The Invention of Ana

by Mikkel Rosengaard

  What do you think it means? I asked.

  Don’t know. That Ridgewood is full of horny artists?

  We laughed a little at that. Then my brother grabbed some beers, and we toasted to artists.

  Oh hey, I almost forgot, he said. I’ve got something planned for us.

  Planned?

  Yeah, it’s not all fixed up yet, but let’s meet next week and have a chat. If things go as I hope, it’ll be an interesting fall.

  Three or four days later I was standing in the arrivals hall at JFK, waiting for Lærke. Her plane was delayed, something about a strike in Paris, and for two long hours I wandered up and down the airport corridors, eating ice cream cones and checking the time, until I lifted my eyes and saw her coming through the sliding doors, her long hair falling obliquely across her forehead and the phosphorous green of the exit sign tinting her pale cheeks. She headed straight for me through the mob of people, let her bags drop, and stood there with her springtime freckles and the look I loved the most, the look of someone hearing a good story they already know, pleased but not surprised, and then she leaned into my chest, all soft and warm and thrumming.

  In the cab she told me about the man she’d sat next to on the plane. A man who’d read Saxo Grammaticus for seven hours straight, a man who hadn’t stopped to eat, who took Gesta Danorum with him to the bathroom, and where did you meet people like that, why didn’t we have more friends like him? I didn’t know, but I said if she wanted friends like that then she was in the right city, and I praised Greenpoint’s piers and Williamsburg, where you could walk twenty blocks without seeing a gray hair, and I talked about the adventures in store for us in the wasteland under the JMZ line, and about Bushwick, which lived a double life, or a life that was two lives, one that shone like MDMA, and one heavy like ketamine. It was our town now, I said, and Lærke put her head on my shoulder and pointed at the skyscrapers glinting on the horizon. Back at the apartment I brought out wine and glasses, and Lærke walked around the place, putting up posters and photos on the walls. Then she took my hand and led me to the bed and unbuttoned my shirt.

  You’re so handsome when you’re not freezing every two seconds, she said, running a hand over my chest. So much better in HD.

  Afterward we lay in bed and talked about the first room we shared in Nørrebro, in Copenhagen, and the time we set up dating profiles for a laugh. The site made you take a personality test: which compliment would you rather have, choose the two words that best express your outlook on life, that kind of stuff. It used an algorithm that incorporated psychological, anthropological, and sociological criteria to identify the most suitable partners, and when we were given our matches it turned out we were number one on each other’s lists. Thirty-two thousand users on the site, and Lærke and I were each other’s top match. It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me. We ran down to the corner shop and bought prosecco, and Lærke said she wanted to have our match rating tattooed on her collarbone, and even after she’d fallen asleep I stayed seated at the computer, gazing at our compatibility report, our profiles, which lined up perfectly: She was sensitive–intuitive to just the right degree; I wasn’t too focused–observant, and I still have the final lines in my head: You both prefer flexible surroundings and have no issues with surprises. You don’t restrict each other within rigid structures and are open to adventure.

  That weekend I showed Lærke the city. I took her to galleries and a Polish bakery, I showed her the abandoned lot at the tip of Hunter’s Point, and on Monday Lærke began her internship at a literary journal while I launched into my final week at the gallery. I’d been hoping to bump into Ana at the closing reception, but although I came early and left late, I didn’t see her. The next day, we began to take down the exhibition. I turned up to dismantle the The Time Traveler, but one of the technicians told me Ana’d left a note with instructions, and that she wouldn’t be coming to help out.

  That week I did nothing but work. There were catalogs to pack up, articles to archive, budgets that needed to be balanced, and every day I hung around the office well into the evening, hoping I’d see Ana. But she never came padding down the hallway, her logbook never lay out on a desk, and when my curiosity got the better of me and I poked through the files for information about her, I found nothing but contractors’ quotes, technical specifications for DVD players, and endless correspondence with the Romanian Cultural Institute.

