All Around Atlantis

by Deborah Eisenberg

  She stood for a moment, shivering, feeling her body taking up space, pushing the air around in ways that were unfamiliar to the room, sending off its tiny, continuous demands. Jamie’s face had changed so much, really; by more than just time. Well, but what would that be—just time? “Morning,” she said.

  Jamie glanced up. “Morning,” he said. He indicated her arm. “Very chic.” Then he wandered out and returned with another kimono—also heavy old silk, but blue, with designs of waves and flowering trees. “Here. Say yes to shame.”

  He sat again, folded his arms, and rested his head on the table. It looked as though he were exhausted, too, although, throughout the long night, Rosie had pictured him luxuriously asleep in the next room—his silky hair, his comfortable, appealing body, which her body had had sex with a few times back in high school, before Mr. Tomlinson showed up and settled the matter for Jamie once and for all.

  Jamie opened his eyes and considered Rosie in the kimono. “O.K.,” he said, and sighed. “Well, that’s all right.”

  He took her through the frozen city. The neighborhood, with its Polish, Greek, and Hungarian bakeries, the hardware store, the German butcher shop, the fish market, the bank, the stationery store. Then farther afield to bars with sad pianos, and coffee shops that stayed open all night, to a bookstore with its webs of old light, to several little neon-festooned night clubs in a jaunty row, and to the downtown, where he and Rosie are working now, with its gentlemanly old office buildings and shining towers. What has all this to do with her? Once, glimpsing a cluster of blue needle caps discarded in a gutter, she is blinded for a moment; she might as well have glimpsed a company of angels departing the earth forever. Yes, this was where she lived; this barren, icy planet was where she lived now.

  She was still feeling far from recovered—though who was to say what “recovered” felt like? Her legs were still subject to involuntary actions; her body rebelled against its new unprivileged condition with small colds, infections, and rashes. Going to the corner for ice cream, washing a dish or two—for the first weeks anything might take her most of the day. She’d get lost no farther than a block from the apartment. Things slipped from her grasp, as if her hands had been confiscated and exchanged for paws. No amount of clothing was adequate to keep her warm or to locate her in space. She spent most of her time in Vincent’s room, in bed, wearing Vincent’s kimono. It was fantastically difficult to bathe; the prospect of water next to her skin brought her nerves right up to the surface, and Jamie’s best towel could have been sandpaper. Her hair became stiff with grime. By way of encouragement, Jamie bought her a little rubber duck. She saw its sunny shadings and its calm, blue eyes, and she rocked unsteadily on her feet. “Jamie—?” she said.

  “Drug-crazed twisto,” he said, and put an arm around her.

  They went on the little train, winding quietly among lines of laundry and fire stairs. They stared into back windows at people staring out at them just as they stare out from Jamie’s kitchen window at the people going by on the train. Rosie leaned back and closed her eyes. A voice near her said to someone, “This is my stop.”

  “How does he know?” Rosie said.

  “Well, I guess it’s on his card,” Jamie said.

  Rosie opened her eyes.

  “His card, the little card they give you that tells you what your stop is.” Jamie looked at her. “Oh, didn’t you get one?”

  The train is audible from Vincent’s room, but the tracks run by the back of the apartment, just outside the window of the kitchen. The people on the train stare into the window as they go by, and Rosie and Jamie stare back. Who are they? Who are they?

  Beyond the tracks are the backs of other houses, hung with a dirty lace of fire stairs. From Vincent’s window and from Jamie’s what you see are the fronts of the houses—turrets and complicated shingles—all dilapidated, with the oily gold light spreading out at night in the windows, and the grape-colored shadows.

  Nights, Rosie fades in and out, echoing with footsteps and whispers, traces of invisible inhabitants. She lies awake in Vincent’s room with its peeling, dark-blue paint, and the city breaks up into pieces, like a puzzle. All the various neighborhoods that Jamie showed her, the little train, the narrow tracks with street lights drooping over them tenderly, like dying flowers, this tiny, dark-blue room, the downtown—that shining wedge that pushes up from flatness and drops off in a sheer glass-and-steel cliff by the water. It floats through the darkness now in a bright sphere. The windows are cold and starry; green tendrils wind around the bed.

