Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  Paul followed him and Amelia let them go. She played with the stem of her wine glass, tipping it so that the candlelight caught in the crystal and light refracted onto Paul like signals in a language he was unable to read. He saw her so alone all of a sudden, as he stood a few feet away – he wasn’t used to seeing her at this distance; she seemed strange, estranged from him, weighed down by a sadness that could break stone – just a few minutes, he told himself, a few minutes, being friendly with Amelia’s father is, after all, a way of being friendly with Amelia herself. Of course he was lying to himself. He stammered out a few ideas, he sounded like he was talking in his sleep, convinced that the man was only listening to him out of forced politeness. Amelia’s father asked him about his education, his career, which caught him off guard because he had braced himself to account for his background, had rehearsed retorts for every blow of condescension – but the oligarch simply didn’t care. He didn’t see a person in front of him so much as, maybe, an opportunity. As he talked, Paul could see Amelia through the door, twisting the base of her glass between two fingers, twirling a lock of her hair between two fingers. It had been a few weeks since she’d gone to the hair salon and maybe she’d decided to grow it out; the longer strands softened the angular face of the woman who’d grown up too fast. The man followed Paul’s gaze and, misunderstanding, said, Her mother had beautiful legs, too – long toned legs, she almost knocked me out, it’s unbelievable how much there is of her in her daughter, it’s criminal, he declared. Paul started and furrowed his brow. Well, she owes a great deal to you too, he said. The patriarch smiled at Paul’s reply since, fundamentally, what he would have liked were perfect clones of himself formed by spontaneous generation, but the stubborn Nadia Dehr had saddled him with a wild child. His second attempt had been with the next wife, who was gentler and calmer and more obliging, and that too had been a failure, his sons were quite spineless. What in this world would it take to have heirs worthy of their inheritance? And Paul laughed and said, We all get the heirs we deserve, and, sure enough, those words met with the patriarch’s approval. He did seem to have what it took, this strange young man who seemed comfortable everywhere because he wasn’t at home anywhere. He had known men like him, he thought, and always in times and in places on the brink of collapse. I’ll be in the office on Monday, he said, call my secretary and she’ll see if she can arrange a time for you to come in and talk about your idea, and Paul thought: so this is how he’s fobbing me off. He couldn’t bear being talked down to. And, of course, he had completely misunderstood.

  *

  She moved in with him. He convinced her the way he might have coaxed a frightened, wounded animal that had wedged itself in the tiniest recess possible, under a step, between two walls, and which he was trying to lure out without getting attacked. They told nobody except Albers, who came to dinner in the immense apartment Paul had had painted dusty white. She came laden with presents: books so heavy that their art, Amelia quipped, had to be in the scoliosis they induced. Massive bottles of champagne, fancy candles, each one guaranteed to burn for forty hours – forty immaterial, extraordinary hours (carcinogenic, too, Amelia insisted once they were alone), silk scarves that she unfurled from her handbag like those failed magicians who sometimes, although increasingly rarely, performed on the street. This is just too much, Albers, you really didn’t have to, Paul finally said, but there seemed to be no end to all this genuine happiness, and even so all these objects seemed to be trying to hide something feigned, something false, that they ended up exposing all the same. Flowers would have been present enough, he said. Albers smiled, as if he were joking. She brandished a huge box that seemed to be even bigger than the bag it had come out of, and wrapped in shiny paper. Paul’s breath caught. It’s Nadia Dehr’s box, he thought, those are Nadia Dehr’s fragments, she can’t do that to me, not now. The blood drained from his face as he remembered the man who had had a pigeon set in his mouth, a live pigeon, and who didn’t mean to, but had ground his teeth during the torture. He felt like he was on the brink of spitting out feathers himself. I can’t have that in my place, he thought. This place would always be his, not theirs, never our place. They already knew that their cohabitation would be short-lived, a kind of mourning ritual. But Amelia was already ripping off the metallic blue paper in which she saw, or didn’t, her own faded, deformed reflection. They were genuinely surprised, for the first time, and Albers burst out laughing. It was a small drone. She remembered, she said, from their last vacation.

  They could be found in stores everywhere but for them it was still the future; they gawked at the machine like country bumpkins. Later on, Sylvia, who was younger, would make fun of him for it; for now, however, Amelia sent it flying, and the future hummed in the immense living room. Sheesh, Sylvia would say years later, what’s wrong with you? This place is way too big, it’s way too empty. I mean, listen: it’s echoing. You bought a cave! It’s like a canyon, the sound’s bouncing all over, it’s ridiculous. What’s the point, even? The little machine nearly crashed into the wall or the ceiling once, maybe twice, before Amelia learned how to control it properly. Albers must be offering us a bit of time, Paul suddenly realised. Albers must be offering us a future, and he wanted to hug her. The drone still represented the future, even as it had become the present for the conflicts just now brewing. They weren’t unaware of its uses and had grown inured to them; these new weapons had, at that point, become little more than words, ideas, an abstraction, and they found the gift less shocking than they would have if Albers had offered them, say, a toy gun. Paul’s father came the following week, walked through the apartment without noticing the high ceilings or the original floorboards, so fixated was he on other concerns: were there enough power sockets and radiators; where were the meters and the fuse box; was it all electric or were the stove and water heater still gas. He wanted to be sure his son hadn’t been taken for a ride. Having finally agreed to sit down, he played at launching and landing the toy, nothing more. Making it take off, making it land, watching it just as inscrutably as he had, years earlier, watched surfers falling off their boards in the waves. Paul drove him back to his house in a comfortable silence that lasted until the minute his father stepped out of the car, buttoned up his fleece jacket, and said, casually (although Paul knew it had been very carefully thought through): I’m not worried. He said it as if he had been weighing up the decision, still considering the prospect that he might be wrong.

