Johnson Avenue looked like an abandoned construction site or battlefield. The road potholed or cratered, a smell of something rotting, the gallery shrouded in a cloud of dust. When I tried the door it was locked, the note about Timemachine no longer attached to the mailbox, but down the block the loading doors were open and two men emerged from the gallery carrying a crate. The shutters seemed to have been opened, the electricity switched on, and when I peeked inside the gallery I noticed the rope around the room had been removed, the black cloth was gone, and everything was steeped in a sharp, tawdry light.
Can I help you? one of the men said, wiping sweat from his nose.
Yes, I’m looking for Ana Ivan. The artist.
I don’t know, man, no Ana around here.
She was doing the performance. In the dark. Do you know when she ended it?
Nah, we only just got here.
What about the gallerist, is he around?
Sorry, we’re just installing the show. I think you’re going to have to call his assistant.
But is he here?
I dunno. You better call the assistant.
I looked over his shoulder for any sight of the gallerist, or maybe of Ana or Irene, but all I saw were the white walls, the floor of metal sheets coruscating under the fluorescent lamps, a single wooden crate marooned in the center of that enormous room. I thanked the art handler and got on my bike again and rode to Ana’s studio, soft asphalt sticking to the tires. On the top floor the heat was suffocating. This time there were no sounds of activity, no smell of fresh-cut wood. No one opened when I knocked on the studio’s chipboard door, the rooftop was deserted, and even the dumpsters had been emptied. The whole building seemed to be abandoned, evacuated in the face of an impending demolition, and I hurried down the stairs, afraid of getting stuck in the ancient elevator. I went home, exhausted from the humid air, and after calling Ana’s voicemail and sending her another email, I sat on the windowsill with my computer in my lap and watched the first of thousands of office workers returning from the city looking drained or sapped or wrung dry of dreams, eyes fixed on their phones as they dissipated through the streets.
When I woke up the next day it was almost noon. I was still dressed, and on the pillow next to me the computer showed some amateur documentary about the Ganzfeld effect, the browser lost in a vortex of online videos. As I took a cold shower I thought about my night in the blackened gallery, searching for any clues as to why Ana didn’t answer my calls, if I might have said or done something wrong. Then I dressed and sat down by the fan, browsing through the library books on sensory deprivation, trying not to call Ana to listen to the ringing bleating like an echo of my last unanswered call. Late in the afternoon, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I called Irene’s number, and when she didn’t answer, I found her website, found her office address, found my keys and my wallet, and went down the stairs.
Across the river the sun was still above the towers, hovering like a kind of mirage. Or not the sun, but what appeared to be the sun, because it was one of those days when the light glitters in the windowpanes, or the reflections glitter, and the sun seems to emerge where it isn’t. I moved slowly through the translucent neighborhoods along the waterfront, without quite understanding what I wanted. Everything that made up Ana she’d placed in my hands: her stories, her secrets, her experiments, for a moment even her body, while she herself vanished into darkness. But what was I supposed to do with all of it? Maybe I was hoping Irene could answer that question, or maybe I was just hoping for someone to talk to. In any case, I made a beeline for her building.
I’d imagined an office either like Ana’s studio, a raw and industrial workshop, or someplace sterile like a clinic or a gallery, white, and full of simple sharp-cornered furniture. The reality landed somewhere between my imaginary poles: a coworking space on the third floor of an unremarkable building furnished with desks and office chairs, wall-to-wall carpet, a vending machine, and a water cooler. An intern showed me Irene’s empty cubicle, and I unfolded a chair and waited under the droning light of the fluorescent tubes. No, lighting doesn’t drone, I thought; maybe there was a printer or an air conditioner humming through the landscape of the office, a landscape that must once have been stately and simple, but which now was overgrown with decades of architectonic excrescence. Oak windowsills peeped out beneath plastic paneling, the ceiling had been lowered dramatically, and all the carpet and walls and ceiling tiles were gray. And not the kind of gray that radiated order and quiet; no, the gray of a derelict tower block, and the block had been under siege. Then the main door opened, and I saw Irene’s torso glide toward me, her legs concealed by the row of cubicles.
