by Dara Horn
“Don’t cry, Pissant,” I said. “All you heard was a drunk old angel in a bar. If he tries to bring me to earth, I’ll smack his nose before he smacks mine.”
“You know how Simon is,” Pissant cried, still sobbing. “He’s a beast, a murderer!”
I knew that Pissant was right. Everyone was afraid of Simon. All of the other angels were too kind. He was the only one willing to bring us down to earth to be born, and smack us on the nose to make us forget our paradise. Every time you see a dent below someone’s nose on earth, it’s Simon’s fault. And whenever you see someone on earth with a pug nose, you can be sure Simon smacked him even harder than most. “What can I do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Pissant sobbed. “Your fate is sealed. You’ll forget everything. Just don’t cry, because if you do, he’ll hit you so hard you’ll be born noseless.” Then, suddenly, he stopped crying and had a twinkle in his eye. “Wait, Sammy, I have an idea.”
“What?” I asked.
He took a piece of clay out of his pocket. “Put this on your face,” he said, “on your nose and right below it. When Simon comes, he’ll be so drunk that he won’t notice it’s not your real nose. He’ll smack the clay, and then you’ll be born without forgetting anything.” He put the clay in my hand. “Go meet him at the bar yourself. It will be easier to trick him if he doesn’t take you by surprise.”
I took the clay and flew with Pissant—our last flight over paradise—until I reached his home and said goodbye. “Whatever happens, don’t forget me,” Pissant sobbed. “Promise me that wherever you go on earth, you’ll remember that somewhere in paradise, your best friend Pissant is thinking of you.” Pissant always was a crybaby. As for me, I was just lucky that the wind blew by and wiped away my tears as I flew to meet Simon.
When I arrived, Simon was sitting at the bar as usual. His face was almost as red as his beard. I stood at the door for a long time before I found the courage to go inside. “Hello, Simon!” I called, my voice shaking.
Simon saw me and tried to stand and greet me, but he had drunk so much that his wings were twisted together and he fell over. I went to him and straightened out his wings. Though he couldn’t stand straight, unfortunately he could fly. And what’s worse, his head was clear enough to know why I had come.
“Good, you’re here. Let’s go,” he grumbled. And before I could say another word, he had taken me under his wing and began flying me to the border between the two worlds.
Don’t think it was easy. Simon was dead drunk, and he kept losing his way. At first we flew for three hours and wound up right where we’d started. Not only that, but it was a dark night in paradise and Simon had forgotten his flashlight at the bar, so we were flying blind. In the dark we crashed into the angel of dreams, who was just beginning his nightly trip to earth, and we damaged one of his wings. That night everyone on earth slept without dreams. I thought of Pissant, safe in his bed in paradise, and wanted to cry. But I didn’t, because I remembered what Pissant had told me—that Simon hated tears.
When we finally reached the border, the winds were freezing. “Ugh, what cold,” Simon muttered, fluttering his wings. But he was still pretty unsteady, wobbling in the air. “All right, Sammy, it’s time to throw you down below!” he growled, and put me down on the very last acre of paradise. At that moment, he became a bit giddy, and gave me a pinch on the cheek. “You’re a great guy, Sammy. A great guy. Now stand on one foot and recite for me everything you’ve learned in paradise.”
I did as I was told. When I finally finished, he took out an enormous pair of scissors, turned me around, and cut off my wings. I was far too nervous to cry.
Okay, kid,” he bellowed, “now let’s see that snout of yours and get this over with quick.”
But while Simon was busy cutting off my wings, I had already placed the clay nose onto my face. He was so tipsy that he didn’t even notice.
“Simon, don’t hit me too hard, please!” I begged. I guess he was listening, because he gave me just a little tap. I almost didn’t feel it.
“Now scat!” he said.
For the last time I looked behind me, and saw all of paradise, the whole scene bathed in golden light. I looked at my wings for one last time, lying on the last acre of paradise.
