Koi set before him offerings, flowers and incense, which the monk worked into his ceremony. With slitted eyes, I stole glances at Seb, whose eyelids twitched as if he were dreaming. He had new stubble on his chin. It suited him.
The monk beckoned, and Aurelia and I inched forward on our knees, bowing. Water particles hit our backs and arms as the monk scattered blessings with the straw of his broom-fan.
Then the seconds charging forward seemed to stop. The throaty chanting of the monk, tired and too human, created composites of pasts and futures, communicating in a secret language of association. All time, Buddhists say, is wrapped in the present moment. We are the ages we have been and will be. In Aurelia’s body, I could see the seed of her future: her hair darkening before going gray, her eyes growing wise, and wrinkles creasing her skin like an ancient map. Then the monk’s chants began to mix with vibrations from another set of lips—Seb’s as he would sing the refrain of a Thai pop song that played at the club. Seb’s tune, his little phrase, would project onto memory what the fog of whiskey had erased—time revived by his ironic humming of the pop tune: Dum dee dum dee dum, dum dee dum dee dum, dum dee dum dee da dum.
Later that night, we went dancing. Even Aurelia came. The walls in the club were dark, with infinite edges, and Seb and I stood as usual at a table in the fishbowl of its center, strobe-lit, staring at each other over whiskey and sodas, not dancing, almost afraid of each other, of something growing between us. Singers on stage lip-synched syllables over the beat that gathered itself and leaped forward: Dum dee dum dee dum, dum dee dum dee dum, dum dee dum dee da dum.
We declared an after-party in our living room. A traveler we’d met at the club came with us—a man from New Jersey, a town Aurelia knew. But as soon as we got to the house, energy waned. Aurelia disappeared, first to the kitchen, then to her bedroom. Seb fell asleep on the couch. The traveler and I shared whiskey and went on talking, Seb snoring softly at intervals.
—He laughs in his sleep, the traveler said. It’s cute. And weird.
The traveler wanted to know if I knew people with whom he’d gone to university, and vice versa. We traded superficialities like worn coins, comforting because they came from a world I thought I was losing. He was the kind of North American male Seb wasn’t: earnest, sure of himself, brusque, with a burly confidence that occluded whatever lay beyond the sphere of his light. In Seb there was a softness, a desire to get a little lost in what was not himself. He shared my wish to be a little destroyed by life. I knew he hated this part of himself, the part that drew me to him, and was always seeking to root it out.
The sky was lightening outside the living room’s wall of glass. The traveler lay back, his eyes lightly closed, his hand on his stomach. There was no question of his driving back to his guesthouse. He was drunk, and it was almost dawn. I saw the open door to my room, then Seb, still asleep, breathing evenly on the couch. He looked innocent, like a small boy, hands folded under his cheek like a prayer. Feeling the traveler’s eyes on me, I looked up. We sat, gazes locked together in the dark room as the sky brightened over the fields. Dark lashes around the traveler’s eyes. Then the electricity went out of the moment. I got up, light-headed, and set blankets and towels on the other couch. Blankets were useless in the heat.
I heard the traveler sigh as I fell onto my bed, sweating.
When I woke, it was to the sound of Aurelia’s voice, answered by a male voice, groggier.
—She made us breakfast, the traveler was saying, stupefied, when I emerged.
—I always want eggs after a night of drinking. Mmm … the greasier the better … ha-ah!
Seb shook his head as if shaking off a spray of water. He went into the bathroom.
Aurelia never cooked. She didn’t keep food in the house. She’d thrown away my cereal once, afraid she’d eat the whole box. I followed Aurelia to the kitchen.
—I made eggs and a papaya smoothie. You should sprinkle the smoothie with instant coffee? Gives it kick. I do it.
Her eyes didn’t meet mine.
—Eggs? You went to the market?
—I couldn’t sleep. I never sleep. I’m worried—it’s okay, but I’m starting to worry about things. It’s okay; it’s just worry.
Loose chords of anxiety in Aurelia’s voice made me uneasy. You can catch anxiety like an illness. A pan on the stove gleamed with oil and bits of egg. She stared at the floor.
—Hard partying, drinkin’ dancin’, you need breakfast. Also, I had to get out of the house. Smelled like … I don’t know, with them sleeping in the living room?
