by Dara Horn
“How is that not a ‘real ending’?” Der Nister snorted. “There are no real endings in life, either. Since when do things end?”
“I suppose it would be a good example of socialist realism,” the teacher said, and Boris heard something snide in his voice, a dark edge.
“I’m telling you, this is as realistic as it gets. ‘Laughing is healthy. Doctors prescribe laughter.’ That’s the best way for anything to end.” Der Nister turned to Boris, his own story refolded in his hand. “What do you think, Comrade Kulbak?”
“I—I don’t know,” Boris stuttered, though it seemed to him that in fact things did end, and that when they did, it wasn’t funny at all. He looked at the Hidden One, at the space below his nose where his thick mustache completely covered the dent in his upper lip.
“Comrade Kulbak doesn’t care about those stories,” the teacher said loudly, resting his hand on Boris’s shoulder. “He’s here to pick one of my pictures.” He turned to look at Boris. “As I said, I can’t give you the larger ones. But I will let you have a study, since you’re giving me a study,” he said, leading Boris toward several piles of canvases beneath the portrait with the scroll. “Look through these studies and tell me which one you want.”
Boris looked, and was surprised to find a series of miniatures of the larger paintings on the walls, as if the larger ones had been broken into pieces replicated on separate little canvases: the musician drawn individually, without his violin; the bride split apart from the groom. There were some that he lingered over, like the two women bathing a baby, and others that he flipped through quickly, like the cartoons of wounded soldiers. But most of them were too bright, the colors too imaginary to be real. And then his eye stopped on a tiny dark painting, darker than all the others, a deep brooding street that looked very much like the street where he used to live, with a man who looked very much like Boris’s own father hovering in the air over the town. This, he thought, was what he had once seen.
“This one,” he whispered.
“That one?” the teacher asked, and in the question, Boris thought he heard a tinge of disappointment. But then the teacher pulled it up from the ground, recognizing an old friend. He smiled. “I think of this one as Going Over the Houses,” he said, his voice soft, as if he were sharing a secret. “When I was a boy, beggars used to come to the house all the time, and people would call it ‘going over the houses.’ When they said that, this was what I saw.”
“He loves to play with words,” the Hidden One said. “If you look, you’ll see that most of his painting are little jokes with words.”
The teacher held Boris’s own painting up in the fading sunlight. “I would call yours El Maley Rechamim,” he said. That was the name of the Hebrew cemetery prayer he had been whistling earlier, Boris remembered. God Full of Mercy. Except the teacher had pronounced it wrong.
“He loves to play with words,” the Hidden One repeated. “He should be the writer, not me. Rechamim instead of Rachamim—you understand?”
Boris shook his head.
“Rachamim means ‘mercy,’ but if you pronounce it rechamim, it means ‘wombs.’ God Full of Wombs.”
Full of wombs?
“So that’s it, then. Take it,” the teacher said, clamping his blue hand on Boris’s shoulder for the last time. “A fair trade. You’ll see your picture on the wall in class tomorrow morning.”
Before Boris could take the painting, Der Nister leapt from his seat. “Wait,” he cried. “I’m not about to be the only unrepresented artist here. Take this, too.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the crumpled paper with his story, grabbing the painting from the teacher’s hands. “I have it all in my head, so you can keep this,” he said. Turning the painting around and balancing it on a shelf behind him, he folded the paper into a long thin strip and then slipped it underneath the wood of the canvas frame.
“Don’t stretch the canvas like that!” the teacher shrieked, then blushed, lowering his voice. “It loosens the tacks. In twenty years the whole thing will fall apart.”
Der Nister held it tight and laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m sure our apprentice artist will take even better care of a pregnant painting.” He grinned as he faced Boris, turning the painting back around and grandly presenting it to him. “I trust you will be an excellent curator of two works of art.”
Boris took the canvas in his hands. “Thank you,” he said, and began edging his way toward the door.
“Won’t you stay for supper?” Der Nister asked.
But Boris looked at his smile and the teacher’s grin and saw the boys’ faces again. He suddenly needed to leave, to escape this strange clarity, which was becoming fiercer than a bad dream. “I have to—I have to go back,” he stuttered, acutely aware of his lie. “The council will be angry if I don’t get my chores done.”
Der Nister frowned. “Spoken like a true Marxist. From each according to his ability. Workers of the world, unite and break the little artist’s back!”
“Shut up, Kahanovitch,” the teacher hissed. He turned back to Boris, who was now clutching the painting in both hands. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, opening the door for him with a laugh.
“Thank you,” Boris murmured again, and stepped out of the room.
“The pleasure was ours. You have a wonderful imagination,” Der Nister called behind him as the door swung shut.
But Boris was already running down the stairs as fast as he possibly could, descending into the abyss of the house’s ground floor and the mud below, hoping the last of the stairs wouldn’t break beneath his feet. For what he had seen up above was now seared forever into his mind: the man who laughed at him, who he knew would last, and the man who praised his imagination, who he already saw disappearing.
