The Invention of Ana

by Mikkel Rosengaard

  Wow, I said. That’s one dangerous sculpture.

  Batshit crazy. But you see what I mean, right? There’s something at stake. It’s not just a naked photo or a shitty bronze statue at a roundabout.

  And what happened then?

  Yes, what happened then? Then I agreed to curate the show for them.

  You’re kidding, I said, and laughed. So now you’re spending several months in some one-horse town in Finland?

  My brother shrugged. Yeah, well, it is what it is. If you want to win, you’ve got to put something on the line.

  Later that evening we went to a restaurant underneath the grimy tracks of the JMZ line. My brother led me over to a table by the window, and as we read the menu he told me about the work he was thinking about putting on in Finland, the turnip field he wanted to plant in the town’s disused athletics stadium, the climbing plant he wanted to grow over two enormous silos. He was going to bring the plant from a Mayan ruin in Belize, and in five hundred years’ time, when it covered both silos, the green cylinders would soar up over the houses and cranes. It was an immensely slow work.

  Vines, you know? he said. I’ve always had this thing with vines.

  I nodded. I didn’t remember him having a thing for vines, but it was a nice image. Green silos reflected in the lake, two twin towers that grew unperturbed out of the centuries.

  We’ve got to work with slowness, he said. That’s where we’re headed. Getting nature involved, sort of.

  I agreed. That sounded right, that stuff about nature and slowness, and he told me about the time he’d sailed up a river in Guatemala when he was on 2C-I. Vines had grown along the river, their tendrils wriggled deep into the underbrush, more tendrils crawling between those tendrils, which led in turn to other tendrils, and before he knew it he’d fallen into a trance or a doze, and he was hovering far above the river, sensing the forest or the mangrove swamp or whatever it was. I tried to picture it, but got stuck on the mangrove swamp. I didn’t have a clue what one looked like, and suddenly he got up and said: Listen, I’ve got an idea.

  Then he went over to the bar and bought beer, and when he came back he wanted to hear my plans for the next month or two. When I said that grad school started in September, that I was looking for a job and writing a few short stories about Ana, he hauled out his bag and told me he’d been invited to an important biennale in Spain.

  Congrats, I said, that’s awesome.

  Taking a folder out of the bag, he told me the biennale was one of the biggest art events in the world, an exhibition he simply couldn’t refuse, but if he was going to get things ready in time for October he’d have to skip the festival in Finland. And that was a problem, because he’d already signed the contract, the Finns were counting on him, there were directors of foundations and major cultural figures from across Northern Europe on the board, and if he canceled on them his reputation would be permanently ruined.

  So I can’t get out of Finland, he said. But I can’t miss out on the biennale either.

  But, then what are you going to do? You can’t be in two places at once.

  No, and that’s why I was thinking you could go to Finland.

  Me?

  Yeah, as my assistant. Go shake up those Finnish hayseeds a little.

  While you’re in Spain, you mean?

  Exactly, it’s just two months. You’ll handle it no problem.

  Then he showed me a map of the disused stadium. The local council had already approved the planting of turnips on the athletics track, he explained, the piece had been conceptualized down to the smallest detail, and now it just had to be planned and organized, the soil plowed and seeds sown. Wouldn’t it be a cool experience, since I didn’t have anything else to do that fall?

  But I have got stuff to do, I said. I’ve got loads to do.

  Sure, but not here, in the city. You can easily study from over there, can’t you?

  Well, yeah, but I’m also writing something for Ana.

  Listen. I know it’s not the greatest job in the world, but if you do this, I promise you there’ll be better opportunities down the road. I promise you.

  Can’t you just hire an assistant?

  If I had the money, I would. But there’s no money in this crappy little festival. That’s the problem.

  So it’s unpaid?

  There’s a small allowance. But fuck money, it’s about doing something together. As brothers. Wouldn’t it be cool to make art together?

  But two unpaid months in Finland, I said. That’s a tall order.

  He leaned across the table and said he knew how I worked, he trusted my judgment, he’d love to have me as his understudy, and wasn’t this a totally unique chance, an experience we’d remember all our lives and one day tell our children, and then he put down the bottle and stared into my eyes.

  I know it’s a lot to ask. But I really need your help. Won’t you do this for me?

  I nodded, and he smiled, and I turned away and gazed through the window. Outside the rain had begun to fall. People were crowding underneath the awnings, and a small, dark-haired woman looked at me through the glass. For a second I thought it was Ana, and at that moment I suddenly realized what she’d meant. My brother opened the folder, taking out the contract and the budget specs, and it was like the space compressed. The dented tin ceiling, the scarred brick, the hiss of the espresso machine, all of it curled tightly around me, and I felt the urge to get out of there, away from this version of myself, the me that acted like a shadow or a dog, like a lapdog whose only talent lay in mimicking its owner’s mood, who lived off the scraps from his table and trotted up wagging its tail each time he called. Even that analogy wasn’t quite accurate, because at least a dog had its instincts and its urges, beneath the tame surface. No, it was worse. I was more like a hologram of my brother’s being, his ideas and experiences copied onto an airy, flickering image, a projection without mass or weight at all.

