Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  Later, he wondered if it was that night, under the bedspread that had been sprayed, or maybe not, with flame retardants, in the night light’s glow, in his hallucinations of a reunion, that he fell sick.

  *

  Like so many fathers, he tried to protect his daughter, and like so many fathers, in the end he failed. He couldn’t shield her from everything. From cold, yes; from hunger, and illness, from some injustices and attacks, yes. From some images. And some ideas. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. As always, there was still the unforeseeable. There was still art. There were still crimes. When she’s sixteen, he repeated to himself, then she’ll be ready. Which ought to have meant that he himself would be ready. But the world didn’t wait. There was an unpleasant moment, after school, when he couldn’t find Louise anywhere and heard someone saying, in a cheerful tone, that her mother had come to pick her up; and Paul had, in his rage and his fear, knocked over a table with one hand, as if it were nothing. You’re scared of me, and you should be, he said, you don’t know what I’m capable of. It turned out to be a misunderstanding; Louise – his Louise – was waiting for him outside, where the other kids were, at after-school sports practice.

  He enrolled her in a prohibitively expensive private school where the students wore uniforms, and the first time he went to pick her up, in front of this flood of pleated skirts and jackets, mute anguish seized him: I won’t be able to recognise her, I won’t know which one she is; but he picked her out in a tight cluster of students – she had seen him already, had probably seen him a long while earlier; their eyes met and he had the impression of having passed a crucial test, unlike any other, as if, without his realising it, everything, absolutely everything he knew about love had been at stake. And then she smiled at him, from afar, and walked towards him, slowly, so as not to look, in front of her friends who were at once more and less than friends, like she was running to her father. But he saw her knees quivering a little with impatience, with love, while she made her way towards him. Finally the group of girls reached him, girls about to be women, who studied him silently – a prospect that terrified him – and Louise turned towards them with a shaky voice that, as he set his hand on her shoulder, she barely managed to control in saying: This is my father. The moment required all the solemnity she could summon, she, the new girl, the one who had to prove herself, earn their affection and admiration and appreciation, and Paul hated these girls judging his own, as ridiculous as it all seemed. But he declared, as seriously as he could for Louise’s sake, Ladies, it’s a pleasure. Call me Paul, please, and an electric shiver ran through the entire group – a shiver of what exactly he never did know, but the girls looked at Louise approvingly, and he saw her holding back a triumphant smile, a small pursing of her lips, he didn’t understand anything about these creatures but he understood that the balance of power had shifted; and Louise gave him her schoolbag, and swiftly turned her back on these girls who were nothing and everything to her, saying: Come on, Paul, let’s go home, this place sucks.

  *

  She asked questions about her mother and the answer was always the same; he had met her at college, in Albers’s class (Albers was still Albers); they had fallen in love; she was dead. But what was she like? the child asked. It would have been better if I hadn’t said anything, Paul thought. An adventurer, he said, an explorer. She was a traveller. Each time, Louise examined his face, and more than once he had the feeling that she wasn’t listening to his words at all; she was scrutinising his face for tells, for signs that he was lying, trying to confirm doubts or suspicions.

