Its getting dark, p.7
It's Getting Dark, page 7
Normally, I don’t have any trouble getting off to sleep, but tonight I lie awake for a long time. I’m not worrying about Hedwig, but I feel like I’m staring into a vast space with eyes shut. I don’t have any sensation, I don’t even feel tired. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, just an unfamiliar one.
The next morning, I feel a bit feeble, but that’s hardly surprising as I’ve eaten nothing and barely slept for twenty-four hours. Even though I still don’t feel hungry, I take a yogurt out of the fridge. When I’ve finished it, I can’t decide to throw the empty container in the trash—it’s as though that would be a decision of far-reaching consequences. As I brush my teeth, I find it difficult to get a clear sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes are pretty good for my age, but I can only see a blurred outline. Even after rinsing my eyes in cold water, it doesn’t improve.
When I lock the door to the apartment, I realize that my trouble has nothing to do with the lock being stiff, it’s simply that I don’t have the strength to grip and turn the key properly. On the staircase I have to hold on to the banister because my legs feel like jelly.
The bus is almost empty, the train too. I hesitate briefly before going into the carriage. I’m tired, but have a great feeling of lightness, almost weightlessness. The light that comes into the compartment seems painfully bright, the shadows cast by the passing trees make it flicker like a stroboscope. I still feel sick, and I’m relieved when my station comes and I get out. At least my vision has gotten better.
There is hardly anyone around. It’s only at the door that I realize that it’s a Saturday. In all those years, this has never happened to me before. Even so I go up to the office, sit down at my desk, and switch on the computer. The squirrel is performing again on the trees outside, and I watch. I have the feeling I’m just as light as that creature, and that I too could leap around the trees like that. Once someone asked me what kind of animal I’d be if I could, I don’t remember who it was, but I do remember I didn’t have an answer. Why not a squirrel?
Around twelve I leave the office without having done anything. I take the train back, and then the bus. I buy what I need and stand in line at the checkout counter. In front of me is a woman I’ve seen before, but I don’t remember her name. She doesn’t seem to have noticed me anyway. When it’s my turn, the cashier gets up and walks over to the shelves and starts stacking something. Hey, can I pay? I say. She doesn’t seem to hear. I pack my purchases in a bag and leave.
Even though I’ve hardly bought a lot, the bag after a couple of hundred yards feels very heavy, and I set it down on the pavement briefly and catch my breath. When I bend down to pick it up again, it feels even heavier. I leave it there, after all, the fridge is full of the things I bought yesterday, and I don’t seem to be hungry in any case.
The lock this time is too much. I can’t grip the key, which keeps slipping through my fingers. I suppose I ought to be worried, but I’m not. On the contrary, I feel a strange levity. I flop down on the stairs and lean my head against the wall. Downstairs, I hear the front door open, and someone coming up the stairs. It’s the woman who lives on the floor above us, but I can’t remember her name even though we’ve been neighbors for many years. She passes me by without saying hello, without even acknowledging my presence. A few more people pass up and down the stairs that afternoon, they all look familiar, but no one seems to notice me. One time, I need to pull in my legs, afraid that one of the children running down the stairs will trip over me and fall.
I’m thinking about my list and wondering if it really was as important as I always believed. Every day I made changes to it, deleting some files and adding others, but I don’t know who really needs it, and who else has access to it. All I know is that it’s printed out every month and sent by the company mail to a dozen departments. I have seen it, thick volumes of lined computer paper gradually yellowing on the shelves, and removed after a certain length of time. I never dared ask whether anyone consults the list, perhaps because I’ve long sensed that they don’t. But sometime someone determined all these processes, and there must have been a reason, why else should so much paper be bound and mailed? Maybe it’s not a matter of anyone needing the information on the list. Like everything else, they are just a part of reality, and their existence doesn’t need any justification. The list is there, as much as we are, and that will have to do.
