was again.
“And you! How old are you now?”
“Thirteen.”
“At the Lycée Français?”
“No, my school’s on the West Side.”
“And just as well, I should think. All these French classes! Too many vocabulary words for a child. Nom et pronom, species and phylum. It’s only a form of insect collecting.”
“Sorry?”
“They always spoke French at Groppi’s. Remember Groppi’s? With the striped umbrella and the pistachio ices?”
Striped umbrella. It was hard to think through my headache. My glance wandered to the long gash in his scalp, clotted and dark, like an axe wound. More and more, I was becoming aware of dreadful bodylike shapes slumped in the debris, dark hulks not clearly seen, pressing in silently all around us, dark everywhere and the ragdoll bodies and yet it was a darkness you could drift away upon, something sleepy about it, frothy wake churned and vanished on a cold black ocean
Suddenly something was very wrong. He was awake, shaking me. Hands flapping. He wanted something. He tried to press himself up on a whistling in-breath.
“What is it?” I said, shaking myself alert. He was gasping, agitated, tugging at my arm. Fearfully I sat up and looked around, expecting to see some fresh danger rolling in: loose wires, a fire, the ceiling about to collapse.
Grabbing my hand. Squeezing it tight. “Not there,” he managed to say.
“What?”
“Don’t leave it. No.” He was looking past me, trying to point at something. “Take it away from there.”
Please, lie down—
“No! They mustn’t see it.” He was frantic, gripping my arm now, trying to pull himself up. “They’ve stolen the rugs, they’ll take it to the customs shed—”
He was, I saw, pointing over at a dusty rectangle of board, virtually invisible in the broken beams and rubbish, smaller than my laptop computer at home.
“That?” I said, looking closer. It was blobbed with drips of wax, and pasted with an irregular patchwork of crumbling labels. “That’s what you want?”
“I beg of you.” Eyes squeezed tight. He was upset, coughing so hard he could barely speak.
I reached out and picked the board up by the edges. It felt surprisingly heavy, for something so small. A long splinter of broken frame clung to one corner.
Drawing my sleeve across the dusty surface. Tiny yellow bird, faint beneath a veil of white dust. The Anatomy Lesson was in the same book actually but it scared the pants off me.
Right, I answered drowsily. I turned, painting in hand, to show it to her, and then realized she wasn’t there.
Or—she was there and she wasn’t. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I had never understood before. But when I tried to say this out loud the words came out in a muddle and I realized with a cold slap that I was wrong. Both parts had to be together. You couldn’t have one part without the other.
I rubbed my arm across my forehead and tried to blink the grit from my eyes and, with a massive effort, like lifting a weight much too heavy for me, tried to shift my mind where I knew it needed to be. Where was my mother? For a moment there had been three of us and one of these—I was pretty sure—had been her. But now there were only two.
Behind me, the old man had begun to cough and shudder again with an uncontrollable urgency, trying to speak. Reaching back, I tried to hand the picture over to him. “Here,” I said, and then, to my mother—in the spot where she had seemed to be—“I’ll be back in a minute.”
But the painting wasn’t what he wanted. Fretfully he pushed it back at me, babbling something. The right side of his head was such a sticky drench of blood I could hardly see his ear.
“What?” I said, mind still on my mother—where was she? “Sorry?”
“Take it.”
“Look, I’ll be back. I have to—” I couldn’t get it out, not quite, but my mother wanted me to go home, immediately, I was supposed to meet her there, that was the one thing she had made very clear
“Take it with you!” Pressing it on me. “Go!” He was trying to sit up. His eyes were bright and wild; his agitation frightened me. “They took all the light bulbs, they’ve smashed up half the houses in the street—”
A drip of blood ran down his chin.
“Please,” I said, hands flustering, afraid to touch him. “Please lie down—”
He shook his head, and tried to say something, but the effort broke him down hacking with a wet, miserable sound. When he wiped his mouth, I saw a bright stripe of blood on the back of his hand.
“Somebody’s coming.” Not sure I believed it, not knowing what else to say.
