by Michael Helm
The imperative was to describe Koss to her sister but the terms were not coming up. Celia’s thoughts coursed into new terrains that didn’t seem her own. She wanted to say there was something about Koss that made you doubt basic suppositions and understandings. So knowledge advanced constantly, so what? He made you believe against yourself.
“He’s no one to get close to. He’s furtive, manipulative.”
“Mysterious, forward-thinking.”
“He’s got Dad adrift from himself.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Yes. It’s a bad thing. It’s like he’s been completely rewired.”
She instantly knew her mistake.
“Oh, it’s his hardware you’re worried about. You think people don’t gain enlightenment, they just have a short in their circuits. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the soulful brain is the only one that’s working to full capacity?”
There would be no getting her on-side, no getting her back, now. If Celia said one more word, Chrissy would go off for ten minutes. I miss telephones, she imagined saying. I used to wash dishes in the middle of our calls. Saying, there’s something about Armin Koss that there’s practically no way of saying. He’s stealing us, one by one.
One wrong word and she’d blow.
“Hartley says hello.”
All dogs, even their names, melted Chrissy, left her at a loss for words. Celia was six thousand miles from her dog but Chrissy didn’t know it.
“Unfair.”
“Hartley.”
“Let’s see him.”
“It’s a standing hello. He’s in Vancouver, I’m in Turkey. For work, sort of last-minute.”
She found herself not mentioning how she’d come to be there. It was an oversight not to have told her before leaving. Now telling her would seem an afterthought. If you added up the oversights and afterthoughts, you arrived at Chrissy’s feeling that she was the less favoured daughter. Not less loved, but less thought of.
There was some lag now, some echo, between the image and the sound.
“So you haven’t heard from Dad,” said Celia.
“Sure I did. He’s off to Berlin.”
The voice came somehow without Chrissy’s mouth actually moving. Celia waited for it to move but it didn’t. The background colour had shifted. Something had changed in the white balance.
“We’ve got a delay. Can you hear me?”
There was no response. Chrissy’s face was tilted down, her eyes unregarding of the camera. She was inwardly drawn, seeming not so much retracted as alone. Celia made gestures now to signal the failing signal, hands over her ears and mouth alternately, but Chrissy wasn’t looking. She presented the crown of her head and a slight movement registered in her arms. Now it was Chrissy who was typing. Was she emailing her? Did she think the call had been lost, that the camera was off? Chrissy whispered the words, as she always did when she wrote. Celia tried to make them out and though she could not, some sense of them seemed to hold on Chrissy’s lips. Celia felt herself attended to, not as someone addressed, but as a subject, written not to but about. She felt herself there in her sister’s prose. How could such an impression have formed?
“Can you hear me, Chrissy? Can you see me?”
And then her sister went still. It seemed the image had frozen, with Chrissy staring at her screen, her eyes caught in some midsentence, but then she blinked and her brow began to knit and the screen went dead.
—
She changed her ticket and rerouted the return through Berlin with a two-day layover through the date of Koss’s opening. Her father would be there or not. He was lost to her or not. On the flight, with an ancient plague in her carry-on safely stowed beneath the seat in front of her, she thought of the young woman who’d heard wolves. The one who asked questions. Her intuitions had once been socially, politically conscious. Now they seemed self-enclosed. The pregnancy had turned her inward and its loss had fucked her up. Her attention since then was slightly off-true. In ways small and large people lost themselves all the time. The important thing was to recover the lost one before you changed too much and became forever a stranger to yourself.
She checked into a small hotel off Kurfürstendamm. Her room overlooked a narrow pedestrian avenue. Opposite her was a long seven-storey glass building that seemed sheared in half, so exposed were the people in their offices and rooms. They moved about their day on display.
