The World to Come

by Dara Horn

  This was something new. She opened her eyes, her skin suddenly cold against the edge of the sink. Saul looked back at her, and a jolt of terror struck her as it occurred to her that he might be waiting for a reply. And if it works out, it means the grandchildren will be mine, she heard Saul’s mother repeating in her head. She was silent. Saul smiled and closed his eyes, pressing his body against her and leaning in toward her ear. Brushing his lips against her earlobe, he whispered, “Marry me, Erica.”

  “No.”

  She looked up to see if he had heard her. He had. He stared at her, his gentle fingers stopping short. Then, without warning, he pinned her to the edge of the sink and thrust into her, crushing her with his full weight. A moment later, as Saul arched his back and gasped for air, Erica took the opportunity to slip out from under him, pushing him back with all her strength. She slipped and plummeted to the floor, knocking her head against the toilet as she fell. Saul followed her to the floor, a mad demon, lying down on top of her like a heavy blanket, or a shroud.

  Afterward it was as if nothing had happened. She let him pull her up off the floor and back into bed, where he promptly rolled away from her and fell asleep. Erica lay silently beside him until she heard his first few snores. Then she crept out of the bed, her movements careful and silent. He was a lighter sleeper than she had thought. She was afraid even to open a drawer. Instead she slipped on a pair of sweatpants and one of Saul’s T-shirts that had been lying on the floor, grabbed her purse, and left. Outside, the sun was just coming up, and the only people on the street were more homeless than she was. She wandered for almost twelve hours, pacing the streets, until she found the courage to knock on her brother’s door.

  After three days of doing almost nothing but sleeping on her brother’s couch and reading children’s picture books to her brother’s little daughters over and over again, she finally found the courage to go back to work. There she discovered a letter on her desk, signed by Saul and two other museum administrators, informing her that her efforts at the museum had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. And so, one month later, she found herself at her new job, sitting in her depressing basement office at the Museum of Hebraic Art.

  ERICA’S BOSS AT her new museum was a man named Max—a happily married grandfather in his sixties, to Erica’s relief. But her relief didn’t last long. Max was enraged by the theft, and he blamed Erica for it. At an emergency meeting the day after the heist, he made a point of asking who on the curatorial staff had been responsible for the cocktail hour logistics, even though he clearly knew the answer, humiliating Erica into raising her hand like a child. Later that morning he barged into her office, foaming at the mouth.

  “Let me put this right on the table,” Max growled, not bothering to sit down. He carefully kicked aside her extra chair, making way for himself to hover over Erica’s desk. “You’re new here. You organized that cocktail hour. This happened on your watch.”

  Erica took a breath. She had been dragged through dirt before. “The problem wasn’t the event,” she said slowly. “I followed the protocol exactly. The problem was that we have no alarm system. You can’t hold a major exhibit like this without securing the objects and alarming them. Every other museum knows that. It’s absurd. We have a huge security budget, but all those metal detectors aren’t going to—”

  “Erica, you know that we have security concerns here that other museums don’t have.”

  Erica closed her mouth. There was no point in arguing, she saw. She looked down at her desk. Saul had left her with a fear of bosses, and she couldn’t afford to lose another job.

  “Here’s what I want from you,” Max said. He was leaning down toward her now with his hands on her desk, breathing in her face. “You have the lists of everyone who bought tickets. Hell, you made the goddamn name tags. I want you to call every single person who came to that event and interview every last one of them about everything they saw that night. In person.”

  Erica stared at him. This was insane. “Aren’t the police doing that?”

  “Yes, but there’s a limit to what the police can do. They don’t know what to ask. We’re supposed to be helping them out. And frankly, I think certain people would be more, let’s say, open with someone like you.” He gave her a disgusting wink.

  Erica shuddered, but Max didn’t give her a chance to refuse. “Start making your calls now,” he said, and left.

  So Erica began. And after three days, she had gotten nowhere. Most people didn’t even bother to return her calls. Those who did had paraded into her office one by one, each with the same lines, as if they were reading from a script: Wow, stolen? Wow, that’s too bad. Lemme think. No, didn’t see anything. Wasn’t looking for that kind of thing, if you know what I mean. Wow, sorry. Wow, good luck. There had been articles in several newspapers with photographs of the painting, soliciting tips, but none had emerged. The police investigation was already focused on the possibility of an inside job, but Erica looked around at her colleagues—old men whose offices were plastered with family pictures, suburban women always running off to pick up some child, administrative assistants who spent half the day playing computer solitaire—and found it hard to believe. Meanwhile, the museum was wallowing in industry ridicule, had an irate Russian gallery and a far more irate insurance company on its back, and would be lucky if it could ever hold a major exhibition again. Even Saul had left messages for her at work about the theft, expressing his own museum’s condolences, apparently for no other reason than to gloat. And then at last she came to the end of the alphabetical list, and waited in her basement office for Benjamin Ziskind.