  *

  And then she turned twelve and he could have sworn he saw the unmistakable strap of a bra suddenly disappearing in a drawer; suddenly, she shut her notebooks when he arrived, tilted away her phone’s screen when he got close. A boy came over one day, a pale thing, half a head shorter than her, whom she peered at, through her lashes, adoringly. What! This wimp, this wilted creature who looks like he’s never seen any sunlight, Paul thought; seriously, his ears are see-through, and that’s just peach fuzz there! And his temples! So thin and blue that you could just squeeze them and push in his skull – like cardboard – that’s him, that’s the thing my daughter, my only daughter, with her powerful, indefatigable heart, can only look at with lowered eyelashes! And he watched them, helplessly, cloistering themselves not in her room – he would never have allowed that – but in the room he’d once thought his father would have moved into, the sitting room, and Louise shut the door so he had no way to be sure that they were just sitting; a brown curl hung over her face – strategically placed, Paul could have sworn. He who, suddenly a stranger in his own house, found himself prowling the hallway, his adjoining office. It’s all a nightmare, he thought. I’m not going to listen at the door, he told himself, I’m not going to listen through the wall. He imagined himself holding the end of a stethoscope up to the plaster, or, worse, an ordinary drinking glass he’d press his ear against to amplify the sounds. That washedout kid! He’s got to be asthmatic, he thought, he’s got to be unable to do anything, just getting an erection would kill him. Love was a matter of optics, unless it was a matter of worry or fear, in any case the strangest images kept cropping up; Paul had never thought he had so much imagination. Jealous of a white-blond boy, just a kid – and yes, circling like a hawk. All the same, I’m not going to be one of those men obsessed with their daughter’s virginity. He thought about calling Albers, instead wondering what she would have done in his place. He stepped into the sitting room that was suddenly no longer for just anyone to use, with a plate of cookies in his left hand, and the right one primed to pull the pipsqueak away from his daughter’s perfect body – and two small heads blindly turned towards him, swaying under the weight of their virtual-reality headsets. They were sitting on the couch a full three feet away from each other – too far away for their hands to touch – held vice-like in those machines. Paul was always terrified by how such mechanical additions to a human body could hobble its user, though of course he knew that inside that apparently inert shell was another world, far vaster than any he could dream up. He himself used it sometimes, for violent games that he hid from Louise, games in which he broke necks with his bare hands, games in which he showed the enemy no mercy and in which the enemy showed him no mercy and in which the blood spouting from a head wound tinged everything with a reddish haze; and when he imagined himself, alone on a couch, in the middle of the night, a non-existent weapon in his fist, a non-existent knife between his teeth, jolting in shock and excitement, he felt ashamed – but not nearly as much as in this moment, one hand holding the snacks and the other ready to strike, facing two pre-adolescents sitting at a noticeable distance from each other, their eyes covered, swaying under the weight of their artificial visions. Looking at him without seeing him – unless, of course, the machines had an independent perception of him. Who knew whether those circuits weren’t carrying thoughts of their own, unbeknownst to the children they encased. Who knew, in fact, who was playing with who.

  Oh, sorry, Paul said.

  He beat a hasty retreat, shamefacedly took refuge in the kitchen – and then started pacing back and forth. He was clinging too much to his fear, or his fear was clinging too much to him, and soon it took hold again – that vicious spiral of thought, But who knows what’s going on down there? Who knows what’s going on in that space that can’t really be said to exist, but also can’t really be said not to exist? What if she’s stark naked in a bathtub and he is as well, and massive, and his erect penis reaching her lips? Who knows if that’s how they have sex these days?

  And, alarmed: What if she’s chosen to be a redhead in that virtual space?

  *

  She turned fourteen and ran away, although it wasn’t a flight so much as a misunderstanding, and to his utter surprise Paul found her in her grandfather’s town. Now, Louise, couldn’t you have called and let me know where you are? Louise was sitting at a bus stop, in a sleeveless top, eating a slice of pizza t
hat looked bigger than her face and almost certainly was – at least she had a book in her hand, which almost never happened. Oh, come on, she said with her mouth full; in a good mood, an excellent mood. I came to see if maybe I’d see our parakeets again. But I think they’re hiding, and Paul wondered if, two years before the promise he’d made to himself would be due, she would come to understand the way the world really worked, to understand what was possible and what wasn’t, that is, to understand violence and cruelty. For the moment he didn’t say anything. As usual, he didn’t say anything. He gave her his coat and she tucked the thin volume in the pocket, where he would find it much later. It was Nadia Dehr’s Life L. He would reread it, his heart pounding, looking for the smoking gun, the poem that must have inspired Amelia to leave, the first time around, all those years earlier. The poem that had caused her to break his heart. If literature could change the world, we’d know it by now, Nadia Dehr had said, by way of explaining why she had walked away from it all. In the end, she would turn out to be wrong; literature would indeed be capable of changing the world, since it had broken Paul’s heart, which is to say, Paul’s world, and had made him the man he would now be. The man sitting in his kitchen, rereading verses older than himself, written by a woman who had been dead for ages. What had ruined Paul’s life had redeemed Nadia Dehr’s art. The smoking gun, he would think stubbornly, that he would remember having discovered in another kitchen, Albers’s kitchen, so many years earlier. This boy is charming, he could be perfect for us – if only. He had thought it would kill him.