She had no thought-out plan. It was best that they all meet together, in the unfamiliar space of a gallery, where things look different by design. She pictured herself physically separating her father from Koss, taking him by the elbow. The confrontation would last only seconds, she didn’t know the exact words. If she could remain calm, she might explain to Koss that her father was prone to strong bondings. She would say that strong human bondings require responsibility. Koss’s interest in the two of them, her and her father, could only be called proprietary. She would insist that he release them. She herself did not wish to be the object of his fascination, trapped in a cell in his honeycombed mind.
Online the Berlin show was getting advance attention. There was the half sense, at least, of an impending breakthrough. The Lernstoff was agreed to be faszinierend. Much was being made of the elusive narrative, the Geheimnis of the Geschichte, meaningful patterns, and of the mystery of the subject, the woman, the unnamed friend, who might not in fact even exist, Koss wouldn’t say authoritatively.
She looked at the building across from her with its exposed offices and thought of a lab technician moving a pipette over a field of the same repeated shape. She imagined partial exchanges with her father and Chrissy made up of past conversations and the one she wanted to have now. They’re in his dining room in California. They speak of novel weather patterns, petroleum derivatives, including a drop in science funding from the oil-slick Canadian feds. Chrissy has a new boyfriend she sketches fast because he’s sketchy. The daughters begin clearing the dinner table and their father notices after a minute and hops up from his chair and takes over from them. Does anyone want music? Chrissy solicits their opinions on dog breeds and the new hybrid cars. And what about her, is Celia seeing anyone? She tells them, apropos of nothing or everything, that she’s what’s called a private person.
—
Thursday arrived, still no word. She read a Berlin guide, marked it up, then skipped the points of interest in her wandering. The city came to her in sliding intensities. Roma musicians on subway cars, the traffic of prams in Prenzlauer Berg. A Russian-run market, the blunt, clay faces. She couldn’t get the hang of the cyclists, she was always stepping back just as they shot across her bow. Berlin seemed too white, the way most Western cities do when you come from urban Canada. The buildings collected into an elusive character, sharing something she couldn’t identify. They were unalike to the same degree. She had lunch on a bar patio. The waiter was cool and attentive.
In midafternoon she was sitting on her bed, watching the glass building. She settled her attention on two small rooms, each with one man and two women. The men stood, now and then pointing to something on their respective walls. The women sat at tables, taking notes. One of the rooms emptied out. The man in the other looked in his thirties, white skin, black hair. He seemed to speak with great deliberateness. He used his hands and chin to punctuate. The women said almost nothing, a word here and there. One woman wore a hijab. The man more often addressed the other woman, a blonde. He seemed to say a word and they looked at him, uncomprehending. He said it again. Then he stepped up to the woman in the hijab and held the back of his hand in front of her face. She hesitated a moment, then sniffed it, and they settled on a meaning.
Over dinner at the hotel she told herself to stay composed. Her presence at the gallery would be enough. She’d be recognized, standing there refusing to look into the boxes. The real thing would trump all. Or maybe she wouldn’t be recognized or allowed to stand there, or even to enter the gallery. It occurred to her she had no invitation
, she’d just assumed the opening was public. Did Galerie Grau on Lindenstraße have a visible door or did you have to know to press on a certain brick so a whole wall slid away? Was there a password? She pictured the black-haired Berlitz man guarding the entrance, presenting the back of his hand.
She turned on her cell and switched on the data roaming. No messages. She called up the gallery address on a city map.