He looked straight into my face, searching for some flicker of understanding, and when he didn’t find it he clawed to sit up again.
“Fire,” he said, in a gargling voice. “The villa in Ma’adi. On a tout perdu.”
He broke off coughing again. Red-tinged froth bubbling at his nostrils. In the midst of all that unreality, cairns and broken monoliths, I had a dreamlike sense of having failed him, as if I’d botched some vital fairy-tale task through clumsiness and ignorance. Though there wasn’t any visible fire anywhere in that tumble of stone, I crawled over and put the painting in the nylon shopping bag, just to get it out of his sight, it was upsetting him so.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll—”
He had calmed down. He put a hand on my wrist, eyes steady and bright, and a chill wind of unreason blew over me. I had done what I was supposed to do. Everything was going to be all right.
As I was basking in the comfort of this notion, he squeezed my hand reassuringly, as if I’d spoken the thought aloud. We’ll get away from here, he said.
“I know.”
“Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.”
Relieved that he’d calmed down, exhausted with my headache, all memory of my mother faded to a mothlike flicker, I settled down beside him and closed my eyes, feeling oddly comfortable and safe. Absent, dreamy. He was rambling a bit, under his breath: foreign names, sums and numbers, a few French words but mostly English. A man was coming to look at the furniture. Abdou was in trouble for throwing stones. And yet it all made sense somehow and I saw the palmy garden and the piano and the green lizard on the tree trunk as if they were pages in a photograph album.
Will you be all right getting home by yourself, my dear? I remember him asking at one point.
“Of course.” I was lying on the floor beside him, my head level with his rickety old breastbone, so that I could hear every catch and wheeze in his breath. “I take the train by myself every day.”
“And where did you say you were living now?” His hand on my head, very gently, the way you’d rest your hand on the head of a dog you liked.
“East Fifty-Seventh Street.”
“Oh, yes! Near Le Veau d’Or?”
“Well, a few blocks.” Le Veau d’Or was a restaurant where my mother had liked to go, back when we had money. I had eaten my first escargot there, and tasted my first sip of Marc de Bourgogne from her glass.
“Towards Park, you say?”
“No, closer to the river.”
“Close enough, my dear. Meringues and caviare. How I loved this city the first time I saw it! Still, it’s not the same, is it? I miss it all terribly, don’t you? The balcony, and the…”
“Garden.” I turned to look at him. Perfumes and melodies. In my swamp of confusion, it had come to seem that he was a close friend or family member I’d forgotten about, some long-lost relative of my mother’s.…
“Oh, your mother! The darling! I’ll never forget the first time she came to play. She was the prettiest little girl I ever saw.”
How had he known I was thinking about her? I started to ask him but he was asleep. His eyes were closed but his breath was fast and hoarse like he was running from something.
I was fading out myself—ears ringing, inane buzz and a metallic taste in my mouth like at the dentist’s—and I might have drifted back into unconsciousness and stayed there had he not at some point shaken me, hard, so I awoke with a buck of panic. He was mumbling and tugging at his index finger. He’d taken his ring off, a heavy gold ring with a carved stone; he was trying to give it to me.
“Here, I don’t want that,” I said, shying away. “What are you doing that for?”
But he pressed it into my palm. His breath was bubbled and ugly. “Hobart and Blackwell,” he said, in a voice like he was drowning from the inside out. “Ring the green bell.”
“Green bell,” I repeated, uncertainly.
He lolled his head back and forth, punch-drunk, lips quivering. His eyes were unfocused. When they slid over me without seeing me they gave me a shiver.
“Tell Hobie to get out of the store,” he said thickly.
In disbelief, I watched the blood trickling bright from the corner of his mouth. He’d loosened his tie by yanking at it; “here,” I said, reaching over to help, but he batted my hands away.