There were five cans of Pepsi Max next to the stovetop, empty.
—I was crazy once, Aurelia said. I’m getting old! Old woman! Take out the coffee?
She thrust a thermos into my hands.
—You’re not eating? I asked her.
She dodged my gaze. Her hands moved nervously over the countertop.
—I wanted to cook, you know? That was the pleasure. Making it. For you.
I felt nauseous and embarrassed by Aurelia’s behavior. It revealed something too intimate. Taking in the coffee, I sat beside Seb on the couch where he’d slept.
—She brought us chilies? the traveler asked.
—For the eggs. Aurelia likes spice, I said, feeling suddenly defensive concerning her.
—She’s not eating?
The traveler eyed the food suspiciously.
—Welcome to the madhouse, Seb said cheerfully, pouring himself coffee.
The traveler forked the eggs, looked at them, and frowned.
—I mean, it’s supernice of her, supernice, he said, shaking his head.
Something about Aurelia’s gesture made me terribly sad. We drank the coffee. Watery.
In the weeks and months to come, Seb would seek out the traveler, befriending him. His delicate manner would harden, give way to something cruel, almost sadistic. It wasn’t the traveler’s fault or intention, just his effect. And maybe it was Seb’s real face revealing itself, his sensitive solicitude a mask he donned, with effort, for my benefit.
When they left, I threw away the eggs and went out to the veranda, where I could watch the rice fields glowing green, absorbing the clean, uncomplicated energy of the midday sun.
26
PURE NERVES, NO SKIN, oddness of channeling the hot season in the dead of winter. Her world springs to life: Scenes crack the cold with their meanings, charging the grayness. How boring it must have been when I had only one body. Now I’m Ella most of each day. Checking the address in my phone, I step into the cold, feeling the oddness of my own skin again in the winter air.
Buildings on the narrow street hunch forward slightly, as if to listen. Cold chalks the concrete. Flurries hang in the frigid air. Time is out of sorts in the journals. It’s worst in the black and green books, but what I missed on my initial read are these first cracks. The yellow and red books contain the etiology of what comes after. It starts, perhaps, with Ella’s conviction that all time is contained in the present moment. Buddhist commentaries I found call this “presentism.” (If time is present before it’s lived, are Buddhists fatalists? Commentaries say no.) But if Ella were testing this simultaneity of time in her writing, it’s possible that her first disturbances are deliberate. What is sense but agreed-upon order, a separating of then and now?
The Japanese tea shop where Zoë works is in a part of the city near the Louvre, on a tiny street webbing out from the rue Sainte-Anne. The idea to consult her came from a conversation we had about Nulle part ailleurs. She told me she wished she had titled it in English: Nowhere Else. She liked that the coordinate of presence—now/here—contained its opposite. We remember and imagine all the time, she said, but these pasts and futures don’t exist except in the present from which we access them. Her way of collapsing photographed and painted space in her artwork was inspired by a book she’d read about religious philosophies of time. It discussed presentism as elaborated in the most arcane of the tripitakas, the Abhidhamma. Zoë said she r
etained only what interested her and was far from expert, but she agreed to talk with me further.
The tea shop is airy and bright, and the shelves of the tasting room are lined with ceramic bowls, teapots, yuzu vinegars, sake, and tea canisters. An English-speaking couple watches Zoë mix matcha with a wooden whisk, her polished nails matching the bright pink of her lips. The couple detects herbaceous notes in the tea. Zoë tells them they have sensitive palates and should return for a sake tasting.
—Herbaceous, she says when the couple leaves.
We laugh, and she makes us a pot of sencha.
—At first, I thought Siobhán hired you to work in the gallery. She needs help desperately and won’t accept it from anyone but Aidan when he’s here. You’re not doing that, are you?
I frown. Zoë never asked what I was doing, so I assumed Siobhán had told her. And Siobhán had never asked for discretion. I didn’t have the sense our work was secret.
—I’m not a gallerist, I say. Siobhán hired me to find her daughter.
Zoë puts down the teapot in alarm.
—Siobhán has a daughter?