  The pieces of the city stream off into the darkness, and even in her sleep, the watery, transparent kind of sleep she has these days, Rosie listens for the little train to start up in the morning, swinging through the city, fitting the pieces back together.

  There are some things, Rosie thinks, that she ought to have dealt with long before she did. To be fair, of course, she’s had her hands full just standing upright. Just trying to work up some traction. Just dealing with the fact of herself, which pops up in front of her every day when she awakes, like some doltish puppet. So certain other worrisome items have just slid right off the agenda.

  Jamie didn’t make a living from his paintings, it was true. He did other kinds of painting, Rosie learned, to make money. From time to time he’d spend a few days or a week on the job, getting up early in the morning and going off to work in some rich person’s home. But when he wasn’t making paintings in his studio, Rosie noticed, Jamie became very…distant. Estranged…How long would it be before he got sick of her and tossed her out? It was a miracle he’d taken her in in the first place.

  What on earth was she going to do when he didn’t feel like taking care of her any longer? She hadn’t meant to just throw herself in a heap on his floor. On the other hand, she hadn’t meant not to; she hadn’t meant anything at all—she was just scrambling. And now she was going to have to get some money together, herself. And fast, too—she’d almost gone through her savings.

  Maybe the best thing about drugs, Rosie thinks now (or, on the other hand, maybe it’s the worst), is the way they unhook you from that stupid step-by-step business—first one moment, then the next, then the one after that. No skipping, no detours, no time off. Which is what she’s had to live through for all these long, recent months, and what she’ll have to live through, now, every day until she dies. No wonder she hadn’t particularly minded working in an office before. Beginning of day, end of day; pure-white time in between. The hands of the clock might sleep or twirl—that was discretionary.

  But the laws of human time must have registered on some template lying around in Rosie’s brain, because, facing the prospect of going back, Rosie remembers herself as a miner, hacking her way through the stony mass, instant after intolerably boring instant.

  And if only boringness were the whole problem! Again, Rosie’s memory offers up things Rosie didn’t even notice at the time: the sadness of herself, the sadness of all the others—the secretaries and clerks, working away like mice in their little cubicles, at their endless, miniature tasks, their careful clothes and clean hands, Good morning, good morning, how was your weekend? And Mr. Gage and Mr. Peralta in their horrible suits and ties, appearing at the doorways of their offices with sheaves of paper, the light from their windows flashing into the fluorescent light over Rosie’s desk.

  How polite everyone was, and how cheery! Their cheerfulness lay like boulders over geysers of misery. Have a nice night. See you tomorrow. By five in the evening you were abrim with filth.

  Rosie asked Jamie: Did he know of any jobs? Any people who worked in an office?

  “Are you out of your mind?” he said.

  Fine, she thought; that was her opinion of the whole thing, too, obviously.

  “You don’t want to do that,” he said. “You’d hate it.”

  “Really,” Rosie said.

  “Why are you pissed off at me?” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said. “Pissed off at anyone.”
>
  “Well, good, then. Hey, where are you going? Aren’t you going to say good night, at least?”

  “Good night,” Rosie said. “So you think I should be a doctor, right? You think I should be a famous artist.”

  Jamie looked at her. “Wow, Rosie…”

  Rosie put her hands over her ears. “Look, Jamie. Could we just not talk about this, please?”

  The next day she apologized, of course.

  “Hey, I was thinking last night,” Jamie said. “Now please don’t get pissed off again. But maybe you could be my assistant.”

  The room dimmed. “I know you’re trying to help me,” Rosie said laboriously, as if she were picking her way through the words in the dark. She was silting up, her blood was draining out. She should have stayed back there, she thought, where the spears just bounced right off. “I appreciate everything you’ve done to help me. But listen, Jamie…” She put her head in her hands.

  “…‘Listen, Jamie’?”

  “Well, I can’t. Obviously.”

  “Can’t what? Let’s see. Can you…” He plucked a paintbrush from a jar sitting beneath the kitchen table, and prodded her with the handle. “Perfect,” he said, as her hand closed around it to push it away. “Great reflexes.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Should I show you how I draw a house? I never even learned to finger paint.”