  Yet the same strange thing would always happen no matter how many times he read the thin volume. He would leaf through it, reread it, even shake it over the table as if art and crime could fall out of it like a flower that had been pressed and dried in it, but he wouldn’t find, could never find the poem in question.

  *

  She was fifteen and stayed out until three o’clock, four o’clock in the morning, and he looked for her with the GPS, looked for the gleaming dot that was his daughter on the map, pinpointing her location in a part of the city where he hadn’t gone in ages, in a club he didn’t know and had no reason to know. He drove there, his gaze feverish, hovering, no matter how dangerous it was to drive so distractedly, on the blue dot that represented Louise and seemed to be static, but the closer he got the more detailed the scale became, as if he were swooping down on her, and the closer he got the more precise the dot became, and just before he reached the end point it seemed as if the dot were actually moving; it was swaying or rather turning upon itself, tracing an uninterrupted figure-of-eight that was, he thought, the movement of a young girl as she held out her arms to make-believe she was flying around the beach, or the movement of a young girl’s hips as she made love in a bed, or even the whiplash movement of a young girl’s head as she is being assaulted in a car park. He walked into the nightclub – Paul wasn’t the sort bouncers said no to – and looked around for her, under the fluorescent lights, his heart pounding, and then spotted her at the bar, a glow-in-the-dark drinking straw in her hand, tracing incomprehensible patterns in the air, straddling the knees of a young man who watched her, his heel mindlessly spinning the stool on which they sat. A bit like me at the Elisse hotel front desk, Paul thought, and he felt very old. His daughter was swivelling: sometimes he saw her face, and sometimes he didn’t, but whenever it was visible, she looked happy. A happiness that radiated from the child that she no longer was – it was beautiful to see, these two moments layered upon one another, the part of her life now ending and the one now beginning, and he watched a while longer, without making a fuss, then decided to simply head back. He waited in the car for her to come out into the fresh air; he watched her kiss this boy, unless it was already another one, because under the glowing lights and in the street they all looked the same; he saw her, her face lit up from below, ordering a car on her phone which came two minutes later, and, when she climbed in, he followed her. A driverless car, a young girl in the back seat; behind her, several metres away, a car with a driver, nobody in the back seat. Or so it seemed. He entered the apartment a few minutes after her but she was already in her bedroom; the empty rooms already had the atmosphere of a long sleep, and he wondered just how many things, in fact, he didn’t know about her. More than yesterday, he told himself, and less than tomorrow. He did something he hadn’t done in a very long time: he went to tuck her in. When he kissed her on her forehead, her lips smelled like mint but her hair smelled like night, a freedom and a passion that he, her father, could not be part of; all he could do was breathe in its remnants on her skin, her coats, the rim of her cups where she’d recently started leaving, here and there, traces of a lipstick that he never noticed on her lips.

  *

  I smell her scarves, I smell her neck, the other day I actually found myself sniffing her toothbrush. Sometimes I feel like I’m a dog, he said to Amelia. It was ridiculous, after all this time he couldn’t keep himself from talking to her. If she had been there they would have laughed, and each of them would have been relieved to see the other one confused. Sometimes, more surprisingly, Amelia answered. There are all sorts of ways, she said, to get from point A to point B. From inside to outside, or from outside to inside, or from the heart to the head, or from the head to the heart, and finally to your hands. It’s a matter of movement, Paul, go easy on yourself – and when she cut in he remembered how he’d loved her, as she had been when he was building his whole life, the one he was now living without her, to see her walk, just walk on by in the sun and in one of his shirts, barefoot on the floorboards. A moment, late afternoon, the light slanting, her hair ablaze. Something that she hadn’t known or been able or been willing to see for what it was: commitment, kindness, the prospect of being a family.

