3
Here IS A NEW MORNING, new country. Fresh grounds in the coffee press. Water heating. Sensibilities sluggish, dampened, as if by the middle pedal on a piano.
The water boils and I pour it over the grounds.
From the window, the panorama of the city is a still photograph. Its colors have faded. Tints. Washes. Perceptions are not film images. Still, the world looks like a giant backdrop—a set I could push over with the tip of my index finger, revealing the bright lights and the actors’ changing rooms.
A sound shrills in the empty space. A black telephone rattles the table by the door.
—Elena?
—Yes.
—Will the flat be okay for you?
Siobhán’s accent is full of odd inflections.
—Yes, it’s … spacious.
The studio is large enough to fit four small rooms. There’s a corner for the bed, nooks for writing and reading by two dormer windows, and an open kitchen bordered by a long bar.
—Friends who stay there like the views. It’s close to shops. I put the journals on the table. Did you find them?
—Yes.
I glance at them, stacked together in their faded colors.
—Good.
A pause.
—Listen, I have documents to help you. It’s best if I come up. Ten minutes.
Soft click.
I take a shower in the European style, hovering close to the bottom of the tub, then dress and do jumping jacks in the center of the room. I make the bed and straighten the pillows. The green journal is on the nightstand, its pages stiff and rippled. I flip it open.
Monsoons. Everything damp. Memories a scourge. I outrun them in waking life. But certain ones remain quiet for only so long.
Closing the book, I take it to the writing table to be with the others. I unlatch the window, and a wet breeze blows through the space. Treetops in the park below, dusted with white blooms, are like graying heads of hair.
Last night I dreamed of a guesthouse in the hills—a scene from the journals—and woke thinking of my mother. (A whiff of perfume, the air you feel when someone leaves a space.) Is there an art that recovers what’s lost—people, the past? I push the press down over the grounds. The coffee gurgles. I pour it into two cups.
Siobhán kisses me on both cheeks, her skin cool and fresh from the summer morning. She transfers a gray folder from her briefcase to the writing table. AFFAIRE CLASSÉE is stamped over the first page. I look at her in confusion.
—It’s a French translation of the Thai police report, she says. They closed the case as soon as it opened. They never took it seriously. Ella disappeared the month of the Boxing Day tsunami—do you remember it?
I shake my head. It happened during my missing months. Learning about it later isn’t the same as remembering.
—More than two hundred thousand dead or missing, Siobhán says. A month before it hit, Ella’s journal transited through Krabi, which means she sent it from one of the islands in the Andaman Sea. For the police, there was no question. But she was seen in the northeast, the Isan region, after the tsunami. A foreigner with her description asked for a job at Khon Kaen University, then vanished again.
—She wasn’t kidnapped? I ask, to rule out my worst fears.
—If she’d been abducted, she wouldn’t have reappeared in Isan—at least it’s unlikely.
Siobhán pauses.
—I think she was troubled, she says, her gaze refusing to meet mine.
She takes from the folder a wallet-size photograph of a girl, a young woman, dimpled and smiling, her hair blond and to the shoulders, eyes looking straight at the camera, fearless, full of that inner smile native to children. She looks anything but troubled.
—She’s twenty-one here, Siobhán says. It was taken before her university graduation.
Siobhán’s hair is pulled back neatly with a clip. Her coloring is similar to the girl’s—something else, too, maybe the shape of their eyes. But their expressions are different. Siobhán is tight-lipped, serious.
—Hold on to it until you finish, Siobhán says, handing me the picture.
I want her to correct herself: Until you find her.
—You have the Thai police report, Siobhán is saying, pulling a different file from her briefcase. This is the report from the detective we hired. There are transcripts of the interviews he conducted in Chiang Rai—Ella’s friends, people she worked with, administrators at the university. All in English. He tried tracking those who had left, but there was one he couldn’t find, a young man rumored to have moved to Japan or India. There are verbal descriptions but no photographs. These are the people she mentions in the journals.
I nod, paging through the report, trying to find some meaning in its official language.
—Keep it, Siobhán says. It’s a copy.
