Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  It wasn’t nothing, but he sometimes trembled for no reason. It really wasn’t nothing, but one day, in the middle of a desert, a land where glassed-in parks were being built, glass-domed ski runs – Paul, the windows guy, sometimes assisted on these projects; this time, though, he was dealing with a tower: a vertical kingdom, an empire without an emperor. It had been a long time, he thought, since he had proposed or thought of proposing anything other than tempered glass, bulletproof panes being the latest fashion, the latest standard – if your work or your identity didn’t result in someone trying to (to use his father’s words) pump you full of lead, then your life was a sham – and that day on the thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth floor of a tower under construction in the middle of a desert, he was standing behind the window, observing the city that several decades earlier had been just a camp, the heart of the space back then being easy to make out, beating as the wind filled the tents’ canvas. But these days that beating heart was lost, or hidden, or buried, or stopped – he was blinded by the light playing on the skyscrapers’ panes, short and long flashes of light dancing on the glass walls – a detail that nobody had noticed apart from Paul, the windows guy, and a little girl sitting cross-legged on the sixty-fourth floor of a building out of his view. I must be losing it, he thought; he knew better than anyone else that these panes of glass were sealed, immovable, and that there was no way they could be flashing. He considered the possibility that these flashes – some short, others long – were an otherworldly language of sorts. He thought about the workers, tens of thousands of workers coming from other countries and continents to build this city, an underpaid army that sometimes suffered horrific accidents, dying without anyone really knowing or caring. I’m losing it, he decided. A few days later there was an emergency evacuation of all the Westerners. Something had happened and now he was in the back of an armoured car, wedged in amongst strangers, and for once nobody was yapping about air conditioning.

  He ended up back home, watching a disaster on screen that hadn’t been clear when he was in the middle of it all. It had come into focus through the bumps along the road, through gunshots in front of the airport, but never so clearly as now in the aerial footage of blazing flames and summary executions. At what moment does one become the enemy, the windows guy, now on leave, wondered. He slept for forty-eight hours, waking up only to let melatonin pills meant to reduce symptoms of jet lag dissolve under his tongue. He woke up to wonder about how subjective that word, symptoms, seemed to be, as his head for the moment felt too heavy to raise.

  Once he had got enough sleep, he showered, put on a clean shirt and ventured out for some coffee, to enjoy the simple pleasures of being at home. Then he did what he had long held himself back from doing: he went to see Albers.

  2

  Simply walking into the university’s buildings was now, for Paul, an extraordinarily complex matter. He remembered it as an intermediary space, both indoor and out, with no barrier to entering or exiting. Arcade after arcade, rows of picture windows, emergency stairwells leading up to terraces where everyone smoked and hung out, as close to the sky as anyone had any chance to be while in the middle of a city. So Paul was surprised to see security guards, vestibules, protocols. He had to exchange his ID card for a temporary access card; the security personnel – ex-cons or young people of modest means – walked him to the building entrance; and yet, he told himself, this all somehow made him feel less safe. The place was stuck in a state of suspended deterioration due to neglect as well as intent. His memories came back, memories of how it had felt to walk down these grungy corridors that he had once considered cosy. When he pushed open the heavy door, the lecture hall was dark; images were gliding, for lack of a screen, right across the whiteboard, slipping along the wall, and the whiteboard’s edges cut through the video, giving it a jagged physicality. Paul leaned against the back wall, whispering an apology – for there were kids everywhere, on the steps, or sitting three to a seat, one on the cushion, the second on the armrest, the last perched on the back. They were so young; expressions flickered across their faces and left no trace, as if over the surface of flat water. Was it possible that they had never, in their whole life, felt anything long-lasting? And, at the bottom of this arena, almost at the students’ mercy (he’d never realised just how vulnerable that position was), stood Albers, whose features he couldn’t make out, drowned out so thoroughly by the projector’s lights that she seemed to be an emanation of the film, a series of moving images suddenly given flesh. It took his brain some time to make sense of them, to assemble them into something coherent: they were too strange, too shocking, too disjointed in these different layers. Anton’s face, her small hands fluttering around, the desk behind her, the whiteboard, the wall, so much visual complication that made the process of deciphering all the more difficult. (Paul wondered, were those unfortunate, optically disorienting conditions part of the class, were they the class?) Finally he had to accept what he saw: a lab, a monkey, and a rabbit. He had to force himself to look, because scientists had removed these animals’ skulls, the part that was perhaps called – he wasn’t sure – the skullcap. And there they were, their brains exposed to the air, and lab assistants had stuck needles into these skulls, expertly discharging light (or maybe not so light) electrical stimuli, and, given the circumstances, due to scientific experimentation, the physiognomies of these otherwise placid animals revealed pure terror. Although it was easily seen in the features of a capuchin monkey, so closely related to our ancestors, Paul was surprised to see that the rabbit, too, with its rabbit’s head and its downy ears dangling around its bared meninges (such a small, pinkish, almost translucent brain – it could have fit in a baby’s hand) – that the rabbit, too, expressed fear, which Paul’s own brain, well protected in the darkness of the thickest bone of the human body, immediately recognised, and if I see its fear and understand it, that has to mean, he thought, his heart pounding, that this rabbit has a face, the same way I do. He ran his hands over his face; he was more exhausted than he thought.

