Honestly, he wasn’t impressed. She struck him as a bit ridiculous. Or rather, what everybody said about her struck him as a bit ridiculous. On campus, he had never said a word to her and saw no reason to. But everybody else there thought differently, it was a thrum of childish delusions: her beauty was bewildering, her soul was black; whenever she walks into a room, someone runs out crying; her father was rich or dead or rich and dead; she was an heiress; she was the Elisse Hotels heiress; she had lovers by the dozen; she was this, she was that, a proliferation of clichés. The first time he saw her, when someone pointed her out in the cafeteria, where she was scanning the room, as if looking for a friend or the emergency exits, Paul wasn’t impressed at all. He found her, unsurprisingly enough, smaller than he’d imagined. Smaller and less symmetrical, her features less legendary. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that, certainly not a redhead. She had the sort of hair that, when it was backlit, seemed to be ablaze – but to actually touch it would be underwhelming, just as it would be for anyone wondering what it would be like to catch a fox, to grab it with their bare hands and stuff it in their coat. But what a silly idea that would be, what strange, dark eroticism, and of course, Paul thought, if this girl had such a reputation it was because liking her, liking her red hair, in fact meant liking a certain sort of danger, a danger that had real teeth; and courting it, and complaining bitterly after about having been bitten. Oh, that’s Amelia Dehr? Paul had said with a rather unconvinced grimace, and his scepticism had made half the table’s occupants quiver with relish and something verging on fear, as if he were questioning something far greater and far more fundamental than that girl right there. As if the uncertainty he had just breathed into this seemingly unambiguous fact – that Amelia Dehr was worthy of being looked at – could spread to other things that everyone at the table would prefer to stay stable and clear-cut.
And now she was once again standing at the threshold of a place where he was sitting; but this was nothing like that day at the university when the presence of his friends had been a bulwark. This time, he was alone, as was she – her outside and him inside. So, he realised, it was true after all: she lived in a hotel. He contemplated not letting her in, leaving her outside all night. Yes, all night if he had to. She buzzed again, and Paul finally pressed the button for the sliding doors, which opened to let in Amelia Dehr. And then Paul did something he had never done before: he hid. He slipped down, calmly, as if his body had lost all form and his clothes were now drifting down, and he huddled beneath the desk. He heard Amelia Dehr’s heels clacking on the black-green marble tile that blurred all the silhouettes reflected in its sheen. He heard her pause at the front desk before walking on to the elevators. All this time, he was crouching beneath his desk, discomfited by how shameful it was to work where she lived, how horribly close that felt to working for her. His pride was so essential to him, so much a vital organ, that he could not accept this; if Amelia Dehr’s gaze ever met his, he and his pride would both burst. In his head, that made sense, but honestly, if anyone was to feel ashamed here, it ought to be those who lived where others worked, it ought to be Amelia Dehr who felt that shame. Paul did not realise this truth, but Amelia, to her credit, did. His sense of shame overpowered him. It wasn’t just that he was poor; he also felt guilty for being so. Yet when he wasn’t at risk of being seen by Amelia Dehr, he felt as if he lacked for nothing; and so he would rather be folded up, curled up, wedged into a crevice, would rather be under the desk than sitting upright in his chair in her line of sight, humiliation eating away at him.
And so a haphazard two-step played out between Paul and Amelia, more specifically between Paul and the Amelia he saw on the screens, the Amelia he imagined, an Amelia who bore little connection to the real one. And young and not-so-young men came and went, waiting in the lobby, on the seats in front of the reception desk and in front of Paul, as he watched Amelia on her floor above leaving her room and coming down, unhurriedly, sometimes running her neat fingernails along the wall, almost gliding. He watched her redo her make-up in the elevators. Her motions seemed unexpected, almost violent to him. But as she peered into the mirror, bit her lips, pinched her cheeks, there was no way for the black-and-white video to show how the blood rose and gave her skin a healthy, attractive flush. And just as the elevator door opened, scarcely a few feet away, Paul would suddenly think up some urgent task he needed to deal with in the back room or he would become absorbed in an apparently lively conversation with one or two of his colleagues. Or he would simply, awkwardly turn his back for as long as it took Amelia to cross the hall and wave to her suitor (where did that word come from, Paul wondered; these men were utterly unsuitable for her). She would leave with him or maybe the man would follow as she turned and led the way upstairs. Paul would then spend far more time than he realised staring at the screen that showed the empty third-floor hallway, waiting for someone there who never did come out. Maybe they’re still all in there, Paul mused as he finished his shift. Maybe it’s one of those rooms you walk into and never leave again.