  So, what do you say? he asked. Do we have a deal?

  No, I said, straightening up. No, we don’t.

  What? he said, gazing at me in astonishment, as if he didn’t speak my language. What’s the problem?

  I don’t want to go to Finland. I’ve got so much stuff to sort out here.

  Fine, yeah, but can’t you—for a moment he paused, his eyes sliding across my face. Really, do you mean it? Are you sure?

  It won’t work. I’m sorry, but not this time.

  He looked at me, then scratched his neck.

  Okay, well, it’s up to you, of course. But think it over. Promise me you’ll think it over one more time.

  A few days passed, and then he called again. I was in the middle of a job application, and I was going to ask whether the festival could give me a recommendation letter, but I never got that far, because my brother had an offer for me.

  We’ll split my fee from Spain, he said. What do you say? Let’s do this thing together.

  Do what together? That field in Finland?

  Yeah, man. I’ve been mulling it over, and I think it should stay in the family. I’d rather lose a bit of cash than give the job to some art student in Helsinki. Look, just think about it for a minute. We’ll be creating a whole stadium together. In fucking Finland. When’s that ever going to happen again?

  Then he said something about the power of art to shape whole cities, landscapes, about Joseph Beuys’s seven thousand oaks in Kassel, about Francis Alÿs, who moved a whole mountain in Peru, and now it was our turn to do something together, to leave our mark as brothers, and, sure, it was only a two-bit show in Finland, but it might be the start of something big.

  Don’t you get how much this means for me, he said. It’s my whole career on the line.

  Yes, but I really can’t help you. I don’t have time.

  But can’t you make time? Seriously, I’ll pay you.

  Look, how many times do I have to say it? I don’t want to go plow some field in Finland.

  For a second or two he was silent. Then his voice crack
led down the line.

  Okay, fine. Just forget it.

  Then he hung up and I sat there for a moment, listening to the tone, before going over to the sink and getting a glass of water. I tried to settle back at the desk and pick up where’d left off, but the sentence I’d begun was swimming incomprehensibly onscreen, and suddenly it struck me how unpleasant our conversation had been. When I thought about it, I realized I’d heard tension in my brother’s voice, and despite his enthusiastic patter about all the things we’d do together, I’d sensed impatience beneath the cheery chatter, as though he were straining not to lose his cool and start yelling down the phone. It was like he didn’t fully believe his own words, and while I paced restlessly around the room, my mind turned to his exhibitions, to earlier works in back rooms and disused apartment blocks, installations in white cube galleries, all the projects and festivals I’d helped with since my teenage years. I’d planted trees and cleared weeds, scrubbed exhibition rooms clean, played chauffeur and attendant, errand boy and bartender, and although there was no shortage of interns in the art world, I knew he’d never find another one like me. An assistant who never asked questions. An assistant who never backed out. Was it possible he’d tried to scare Ana away so he could have me to himself? So he didn’t have to share me?

  I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to think so badly of my brother, and I got up and changed into shorts and went for a run to shake off the idea. By the riverbank the clouds hung low and ill at ease above the city. The clammy heat settled around my neck, and although I ran so fast the summer air burned my lungs, I couldn’t give my thoughts the slip. The hours I’d sat in doorways at his exhibitions, the chipboard sheets I’d lugged up stairs, the grant applications I’d written in his name; all of it passed through my head.

  I couldn’t keep living as his shadow, I told myself. It was time I stepped up and found my own place in the world. But how? As I jogged along the waterside, I racked my brains. I imagined cities I could move to, jobs I could apply for. I thought of my short story about the appendix and the things Ana’d encouraged me to write; perhaps they were the solution. That magazine editor had been interested in reading them, and if I could get a few stories published, if I could get an editor in New York, it would prove I could manage on my own. That was the idea I landed on as I stopped, out of breath on the Pulaski Bridge. A desperate idea, a naïve idea? Absolutely. But an idea that gave me something to work with nonetheless, and as I walked down the stairs toward Greenpoint, I promised myself I’d work harder than ever before. I’d dedicate myself to Ana’s stories, I’d write at least eight hours a day, and I wouldn’t stop until I reached the edge of the story, the rift where Ana’s life collapsed into fantasy.

  By dawn the next morning I was already at my desk. Lærke got up at seven thirty, we had breakfast, and as soon as she’d gone to work I sat back down at the computer and wrote on. A couple of times I wondered what Ana would say if she knew I was copying her stories, if she’d feel betrayed or abused, or if a stack of such tales was exactly what she wanted. But I didn’t waste much time on those questions. My thoughts soon drifted on, condensing rapidly into a story about a girl who was her own sister, into the two years of the girl’s life that didn’t exist but were the center of her world: a two-year void on which her family turned, like a galaxy revolves around a black hole, and suddenly the sun had set, and Lærke was home, and I was still trapped in the cold blue light of the screen.