  Fear has a spatial component, said Albers: if there is no space, there is no fear. Fear is primarily located in an area of the brain that can be activated, as these images show. Whether or not these images should exist at all is up to you. Fear is also located, at least for mankind, in darkness. In the night. The absence of perceptible boundaries, a formless space – and night, in reality, is the opposite of a definite place; it’s an area, a vagueness. Incidentally, it seems that intense, unrelenting fear makes one more receptive to abstraction – and I will leave it to you to establish a fearful history of modern art, the explosion of abstractions after World War II and the Holocaust, for example. And it is also the case that fear is located, as we will now be considering, in cities. Lights, please.

  A slim young blonde sitting near Paul, who smelled faintly like mint, flicked the switch; the fluorescent lights hummed on. Albers was illuminated in the deeply intimate gesture of adjusting her lapel; she looked up at these kids who were simultaneously her subjects and her judges – and she saw Paul, and smiled at him. It was a sweet, playful smile that was at once childlike and motherly, one that softened her face and her eyes, and Paul felt at home. By the end of this class, Albers, as was her habit, the title of the class notwithstanding, still hadn’t developed her point about cities, still hadn’t touched on the theme of tomorrow, and he made his way, against the current of students leaving, down the rows of seats; the last ones who lingered, both the shy ones and the ambitious ones who wanted to say something quickly, one-to-one, were surprised to see their beloved professor throwing her arms around the neck of a tall dark-haired man whose face she, standing on tiptoe, held in her hands as she exclaimed: My little Paul! What a surprise! It’s been years!

  They went down to the car park where Paul had sometimes worked while a student. Albers had put her arm through his and he felt like an adult at last, as if he had gone on growing all this time, even though he had of course already reached his full hei
ght by the time he had hidden, terrified, in the sentry box with its Plexiglas covered in the whorls, the small greasy galaxies that were the fingerprints of those who had worked there. He had to curb the impulse to stop and rub them away with the hem of his sleeve. Albers was nattering away beside him. This time, it was he who drove the German car, still the same one, still parked in the same spot, as if nothing had changed, although he noticed an uneven scratch along its gleaming side, as if someone had scraped it with a long talon – or, more likely, a key. He raised an eyebrow, feeling protective. Albers waved off his concern.