  “Rosie, we are not talking Sistine Chapel, here. Do you know what these jobs are about? The whole thing is ridiculous. A lot of these people like to think that there are only a few special people—really gifted people—who can do this shit. They get So-and-So, you know? Or So-and-So. Artists. But anyone could do it, a monkey could do it. Plus, do you know what kind of stuff they want? Once, I was flown to the Cayman Islands to paint an extra inch of rug on some guy’s floor. Once, I had to marbleize all of some lady’s toilet-paper holders.”

  “You think anyone can do it because you can do it,” Rosie said.

  “Wrong,” Jamie said. “I think anyone can do it because anyone can do it. Especially the easy parts, which I’m going to show you, foolproofily, how to do. Look, how do you think people get to be able to do a thing? First they pretend they can do it, and then they do it, and then they can do it.”

  Rosie stared; he wiggled the brush. “The main thing you’ve got to learn is to stay out of the medicine cabinet. Hey, lighten up—that was a joke.”

  The first job was an hour’s drive distant, and there were four of them—Jamie and Rosie and Marina and JeanMichel, squashed into Marina’s red pickup truck. Marina and Jean-Michel looked at Rosie. What had Jamie said to them? “Great,” Marina said. “A new face. Someone to bore with our war stories.”

  The sun was round and yellow. The city melted away. Lawns and trees and driveways flowed by. Massive houses sat behind hedges. The houses looked like pictures from travel posters: Spanish, Rosie thought; Japanese; English, maybe from some other century. “Where are we?” she said.

  “We’re dead now,” Marina said dreamily. “This is the land of the dead. Unfortunately, this civilization wasn’t worth preserving, so all these people fell into their pools and died. Isn’t that sad?”

  “Darling—” Jean-Michel sighed. “It’s not for us to judge these people. Scum though they be, it’s just not our job to judge them.”

  “No?” Marina looked at him with enormous gray eyes. “So, what is our job?”

  “Our job,” Jean-Michel said. “Our job…Right. Well, our job is to make a mockery of our God-given talents.”

  “Oh, yeah…” Marina said. “Right…”

  Rosie sighed; she was never going to be able to do this stuff…

  The red truck rattled and screeched into a driveway; the house at the end of it looked shocked into its whiteness. With noisy rapidity, Jamie and Marina and Jean-Michel unloaded pails and jars and stained rags and cloths, wooden sticks and cans and huge, old sponges, heaping it all up in the driveway like booty. Rosie blinked. “Trash,” Jamie said into her ear. She looked at him. “Trash,” he said again, as if he were patiently teaching a parrot.

  The lady of the house came out and greeted them nervously; her glance snagged on Jean-Michel, as if she’d been briefly hypnotized by his elaborate mass of little braids. She probably didn’t see too many black people out here, Rosie thought, who weren’t in uniforms. “I’m so glad you could come,” the lady said confusedly. Jean-Michel inclined his head, disengaging her stare with kingly ease.

  Upstairs, the four inspected a room where they were to paint a border of stenciled sheep, and a blue ceiling with white clouds, and then another room, where they were to make a border of stenciled flowers.

  “For this she needed us?” Marina said.

  Jamie shrugged. “It’s only our prices that can justify the misery of her husband’s existence.”

  A carton stood in the corner of the room, containing a whole little life—a jumble of soft toys and dolls, and a small, fuzzy blanket. “Hey, wow—” Rosie said, and the three others wheeled around.

  “I was just looking,” she said.

  “No, I know,” Jamie said, as Marina and Jean-Michel returned to setting out their tools. “Just, it’s…”

  “Fine,” Rosie said. “So I won’t look.”

  Jamie gave her a stencil and a round brush, and showed her how to hold them both and to pat the paint onto the wall instead of stroking it on.

  It was hard. You had to hold the brush just right and the stencil just right or you’d smear or drip. Rosie’s heart pounded in her ears as she lifted the stencil from the wall. “Right,” Jamie said. “Perfect.”

