by Ami Rao
At some point, Ameena shut her eyes, still arranging paintings inside her head until they all faded into a single inconsequential wash of colour, much like the stories of each of our lives collapse finally and frivolously into a single flash of bright light. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself lying on her back in the middle of two parallel beams of sunshine that streamed in through the gallery windows.
At 7.30am, she pulled the door shut behind her and left for work. At 8am, she stopped at a deli en route to buy a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a small black coffee, a plain poppy-seed bagel and a bag of unsalted almonds. At 9am, she attended a briefing meeting about the importance of surprise and joy in content. At 10am, one day too late, she started writing a piece for Whitney, entitled ‘Bold Fashion for the Feminist’. At 12pm, she ate a handful of the almonds for lunch, and kept writing. At 5.30pm she wrote the last sentence of the piece and breathed a sigh of relief, but when she popped into Whitney’s office to inform her that she was done, her editor’s face looked so expectant that Ameena felt a moment of regret that she hadn’t put more surprise or joy into it.
For a brief second, she considered taking the whole thing back and asking for more time, but on more than one occasion Whitney had made it explicitly clear that she didn’t look kindly upon broken deadlines. Or bad writing, Ameena thought ruefully. But, it was done now, and she had to be at the gallery at six. Grabbing her bag and her cell phone and ignoring the ping of a new email alert on her computer, she ran out the door and down the block to catch her train.
On the way to the subway, she checked her phone – she had locked it up inside the drawer of her desk all day, like a thirteen-year-old with no willpower, she thought with disdain, and noticed that David had tried to call her a few times but hadn’t left a message. She tried him back and he picked up on the third ring.
‘Hey,’ he said.
‘Hi handsomeness,’ she said, ‘so sorry, was trying to finish up this thing for Whitney one day late and now rushing off to meet Suzy for six but I know I’ll be late. So that means I’ll probably be home late.’ She sighed. ‘When did I turn into one of those people who is always perpetually late?’
‘Ha! Don’t worry. It’s New York. Everyone’s always finding ways to buy time.’
She smiled into the phone. ‘Okay, I’m at the subway, gotta go, love you.’
‘Love you more. And good luck tonight.’
Ameena ran down the stairs as fast as she could, two steps at a time, and when she’d almost reached the bottom, she heard the low rumble of the approaching train.
Made it! she thought happily.
Five seconds later, she found her body dishonourably thrust against the cool metal bar of the turnstile that appeared to be refusing, like a wayward child, to give way.
‘What the hell!’ she said aloud.
‘Please Swipe Again.’ ‘Please Swipe Again.’ ‘Insufficient Fare.’ replied the turnstile.
‘Fucking crap,’ someone behind her cursed, not bothering, in true New York fashion, to even attempt to conceal the contempt, ‘fucking dumb tourists.’ Ameena didn’t dare turn around to see what this indignant emitter of eloquent epithets looked like. Even to look would be to plead some sort of unspoken defence. Train crimes, she thought, infuriated with herself, this business of not knowing your own balance. Guilty as charged.
On the platform in front of her, the train rolled languidly in, the doors opened, people got out, other people got in, the doors shut, then opened, then shut, then opened, then shut, then opened – taunting, taunting, could have made it in now, or now, or now, if only you were better organised, it seemed to be saying – then finally the doors shut and remained shut, and the train disappeared, slithering like a metallic snake into the tunnel on the other side.
‘Bloody great,’ she muttered irritably, ‘just bloody brilliant.’
But a few seconds later, when she went to refill her subway card at the machine, she found herself faced with something she wouldn’t have expected, not then, not in a million years, not from the MTA.
How had she not noticed this before? How had she never paid attention?
Her annoyance thawed, her eyebrows came together, her dark eyes deepened, her lips curved into a tiny, incredulous smile.
Fuck, she thought, I love New York.
And then immediately, I wonder what David would think?
For alone, how could she answer what was being asked of her in that moment, in the underground depths of the New York City subway? How could she possibly answer this, the most existential question of them all?
What do you want to do, the machine was asking her: Add Value? Or Add Time?
2.32
‘My sons…’ his mother said from the hospital bed, one of the last things she said before she found it too much effort to speak at all.
David was sitting on a chair by the window. Abe, towering over everyone else, even at eighteen, was skulking around sullenly, as he’d done ever since the jolly-looking doctor with the big hands and rosy cheeks had looked at them sadly and solemnly, and uttered the phrase, ‘Not much time.’
But our father is a watchmaker, David wanted to scream, don’t you get it? He makes time.
‘My sons,’ she said, this sick, frail, too-young-to-die, dying woman, in a weak voice, which like so many other things had ultimately betrayed her, ‘I hope that you are kind to the world, and that the world is kind to you.’
At first David thought this was another one of her delusions. She often confused past and present in those days – morphine will do that to you, he had learned, the price of quieting pain – so he assumed that she was speaking to them in the past, as a mother of small children. It was only later that he understood that she was speaking to them in the present, as young men, as a mother of young men, and that in what she wished for them, she moved easily across the continuous spectrum of time and lifetimes. She was alluding, in that final wish for her children, not only to a future, but to a past, to a history that she had lived out with them in her own too-short life, but also to a more significant history that began long before her time and would continue long after.