Siobhán has to get back to the gallery, but she asks if I’m free tomorrow for dinner.
I smile, wishing we could meet again earlier.
—Oh, she says from the hallway. Please translate a sample, any section of the journal, into a story. It doesn’t have to be long, just to give us a starting point. So that we can talk. Bring it tomorrow night.
Before I can ask how many pages, she is gone.
I go back to the table, drink Siobhán’s untouched coffee, and read the report. Physical descriptions precede the transcripts: Muay, a politics professor, round cheeks and glasses. Ella was so curious, learning the Thai language. Aurelia, Ella’s American roommate, insisting that Ella was fine. Someone had seen her in Isan. Ella was frail but full of love. Lek, a photographer, saying she was nice, liked whiskey. Soraya, who had just joined an order of bhikkhuni, Buddhist nuns, had a shaved head and nodded yes or no to questions, keeping her vow of silence. The vice president of the university saying what a splendid teacher Ella was, mounting an encomium. Anthony, who had taught with Ella before retiring to Bangkok, saying how delightful he found her, quick of wit. Only one person seemed concerned about Ella’s state, a friend and neighbor in the village, a Frenchwoman, Béa. Ella seemed burdened before she left. One man was missing, Sebastian.
OUTSIDE, THE AIR IS DAMP. Stone steps lead from a small plaza to a road rounded like a crescent. Most shops are shut and there are few people in the streets. A man looks at the sky while his dachshund shits lengthily in front of an empty café. The sun shudders onto the pavement, then disappears. More stairs lead up to a smaller plaza, where the beige of buildings colors the city differently. The air is thick with coming storms. A red geranium hangs over a balcony.
A calico with black and tan spots over its eyes stretches on the stone, belly up in a patch of sun. It stops mid-stretch, feeling my gaze, caught in a moment of pure freedom, pleasure—rough stones pulling gently at the hairs of its back as it watches the clouds. I’ve ruined, with my gaze, the for-itself of the cat. Now, it will be for-another, self-conscious and watchful.
Back in front of my building, on the place Marcel-Aymé, a man is leaning against the wall, looking intently at the cigarette between his fingers. Black hair, dark eyes, black eyebrows. He looks up when I pass. I look back. He doesn’t look down, so we stare.
Inside the building, I meet an older woman moving slowly down the narrow stairs. I flatten myself against the wall and wait for her to pass.
—Bonjour, she says liltingly.
I reply, botching the cadence.
—Vous êtes la jeune fille qui habite l’appartement de Siobhán, c’est ça? She says this very slowly, enjoying each syllable. She looks at me a long time.
I find myself nodding as if to say, Yes, I’m the girl who lives in Siobhán’s apartment. It feels good to remind myself who I am, where I am, and why.
—À tout à l’heure, she sings, and leaves.
Through the door, open onto the square, I hear her sigh.
—Ah, Jérémie!
Back in the flat, there is relief. Empty space. There is so little furniture: the bed, the writing table by one dormer window, a re
ading chair by the other, two stools by the kitchen bar. I stare at the journals. Open one. Close it. Sit on the bed. Get up. Open the windows. There is discomfort, difficult to explain, as if the journals and I cannot exist together easily in the same space.
Finally, when the clock by the bed reads 5:00 P.M., I spread all six journals chronologically across the parquet floor. The colors of their covers:
beige
baby blue
mustard yellow
bright red
black
green
I open the beige journal. First page: June 16. I close it.
I open the blue journal. The letters are neat and round, as in the first journal:
Laughter is a discipline. I’m learning it. Elsewhere is just deferral. Stupid to believe in what is “to come.” It never arrives. Desire = this love of the impossible. When you look for me (you will), it will be too late. I’ll be gone. I’ll be laughing. I’ll have learned to laugh like the Chinese Buddhas in the spare bedroom with their enormous bellies.
When you look for me? These words will make sense differently in context, fit into Ella’s story. But now, shorn of time and place, they address me personally. I know I can’t be the “you” she describes, but why not imagine Ella guessing there would be, far in the future, someone like me? Someone somewhere—or always elsewhere—looking for her.