  *

  She wouldn’t go along. She wouldn’t let herself be loved. Not the way Paul would have liked. There were arguments, drawnout ones, where he insisted on knowing where she was, and with whom; one or two early mornings spent calling everyone he could think of – he didn’t know any of her new friends, assuming she had any; to assuage his fear and fury, he ended up calling hospital after hospital, because he had to do something, anything, and he lost his head at some point, heard himself yelling into the handset at people who didn’t care, if there was even anyone listening. Here was a man whose wife wasn’t really his wife, whose wife hadn’t come back home that night. He shut his eyes and described her, first her hair, then her complexion, her lashes which were neither light nor dark; he shut his eyes and recounted how they met, and his hopes, which she had systematically set to destroying. Then he recounted things he saw, the wounds she must have sustained or (he understood later) should have sustained, as punishment for the nights and mornings she inflicted upon him. On the other end of the phone there hadn’t been anyone listening for a long while, such a long while that there wasn’t even a dial tone, and Paul described the horrible accidents he feared – he saw her with shards of bone jutting out of her skin, or trapped in a car on fire, or her side sliced open – and eventually he ended up understanding that what he now feared might in fact be what he, deep down, longed for. He stayed there, mourning not only her but also an idea of himself. She disappeared until Paul was forced, briefly, to face up to himself, wild with anger and fear. To see who he really
was. To take the full measure of his buried desires, the ones he made a point of ignoring. Oh Amelia, he finally thought, just go ahead and fucking die, so we’re done with this, and there he was forced to concede: I’m such a bastard, and he stayed there, worn out in the immense apartment that she didn’t care about. Then, and only then, would she return. He would hear her setting her keys on a table, taking off her shoes; he would know at last that she was safe; he would feel relieved, disappointed, furious. He would pretend to still be sleeping. Another man, at another moment in his life, might have followed her, or have hired a professional, a private eye, who could have provided him with a detailed report on the secret life of Amelia Dehr; but not Paul. Yet another man, or maybe the same one, would have started drinking heavily, no doubt would have hit her; but not Paul. The one thing that did hold him back, he knew, had nothing to do with the empty, false idea he had of himself as a good man, and everything to do with his pride, with his self-love, which was, he thought increasingly often, the only kind of love that reigned in this home he had wanted to build and where, in the face of Amelia’s absence, or of her secretive, slippery presence, there was too much of Paul, too many degraded versions of himself: Paul was confronted by all his potential selves, alcoholic Paul, violent Paul, self-conceited Paul, cruel Paul. Staying himself, someone he could live with, became quite the ordeal.

  What a bastard I am, he thought. He was driven to despicable behaviour. Nobody would have said that, of course; on the contrary, they praised something they struggled to define and which was – although they had no clue – his survival instinct. Paul, however, knew that it was more complicated than that. In one way they were right, but in another, surviving Amelia was exactly what he was trying to do, exactly what made him an asshole: making a resolution to outlive her. The great betrayal he was preparing himself to commit.

  When it did happen, it did so, in fact, quite naturally. One day, something within him gave way and he stopped resisting. He saw Amelia’s father again. He went all out, swore fealty; they drank amber-tinted alcohol, smoked cigars, traded a few lewd jokes and not a few bad puns. In the twenty-first century, everybody will be in safety, he said as a foregone conclusion of sorts, with a handshake. The line struck him as ironic; he remembered, much later, that it was a misinterpreted sentence that Albers had once uttered. And then he thought: whatever. He took the money. Left the Agency. Started up the business he had talked about. The more self-assured, the more detached he became, the less arrogant Amelia now was – in a way, she was less herself. As if she were dwindling away, he thought. He seemed to be watching all this from a long way off; his distance tormented her. Her gestures lost their precision, she stumbled, she looked up to meet his eyes, uncertainty crept into her words. She regressed into the unloved, unwanted child she had been; one who made up imaginary friends. She couldn’t make sense of what was happening. There she was, in front of him, raw and hurting, and he closed his heart off to her, refused to sympathise with her, because at this stage, Paul thought, only one of them would make it. Everybody believed that he was kind to her, more than kind, that he’d tried to give her everything, but she didn’t want it. Even his father, whose insight and judgement he feared, was fooled. The truth, Paul knew, was that he was an utter shit. The truth was that she needed help, needed love, that she was sick and that refusing love was, in her mind, a way of accepting it, of asking for more, but he couldn’t go on. He’d had enough. We can’t go on like this, Paul said, You know this, Amelia, I’m exhausted, I can’t do this any more, I deserve better than this. She looked down. At some point she lifted her legs slightly to slip her hands under her thighs, like a little girl. She cried pitifully, quietly. But you love me, she said, you do. It’s too late, Amelia, it’s not working. It never worked.