“He’s got to close the register and get out!” he rasped. “His father’s sending some guys to beat him up—”
His eyes rolled up; his eyelids fluttered. Then he sank down into himself, flat and collapsed-looking like all the air was out of him, thirty seconds, forty, like a heap of old clothes but then—so harshly I flinched—his chest swelled on a bellows-like rasp, and he coughed a percussive gout of blood that spewed all over me. As best he could, he hitched himself up on his elbows—and for thirty seconds or so he panted like a dog, chest pumping frantically, up and down, up and down, his eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see and all the time gripping my hand like maybe if he held on tight enough he’d be okay.
“Are you all right?” I said—frantic, close to tears. “Can you hear me?”
As he grappled and thrashed—a fish out of water—I held his head up, or tried to, not knowing how, afraid of hurting him, as all the time he clutched my hand like he was dangling off a building and about to fall. Each breath was an isolated, gargling heave, a heavy stone lifted with terrible effort and dropped again and again to the ground. At one point he looked at me directly, blood welling in his mouth, and seemed to say something, but the words were only a burble down his chin.
Then—to my intense relief—he grew calmer, quieter, his grasp on my hand loosening, melting, a sense of sinking and spinning almost like he was floating on his back away from me, on water.—Better? I asked, and then—
Carefully, I dripped a bit of water on his mouth—his lips worked, I saw them moving; and then, on my knees, like a servant boy in a story, I wiped some of the blood off his face with the paisley square from his pocket. As he drifted—cruelly, by degrees and latitudes—into stillness, I rocked back on my heels and looked hard into his wrecked face.
Hello? I said.
One papery eyelid, half shut, twitched, a blue-veined tic.
“If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”
But his hand in mine was limp. I sat there and looked at him, not knowing what to do. It was time to go, well past time—my mother had made that perfectly clear—and yet I could see no path out of the space where I was and in fact in some ways it was hard to imagine being anywhere else in the world—that there was another world, outside that one. It was like I’d never had another life at all.
“Can you hear me?” I asked him, one last time, bending close and putting my ear to his bloodied mouth. But there was nothing.
vi.
NOT WANTING TO DISTURB him, in case he was only resting, I was as quiet as I could be, standing up. I hurt all over. For some moments I stood looking down at him, wiping my hands on my school jacket—his blood was all over me, my hands were slick with it—and then I looked at the moonscape of rubble trying to orient myself and figure the best way to go.
When—with difficulty—I made my way into the center of the space, or what seemed like the center of the space, I saw that one door was obscured by rags of hanging debris, and I turned and began to work in the other direction. There, the lintel had fallen, dumping a pile of brick almost as tall as I was and leaving a smoky space at the top big enough to drive a car through. Laboriously I began to climb and scramble for it—over and around the chunks of concrete—but I had not got very far when I realized that I was going to have to go the other way. Faint traces of fire licked down the far walls of what had been the exhibition shop, spitting and sparkling in the dim, some of it well below the level where the floor should have been.
I didn’t like the looks of the other door (foam tiles stained red; the toe of a man’s shoe protruding from a pile of gravel) but at least most of the material blocking the door wasn’t very solid. Blundering back through, ducking some wires that sparked from the ceiling, I hoisted the bag over my shoulder and took a deep breath and plunged into the wreckage headlong.
Immediately I was choked by dust and a sharp chemical smell. Coughing, praying there were no more live wires hanging loose, I patted and groped in the dark as all sorts of loose debris began to patter and shower down in my eyes: gravel, crumbs of plaster, shreds and chunks of god-knows-what.
Some of the building material was light, and some of it was not. The further I worked in, the darker it got, and the hotter. Every so often my way dwindled or closed up unexpectedly and in my ears a roaring crowd noise, I wasn’t sure where it came from. I had to squeeze around things; sometimes I walked, sometimes I crawled, bodies in the wreckage more sensed than seen, a disturbing soft pressure that gave under my weight but worse than this, the smell: burnt cloth, burnt hair and flesh and the tang of fresh blood, copper and tin and salt.
My hands were cut and so were my knees. I ducked under things and went around things, feeling my way as I went, edging with my hip along the side of some sort of long lathe, or beam, until I found myself blocked in by a solid mass that felt like a wall. With difficulty—the spot was narrow—I worked around so I could reach into the bag for a light.