What’s up? she said. I heard you were in here.
She looked at me with surprised suspicion or maybe amused boredom, as though she’d just discovered waiting on her desk a gift or cupcake she didn’t want. Then she dropped her bag on the floor and started rummaging through it, telling me about a call she was waiting for, that the phone might ring at any moment, and all the while a smile was glued to her lips.
And what about you? she said, as she dug out her notebook and phone charger, her tissues and keys. How’s it going with those stories?
The ones I sent in, you mean? I never heard back.
Well, whatever. What matters is we got them written down. They don’t need to be masterpieces.
Then she sat in her chair and leaned back, cradling her phone in her lap.
What’s up? she said again.
Ana, I said. I don’t know, I don’t think she’s doing very well. I went to see her, but she isn’t at her studio or at the gallery, and she isn’t returning my calls.
Of course she’s not at the gallery. The show is over, Irene said, glancing at her phone, and when she didn’t add anything else, I tried to explain Ana’s mangled speech, full of lost Romanian words, and I repeated what she’d said: that she felt like a virus or a curse, that she ruined the people around her. I said she’d cried and asked me to leave, then told me about Isak anyway. Irene smiled. I wasn’t sure if it was something on her phone or if it was me who’d amused her, so I told her about Ana’s story, about the two years her parents had invented, and about what the story had cost: Ciprian’s suicide, Isak’s madness, my own disturbed months.
Maybe there’s something to it, I said, and I told her about the hours I’d followed Ana into the dark, the days and nights I’d spent writing down her stories, how for each word of Ana’s I’d repeated, the further away I’d slid from all that was real and tangible, from my girlfriend and my brother and my university studies, and while I talked the humming in the office pressed in around us, like the sound compacted into a single pulsing point, a point that disturbingly seemed to be Irene’s lap, and I told her how I’d pushed Lærke away, that I had even turned my back on my own brother, that all I had left now were the stacks of Ana’s memories and imaginings, memories that weren’t even my own, until suddenly a new whine opened between Irene’s legs, a whine that turned out to be a ringtone, and then Irene got to her feet with a sweeping, apologetic hand gesture, picked up the phone, and stalked out of the office.
Dusk was falling, or something like it. I don’t know how long I waited for Irene, but when she returned the direct light of day had vanished from the office, and the gray surfaces beneath the desks were sinking into black.
Funny, that, said Irene, sitting down and pointing at the phone. My friend. It was kind of like what you were saying.
What was?
Do you know my friend Anastasia?
Sounds familiar, I said, afraid it was a name I ought to know, an artist Irene was about to school me on. But it wasn’t an artist she had in mind; it was just a friend, an academic with a PhD in French Creole who’d been dating a classical musician for a few years. Irene had met them a handful of times and they were a beautiful couple, the linguist and the wind instrumentalist, but then one spring or summer’s day the linguist was on her way home from a conference when she g
ot an email. An email from her oboist. Yeah, we all know where this is going. He’d met someone or it couldn’t go on or he didn’t love her anymore, Irene couldn’t remember. But he was moving on. For a while the poor French Creolist tried her best to win him back. She sent desperate texts, but he soon changed his number. She showed up at his apartment late at night, but a new tenant soon answered her buzz. That’s when she realized she barely knew any of the oboist’s friends, and he wasn’t on good terms with his family, or pretended not to be, who knows, she never met them. In any case, all the linguist could do to calm her nerves was stalk him on social media. Poring over his photos, she soon discovered another woman, an expat Ukrainian architect or city planner who showed up in the periphery of the oboist’s posts with alarming frequency. Soon, sure enough, the Ukrainian started liking the same pictures as he did, she started commenting on his posts, and one night, staggering home after a few drinks too many, the linguist could no longer hold back her rage. She sent the oboist a message or a tirade, demanding to know who this Ukrainian architect was. The result being, of course, that the oboist blocked her, leaving her with no recourse but to carefully construct a new, fake profile. Not