The words tumble out: Given up for adoption. Siobhán never knew her. Adult child. Twenty-three. Disappeared. Siobhán haunted by it ever since.
Zoë listens. She says the story makes sense. It explains why Siobhán is so hard to know.
—What are you, she asks, a detective?
Shaking my head, I tell her about the journals and the book Siobhán has commissioned.
—Ah, the press! Zoë says, then grows solemn. It means the girl is dead.
—The goal is to find her alive, I say, surprised at the sharpness of my voice. If I rewrite the journals, then I get inside her head a little, figure out where she went.
Siobhán’s arguments take shape on my lips, believable. It’s flattering and intimidating to think the press may be for me—for my work. But Zoë looks puzzled, so I get to the point, describing Ella’s interest in Buddhism.
—So either she’s performing this “presentism,” running events together in her entries, or something is starting to go wrong with her mind, I say.
I’ve been staring past Zoë as I talk, conjuring the journal world from remembered script. When I find her face again, it has a faraway look.
—There’s beauty in looking for someone, she says. You’re a writer?
—Not really. Siobhán knew my mother.
Stalled out by the strangeness of Zoë’s question, my mother’s illness, and my old vow not to become an artist of any kind, I take out the journals and flip to a passage in the yellow book I want to show Zoë. She runs a finger along the fraying spine of the red book and says it’s delicate. She doesn’t insist, nor does she mention it again, but it unsettles me to think that she believes Ella is dead. Maybe it was just something to say, a passing idea. She doesn’t really think so. The entry is in red ink, parts washed out by water stains,
Jan. 22
Too hot to do anything but lie here. Seb. Strong sensation, all body. What pulls me to him, this man sealed in indifference? Dreamed we were camping by a lake. Too much rain. I was screaming. He couldn’t hear. Black pen gone. Time begins to scatter. Now, now, now. Happens now, now, now while I’m missing it. Aurelia, desperate to wake the stillborn within her, murders it with Pepsi Max. Animal, solitary [illegible]. Flood when it breaks. Instinct. Rub out the face that is eager to please. [illegible] pulse on skin, electricity quickening at life’s edges, evidence of its inner source.
—Oh, god, Zoë says. Why do you think it has to do with Buddhism?
Embarrassed, I point to the bit about time scattering and the now, now, now. When I was alone, Ella’s words made sense. Now, I can’t find the collision of times I identified before. We look at a few other entries, this time in the red book. As we study them, trying to decide what is when, Ella’s words dry out, lose their shine, like the rubbery bodies of jellyfish dead on the sand.
—What’s clear, Zoë says finally, is her sense that spirituality can be a cure for obsession. It’s really common. You see it also with addiction. It’s how I started. It saved my life.
The owner of the tea shop calls, and Zoë disappears. When she returns, I see she has to tend to other things. As I gather my coat, she invites me to a concert she’s going to with a painter friend, giving me the place and time before I can refuse.
On my way back to the flat, halfway up the rue des Martyrs, jasmine plants press against a florist’s window. I go in and buy one. At first there is only the cold in my nostrils, then the faint, cloying odor of the pearls. I carry the plant like a child up the hill to the flat, wanting to know what it was to be decked in one of Soraya’s jasmine necklaces, to smell it on the breeze at night. Did Ella go mad, or did she just know something most of us don’t? At the writing table, I separate things I’ve done today as Ella and as Elena. The last sun rays make narrow shards on the floor, grow thinner, then close into shadow.
27
EVERY TUESDAY EVENING during the hot season, I would find Béa amid the stalls of Ban Du Market, and we would pick out snacks to take to our Thai lesson. One Tuesday, well into the season, when the heat was fiercest, I arrived at the market desperate for anything to distract me from Seb—fantasies like firecrackers, fevers, he’d appear behind windows, desks, and doors. The heat-mirage Sebs had multiplied because for weeks the real Seb had been distant. The arrival of the traveler had brought out a hardness in him that wasn’t there when it was just the two of us. Seb was polite—I had nothing to reproach him for—but he’d stopped confiding in me. Our old intimacy was dying. If we could be alone together, I was sure it would return. But the traveler was always there. With no job—was he living on savings? a trust fund?—he’d moved from his guesthouse downtown, taking a patio apartment near Ban Du Market. He planned to stay awhile. So my fantasies had become richer than life and were getting harder to control: Seb’s face, his voice, his smell at the ends of all my nerves, flushing my skin. In my office, in class, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was in this agitated state that I arrived at the market, longing for little rituals, language games.