3
THE PAINTING was even more beautiful than he remembered it, Ben thought as he propped it up on the headboard of his bed later that evening, lying on his stomach in front of it. With his head at this level he almost felt as if he were walking down the painting’s street. He looked at the painting and found himself feeling very light, as if, lying prone on the bed, he were actually floating through the air. He wondered if this was what people felt like when they were finally freed of their bodies. There was a strange ache in his cheeks. He sat up and caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror next to the door, one of the few things his wife had failed to take with her when she left. To his surprise, he was smiling.
He wandered around the apartment that his former wife had denuded of everything but the bed, a desk, and one small bookshelf. On the desk was a stack of papers he had taken home from work, articles he had been assigned to edit for the American Genius Online Encyclopedia, a pathetic piece of pseudo-scholarship whose only purpose was to provide fifth-graders with material they could plagiarize for school reports. At the top of the pile was a recent encyclopedia submission on the subject of “Schrödinger’s Cat,” a paradox in quantum theory that had impressed him as supremely logical when he had first read about it as a teenager. In a hypothetical experiment, a cat is placed in a box, Ben fondly recalled, with a potentially self-opening pellet of cyanide that creates a fifty-percent chance of feline death. As the encyclopedia article rather inelegantly explained it,
Subatomic particles are often described as existing simultaneously in two contradictory states. But this is a paradox, like the idea that the cat in the box is “fifty-percent dead” up until one opens the door of the box to find out the cat’s state. On the macro level of the non-subatomic world, it is impossible for something to be both dead and alive at the same time, or to be “half dead.”
Ben glanced at the unedited article and smiled. It suddenly seemed to him profoundly possible for something to be both dead and alive at the same time. Half dead, surely. He turned to the floor, which was covered with old stacks of paper, whole categories’ worth of questions that hadn’t made it onto American Genius:
Which Aztec deity is considered the Lord of the Land of the Dead?
What name have scholars given to the compilation of spells discovered on scrolls that had been placed between the thighs of Egyptian mummies?
What is the Greek term for the transmigration of souls?
In the Book of Genesis, what guards the path to the Tree of Life?
He was in the habit of leaving questions lying around the apartment, scribbling them down whenever they occurred to him and then forgetting about them until he would return to the bathroom and pick up a tissue that asked him for the dates of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, or open a kitchen drawer and find a shopping list requesting the date of George Washington’s birthday according to the Julian calendar. His wife used to laugh at him for that. Sometimes she would append the notes with questions of her own:
Does your Five-Year Plan include cleaning the bathroom?
What do you want for your birthday?
Do we really have to visit the hospital every single weekend?
Have you ever noticed that your sister is always covered with paint? And once, toward the end, beneath a question about Egyptian kings:
Why should I care?
Only later did it occur to Ben that she wasn’t just referring to the pharaohs.
One day in recent weeks while he was slogging away at American Genius, she had returned to the apartment in his absence and relieved him of all of their furniture. Sara told him he should sue. He settled for changing the locks, but not before she returned again and took all of his books, for what reason he didn’t know—and there had been hundreds upon hundreds, cherished memorized volumes from the days when he had been a child prodigy, before he had learned the horrid truth that there is no such thing as an adult prodigy—except that she was thoughtful enough or resentful enough to leave behind the series of picture books by Ben’s mother. In the past few months he had barely been able to look at them. Now, though, with the painting lying on his bed as he waited for Sara to arrive, he took his favorite off the shelf and opened it.
It was a masterpiece: a beautiful melding of ink and watercolor, solid inked drawings of real things and then imaginative watercolor tracings of things in the story that had disappeared. The illustrations had won a prize. She had always been an illustrator, even before she began publishing her own books. But this time, as he opened to the very first page, it was the text that drew him in. He sat on his bed, more fully awake than he had been in weeks, and began to read the book called The Man Who Slept Through the End of the World.
* * *
He was always sleepy. At every opportunity he slept. Everywhere: at all the big events, concerts, parties. Everywhere. He just sat and slept.
One night while he was sleeping, it seemed to him that it was thundering outside. But he didn’t wake up. When his bed shook, he thought in his sleep that it was raining outside, and his sleep only became more delicious. He snuggled up under his blanket and kept sleeping. But when he woke up, he had quite a shock.
His wife was gone. His bed was gone. His blanket was gone. He would have looked out the window, but there was no window to look out of. He would have run down the three flights of stairs and yelled for help, but there were no stairs on which to run and no air in which to yell. He would have just gone outside, but there was no outside!
For a while he stood there, confused. Then he decided he would just lie down and sleep on the ground. But then he saw that there wasn’t even any ground to sleep on.
“What a mess,” he thought. “I’ve slept through the end of the world. How do you like that!”
Then he was annoyed. No world, he thought. What would he do without a world? Where would he work? And how would he make a living? Especially now that everything was so expensive and eggs were a dollar and twenty cents a dozen and who knew if they were even fresh? And where was his wife? Was it possible that she had also disappeared, along with the world and the money in his pants pocket? She wasn’t the type to disappear, he thought. And what would he do if he wanted to sleep? What could he lie on, if there was no world?
Well, there’s no world! Too bad,” our hero decided. “What can you do? I might as well go to the movies and kill some time.” But to his great surprise, he saw that along with the world, the movie theater had also disappeared.