I read passages in the journals, haphazardly, listening to the soft sound of the rain outside, until it occurs to me that I’m searching for something in particular: a teakwood bungalow in the hills, a man in a white shirt with his back turned, the scene from the journals that captured my attention when I arrived. It was the same scene, again, in my dream.
It’s nearly ten in the evening when I break, with a feeling of having returned from somewhere—deep in Ella’s world (though no sign of the teakwood bungalow). Sharp hunger nudges me out into the summer evening, long in light. On the place Marcel-Aymé, the rain has stopped. The air is warm. I turn down a tiny street that leads to Abbesses, and Ella’s early impressions of Chiang Rai flit by: visions of temples and moon gates replaced by motorbikes, telephone poles, and Pizza Huts. When I first heard the name Abbesses, similarly, I imagined stone cloisters, abbots and abbesses lost in thought, not these crowded terrasses and buskers.
The restaurants are all alike, tables on sidewalks. A vendor spreads crêpe mixture on a black griddle and cracks an egg in the center. I eat my crepe—egg, salty ham, hot cheese—on a bench in the darkening plaza in the glow of the carousel lights. From here, I can watch conversations in restaurants, leanings toward and away, drinks sipped and poured, and the moon rising over the uneven tops of buildings.
A woman with an orange scarf in her hair ducks into an alcove. I get up and cross the square after her, walking quickly. When I reach the alcove, there is no one. She may have passed through a door. But in that case, I would have seen it open. My breath quickens, and I lean against the building. An elderly couple passes on the sidewalk. Their pace slows as they notice me. They wonder what I’m staring at. Nothing. My heart pounds in my ears. Siobhán’s words return: She was troubled. Am I safe, reading Ella?
Back in the apartment, city lights make the dark uneasy. A square of paper, blue in the dim light, has fallen to the floor. I pick it up, my hands shaking, though nothing has happened, nothing is wrong. It’s a napkin, stiff and pressed with age, Singapore Airways logo. The underside is crawling with ants. The ants become words, tight black letters:
Forward forces. Ladders out of the this horror. Body a swamp, where dead things. Inner storms swell. Swollen oceans seethe, spit and cataract, tides pulling, terrible parasites. No words make sense now. Can’t struggle against anything but mySELF. String Time on a line or it will eat me, or I will eat it, Time, until I burst. Dead possibles. Devastated Time.
I turn on all the lights. The green journal is facedown on a chair. It must have fallen from the table when I opened the door. The napkin must have been inside. I pick up the book to its open page. Same tiny script:
I am too much a god taking life. It will be okay if I write again. Words. On the first flight (she tried to keep me) screaming. Then ghosts of people never born. No, just one. She has dirty knees. And she wants. Plane is metal and high up, so I see skin-flesh ripped away. Nothing more attaches. No earth. The day is black. Home is where I’ll never see again. Never knew fear really until now.
The beating of my blood pounds loudly in the room. City noise fades, far below. These passages are dark, different from the others. What happened to change her? The entry has no date, but others nearby, more coherent, suggest that Ella wrote the lines in late July, five months before she disappeared. She doesn’t mention travel, but she describes returning to her village and finding it a ghost town, empty. She must have gone somewhere, but where? Why?
I turn to the last page of the green journal, looking for some indication of a plan—a destination. To my surprise, fat, neat letters on the inside back cover spell out Siobhán’s address in Paris. Ella must have written the address earlier, since the rest of the page is filled with tiny, cramped letters, dizzying. It makes me almost physically sick to look at them. There is a ragged edge where the last page of the journal has been torn out. I feel a flash of anger at Siobhán. Had Ella lost her mind? Of course, it’s my mother who drew me in—her knowing Siobhán. Z saw it—a way to shirk my dissertation, which, once finished, might open onto a life of my own. Sabotage. Since she died, everything has been about that—her dying. The things I’ve done have all grown out of opposing drives to discover and escape what happened to her. A sky-wide task narrows back to my obsession, and the world closes up again. The symmetry strikes hard and hurts the way it does when you discover you’ve been looking away from what’s in front of you: Siobhán solving the mystery of her daughter’s disappearance, me wanting to know more about my mother. Only Siobhán doesn’t seem stymied or stuck. She has a plan, strange as it is, to recover her lost daughter. But I have no power. The room is too warm with the windows closed, and I can’t stop shivering.