that it took that much care. A bland and neutral name, a handful of photos downloaded from some random profile—that was all, really. And armed with this new avatar, the expert in Bourbonnais Creole started adding and following the draftsmen and architects and resort developers in the Ukrainian’s circles, started adding the Ukrainian’s ex-coworkers and college classmates, and finally, after a few weeks, began following the Ukrainian herself. It’s not like she was proud of it, Irene said. The linguist had trouble sleeping back then, and the pills didn’t work, so she just kept at it all night long, sifting through hundreds or maybe thousands of posts with the strangest ideas racing through her mind, until one night or morning she saw a video sent by the Ukrainian architect from an aquarium in some seaside town or neighborhood, and could have sworn she heard the voice of her oboist in the background. His face wasn’t in the picture, and as far as she knew the oboist never went to the coast, but for a second she did hear his laughter, and then the image dissolved and she was plunged back into the fluorescent night of her basement bedroom.
Do you see what I’m talking about? Irene said.
Yeah. She stalked her ex.
Well, yes. But she also descended into fiction.
The linguist did?
Right, said Irene, although back then the linguist didn’t think about it in those terms. She just scrolled through the newsfeed of her fictional profile, and one night she saw a photo posted of the oboist or his doppelgänger having dinner with a group of architects at a restaurant in Brighton Beach. Trawling through the photos and videos tagged there, she noticed another picture of the Ukrainian architect sipping wine with a man by her side, a man with a back like her oboist, and that same night she got on the southbound Q train. For an insomniac, it wasn’t such a bad ride. As soon as they emerged from the tunnel at Prospect Park they barreled down the elevated tracks, the city glimmering on the horizon, her mind in some half-conscious stupor, until the doors pulled open and the ocean breeze wafted in, and when she shifted in her seat she saw a glimpse of the architect’s maimed face and Astroland grotesquely silhouetted through the darkness. Most nights she’d sit at the bar in the seaside restaurant, staring at the dinner parties until a waiter stirred her and she’d go freshen up in the salty or deep-fried or sticky-sweet breeze of the boardwalk. That’s where she met the other Ukrainians. They were underemployed adjuncts, PhDs like herself, Anastasia and Vadim and their crew. They wrote high-school admission essays for the children of Chinese industrialists, carving out a business writing like aspirational twelve-year-olds, that’s how they made a living. Not a very glamorous living, let’s be honest, but a living nonetheless, like amoebae persisting in the cavities of a tooth, in the rotten molar of some great and terrifying predator. Now, Irene wouldn’t say they became friends overnight, the Ukrainians and the linguist, but one evening they did show her where to get the best pirozhki in Brighton Beach, and there were moments when the linguist felt happy listening to Anastasia’s ramblings, or sitting around in bars pouring water into their glasses so the waiters wouldn’t foist another drink on them. It was still the summer break, after all, and the French Creolist still couldn’t sleep at night, so to pass the time she started picking up Ukrainian. She was not a linguist for nothing, and to build her vocabulary Anastasia took her to the warehouse parties in Ridgewood where she DJ’ed on the weekends, to after-hours clubs in Bed-Stuy, and to late-morning drug sessions in moldy bungalows in Sheepshead Bay, the two of them sinking farther and farther south through the borough, until, eventually, they arrived in Brighton Beach, where Anastasia retreated to her cramped apartment and the linguist went back to the restaurant, thinking or maybe whispering: I know you’re here, you can’t hide forever. But evidently the oboist could, because she never did see his face again, except one night as she sat on the Q train passing through Midwood, the wild parrots probably screeching in the background, and on the seat next to her she sensed a shape, a tender presence she remembered, and slowly she turned around and saw his face, or a face just like it, a sleeping face that morphed into the face of Anastasia, as if the whole thing were a telenovela with an endless list of actors all playing the same parts, and that’s when Anastasia opened her eyes, and that’s when the linguist took her hand, and that’s when she put her head in her lap and fell, finally, asleep.