  Friday at lunchtime we closed the festival office. Once we’d turned the key in the lock, my brother invited the curatorial assistant and the interns to a farewell lunch at a restaurant in Vinegar Hill. He ordered wine and talked about his plans. He was off to Liverpool the very next day, and from there to Helsinki and Copenhagen, to meet with artists and bigwigs in the cultural world, and he’d be gone for a couple of weeks. Then he lifted his glass and I lifted mine, thinking: My apprenticeship’s over then, I have to manage in New York on my own.

  For the next few days I stayed home writing job applications. Lærke was engrossed in her internship, off to events every night, and after all those hours alone at my desk I was glad of the interruption when Ana phoned one Tuesday afternoon. She apologized for not showing up at the reception, explaining that she’d met an American curator and that they were organizing an exhibition together. She sounded enthusiastic, and we chatted for a while, me telling her about the job hunt and her telling me about the nonvisual installation she was setting up in the gallery. I asked how it was looking, but Ana said she didn’t know because she hadn’t seen it yet. That was the whole point. Then she stopped talking, and for a while I stopped talking too, and we listened to the traffic or the crackling on the line, or maybe each other’s faltering intakes of breath. I remember I pictured Ana standing on the pavement in Woodside or Bushwick, staring out of the corner of her eye with that dreamy or paranoid gaze, clinging to her little red tote bag, when suddenly I couldn’t stand the silence any longer and asked why she had called. There was a moment’s pause before she answered.

  I just wanted to know if you’d come over and give me a hand with the exhibition. If you get a move on you’ll be here in time to meet the curator.

  Half an hour later I was crossing underneath the BQE. It was one of those evenings where the wind changes, and a warm breeze makes six o’clock feel like midday. My shirt was sticking to my back as I clambered off the bike in front of the gallery. It was on Johnson Avenue, squeezed between a lumberyard and a carpet store, and a cloud of dust drifted across from the cement works on the other side of the street. The door was closed and the shutters were down, and for a moment I thought I’d come too late and Ana was gone. But when I tried the handle, the door opened. Lights were on inside, and in the middle of the room stood Ana, writing in her logbook.

  Welcome to our cave, she shouted when she saw me. What do you think?

  Not bad, I said. It’s a really nice space.

  At that moment a woman emerged from the back office, and Ana introduced her as the curator behind the exhibition. I didn’t catch how they knew each other, but her name was Irene, and she’d grown up on the other side of town. Ana took my hand and gave me a tour of the gallery: an exhibition space, its floor covered in sheet metal, a toilet, and a back office full of junk. That was it. But the layout wasn’t really important, because Ana’s installation was called Timemachine, and it consisted of a single blacked-out room. And I don’t mean blacked-out like an unlit basement or a night in the woods. No, I mean absolute blackness, a total absence of light, one hundred percent pitch-fucking-dark. Ana’s idea was that people would live in the room while they worked or slept or danced; it didn’t matter so much what they did, just that they lost touch with the rhythms of the day.

  Ana herself would be living there for thirty days, to explore how the darkness altered her perception of time, but first a whole series of other artists were going to use the installation. In the first week they had a guy organizing a string of dinner parties in the dark, then a dancer putting on a prop
rioceptive ballet. I’m not sure how Irene and Ana had persuaded the gallerist to go through with such a dangerous project, but persuaded him they had, and now their problem was blacking out the space.

  We bought staple guns and staples, ordinary and nonslip gaffer tape. We bought a rope that we nailed to the wall all around the gallery, so that the audience could follow it around the room and find their way out of the door again. Irene had brought a mattress that we threw into a corner, and we put a plastic tub in the bathroom so the artists could bathe. Ana padded back and forth across the floor, issuing orders to me and Irene. She was full of nervous energy, and kept saying: Is there any guarantee that the sun’s going to rise tomorrow? No, there isn’t.

  Then we wound down the blinds and switched off the electricity, but there was still the problem of the light seeping in around the door, and we had to rig a kind of airlock system with three layers of black cloth before we were able to block it all out. Finally we taped over dozens of tiny fissures where the sun was shining through, while Ana lectured us about photons.

