After James (35 page)

She gave the taxi driver an address and as they drove she looked down at her hands resting on her purse. Every two seconds the passing streetlights made two of her fingers look broken sideways. After a while the driver talked about the traffic, the weather. He assumed she was American, asked if she knew Los Angeles, which he'd always wanted to visit. He said they were entering Kreuzberg. He let her off on a narrow commercial street with bright windows. Small galleries lined the avenue. Grau was already full. People bunched in the window, pale and narrow, and the lines they made, their clothes, accentuated their length. She studied them as if looking at a diorama, as if she had been transported back a thousand years from the future to observe earlier humans while standing on their cobblestones. She couldn't see Koss or her father but sensed they were impending, that they hadn't arrived yet, and upon this understanding, based on nothing she could detect, she was struck with self-consciousness. She moved on, as if she had some other destination.

The gallery next door was closed. One a little farther along was open and apparently empty. She went inside and wondered what she thought she was doing. She was on a rescue mission, was what, but unprepared, at any number of disadvantages to be confronting Koss so fully on his turf, in his city, his milieu, without his language. She was afraid that
she'd fail to see what needed to be done, or see it and fail to act, not say what needed saying. Afraid she'd allow herself to be turned, swayed by some graciousness, fitted with a look of true concern, fooled by a perfect, false compassion.

Already she was failing, standing in the wrong art gallery. In midroom was a long glass case displaying open notebooks filled with the smallest handwriting she'd ever seen jammed onto each page. The writing was in English. She walked to one end of the case. The work was titled
The Copyist.
The explanatory text fixed to the glass was in German, the only English words in quotation marks, “found art” and “unknown outsider.” The artist was nameless, maybe not an artist at all, she couldn't tell. She bent close to the cramped script and picked up one of the magnifying glasses resting on the case, chained at intervals. The opened pages in the first book described Saint Jerome translating the Vulgata from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. For centuries the translation was copied by hand, sometimes in monasteries.

As mendicant orders emerged, small, light, pocket Bibles were required for traveling. The copied text was compressed and the pages became animal, made from the thin, strong, luminous skin of unborn calves. The illuminated human figures drawn in the margins were given rouged cheeks to suggest health amid the plagues of the times. The best copyists were illiterate, unable to anticipate letters or phrases or to think they'd found errors to be corrected. I myself am illiterate, copying what I see to the letter.

She walked past ten or twelve notebooks to the last one, at the end of the case, and through the magnifying glass read the open page.

Episode One of the murder show ends with the woman just short of dead. In Episode Two a woman is missing, the worst of fates presumed. Episode Three is happening now. The woman is in the next room or next building, or, yes, two doors down. The frame only appears when I turn off the screen but that hardly ever happens. The episode now unfolding affords me no escape. I press my Guide for Episode Four but it hasn't happened yet. The woman has just lost a job that she loves, the workplace she worked in is distant. She sits in a room and reads and reads and of course she is just asking for it. We have a connection, the women and I. Without me they don't exist. A movement at the window, is that you? The screen only appears when I kill it.

She stood back from the case. Now she wanted to know what she was looking at. Where and when had the notebooks been found? Was someone making money off a record of mental illness? Or was the copyist an invention, like Koss's anarchists and antianarchist? Of course he was. “I myself am illiterate.” She wanted to put her fist through the case.

The moment she stepped out of the gallery a car turned the corner in front of her, emitting a high squealing, several squealings overlaid, and moved away down the street. The
sound returned Celia to herself and she remembered her purpose. A young man wearing a cheap faux-satin jacket passed by, headed toward Grau. She stepped in a few paces behind him and the windowlights reflecting in the folds of his back moved and died in the rhythm of his steps. He stopped suddenly and saw, just before she did, a wasted man sitting in the doorway to the gallery she'd earlier found closed. His head was shaved. He said something in German and the man in front of her responded briefly and walked on. Celia expected to be addressed but the seated man called after the other, something like “Sie brauchen one two.” She kept her eyes forward and continued. The walking man, who seemed a kind of protection now, passed by Grau and kept going. The man in the doorway hadn't noticed her. He watched the jacketed man and then suddenly he saw her and his face became a cartoon astonishment. He didn't quite meet her eye, but focused on something just in front of her, though there was nothing in front of her. Then he looked down quickly to the palmscape of his hand and whatever he saw there caused him to look back at her and stand and hurry away down the street.