Our teacher, Ploy, had strong preferences and loved pork with sticky rice.
Channeling Ploy—the way her mouth would swell with the taste of Thai words—I asked for two bags of khaow niaaow and two of mu ping.
—Falang pood Thai gaaeng maak! The wrinkles on the seller’s face lifted into a smile.
She charged the usual but gave me four bags of sticky rice with the pork. I thanked her.
Ploy lived close to the market in a house that opened almost onto the superhighway. Cars, trucks, and motorbikes passed at great speed, making lines of light in the dusk. We rang the bell. Ploy called to us to come in. We pushed, but the door didn’t move. It was an absurdly large door, painted metal, out of proportion to the house. It took the full weight of Béa’s body and mine to open it. Once ajar, it gained momentum, swung on its own, and we tumbled into the house.
Inside, a dark eye, amused, peeked out from behind the kitchen wall. We slid off our shoes. As Ploy crossed the room, her wide-necked shirt slipped from her shoulders. She pushed it up casually. Her walk was slow, both flirtatious and making fun of flirtation. Admiring this, I’d become a student of her style as well as her language, thinking her charm could be mine if only I got the cadence right.
Ploy laughed when she saw how much rice I was carrying. Her laugh was a dam bursting, surging between words and syllables. Béa laughed with her. Thai came easily to Béa, who could endure moments of nonunderstanding as if there were nothing other than laughter to be learned. Béa didn’t sanctify language, but I wanted it perfect, like a god.
—You have brought us a feast! Ploy said, gesturing to the rice in my arms.
Ploy’s English was meticulous, errorless. Maybe she considered it part of her job to demonstrate that attention as well as submission was necessary to mastering a foreign tongue. All sound play, all glossolalic poetry (usual byproducts of forays into ling
uistic unknowns) got referred, in Ploy’s case, to her Thai. She reduced words to phonic textures, twisting meanings into spasms of sound. Ploy instructed us mostly in English, so we had to intuit the eccentricity of her Thai from the way she spoke on her cell phone and her frequent admonitions: Do as I teach you. Never speak like I speak. Then the laughter would come, spreading from her body into Béa’s and mine. We never knew if Ploy had a curriculum, but her laughter told us if our tone, pronunciation, or grammar was awry. Her laugh wasn’t derisive—just pleasure at hearing Thai phonemes oriented on axes that weren’t their own.
Taking the bags of rice from my arms, Ploy led us to the kitchen.
—Too much khaaow. How do you say cow, I mean the meat?
—Néua, we replied, familiar with the game.
—Néua, Ploy said, correcting. High tone, néua! Beef.
I handed her the pork.
—How do you say pork?
—Moo, Béa replied from deep in her throat, like a cow.
—Moo-what-tone? Ploy chanted in unvarying pitch to test our memories.
The sound was out of my mouth before I could cycle through the five diacritics.
—Rising! Chaaaiii! Ploy said to me. Right.
Smiling, she disappeared into the darkening garden, letting in a warm breeze and the smell of the superhighway. She came back with bunches of bird’s-eye chilies, red and green.
—We will cook something to go with so much rice! Som tam, tam eng. Malagaw, she said, taking shredded green papaya from the refrigerator. What do you make with this?
—Som tam, I said, my lips vibrating m’s like the skins of hand drums.
—Chaaaiii! Tam eng? Oh! Tam eng is to make yourself. Homemade.
—Som tam, tam eng, I said.
—It’s just like language, the food you eat. In Thailand, it’s the way people are together. How spicy? she asked, her black eyes teasing as she tossed chilies into the mortar.
We sat on the floor mats in the living room, scooping up sticky rice, pork, and papaya salad. Béa lit a cigarette as the meal drew to a close. Words were streaming in my mind. I felt them in my sinus passages, their nasal sounds: khao niaow, moo ping, som tam, tam eng. Ploy was saying sentences, leaning toward us, sweating. She put sticky rice and som tam on her plate.
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