There in the mirror in her neat, cramped room, she wore an auburn sweater over a cream blouse, a pair of black pants, conservative fit. She wanted to look apart from whatever were the looks in Berlin galleries. It was North American professional, her look. Serious, contained, half-turned away from style. It was an outfit she wore to meet the higher-ups at the company, the level of authority above the teams and team leaders. She had always been good at reporting, the team spokes-member. She put local test results and stats in national and global contexts. She explained findings, found language for numbers. The last time she wore these pants she’d nailed it, everyone agreed. Even with no strong results she’d justified their course, the idea they could engineer a generation of prophylactics, antiretrovirals, maybe even targeted antibacterials, if only they kept funding research into ancient DNA. What she hadn’t reported was the hope she always felt when talking the real language of research. Hope in the comparative analysis of gene sequencings drawn from past pandemics, hope in the measures of mass death, whispered in a nonsyntactic, post-human language. “The YopJ T3SS effector of Yersinia acetylates Ser and Thr residues critical for the activation of the MAP kinase kinases and the inhibitor of kappa B kinase beta and alpha.” She’d presented only so much, said nothing inadmissible. “YopJ-mediated inhibition of the NF-kB pathway allows Yersinia to suppress expression of TNFa from infected macrophages and to induce apoptosis in naive macrophages.” What could be driving this hyper-precise seeming nonsense but hope? It held in her chest, below shoulder level, a little heliated balloon of promise. Something to remember when things, as now, weren’t otherwise promising. The promise of mass salvation. Mass healing. Mass life. When she had her father back, she would tell him about the little balloon.
She gave the taxi driver an address and as they drove she looked down at her hands resting on her purse. Every two seconds the passing streetlights made two of her fingers look broken sideways. After a while the driver talked about the traffic, the weather. He assumed she was American, asked if she knew Los Angeles, which he’d always wanted to visit. He said they were entering Kreuzberg. He let her off on a narrow commercial street with bright windows. Small galleries lined the avenue. Grau was already full. People bunched in the window, pale and narrow, and the lines they made, their clothes, accentuated their length. She studied them as if looking at a diorama, as if she had been transported back a thousand years from the future to observe earlier humans while standing on their cobblestones. She couldn’t see Koss or her father but sensed they were impending, that they hadn’t arrived yet, and upon this understanding, based on nothing she could detect, she was struck with self-consciousness. She moved on, as if she had some other destination.
The gallery next door was closed. One a little farther along was open and apparently empty. She went inside and wondered what she thought she was doing. She was on a rescue mission, was what, but unprepared, at any number of disadvantages to be confronting Koss so fully on his turf, in his city, his milieu, without his language. She was afraid that she’d fail to see what needed to be done, or see it and fail to act, not say what needed saying. Afraid she’d allow herself to be turned, swayed by some graciousness, fitted with a look of true concern, fooled by a perfect, false compassion.
Already she was failing, standing in the wrong art gallery. In midroom was a long glass case displaying open notebooks filled with the smallest handwriting she’d ever seen jammed onto each page. The writing was in English. She walked to one end of the case. The work was titled The Copyist. The explanatory text fixed to the glass was in German, the only English words in quotation marks, “found art” and “unknown outsider.” The artist was nameless, maybe not an artist at all, she couldn’t tell. She bent close to the cramped script and picked up one of the magnifying glasses resting on the case, chained at intervals. The opened pages in the first book described Saint Jerome translating the Vulgata from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. For centuries the translation was copied by hand, sometimes in monasteries.
As mendicant orders emerged, small, light, pocket Bibles were required for traveling. The copied text was compressed and the pages became animal, made from the thin, strong, luminous skin of unborn calves. The illuminated human figures drawn in the margins were given rouged cheeks to suggest health amid the plagues of the times. The best copyists were illiterate, unable to anticipate letters or phrases or to think they’d found errors to be corrected. I myself am illiterate, copying what I see to the letter.
She walked past ten or twelve notebooks to the last one, at the end of the case, and through the magnifying glass read the open page.
Episode One of the murder show ends with the woman just short of dead. In Episode Two a woman is missing, the worst of fates presumed. Episode Three is happening now. The woman is in the next room or next building, or, yes, two doors down. The frame only appears when I turn off the screen but that hardly ever happens. The episode now unfolding affords me no escape. I press my Guide for Episode Four but it hasn’t happened yet. The woman has just lost a job that she loves, the workplace she worked in is distant. She sits in a room and reads and reads and of course she is just asking for it. We have a connection, the women and I. Without me they don’t exist. A movement at the window, is that you? The screen only appears when I kill it.