I have no idea what the time is when Hedwig finally gets home. She looks exhausted. She doesn’t seem to see me either. I am on the point of moving aside to let her pass, but she walks right through me. She dumps her full shopping bags in the kitchen before coming back to lock the door. I took advantage of the moment to slip inside. After that, I’m so exhausted that I remain seated in the corridor. I am glad Hedwig hasn’t turned the light on, my eyes are unusually sensitive, my hearing likewise. Although the kitchen door is closed, I can hear every word the man says on the radio, hear overdistinctly Hedwig chopping onions, opening and closing the fridge, I hear the bubbling of the kettle, the clatter of pans, and even the gas hissing out of the stove, the clicking of the lighter, the flicker of the flame.
I don’t have the feeling that Hedwig is missing anything, that she misses me. She has cooked her supper, taken it into the sitting room, and sat down. She hasn’t set a place for me, and I can feel no unrest in her movements, no expectation. I don’t know why I can see all this. I haven’t moved in all this time, but it’s as though my consciousness could float around freely in the apartment, as though I could see and hear everything, as though I was everywhere and nowhere at once. Only in the corridor, where a moment ago I sat down, there seems to be some sort of concentration, a shapeless darkness.
I try to speak, but I don’t succeed. The feeling of being at once very heavy and very light, immobile and floating, is an exhausting one.
Hedwig eats slowly and carefully. She wipes her mouth on a paper napkin, clears her throat, carries the dirty plates into the kitchen. She cleans the kitchen, washes the dishes, opens the window to let fresh air in.
I feel the chilly air streaming in, seizing hold of me and bearing me across to the window. I try to hold on somewhere, but I can’t, I have no arms, no legs, no sort of body.
The moon is full and it really does seem brighter than usual and very close. It’s as though it were drawing me up to it. The stars too are so bright that they seem to tremble. I climb slowly up into the air, see our building dwindle, see our little street, then the main road, with no traffic on it just now, our part of town, then the whole city. The moonlight is very bright, the scenery is easy to discern. I climb and climb. The lake, the hills in the distance, the snow-covered mountains. Before long I will see the Mediterranean, and then Africa, the Atlantic, America. I climb.
Sabrina, 2019
The first time Sabrina saw herself she was a little startled. She knew what she was letting herself in for, Hubert had explained it to her, and she had given her agreement, more than agreement, she was pretty enthusiastic about his idea. The fact that he had asked her of all people had flattered her and made her happy for a whole day. When he said he was looking for a model, she’d been apprehensive at first, in case he was one of those people who take erotic photographs of underage girls, but she’d heard him out, and so learned that it was nothing like that at all, and that he was a serious artist. She was happy to cooperate, even though she had no interest in art, or perhaps no understanding of it. He had explained lots of technical matters to her, the whole process, but by then she had switched off, that was all his business, all she needed to do was look pretty. Then she’d visited a museum to look at sculptures. She examined them carefully, imagined standing in their midst, herself a sculpture. She copied the poses, till she noticed a museum guard watching her; that gave Sabrina a pleasant sense of superiority. She was going to be a servant of the art, and that was something noble and significant.
Hubert had asked her to bring clothes she felt comfortable in, everyday sort of things. Her little wheeled suitcase contained a couple of classier outfits, things she might wear for a night out with her girlfriends, but after to-ing and fro-ing a little bit, he had plumped for a pair of ripped low-rise jeans, a crop top, and sneakers. Each time she got changed, he turned his back, which she thought was sweet but not really necessary. She wasn’t inhibited, and was used to all kinds of things from her job in the hospital. The scanner, which looked like a large iron, threw a web of light across her body, and she was put in mind of the patients she escorted to have their MRIs or X-rays taken. For a moment she wondered if Hubert could see inside her with that machine of his, and see things about her that she wasn’t even aware of, such things as illnesses, destiny, secrets.