She entered Grau. Viewed from inside, the crowd now had dimension. Its shape suggested a character. Part of the character was the noise it made, the high chatter babble of such spaces anywhere. Most of the patrons held glasses of wine or beer. They tended to look past one another, even while conversing. No one recognized her, apparently. She was repeatedly assessed and dismissed. Koss's name beckoned, floating in elongated script on the archway to another room. She walked under the archway.

The second room was enormous. She couldn't imagine how it fit into the gallery she'd seen from the street. She scanned the space for her father but he wasn't there. The script on the wall read
Apokalypse.
Lining the room were boxes, maybe four feet apart, more than the forty-eight memory theatres she'd seen online at Koss's site, maybe twice that many. People stood in ones and twos before them. Their gaze had a certain character of self-loss. They seemed to break from one box and step to the next without removing themselves from the viewing. Only at the first few boxes did people speak now and then. By the fifth or sixth they were into the story, putting things together.

She kept her distance from the walls, stepped into the room's open middle area. She saw at the far end a roped-off space with a stage, a small riser and three empty chairs, a podium and microphone. Soft laughter rose up from nowhere and died. Voices moved in the range of quiet to conversational. The words she could make out were foreign. She stood and took it in, the German murmur. After a time, words came clear. A young couple had taken to meeting each new box by trying to guess what would happen next before peering in. The guesses were in English—“The cave collapses,” “The dog drowns,” “A message from the sponsor”—and brought on little pulses of dread. They smiled and put their faces to the box and watched together. Each time, before they moved on, the man touched the woman, on the shoulder, the hip.

Now and then people crossed the floor and skipped forward or back, not noticing Celia, but most progressed box to
box around the room. Still another room led off this one, she now saw. She stepped into it, a longer, narrow rectangle. Her father and Koss weren't here either. This space was more crowded than the first, there were bottlenecks forming at some of the boxes. The people moved differently, with an urgency. Some laughed nervously at what they'd seen. One woman, older, in severe glasses, held her chest in a gasp or mock gasp. There was something a little raw in the voices. The viewers were slightly losing their cool.

When the first box came open Celia let herself be drawn to it. Through the glass she saw herself standing at a window. She wore pyjama bottoms, a red T-shirt. Then the scene changed and she was at a door, letting a dog out into a bright winter day, a woods in the near distance. End of box. She waited a few seconds and it played again. She tried to study it, to understand why it felt familiar. She didn't recognize the house. The dog looked slightly less like Hartley than she looked like herself.

The second box gave no clues, yet the feeling of familiarity persisted, became almost acute in its refusal to hold still. It produced a kind of déjà vu that she understood would be particular to her only, so strange were the conditions. Lia, Koss-Lia, was sitting at a computer, extracting something from a plastic bag. She plugged the thing into a port. On her screen up came a scene and the camera zoomed in until the new image filled the light box. A woman not Koss-Lia was leaving the same house, in summer, to meet someone arriving in a brown-and-orange pickup. The truck stopped and a dyed-blond young woman emerged. End of box.

A space had opened near the entryway and now she saw on the wall the title for this part of the show.
After James.
The words dropped inside her for a few moments before going off. She'd told no one the name of her lost child. She said something aloud. The room seemed to move at great speed.

A new sound came from the adjoining gallery. The lights were dimmed in all the rooms and people turned to face the little stage and podium. It was rare anymore, she thought, this feeling of everyone looking at the same thing in real time. The narrow room began to empty into the larger one and she stepped into the human stream and looked back. A few viewers were staying to the end of the story.

