I’m deep in Ella’s descriptions when I notice the black-eyed man beside me, his eyes soft, almost brown, in the afternoon sun. He speaks French at first, then English. He asks what I want to order, says he named the café the Cave and does this sound good in English and have I ever seen a coffee plant and do I know the fruit is red? He tells me his name, Jérémie. He asks about the journal. I tell him it’s a story I don’t know how to begin.
—Beginnings are the best, he says with a lightness I don’t expect, given the sullen dreaminess, the airy gazes riveted to his cigarette I noticed before.
—Why?
—You do just what you want. Everything is possible.
He moves like a cat, nervy and exact, long, thin limbs given to sudden gestures. He seems both very young and very old.
His words about beginnings stick. What do I like best? On the full moon, we’ll strip off our memories … a ritual about sending the self away in tiny boats: Loi Krathong. In the café, I make a draft of a scene.
I’m supposed to inhabit her, like an actor accepting a role, but I’m reluctant to lend my I to Ella. If I change body-minds for a time, mine might slip away forever, leaving me I-less, one of Marker’s haunted watchers.
As I walk the city, taking a detour back to the flat, I follow Marker’s example, stitching together what’s disparate in my field of view: oddities like the discarded braids and clouds of fake hair on the rue Poulet and the goat heads at the boucheries at the market at Château Rouge. All these impossible things make up a city—a very large man carrying a puppy beneath his coat, sheltering it in a cloudburst.
When I reach the flat, I reread the scene I wrote in the café, hoping to find some life in it. It’s stilted. Ella’s not breathing; it’s still my air. Under my pen, she dies a little. A different example shows how absolutely my words bury her impressions. Ella’s entry versus my translation.
Transcription:
Paths dissolve in flight. Is this “letting go”? Is this what that means? Leave behind what you once were. Set out. Be larger. Be the air, the walls of the airplane cabin. The man next to me is asleep. Too dark-electric for sleep. …
Translation:
I was twenty-one when I flew west to go east, which, if you never return, adds time to your life. From the airplane window, interstate-rivers of light. Leaving tugged like a tide as the city receded, its people invisible, slower than cars. Time spooled around the earth curve.
On my first night in Thailand—everything new, tiny hammers to the senses—I crept out of bed and carved my name in blue inside the kitchen cabinet. It was out of desire or terror or premonition that the raging world would swallow me whole, spit out my bones, dissolve me into things. I was afraid if I slept of becoming a thing. Wouldn’t see wouldn’t hear wouldn’t touch. Osmotic skin. Place would grow into me. To stay conscious, thinking, I’d need tactics. The groove would be there tomorrow. I’d know I carved it. Mark of my passage.
Transcription. Translation. Ella’s round letters press into me the dark quiet of the airplane cabin. But even the journals are not what happened. They’re only glimpses. Stills. Incomplete. Not even a camera the size of a pinhead, recording from Ella’s eye, would allow me to move with the weight of her body, or see Chiang Rai vectored by her interests (her frustrated love or her penchant for jasmine). Then there’s what her perspective obscures: Orchids bloomed behind her back and seeds of rice were sown in the ground while she gazed at the sky. Am I meant to expose more than her words reveal—or cast form upon her living, the way the Gregorians reordered the past according to their calendar? Thoughts like small screws spinning in the darkening room.
THE NEXT MORNING, I WALK FORTY MINUTES to the Ormeau. It’s not a pleasant walk, most of it along the busy boulevard Magenta. The quiet, narrow streets south of République are a welcome contrast. Siobhán and I sit in a bright café, speaking of things other than the project: the new show in her gallery, work by a Franco-Portuguese artist whom Siobhán refers to affectionately by her first name, Zoë.
As we walk along the cobblestones, I admire the large formats through the gallery front, stalling because I have nothing to show her.
In the skylighted back room, Siobhán pours fizzing water into tall glasses and tells me that Ormeau is the name of the road where her mother had lived as a child. Her mother is a poet, not one I’ve heard of. She asks about the pages.