  Did children really like these little sheep? Or was it just the sort of thing adults insisted they like. Would Rosie have liked sheep on her wall when she was little? Sheep: She doubted they would have applied. She doubted these petrified-looking creatures would have improved her dreams any. She liked them now, though, poor things. Now it was easy enough to imagine them jumping over their fences, on their way off to slaughter…

  Painted sheep, stuffed animals, ribbons, sweet little-girly things—it reminded Rosie of sitting in the pretty bathroom back at Ian’s with her cappuccino and her bottle of rubbing alcohol and her needle and her hairbrush. “You’re doing good,” Jean-Michel said, and she jumped.

  “Thanks,” she said, flushing with rage and shame. Yeah, thanks. She knew perfectly well she was a charity case.

  The others laughed and joked—they didn’t even have to concentrate, though it was all Rosie could do to remember what, out of all the rags and brushes and stencils and containers she had to juggle, she was holding in what hand. “Oh, no!” she said; she’d blurred an edge. “No problem,” Marina said, quickly dipping a rag into some thinner and dabbing it expertly against the wall. “See? All better now.” Without looking at Rosie she returned to her own section of wall.

  But, after the third time Rosie smeared, Marina sighed loudly. “Sorry, but stencils are not the easiest way to start,” Marina said. She looked at Jamie. “You’ve got to be really, really careful with them.”

  “We’ve got too many people doing this anyhow,” Jamie said. “What we really need are some clean brushes.”

  He showed Rosie how to clean the brushes and lay them neatly out on a rag to dry. Fuck you, she thought; fuck you, fuck you. But the fact was it wasn’t all that easy to clean the brushes, either. You had to swish them around in a little jar of thinner, Jamie explained, and just keep changing to new thinner until it stayed clear. Changing it over and over, and over and over and over. And obviously, Rosie thought, the thinner was never going to stay clear.

  Marina was applying two bands of blue tape to the wall, in order to paint a thin pink stripe between them; the space between the bands didn’t vary by an iota, as far as Rosie could see. Marina and Jamie and Jean-Michel were working away, bending and reaching, with unhurried, engaged precision as the toxic incense of the paint rose up and swirled around them. Their hair was bound up in brilliant scarves, and their clothing and the ex
posed parts of their bodies were smeared with glistening colors.

  There were times Rosie missed her needle so much she could have burst into tears. She’d done just that, in fact—over coffee at some counter, in line at the bank where she went to open a tiny checking account, and once simply walking down the street she’d sobbed loudly, as if she’d been flung at the wall of a prison.

  For a few moments the tears would dissolve the distance between herself and her bartered immortality. When the tears were gone, the distance was back, as solid as before. But each time it happened, she felt a bit better—she’d had a little visit.

  “How’s it going?” Marina said brightly, not waiting for an answer. All friendly solicitude now that the walls were out of harm’s way.

  Rosie wandered into the bathroom they’d been instructed to use. Oily stains were ingrained all up her arms—phantom badges she had no right to wear. Her skin was already sore and stinging from the turpentine she’d rubbed on it, but she worked at the stains with soap, and then shook her hands to dry them. Were they allowed to use the towels? The lady hadn’t said; best not to. Rosie checked the mirror again, and smiled at it falsely. There. All better now.

  Stay out of the medicine cabinet. Some joke. Well, what did people like this keep in those things? Jamie had aspirin, and that was about it. These people were more serious, of course. Serious people: Rogaine, Aldomet, Propanolol, Zovorax, Imodium, and oh—there. Fiorinal. Marina with that blue tape! The patience of a robot.

  The bottle of Fiorinal was in Rosie’s hand, she noticed. She looked at it, and replaced it in the cabinet. She stared into the mirror, then smiled falsely at it once again. Ha—a person. But what a disappointment that she was the person she’d turned out to be. She reached for the bottle, opened it, and shook about half its contents out into a Kleenex.

  She found Jamie and the other two in the second room they were to paint. The lady of the house was with them. “Well,” the lady said. “Now I want her opinion.” She turned to Rosie. “He’s almost got me convinced. And these people”—she indicated Jean-Michel and Marina—“agree with him.” Jean-Michel, Marina, and Jamie stood by, splendid, like rabble in their raggy work clothes, their eyes gleaming and their faces streaked. “You’ve seen the samples, I’m sure. Let’s hear what you think.”