  Over the next few days I remembered all kinds of details from Ana’s anecdotes. Sometimes I’d be standing in the bathroom; other times I was mid-conversation with Lærke when a story came crashing into my mind, and my gaze faltered, and my answers grew light and fluffy. On those days I forgot to eat, I forgot to drink, because there was always another sentence to include, always a piece of dialogue to add, and the one thing that made me relax was sitting at the keyboard, writing Ana’s stories. As soon as I got up and left the apartment, I longed to be back at the screen. At the coffee shop or in the park, with Lærke’s hand in mine, I pictured the scenes I was going to write: a man setting his watch, a girl’s hand dissolved in soapy water, the reek of paper burning in a stockpot. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I asked Lærke, Shall we go home?, and as soon as she’d gone to bed I took out my stories and flicked through the pages.

  I kept going like that for a week or so. I wrote from morning till evening, and I was making progress, or I believed I was making progress, and one night, as I lay in bed and waited for sleep, I had the hopeless idea of writing the story from the dead sister’s perspective. Because the narrator was dead, the voice wouldn’t move through time like normal people did. No, the narrator would be outside of linear time, she’d live in time like a landscape—a landscape where all moments existed side by side and nothing was ever in the past. It was an original idea, I thought, stupidly, or at least an unoriginal idea that might bind the short stories together. As soon as the library opened the next morning, I rushed from shelf to shelf, borrowing books about block time and eternalism, articles about tenseless languages and tertiary tenses, future indefinite and pre-future tense, and dissertations on tribes with uncommon perceptions of time.

  That evening, as we were barbecuing on the roof, I told Lærke about my dead narrator idea and about an article I’d read, a dissertation about the Aymara people from the Andes, whose conception of time was apparently the reverse of most cultures’. In their language, time wasn’t a space consciousness moved through, like a line drawn from the past through the present and into the future. Instead, they saw consciousness as a fixed point. They imagined humanity standing still in the present, the past ahead and the future approaching from behind. Like a man who stands at the center of time’s space and braces himself against the gale, his eyes riveted on the past and the winds of the future blowing at his back.

  Later we lay in bed and talked about the Hopi tribe and the linguistic debate about their ancestral language that had been raging for years. One group of researchers insisted that the Hopi had no grammatical forms or constructions or phrases that referred to what other people called time, and thus couldn’t conceive of it as we did: as a continuum through which everything else in the universe flows. What they did think about time the researchers never fully established, and I tried to imagine a world where past and future didn’t exist, but it was impossible, I couldn’t see it, and then Lærke rolled over and said I should try imagining a world where the alarm clock went off at seven.

  Days passed, summer sank over the city, and although I couldn’t write like a Hopi, and even less like a girl who was dead, I convinced myself I was gradually producing short stories worth reading. The desk bulged with notes, the floor swam in discarded drafts, and one Wednesday morning I sent an email to Ana’s editor friend with the manuscript attached. Even after I’d sent the stories, I continued reading about the unreality of time and the temporality of consciousness, checking my email again and again. But the editor didn’t respond, and ten days later I sent another email. That night I fidgeted beneath my desk lamp, leafing through the stories, making corrections and additions, striking out words and changing sentences, until suddenly Lærke was standing behind me, her hair tangled and her eyes drowsy, staring at me and holding the computer’s power cord.

  Oops, she said, pulling out the plug. Must be a power cut.

  Then she dragged me back to bed, but I couldn’t escape Ana’s stories so easily. I saw them everywhere, and the following night I woke from a nightmare. It was a dream about a sink or a pipe or a radiator that had sprung a leak, and in the dream I roamed around a pitch-dark gallery, trying to find the source, but of course I couldn’t find it, and the water rose and rose, reaching first my navel, then my shoulders and chin. It was a predictable, clichéd nightmare, but a nightmare all the same, and I woke up with a cry.

  I still hadn’t shaken off the dream the next morning, when I was waiting for the train and happened to overhear a conversation. Two men were discussing a c
olleague who was originally from Rwanda but had been adopted by an American family. One of the men had been invited to the woman’s twenty-seventh birthday, but a few days before the party the woman had canceled it without explanation. He was puzzled, because the woman had been talking about the party for weeks, and when he saw her some time later he asked what happened. Apparently, in the process of setting up life insurance, the woman had contacted the adoption agency to get a copy of her birth certificate, but when it arrived a few days before the party, she discovered to her horror that the orphanage had lied on the forms and pretended she was three years younger than she was. Presumably it had been easier to get a four-year-old adopted than a strapping seven-year-old. Thus, in a single blow, the woman was no longer an emerging talent in her mid-twenties but an unmarried thirty-year-old without children or a permanent job, neither engaged nor pregnant, and death had crept three years closer.