—I don’t understand your strategy, I say.
It’s a poor excuse, but I can’t describe what comes over me as I write, a feeling of dissolving Ella and of being dissolved.
—My strategy? Siobhán asks, surprised.
—When I write over her, she becomes more shadowy. I don’t want to bury her.
Siobhán loosens the scarf around her neck and selects a group of folders from a filing cabinet. She pages through them, squinting at photographs of artworks. Next to her is a large graph-paper notebook with the names of people she must call.
I sit in silence, wondering if she’s ignoring me or merely concentrating on what I’ve said. I should have brought something—even a page might have spared me Siobhán’s chilly anger. Her position isn’t hard to understand. The journals are the messy notes of a daughter she couldn’t know and wants to love. My job is to make them into something she can access. And it’s not impossible that something in the journals—overlooked until now—might lead us to Ella.
—Your question, Siobhán says. Does a kind of writing bury a person? Maybe. But the opposite is also true. It can also bring life.
She goes back to sorting the portfolios, moistening her index finger with the tip of her tongue. Her words are eerie but not absurd—at least not here in this room with the sun showering down from the skylight. Composed, calm, Siobhán exudes certainty.
—All writing is translation, she says. Experience is just darkness until it’s lit from behind. Like a negative.
Siobhán is bizarre—elegant, but bizarre. Ella’s journals have to be illuminated by some other mind—mine? Vague nausea tells me I cannot continue. If Siobhán looks up, I’ll tell her—
—Tomorrow, Siobhán says, her eyes never leaving her work, please bring the pages.
Bells from a nearby church chime noon. As I cross the gallery, a painting gives me pause. Part paint, part photograph. A tree seen from below. Stopping in front of it, I let myself be drawn in by its bright leaves, which, frozen in eternal sun, seem more real than the branches outside the glass front of the gallery. Caught between two versions of the same space, the same leaves, I find the painting’s title: Nulle part ailleurs. Nowhere else.
I turn around, wanting more of the sensation—pleasure in art that makes the trees outside seem fake, their power to seduce weak because they can’t flaunt their reality. The other large formats fade around a wooden sculpture on a high white table on the other side of the gallery. Making sure the door to the back room is closed, I move closer. Its smooth forms seem to be hugging, fit together like an egg to its shell. Wood so polished it looks like skin, so familiar that it’s terrible to think I didn’t notice it before. It’s not part of the exhibit. I know who made it. I touch the surface, smooth wood I half-expect to be warm. Most of my mother’s work was destroyed.
On the street outside, I decide: no more doubt. I seal a pact with myself to develop Ella’s impressions. Her words will disclose a world inside of this one. Nowhere else. I have the sense that what the journals hold isn’t irrelevant to me, to what I’m looking for. I’ll transcribe each entry. Save file. Rewrite. I’ll weave her fragments into a story. It’s okay that in my own experience, none of it has happened—unless it has, in other ways, involving other characters on other streets in other cities. This way, I have the means to understand, to live something other as if it were my own.
7
Here, with the palms and banana trees and the airport tarmac as my witness, I vow to dissolve my Self in pure world. After more than a day in the air and layovers (three), I came to Chiang Rai’s little airport. On the air
was the smell of a sweet flower. The sun was high and there were green hills …
Immediacy cannot happen immediately. Get inside her, Siobhán would say. It takes work. Closing my eyes, I lay my head on the writing table and see the evening sky over Philadelphia—a skyline I know. Adventure or escape, Ella’s thinking. She’s sitting in the passenger’s seat. Her father is driving her to the airport (in my mind, he looks like my own father). Adventure, escape, or a third term, she thinks. It’s living. Just life. Succession of flights: runways, cities fading into cloud, ocean’s tug at the belly of the plane, pacifying Pacific, Ella thinks, and the distance from home—its illusions—calms her until the unknown catches on and pulls her forward. Excitement. Bangkok airport, then the last leg, a short flight to Chiang Rai, a northern city. Arrival:
All at once there was the place. I held up the line coming out of the plane because of the air. It carried flavor and living. On the breeze was a sticky-sweet smell I’d come to know. All at once there were palms, banana trees, and tea plantations stretched across the bellies of hills. Pausing to take it all in, I vowed that in a struggle between my Self and the world, I’d back the world, which bursts in anyway sooner or later.
