Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  *

  Paul never talked about where he came from. He wasn’t aware, at that time, that people could be defined just as much by what they left behind as what they strove for. But what could he have said, anyway? He didn’t have the words he needed. He came from a place defined just as much by its geographical location, its per capita income, its unemployment rate, as by its lack of a story. It did have its history, an accumulation of anecdotes such as the one about the sickly blue street lamps that kept junkies from finding their veins, or the one about how Paul’s father first arrived and was wise enough to change his name as soon as he could to make it more French, calling Paul Paul – but maybe he had been more naive than he thought. After all, there were other ways to find out about someone’s origins, as if they weren’t implied in the dense, slightly bluish-black curls of his hair, in his long, thick eyelashes, in his sharply arched eyebrows and the intense, pleasing orderliness of the expressions that resulted; not to mention all the rest that was beyond sight: blood, genes, patterns and figures on a screen. An entire history of which Paul was mostly ignorant, that had not been relayed to him – and so what could he have shared of it, especially with Amelia, a woman like Amelia, who had crossed oceans more often than she’d crossed the motorway ringing Paris? He came from a place that he both was and wasn’t surprised to hear regularly invoked as an example of an urban disaster; he wasn’t surprised because he knew deep down just how ugly, how dangerous, how dysfunctional it was; but he was surprised because, even so, it was his home, his ground zero – it just was. He was more ashamed of the way this place lingered within him than of the actual place, which already felt distant, far away, almost off the map; and yet its essence seemed to have defined Paul inside and out – his way of moving, his way of reacting to any threat, real or imaginary, he might sense. And it took Paul, who had grown up within a certain degree of risk and fear, some time to see that fear was now something his own body aroused. It was only when he gestured in frustration, at the cafeteria between classes, and noticed everyone’s reactions, that he saw it. He was astonished. Deeply ashamed of it, as if he had betrayed his new self. He had exposed himself and it was a breach of etiquette. And so, when the city that was no longer really his was plastered across every screen, he did not say anything. Numbly, he watched the news bulletin. A kid barely younger than him was dead. There had been a manhunt and he’d hidden in an electrical substation, because he was so scared of the police – it wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last – and he’d been electrocuted. In a single second, probably the moment he’d trespassed, the entire city had been plunged into darkness, a pause that was temporary for most people but not this boy or his family. Paul, sitting on the edge of the bed in room 313 as his mind was elsewhere, took in the images on the screen, Amelia behind him, her chin on his shoulder, her legs crossed around his waist, her arms wrapped around his torso – they didn’t talk, but something passed between them, something circulated, not the image on the screen, which bore no connection to it – something internal, murky, secret. Paul’s body retained some memory of the perimeter wall, of having scaled it, then of crouching down, holding his breath, feeling sheer terror at being betrayed by the inevitable breath of air escaping his lungs; and there was something else, maybe, not a memory but maybe a feeling that got harder and harder to shake; the speed of electricity running through a teenage body, the smell of flesh burning, jaws clenching to the point of teeth shattering, a nightmare that, Paul told himself, might well have been drawn from Nadia Dehr’s box – a nightmare that amounted to documentary poetry. Maybe Amelia was thinking the same thing as she stroked the tensed muscles that she still loved, or believed she did. Maybe it was then that her greatest fear took shape: since she hadn’t opened her mother’s box, everything seemed to be coming out of it; every horror, every injustice. It was the origin of the modern world – the world according to Amelia Dehr. She thought she had rid herself of that box, but instead it had engulfed all she knew.

  She wanted to take part in the protests that ensued; that teenage boy shouldn’t have been hunted down like an animal. It drove him crazy that she – who claimed to know everything about the world – should suddenly be so naive; it awoke the worst in him. He told her not to go. He said out loud, I forbid you, furious that he should have to say it. She didn’t stoop so low as to break the silence; instead she looked at him with an unreadable smile – it wasn’t quite disdainful, but amused. Of course, she went, she was arrested, she came back with ugly bruises on her face that terrified Paul, who couldn’t stand the idea of anyone raising a hand against her, much less of her body being marked by what he had been determined to escape – the sickly blue public lights of those ugly, inhospitable nights. Now, those origins he had detested and fled were imprinted upon her face, the holiest thing in his world. He was sick with rage and (although he wouldn’t have admitted it) fear.