For she knew, even as her own story was ending, that the bigger story can never be erased; it remains dormant within the dusty pages of history books until such time that the actions of men rouse it from its sleep.
Then, it screams.
She opened her eyes to speak. It was an effort, David could see, even that tiny movement of the lids was an enormous effort, but she made it, she opened them wide.
‘Freedom,’ she said, ‘I wish for you…’
And David had remembered the rabbit. The eyes of the rabbit.
No, history can never be completely quietened. Not unlike a dying person’s pain.
2.33
The phone on the white Formica table that sat forlornly by the entrance of the split-level flat on Chapel Road rang, shrill and loud.
Yusuf answered on the first ring. He sounded tired. And old, Ameena realised with sudden shock. That was an old man’s hello.
‘Abbu?’
‘Ameena!’ The delight. The delight that almost made her cry.
‘How are… things, Daddy?’
‘Things are good, fine, Ameena, not to worry. And, how are you, my dear?’
But before she could answer, there was a noisy screech on the phone line and she heard her mother huffing and puffing as if she had run all the way from the other end of the city – an impossibility, Ameena knew, and smiled inwardly at the thought, in spite of the grimness of their present circumstances. Zoya had always been anathema to unnecessary physical exertion of any kind; even the idea of exercise as being linked in some way to one’s well-being was completely lost on her.
‘Ameena?’ she said, panting heavily into the receiver.
‘Hi Mum…’
‘Ameena, he is hiding th
e truth.’
‘What truth?’
‘Things are not good and fine. Big fat lies. They still haven’t repaired the window.’
‘But…’ said Ameena puzzled, ‘why not? It’s been weeks!’
Earlier, she had stopped at the supermarket on her way home from work to pick up a few things for dinner. Now, she was walking through Madison Square Park, by the statue of Seward, best known for having purchased Alaska from Russia all those years ago for two cents per acre. It may as well be Alaska, Ameena thought wryly, groceries in one hand, phone in the other; it was bitterly cold in New York, the wind finding its way to every exposed bit of skin, chafing it, leaving its mark.
Still, their apartment was warm, she thought guiltily, warm and cosy, the heating in order, the windows intact. But, why hadn’t they fixed things yet? Was the window of a style they no longer manufactured? Was the glass of a specification that took extra-long to source?
To her mother, she remarked, ‘Why is it taking so long? It’s probably freezing there too. Isn’t it?’
‘We sit upstairs. We had to cover all the furniture. The rain comes in.’
‘But, I don’t understand. Why hasn’t it been sorted yet?’
‘That is the thing your father is not telling you. There is some confusion, you see, with the insurance company. We are not covered, it seems, for terrorism.’
‘Terrorism?’
A middle-aged man walking next to her reached for his young daughter’s hand and quickened his step. Two old ladies on a park bench, gloved and mufflered, stared at her with a mixture of fear and rebuke.
She slid the grocery bag higher up on her arm and covered her mouth with her free hand.
‘Mum, what are you saying?’
‘I am not saying. They are saying. They are saying to be covered we should have been paying separate terrorism insurance policy. We have only been paying the normal home insurance, so these special cases are not covered. We never knew there was separate policy for such things. So, everyone is fighting with everyone else and the window is not fixed. I told your father, just forget it, we pay ourselves. But when has he ever listened to me? No. He likes to suffer. Every day, he is making rounds from police station to insurance company to repair shop. Every day without fail – morning he goes, evening he comes back.’
Inside her gloves, Ameena felt herself digging her nails into her palms. Movements of the body, one cannot control the movements of the body; they always speak the truth.
‘And the police?’
‘They are still investigating, they say. Looking into the matter. Trying their best.’
‘Well, if this is deemed terrorism,’ – she whispered the word – ‘surely it should be high-priority?’
Zoya sighed. ‘What else can we do Ameena? Alone, a person is invisible. They are nothing.’
2.34
The Ides of March arrived, and with it, the evening of Ameena’s second show.
The paintings were on the walls, David was around somewhere, and Ameena, secretly scrunching up her toes in her very high, very expensive, very uncomfortable new shoes, was in mid-conversation with a little old lady from Greenwich, Connecticut, with false teeth, shiny black leather trousers and an only son who was a doctor-without-borders in The Gambia, when Suzy snuck up behind her and grabbed her arm with a kind of theatrical fervour.
‘I’m sorry that I interrupt, Mrs Barry, but I must borrow Ameena please.’
Mrs Barry, who, by Ameena’s estimation, seemed decidedly tipsy on whatever was being offered around by the waiters bearing trays, started to say something, but Suzy had already steered Ameena away.
She dragged her to a corner and, looking in the direction of a tall, balding man in a long black overcoat, whispered, ‘That’s him.’