“Look what I’ve gotten myself into!” our hero thought. “If I hadn’t been so fast asleep, I would have disappeared right along with everything else. Now where am I going to get a cup of coffee? And what about my wife? Who knows who she’s disappeared with? Maybe she’s disappeared with the guy from the top floor…. And what time is it, anyway?”
At these words our hero would have taken a look at his watch, but it had disappeared.
“I always drink a cup of coffee in the morning,” he thought. “Where am I going to get a cup of coffee? And here I went and slept through the end of the world!
“Help! Help!” he shouted into the emptiness. “What was I thinking? Why didn’t I keep an eye on the world and my wife? Why did I let them disappear? Help!”
And our hero began banging his head against the void. But since the void was a very soft void, he didn’t hurt himself, and he lived to tell this story.
* * *
When Ben last read it, years ago, the story seemed the same as always: amusing, absurd. But this time, as he looked around his empty apartment, he was suddenly astonished by how possible it was to let your wife and your life slip through your fingers simply because you didn’t hold on tight enough, how normal it was to assume the best of people, how common it was to foolishly count on others to guard you while you slept—how very, very easy it was to sleep through the end of the world. He was still thinking about it, banging his own head against the void, when Sara arrived at his door.
THAT NIGHT SARA was radiant. Her radiance came from confidence, from a failure to care about what anyone else thought of her, and Ben envied her for that. She was a doctoral student in art history and an artist herself, ten minutes younger than Ben, and she wasn’t what anyone, other than people who knew her well, would call attractive. Tonight, for example, it was clear that she hadn’t been teaching, only working alone: her right hand was encrusted with blue paint, and her hair was pulled back with a white garbage tie. But Sara had the kind of beauty that would sneak up on you, catching your eye only when you saw her burst out laughing, her blue eyes crinkling into dark slits in her face, or when you saw her with her head dipped into a book, her perfect fingers resting on the pale nape of her neck, or tracing the edge of her forehead where you could see the tiny dark brown hairs emerging from her skin, held in absurdly straight lines by her tight ponytail until they were allowed to race into wild curls. And then you couldn’t believe that you hadn’t always thought she was beautiful.
They were long past the point where they bothered saying hello to each other. Even phone calls between them generally started with a brutal question, going straight for the jugular. This time, she looked around the room, kicking lightly at the piles of questions on the floor. She plucked one off the rug, read it, and smiled.
“The Book of the Dead,” she said.
It was the answer to the mummy question. “You’re an American Genius,” he told her.
She snorted, then glanced at Ben’s lap and smirked. “How’s the book?”
He slammed it shut on his knee, trying to think of an obnoxious retort. But he found that he couldn’t even growl at her the way he wanted to. He couldn’t help it; he was still smiling.
Sara looked him in the face. “What’s so funny? Did you meet someone at the museum?”
Ben glanced at the mirror built into the wall behind his sister, and saw what Sara had not yet noticed: the painting resting on the bed behind him. And then all of his usual resentment of Sara—of her talent, of the competence that made their mother give her power of attorney, of her brilliant marriage to the brilliant husband whom Ben himself had long ago deposited in her lap—evaporated. Tonight, at least, he was the one with the bigger news.
Ben turned to the treasure l
ying behind him, picking it up and turning back toward Sara as he stood, holding it against his chest. “Do you recognize this?” he asked.
It took her a moment to respond, and when she did, it was as if someone else were speaking in her voice—as if, Ben thought, she were only a shell of herself, and the real Sara was floating freely around the room. “From the house,” she murmured. Ben grinned as he watched her gazing at the painting, mesmerized. It was a long time before she looked at him again. “You bought a copy of it?”
“It’s not a copy. It’s the one from our living room,” he said. “Look, you can even see in the corner where you smeared nail polish on it.”
Sara leaned toward him and peered at the painting’s corner. “Oh, God, you’re right,” she breathed, and stayed there, staring at it. “Where did you find this?”
“On the wall in the museum.”
“What?”
“It was part of the exhibit.”
Sara snapped her head up and stepped back until she had her back against the wall. She stood there, silent.
“There weren’t any alarms or anything. I was kind of surprised.”
Ben watched her face tremble as she struggled to speak. An eternity seemed to pass before she managed to form a word. “Ben, this is a crime,” she said slowly. “A crime. This is not like shoplifting in a drugstore or something. You’re going to go to jail for this.”
“Only if I’m caught.”
“Only if you’re caught?” she shrieked.
He ignored her, turning the painting back toward himself and sinking to the floor. Sara squatted beside him, still fuming. He pretended to be entranced with the painting, avoiding looking at her until she glanced away. Sara leaned her head back against the door and stuck out her lower lip, blowing air up toward the loose hairs on her forehead to make them fly. Sitting on the floor with her, Ben suddenly had the strange feeling that they were eight years old again, when sitting on the floor was completely expected, admiring a painting which, he had to admit, could have been an eight-year-old’s work. A vague memory entered his mind of sitting with her on the floor like this once, using paints to cover the wall of her room with fake paw prints, until their parents discovered them. The warm wave of longing that ran through his body embarrassed him.