There were daily, daytime fears; fears of falls and germs, fears of madmen and the future, fears of new weapons. Fears of robots and pollution. Fears of attacks, explosives. Knives, hammers. Fears of driverless cars but also fears of cars with human drivers, of reckless drivers. Fears of epidemics that spread from birds to men or from birds to cats or from cats to children; fears of illness, fears of mental illness, fears of academic failure; fears, no matter what he said, of difference; and some of those fears were ones that Albers, in her carbon-copy apartment, shared. The decisions, however, were his own; this was why the paediatrician, holding a gun of sorts that shot compressed air, got ready to inject a small chip beneath Louise’s tender skin that would allow Paul to follow her position remotely. More and more parents were doing it; others weren’t, others said that their child wasn’t a cat. Paul said it as well, and yet this defence was futile against his fatherly anxieties about the world as it was. If something happened, he would never forgive himself for it. He had quickly weighed up the pros and the cons. The pros were the world and Amelia. As there was this inherent, inchoate danger that Louise might be, would end up being, her mother’s daughter. A risk Paul couldn’t fathom. Or maybe (and this made him shudder) it was to be expected. The cons were a lack of decency or respect for Louise – for who she was and who she would become, but in these new times that seemed short-sighted, a luxury that he was not allowed to indulge in, despite having access to everything. Yet it also seemed gentle; something that provoked nostalgia, and he didn’t want that. The pros and the cons. Everything could now be broken down into columns, into statistics, have I gone the wrong way? Have I gone completely off the rails? Paul stifled this worry in order to reassure Louise, who barely needed to be reassured. It won’t hurt, kitten, it’ll just be a little pinch.
She had a bruise for several days, a bruise in that shamefully beautiful blue shade of other people’s pain; but when he logged in for the first time to check where his daughter was, he saw the map that confirmed that she – this luminous dot, glowing blue – was at Albers’s, exactly where he expected her to be, in the dining room which was a perfect copy of his own. A peacefulness that he hadn’t felt in a long, long time came over him. Like every parent of his time and class, he tried to prepare her against all the dangers he could think of. But the problem, a sympathetic yet mocking voice within Paul said, is the dangers you don’t think of, the ones you can’t think of. The unforeseeable is the apex of danger, and to predict it you need something other than your ever-younger, ever-prettier girlfriends – who couldn’t imagine anything for the life of them, except perhaps new ways of coming – something other than your paediatricians and your screens and your pitiful, domesticated fears.
When she turns sixteen, I’ll tell her everything. I’ll tell her everything she should know, he decided. Whether that was a threat or a promise, he wasn’t sure.
*
Once a month Louise slept at her grandfather’s in that unpleasant, unsafe little town. It meant that for Paul or for Albers, it would be a bad night. But the ritual was important; the child clung to it. It was the night when they bathed the birds, she explained to her mystified father. The night when they took them, one by one, from the cage, so carefully that it was as though their hands themselves had a mind of their own. Very tenderly and gently, they put the quivering creature in the bowl of warm water, a metal bowl with an enamelled flower – a trembling image – at the bottom. They washed the little things, let them flutter around, shake themselves dry in the fountain they had made, and into which Gramps sometimes poured a little bit of water from the kettle. That was what Louise liked best in the world. A fragile, living ceremony in a language that was secret.
It’s all fine, Paul told himself, but he still slept badly. He sometimes woke up for no clear reason, his throat clenched, his heart pounding. He heard his daughter crying when she wasn’t; he heard windows opening when they didn’t. His exhaustion took strange forms; lights alarmed him even in the middle of the night, even in the darkness. He shut his eyes, buried his face in the pillow, but the light was relentless and it left him no rest. Leave me alone, he sometimes said in his sleep. When he woke up, he didn’t remember anything.
He still didn’t believe in ghosts.
Yes, it’s all fine, Paul told himself, which didn’t keep things – the world – from getting worse. There was, apparently, too much of everything. But not enough peace. And water was getting scarce. Louise pensively watched it come out of the tap. She turned the water on, turned it off. Watched the small helices it made as it flowed into the basin. Of course, the innocent girl had no idea the desert was spreading across the globe and into hearts. The love we have for our children is a Trojan horse, Albers declared on a talk show. Louise watched her, slack-jawed, she who usually walked indifferently past those newsflash images following each other endlessly: murder and investigations, ruins and war, immense cities that weren’t cities but tents, arrays of tents in the desert, where those who no longer had a city now lived. Louise touched the surface of the screen – it was, and wasn’t, Albers.
A Trojan horse. The love we have for our children is how an indefensible world can seem defensible and ultimately is defended, is welcomed. Lies. Global surveillance. Insidious militarisation. Who wouldn’t want to know that their children were safe? Who wouldn’t be willing to pay a high price for that? It’s out of love that we reinforce our cities, our streets, our houses. But evil is what gets in. Evil, and all our errors will haunt us. They’ll come and gnaw away at our sleep, our bones. We live in a world that has given in completely to brutality and injustice. Every man for himself. Every man for himself and his own children. His own genetic material. And in the meantime the driving force of the world has become expulsion. Families on the street. Cities razed, entire populations forced to flee. Everywhere I turn, I see unreality forcing its way into reality. The uncanny has become normal, and the fantastical has become the condition of our existence, Albers ranted, insistently – and all that Paul saw was an obstinate old woman crowned by white bangs.