And so she was at the back of the crowd when it began, barely able to see the speaker. She looked for her father and Koss but it was hopeless. A young black woman in a light blue headscarf introduced a man whom Celia took to be the curator of the show. He wore a charcoal, collared shirt. His hair was close-cropped. From where she was standing he could have been thirty or sixty. He stepped to the microphone without smile or greeting. She couldn't follow his remarks but now and then an English word or name or quotation came clear. She heard “John Dewey” and “William James Lecturer.” She heard, in clean English, “the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip.” The crowd waited, bored and patient, for him to finish and introduce Koss, wherever he was, somewhere on the floor, presumably. All at once she felt someone looking at her. She turned, saw no one, and remembered she'd had these little moments now and then in the past few weeks. They came to her, saying, I've found you, and
then they disappeared and she forgot them, the specific character of them, until the next one spoke.

Finally, without the slightest finishing gesture that Celia could detect, the curator moved away and sat on a chair beside the headscarf woman. The lights brightened for a moment and then the room went almost dark and there at the microphone, like an apparition, was Koss himself.

It wasn't clear where he had come from, a magician's trick entrance. He was standing with his arms at his sides, looking downward, as if at papers on the podium, though not quite. He looked as he'd looked at the chateau, same hair, though now dressed casually in an orange T-shirt printed with some design she couldn't make out. He rocked slightly forward and back once. When his voice came she felt the first pinch, a slight shudder. The voice sounded wrong, was mic'd differently than the others had been, and now something was stirring in the crowd. There were whispers and shushes. A woman standing about fifteen feet in front of Celia turned around open-mouthed and made a shocked expression at someone, her boyfriend, and Koss rocked back and forth. It was the same movement exactly and Celia realized only then that he was on a loop. His voice was flat and declarative, recorded, in keeping with Koss-not-Koss, false-Koss, the artist there and not, present not-present, holographic-Koss. She detected no tone of apology. Some people were pushing forward to the image, others drifting back or turning and leaving. A few looked pleased, some confused, others were nodding, apparently certain that they knew what point was being made. Celia wanted to stop them, ask them what it was they thought they were seeing.

When she reached the foot of the riser he rocked once again. She examined the others close by. It was obvious now that her father wasn't here. No one noticed her, she was among several who'd come closer to look, and just as Koss said what sounded like the title of the show, she stepped onto the riser. Holding steady through the surge in her blood to be so close to him, his presence and specific, immaculate absence, in a gesture she thought of as a refusal of her consent, she passed her hand into him at chest level and let the colours spill onto her arm and the hologram and voice continued on their loops. She withdrew her hand and looked out at the crowd. Those near the stage stared dumbly, delightedly, and seemed to think she was part of the event, as of course she must be, breaking the illusion, the continuity, in a show called
Apokalypse.
Then she saw a lone figure at the back of the room. He wore jeans and a black hooded jacket, the hood was deep, it obscured his face. Only when he lifted his hand did she see the object, and at that moment she was taken by her elbow. With the nervous look of someone appeasing a madwoman, the curator gestured for her to return to the floor.

Just as Koss's voice cut out and his image died there came the first explosion from the back of the room. The hooded man raised the hatchet again and smashed a second box, which fell to the floor, and he struck it again and stepped to a third and smashed it and now he was on the run as men from the audience rushed him and he made the door and the crowd opened like a hand.

The gallery emptied onto the street. The curator and the headscarf woman who'd introduced him were standing
over the destroyed boxes. Celia stepped off the riser and passed through the room and out onto Lindenstraße. People stood along the sidewalk, on the street, looking this way and that, some still holding their wineglasses. Presumably others were off in pursuit. A young man with something tattooed on the side of his neck, parentheses, approached and said something in German, then asked in English, “Are you the woman in the boxes?” Celia looked back into the gallery through the window. The curator was on his cellphone, talking, a brief smile. The headscarf woman was using her phone to take pictures of the wreckage. She shot and tapped, shot and showed the curator, who nodded and tapped.