She stood back from the case. Now she wanted to know what she was looking at. Where and when had the notebooks been found? Was someone making money off a record of mental illness? Or was the copyist an invention, like Koss’s anarchists and antianarchist? Of course he was. “I myself am illiterate.” She wanted to put her fist through the case.
The moment she stepped out of the gallery a car turned the corner in front of her, emitting a high squealing, several squealings overlaid, and moved away down the street. The sound returned Celia to herself and she remembered her purpose. A young man wearing a cheap faux-satin jacket passed by, headed toward Grau. She stepped in a few paces behind him and the windowlights reflecting in the folds of his back moved and died in the rhythm of his steps. He stopped suddenly and saw, just before she did, a wasted man sitting in the doorway to the gallery she’d earlier found closed. His head was shaved. He said something in German and the man in front of her responded briefly and walked on. Celia expected to be addressed but the seated man called after the other, something like “Sie brauchen one two.” She kept her eyes forward and continued. The walking man, who seemed a kind of protection now, passed by Grau and kept going. The man in the doorway hadn’t noticed her. He watched the jacketed man and then suddenly he saw her and his face became a cartoon astonishment. He didn’t quite meet her eye, but focused on something just in front of her, though there was nothing in front of her. Then he looked down quickly to the palmscape of his hand and whatever he saw there caused him to look back at her and stand and hurry away down the street.
She entered Grau. Viewed from inside, the crowd now had dimension. Its shape suggested a character. Part of the character was the noise it made, the high chatter babble of such spaces anywhere. Most of the patrons held glasses of wine or beer. They tended to look past one another, even while conversing. No one recognized her, apparently. She was repeatedly assessed and dismissed. Koss’s name beckoned, floating in elongated script on the archway to another room. She walked under the archway.
The second room was enormous. She couldn’t imagine how it fit into the gallery she’d seen from the street. She scanned the space for her father but he wasn’t there. The script on the wall read Apokalypse. Lining the room were boxes, maybe four feet apart, more than the forty-eight memory theatres she’d seen onli
ne at Koss’s site, maybe twice that many. People stood in ones and twos before them. Their gaze had a certain character of self-loss. They seemed to break from one box and step to the next without removing themselves from the viewing. Only at the first few boxes did people speak now and then. By the fifth or sixth they were into the story, putting things together.
She kept her distance from the walls, stepped into the room’s open middle area. She saw at the far end a roped-off space with a stage, a small riser and three empty chairs, a podium and microphone. Soft laughter rose up from nowhere and died. Voices moved in the range of quiet to conversational. The words she could make out were foreign. She stood and took it in, the German murmur. After a time, words came clear. A young couple had taken to meeting each new box by trying to guess what would happen next before peering in. The guesses were in English—“The cave collapses,” “The dog drowns,” “A message from the sponsor”—and brought on little pulses of dread. They smiled and put their faces to the box and watched together. Each time, before they moved on, the man touched the woman, on the shoulder, the hip.
Now and then people crossed the floor and skipped forward or back, not noticing Celia, but most progressed box to box around the room. Still another room led off this one, she now saw. She stepped into it, a longer, narrow rectangle. Her father and Koss weren’t here either. This space was more crowded than the first, there were bottlenecks forming at some of the boxes. The people moved differently, with an urgency. Some laughed nervously at what they’d seen. One woman, older, in severe glasses, held her chest in a gasp or mock gasp. There was something a little raw in the voices. The viewers were slightly losing their cool.
When the first box came open Celia let herself be drawn to it. Through the glass she saw herself standing at a window. She wore pyjama bottoms, a red T-shirt. Then the scene changed and she was at a door, letting a dog out into a bright winter day, a woods in the near distance. End of box. She waited a few seconds and it played again. She tried to study it, to understand why it felt familiar. She didn’t recognize the house. The dog looked slightly less like Hartley than she looked like herself.