She repeated herself. The fantastical has become the condition of our existence, Paul, she whispered on the phone. An impossibility that’s suddenly become possible. I know, Albers, I saw you on TV, but I want you to take care of yourself a bit. The world’s changed.
She was put under house arrest. For your own safety, they said. It would have been dangerous otherwise. An armed guard was placed in the lobby of the building and nobody was quite sure, really, whether it was to keep evil from coming in or to keep Albers from coming out.
*
Paul knew every sob his daughter heaved; it was almost a language. This knowledge wasn’t innate – on the contrary, he had spent his days and nights, in the first weeks, the first months, listening, deciphering her cries for a possible cause, a stimulus, an emotion; Albers said that he was a mother to the baby, she maintained that he was a seer, a diviner, she smiled but he suspected that she felt a faintly hidden resentment. His father didn’t say anything. Don’t you think your boy’s something special, the old woman had asked without understanding that he didn’t really talk about such things, that he didn’t praise or mention anything, that he didn’t discuss or compliment or criticise in general – it wasn’t his style. But, put on the spot, he thought a bit and then said: He’s a father. Nothing could have made Paul happier.
He knew those cries and those tears; the way everything sometimes combined, exhaustion, frustration, hunger, nightmares; a wet bed, a chill; the bedroom and hallways – which suddenly dilated so that she was alone, alone in the world, on a small damp mattress unmoored in the unknown like an island in darkness; until her father’s familiar footsteps could be heard and all this emptiness around her reconfigured back into what it had been; a few seconds of waiting before the closeness, the warmth, the comforting words that she understood instinctively. Later on, he knew when she was ashamed, or when she was bored; he couldn’t have said how, he just knew. The cost of this know
ledge was becoming a light, fragile sleeper; he was now an animal ready to leap. And leaping was what he did one night, when Louise was about seven, and Paul’s sleep was riven by a scream in which he recognised Louise’s voice – although it was not like anything he had heard before; it sounded like no physical or psychical need she had ever expressed. What’s that, he thought, literally feeling his hair stand on end, a sharp cry so acute that it reached into the inaudible, the ultrasonic, something that was not meant for the human ear to hear (but what ear, then?) and he had run into the child’s room. Louise, sitting in her bed clutching her knees, an expression on her small face he had never seen before, was staring at a corner of the room, at the armchair where Paul had so often sat for a moment after reading her a story, before leaving his daughter for the night. Louise’s arms were tight around her knees as she rocked back and forth. The window was open.
Paul hugged her, kissed her beloved head. What’s wrong, my dear, what is it? And Louise didn’t say anything, he thought maybe she was still dreaming, her eyes apparently open but turned inward, and he rocked her in his arms, warming her with his whole body through the small quilt, rather than first getting up to shut the window, and at the moment he finally felt her relaxing, at the moment when he himself was starting to nod off, Louise whispered in his ear:
The woman. He thought he had to be dreaming this time but he asked, What woman, my pet? The woman with fiery hair, Louise said, and Paul held her tight, There’s nobody, sweetie, there’s only you and me and we don’t need anyone else, he whispered, but the truth was that he didn’t dare to turn towards the armchair. He shut his eyes and did what he didn’t know how to do because nobody had ever taught him: he prayed quickly, without realising that that was what he was doing. This is like a nightmare, he thought.
*
He never talked about Amelia. He said as little as he could about her, and hoped that would be enough. He looked at Louise, he watched her, she didn’t seem to lack anything. But a child is not a bird. A child is not a cat. They played in the beautiful empty living room and Paul had terrible visions: a tall redhead walking through the walls and out the window, throwing herself down to the sidewalk below. Yes, a tall redhead, caught in the walls like a bullet shot many decades ago, a bullet which still pressed on, imperceptibly, coming from another point in time, but who could say, even so, that it wouldn’t break through one day? Her fists and knees first, then her nose, her forehead, the rest. All the rest. And the final step, the jump through the window which wasn’t even open, her fall a rain of glass, of shards in which the sky is momentarily reflected. This sky she hadn’t known how to love. He suppressed his obsessions, pushed forward a small horse or pawn or other figurine meant to represent him within the game. Louise was having fun and he was incredulous and grateful beyond words for his daughter’s innocence. Until the day when he caught her tapping the walls with a spoon in her hand. Hello, she said. Hello. And pretending to listen carefully. What are you doing, pumpkin, Paul had asked, a growing sensation of unreality in his chest, of unadulterated dread. I’m looking for Mummy, said Louise.
