My mother’s name sent a tremor through me. So she and Siobhán had known each other in London, where she’d studied sculpture at the Slade before following my father to the United States. I felt ashamed. It was clear from Siobhán’s face that something terrible had happened, and I could think only of myself, of my mother and how much I still needed to learn about her.
It occurred to me to ask why Siobhán had given up her daughter in the first place, but I refrained out of politeness.
Siobhán swallowed hard, then smiled—it was an expression I knew better than my own, tying up pain with terrible lightness. It sucked out my breath, ran gravity through my limbs. Siobhán’s own expression returned, but I still wanted to fling my arms around her, a stranger. In the coldness of her face, I wanted to find that smile again. It was my mother’s.
—I wish I could help, I said.
My reply was genuine, though I meant it abstractly, the way most people mean I’m sorry, which is what I should have said. But Siobhán stared at me strangely, narrowing her eyes as if to take in my whole body.
A WEEK LATER, I STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK in front of the Ormeau Gallery. Having arrived a little early, I peered through the glass front into the space. Siobhán was inside, with her back to me, her phone pressed to her ear. Her movements were bird-like, polished and abrupt. Not at all like my mother. Seeing her end the call, I tried the door. Locked. She turned and crossed the space to let me in.
Inside, daylight intensified. City noise faded.
The gallery was empty except for a few covered sculptures and a spiral staircase, its iron railing too intricate in the bare space.
—We’re between shows, Siobhán said. New work goes up the day after tomorrow. But you have a sense of the place. There are two levels.
She gestured to a loft at the top of the spiral stairs, which extended halfway across the gallery, leaving a cathedral ceiling over the rest of the space. That was the tour. Then she invited me to lunch at a nearby café. We had omelettes.
—What interests you about Marker? she asked, after telling me she didn’t like to mix egg with cheese, preferring plain omelettes to the version I had ordered.
—He makes what’s ordinary mean something.
I was thinking of the fictional cameraman in Sans Soleil, “tracking banality with the restlessness of a bounty hunter.” Instead, I said:
—He takes his cue from Sei Shōnagon’s list of “things that quicken the heart.” He said it wasn’t a bad criterion for making films.
—Filming things that quicken the heart?
—He isn’t afraid of emotion.
Siobhán nodded, cutting a neat wedge from her omelette. If I was her daughter’s age, she was also about the age my mother would have been, and something about her bodily presence threatened to fill a need I’d thought permanent. The intensity of my reaction embarrassed me, so I hid it behind a mask of competence, describing Marker’s idea that memory travels from person to person, his theory that montage produces meaning, and his debt to the Soviet montage theorists: Kuleshov, Vertov, and Eisenstein, who said that narrative always proceeds with an eye toward rhythm.
Siobhán looked intrigued. Perhaps it was this brief show of passionate professionalism that decided for her. I can’t imagine why else she’d think me competent for such a task. I’m told I speak well, that I’m articulate. It leads people to believe I’m cleverer than I am.
I returned to the gallery the following day at Siobhán’s request and was shown the journals.
Heels clicking over the hardwood floor, she led me through to the gallery’s narrow back room. Walls extended to a skylight, which revealed clouds and the edges of buildings. She knelt beside a low bookshelf and gestured to a set of notebooks, ragged and multicolored, their broken spines pressed between elegant art books.
She picked one out—blue cover—and turned it over in her hands.
—It was too much to go into the other day, she said. Ella is missing. It has been six years. She was twenty-three when she disappeared.
My breath caught. My imagination ran wild: cults, sex trafficking, drugs.
—I was the first to know, Siobhán said. A package arrived for me from the south of Thailand a month after its postmark. There was a letter and Ella’s green journal, her most recent. She must have hated me, or the idea of me, to send that. Monstrous.
Siobhán laughed bitterly, then composed herself.
—It worried me. I called her adoptive parents. We hadn’t spoken in twenty years. Ella had asked them for space, and they were trying to respect this, but they’d had no news and were frantic. We flew to Thailand. Police. Detectives. We went first to the south, then to the north—she was teaching English near Chiang Rai. The university where she worked told us nothing. Only that she’d gone to the south because she needed rest.
Siobhán stood and began pacing the narrow space.
—In Chiang Rai, we found her things. Ella’s adoptive mother kept her clothes, in case she returns. After reading the first pages, she wanted nothing to do with the journals. The detective dismissed them. Girlish and irrelevant, he said. So they’re here, all six books. When a year went by and we hadn’t found her, I sold my firm. I built this, Siobhán said, indicating the gallery.
I stared at the blue book in Siobhán’s hands. Its physicality made Ella more real.
—You’ve read them? I asked, turning my gaze to the others, in a row on the shelf.
—It doesn’t help. I don’t understand them the way I would like to.
Siobhán opened the blue journal and handed it to me.
I made a show of turning pages, squinting at lines of script: jasmine, gray eyes, lights in the river. I couldn’t focus on sentences. But the language was clear, logical.
—Once, Siobhán said, I hired someone to translate them into French. I thought—I still think—there must be something in them, a clue. I thought I might access them better in another voice.
