When Ciprian woke, the bus had stopped by a shack. Passengers smoked cigarettes, stretched their legs. Two boys sold sweets from a kiosk. A man on the seat in front of him had turned toward Maria, pointing at the baby in her lap.
Such a cute little girl, said the man. How old is the little beast?
Two, said Maria, lifting the knitted cap so the child could open her eyes. We’ve just celebrated her birthday. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?
But Ana didn’t answer, of course. She turned her head and squinted. It was early morning, and the sun was peeping over the Atlas Mountains.
IV
Normally several days could go by without me giving a thought to Ana, but after she told me her story, she colored my life like a filter. I could no longer ignore the clock on the microwave, which I’d forgotten to switch to daylight savings. When I went up the stairs, I caught myself counting the seconds, and before long just looking at my watch became a worrying experience. I couldn’t help noticing that although I’d probably never had more time to myself, it was like time was shrinking around me. More and more often I glanced up from the computer and realized it was already eight or nine, and a few evenings after Ana told me her story, I went down to the pier to watch the sunset, only to discover that the streets were already dark.
That night as I lay in bed, Ana’s story filled my thoughts. The blinds were drawn, no lights were burning, and as I stared into the dark it was Ana’s parents I saw, and all the moments they’d erased. The trowel cut into the soil, the child wrapped in thick towels, a cold hand against the soft fabric, all of it contrived away. I couldn’t comprehend how they could do something so terrible, and after lying awake for an hour I unwound myself from Lærke’s arms and switched on the computer. Hunting around online, I trawled through forums about the People’s Republic of Romania to find a loose thread in Ana’s story, but all the facts fit. Ceaușescu’s daughter really had been a mathematician, and the Institute for Mathematics really had been closed down by the president in 1975. There had been a Romanian exchange program with Morocco, and on an antiquated website I found a travel diary by a mathematician stationed in Rabat who mentioned a Sefrou-based female colleague in his entries. I could scarcely believe it, but all the details held water, and it worried me. If Ana actually had been brought up as her own sister, if her parents had done something so awful, then why had she told me? Maybe she had been right in keeping the story to herself, and I shouldn’t have pressured her to tell me. All that talk about the story being appalling, sick, ruining lives even, did she really mean it, or was it an act meant to goad me on and make me interested? I didn’t understand, and it scared me, but it also made me curious, and when I went back to bed I puzzled over what was going on.
The next day was a Saturday. I’d barely shut my eyes all night, but that afternoon I took Lærke all the way up to the Bronx Zoo anyway. I’d promised to show her a coati, and today was the day, tired or not, lugging a picnic basket and wine and everything. The sky was blue and endless, ice-cream trucks jingled like Pied Pipers through the streets, and as we sat in front of the flamingos and drank out of thermos mugs, Lærke told me about last Thursday, which she’d spent with one of her new colleagues, a man who wrote grant applications for the journal. The colleague came from a provincial town in the Midwest, a town haunted by meth labs and the moldering dreams of high-school athletes, and in this town he’d grown up with his twin sister, who’d blazed a trail out of the womb and entered the world fifteen minutes before him. Their whole childhood, it was the same story. His sister was the first to walk; she could read several months before him; it was she who chose their friends and decided their games; and because she wanted to be a ballet dancer, he did too. At thirteen they were dancing at the local ballet school, and later they studied modern dance, and naturally they were each other’s dance partner at the provincial college’s sequined recitals. Quite a story, said Lærke—a pair of dancing twins from a town where the fog was thick with polychlorinated biphenyls, where the wind gasped around the vacuum factory’s abandoned halls and rippled the lake where mutated fungi multiplied—and maybe it was because they were twins that they were invited to audition for a corps de ballet in Chicago, a corps that called them back for a second audition, and while they trained and dreamed of shining marley floors in theaters across the world, the sister made a jump and landed badly, twisting her knee, tearing the meniscus or the ligament clear across, and in that one jump her career was over. Of course, they didn’t know that at the time, said Lærke, because at the auditions he danced for both of them, while she sat by the mirrors and stared into his eyes during the exercises, her dark eyes fixed like lodestars through the dévelopés and arabesques, her gaze reaching for his collar and guiding him through the dance, a gaze that was more like a cord or a noose, and the ballet master wanted to accept them both, but only once the sister’s knee was healed, so she went back to the provincial town to recover, while he began the training at once. Oh, but how cold and lonely it is in the big city without your twin—or how cold and lonely it was, for soon the company was setting off through California and Texas, and the sun beat down on Florida and the Carolinas, and in DC the cherry trees blossomed, while his sister went through physical and chiropractic therapy, methods both Mensendieck and Feldenkrais, and the gaps between her emails widened, splitting into gorges or chasms, until at last they stopped entirely, and then one evening there was a knock on his dressing-room door: a European agent, taken by his turnout or his port de bras or those tremulous dark eyes of his maybe. How her dancing colleague was able to drop his contract and head straight for Europe Lærke wasn’t entirely sure, but before long he was dancing on stages in Hessen and Baden-Württemberg, Moravia and Cisleithania, and the applause came thundering down as they toured