I wanted the keychain light—at the bottom, under the picture—but my fingers closed on the phone. I switched it on—and almost immediately dropped it, because in the glow I’d caught sight of a man’s hand protruding between two chunks of concrete. Even in my terror, I remember feeling grateful that it was only a hand, although the fingers had a meaty, dark, swollen look I’ve never been able to forget; every now and then I still start back in fear when some beggar on the street thrusts out to me such a hand, bloated and grimed with black around the nails.
There was still the flashlight—but I wanted the phone. It cast a weak glimmer up into the cavity where I was, but just as I recovered myself enough to stoop for it, the screen went dark. An acid-green afterburn floated before me in the blackness. I got down on my knees and crawled around in the dark, grabbling with both hands in rocks and glass, determined to find it.
I thought I knew where it was, or about where it was, and I kept looking for it probably longer than I should have; and it was when I’d given up hope and tried to get up again that I realized I’d crawled into a low spot where it was impossible to stand, with some solid surface about three inches above my head. Turning around didn’t work; going backwards didn’t work; so I decided to crawl forward, hoping that things would open up, and soon found myself inching along painfully with a smashed, desperate feeling and my head turned sharply to one side.
When I was about four, I’d gotten partially stuck inside a Murphy bed in our old apartment on Seventh Avenue, which sounds like a humorous predicament but wasn’t really; I think I would have suffocated if Alameda, our housekeeper back then, hadn’t heard my muffled cries and pulled me out. Trying to maneuver in that airless space was somewhat the same, only worse: with glass, hot metal, the stink of burned clothes, and an occasional soft something pressing in on me that I didn’t want to think about. Debris was pattering down on me heavily from above; my throat was filling with dust and I was coughing hard and starting to panic when I realized I could see, just barely, the rough texture of the broken bricks that surrounded me. Light—the faintest gleam imaginable—crept in subtly from the left, about six inches from floor level.
I ducked lower, and found myself looking over into the dim terrazzo floor of the gallery beyond. A disorderly pile of what looked like rescue equipment (ropes, axes, crowbars, an oxygen tank that said FDNY) lay harum-scarum on the floor.
“Hello?” I called—not waiting for an answer, dropping to wriggle through the hole as fast as I could.
The space was narrow; if I’d been a few years older or a few pounds heavier I might not have got through. Partway, my bag caught on something, and for a moment I thought I might have to slip free of it, painting or no painting, like a lizard shedding its tail, but when I gave it one last pull it finally broke free with a shower of crumbled plaster. Above me was a beam of some sort, which looked like it was holding up a lot of heavy building material, and as I twisted and squirmed beneath it, I was lightheaded with fear that it would slip and cut me in two until I saw that somebody had stabilized it with a jack.
Once clear, I climbed to my feet, watery and stunned with relief. “Hello?” I called again, wondering why there was so much equipment around and not a fireman in sight. The gallery was dim but mostly undamaged, with gauzy layers of smoke that thickened the higher they rose, but you could tell that a tremendous force of some sort had blown through the room just from the lights and the security cameras, which were knocked askew and facing the ceiling. I was so happy to be out in open space again that it was a moment or so before I realized the strangeness of being the only person standing up in a room full of people. Everybody else was lying down except me.
There were at least a dozen people on the floor—not all of them intact. They had the appearance of having been dropped from a great height. Three or four of the bodies were partially covered with firemen’s coats, feet sticking out. Others sprawled glaringly in the open, amidst explosive stains. The splashes and bursts carried a violence, like big blood sneezes, an hysterical sense of movement in the stillness. I remember particularly a middle aged lady in a bloodspattered blouse that had a pattern of Fabergé eggs on it, like a blouse she might have bought in the museum gift shop, actually. Her eyes—lined with black makeup—stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.