  It was true in a way that she couldn’t deny, but it was false as well. She didn’t have the words to say it. It had been working quite well between them. And if Paul didn’t like what had worked between them, that was his problem. Why did he have to go and shame her? It’s tearing me apart, Amelia said, it’s like my left hand is breaking my right.

  Their gazes met for a moment and then, right there and then, Paul became one of those men who have power and wield it, at the expense of the women who made them. I’ll call you a car, he said. Wait, Amelia said, but he wasn’t having it any more. He was businesslike all of a sudden, determined to reject feelings and bankruptcies; feelings that became bankruptcies. There was no overt violence in how Paul dealt with Amelia’s protestations; it would take some time to see that. In another century he would have been the sort to lock women up in asylums for hysteria, or have them walled them up in an attic or a cellar or some other dark cranny. Should something manage to break through the heavy stones – a plaintive moan, say – they wouldn’t hear anything or would pretend not to hear anything or would say, It’s the wind, whistling across the moors.

  Wait, Amelia said. I’m pregnant.

  night as it falls

  1

  And what do you do for your security? A reinforced door, maybe? An alarm system? Or just one of those solid, trustworthy, multipoint locking systems? A few simple rules: be careful in the dark, be wary of strangers; a so-called smart home that knows whether you’re there or not; and that knows or will know soon whether your heart, tonight, is beating too quickly, beating the way a heart in safety never would.

  The more money you have, the more paranoid you get. Paul knew this, of course, but didn’t admit it. What he did say was: fear doesn’t protect you from danger. He said: the average time for help to arrive, in case of a break-in, is X minutes in your neighbourhood. What you need, at least, is to be able to delay for that long. It’s probably around half an hour: he updated these statistics regularly, painstakingly, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, case by case. All the numbers he had were reliable; more reliable than their sum, which was the picture he painted for them, the fiction he created – the hellish fiction his potential clients were all too eager, were being encouraged, to embrace. One cubic metre of oxygen per person was enough for five hours of total self-sufficiency, in case of a biological attack or a nuclear accident. Think it through, because the answer to this question will save your life: what do you need? Call me in three days. And they called. And their answer was never the right one. This Paul knew, but of course never said.

  On the one hand were certain dangers that were real; on the other were fears that were irrational, even outright fabrications. The force field created by that tension allowed Paul to establish himself in a certain space, to grow and prosper. In the twenty-first century, he was in security. He created elaborate surveillance systems, alarms that just a breath could trigger – or maybe even a thought. He sold armourplated doors and windows and walls, sensors that detected intruders deep inside buildings. Ironically, he also sold vault rooms that, hidden within an apartment, within a house, made it possible to live in absolute secrecy, wholly autonomous, and evade all the aforementioned devices. He himself had one, at his place, a clandestine monument or tomb of sorts, that he never stepped into.

  *

  She loved him even when he no longer loved her, obstinately, because she had denied her own feelings once and what good had come of that? None at all. Art. Crimes. Lost time. She loved him for nine months, loved the baby she was carrying since it was his, and she who had been so articulate and eloquent never found the words to tell him so, to convince him that she was there for him, now, that she was ready. But there was no point; all the while something in her was conspiring to pull away, yearning to drift away into oblivion.

  He cared for her during the pregnancy. He was irreproachable, which, to her, was perhaps the worst reproach. Their relationship had become purely transactional. She wasn’t doing well enough, didn’t trust herself enough, to know what she would end up understanding later, much later: Paul had loved her and he’d only ever loved her, and even when he said he didn’t, when he didn’t want to, he still did. She was the heart beating in his ches
t, the powerful swimmer’s heart that never seemed to tire no matter how tired she, Amelia, was. The birth was difficult; she nearly died, the baby too. There was a Csection and, under anaesthesia, she thought she remembered things she had endured rather than experienced, thought she remembered the infant extracted from her belly as being blue, a bloody eel of umbilical cord knotted tightly around its neck, as if nothing that came out of her was or could ever be viable. Barely born and already blue. Of course, she knew these things only because Paul told her, later on, about the complications. Had it always already been too late for them? When she opened her eyes, she was in a hospital bed, a handsome man was sitting beside her, a tiny baby in his arms, and she didn’t recognise them. In her morphine-induced torpor she had turned towards the nurse, worried, and, as if the two women were in front of a scene, rather than within it, in Life L, she asked her in a whisper: Are you sure this is my family? Paul would never forgive her for that either. She would never be able to tell him just how intensely she’d hoped, right then, seeing them there – so handsome, so alive – that they might be her family. She didn’t deserve them. She couldn’t deserve them, not her, not Amelia Dehr, daughter of Nadia Dehr and a man who had never loved her. Daughter of Nadia Dehr and an emperor of sand. It was something she would never find the words to explain.