  When you heat an object, she said, it emits light, okay? Light is made of photons. Does that mean the photons are already inside the object you’re heating?

  No, I don’t think so.

  Right, so they’re produced. They’re created. Photons don’t exist inside atoms. It’s creation, see?

  I laughed. It was rare to see her so enthusiastic.

  Don’t you know anything about photons? They’re so tiny and adorable and weird. If you let two photons interact with each other, then you separate them and put them on two entirely separate islands, the first photon on Tenerife and the second on La Palma, measuring the one on Tenerife will instantly alter the state of the other. Literally at the same moment, without any delay. Isn’t that absurd? It’s like they’re teleporting back and forth, or time-traveling or something. It shouldn’t be possible, but the photons don’t care about possibility. They do it anyway.

  Like bumblebees, said Irene.

  Exactly.

  But it doesn’t happen naturally, I said. It’s only in artificial experiments, isn’t it?

  Doesn’t happen naturally? cried Ana. It’s been demonstrated thousands of times—it is nature. In fact, quantum mechanics is so well established that it’s considered a definition. So if I take two electrons and measure their mass, I’ll always get the same result. I can take that for granted. Unlike you. Can I take you for granted? Can I count on you? There’s always going to be room for doubt.

  I laughed. I don’t know about that theory. You could always test it.

  No thanks, she said. I’ll stick to photons.

  We kept working late into the evening, until it couldn’t get any darker. Irene ordered pizza, and we ate it blindly. Afterward Irene went home, and we lay on the floor in the blackness, trying to sense different parts of our bodies in space. Ana unpacked her things; she wanted to do a trial run, spending the night in the gallery. I helped her put sheets on the mattress, succeeding only after five or six attempts, and we laughed at our own incompetence. She unpacked her toothbrush and toothpaste, spare clothes and soap, a notebook with a pen on a string. After taking out a screenless music player full of audiobooks, the last thing she removed from the bag was a stopwatch for the blind and visually impaired. When you stopped the watch it spoke the time out loud.

  Count to 120, she said, as we sat resting on the mattress.

  Why?

  Just do it, count to 120. But count it out in seconds—count to two minutes, okay?

  I nodded, which was a ridiculous thing to do, all body language thwarted by the darkness.

  Okay, I said, as Ana pressed start and I began to count. Trying to fall into a rhythm of one number per second, I counted Mississippis, and I felt pretty confident in my accuracy. I found a pace that fit the beat of the passing seconds, but when I’d counted to 120 and Ana stopped the clock, three minutes and eight seconds had elapsed.

  Wow, said Ana. You’ve only just got here and already your sense of time is slipping. Time flies for you, I guess.

  What do you mean?

  I mean you lost a third of it. Don’t you see?

  No, I said. Three minutes is three minutes. I didn’t lose anything.

  But Ana didn’t want to hear that kind of nonsense, so she told me about an underground explorer and scientist called Michel Siffre, who had spent two months in a subterranean cave buried deep beneath a glacier in the Alps. During his experiment, Siffre had lived there alone and cut off, no sunlight, no watch, his only contact with the outside world a cable telephone he used two times a day to speak to his colleagues: once when he woke up and once when he went to bed. The researchers discovered a disturbance in Siffre’s perception of time. When they phoned to tell him that two months had passed, that the experiment was over and he could come out of the cave, he had only slept thirty-six times. He thought just over a month had elapsed. Time had gone more quickly than he’d realized.

  Something happened in the cave, said Ana. She spoke more quickly than before, the pitch of her voice changing, her tone suddenly urgent, almost agitated. She said: The clock went twice the speed of Siffre’s experienced time. He lost half of it. Half. Can you imagine? Nobody knows why the time passed so quickly, but they think it has to do with routine. When your life revolves around routines, your memory can’t pin time down. It slips away. After a day or two you forget what you did the day before, and your only points of reference are falling asleep and waking up again. Apart from that there’s nothing but darkness, like one long night.

