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  The Writing on the Wall

  A Novel

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  The public reports about the shock and grief suffered after the attacks on September 11, 2001, implied that those feelings were uniform and generic in everyone. And probably extremes of shock and grief, like extremes of hunger and desire, do feel the same in everyone. Yet the people who endured the transforming effects of that day were not blank slates ready to be imprinted with the same images. They brought to that moment all the events of their lives until then, and the new events, by their very force, called forth earlier shocks and reconfigured them in a new context. So the collapse of the buildings made a different sound for everyone who heard it, and for each the noise echoed in a different key.

  CELIA STRENG

  The fire fed on wrecked office furniture, computers, carpets, and aircraft cargo, but primarily it fed on ordinary paper—an ample supply of the white sheets that were so much a part of the larger battlefield scene. Without that paper, the experts believed, the fire might not have achieved the intensity necessary to weaken the steel beyond its critical threshold. It would be simplifying things, but not by much, to conclude that it was paperwork that brought the South Tower down.

  WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE

  American Ground, 2002

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Prologue

  ON BRIGHT MORNINGS, THE sun sliding along her bedroom window stamps the wood floor with a dappled pattern that resembles large scattered petals. Or a magnified fragment of Chinese calligraphy. If she had the extraordinary powers of Ts’ang Chieh, an ancient Chinese sage credited with inventing written characters, she might be able to read something in the sun’s design. Legend tells us that Ts’ang Chieh modeled his characters after patterns in nature: the constellations of the night sky, the designs on tortoise shells, animal tracks, tree branches silhouetted against the sky. But though Renata is a pretty good linguist herself, her talents don’t go that far. Anyway, this morning the pattern hadn’t appeared yet—it was too early.

  She lay on her stomach and Jack held on to her as he always did, a leg and arm flung over her, his head buried near her shoulder. She liked being weighed down. He was gripping tight, fast asleep, then his body suddenly stiffened and shook in spasms. Christ, she thought, he’s going to come in his sleep like a teenaged boy. And all over her. The nerve, a grown man, and dragging her along out of habit. If it really was her he was pumping in his sleep, who knows? She was mistaken. This was no kind of pleasure. Jack’s leg stiffened again, as if he were pressing down on the brake of a car, and he gave a few low moans, no, more like whimpers of fright. Near her head on the pillow, the fingers of his right hand made jerking movements, like plucking staccato notes on the strings of a bass fiddle. He gripped her tighter. She thought of waking him from his nightmare to save him from whatever was threatening, a collision maybe, but decided not to. People have a right to their dreams, even the bad ones. Maybe the dream was important, maybe it was delivering a shred of crucial information. Then again, Jack never analyzed his dreams. Once in a great while he would report one. So what do you think it means? he’d say. What do you think, she’d answer, as the therapists do. He didn’t mind that, just shrugged. Renata, on the contrary, liked tinkering with puzzles; she saw all sorts of dire meanings in his dreams but never suggested them. People have a right to their ignorance, too.

  She left him to his fate. When she next opened her eyes he was watching her. There were mornings when she woke feeling amorphous, shapeless, selfless, and he could tell, though he couldn’t tell why; then he would rub and stroke her body all over, like a mother bear licking her cub into shape. And as he stroked she would take on the familiar shape of the day before. This wasn’t one of those mornings. Today it was Jack, usually so serene and balanced, who seemed lost, stranded on the trail between dream and waking.

  “Is it over?” she asked. “You had a bad dream. You were shaking.”

  “Was that it? I woke up with a terrible feeling. That must be why.”

  “What was it? Is the stuff on my walls freaking you out?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  The floor showed its pattern of dappled light. It would be a very bright day. All the days had been bright lately, a blessing from the gods of weather. She took his hand and brought it to her stomach and pressed it down. “I thought you were fucking someone in your sleep. Me, maybe. So?”

