Amelia? he called out softly. He pushed the door with his fingertips. It’s like a gruesome horror flick, Mariam thought, although one of the least gory parts. Paul was afraid, and it was because of the tension created by the fact that he already knew and at the same time still didn’t know.
Amelia? He reached out to turn on the light.
The room was empty. Completely empty. No clothes on the chairs, no piles on the desk, no books under the bed, nothing. Nothing at all. Paul stood helplessly in the place where he had experienced the most intense moments of his life so far. The place was stripped of the slightest trace of anyone’s presence, as if nobody had ever lived there, as if nobody had fallen onto the bed, had jumped under the shower or into the bathtub alongside him, had fogged over the sealed window with her breath while he’d held her from behind, while they’d had sex looking out on the city. Nothing. Or rather, worse than nothing. He finally found something – almost an outright subtraction. The bathroom waste bin was full of red. Long, silky hair – one year, two years, five years of red hair; a mass that slipped through his fingers like water, that seemed to be still alive, but likely no longer was.
it’s complicated
1
He was distraught. He did what anyone would do; he did it, then he talked about it. He recounted everything without holding back, picked at his memory like a scab, never found a foreign body there, let alone extracted one. He tore up photographs, gave away books, foisted off clothes. He slept around. A guy who kept rattling off his sob story in bars, filthy dive bars with sticky floors that were all named after women, beautiful foreigners who had died of heartache: Carmen’s, Aida’s. A bleary-eyed guy who talked to strangers, who spilled his guts to them, and who, one day, at dawn, pulled out a hammer and set it in front of him, amid the empty glasses, then stared at it, unable to say what the tool was for or how long he had been lugging it around, and whoever had been listening was, of course, even less help there, and silence closed in around them. An unshaven guy who stumbled down the streets in the wee hours, hammer in hand. Its heft was reassuring. He slipped it under his pillow to protect him from dreams in which she lingered. Dreams in which she whispered everything he should have said and done to make her stay, and in his dreams he understood – he understood everything, he was overcome with gratitude and love and that joy jolted him awake, sheer relief shook him awake, but when he tried to remember what she had told him, he was faced with a void, a blank that stretched out and out.
One night he drank too much, got into a brawl, pulled out his hammer, and between his heart’s mad beats the strange idea crept in that she was the one who, as she left, had slipped this tool – a head mated to a shaft – into his bag, as a way of saying goodbye, knowing that one day it would come in handy. And after having used the hammer he went back home in a dark red haze, threw up all night, then all morning, a bout he had never thought was possible, as if his body were revolting against itself. He ended up falling asleep on the bathroom tiles. When he awoke he was freezing and, as if he had managed, with great pain, to expel the poison and the source of his sickness, he had forgotten Amelia’s face.
After that, things slowly got easier. He threw the hammer into the Seine and, when his father asked, claimed not to know what he was talking about. His father bought a new hammer and that was that.
Paul focused on his studies. Success was his ultimate method of camouflage, the best or only way he knew to blend in. In his free time, he did what everyone else did, he spent hours in front of increasing numbers of increasingly small screens and before long they fit in his hand and his pocket. A few years later, when Paul started to make a good (very good) living, he went to find his father and asked him where he wanted to go. I’m taking you on a trip, he said. They had never gone anywhere together. To the best of his knowledge, his father had only ever known two countries: the one he’d left, and the one he’d had Paul in. He’d spent more time in the latter than the former. His father didn’t say anything; he just reached for a piece of bread and some sharp cheese, but Paul could see in his measured, efficient movements that he was thinking. His father thought with his muscles. His father thought with his joints, with his limbs, with his whole body, and now his whole body, small and keen and light as a boxer’s, and lean as a boxer’s, despite being a labourer’s – his whole body was considering what answer to give, amongst all the answers possible, to this question his son had asked. And as his father thought, Paul realised that he didn’t have the least idea what he was going to say. He chewed his bread and cheese in silence and Paul realised that all the destinations he was expecting were destinations that he, Paul, would have liked to go to. The sixty-year-old man in front of him seemed strong and steady and in full possession of his faculties; his age showed only in the deep crease of his forehead that almost seemed to cut through the skin into the depths of his skull. His frowning motion was a tremor, a tectonic shudder of his bones – not just his bones, a revolt of the gelatinous mass within, his grey matter exerting itself. Paul looked at the crease, which reminded him, although he wasn’t entirely sure why, of his mother’s death – and then at the sixty-year-old man chewing across the table from him, and, realising that he in fact had no idea where his father might have wanted, would have wanted to go (nowhere, maybe?), he felt ridiculous, ashamed at his offer. I’ve come all the way out here just to lord it over my father, he thought, and, after a second mouthful, and a long stretch of silence, he realised: the truth is, I don’t know this man at all.