  So they didn’t always see eye to eye. Of course they didn’t, despite it all – but only at moments. Paul only realised it later, in the stark hindsight that made a bleak landscape of the past. They kept to themselves at the hotel, or at Albers’s, as Amelia had left the university’s lecture halls for good. What was she doing while on her own? Nothing, clearly. Paul lived for the two of them. The light bulb in front of room 313 kept burning out, and he kept changing it. Once, he met her father, who had come to pick her up. The man was nothing like his own father: he had green eyes, a cashmere overcoat, he looked around the place worriedly and nearly didn’t shake the hand Paul proffered as he introduced himself. Another time he met Amelia’s old friends (or old acquaintances, rather, she said). They were all that remained of her disjointed childhood: between Swiss boarding school and upper-tier prep schools, between long American winters and tennis courts, swimming pools she could have floated across for months and played at drowning in. It was a life Paul couldn’t picture, having never seen anything like it, not in books, not even on screens, as that particular echelon of society prided itself on its discretion, its aloofness, and hardly needed to be seen to feel that it existed: the world was its oyster. Huge apartments, glass doors, polished wood floors, long hallways that twisted and turned, a certain way of carrying oneself: Paul was more curious than impressed; he seemed to be there incognito, disguised by wearing the right shirt and holding the right cigarettes; but someone outside the kitchens (because in these immense apartments everything was multiple, multiplied: the kitchens, the stairs, the doors, the windows) distinctly referred to him as the handyman, which resulted in amused laughter, and Paul felt attacked, he felt both seen and dismissed. Unmasked, he thought, and an icy panic came over him because for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what had given him away.

  Towards the end (though he had no way of knowing it would be the end), Amelia insisted that they go stay at a particularly fancy hotel, nothing like the Elisse chain. The impish look on her face was one he’d seen once or twice before, and he loved it. The place had survived successive eras; its name alone commanded respect. After many delays, the decision had finally been made to revamp its legendary interior completely. And, just as the months-long closure was about to begin, some PR pro had had a genius idea: before the renovations crew arrived, a group of carefully hand-picked guests – young, rich, photogenic, overwhelmingly white – would be let loose on all the hotel’s floors, with endless magnums of champagne and full licence to blow off some steam, to unwind, to demolish the royal bedrooms and the presidential suites, knock down wall after wall, yank out draperies and tapestries, rip open mattresses upon which a number of them had actually been conceived. That would be the first time he saw Amelia’s fury, her rage – finally she was finishing what she started, following through on her lazy gestures that barely got nine-tenths of the way, because the final tenth, the missing tenth, was outright destruction. Amelia ripping out beaded crystal chandeliers. Amelia throwing bottles, empty and full, at the tall mirrors that seemed to contort at first, then actually caved in. The expanding rin
gs of cracks reflected a fractured, multiplied image of Paul and Amelia. He had never seen her like that – nothing, not even sex, aroused such passion, such radiance. She was in her element there, seemingly at home; and for the first time he felt slightly afraid of her.

  In the memory he would have of that evening and the demolition party, Paul was nothing more than an onlooker, watching this orgy of annihilation in a daze. But there were other memories apart from his own, and one in particular is collective, unmoored from any one single mind, in the form of a short, slightly shaky video. It shows young brutes, their eyes set blazing by drugs, alcohol, and their own unbridled strength, amongst them a tall, hulking, dark-haired, almost wolf-like man, and if he ever saw the clip Paul wouldn’t have recognised himself, not immediately, even though it’s him all right, kicking down a door and dragging a willowy redhead in before kissing her against a wall. He slips his hand under her skirt, pushes it up. It’s impossible to make out their faces which seem to be welded, fused together – if they pulled apart at that moment or someone pulled them apart, their features might well have been scrambled, jumbled together forever. She holds a hammer, her stiletto digging into the wall, and then the scions and socialites break into the penthouse and run amok. The guy isn’t just kissing her any more, and her leg is wrapped around his hip. He absentmindedly slides his hand up the wall, as if putting his weight on it – and instinctively, without even looking, yanks a sconce light out, a blunt gesture inherited from a long lineage of neck-breakers. And then there’s nothing in the room, nothing but shadows.