through the Middle East and crossed back over the Atlantic, until finally they reached his home state, where he hadn’t been for several years. That evening his twin sister had to work a late-night shift and couldn’t come to the performance, so they nervously agreed by phone to meet the next day. It might have been nerves, in fact, that took him to a bar with his fellow dancers after the performance, and at the bar he bumped into three friends from high school, boys who now were men, or men who still were boys, Lærke couldn’t remember which way around, and they took him on their crawl through the town, surging from bar to bar toward the suburbs, till late at night they reached a club near the outskirts of town, a strip club populated exclusively by men, by hollering, raucous groups of men like the group of which he was a part, but which now dissolved into the bar, his old friends vanishing or sinking into the night—or perhaps he couldn’t see them through the disco smoke and alcohol—when suddenly a spotlight appeared with a flash and a silence fell across the audience, and he looked up from his shot of tequila or whiskey to see his own body emerge out of the dark: his own legs coiled around the pole, buttocks slowly lowered toward the edge of the stage, thighs spread, dollar bills pressing against thong; and through the blinking flare of the stroboscopic lights he saw her eyes, his sister’s dark eyes boring through the night, as though their lives and fortunes were a zero-sum game, all his luck countered by her humiliation and decline, as though they could never rise out of the muck, the two of them, because for each step one of them took toward the surface, the other sank deeper down. Then the colleague’s voice had broken, and Lærke had ordered another round of drinks, and she’d told him about her own past in the sticks, about her dad’s handball club and her mom’s obsession with radon and mold, the imaginary mold that crept behind the ceilings and the bathroom tiles and deep down into the bronchial tubes, and they’d talked about school gyms and walks down country roads in the early morning, as the sun rose above the corn or the rapeseed, beech or buckeye, on the way home from parties, and then they’d caught a cab to a club and danced all night like you dance in lost provincial towns.
How’d he end up as a grant writer? I asked.
Something about his knee. Some injury or other.
Yeah, isn’t that insane? Always like his sister’s shadow.
Exactly the same thing with Ana, I said.
What is? said Lærke, pouring more wine into our cups, and as the flamingoes quarreled with the ducks over their pink-pigmented feed I told the story to Lærke: how one sister was buried among the hills while the other prattled, swamped in a two-year-old’s loose clothing; how one sister was like the echo of the other; and how Ana’s parents had conceived an idea so strong it took corporeal shape and gained life in the world of reality, living beyond their consciousness, like a boat tugged loose from its moorings, a ship without a crew drifting across the ocean, its windows frosted with salt, its hold gapingly empty, a can of soda rolling back and forth across the icy deck, its only cargo, pitching through the waves.
Yeah, alright, said Lærke, enough with the metaphors.
But seriously, I said, how could they do it?
Lærke just shrugged, like it was possible to shake the story off. She didn’t believe it—the story couldn’t possibly be true—but then I told her about all the evidence, about Ana’s father, who’d hanged himself, about the appendectomy that nearly cost Ana her life. I mentioned the photograph at home on the bookcase, the one where Ana was a whole head shorter than her classmates, and maybe I got carried away, because Lærke didn’t say much, and later she went to the bathroom, or I thought she went to the bathroom, and it was a while before I realized she was gone. When I finally stood up, I found her in the tropical house outside the coati enclosure.
Just look at them, she said. Aren’t they the cutest things you’ve ever seen?
Lærke showed me how she’d once fed a wild coati a piece of pineapple, describing the dainty way it held the food in its small, furry paws, and I crouched down to see the animals better. They were inquisitive little beasts. One of them came right up to the glass to study me, sniffing at the pane with its long snout. Lærke looked at us with a smile.
Hey, it looks like you.
I stared at the animal. It had started licking something, its tongue buried in a brownish slop.
What? No, it doesn’t.
It totally does. Just look at it.
Lærke took a step backward to compare us better: It was something about the pointed nose, she said, something about the self-satisfied smile. On our way out of the tropical house we passed through the nocturnal animals area, and as we sauntered among the glass enclosures of bullfrogs and opossums and flying foxes, I couldn’t help thinking about Michel Siffre, the speleologist, and I told Lærke about his last great experiment. In the early seventies NASA got interested in his experiences underneath the glacier, having heard about the peculiar results. They wanted to investigate human beings’ internal clocks, to get to the bottom of our perception of time, so in 1972 they lowered him deep into a cave in Texas. For six months Siffre lived in the cave with electrodes and cables hooked up to his brain, living without daylight, without clocks, cut off from external time and seasons. For half a year he lived exclusively according to his body clock—each day he got up when he woke, each day he went to bed when he was tired—and he kept a record of his silent days in a logbook. He explored the cave, listened to records, and read books by the light of a lamp. It was a uniform life, a regular life, and the logbook entries that described his days were roughly the same length. Each day he completed approximately the same tasks, each day felt more or less the same; but the researchers on the surface could see the distortions. One night he slept thirty-three hours at a stretch. Another night just two. Some of his days were fifty-two hours long, others only six, but when Siffre read his diary he couldn’t tell the difference. He’d perceived the days as absolutely uniform, as if they were the same length.