  He looked over at the clock. “I can’t. I wish I could, but I have a meeting at nine-thirty and I’ve got to stop at my place first.” They were sleeping at Renata’s apartment because Jack had found an excellent parking space nearby, no small consideration in Brooklyn Heights. Most nights they spend together, they’re at Jack’s place a few blocks away. He doesn’t care for hers, too weird, he says. Meaning the stuff on the walls. Her clippings, her lists. He doesn’t like obsessions, though he likes her.

  “Suit yourself.” And she moved his hand away.

  “That’s what I need at my place, a suit, actually.”

  She groaned, as she was supposed to do. He makes such quips on purpose, to hear her groan. They indulge each other, Renata and Jack. They have their little games, their routines. Like Reality Tourism, Jack’s game. For the traveler who’s been everywhere: consider two invigorating weeks in Attica. Too much time sitting at a desk? Try a week’s stint at a sweatshop. Or Renata’s game, Redundancy, also known as Twin Titles. Kingshighway Boulevard. Perennial Classics. The real-estate ads are a good source. Summit Heights. Chateau Estates. She keeps a list. They have to be real, with data on where they were first sighted. The first time they slept together, Jack suggested Maison de la Casa, which he claimed was a new continental restaurant in Chelsea, but she wasn’t fooled.

  “Tonight, then?” he said. “Will it keep?”

  “Whatever.” Again on purpose. Jack dislikes that word. She doesn’t like it much herself.

  His cell phone, near at hand on the night table, bleeped, and he cursed as he waited for the message: “Jack, I just wanted to let you know I’ll be late, sorry I forgot to tell you yesterday. I have to get Julio to day care myself because my mother and sister are in Puerto Rico for a few days. Anyway, in case you get in first I wanted you—”

  “Carmen? I’m here. No, that’s okay. I’m glad you called. Look, since you’ll be right around there could you stop off at the Port Authority, I’m not sure which floor, the nineties I think, you can check in the lobby, and pick up those homelessness statistics? They promised to fax them but God knows when....Thanks....No, take your time.”

  “Carmen,” he explained when he hung up. His stellar assistant.

  “I figured that out,” said Renata.

  He dressed and bent to kiss her good-bye. “Don’t forget to vote,” he murmured, his hand lingering on her breast. “Primary Day, remember?” She called him an anarchist, but he was such a good citizen.

  He was gone. A man not given to quick fucks. Everything he does is done with care and attention. A fine quality, but it has
its drawbacks.

  Not worth fretting about, though. The restless warmth inside would ebb away soon enough. Not worth sinking into the doldrums. The expression made her smile. Her friend and library colleague, Linda, a storehouse of arcane facts, told her about the doldrums last week at lunch.

  “That old guy with the long yellow beard and the one earring, you know who I mean, who keeps hanging out at the Answer Lady desk? He told me he was in the doldrums, so I said he might like to know that the Doldrums are an actual place around 800 miles south of Hawaii. It’s an area that’s always covered with big dark clouds and almost no wind to drive them away. He liked that. I keep my customers happy. I see you like it too.”

  No doldrums today. Not a cloud in the sky. She was having lunch with Linda again—who knows what she might learn? She’d vote on the way home, not because she was a good citizen but because Jack would check up. Voting to please a lover—surely not what the Founding Fathers intended.

  Before she left, she looked, as always, at the panels of Chinese calligraphy on the walls. The illustrations were small; the calligraphy dominated. The one she liked best had no illustration at all. It was from a letter written almost a thousand years ago by a local magistrate, advising a new colleague about how to govern. “A good magistrate must follow the people’s wishes and help to spread a civilizing influence. He must clear his eyes and listen intently, so that he and his subjects may together be molded by the spirit and transformed.”

  She had studied the calligraphy hangings so long and so steadily that often she fell into dreamy wishful thinking and invented translations that resembled news bulletins. For the letter to the magistrate, she would imagine, “The child was found unharmed in the early evening, playing in a sandbox not far from the merry-go-round where she disappeared.” Other times it read, “The perpetrators were apprehended in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and charged with kidnapping. The child was returned safely to her aunt in New York City.” An alternate version of reality, the “what if” theory of history applied on the small scale.