The walk across the tarmac made me aware of my clothes, loose sport pants that dragged on the ground and a long-sleeved shirt, cotton sticking to my arms and stomach in the heat. My carry-on was overfull and bulked against my hip. None of it mattered. Living green hills cupped the airport in their valleys.
Arrivals was a single room with linoleum flooring. Signs with names disappeared one by one, and the crowd thinned to a single woman cleaning the floor in circular strokes. The heat and the smell of the cleaning fluid made me dizzy, so I sat with my bags facing the glass doors, one of which stood open. Someone from the university had been supposed to meet me. My heart began to race. Then a wave of thirst and fatigue swept in.
When I woke, a woman was leaning over me, eyes like fish swimming behind thick lenses.
—Ella, Ella.
Startled, sweating, I gathered myself and made a bow.
The woman erupted in laughter, full-bellied and real. She wai’ed in return.
—Oh, she said, it’s perfect. Come. This way.
Later I’d learn that Muay had been mortified to find me dozing and dressed the way I was, hair stuck to my face. Her laughter covered embarrassment. I’d been in the air for days, I told her later. What did she wear on the airplane?
—Not pajamas, she said.
Now, she led me out of the glass doors to the parking lot, and we loaded my bags into her car, which bore decals of tender-faced anime creatures and the logo of the university, where she was a professor of political science. She said that the vice president had asked her to take me under her wing, since I was young and new to the country, and she knew something about where I was from, having studied in Minnesota.
—Why did you choose a place so cold? I asked, knowing nothing about Minnesota.
—Choose? she said, laughing. I hardly choose anything. But I learned that snow disappears in your hands. I was amazed, like a kid—you know, snow is exotic to Thai people.
—You didn’t want to stay?
—Sure, she said, starting the engine. But, again, I don’t choose.
She had dimples, many of them, and hair cut straight, chin-length. Her blue blazer was too tight in the arms. She must have been hot.
—Why don’t you choose? I asked.
—My family needs me close by. The United States is too far. You know, in Thailand family is so important. I wanted to stay longer, but not forever.
—Would you go back?
Muay shrugged.
—I’m happy here, lots of friends, good job.
She smiled, showing her dimples.
—And my family wants me to find a husband. That’s harder in America.
—Your family, I said. Do you want a husband?
—Do you? Muay asked me, mocking.
—I want lovers first, I said without thinking.
Marriage belonged to a different phase of life, but love had no phase. I was open to love.
—Do I want a husband? Muay repeated, amused. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I have better things to do. But don’t tell anyone—at least my family—just don’t tell my family.
I promised, and we laughed.
—Call me Muay, she said, or pi-Muay. You know pi?
I shook my head.
—Awww, she said, her voice rising and falling, pi means older sister, but here we say it all the time. With friends.
We gained speed along a straight road—Airport Road—which cut south of Ban Du village to the superhighway. All this would become part of my intimate geography, but at the time I was just drinking colors: cerulean sky, yellow pineapples in roadside carts, rice fields glowing green.
—Was your plane late? Muay asked.
I shook my head. Four flights. All perfect. On-time arrivals were validations of my direction, while delays meant that my strong will had run afoul of the fates. It was a ridiculous superstition I took seriously.
—The driver from the university came to look for you, Muay said, merging onto the superhighway. He didn’t find you.
—I was there! I said, not liking things to escape me.
—Yes, you seemed wide-awake.
Muay looked at me sideways, chin tipped up in amusement, until I laughed. We laughed at nothing, at my indignance, at the driver I failed to notice, at my ability to sleep anywhere, at family, at being far from home.
—It’s no problem, but there is one problem.
We laughed again, at contradictions.