His father finished his second mouthful and carefully prepared a third and Paul was convinced he wouldn’t answer. Yet he looked up with an expression he hadn’t seen before – shy, almost coy – and asked: Anywhere I’d like? Really? Paul, suddenly touched, oddly touched, said: Yes, Dad, wherever you want. His father finished his bread and cheese impassively, but his son had the impression that he felt like a great weight had been unburdened from his shoulders. He stood up, a thin but vigorous man, took his plate, washed it, dried it, cleared the sink. Maybe back to the homeland, Paul thought, maybe he’ll want to go back to the homeland, or to New York – or maybe he’d like to go to Rome, or Naples, or Greece. My father’s slaved away all his life; where would he possibly dream of going? He hadn’t dared to say the word vacation, he had said trip, he had thought about the way of suggesting it that would offend him the least. He remembered having seen his father watching wildlife documentaries thoughtfully; the cycle of life, the savannah at sunset, big monkeys screeching in the jungle; strange, pale creatures of the ocean deep that were all jaw and weak light. He knew that his father barely had any hobbies – though he played cards and dice a bit; he made bets on cockfights and dog races, though never on boxing matches, nothing involving human persons. Paul had always wondered who these inhuman persons might be that the phrase seemed to imply existed. The last few years had been straightforward, he thought; he was working on a site that, oddly, seemed to have no end in sight. There was always something to do, and by the looks of it, things did progress, but actual progress was so slow as to seem non-existent. It had become a running joke between Paul and him, this construction site with no end in sight, the infinite, dusty building work. For some obscure reason it reminded Paul of Amelia Dehr, whom he tried not to think of, like someone trying to walk straight in total darkness. It had become a running joke, and his father accepted it, but over the last few years Paul had noticed wounds, bruises, long scratches on his father’s torso and on his father’s back which looked like they had been made by a wild animal, that in their own way also reminded Paul of Amelia Dehr. But he knew this time that it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with old age, which was swooping down on his father. Clearly he could not go on working interminably, forever. That was what Paul wanted to talk to him about on the trip.
Maybe a safari, or maybe Alaska, or, no, more likely the countryside. More realistically one of those places where the older folk pulled their chairs out in the sun every morning and put them awa
y every evening and chuckled amongst themselves as they declared it a day well spent. Or maybe nowhere, Paul thought again. The more he thought about it, the less he was able to picture his father anywhere other than his exceedingly tidy, exceedingly bright little apartment. Paul had trouble imagining any place in the world smaller, tidier or brighter than his father’s apartment.
After mulling it over a long while, as if all the way to the tips of his fingers, Paul’s father said: I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii.
Paul was now working at a reputable agency, on very expensive, very competitive projects, where he was in charge of windows. Whatever the request for proposals might be for, a museum or a hotel, a shopping centre, an investment property, one of those new cities somewhere in a deserted region unfit for urbanisation but about to be urbanised all the same – he was the windows guy. It was good work, and yet he knew he wouldn’t keep doing it forever. He knew it because, more and more often, when he thought of particular places or he found himself in particular places and his attention turned, quite naturally, to the windows, he imagined, with great pleasure, how the place might look with all its windows shattered. He imagined the cracks in the glass, the points of impact, and the radiating fractures; their effect on the light, on the way that light entered the space, and the shadows reminiscent of sunshine shattered across a swimming pool’s surface and forming patterns on its bottom. This, too, reminded Paul of Amelia Dehr. Ever since their relationship, he found, he had been quite fortunate in love, precisely because he had never truly loved again.
He took care of everything and filled out his father’s pale-green questionnaire, Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide. He gently took it out of the elder man’s hands, at an altitude of thirty thousand feet above an ocean that his father had never crossed, because he was carefully and diligently reading each question and, at each question, Have you ever detained, retained or withheld custody of a child from a US citizen granted custody of the child? was absorbed in a long meditation, maybe even racking his brain to figure out whether or not he had ever been judged guilty of these acts. Paul quickly checked the No column for each scenario, and his father watched him proudly, as if surprised that his son knew him so well. Paul spoke English on the plane, ordering Bloody Marys for them both although his father only drank the tomato juice, quickly slipping the miniature bottle of vodka into his sleeve with a wiliness that Paul hadn’t known he’d had in him. He hadn’t expected his father to be so light-fingered. Paul spoke English at the Los Angeles airport, his father waiting, like a well-behaved child, to be told to step forward; I’m taking my father to Hawaii, he told the immigration agent, and the other man nodded – Paul and he were about the same age, and, as two sons, they understood each other. You were talking about me, Paul’s father later said to him. It seemed to have made him happy.
At Oahu he struck up a conversation with some seasoned, grizzled sailors who took him to see a trimaran, and once they’d worked out a deal they made fun of Paul’s suit, which he was wearing without a tie, and teased him about his dress shoes. They wore shorts and those Hawaiian shirts that Paul was astonished to see weren’t a myth, and the old sailors tried to recall the last time they had put on suits. One wearing an eye patch stamped with a golden anchor, who hadn’t put on a blazer since the day he’d set foot on the island – before Paul had even been born – told him not to trouble himself on their account, and after some bargaining he agreed to take Paul’s father and him on a decently sized sailing boat to see the other islands. They spent eight days at sea; every so often Paul’s seasickness caught up with him but his father was fine. Eight days of being real men, the sailor and the labourer – as sinewy as each other, unable to talk to each other, and yet able to get along perfectly well.