“Goodbye, Simon!” I said to the angel with the twisted wings, and fell to the earth. He looked at me as I fell, shocked, but it was too late. I had remembered his name.
And to this day, I still remember everything.
It used to be Sara’s favorite book, this little watercolor treasure her mother had created. When My Last Day in Paradise was published (long ago, when Sara was still in college, counting the days between Leonid’s visits, days that might as well not have been days for all they mattered to her), Sara remembered thinking that she would someday read it to herself when she was pregnant. She even imagined reading it to her children. But now that the time had actually come—her pregnancy still invisible, barely a shadowed hint on her imperceptibly radiant cheek—she read the book and was simply horrified. She knew she was supposed to be happy, and in rare moments she was. But late at night, waiting for Leonid to finish putting in his long hours at work, and then even later, lying beside him, holding him, making love to him (for how much longer?), turning out the lights and trying to sleep beside him, she was paralyzed by fear.
Sheer terror. Sometimes she thought of the person inside her, the not-yet person, and felt herself shudder at the thought that it was a separate person, a person she didn’t know and didn’t trust, and therefore someone who might tear her apart, before birth or after. The person could gnaw through her body too early and die. Or the person could wait silently inside her until the appointed hour, but then be born ghastly, distorted, without hands, without eyes, without legs. Or worse, he could be born perfect, and then, through some error she would never perceive, grow up to destroy someone else’s life—for there are thousands of ways to destroy someone’s life, Sara knew, but to improve someone’s life, there are so few, so few! Or worse, he could be a she, and suffer as she had, forced to drag the future with her in her body, to wait for the world to come. When she thought of it she shook with fear.
And for good reasons, she was beginning to think. When she saw people with babies on the streets, she never once saw any of the parents smiling. Instead they grimaced. Not just frowned, but actually grimaced, bracing their faces and their babies as they stormed into stores and back out into a day so beautiful that the sun laughed out loud at the tight lines on their faces. Even the babies themselves looked exhausted, burned out. They squinted out of their baby seats like elderly men, shriveled and bald, three months old and already bored by the world. She kept hoping that with her baby it would be different. Late at night, though, as she lay next to the immense, slumbering Leonid—a sleeping giant, a solid rock that trembled with each breath like a shifting tectonic plate, slow and inevitable and certain, as if he slept without dreams—she realized that she didn’t believe it. And then she would struggle not to cry until Leonid heard her thinking and woke up.
“Are you worrying about the baby?” he asked her in the dark. He slurred his words the way he used to back in high school, his accent like a cage around his tongue. She remembered walking home with him and Ben from the high school once, not long after they had met. Ben had offered to walk Leonid home—a gesture of goodwill, helping Leonid carry his things while his arm was still in the cast—and Sara had joined them. But when they reached the deserted path behind Leonid’s building, Ben had stammered that he had left a book at school, and ran back to get it. Sara and Leonid were alone. And then Leonid, previously sullen and silent, suddenly started talking to Sara in that slurred voice, nonstop, words tumbling out of his mouth in random order, without articles or conjunctions or the past tense: about Chernobyl, about his school there, about his teachers, about his friends, about the junior boxing club where he had almost won the championship, about the nuclear meltdown, about fleeing the city, about the vast industrial wa