  As they entered her building his heart began to pound; he was afraid the place might have somehow become smaller, afraid of being disappointed as one is when revisiting the places one has grown up in; but no, nothing had changed, and he padded around Albers’s spacious apartment – it could have housed a family but she was living there alone – where every facet of her personality, every one of her moods had its own corner, its own privacy, as if she were, in her own eyes, an entire tribe, several generations coexisting peacefully. What a perfect life. Books everywhere; chairs and lights that Paul now knew the designers and prices of; and even a pinball machine that sparked a pang of melancholy because Amelia and he had given it to her. An old thing from the eighties, with a scantily clad heroine emblazoned on it, a cascade of blonde hair, roses and brambles around her: kitsch martyrdom, black romanticism and Japanese manga fetishism, an eighteenth-century Frenchwoman who had dressed as a man, and lived through the Revolution, and whose name no one would ever forget. Paul was amused to find class handouts and half-finished articles covering the glass top. Albers let out a soft laugh and handed him a glass of wine. What do you know, it’s become my second desk – they say that sitting is the new smoking, and sometimes, every so often, playing it helps me think a little. (Albers didn’t say pinball; instead she referred to it, quite formally, as electrical billiards.) She was every bit as devoted to her work (the end of the world) as she always had been, and she couldn’t resist telling him about her research, there, in front of the old arcade game, before even offering him a seat – everything about her warmed the very core of his heart. Albers had been writing not long ago about exile and flight as principles of spatial organisation. She had aged a bit; her hair was grey – she took, as she told Paul, a certain pride in it; she had chosen the sheen carefully, gone to the hairstylist; her eyes, equally grey, stood out even more. Moved by a feeling that was rather unlike him, Paul put his arm around her, making sure not to knock over their glasses. Albers laughed. My little Paul! Come here, tell me everything. Of course she already knew everything – the Agency, the windows, the uprisings in the desert; she knew that he was making a good living; a very good one; if she was disappointed by the career he had chosen, she didn’t let on; not everyone could devote themselves to research, to teaching. That wasn’t the path meant for Paul; he had struggled too much with his own background of poverty, and the deep-rooted rage he felt towards the leisure class that he had infiltrated, that had adopted him – a rage he himself wasn’t aware of, not really. Sometimes this fury became, briefly, something perceptible, but more often it was ghostly, a rift in the space–time continuum, a breach of the allegedly universal laws regulating the world. His rage was practically foreign to him; when he felt it he was literally beside himself, as if possessed; even though it was the most genuine, or truthful, expression of who he really was: Paul, the windows guy. Of who he really was when windows were taken out of the equation, along with tailored shirts, and refined gestures, and all the nights spent meandering around world capitals with colleagues he considered friends. In these last ten years he had learned not only how and when to talk, but also how and when to be quiet; he had learned how to play office politics, how to detect the political underpinnings of personal relationships, the betrayals; these days, he seemed to be no different from any of them, he smiled (and, on the inside, blushed) at everything he’d been oblivious to when he was younger, when he thought belonging was a matter of the right brand of shoes or cigarettes, whereas it was in fact a well-timed shrug of the shoulders, a wry aside, a silence. Yes, even silence was a different thing here. It wasn’t at all like his father’s silence: not only had Paul come up several social classes, but he had come into a more self-assured stance that lay in knowing how and when and especially why to be quiet. Few people had any suspicions that this placid man was in fact blazing with fury, had in fact an unquenchable thirst for justice; few people had any idea that his well-kept hands could wield a hammer on the fly, could land a blow to the face, and feel jaws and molars shattering on impact, thinking all the while about his own grief and the rising dawn. Some nights, when he was with a handful of businessmen – all in high-flying careers, thirty-somethings in search of a thrill, all dressed in identical suits and ties – sometimes he was singled out from the pack. A bouncer or some other minor authority figure covered in hair or tattoos or piercings or scars would recognise something in him that the others didn’t have and let him in, just him, and nobody else in the group, and he would always give them a small, apologetic smile before going in, breathing more easily once alone, and the night was his oyster: the disused factories where the thumping bass became his heartbeat, the fancy townhouses where someone would stick a circular, triangular, star or virus-shaped sticker over the camera lens of every guest’s phone, and in this guaranteed anonymity, they would only be able to see with their own eyes, and they would see all sorts of things: dominatrices and orgies both human and animal, faceless men and crotches everywhere, and all their worldly accessories – heels, riding crops, toys of all sorts, baroque get-ups. Paul would stay for an hour or ten or fifteen, and by the time he emerged, and found his colleagues, his acquaintances again, it had become a joke, a mystery, nobody could understand what shady quality he had that made him someone to reckon with, someone so unexpectedly desirable. And Paul would simply smile, and say nothing.

