*
Paul pretended everything was fine. And he did well for himself. He hired one person, then five, then ten. On big screens and small screens, the world caught fire, the world broke up and split apart and one day Louise looked at him cheekily and said, Well, what’s that, anyway, this Balkanisation everyone’s talking about?
Louise and her friend David grew up in a terrified city, a city paralysed by its reflection in countless monitor screens, none of which, however, were enough to prevent the violent attacks, a truck driving into a crowd, a man setting someone on fire in a movie theatre. An explosion in the middle of the city – maybe a device placed there days, weeks earlier, during a short-term rental. Each incident taught these young people how to see, first and foremost, the threat that a new situation could pose, and so Paul and his daughter would eat dinner, fork in hand, and where the one saw a utensil the other saw a weapon. Yet newcomers continued to flood into this dangerous city, fleeing something further south that was worse, that was more tangible and dangerous, trading the certainty of an unspeakable death for, they came to realise, the uncertainty of an unspeakable life. Paul had been pursuing his ambitions, had been dreaming of Amelia Dehr, and all the while, as his mind had been elsewhere, the divisions in the city had deepened. On one side was what it had been and now struggled to be, forever a city of light, a capital of archaic opulence. And on the other side was a new city that was insubstantial and drifting and miserable and enduring, a strong-willed city determined to survive. A city underneath the city, in the cracks, the shadows, the rifts. Makeshift shelters. Mattresses under stairways, on rooftops. The city of cats become the city of desperate human beings, and yet it was still full of hope – hope that, too, was insubstantial and drifting and miserable and enduring, bric-a-brac architecture that was poor, fragile, but hardy. Headstrong. Site plans that changed every day, that marked where abandonment and violence broke out every night. Floor plans of broken promises. How strange it was that each of these two cities, of these two faces of the city, should fear the other and believe itself besieged by the other. And so the city turned upon itself. As if its left hand was breaking its right.
So Louise grew up in a state of emergency, although it was a vague, murky, unending emergency. Everything was a potential danger; identities and allegiances weren’t fixed: it was all too easy for someone to be a citizen one day and an enemy the next. Authority was volatile, violence was volatile, police forces appeared and disappeared seamlessly; one day armed men were everywhere, in the streets, in front of the schools, and the next they had vanished only to re-emerge elsewhere. The weapons, too, were new, their lightness championed as a humane improvement when, in fact, they were simply evolving, adapting, becoming more precise and therefore more dangerous; and these new arms were tested on the population, on the city within the city, on the citizens within the city, increasingly adaptable water cannons brought out to disperse makeshift shelters by night and angry students by day; powerful jets drawn from the city’s underground systems to subdue it, leaving bruises that subsequently turned yellow before disappearing; purportedly non-lethal arms with futuristic names, strange and poetic names: impulsive bullets, blasters, other weapons with names that nobody really used, that electrocuted their targets; but still, the armed forces’ obsession with the infrastructure undergirding the city (water, electricity) drew them to weaponise it against the people it served or was supposed to serve – all these state-of-the-art conveniences were repurposed for repression. At least that was the gospel according to Albers.
These teenagers – Louise, her friend David, all the protesters – were pioneers. They were explorers: testing out their rights, their obligations, in search of a new world; like chemists. And like chemists during an accident in handling materials, during an encounter with the realities of power and emergency, it was their eyes and their hands that they lost most often, that they lost first, before losing everything. Eyes and hands were the most common injuries, the threats that kept Paul awake at night. Brittle bones – carpals, metacarpals – crushed under a boot, shattered by an expandable baton; retinas detached by the impact of non-metallic projectiles, corneas burned by riot gas. Eyes and hands: makeshift bombs thrown haphazardly, thrown too late, at a risky angle, some wounds and lives alike became casualties of mistakes. The first body parts to meet the world, the first organs to revolt were torn to shreds, drenched in blood. If thought resided in the mind and love in the heart, the hunger for justice and recognition in turn had their twinned and complementary seats in the eye and in the hand.
But they were innovators as well; they were reinventors; and the first tool, the first conquest, for these young, sad dreamers who were perhaps violent as well, was camouflage, elevated to scientific levels. The ways to cross a city under constant surveillance while going unnoticed: this was the focus of Louise’s conversation, and her face was flush with youth and health; what inventiveness, Paul thought. Then it was invisibility as a fine art; what innocence, what childishness, he thought. He recalled the chip in his daughter’s arm which he hadn’t told her about, which she hadn’t talked to him about, which she didn’t know about.
She grew. He aged. Little by little the world he knew turned into one he didn’t know.