They knew their way around knives, both of them. Paul didn’t dare to ask his father how he had smuggled in his pocketknife. It vaguely reminded him of his childhood, and also, for some reason, of his mother and her death. He suddenly recalled that when she had died his father had peeled an orange for him with this very knife – he could still smell the juice and the metal. He didn’t think he’d seen it since, but he had always known it was there – wherever his father was, so was the knife. They talked about his mother. In terms that surprised his son, Paul’s father described a dress she had worn. Flared, buttoned up the front, polka-dotted. The dress and these buttons also reminded him of the knife, even though he didn’t know why and didn’t dare to ask. Paul talked a bit about Amelia Dehr. He said that they didn’t come from the same background. He said that in her arms he had been sure that his heart was beating under her skin. His father seemed to understand. Then they were quiet for a long while. They saw turtles, and dolphins, but what his father liked best were the whales, swimming peacefully, amiably, assured of their strength, wholly unaware that men might be a danger – or perhaps aware but uninterested in keeping their distance.
When they came back to Honolulu, his father surprised him again by expressing his wish, a bit like a child who knows or thinks he knows he’s asking for too much, to spend a few days by Waikiki Beach. It was the most expensive and touristy part of the island, and the tackiest, but his father was absolutely besotted by it. Paul booked a room for them at the ritziest hotel on the beachfront, a huge colonial-style establishment directly overlooking the sand, which occasionally spilled over onto the floor of the restaurant and all the way to the lobby, like in a ghost town. At this point in the trip his father was tanned and wearing a University of Hawaii T-shirt, and he watched – more out of curiosity than lust – the young blonde girls walking barefoot down the streets with huge drinks in their hands and climbing into massive SUVs before slamming the doors, leaving Paul’s father’s face reflected in the tinted windows. Most days he went to watch the surfers. He never stepped into the water, and Paul found himself wondering whether his own father actually could swim, but he sat on the beach and watched the waves and the surfboards and the teenagers doing their best to stay upright on them. Then he pantomimed the riskiest-looking positions for Paul. That was the one thing Paul’s father always had his attention on, no matter what else he was doing: the danger at hand.
Most nights he turned in early and Paul went back out. He walked up and down Waikiki, which apparently never slept. A sensation of strangeness welled up within him, as if he were alone in the world. Everything struck him as fake. The streets made him feel curiously claustrophobic, as if they were unreal, as if it weren’t already unreal that this island should be lost deep in the middle of the water, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He tried to imagine all this blackness from above. From a plane. Some nights he drove a long way west, where ruined neighbourhoods teemed with guns and meth, and he listened to the sound of waves in the dark, waiting for his uneasiness to subside. One night, he was smoking on the beach in front of the hotel and saw a woman walking out of the water – a woman he was sure, absolutely certain, was Amelia. He watched her stumble, giggling, towards a man whom she kissed right on the lips, as if she’d won a bet. The man was wearing a wrinkled shirt and light-coloured shorts and Paul almost felt her wet body against his own wrinkled shirt, his own shorts. Then he saw a second man close by. He noticed him because he was staring at her as she pulled away from the first man to run into the darkness. She kissed him, too, the same way, passionately. It was a nightmare for him. The next day he ordered a stiff drink at breakfast, and by the light of day everything seemed better, but when he walked by the front desk, they told him that someone had left a message for him, and he was transported right back to where he had been the night before. He ran a hand over his face. But it was just the Agency.
If his father noticed anything wrong, he didn’t let on.
*
After Hawaii, which had been an attempt, even if neither of them would admit it, for his father and him to say goodbye, Paul set on an obstacle course for the Agency; the obstacles facing him, however, were neither
physical nor material. On the contrary, nothing stood in his way, all doors automatically opened, all stairs were easy escalators, attentive young women seemed to anticipate everything he might need. Even in restaurants, dishes were presented ready to wolf down, underneath transparent plastic covers, on narrow conveyor belts. His routine was to see what looked appetising on the first circuit and, on the next, to reach for what he wanted or thought he wanted – which sometimes weren’t the same, sometimes didn’t correspond, and that would leave him feeling oddly dissociated, like a body without a head, or a head without a heart. For weeks, months, he didn’t touch any cash, any bills, any coins, anything his father, with his third-world common sense (to use Paul’s words), considered real; anything that would give him the particular pleasure that an older man, a widower, might take in finding, deep in his pockets, bills worn soft. A pocketknife. Cash. My father has found this way to feel the power he has. He may not have a lot, but it’s his, he can touch it, hold it in his hand, close his fist on something tangible that gives him strength. Impact. As for me, Paul thought, doors open wherever I go. My body is outside time zones, rhythms, biology, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, a strength or a weakness, but I don’t dwell on it, I just keep going. That’s the power I have. It isn’t nothing.
Night as It Falls Page 8