  *

  And then came the end. It was calm: Paul was studying for his finals, Amelia seemed to have given up all pretence of wanting to learn anything, and was watching (Paul thought) porn while eating crisps, staring straight ahead, her mind somewhere else, although Paul couldn’t really be sure where; he hardly had time to think about it. After finals, he told himself, I’ll talk to her. His ambition or his fear of failure, which amounted to the same thing, had shifted his mental focus back on himself for the moment. A few days during which the world wouldn’t be revolving around Amelia, who was perfectly capable (Paul thought) of accommodating this revolution.

  He was back at his job, at the front desk, and sometimes everything blurred together; he looked at the monitor screen like a textbook and at the textbook like a monitor screen. But he was getting better. Albers had told him that she wasn’t worried about him, using those exact words, and he was flattered but also saddened, as if she were abandoning him – deep down, he wanted his beloved professor to care. His work at the Elisse hotel exhausted and desensitised him in a particular way. There were moments when he wasn’t sure whether he was asleep or awake, and everything became muddled: theory and practice, classroom abstractions and first-hand experiences, here, now, the present coming away, floating a little.

  *

  Architecture from another, bygone century, which was never meant to last. Despite the emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene, the very proliferation of hotels made their growth parasitic. And just as any single termite or flea has no more distinct an identity than any other termite or flea, so was any single Elisse hotel just as good as another. Species could have a history, but individuals – if it was even really possible to talk about individuality in this case – couldn’t. Apart from the encroaching, all-encompassing history of how they spread from one continent to another, of air conditioning or electronic locks – using white cards that Paul, with a casual swipe, keyed and rekeyed for each newcomer, and which opened the rooms and the elevators, for renewable yet always finite lengths of time. All the Elisse hotels were built on the same model; only the scale changed. The front desk always facing the elevators, always to the left upon entering, past the revolving door that a motion detector set spinning, the door’s glass panes sweeping across the floor with a soft, pneumatic sigh; identical marble floors, each one weathered an almost other-worldly greenish-black.

  The number of rooms varied from location to location, of course; each one bore the Elisse trademark – a double bed topped by a sideways figure-of-eight, shrewdly alluding to the helices behind the hotel’s name; a sideways figure-of-eight, a small chain of minuscule stars akin to asterisks, as if each one corresponded to a footnote, a contractual stipulation in such fine print that no eye could even see it – no way to know what, exactly, one might be agreeing to here, and the motto We won’t sleep You’ll sleep better imprinted on every tenth door. In this way each location, no matter its size, was a cell within the Elisse Collection, a network growing as exponentially as a mathematical sequence or a viral outbreak. If Paul had perfected one skill, however, it was that of filtering out his immediate environment; and all this, he thought, ought to have practically no effect upon him.

  In purely statistical terms, night drivers will fall asleep without realising it for several minutes per hour – a fact corroborated by the data for car accidents. What goes for these drivers ought to go for Paul in front of his screen. By definition, he has no way of knowing, in the moment, that he’s fallen asleep – one of the advantages of his job being that he’s hardly risking losing control of his vehicle. Unless the vehicle in question is his own head, which might grow heavy, might shift this way or that, might sag on his shoulders. And maybe that’s what’s happening, he thinks he’s awake but he isn’t, he thinks he’s awake but he’s dreaming and his dream is an exact replica of what he’s seeing, of what he’s paid to see and what has been broken up over the night, has crumbled apart without his noticing it to become another world; maybe that’s why Mariam is suddenly there and calling his name, touching him, tapping his shoulder, but as soon as he comes to, she’s a couple of feet away, her arms flat against her torso, as if to underscore that everything is as it should be again, Paul awake and Mariam not touching him. Nobody ever touches Paul, unless he falls asleep, and he always, at least the overwhelming majority of the time, sleeps with Amelia.