4
BRIGHT SUN IN THE APARTMENT when I wake. I know without checking that it’s late, past eleven. The journals scattered over the writing table make the walls feel close. I push open all the windows, and the city glitters in the light.
Before searching for a plane ticket home, I should at least ask Siobhán what she knows, gather all the facts. It’s possible I’m projecting my own terrors. I’ll buy groceries, test the neighborhood’s cafés, visit the cinema Cocteau designed. It’s supposed to be close to here.
Feeling better, I take my wallet and keys from the counter and a canvas shopping bag from the kitchen. From its perch on the writing table, the beige journal—patient, almost animate—reminds me that I must produce a “translation” by this evening. I add it to the empty shopping bag.
Outside, the sky is an arresting blue. It swoops down to meet the cobblestones in narrow strips between the buildings. I stop at a kiosk for Le Monde, Libération, and my chest tightens; my mouth goes dry. I look around, searching the innocent shop fronts, gleaming café tables, and faces of pedestrians for a reason. But fear isn’t reasonable. It springs up at odd times, in plain day, in the sun.
At an outdoor table on the rue des Abbesses, I order a café crème and a croissant. People pass with bags of fruit and newly bought clothes. Snippets of conversation float toward me and away. I lean back in my chair, sun warm on my skin. The fear fades.
The woman next to me dips her croissant in her coffee. I do the same. She, too, wears a scarf in her hair. A man sits beside her. They share a cigarette, then leave. I think I see my mother in the street sometimes. It no longer happens in cities I know well. But in Paris, where women wear scarves the way she did, I sometimes see her in the crowd. I follow. I always follow until I can see the woman’s face, until I can know for sure it isn’t her. I know it can’t be, but there were the colored scarves she’d weave through her hair, darker than mine. I can still see the fl
ash of her eyes, the curve of her nose. And just as the double turns around, my breath quickens. Then shame.
She died six years and six months ago. My memory from that time is also gone. It’s staggering to think there are months in which I was there but remember nothing. Some reflex of my body lowered a floodgate. I remember scraps of a train journey in December, going home, then a field in June the following year, nothing in between. Diagnosis: shock. There was neuroanalysis, psychoanalysis, hypnosis. Nothing. Forgetting is how the body keeps itself sane.
No one said anything—not my father, not the doctors, not Z—but I understood that I needed to stop what I’d been doing. I was working as an apprentice to a photographer in New York, writing stories and painting on photographs on my own time. I felt the world fueled, flowing with colors no form could contain. The photographer agreed to take me back once I’d recovered, but I knew my only chance was to step softly over surfaces, not to plunge deep. If I didn’t draw attention to myself, whatever spirit possessed her might pass over me in silence. I got a job as a fact checker for an arts magazine.
One of my first assignments was an article on the history of the film essay. I discovered Marker, intrigued by his ability to turn the failure of a movement he cared about into something playful. Global socialism—the revolution—was the Cheshire cat’s grin, a promising smile with no body, no cat. I watched Sans Soleil, La Jetée, ¡Cuba Si!, and Le Mystère, then Varda and Jean Rouch, then Godard and Truffaut, then Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, and Medvedkin because Marker loved them. In the dark with my lit screen, I was both solitary and connected. I applied to graduate school to keep watching—film studies.
I try not to think about that time, before Marker. There may always be a sealed door in one corridor of memory. But it is that door and no other that would have opened onto life. For the past six years, I’ve known that this—where I am—is the wrong world, a somber imitation of a life I failed to seize. Only in films, the old ones (Maya Deren), does living become vivid again: A woman splits in two; her avatar moves along a shore, gathering pebbles in the folds of her dress, face to the wind. I feel her thrill and her longing—maybe this is what Ella wants; maybe she’s tempting me aground like a Siren, leading me to give up my degree, ruin things with Z, and shirk the steady work of rebuilding a life after the world lost its taste.
Her Here Page 3