sky. At night I can see stars, and in the morning sometimes there are birds passing very high up. I can tell what time it is by the color of the sky.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” he says, whispering. I think he is afraid of me telling him I do not want any more children, afraid of what he knows is already true. I keep waiting to see if my heart can change, if I can find an opening in myself for loving him, but the opening is hidden from me, like the entrance to a cave that is a secret.
Now, I sit in my car and keep looking in my mirror to see behind myself. It feels like someone is watching all the time, even though there is no one there. I call Warren again, to see if I can tell him something. “I am all right and you should not worry about me,” I say. “I am going to call you again soon.” The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up, listening.
virtual state : (in classical physics) a force between bodies not in contact, e.g., electrostatic repulsion, is represented by a field
Paula’s letter was tucked under the cushion of my chair, still unopened. I was deciding to keep it hidden, and let Sola leave without reading it. Why did Paula need her to stay? I could take care of myself, I could keep an eye on Paula’s place too, there was no reason for so much caretaking. Water plants? I could do that. I was already in charge of the mail, and what was so difficult about lunch? I could make more trips to the deli, even build the sandwiches myself. Thinking about it made it all seem possible, even though the more I tried to picture myself completely self-reliant and truly alone, the more the details eluded me.
The problem was that I had begun to taste new things; the gazpacho and its mosaic of flavors, the mango’s juice and texture, even the tart surprise of lemons in water. My tongue and skin and all of these messages were waking up too much. The unreceived letter was a door I could close on everything.
causality : the relating of causes to the effects that they produce; many contemporary physicists believe that no coherent causal description can be given of events that occur on the subatomic scale
Dear Sola:
I’m hoping that everything has worked out well so far and that you’re enjoying the apartment. I have another favor to ask—that is, an extension of the favor you’re already doing for me. Could you possibly stay another two weeks? I have a brilliant opportunity I can’t bear to pass up, and it means staying away longer.
If you aren’t able to do it, I’ll understand, but I’m hopeful you won’t mind staying. I just don’t want Julian to have to be alone there.
You’ll find Herman Roth’s phone number in my address book by the bed; just let him know whether or not you can stay, and he’ll get in touch with me. Thanks in advance for helping me out so much—and I’m instructing Herman to send you another check for the additional time.
Forget the wolf, I had said to her, the way she wanted me to. I knew how to be alone, that was the one thing I knew how to do. Didn’t she understand?
I want to go home and take a shower, but I do not know what place is home for me. Paula’s apartment is where I have some of my things, and the rest are at my own apartment. I keep hearing my neighbor’s voice saying “Somebody lookin’ fo’ you,” and I think about where I can hide, up in the park maybe, among the trees and deep into the dark, all I need is water and I can stay there for days, until they stop looking and it is safe again. Without really thinking, I start driving into the hills too fast, toward the forest, barely stopping at the signs, feeling my wild heart in my chest.
When I get to the edge of the woods, I park the car in a cloud of dust and look for anything in the trunk that can help me: a blanket, a water bottle, a warm sweater. My arms gather things while my mind is already flying into the trees. That way, I think, as far as I can go. When I hear noises behind me, I turn without breathing to see a group of children, maybe twenty, all wearing hats and bright colors and carrying little packs on their backs. They are going for a hike.
For a few seconds, maybe longer, I watch the children laughing and drinking water from a low fountain and tying their shoelaces. When the teacher tells them to line up in twos and hold hands with their buddies, I think that is what brings me back. I am here, in a town with no soldiers, no one is trying to kill me, there are no guns pointing at my head, no one screaming or bleeding or being cut open. Here in these woods people walk with their dogs and have picnics and pick berries; no one comes here to hide from murderers. I start breathing again. My arms are full of things; I put them back into the trunk and feel my heart become more quiet. Slowly, I climb into my car and drive back down the hill to the place where Julian lives, the place with the golden tree.
“It is me,” she said, shouting.
I turned the sound down again and went to the door.
“Okay,” I said. My hand was on the knob but I hesitated, staying inside.
“I just want to say I am sorry for calling before,” she said from the other side of the door. “I do not want to bother you now too. Just to say I am sorry.”
“Okay,” I said again. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, and my hand turned the knob.
“Are you all right?” I heard myself ask. The door was open enough for my head and shoulders to lean through, toward the stairs.
Sola turned around from halfway down the steps and gave me half a smile. “I am all right.”
“What are you doing now?” I asked, leaning farther through the doorway.
“Now?” she shrugged her shoulders. “I am taking a shower. My skin smells like too many chemicals from work. Then I am eating a little something.”
“Oh.”
“What are you doing now?”
Waiting for you, I didn’t say. “Just thinking,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
“Were you scared about something before?” I asked her. The door was wide open now.
She looked away and shook her head. Her dark T-shirt was covered with splashes of white, like snow or stars. Bleach, I realized, had stolen the color. “It is nothing. I am just nervous a little bit.”
“Who was it?” I asked, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“I do not know,” she said, and then went down the rest of the stairs. I saw the top of her head vanish. “Maybe later,” she added from Paula’s door. I couldn’t see her there, I could just hear her voice.