  Standing next to Albers, however, after so many years and hotel rooms and time zones, he felt a peace that he hadn’t experienced in a long while, and he felt innocent and new again. They caught up, she ordered some takeaway – Albers didn’t cook: rather, she had to admit, she put stuff in bowls, sometimes on plates. When the delivery man buzzed, Paul insisted on getting the door and paying for the order; for a few days afterwards, he could remember the exact amount but barely anything about the man who had shown up at the door. That was the thing in those days, nobody ever looked at anyone else’s face – here, a delivery man just like any other, in the bustling gig economy, young guys on bikes with sinewy muscles and uncertain futures. Later on, once everything had changed – fallen apart – a man like that would show up at Albers’s door, she would open it, and she would take a bullet straight to the heart, another to the head, and nobody, of course, would be able to remember the man, while the better world she’d had in her heart and her mind was bleeding away from the only place it had ever truly existed, pooling on the floor in red puddles, the future of utopias congealing on the ground.

  Hours went by. Albers turned on lamps here and there, their circles of soft pink or yellow light falling gently across every surface, and as he caught his reflection in the living-room window, he saw one of the panes was cracked: a fine web of radiating fractures that would inevitably catch a visitor’s eye at one moment or another. A projectile thrown from down below, from the courtyard, he presumed; a pebble or a coin, now gone, its impact a visible trace in Albers’s living room, marring it – wasn’t this, after all, the one place in the world where Paul felt safest? It reminded him of the long scratch on the silver car, and a children’s story, and a proverb in a foreign language; it reminded him of a desire deep within him that was now reawakening. He lingered in front of the cracked glass a long while, he – the windows guy – perched on the couch like a child, on his knees, turning his back on his hostess, touching his fingers to the pane. Finally he went and sat by Albers again, and she must have seen the question on his face before he
was even able to put it into words. Oh, she said, when Amelia came back, she didn’t have the keys with her. Actually, I wonder where they are, she must have lost them, in a forest somewhere; I’ve found myself wondering if, with rainfall, the keys have somehow imbued the dirt all around with their molecules and now the plants and trees growing there retain some memory in their foliage, their leaves, of the door locks, the apartment, maybe even my sleep, my work, my solitude. But Paul wasn’t listening, not really. He was floored, as if he was the one being hit, now, by the hammer he had swung ten years earlier at dawn. Albers broke off her train of thought: But didn’t you know, Paul? I assumed that was why you’d come.

  3

  Amelia had looked like shit. Paul wanted to retort, what a surprise – but no words came. She had shown up in the courtyard without even a handbag, just the clothes on her back, all skin and bones. She’d thrown things at Albers’s window until the professor was irritated enough to leave her desk and go see who or what was making all this ruckus. When I opened the window and I saw Amelia down there, Albers said, I didn’t even recognise her. At first I thought I was looking at her mother! I felt a jolt of happiness; my body was convinced my youth was coming back to me. Nadia had spent her life coming and going and I’d hoped for so long that she might reappear – but no, Nadia had pulled off this final trick of disappearing without a trace. Or maybe she did come back, if only in Amelia’s features. I can’t say if it’s a good thing for a daughter to be haunted by her own mother. I don’t think it is. But unlike other people, unlike myself when I was a mother – fourteen months may be short, but once you’ve given birth, there’s no changing that; I may be childless now, but I’ll always be a mother (all that was maternal in Albers manifested itself otherwise, elsewhere: in her lectures, between the lines of her books, in the gaze she now fixed upon the dumbfounded man in front of her) – when Nadia had her daughter, she decided that she had earned the right to slip away, that she had passed along something essential – nothing personal, nothing genetic, Nadia wasn’t self-absorbed like that – no, she saw her child as something abstract. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never met her; there was some life, she had given some of it, it’s really in those terms that she was thinking; she had paid her dues and could now focus on whatever her heart truly, secretly wanted. That’s how, I think, she understood motherhood: some life had passed through her, and was going to persist, with or without her, there or elsewhere. You don’t know Gilles, do you? Amelia’s father? No? Well, of course Gilles thought that was no way to raise a child. In this sense he was more maternal than Nadia – in other words, he had an almost brutish tendency towards convention. If there’s one thing that Nadia and I have both always agreed on, it’s that there are many ways to be a mother, just as there are many ways to be a woman, from not being one any more to never even having been one. Nadia and I were trying to determine our times; it never occurred to us that the times, in turn, could end up determining us. I suppose I’m trying to explain why I didn’t do anything myself to hold on to her: because I thought, then just as much as now, that there’s no getting in between a woman and her choices, and that there’s nothing that can get in between a person and her freedom. Not her purported responsibilities, not her children. Freedom is like skin; it has many layers, and can only be removed at great cost.