  HE WAS FIVE minutes late. No, ten. He was her last appointment of the day, and she had already turned off her computer, eager to leave. But now he wasn’t showing up. Irritated, she decided to give him five more minutes, and began to doodle on the legal pad where she had written his name at the top. Ziskind, she thought. Why did the name sound familiar? She didn’t remember him from the cocktail hour; no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t recall a face from that evening to fit that name. No, she had heard the name somewhere else. Then she knew where she had heard it: it was the name on the cover of the picture books she had read to her nieces, during her involuntary stay at her brother’s home and on several visits since then. Her nieces seemed to have an endless supply of books by that one author, and they refused to let Erica read them anything else. Thankfully, the books had been pretty good. Her phone rang: a different Ziskind was on his way down.

  There was a knock at her office door. “It’s open,” she called, almost forgetting who she was waiting for. Then the door opened, and Erica held her breath.

  Standing before her was the one person from the cocktail hour that she actually remembered, though she had forgotten his name—the jittery man who had snapped at her. He was a slight man, thin, with dark hair and thick round glasses, not much taller than she. Yet there was something unnerving about him, captivating, both then and now. He hesitated at the threshold, holding the door open with his fingertips without stepping closer. It was as if he couldn’t enter without her magic word.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Ziskind,” she said, trying to sound businesslike. “Please, come in. We’re just doing a routine follow-up here after the theft. I know you mentioned on the phone that you’d already talked to the police. That’s great. I just need to take down some details about you and what you saw.”

  “Okay,” he replied softly. There was a stillness in his voice that surprised her. He entered her office and sat down on the chair opposite her desk, the one that Max had kicked aside during his tirade. He took off his glasses for a moment, rubbing one eye before opening both and looking right at her. His eyes were large and brown, almost black. With his glasses, she had barely noticed them. She fumbled with her pen, and it fell to the floor. Embarrassed, she reached for another one from the corner of her desk. He leaned forward and pushed it toward her, sending it swiveling across the surface between them. Whe
n she caught it, he smiled.

  Flustered, she stared down at the paper and asked him for his address. She found herself taking more time than she needed to write it down, spelling out the letters of the street name. It looked beautiful like that, she thought. West Seventy-eighth Street. But she was being ridiculous.

  “Occupation?” she asked. She looked up again, eyeing him across her desk. Here in the depths of the museum, under harsh fluorescent light, his pale skin glowed thin, revealing dim blue veins along the sides of his neck. Yet he looked older than he had seemed in the gallery that night, and more confident. There was a firm clarity in the way he glared at Erica that reminded her of her father, on her father’s better days.

  “Television,” he said.

  This seemed hard to believe. He was attractive, she admitted to herself, but hardly glamorous. She noticed he straightened his back as he said it, almost with pride.

  “Doing what?” she asked.

  “I write questions for American Genius.”

  Erica stared at him, waiting for him to smirk, or to otherwise let on that it was a joke. “That’s a full-time job?” she asked.

  But the man didn’t smile. “I write several hundred questions a day,” he told her, deadpan. “For every question on the show, there are hundreds that are rejected.”

  She was about to laugh when he awkwardly raised his hips in his seat, wresting a thin wallet from his pocket. He pulled out a ragged business card and slapped it down in front of her: Benjamin Ziskind, Staff Writer. The network’s logo gleamed on card stock. He was serious, it seemed.

  “Interesting job,” she said. “I’ve seen that show a couple of times. Isn’t that the one with the really annoying host? That fake cowboy guy? I hate him.”

  To her surprise, Benjamin Ziskind laughed. It was a ridiculously loud laugh, and she had to stop herself from laughing at his laugh. “That’s the one,” he said, when his wild laughter had settled down.

  She tried to hold back her grin. With people like Max and Saul, she had begun to think that she was crazy—inadequate in some way that others saw immediately but that she herself insanely couldn’t see. But Benjamin Ziskind seemed to be even crazier than she, even more oblivious to the world, and that fact soothed her. “Let’s get down to business,” she said, allowing herself to smile. “What do you remember about the cocktail hour?”

  He had stopped laughing, sipping slow breaths. Now he leaned back, stricken. “Look, I already talked to the police,” he said. His hand gripped the chair’s armrest like the gnarled roots of a tree. “I told them everything you would want to know. I didn’t see anything suspicious. I didn’t even recognize the painting you’re talking about when I saw it in the paper.”

  Erica tapped the pen on her desk and sighed. It was the same thing everyone else had told her, only more concise. Max was an idiot, she thought. But then she remembered something. “You were in the gallery right before the music started, weren’t you?” she asked. “Did you see anyone lingering there before you went down to hear the band?”

  She watched as he moved in his seat, fidgeting with a finger as if twisting an invisible ring. Amazing how harmless certain men looked to her after Saul, she thought. And how gentle. She remembered thinking he was short at the cocktail hour, but in his seat he looked taller, his posture so perfect that he seemed almost regal. In another context, she might have reached for his hand.

  “I really don’t remember,” he said. “I was on my way out.”

  “You didn’t stay for the music downstairs?” she asked.

  “I had to go home to meet my sister,” he said. “The police already called her, if you don’t believe me. I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you, too, if there are other interrogation cells available.”