*
If you see the camera, the camera sees you. It recognises your gaze, the space between your eyebrows, your nose, your mouth, Louise explained. So that means the simplest thing is still not to look it in the eye. The simplest thing is a plain old baseball cap, Louise said from beneath her own coral-toned one that boasted the words BALLROOM MARFA in light-blue ink – Paul made her take it off during meals, while Albers didn’t. She had never been to Marfa in the West Texan desert, where there was no real ballroom to speak of, unless, of course, sidestepping scorpions and rattlesnakes counted as dancing. You shouldn’t ever face the camera directly, you shouldn’t ever meet it head-on, look it in the eye. Gramps taught me the same thing with some wild animals, said Louise, and Paul’s heart twinged, he missed what his father had never told him. The simplest thing is plain old reflective sunglasses, Louise declared; on her nose was perched her own aviator-style pair – Albers made her take them off in the apartment, while Paul didn’t. That way, the camera doesn’t see you, it sees itself. It looks at itself, it loses itself, the camera doesn’t know it’s a camera and it falls in love with itself, Louise explained. And it’s the same for drones. Gramps told me the same thing about demons, and Paul wished she would take off her sunglasses so he could see whether she was joking; he had the feeling she was, but all he could see was himself, strangely deformed, strangely distant, as though his right hand on the table, and the knife it held, bigger than his head, were thrust at the present, while all the rest of his person, his chest, his face (his heart, his head) swerved easily away into the past.
Gas masks are good for protests, obviously, because they’re hygienic and anonymous, but the police check your bags so you have to strap them on under your clothes. Hoods are good, too, and in everyday life as well, Louise added two days later, as she pulled tight the drawstrings of her fleece hoodie; and Paul was delighted and charmed and a bit worried to notice that, near the hood’s seams, right where the horns would have been if she had been, say, a gremlin, she had embroidered two blue circles within two white diamonds – spirals of thread, no, helices of thread; azure and nacre; inlaid shapes that could be just that, shapes, but which could also be eyes, wide open eyes, which rested or seemed to rest upon the devices that were now everywhere to be found between the sky and them. Like some fish, Paul thought. Like some birds. False eyes that hoodwinked their predators, made the animal seem bigger than it was, diverted their attention, protected the actual orbs. Camouflage is the weapon of choice for the smallest and most vulnerable creatures; his heart trembled, his heart never stopped trembling, nothing would be left of it in the end, he thought.
Clever, he said, trying to sound nonchalant, and the usual answer came: Not bad, huh? Gramps taught me how. How many
lives, it occurred to Paul, can anyone live in a single life?
And then there were other things, silk scarves printed with the lower half of another face, like in that game for children where they combined and recombined different strips of paper ad infinitum to piece together faces of every variant of the human species with faces of animals, a fox or a bird; as if this whimsy was how mankind had been evolving, in fact, prepared for it; got ready to slip into what it wasn’t, at least not just yet. And all of this, Paul told himself, was also a children’s game, a childish game; Louise and the wimp and a few other friends were the next generation: those a few years older than them would have tried as hard as they could to inscribe themselves within the collective space of the cloud, to sublimate themselves into it, to disperse their presence through photos and selfies and videos, expertly and incessantly documenting their own lives. But these ones didn’t. Their parents congratulated themselves for it at first.
*
And then she was sixteen and it was time. The faint whiffs she exuded started to change; she smelled like things he didn’t know, unfamiliar mixtures of familiar liquors, clean-smelling chemical products that gave her a vacant air; now when she was late and they checked screens to reassure each other – just to reassure each other – she no longer showed up in bars or nightclubs but sometimes, strangely and perhaps even more worryingly, in public gardens that were closed, or in museums that were closed, or – I don’t think this thing is working right, Albers said, waving her phone – in nameless areas that were wastelands, soon-to-be residential neighbourhoods, or buildings under construction which had never been opened. Listen, Paul said to Albers, let her be, because he remembered when he was sixteen, he, too, had been hanging out all the time, prowling, hopping over gates and scaling fences, exploring dangerous spots, and that had made his heart pound and he had liked the way his heart had been pounding – the truth was that transgression and Amelia Dehr were the only things that had made him feel truly alive, alive at long last. And Louise had her father’s heart. Where’s the little girl I used to know, Albers complained, she pops in, she pops out, it’s like I’m looking at a stranger, and Paul gave a polite nod, but the truth was that he finally recognised himself – or so he thought – in his daughter.
Sometimes she came back smelling like saltwater, like dunes. The sea, however, was far away. Sometimes she came back and Paul could trace the sand slipping out of the soles of her trainers; and one time she came back and her mouth, covered in something that wasn’t quite lipstick, was chapped, red, bruised, and her eyes were ringed in red, and she smelled like gas.
Come here, Louise, I want to talk to you. It was all there – he’d had sixteen years to find the right words, sixteen years to put everything in order, to pull together and sum up his whole life, to focus on just the basics, to invent it if needed. The funniest or oddest or saddest thing was that, after sixteen years, all that was left was a couple of sentences. Simple words that slipped past everyone’s lips every day, or should have. Two sentences – but they were true. Paul knew this. The way he knew it was time.
Not now, Dad, said Louise, and she shut the door behind her.
*
The next day, she called him; he saw her name show up on the screen. She remembered that I wanted to talk to her, he thought, his fatherly heart filling with hope. He knew it was her, but all he heard was crying, simple and animalistic, Daddy. When he came, she was on her knees in front of Albers, soaked in blood, both of them soaked in blood. She had tried to save what Paul immediately saw could not, never could be saved. They had ordered takeaway but what had arrived was an interruption of reality, forcing its way through.