—I’m sorry, she said: your clothes. You have a meeting with the vice president. The driver would have taken you first to your room, but now there is no time.
I glanced at my sneakers and Adidas pants.
Muay explained that the vice president of the university would leave in a few hours for Yunnan, China, to manage a partnership between universities of the Greater Mekong Subregion. He had to meet me before I could sign my contract.
—He approves all faculty, Muay said.
Bright banners and a flowering meridian announced the university, a uniform village of taupe-colored buildings and covered walkways cut into a hillside. Muay gunned the car uphill, gears changing under us. At the summit, we pulled into a circular drive outside a building with palatial doors. Getting out of the car, I was all dread.
—Why did no one tell me, I asked, about the interview?
Muay shrugged, as if to suggest that a foreign teacher’s arrival was not foremost in the administration’s mind. She looked at her phone.
—Five minutes. Anything near the top of the suitcase? she asked.
I shook my head helplessly.
She kept studying me as we approached the doors, her expression troubled.
—Is the job really important for you? she asked. I nodded.
She bit her lip and took my elbow. We crossed the black marble floors of the empty lobby to the women’s restroom. Muay locked the door and put a finger to her lips.
—Don’t ever tell anyone, she said, full of the bright energy I’d seen earlier.
I was so grateful I didn’t know what to say, but she was already in a stall, tossing her blouse over the top. I changed quickly.
The full-length mirror returned to me a girl playing dress-up in a navy skirt suit. It made my body look boxy, prematurely aged. But Muay’s shoes fit perfectly.
—Better too big than too tight, Muay said, peering out from the stall. Now go! Second door on the right; ask for the vice president.
Full of verve, I unlocked the bathroom door.
—Hey, she said.
I turned.
—Don’t forget me here. And good luck.
8
THE SKY OUTSIDE IS A TIN BOWL, humid and uninviting, different from yesterday’s heat and sun. Siobhán has invited me to her flat for tea, which she serves from a Chinese clay pot decorated with frogs and lizards
. In the flat are white couches, Oriental rugs, and high French windows (and a white rug in the bathroom that I stepped around for fear of getting dirt on it).
As Siobhán reads my pages, I sit on her white couch and study the geraniums, oddly humanoid, in flower boxes outside her window. She will love the pages or hate them, or she will say nothing. Whatever happens, I’ll continue. This time, writing I to mean she, I was more than myself, Ella leading me into a world of edgeless spaces and vivid colors.
Siobhán is so finely polished that it’s hard to imagine her close to my mother, who hated things too rigidly in place. But the wood sculpture in the gallery is proof of their friendship—and precious, since so little of her work survives. She wanted it all destroyed. My father hesitated. Then fate decided for him: an electrical fire in her studio, where we never went, three months after she died. Old wiring, yes, but what is errant electricity if not the work of ghosts? Apart from the pieces in galleries or private collections, nothing is left. She worked in wood early on, then plaster and metal, returning to wood at the end. She must have given the sculpture to Siobhán, but when?
Siobhán sets the pages on the table between us.
—The story is fine, she says.
She sits rigidly on the edge of her chair, her spine very straight. I stare at the Oriental rug, wishing she had a small dog, something I could hug or pet.
—So much detail, she says. How did you do it?
I tell her about the virtual tour, the campus map and faculty profiles I found on the university’s website (which, fully updated two years ago, had no record of Ella). Nicknames weren’t listed, so I went through the profiles of all the female professors of political science—there were only four—and found a picture that fit Muay’s description in the journals. I checked for Minnesota on her CV and even ordered her book from the library: The Thai Government’s Position on Ethnic Minorities, translated by Muay herself and published four years ago in English. This is what I tell Siobhán, but it isn’t the truth. The truth is that the journals carry a sort of magic. They speak. How else could I feel the breeze on Ella’s arms, her easy laughter with Muay on their drive from the airport? It may not have happened that way—the level of detail means it almost certainly couldn’t have—and yet it’s true.
Her Here Page 6