rehouse where they stayed for endless days with thousands of strangers, sleeping on concrete and waiting in lines for hours to use the outdoor toilets and icy showers while they waited for the poison to go away, about his aunt’s illness which his mother was sure was from the poison, about the same aunt’s death which his mother was sure was from the poison, about his father and mother screaming at each other in the warehouse in front of everyone—about how his father called his mother a fat cow with no imagination and his mother screamed that he was a male whore who did nothing but sleep with teenage girls and did he really honestly think she didn’t know about Katya because the whole world knew about Katya and there was hardly a person in their communal apartment who hadn’t heard every single groan that that little slut let out every time his “unimaginative” fat cow of a wife of eighteen years was out teaching her night class for adults and actually making something of her life, which is what people do who don’t feel the need to have an “imagination,” and if he was stupid enough to think that Lenya didn’t know about his little slut then he might as well be a cow himself for all he knew about children, because children see everything, and maybe he could hide his little slut from all his “imaginative” friends at work but no one can hide from a child, and it had deeply offended Leonid to be considered a child, particularly since he in fact did not know about Katya at all and this was the first time he had ever heard of her, and he adored his father and quickly decided that it was a lie and that his mother was a liar and a fraud and a fat cow like his father had said, and he therefore had sat silently raging at his mother while wrapped in a dirty government-issued blanket on the cold bare concrete floor in the giant industrial warehouse in front of thousands of other meltdown refugees who had begun watching the fight like it was a boxing match, cheering for one side or another while the poison continued to quietly leach its way into their homes hundreds of miles away—and then about returning to the city, months later, about going back to all the old things like his school (which had itself moved to a warehouse on the far end of the city) and his friends and his junior boxing club and pretending that everything was the same even though everything had changed, about being afraid, about being afraid to eat anything, about losing weight because he was afraid to eat anything, about being afraid to put on his clothes or brush his teeth or even to bathe because everything might have been poisoned, about starting to think that everything really had been poisoned and not just what the government said had been poisoned, about finding his father and Katya making love in his parents’ bed the night he returned from losing the championship (which his father had profusely apologized for being unable to attend) and knowing for certain that everything had been poisoned, about punching his father, about his father punching him back, twice as hard, many times, his father pinning him to the floor and pummeling him and then slapping the floor and counting like a referee while Leonid jerked in and out of consciousness, one, two, three, ten, about how he was a whole lot bigger now and if his father were here he could easily destroy him, absolutely destroy him, tear him into pieces (exactly as he was now destroying the already frayed edge of his canvas sling, the enormous fingers of his good left hand shredding tiny pieces of it over his right hand’s shriveled knuckles), but he was fifteen already and life wasn’t long enough, because what do you end up with when you fight someone, usually nothing, since you never know when someone who looks like a little weakling might actually be wearing a steel brace under his clothes and then all you get for it is a broken hand, so maybe it was time to stop fighting, and to stop being afraid. Sara listened and saw the giant in front of her shrinking down in her mind from a giant to a person, the way her father used to do when he would take off his prosthesis at the end of the day. “You took the words right out of my mouth,” she finally said. Then Leonid smiled at her, and asked, “Can I put them back?” She wasn’t sure what he meant until an instant later, when he leaned his enormous body toward her, cast and all, and slipped his tongue between her lips.
“You’re worrying about the baby. I can tell,” he said.
“No,” Sara lied in the dark.
She felt Leonid’s arm drift across her breasts. “It will be wonderful,” he said. “It’s different when it’s your child.”
That was what her mother would have said, of course: “It’s different when it’s your child.” Yes, Sara was beginning to think. Very different. It’s much worse.
But Sara was thinking of other things, too, now, as she lay in Leonid’s arms. She thought of the Chagall painting Ben had brought at last to her apartment, and how he had told her in a rush of words about the woman at the museum and about the numbers underneath the canvas. Sara and Ben had delicately detached the canvas from the lower right corner of the frame until the numbers appeared, as if formed from a void. The numbers slithered through her thoughts along with the shadow of a person in her womb, blending in her mind with the cryptic columns from her medical reports: the baby’s heart rate, the baby’s growth rate, the codes imprinted on the baby’s genes.