* * *
—
So now she was confronting herself, only this second Sabrina wasn’t flesh and blood but aluminum, and an inch or so bigger, which made her appear somehow threatening. The fact that next to the sculpture was a second, identical copy also had its disquieting aspect. Sabrina inspected her image, if anything, more carefully than she’d ever looked at herself. She could see herself at angles that her mirror didn’t offer, from behind, from the side. She got down on her haunches and looked up at herself, she stepped away and moved back in, she went right up to one of the figures. Her earlobes suddenly struck her as tiny, and the ears themselves were just weird with all their windings and swellings. She didn’t like her posture either, standing there with outthrust pelvis and bare belly. She caught herself standing there in that same way, pushing her belly out at the sculpture, as though in a contest. She lifted her T-shirt to show the other Sabrina the navel-piercing she still wore, the hand of Fatima, an Islamic emblem that was meant to keep evil spirits away, as one of the doctors had recently told her. Sabrina had just taken a liking to the figure of the little hand in the store, and got the piercing done, without thinking about it much. Around her neck, metal Sabrina was wearing a gold chain, just like, and the jeans copied every seam and crease, the precision of it was a bit baffling, almost scary.
Well, and how do you like yourself? asked Hubert, who had sent her on ahead, because he still had something to discuss with the metal caster. She wondered if Hubert considered her attractive. She was certainly not plain-looking, but she wasn’t strikingly beautiful either, she couldn’t kid herself. Once, when she was still a girl she had asked her mother if she thought she was nice-looking, the mere question had humiliated her, regardless of what her mother had replied. But beauty didn’t seem to be Hubert’s criterion. To go by the other work of his that he had shown her, she wouldn’t have been able to tell his type, whether he liked women with slim or full figures, with hard or soft features, long or short hair. He was looking for perfectly ordinary-looking women, he had told her the first time they met, and then straightaway apologized and said something nonsensical about all women being beautiful of course. She had found that more offensive than comforting. When she had gone to his studio, he had given her coffee and showed her pictures of other sculptures, and a book about Pompeii with photographs of plaster casts of the victims. A man trying to shield the face of his pregnant wife with the corner of his garment, to protect her from the falling ash, a woman holding her baby in her arms, fleeing an ineluctable death. This is morbid, said Sabrina. I find it fascinating, said Hubert. They’re all long dead, of course, but this gives them a chance for us to look at them. I don’t think that’s right, said Sabrina, at least I was asked if I wanted to be a model.
How many clones of me are you going to make anyway? she asked. Five or six, said Hubert, it all depends on how well they sell. Will you give me one? Sabrina knew from his expression that her request was inappropriate. He had told her how expensive they were to make, and her own contribution to the project was fairly negligible. She had put her body at his disposal for a day, had tried out a few costumes and poses, and then maybe stood still for a couple of hours while being scanned, but that was it. There were endless women who could have done it and done it just as happily and willingly as she did.
I’m not really serious, she said. What would I do with something like that anyway? Put it in the sitting room in my co-op? Use it for a clothes stand? But it was too big to fit her clothes. How much do they weigh? she asked and tapped the sculpture with her fingernail. Don’t touch, please, said Hubert. Maybe seventy or eighty pounds. Sabrina laughed. So you’ve made a taller and skinnier version of me. Or not skinnier, just lighter, I suppose, she said, pulling a face. When they said goodbye, they shook hands. Was that it, then? she asked, in some disappointment. You can come to the private view, he said, fishing a card out of his briefcase.
* * *
—
Sabrina had never been to a private view and felt immediately out of place. She was far and away the youngest person there. Hubert had called her just ahead of time, and said he thought it might be fun if she came in the same clothes she had worn for the sculpture, and now she felt wretched in the old stuff. The other women wore makeup and were in smart clothes and all looked very confident and somehow radiated importance. Most people seemed to know one another, and they exchanged greetings and laughed a lot. If Sabrina had only had someone with her, but her girlfriends all had better things to do. She picked up a glass of chardonnay and strolled through the show, only taking pains to avoid her own image, she really didn’t feel like being identified by someone and spoken to. The thing with wearing the same clothes was an awful idea, and she was furious with Hubert, also because of the way he’d just given her a cursory greeting and then left her standing there while he went off to talk to more important people, people who had money and understood art, the kind of people who belonged here. The figure might bear Sabrina’s name, but she herself was perfectly exchangeable.