  We fell silent. I wanted to talk about something less creepy. Three full minutes had passed as I counted the seconds, but I had only experienced two. What had happened to the other one? It had vanished. I had missed it, letting it slip through my fingers. And suddenly my seventeenth birthday party rushed back to me, when my brother told me I was already halfway through my allotment of perceived time. It depended, of course, on how old I got, he had added, but in terms of averages. In terms of averages, I’d already lived half my experienced time—the years had long since begun to feel shorter, and they would only get more so. Shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter, he had said, and then my mother had told him to shut up. We never spoke of it again, but now and again I caught myself wondering whether time really did shrink as we grew older, if maybe the last six months had flown by more quickly. Lærke had even mentioned it the other night—all of a sudden it was summer again, and we didn’t know where the spring had gone.

  Why are you so interested in time? I asked, to change the subject.

  Because I’ve been time-traveling my whole life, said Ana.

  Yeah, right.

  No, really. I have.

  You’ve traveled through time. How did you manage that, then?

  I wouldn’t dare tell you.

  You wouldn’t dare?

  No, it’s a sick story. Really appalling—you don’t want to hear it.

  Come on, it can’t be that bad.

  It is. So let’s talk about something else, okay?

  No, I want to hear it.

  But if I tell you, you won’t want to see me anymore.

  I laughed. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I’ll still want to see you.

  No, you’ll just think I’m lying. That I’d have to be sick in the head to come up with something that disgusting.

  We were silent a moment, maybe two—it was so dark it made you doubt everything. All I could hear was the throb of my pulse, Ana’s breathing, and the rustling sheets beneath us. Then she leaned her head against my shoulder, and suddenly I felt her fingers grazing mine.

  I mean it, she said. People get weird when they hear that story.

  I tried to laugh, but I could feel the pressure of Ana’s hand against mine. I don’t know whether it was deliberate, but she let her fingers rest against my skin.

  Seriously, I said. Do you think you have supernatural powers, or what?

  But Ana insisted. Her time-travel story had already ruin
ed far too many lives, and it would have been better if she’d never told it to anybody. I thought she was joking, of course—how bad could it be? It was just a story, just a handful of words one after another. It wasn’t black magic.

  Come on, I said, stupidly. I’m sure I can handle it.

  Shifting her body, she laid her head in my lap and drew the sheet over herself, and in all honesty I can’t remember how she began her story. The darkness in the gallery was so thick that there was nothing to hang my memories on, only the sound of her voice, the feeling of our sweaty hands, the weight of her neck against my thigh. Did she begin with the birth certificate or with her father? That evening it was difficult to tell where one thing finished and another began, but you have to start somewhere, and that somewhere was in Bucharest during the Good Years, at the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy, the most celebrated, most prestigious institute east of the Carpathians and west of the Black Sea. Not that there was much competition, it must be said—it was probably the only celebrated institute in those parts—but celebrated it was, especially in those days. The days when the Institute’s alumni formed the backbone of international mathematics. The days when Solomon Marcus stalked the halls, devising the first mathematical poetics. The days when Alexandra Tulcea was the femme fatale of the natural sciences, married to Saul Bellow, playing the lead in his novels. The golden days, in short, before Ceaușescu shut them down.

  It was during those days that Ana’s father, Ciprian, traveled to Bucharest from his rural village to take the entrance exam at the Institute, and as he didn’t have anywhere else to stay he took up residence in Cișmigiu Gardens. Not the teeming Cișmigiu Gardens they are today, full of juice vendors, street kids, and Romani families. This was the Cișmigiu Gardens of the Good Years, peaceful and magnificent, a park famous for its black swans. It was here that Ciprian settled down on a piece of grass along the fence near the main street, beneath a tree that doesn’t stand there anymore. He lay basking on the benches and relaxed, thinking of all the poems and novels he had read about the Gardens—about unfaithful lovers meeting in the shadows of the trees, about men who died tragic deaths among the flowerbeds—and doubtless of the entrance exam too, and of all the beatings he had received when his illiterate father caught him studying: batterings with bare fists, thrashings with sandals, peltings with beetroots, wallopings with half-empty sacks of potatoes.