Ameena followed her gaze. She tended not to be partial when it came to her work, but he was looking at one of the pieces that she had some sentimental attachment to. It was an abstraction of a flower vase David and she owned, that lived, in real life, on the windowsill of their kitchen, unbroken and happy. In the painting, it had fallen to the ground and lay shattered in fragments of red pottery, the uneven splotches of yellow and fuchsia and purple and green representing a distorted reality of the strewn petals, the scattered leaves – a kind of freeing from confinement, of living things.
‘Go,’ Suzy ordered.
Ameena looked at him again. He had his back to them, and yet he cut an imperious figure, tall and regal, exuding a kind of confidence that she knew came only from power.
‘Go,’ Suzy repeated with – Ameena noted – an almost desperate urgency.
Ameena swallowed. Then she took a deep breath, put on her most disarming smile and walked up to him, until she was standing alongside him, looking at the work she had created. She was just going to introduce herself when he turned his head sideways to look at her. He had shrewd blue eyes, she noticed, and thin, pale lips, so thin and so pale they almost melted into his face.
‘It lacks authenticity.’
Ameena cocked her head slightly. Surely she’d misheard the great man.
‘Sorry?’ she asked in a genuinely apologetic tone, for it seemed only appropriate – after all, she was asking him to go through the effort of repeating what he had said, which she had, quite surely, misheard.
His face was turned back now, away from her, looking around the gallery, his eyes doing a practised, systematic sweep.
‘Come to think of it, they all do. They all lack honesty.’
Ameena rocked backwards and found herself on the very tips of her sequinned stiletto heels – precariously – as if she had suddenly, and without warning, fallen off a mountain (though she’d never been on a mountain), as if she had drunk one tequila shot too many (though she never drank tequila), as if she’d been caught cheating in an exam (though she’d never cheated in an exam) as if what she felt – this momentary sense of delirium – was not real, but imagined, imagined in some sort of unnatural, alternate, other world.
‘In what way?’ she heard herself say faintly.
‘There’s too much going on. Too much colour, too many shapes, too much everything. Overwrought, like a Picasso that’s trying too hard. You’re trying too hard not to do something. Only you know what that is.’ He sighed. ‘But you’ve killed the life.’
Shame. A fog.
He paused, then looked at her pointedly. ‘I wish it wasn’t so, but I don’t think, my dear, that you’re quite ready for prime time.’
Later, she wouldn’t be sure if it was the actual words or the easy matter-of-fact manner in which he said this thing, this thing that he knew – he must have known – was a kind of death warrant that would kill her fledgling dream, that caused something inside her to snap, but he’d barely finished his sentence when almost instantly, she felt something else, something strong and overpowering – she felt the shame melt into a bright flash of blinding anger. Who the fuck did he think he was?
‘Well,’ she said tersely, ‘you’re certainly entitled to your opinion. Art is subjective.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said somewhat sadly, ‘but I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’m only telling you how it is.’
‘That’s only your opinion,’ she fired back. ‘It has nothing to do with the quality, meaning or significance of my work.’
He stared at her with what appeared to be a look of genuine bafflement.
‘The significance of your work? Easy, my dear, easy! Do you know how many years I’ve been a collector?’ But then his tone softened, ‘You’re still young, you have much to learn, but you’re lucky, you have time on your side. You should spend it in the studio and strive to find your voice. Try and come up with something that’s yours, something you have conviction in. Imitators always get found out, it’s only a matter of time.’
‘Imitators?’ she repeated hoarsely, a barely audible whisper.
‘Regrettably so. And that’s perfectly natural when you try and do something before you’re ready for it. You have plenty of time to get famous – I would counsel you to take that time. I’m only surprised that Suzy with all her years of experience didn’t offer you the same counsel. Quite frankly, this whole thing is artistically irresponsible. There’s absolutely no need to run before you can walk.’
Ameena felt the all-too-familiar rise of nausea swell up inside her, powerful, unyielding, terrifying, despite its familiarity. Her head was spinning. Or maybe it was the room. She looked around in a trance-like state and saw Suzy – multiple versions of Suzy – looking straight at her, a look of rabid concern in her eyes, she had many pairs of eyes, an incarnation of some exotic, multi-headed god. From the corner of her own eye, she saw a waiter approach, expertly balancing a tray full of champagne glasses on the underside of his palm. He had skin the colour of hers. They made eye contact briefly, then he lowered his eyes and then he was extending the tray towards them, offering it out – a kind of munificent lord.
In front of her, somewhere beyond the amorphous throng of strangers, she saw David and Peggy standing side by side, watching her. Other people were watching her too, she felt their eyes bore into her, but what she remembers is David and Peggy. David and Peggy, Peggy and David. Blending into one, their four eyes converging into one single Eye of Providence, a fearful, imploring look in the Eye. Don’t do it, the Eye was begging, don’t do it, please don’t do it.
Next to her, Ivanov extended his long, black, overcoat-covered arm towards the tray. She didn’t know if it was her brain playing tricks on her, but the arm seemed to move forward in slow motion, a freakish, jerky, reptilian swaying, that made her want to scream.
And then his hand hovered above the tray.