When the gallery owner stopped everything and gave a little speech, Sabrina was already onto her third glass. She could feel the alcohol getting to her, but at least she didn’t feel as out of place as she had when she’d arrived. The gallery owner welcomed everyone and then said a few words about Hubert and his new work. Most of what he said went in one ear and out the other. When he said of the sculpture, Sabrina 2019, that she looked out of place in the exhibition space, he might have said the same thing about her. He talked about the loneliness of the sculpture, her solitariness. Hubert wasn’t concerned with a true-to-life mimesis, all his works were an expression of his strong feeling and thinking. Sabrina wondered what the feeling might have been in their case—it certainly wasn’t anything concerning her. Don’t you wonder what this seemingly randomly chosen girl is thinking, looking out at the world with that quizzical expression? the gallery owner mused aloud. Then he paused briefly and went on to the next piece. So she was now a randomly chosen girl with a puzzled expression. Ideally, she would have vanished straightaway, but something kept her there, she didn’t know what it was herself. She took another glass of wine and texted her girlfriends: what was keeping them?
* * *
—
I’ve just bought you, said a voice in her ear, making her jump out of her skin. She looked up from her phone and saw a man of sixty or so whom she had noticed earlier because he seemed so confident in the way he negotiated the room, saying hello to right and left, as though he lived there. She had seen Hubert—looking smaller than he sometimes did—having a lengthy conversation with him. The man held out his hand: Robert Lang. Sabrina, she said. I know, he said, Sabrina, 2019. He laughed, but not unpleasantly. I hope you won’t mind the fact that you’ll be standing in my house before long. I never imagined anyone would buy her, said Sabrina. But of course, silly, Hubert has to live off something. Live pretty well too, I should say, said this Robert Lang, with another laugh. Do you have any idea how much you’re costing me? Not me, said Sabrina, that tin girl is, I don’t get a penny. She was half-irked, half-flattered by the man’s interest. I couldn’t begin to afford her. Well, you have only to look in the mirror, said the collector. But if you feel like it, why not pay yourself a visit? He gave her his card.
Later, when Sabrina told her friends in the hospital about the conversation, they were unanimous in saying the man was after something. He’s not paying tens of thousands of francs for your statue if he doesn’t want something from you, said Jasmin, and Tamara said, maybe he’s one of those pervy men that has sex with statues. How do you get that? asked Sabrina. She’s made of aluminum. Tamara said she wasn’t sure either, but there was something she’d seen once on YouTube. You’re crazy, said Sabrina, anyway, he’s ancient.
* * *
—
The next day, after work, Sabrina went to the gallery again. There was no one there except a young woman looking pretty and bored at a desk. If she hadn’t happened to have her phone out, whispering something, one might have supposed she too was a work of art. This time, Sabrina made a beeline for her sculpture. She looked different from yesterday, a bit smaller, and her expression looked somehow disappointed, or melancholy. Sabrina laid her hand on her bare upper arm and felt the chilly metal. Take it easy, girl, she said quietly, he won’t do anything to hurt you. He seemed quite nice, really. She sat down on a bench along the wall, and stayed there awhile, not looking at the sculpture, she simply felt the need to keep herself company. For once, she managed not to pull out her cell right away, to send a text or watch a video or play a game. She just sat there as still as her image. What do you think, she asked herself, should I get the piercing taken out? It’s a bit of a pain, and in winter no one sees it anyway. Or do you need protection from evil spirits? Shall we grow our hair out? Or get it all chopped off? It might be time to toss that old top, it’s really not a nice color anymore. You doing all right? Mom’s a pain, but you knew that. Calling all the time. And of course co-op life’s not as cool as I’d hoped. Still, better than hanging around at home. But you—you’re moving somewhere swank, I’ve heard. Maybe he owns some more sculptures, so you’ll have a bit of company.