It’s worse if you don’t say anything. If you don’t say anything, evil flows in and permeates, percolates through the heart of everything. Even so, he struggled to talk; what could he have revealed to Louise that she would have understood? That when the plants in the bathroom which he had bought because his daughter had begged for a jungle in which she could be a wild animal, when these monstera deliciosa and monstera obliqua trembled in a breeze he couldn’t feel, it was like a sigh that he hadn’t felt for years on his face, on his body? It’s worse if you don’t say anything. But what should he tell his daughter about a woman who, in the maternity ward, hadn’t recognised them? A woman who hadn’t loved them? And what should he tell her about his lovers, whom he brought home some nights, kissing them sometimes in the bathtub or against the sink, neither Paul’s body nor those of these women leaving any trace, the surfaces retaining no memory of it, the debauchery slipping right off them, onto the pale-green tiles, onto the dark, gleaming leaves – or about what some of these women, these strangers, were feeling or claiming to have felt – some hostility, some presence?
He showed her some photos. In the one he liked best Amelia was wearing one of his shirts and Louise asked if she could have that one. We can frame it, if you’d like, he’d said, wondering what it would feel like to walk into his daughter’s room and to see, each time, on the wall or by the bed, the sum of his failures. Not the photo, Daddy, the shirt, Louise said. How strange this child was! Not interested in images so much as in what was tangible. What could be touched, tracked, captured. At the museum she focused on the ground and the corners, blew on dust bunnies, loose strands of hair, everything that could come alive with a movement, intentionally or not. Come on now, Louise, look – the lady. The mountain. Look at the sky. But Louise said: That’s not a lady, that’s not a mountain. Pictures of skies upset her the most – she got angry, wrinkled her nose, slipped away, kicked off. Insects, by contrast, were a deliverance. You really are a little animal, he said. But he was charmed.
So Paul gave her a shirt that looked like the same one. For a few days, a few weeks, Louise wore it to sleep. Then it went back on a coat hanger, in the wardrobe, where it hung amongst the blues and greens of her childhood, at a slight remove, white and empty.
*
One cold spring day, he drove to the city where he had grown up to pick up Louise at his father’s. He found them in a room that struck him as larger than usual, chillier too, until he saw what was missing: the birds. The birdcage was empty and his daughter and father radiated something, an electric feeling, a strange light (was that what had made him sick? He refused to believe it), they stared at him oddly, silent and energised. Louise was ten and her face was starting to change, to slip towards that of a stranger; her nose, her mouth, were on their way to their final form; but to become who? He still wasn’t sure – he simply saw what he saw, his father, his daughter, a new silence between them, an empty cage, the two of them glowing. Did you let them go? Paul asked, stupidly; they nodded together, and caught him off guard; he had thought that all this time they’d planned only to let them go when the birds were ready, which also meant, We’ll let them go when we’re ready. He thought that meant never. That no one is ever ready to let beauty out of one’s life, no matter how unhappy that beauty might be. And he thought that it was still cold, too cold for colourful small birds in a drab city, and an image came to him – like the foreign ones that seemed to have come from somewhere outside of him: exotic birds – yellow, blue and green – raining down on the roads, unfit to survive in urban settings, tragically out of place.
And he who was the voice of reason, the family man, pushed away that image or vision or fear or desire to see colourful creatures plummeting, dead, onto windshields, onto umbrellas and balconies, pushed it away and kissed his daughter, then his father, and said: It’s a bit chilly, maybe you could have waited a while longer, given yourself a bit more time, and they didn’t say anything, didn’t look at each other, but something changed, something imperceptible. And in that moment he understood. No, they couldn’t have waited any longer, they couldn’t have given themselves any more time, and they looked at him, his daughter and his father, without saying anything, and he knew that they knew, that they wouldn’t say anything but that they knew, and less than a week later, without any warning, or seemingly without any warning, his father was dead.
*
Only then did he discover total loneliness, thorough isolation. He shut himself away in his strongrooms, in his clients’ homes, he curled up on a bunk, reverted to the lost student who hadn’t dared to leave his room because he didn’t understand, wasn’t sure he understood, how he should talk, should move. He wasn’t sure he knew how to live. Louise could have consoled him, but no daughter should ever have to comfort her own father, he thought, and he didn’t want her to be afflicted by his sadness which was far more than just sadness. He kept
his distance. He spent hours and hours alone, not moving, not thinking about anything. An empty shell. He cried, but only in his sleep, and it wasn’t clear whether he was crying for himself or for his father – nor did it matter which. You have to take care of yourself, Albers insisted to him, if you want to see your daughter again. He saw a therapist, a level-headed woman who worked on setting him to rights again, on making him a man amongst men again, a proper master of the universe again, and he listened to her obediently, but the whole time she was talking and he was answering, with difficulty, the same way a child might grasp at words, the way Louise grasped at French – the whole time, a part of him was bashing in the woman’s face with a hammer.
He ended up getting a room in an Elisse hotel, their Elisse hotel, he insisted on room 313 with an authority he didn’t feel. In the elevator everything came back to him, and in the hallway, and in front of this door where things had broken: voices, furniture, maybe bones; and certainly his heart. He fell onto the bed which couldn’t possibly have been the same one, slipped between the sheets which couldn’t possibly have been the same ones, and that night, at last, he felt a body against his consoling him about everything, the only one capable of saving him from himself. Living the madness turned out to be how he survived it.
Night as It Falls Page 16