Irene cast down her eyes. In her lap the phone was vibrating, and I could have asked what happened then, I could have asked what she meant or was insinuating by the story, but instead I just sat mutely and stared at Irene’s half-illuminated face, watching her pastel-painted nails dance across the screen.
That’s it, she said, looking up.
She fell asleep?
Yup. A happy ending, she said, and at that moment or the one right after it the lights in the office went out. We’d been sitting still for too long, but neither of us waved our arms, and neither of us clapped our hands. For a few seconds we sat gazing at each other in the darkness, or in the cone of light that fell through the pane like a searchlight from the office on the other side of the street. I think I could see Irene’s teeth brighten into a smile, and I thought: Is she calling me an insomniac stalker? Is it me that’s the jilted lover? Is she just full of shit? Then Irene flicked her hand and the lights came back on, and she picked up her keys and phone and grabbed her handbag off the floor, so there could be no mistaking that it was time to go. As I got up, Irene said something I couldn’t hear.
Sorry, I said. What?
Don’t worry, she’ll let you know when she’s ready.
Ready for what, I thought, as Irene accompanied me to the door. When I’d walked a few steps down the stairs, I turned around. Irene was still standing in the doorframe staring at me, a smile on her lips and the phone glowing in her hand. Talk soon, she said, and then she shut the door.
That evening I tried again to write about Isak. I tried to conjure him on the bridge in the dusk, listening to Ana’s story, wearing a Portuguese T-shirt two sizes too small and the smile of someone teetering between curiosity and dread, a thought already gestating behind the synapses and sodium-potassium pumps, behind the forehead soon to be crushed against the waters of Stavanger harbor, a forehead to weep for, as I tried to imagine it. A little after midnight, the one remaining light across the street was switched off, but I went back to my computer as though summoned by the words Ana had spoken, words that I repeated deep into the night like some mournful incantation. The sun rose over Brooklyn. And then again, any number of times, while I tried to transcribe what Ana had told me, sitting at my computer or standing by the sink, watching myself from the outside: a young man bent over his desk in the dusty glow of a lamp, poor, lonely, sleepless, obviously lost in illusions. Irene was right. The show was over. The curators and critics had paid their visits, the reviews were already published, the collectors had groped
their way through the darkness, and somewhere Ana was probably constructing a new piece. It was all done, rent was coming up, I didn’t have the money, and the only food around was granola and coffee, so much coffee that my hand shook and the pen skittered over the paper like it was transmitting in Morse code: What are you doing? Get out of there, go home to Denmark, forget all about Ana and her deranged boyfriend, forget all about that woman and her experiments nourished on anti-light, on anti-matter and non-time, on two years that never happened. And I stared at the text again, and I tried to picture Isak on the bridge, but I couldn’t or I didn’t want to, and then I shut down the computer and grabbed a plastic bag from under the sink. The apartment was a mess. The desk was flooded with papers and folders and dirty glasses, the floor stacked with books and plates and unwashed clothes. Unfurling the bag, I took notebooks down from shelves, gathered the short stories and articles, crumpled up drafts and the photograph of Ana, and I threw it all into the bag, and the next morning I returned my books on the perception of time to the library.
It was mid-August. I’d run out of ideas—out of money too—and although I knew I should give up the apartment, forget Ana’s story, and get on with my life, I couldn’t pull myself together. Something told me the story wasn’t over, and reluctant as I was to get further entangled in Ana’s fantasies, I still hoped for a last goodbye, a conclusion or a resolution, or maybe just proof that the past few months weren’t sheer manipulation.
The Invention of Ana Page 25