Sometimes he saw her going down to the basement, to the gym; other times she came to sit in the empty restaurant. He wondered what she was doing in the half-light – there, or in the deserted meeting rooms. He watched as she tried the door handles to see if one was unlocked, which there always was since the staff were often careless, or not so much careless as rushed, and forgot to lock them after business meetings and industry conferences and all those deathly boring talks that went on there. Paul would sometimes go down, and, even though there was no one else to watch the monitor screens, anyone who did look would have thought he was locking all the doors, when in fact he was using the hotel key to make sure that one of them remained unlocked should Amelia Dehr feel the need for a meeting room.
Once or twice there were disturbances, rowdy parties, smoke alarms going off, and once or twice there were screams. I don’t know what’s happening next door, said the worried guest whose name Paul never did learn; I don’t know what’s going on, but it sounds like something being broken. Maybe furniture? There are voices. Paul’s face remained impassive. She wasn’t deterred: what if it’s bones? That night Paul had no choice but to go up, this woman hot on his heels, and knock on Amelia Dehr’s door, even though they couldn’t hear anything from the hallway. He had no choice but to bang on the door, and Amelia finally opened it, slightly breathless yet steady – though her lips, Paul thought, seemed to have been bitten recently, bitten by someone else? As if by tacit agreement, they acted as if they didn’t know each other, as if each had never seen the other before. Is everything all right, miss? Paul asked, and Amelia replied: Thank you, sir, yes, everything is all right. Her eyes were unsmiling. He tried to look past her, into the room. An unmade bed. A lampshade, slightly askew. Nothing.
*
They were nothing to each other and then they were friends. Later on, they would be lovers – or they were lovers, and later on they would be friends. But before all that, before any kind of relationship, Paul and Amelia Dehr were rivals. Secret, stubborn rivals. She came out the victor. Paul saw this as a tragedy; later on, he would see it as a blessing. At the time, the undisputed celebrity of their university, of all universities (or so they thought) was Anton Albers; crowds of students thronged in front of the lecture hall at dawn, long before their class started, in order to snag a spot. The wait, Paul would say much later, was part of the class. The wait, Amelia would say much later, was the class. He disagreed adamantly, but he would come to feel that it was under Anton Albers’s auspices that he had become who he was. Amelia, by all appearances, hadn’t become who she was then. Amelia already was who she was. Paul saw this as a blessing; later on, he would see it as a tragedy. Now, she only had to unbecome herself.
Anton Albers was internationally renowned, but Paul had no idea of that. There was so much he didn’t know when he arrived: he got lost in the streets, in the hallways and even in his own thoughts. It took him two weeks just to find the lecture hall f
or Albers’s class and when he finally walked in, he walked right back out, because the classroom was packed. The emergency exits were blocked; students sat in the aisles, on the steps, against the doors. They were listening to a woman, when it seemed perfectly clear that this professor he was looking for was a man. This was how deeply ignorant he had been. A wisp of a woman whose age was impossible to guess even though she did not hide it: she had been born in Buenos Aires, right after World War II, the daughter of a German engineer turned Nazi sympathiser, a regular correspondent with the architect Albert Speer and Wernher von Braun, the father of rocket science who had been welcomed to the United States with open arms. Albers’s father went to Argentina, where he met his wife and where their daughter Antonia Albers would be born, then to Chile, where the girl would lead a dreamy childhood, and she soon left on her own, as a minor, for Mexico, and the next chance she got, she was on her way to the United States. She had been a fleeting figure, if not necessarily a fleeing one; and only ever alluded to her earliest years in vague terms which, even though she mentioned no real particulars, made it seem all the more concrete: a father, a mother, sunshine on the patio. A dog. Notwithstanding her family’s past, it was her first name that she changed, lopping off the feminine suffix that was its final syllable. Antonia became Anton; the few photographs of that time showed what appeared to be a slim young man with fine lips and finer hair.