She turned in the bed beside the mountainous Leonid, and kept thinking. She thought of the painting she had bought at an antique shop earlier that day, identical in size and age to the Chagall, and of how she had found a book called The Art Forger’s Handbook at a used book store, and of how she had followed the book’s advice and scrubbed the surface of the other painting with steel wool and dipped it in bleach until it was burnished and blank. She thought of how afraid she had been that her apartment would be searched, or that her mother’s house would be searched, and of how Leonid had given her the keys to his mother’s apartment in New Jersey, since his mother had gone to Russia for the week—and then she thought of how Leonid wasn’t worried at all, was never worried about anything, not even the baby, because ever since he had met her when he was fifteen years old, he had decided to stop being afraid. And she thought, too, of the papers from the inside of the painting, the ones the woman from the museum had given to Ben—the ones he had mentioned, but hadn’t shown her. Pay attention to the shape of the dents in the canvas on the original, he had muttered, all business. You can replicate them by stuffing some paper into the frame to make it sag when you’re done. Don’t forget, or they’ll notice. And whatever you do, don’t forget the numbers. The numbers are the most important part. And then Sara thought of how strange Ben had seemed when he had given her the painting: how reluctant to talk, how hurried, how preoccupied, how distracted, how ashamed. Sara always knew when her twin brother was in love.
“Sara, stop thinking,” Leonid said. He ran his fingers through her hair in the dark, and then wrapped his arms around her, resting his hand on her belly as he cupped the shadow of a future person in the palm of his giant hand. “Please, stop thinking and sleep.”
Near dawn, she did.
COLOR, COLOR, BOLD, loud colors, colors that sang, colors that hummed, colors that screamed, colors that sobbed, or more often than anything else, colors that seethed, angry, bitter, unlooked at, unnoticed, darkening not from age but from loneliness, from knowing that they do not exist without someone to see them—Sara did not merely see them, but heard them, smelled them, tasted them, touched them. But when she started painting the Chagall in the newspaper-covered studio she had created in her mother-in-law’s kitchen—Leonid’s mother would never know, and Ben and Leonid had reasoned that hers was one address that the police would never trace—she found painting, for the first time, painful. She began with the meaningless numbers, detaching the canvas in exactly the right place and copying the shape of them exactly, down to the wisps of brushstrokes that grew from them like hairs. But she had to wait for the numbers to dry before she could reattach the canvas and continue, and the morning sickness she had staved off earlier had returned with the smell of the paint. She rushed to the bathroom and tried to vomit, but nothing came out. Instead she wandered into her mother-in-law’s bedroom and lay down on the bed, trying to feel better, staring at the blank white ceiling as though it were a canvas. But she
was still afraid.
Long ago, in a dream, Sara had climbed up a ladder into the night sky. It was the night of the Day of Atonement. She was twelve years old, fasting for the first time—and for the first time watching her hair turn from straight to curly, her body from straight to curved. She had worried that she would already be hungry and thirsty lying in bed that night, but she wasn’t. Instead she felt as light as a leaf driven by the wind, as if the world had released her. In her dream that night she ascended the ladder, climbing higher and higher until she reached a door that stood between the stars. She knocked, but no one answered. She knocked again, and still there was no response. But the third time that she knocked, dipping her feet into the night sky, the door opened and she found herself standing in an artists’ studio.
It wasn’t at all like her parents’ studio, with its neat piles of paper, or even like the art room at school, though in one corner there were large slabs of clay. Instead it was a vast workshop with dark wooden floors and walls, filled with all kinds of equipment—potter’s wheels, anvils, kilns, looms. Sparks jumped in the air. The equipment hummed in the room’s buzzing space with speed, energy, power, urgency; the shuttle of the loom shot back and forth through the shifting threads, the heavy clank of glowing iron into solid metal and the tight taps of a chisel into stone rattled the air, bubbles of glass and clay grew and contracted in the heat as molten silver dripped like hot tears. The people working there were both men and women, most of them old, though one of them, kneading a slab of clay, was a man in his forties, a short, thin man with a bald head and something disturbingly familiar about his expression. All of the artists looked familiar, actually—not in the sense that she knew any of them, but there was something more comfortable about them than typical strangers. They noticed her and smiled, nodding quickly before returning to their work.