  For a while, at the very beginning, it would have been quite possible, quite easy, for him to sleep with Mariam, but they didn’t work the same shifts: she did housekeeping very early in the morning, right when he was clocking out. He admired her long, toned arms, her striking skin, her face with its singular features – her cheekbones, her Cupid’s bow lips, the hollows of her eyes on either side of her nose – all gleaming, as if polished by an expert hand. They had had a moment, as people say (as Paul said); they had flirted a little, barely, but no one had done anything untoward, and so they could act as if nothing had happened. Ever since he’d taken up with Amelia, Mariam had looked at him every time they saw each other as if she were trying to hold back an uncontrollable laugh. But not today. Today she seemed concerned. Paul, there’s a problem in 313, she said. Mariam never called Amelia by her name, maybe she didn’t even know it, she said 313 the way everyone else did; but in her voice he could actually hear the capital Ts of Three-Thirteen, the only trace of irony she allowed herself, as she otherwise considered such derision beneath her.

  What do you mean, a problem? Paul was visibly disoriented. Mariam usually looked him over as though holding back a contemptuous laugh, a wild laugh, which if released would never have stopped, but this time was different. She was wearing a white uniform that was stretched tight, as well as small white tennis shoes perfectly suited to her bounding footsteps. Paul wiped his face, met her gaze; Mariam was always wearing some crazy new get-up, and this time it was coloured contact lenses, lifeless green things that slid around her deep black pupils, shifting slightly with every blink of her eye, and the next time he saw her again, an hour or two later, she had thrown them away. It had to be four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning. What do you mean, a problem, Paul repeated. Mariam shrugged pointedly, and he got up.

  Strange how something so banal, so common as a hotel room can suddenly become troubling. All it takes is for a door to be ajar in the middle of the night, for the light in the hallway to be slightly dimmer around it – Paul cursed the bulb that always went out in front
of 313, plunging the doorway into shadow. All it takes is for the cracked-open door to reveal total darkness, perfect blackness; this slight variation, a oneinch strip of night – it doesn’t take anything more than that for Paul, hovering on the threshold of the room where, for weeks, for months, he’d fucked, showered, eaten, read – to be seized by a sort of anguish not unlike the sort Mariam was feeling, the two of them thinking of things they had never come across: bodies hanging in a closet, bathtubs full of blood, gruesome deaths, equal parts unreal and plain as day, in other rooms identical to these ones, in other Elisse locations. These second-hand memories flow from one place to another in the minds of those who clean hotel rooms, wipe down windows and change sheets, impersonal memories whirling through the vents, seeping into the carpet and its synthetic fibres, into the paintings on the walls, waiting to inhabit a body or two again. Paul and Mariam looked at each other and neither of them was entirely sure where this sinister premonition had come from, if not from the space itself.

  What are you going to do, Mariam whispered, a sentence that left him standing alone in front of the ajar door to 313. No, she didn’t want to laugh any more, she actually seemed to feel sorry for him, the front-desk guy who was utterly compromised, who had gone to the dark side and now had to pay the price, was already paying it without his realising it. Mariam had seen him ransack a palace, kick down a door violently, she had seen him screw an heiress against a wall, pull out a crystal wall sconce, she had seen him act like he was one of them, like he was part of their world. He had gorged on this dream like a wild animal might on blood. From these shaky images she had deduced what he wanted to be and never would, and that made her laugh as only a woman scorned could. It now gave her pleasure to see him asleep, unshaven, without even realising he was asleep, in an uncomfortable chair, under fluorescent lights that accentuated the dark circles under his eyes and made him look even more tired. She saw the love he had for a rich girl, a mad love; she also saw that this rich girl, like all rich girls, believed that being loved was the natural state of things but was incapable of returning the sentiment, and she had other problems besides. Amelia was insane, and Mariam knew it. She laughed at Paul’s failure. At all his present and forthcoming failures. She laughed, but tonight was different, it was different as she stood at four or five in the morning in front of Paul whose heart was only a minute or two away from breaking.