  Erica winced. She was surprised that the sarcasm bothered her, but it did.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. He hunched forward, his hands in his lap, looking down at his knuckles. “I’ve had a difficult week.”

  “We all have, I suppose,” Erica said, hiding her astonishment. It had been a long time, perhaps years, since she had heard a man apologize. She smiled.

  “Do you have anything else to ask me, or can I go?” he asked.

  She looked down at her legal pad, wondering what more she could say to prolong the conversation. Then she saw his name again, the doodle lingering between the letters of his address, and glanced at him again. “I was just wondering: Are you related to Rosalie Ziskind?” she asked.

  As soon as she said it, she heard how irrelevant it was, absurd. But the man sat up in his seat. At first Erica thought he recognized the name, but then his face resumed its grim, tight-lipped pallor. He looked disappointed, as if he had been hoping for another chance to proclaim his innocence and had lost it. He watched her, waiting for more.

  Erica made herself smile, surprised to find herself embarrassed. Why had she said anything? But now she was forced to explain. “This is going to sound silly, but—well, my nieces have this huge collection of picture books by someone named Rosalie Ziskind,” she said. “They have the whole series, and I really like those books. Anyway, I’m sure there are thousands of Ziskinds in the world, but I was just wondering if you were related.” She grimaced, unable to sustain the smile.

  The man’s lower lip hung open for a moment. He moved his head slowly, as if the room were moving and he were trying to steady his vision. Erica opened her mouth, ready to tell him to forget it, when he finally spoke. “She’s my mother,” he said.

  “Your mother?” Erica repeated. She looked at him, stunned. When she started talking again, she almost couldn’t stop. “Well, please tell her for me that I absolutely love her books. My favorite was The Dead Town. That was amazing. Usually ghost stories for kids are just gory or stupid, but that one…I mean, a town where people don’t even notice that they’re dead? Or where the dead come back to life because they aren’t worthy of being dead? I read it to my nieces as a bedtime story, but then I couldn’t sleep for days. I just couldn’t get past that line near the end, where the man from the dead town says, ‘No one in our town has ever really died, because no one in our town has ever really lived!’ I mean, God, that’s not a kids’ book. That’s—I don’t know what that is.”

  Erica realized that she was babbling, letting down her guard, and for no good reason except that she had talked to almost no one in weeks except for a few coworkers and her brother—and she didn’t want the man to leave. She held her breath, then considered the person in front of her. He was sitting like a statue, and for an instant she caught herself admiring him, her eyes tracing the tension in his arms and shoulders as if he were one of the sculptures in the galleries upstairs. But when she finally let herself smile at him, he didn’t smile back. He watched her from behind his glasses with a puzzled look, and then backed his chair away from her desk. Suddenly she was sorry she had said anything; clearly she had said something wrong. “Your mother is incredible. Really,” she said, swallowing a seeping taste of shame. “I’m looking forward to reading whatever she writes next.”

  He coughed, then suddenly stood up. “I have to go now,” he announced, glancing at his bare, hairy wrist as if he were wearing a watch. “May I please leave?”

  Erica had barely nodded her head by the time he reached the door. “Sorry to take up your time,” she called after him. But the door had already swung shut.

  Erica stared at the closed door, wondering if she should invent a reason to follow him out. But the opportunity had passed. She looked again at the legal pad with his name on it, her few sparse notes taken along the sides of the doodle, and she found herself thinking again of the picture books she had read to her nieces so many times, with their rivers of watercolor and deep shadows of ink. Her own mother had been an architect, and Erica had always loved to watch her work: careful, steady hands laying out lines with purpose, each perfect angle braced with potential, with a world waiting to be built. What was it like growing up in the Ziskind house, she wondered,
with a mother making those books? Was it like growing up in hers? But here she was, daydreaming, wasting time with other people’s memories. Your problem, Erica, she heard her brother lecturing in her head, is that you take other people too damn seriously. You believe everything anyone ever tells you, and then you end up taking all their shit. Her brother’s only problem, it seemed to her, was that he was always right.

  Erica tore off the sheet from the legal pad and reached for a file folder on her desk, the one where she was storing all her notes from these pointless Max-induced meetings. She would have to copy it over later, minus the doodle. On top of the folder was a stack of documents about the stolen painting, papers that she had barely had time to skim. She tugged at the folder from underneath the pile, but it wouldn’t budge. She leaned over to move the stack instead. On top was a piece of paper listing the painting’s provenance. She was about to push the pile over to get to the folder when she saw the words at the top of the page:

  “Study for ‘Over Vitebsk,’” by Marc Chagall, 1914.

  Earliest known owner: Private collection, Rosalie K. Ziskind.

  7

  WHEN TWINS are in the womb and one of them is born—Sara remembered hearing once—the twin who remains behind watches his sole companion vanish and suffers an agony almost too devastating to bear. Only a moment later, he will understand that his twin has not died, but quite the opposite, that his vanished friend is closer to him than he can know. This, according to a story Sara once heard, is also the way of real death and the world to come. Just because we think people have disappeared doesn’t mean they have. They are closer than we think.