So what? asked Lærke.
So what? Just imagine if you could bend time like that. Imagine you could be awake for six hours but feel like you’d lived a whole day. Life would feel a lot longer.
Bullshit. You’d still be living the same amount of time.
On paper, yes. But it’s the feeling that matters.
Lærke said nothing. She turned toward the exit.
Don’t you see what I mean? I said. That’s what makes Ana’s work so strong. You think it’s about science, but really it’s feelings she’s exploring. Feelings manipulated by science, or science distorted by feelings. It’s feelings, see?
Yeah, said Lærke, opening the door onto daylight. You don’t need to tell me that.
Not long afterward, I began writing a short story about a girl who’s her own sister. I changed none of the details, just filled in the gaps. The librarian’s spare room, where the girl’s father lived as a young man. Two infatuated mathematicians in a shed behind a summer cabin, a bus lurching up the Atlas Mountains. I saw it very clearly. Her mother walking through the living room, impelled toward the phone, her sister’s arms splashing in the water. The girl many years later, reading a note on the door to her father’s office. I’d never been so full of a story, never felt another person’s life rush so clearly through my body, and for the next few days I set my alarm clock early so I could write in peace and quiet, before Lærke woke. In the early light of dawn I made a cup of coffee, and sat quietly at my desk, writing about the girl, uplifted by the epic mood that sometimes gripped me when I heard about other people’s lives, the places they’d been, the people they’d met, the possibilities their choices opened up, and for a moment I felt like I could lead a life as rich and complex, if only I would listen closely.
Four days after our trip to the zoo, I was walking through the gilded columns of the Brooklyn Public Library when Ana called. By that time it was probably six or seven days since I’d seen her, my short story about the two sisters was in full flow, and I was on my way to the library to track down books on topology and algebra. I was brimming with questions about Zoia Ceaușescu and the Institute for Mathematics, but I didn’t get a chance to ask them, because when I picked up the phone I could hear the disappointment in Ana’s voice.
So I was right, then, she said. I should never have told you that story. Now you don’t want to see me anymore.
What are you talking about? Of course I do.
Then why haven’t you called? It’s been a week, and I haven’t heard anything.
I’m sorry, Ana, it’s just that I’ve been pretty busy. My girlfriend’s just flown into town.
Oh yeah, your Danish girl. Right.
Then she told me about the preparations for Timemachine, her performance, which was beginning in a week. At first she’d been looking forward to moving in, spending nights at the gallery to get used to the dark, but the past few nights had been full of nightmares and daydreams and hallucinations, there were scratch marks all over her body, and last night she’d been convinced that the blankets were wet, because there was no light to separate sleep from consciousness. It was impossible to tell if she was asleep or awake, and she’d groped around on the mattress for hours, clawing at her arms to make sure she was still there, still breathing in that abysmal anti-light. All she was sure of was the feel of skin pressing against her fingernails, pain emanating from her forearms, sensation her only bulwark against everything that might creep out of the darkness, imagination all there was to fill it.
Look, Ana, I said. Are you sure this exhibition is a good idea?
Of course. It’s just a been a weird couple of days.
Weird how?
Well, it’s like my brain’s on playback. When I can’t see anything, it starts broadcasting reruns. Old memories, conversations, TV shows I thought I’d forgotten.
Then she reeled off a series of memories that had come to mind in the dark: the heroine in a Russian cartoon she’d once seen; the names of the hens they’d kept in the bathtub during the lean years in Bucharest; an incident in the nineties when the family cabin was overrun by a swarm of grasshoppers. She’d been ten or twelve at the time, the air had hummed with insects, and every day she followed the grasshoppers around the house. S
he wanted to find out whether they were really as lazy as Aesop said in his fable, so she followed them through the woods and far across the fields, watched them gnaw the ears of wheat and mate unthinkingly, and decided Aesop’s story had done a number on their image. They were no lazier than other insects. They didn’t play the violin all summer long. One day she followed a grasshopper that was behaving strangely. She found it at the edge of the road and tracked it across the field as it hopped along without pausing to rest, leaping among rows of sunflowers toward the pond. But instead of stopping at the water’s edge like the other grasshoppers, it hopped straight into the water. It didn’t swim. It didn’t even try to get out. It just lay on the surface, utterly still, its head beneath the water, as though it had lost courage or the will to live, a dejected little insect. She’d not thought about it since, but as she lay there in the dark the suicidal grasshopper had popped into her head, along with an article she’d read in a science magazine a few years back. The article was about a hairworm, a parasite that infects praying mantises and grasshoppers through drinking water, and lives in their stomachs. When the hairworm is sexually mature, it no longer needs its host. All it needs is an aquatic environment where it can mate. So it spreads its genes through the grasshopper’s nervous system, infecting its brain and changing its nature, ordering the insect to plunge headfirst into water, making it drown itself. Then, once the grasshopper has committed suicide, the hairworm crawls out of its guts, abandons the corpse and swims out into the water to lay its eggs, and a new cycle can begin.
The Invention of Ana Page 18