Would you say, Madame Albers, that it was more difficult to have a feminine present, a present as a woman, than a chequered past? was one of the questions she was most frequently asked, and one she never answered. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, she usually replied. It was hard not to admire this commitment to ambiguity. Other people were unimpressed by her refusal, of course, and considered it cowardly or simply unacceptable. Her biography was nebulous and spotty: she seemed to have studied on every continent and in just about every time zone. She had authored theses in history and law and urbanism on the topic of the night – or were they all the same unpublished text that her biographical note always alluded to? By the time she had become the icon she now was, equal parts revered and reviled, the bound manuscript was long gone from the dusty shelves at the University of California, Berkeley. When people asked about it, Albers’s only answer was a shrug and a mischievous smile. Her beauty had left with her youth, but she radiated a particular charm all the same; ever since her early thirties Albers had looked the way she did when Paul shouldered his way into the lecture hall, a sexless, impish, ageless mien reminiscent of a hermit or a nun. When exactly she had stopped trying to pass as a man wasn’t clear; maybe during graduate school, maybe later. In the sixties and in the American Southwest, she had hung out with artists, the sort who dug immense pits in the dust and called it art; the sort who bought craters from which to watch the sky and called it art; and who, without exception, ended badly. ‘Ending badly’ was a running theme amongst Albers’s closest acquaintances, or those who warranted the slightest bit of interest. Then came a surprise of sorts: somewhat late for the time, she gave birth to a daughter whose father’s identity she didn’t disclose. The child did not live.
At that point, Albers’s work had already swerved towards a poetics of risk. The future of cities she believed to be the future of the world. From that point on, her career veered away from the traditional academic path and became something else: a philosophy, a vision. She taught all over the world, she lectured about lost cities and pirates, she delved into emotions that had been relegated to history books as well as those yet to come. She talked about the seal of Tutankhamen’s tomb, a knot that lasted 3,245 years. In the late eighties, she asserted, in answer to a question about the creation of post-war Europe, that the Europe to come would resemble nothing so much as a besieged city. When she was asked how she envisioned the twenty-first century, she responded, in painstakingly precise French, In the twenty-first century, everybody will be in security, which the journalist had relayed as ‘in safety,’ a misinterpretation that would inspire, Anton Albers suggested with her perpetually indecipherable smile, the labour of the next decade.
In and of themselves, her lectures were strange and riveting. Her words were clear yet impenetrable; nobody else could speak such sentences. It was like watching someone foretell the future, not unlike those shows in which some clairvoyant made contact with souls from the hereafter, except Albers seemed to be in direct communion with the West to come, the future of capitalism and industrialism, whereas the people Paul thought of while listening to her were all, to a man, impostors. The semester’s lecture was called ‘The Cities of Tomorrow’, but so far it seemed she had only talked about fear. Hour by hour, week after week, she slowly assembled a history of the feeling. As they got deeper into autumn and icy rain pounded the skylight of the lecture hall, she still hadn’t made any mention of cities, much less of tomorrow, and so the rows thinned out. Paul continued to go, but he was not attending a class so much as a secret ceremony. Every sentence Albers uttered seemed to signify more than the words themselves, but this more, this subtext, kept escaping him. It lay on the tip of his tongue, always just out of reach. He couldn’t shake the feeling that, if he could catch it, it would have made sense of the days and nights and betrayals soon to be inflicted.