Unless it’s the other way around, Paul thought, in his shock. Unless reality is precisely this: an old woman, a bullet hole in her stomach, a bullet hole in her forehead, and Louise covered in fresh blood.
Chaos breeds strange thoughts, and the thought that came to Paul, as he took his beloved daughter in his arms, as if a father could possibly save his child from all the horrors of the world, was: If she had looked more like her mother, even her lashes would be red, tinged with what nobody should ever see. So much blood. Poor dear Albers, that mind and that heart.
She’d spent her life wondering what could die in a city dying of fear.
*
Not long afterwards, he woke up in the middle of the night convinced that he could hear a woman’s voice distinctly asking: Where is she, Paul, she’s not back, something’s wrong. He logged in to monitor his daughter, seized by a strange foreboding, almost certain that he wouldn’t see anything, that there was nothing left to see. But no, the blue dot was right there, Louise was right there, at first he didn’t understand what was out of the ordinary here, what explained the rush and panic. Look closer! it insisted, open your eyes – yes, he would come to think about this often, about this command, open your eyes, and that was what he did, he opened his eyes and looked. Then he saw what was wrong: his daughter – the blue dot that was his daughter – was moving across the city’s map in a way that defied comprehension. She’s walking through walls! Paul thought. It was the first thought that occurred to him and, at first, the only one. She’s walking through walls. The blue dot was flouting streets, corners, their directions. Louise was cutting straight through the fabric of the city. Through buildings, even through strongrooms; walls didn’t stop her, matter didn’t stop her, she was going at full speed, this was his daughter, his splendid daughter who had conquered the city. Amazement overcame him. She’s flying, he thought.
Louise had left with nothing but her coat, and he ended up finding the strange signal that was moving according to superhuman or inhuman laws: a jay, a small bird with reddish-brown feathers and a black tail, although its wing was tipped with blue, a blue more beautiful and vibrant and complex than anything that could possibly appear on a phone screen. A species of field bird that, despite its fearfulness, had adapted to the city; birds that mated for life, but this one was alone – either it had lost its mate or had not yet found one – and Paul contemplated the fluttering creature in a tiny cage set on a desk at the private security company. Here, said the employee. And Paul, stunned, had gone, cage in hand, jacket thrown over it to shield the bird from the cold, from the weak lamplight – this is stupid, he thought while shivering, it’s flown through the cold and the light, after all. This is stupid, he thought, but he still didn’t pull the jacket back over his own shoulders.
In her wardrobe, under the clothes that had been too small for her for years now, he found a compress. On it was dried blood, rust-coloured stains in which the devastated father tried to find something, anything – a loving word, a promise, a treasure map – but none of those could be found. A slight smell of evaporated rubbing alcohol. She must have cut herself in the bathroom, mutely, taking care not to cry out; she must have felt with the tip of her knife for the foreign body, the parasite keeping her from being herself. Once she had found it, her good arm must have thrown it out the window. This was the most likely scenario, what he hoped for. That she had thrown it out the window. But when he closed his eyes, what Paul saw was that she had stuck her hand out in the night air and waited patiently until a small hungry creature had overcome its survival instinct, its sense of self-preservation, enough to come eat, out of her hand, this seed that the entire city had sprouted from, the city and its secret heart, Louise, and that nothing else would grow from now.
She had left with the others. With these long lines of sad young people who didn’t recognise themselves in the world as it was, who took their coats one night and went, where to nobody knew. As vast as the world is, there’s still no escaping it, and Paul thought about them, about his daughter amongst them, perhaps in forests, or almost certainly in cities, the cities of this century and the last, and his heart was torn but he counted on her to survive, counted on her indefatigable heart, her toned muscles, the knife he had never found because, he knew, she had had the presence of mind to take it with her, Louise who had
left with nothing but her knife.
At night, in his sleep which no longer came, he knew the truth: Amelia had come for what she was owed. Her child, the girl he had tried in every way to keep away from her. He knew that was the way of the world. The way of the night.
Watch over her, he thought. That’s all I ask of you: watch over her.
3
Louise remembered her childhood as a story in which some parts, important ones, might have been told to her in a foreign language or in her sleep; the scenes overlaid one another and sometimes contradicted one another. Chronology wasn’t respected; she had never known her mother but was sure she had known her mother, and when she thought of those long, endless years that she had spent with Paul, she was sometimes reminded of a fairy tale – enchanting yet puzzlingly distant. There was danger there, a danger different from what you expected; a message that was thoroughly hidden; and this remarkable architecture, which kept little girls awake in their beds and fathers sitting at their bedside, this architecture that was a space within an indefinite time and era together (together in the forest! but also in her bed) – this architecture is perhaps, Louise came to think, a huge trick, a trap. Once upon a time there was a father and his daughter, once upon a time there was Paul and Louise, and their world, their wonderful world, was built on a threat, built around a central void, and she didn’t know it or knew it without knowing it. However, she remembered everything.
Night as It Falls Page 18