I felt my muscles stiffen.
—And did you?
—It was too much the same, just in French, Siobhán said, shaking her head. It was clear from the sample. I canceled the contract.
Siobhán was looking at me expectantly. She wanted me to offer—she wanted something. Wary of her intensity, I said that my flight back to the States was in three days. It was true.
Siobhán took a slip of paper from the top of a filing cabinet and handed it to me. It was more like a poem than a contract, words islanded by white space, winnowed to essentials.
Accommodation: private studio flat, eighteenth arrondissement.
Airfare: paid by reimbursement
Living Expenses: paid by stipend, six hundred euros/month
Project: length negotiable, unified story
Duration: one year
I looked up, unable to hide my shock. Siobhán gazed back at me, composed.
—I have a studio I’m not renting. Seventh floor, no elevator. The stipend is not a lot, but it would enable you to begin your dissertation research right away. You wouldn’t have to teach and save. In exchange, you would work on the journals.
I pointed to the line that said “project.”
Siobhán nodded, as if expecting this.
—You would rewrite the journals as an account of what happened.
—A report? I asked.
—A narrative. A story.
Siobhán’s face was impassive. I asked myself why she would want this. I could understand her asking me to analyze the journals; I was good at analysis. But a story? And why me, whom Siobhán hardly knew? Emotionally, something clicked into place. I felt satisfied.
—Is Ella alive? I asked.
Siobhán’s gaze settled on me. Fine lines seemed to deepen and extend around her eyes.
—Ella is an American citizen, she said. According to American law, a missing person is declared dead after seven years. By law, she’s alive until January.
Siobhán sat down at the table, her forearms resting on the contract.
/> I could feel the breath in my lungs. From their shelves, the journals seemed to peer out, as if to impress upon me how long they’d waited, asking patiently, urgently, for something Siobhán could neither ignore nor understand.
—I’ve never been to Thailand, I said. I know nothing—
—We won’t find her by going to Thailand, Siobhán said wearily. We tried that.
She put her fingers to her lips, as if deciding whether to go on.
—You know, she said finally, I used to think one day you and Ella would meet. You were born only months apart. You might have been great friends, like your mothers. When I saw you yesterday, I thought you were a ghost. You look just like Ida.
—People say that.
She rose from the table, composed and certain. Watching her move was like watching an infinitely protean form, her scarf, her belt, her jewelry keeping her in flux.
—Don’t answer now, she said. Take some time. Think about it while you’re in the States.
PHILADELPHIA WAS A RELIEF. There was the familiarity of my apartment with all my things, closer contact with Z by phone, beers with friends from graduate school, and the light humidity of early summer on the East Coast. No more sullen sky and heaviness of gray buildings, just cheery bright brick and right-size coffees. I could imagine I’d never met Siobhán, never seen the gallery, knew nothing about Ella or her journals. And Siobhán’s proposal had exposed Paris as an ideal. Now that living there was possible, it became less desirable, less necessary. At this early stage, much of what I needed could be found through the university library. What would I do now with rare footage, letters, notebooks, and typescripts?
I even thought of other places I might go. In Berlin, for instance, I could research Weimar cinema or UFA in the era of silent film. But it wasn’t the origins of cinema that interested me; in Paris, I cared little for the Lumière brothers. We never fully know the reasons for our obsessions; such knowledge would cure or quell them. I worked in a fever dream the months after my field exams, rewatching films, teaching myself the language and political history of France, Cuba, and Vietnam, sifting through Marker’s many pseudonyms, until this man, lover of cats and owls, began to define me: a scholar of Marker in training.
Around this time, a professor recommended an essay of mine for a prize. I was flattered at first, but actually winning provoked a bizarre sort of crisis. I found myself telling the second-place essayist seated next to me at the prize dinner that Marker was a distant relation of mine, the great-uncle of a third cousin, as if to explain why I could write about him with any authority. When, later, she mentioned she’d grown up in Moscow, I told everyone at the table I’d valiantly tried to learn Russian for years but found it too difficult. (It felt true. I was sure this would happen were I to try. Russian has seven cases.) I thought a lot about the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin in those days, the bewildered and desperate miller’s daughter. But, unlike her, I was unable to guess the dwarf’s name, break the spell, and claim any power as my own.
When I first arrived in Paris, I took notes diligently on the books I’d brought, but couldn’t keep to any schedule. I would write something one day, only to delete it the next because it was no longer true. I would walk back and forth along the canal, unable to decide where to go: to the cinémathèque, to a library, to a café. In one of these places (only one), a change would come, and ideas would flow. But if I chose the wrong place, I’d remain who I was, and the possibility of a release from myself—a plunge into something other—would be forever foreclosed.
So, holding all options open, I’d walk between the parc de la Villette and the place where the canal flows underground to reach the Seine, following my reflection in the windows of restaurants, surprised at the length of my arms and speed of my legs. Nights I spent in a rented room on the rue Bichat with the same film on my laptop: the narrator on the runway, seeing himself from the future, watching himself dying. I played it again and again, hoping its images would wake in me what I must have felt once.