Dim oils, dulled gilt. Taking tiny steps, I walked out into the middle of the room, swaying, slightly off balance. I could hear my own breath rasping in and out and there was a strange shallowness in the sound, a nightmare lightness. I didn’t want to look and yet I had to. A small Asian man, pathetic in his tan windbreaker, curled in a bellying pool of blood. A guard (his uniform the most recognizable thing about him, his face was burned so badly) with an arm twisted behind his back and a vicious spray where his leg should have been.
But the main thing, the important thing: none of the lying-down people was her. I made myself look at them all, each separately, one by one—even when I couldn’t force myself to look at their faces, I knew my mother’s feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes—and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.
In the gallery beyond: more dead. Three dead. Fat Argyll-vest man; cankered old lady; a milky duckling of a little girl, red abrasion at her temple but otherwise hardly a mark on her. But then, there were no more. I walked through several galleries littered with equipment but despite the bloodstains on the floor, there were no dead at all. And when I walked into the far-seeming gallery where she’d been, where she’d gone, the gallery with The Anatomy Lesson—eyes closed tight, wishing hard—there were only the same stretchers and equipment and there, as I walked through, in the oddly screaming silence, the only two observers were the same two puzzled Dutchmen who had stared at my mother and me from the wall: what are you doing here?
Then something snapped. I don’t even remember how it happened; I was just in a different place and running, running through rooms that were empty except for a haze of smoke that made the grandeur seem insubstantial and unreal. Earlier, the galleries had seemed fairly straightforward, a meandering but logical sequence where all tributaries flowed into the gift shop. But coming back through them fast, and in the opposite direction, I realized that the path wasn’t straight at all; and over and over I turned into blank walls and veered into dead-end rooms. Doors and entrances weren’t where I expected them to be; freestanding plinths loomed out of nowhere. Swinging around a corner a little too sharply I almost ran headlong into a gang of Frans Hals guardsmen: big, rough, ruddy-cheeked guys, bleary from too much beer, like New York City cops at a costume party. Coldly they stared me down, with hard, humorous eyes, as I recovered, backed off, and began to run again.
Even on a good day, I sometimes got turned around in the museum (wandering aimlessly in galleries of Oceanic Art, totems and dugout canoes) and sometimes I had to go up and ask a guard to point the way out. The painting galleries were especially confusing since they were rearranged so often; and as I ran around in the empty halls, in the ghostly half-light, I was growing more and more frightened. I thought I knew my way to the main staircase, but soon after I was out of the Special Exhibitions galleries things started looking unfamiliar and after a minute or two running light-headed through turns I was no longer quite sure of, I realized I was thoroughly lost. Somehow I’d gone right through the Italian masterworks (crucified Christs and astonished saints, serpents and embattled angels) ending up in England, eighteenth century, a part of the museum I had seldom been in before and did not know at all. Long elegant lines of sight stretched out before me, mazelike halls which had the feel of a haunted mansion: periwigged lords, cool Gainsborough beauties, gazing superciliously down at my distress. The baronial perspectives were infuriating, since they didn’t seem to lead to the staircase or any of the main corridors but only to other stately baronial galleries exactly like them; and I was close to tears when suddenly I saw an inconspicuous door in the side of the gallery wall.
You had to look twice to see it, this door; it was painted the same color as the gallery walls, the kind of door which, in normal circumstances, looked like it would be kept locked. It had only caught my attention because it wasn’t completely closed—the left side wasn’t flush with the wall, whether because it hadn’t caught properly or because the lock wasn’t working with the electricity out, I didn’t know. Still, it was not easy to get open—it was heavy, steel, and I had to pull with all my strength. Suddenly—with a pneumatic gasp—it gave so capriciously I stumbled.
Squeezing through, I found myself in a dark office hallway under a much lower ceiling. The emergency lights were much weaker than in the main gallery, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust.
The hallway seemed to stretch for miles. Fearfully I crept along, peering into the offices where the doors happened to stand ajar. Cameron Geisler, Registrar. Miyako Fujita, Assistant Registrar. Drawers were open and chairs were pushed away from desks. In the doorway of one office a woman’s high-heeled shoe lay on its side.