  Danger won’t come from where you think it will, Paul thought. At the same time, danger will come from exactly, exactly where you expect.

  *

  Girls disappeared, teenagers evaporated. One night they had been asleep in bed; the next morning, they were gone. Sometimes there was an open window. Rain fell into pink-and-white bedrooms, soaking the carpets – that was the first thing their fathers noticed, this fatal yet beautiful blurring between inside and outside. It was as if the girls themselves had turned into rain. Rain washed away everything. Curfews were instituted, with little effect on Louise’s life with Paul. Girls were disappearing, an epidemic of kidnappings – but more likely they were runaways. Rarely were their personal belongings missing. They left with nothing but their coats.

  I want you to come straight home, Paul said to his daughter; I don’t like this, I don’t like this at all. She rolled her eyes, and sometimes she looked so much like Amelia that it was unbearable, but never so much as when she pulled away. Daddy, stop. It’s a rumour, not a crime.

  It’s not an art, either, he almost responded, but he caught himself. In the schools, it was all anyone talked about, frantically, to the point of near hysteria. Paul bombarded Louise with questions and Louise sized him up, as if she were wondering what he was even capable of knowing, what hearsay he was working with. Yes, she finally conceded. A woman, sometimes outside, sometimes inside – how she gets in, nobody knows – she’s there, she doesn’t do anything, she just watches you sleeping until, if we’re to believe it, you disappear.

  Have you actually seen her? he asked. With your own eyes?

  Louise looked at him doubtfully for a long minute without answering.

  Oh, Dad, she finally said. Come on. Don’t be childish.

  *

  We believe we’re protected, we believe we’re outside all power relationships of which we ourselves are unaware. All the same, we ultimately have the better end of the bargain. In other words, the power we might actually be exercising – in fact, are likely exercising – is power we’ve been unaware of. Paul only realised this, belatedly, one morning, because he had never been afraid for his own sake but always for Louise’s. Louise and her friends, Louise and her flimsy sham boyfriend, w
ho by not being her actual boyfriend ended up winning Paul over despite his reluctance, despite his worries about the boy who seemed so withered a spark would set him on fire, so pale a spark would set him on fire, like a sunstarved plant growing deep in a basement. How could his parents let him out of the house, how could they let him do anything, even simply go from point A to point B – not to mention the protests they went to, these children who were no longer children, not really, and who now took part in these huge waves of human bodies that terrified Paul; of course, it was difficult, impossible to forbid them, although Paul tried all the same. These things always break down in the blink of an eye, Louise, it turns into a mess; and Louise, who barely came up to his shoulder, glared at him, witheringly, heartlessly; she smirked at him, yes, in an almost cruel way, which he felt was unjust, undeserved. He would only understand later, much later that she was the mess.

  *

  He recognised her in one of those amateur videos where it seemed at first like he wouldn’t see anything or that the only thing to be seen was the trembling of the cameraman’s hand. Albers, he whined, it’s making me seasick. She isn’t there, I see a hat, a scarf covering a face; none of this proves that it’s her; okay, there’s a long arm, a thin strong arm and a gloved hand, and there’s some kind of projectile. But he watched as it was thrown carefully and maybe even artfully – if throwing a ball is a sport and throwing a champagne bottle against a mirror is a pastime, then what should we make of those Molotov cocktails that strike a car and only then, as if by sheer force of will, of desire, explode and catch fire? Of course, he didn’t say anything to anyone. Of course he talked to her about it, Now, Louise, what’s wrong with you? Have you completely lost your mind? She shrugged. You’re such a hypocrite, Louise replied, I can’t believe you’re trying to make me feel bad when you tore apart a luxury hotel. I saw you. And you were doing far worse things. Who’s that slut you were fucking? That’s your mother, Paul shot back. Louise slammed the door shut behind her. As soon as he could he tracked down those images, the proof that what had happened had really happened. He didn’t recognise any of it. Their youth was all he could see, all that stood out. A preposterous, blinding, wild youth that he hadn’t imagined he’d lived. But his body remembered. His body remembered everything.