Ella might have gone to Thailand for the usual reasons: to teach English, to see the world. Or she went east because it’s where all lost travelers go. I read once that orientation literally means east-facing. Those who go west (the pioneers) already know what they want—no need to go searching for the heart of things.
My spell of contentment in Philadelphia lasted a week; then I was restless again. The soft humidity turned to poisonous vapor, and I felt stuck in my old ruts and routes. I called Siobhán to test (so I told myself) whether the proposition was real. The first stipend arrived in my bank account three days later with instructions to forward airline receipts. Things were in motion. After that, it was easy to tie up affairs; a medical student agreed to sublet my apartment, my teaching jobs went to other graduate students in need of funding, and my professors approved further research abroad. To avoid fees, I withdrew temporarily from my doctoral program.
Z used his vacation days as soon as he could and drove down from Boston. He moved there in January for a job that will devour him, and he wants me to move with him. I haven’t forgiven him for leaving Philadelphia, which he knows. Still, we’ve been together nine years and have known each other ten. We don’t lie to each other. So I surprised myself by telling him that research was going so well that I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to spend a full year in Paris. Even if I didn’t go, I reasoned, we wouldn’t be in the same city. Z dodged my provocation with a sigh, reaching for my waist to pull me close and beginning to unfasten the buttons of my shirt. Z, even more than most people, likes things to make sense. And what I still can’t explain—especially not to Z, whose mind is so elegantly logical—is the way Ella’s story splashes color across a landscape of dull forms, the colors of life I can’t remember.
Z sensed the truth, of course, and asked what was really drawing me back to France. He waited until the next morning, then wrote his concerns on a paper napkin at the breakfast table:
a). How is copying diary entries supposed to locate a missing person?
b). Why are you looking in Paris and not in Thailand?
c). Are you avoiding the Ph.D.? You can still change your mind and reregister for fall.
Z began a financial consulting job this year—(1) to raise the material means for his philosophy Ph.D. and (2) because he thought it necessary to flirt with the mundane before conscripting himself to the esoteric. Those are his words, but if he were telling you this, he would letter his points rather than number them. Letters remind him of logic proofs. It might be for similar reasons that he prefers letters to full names. He’s been Z and not Zachariah for as long as I’ve known him and gives the same silly grin whenever he’s asked.
Z never told me not to go—he is too kind, too shrewd for that—but, mixing his yogurt very vigorously, he pressed me about it over breakfast. He wanted to understand.
—Why? One good reason.
His voice cracked.
—The dissertation is going nowhere, I said.
—It will only go nowhere if you don’t work on it. You might work better here, where you have all your books.
Z pressed his lips together and looked up, waiting for me to agree.
—Reasons don’t exist, I said.
—They do! You’re just not good at using them.
—We make up reasons after the act. To understand what we’ve done. Reasons are just impulses woven into narrative.
For the first time with Z, I thought I’d had the last word. But after several seconds, he said:
—You can do almost anything well, but you stop just before the finish line. It’s as if you’re afraid of finding out what you really can do and what you can’t.
He was looking at me seriously.
—I’m not stopping the dissertation, I said. It’s possible I’ll finish faster this way.
My words sounded hollow.
—Just think it through. What is your connection to this woman? Asking you to write a story to find a missing person is worse than ill
ogical. And why you? She hasn’t seen your writing. Why not hire a professional? Money doesn’t seem to be a concern for her.
—Siobhán was a close friend of my mother’s, I said, pausing to make sure Z absorbed this. They lost touch. And I’m American, like her daughter—a similar age. I’m in a position to understand the journals. …
I stopped because Z was shaking his head.
—What’s in it for you? he asked. What do you get out of this?
The directness of his look told me not to bother mentioning stipends or research.
—There’s a chance I’ll come closer to knowing her, I said.
—Your mother.
I nodded, hating the sadness, the pity in his look.
—What could she possibly tell you that would help?
—It’s intuitive, I said. Not everything is calculated. Getting to know Siobhán might help me understand. Then maybe I can move on. Nothing matters now as much as it should.
I looked down, embarrassed by the bitterness in my voice.
Z sighed, running a hand through his hair. He didn’t want me to go.
—Intuition cheats, he said, leaving me to fill in the rest.
It was an old joke between us: Intuition cheats by discrediting argument.
—Please be careful, he said, pulling me to him, resting his chin on the crown of my head.
All that remained was to tell my father, who, like Z, made a case for my finishing my degree on “terra firma,” as he put it. I reminded him that he, too, had done his doctorate abroad and look what happened. He laughed and relented—not that I needed his permission. But the concern didn’t leave his face.
Ella went missing six years ago. Her case can’t be solved, only resolved: sutured with a sturdy narrative. For years I’ve felt disconnected from the places my body occupies. The difference now is purpose—one to string itself through my days, adding tautness, definition, orienting them on an axis of someone else. In practical terms, I have a nicer flat, a small income, and a task that’s an emblem of what I’d be doing anyway: finding anodyne escapes from the life that’s mine.
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