Albers spoke of cities now gone, cities of single or double or triple outer walls, with underground tunnels capable of sheltering troops of a hundred knights, and she read out, in Old French, detailed protocols for locking the city’s gates at nightfall, and quarantining travellers who had had the misfortune to arrive at twilight and were left to wait for daybreak in limbo between two barriers of stone. And then she spoke of the city-dwellers’ fears, their fears of wolves, their fears of Turks; she drew bird’s-eye views from the ramparts, diagramming how, as she insisted, terror spiralled outward. What she meant to say, in this vein, about cities and about tomorrow, about the cities of tomorrow, remained unclear, but the first exam took the form of a single question: Can a city die of fear?
The rows thinned out but, in the second term, when it was time to sign up for further seminars, both Amelia Dehr – who only ever seemed to show up on campus for Albers’s lectures, but was at every single one – and Paul were quick to put down their names for Anton Albers. She showed no hint of approval. Whether she simply didn’t know them yet, or whether she knew them better than they realised, there was no change in her demeanour: a vague look of detached contentment, or of contented detachment. She was a woman slowly (very slowly) doing what she had to do. Paul and Amelia jockeyed like precocious schoolchildren. They were besotted with their own intelligence, because it was finally being put to the test. Albers was the reason they were exploring areas that they otherwise might not have considered, or not until much later, excavating dangerous realms despite their dread of what they already knew, or began to sense, of the world – and despite their dread of coming across a sentence or idea that would prove the limits of their intelligence. Not unlike the retrograde fears of those who, believing the earth to be flat, set sail for its edge while terrified they might in fact discover it. They fought to be the first to read something; their intellectual tug-of-war played out through the gaps on library shelves, each missing volume an affront to Paul, a further proof not only of Amelia’s existence but of her potential superiority. All that was straightforward enough, but their simmering rivalry also played out on another battleground – although it was anything but a ground: it was an instability, a dark ocean. When it came to Albers, they competed the way only two motherless children could. And it was perfectly clear that Amelia had the upper hand, which very nearly broke Paul, but he resigned himself to that reality, as if he’d known from the very beginning that disappointment lay in store for him. The two women seemed very close; he tried to grin and bear it in class, but he was genuinely annoyed and kept wondering: why was Albers so taken with that girl? (The answer: Amelia’s intuition for disaster, her instinct for catastrophe.)
One evening, during the February break when eve
rybody seemed to be away, skiing or with their families – or worse still, skiing with their families – and he was stuck in the freezing, damp city, he discovered just how close his beloved professor and Amelia Dehr were. The entire month had been tough; money was so tight that he’d had to sign up with a temp agency and take on some night-watch work. He paced up and down dark warehouses and car parks amidst the echoes of his own footsteps. The uniforms he was given were a failed attempt at semantics, at a language of sorts, drawing inspiration from the gear of riot cops, exuding something almost military but coming up short. Every part was designed to evoke municipal troops, but not quite, and Paul was never more unhappy than when he wore his laced-up combat boots and reinforced nylon jacket, a truncheon swinging against his hip.
Lonely and cold, he saw them coming down the underground ramp of a car park, a spiral burrowing into the city’s core. Really, he saw their silhouettes on a monitor screen. He panicked. A German car. Albers in the passenger seat, perfectly recognisable, her black bangs just starting to turn grey – although he couldn’t see that – and, slamming the driver’s door shut, a willowy woman a full head taller than her. They made an almost comical pair; one tall and one small, one young and one not so much. They could have been fox and hen. He watched with dread as the two women headed towards the exit and towards him. He had never contemplated what Albers might do with her spare time, outside those two hours during which she gently addressed Paul’s own fears, led him ever so patiently through deep-rooted, embarrassing anxieties, until she could show that he was in good company, demonstrating that these feelings were not his alone, were in fact shared by all – and a worthy object of study. Fear of the dark, fear of others, as well as the murky, abstract memories of widespread plagues, widespread purges retained in his bones and marrow – memories of things his body hadn’t experienced but which all the same had shaped him. People huddled in the dark, a communal terror circulating amongst them, through points of contact, shoulder against shoulder, palm against palm, hand against mouth – a huge, collective body of fear. Never had it occurred to him that the woman tracing the genealogy of this feeling might some day end up eliciting it in him.
Night as It Falls Page 2