  That morning, the bad dream morning, Primary Day, the blessed weather morning, was when the sky burst into flame and paper rained down. No one voted.

  But first—for isn’t it natural to want to delay a disaster, to pretend for a while that it never happened?—what is a reclusive librarian sworn to solitude, or at least to emotional celibacy, doing in bed with someone she loves? Or is pretty sure she loves.

  One

  IT STARTED WITH A pick-up. She’d had pick-ups before, a good number, but nothing that ever lasted more than a few nights, or weeks. The men wanted to know too much, they wanted to exchange life stories, and they lost patience with her. This one would be different. He would become part of her life story, step right into it, even though he didn’t know the early chapters. That took nerve. And he was patient. He could wait for the story. He would wait a long time. A museum, a likely place for a pick-up, though neither of them had come for that. People do, it’s well known, but Renata wanted to see what had so incensed the mayor that he threatened to cut off the museum’s funds—an incident that became part of the urban folklore. The show, featuring young British artists with attitude, was called Sensation, and the offending painting, a Madonna, had dollops of elephant dung plastered here and there, elephant dung, in African tradition, being a semi-sacred object with spiritual overtones. The mayor was unaware of the symbolic significance of the dung. In fact if he hadn’t been informed to begin with that the black dollops were dung, the whole brouhaha might never have taken place. So much for the information age, for every ingredient in drugs and food and paintings being labeled.

  But that painting wasn’t what she was looking at when Jack turned up. After a quarter of an hour she was hardly looking at the exhibits at all; she was mesmerized instead by the writing on the wall, those informative little cards that make going to a museum like heavy-duty research—so much reading and cross checking is involved. She was copying what was on the cards into a notebook and would later transfer it to one of her folders—Absurdities, Banalities, or Meaningless Words, she’d decide later. The card before her accompanied an exhibit of a shark in formaldehyde. “Perhaps the shark is a cruel reminder of how even the most ferocious spirits—animal or human—are eventually brought low,” it said. “Whether we feel weak or strong, we are all headed for the same end.”

  The words brought to mind an obscure language spoken in a small area of Lapland which she had learned last year for her work in the library. Bliondan was a language rich in near-synonyms, with an abundance of terms in the category of prashmensti or “wrong words.” The closest translation in English would be “lying,” but prashmensti connoted a great deal more. The varieties of wrong words in Bliondan ranged from what we would call “white lies,” told for convenience or to avoid hurt feelings, to words used imprecisely or insincerely in order to obfuscate (prashmenosi), to distract (prashimina), to mislead and thus avoid dangerous truths (prashmial), or used out of sheer stupidity, or to fill space when words were required—all derivatives of the root word, mentasi, speech. The words on the museum wall would probably be called prashmenilak, a combination of stupidity (prasbmenilis) and the need to fill space (prashmenala).

  “Its interesting,” a woman beside her said to her companion, regarding the shark, “but I wouldn’t want to have it in my living room.”

  Renata felt him come up behind her. He radiated sex. She didn’t have to turn around to know that he’d speak, that he wanted something of her, for he stood there longer than it took to read the words. But she did turn. A casual look, no come-on, mere curiosity. He was large and burly, blunt features like carved rock, marvelous thick straight salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in jeans and a shaggy gray sweater, the kind of man who doesn’t bother shaving on weekends. He met her eyes briefly. “ ‘Whether we feel weak or strong,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘we are all headed for the same end.’ ” So they burst out laughing.

  She ambled on and he followed, to a series of small photographs of the artist’s family, to all appearances a sorry lot. “ ‘How are we to judge the way they live?’ ” Jack read. Renata giggled, though usually she was not much of a giggler. “ ‘We see emotional turmoil: In one photo, his alcoholic father is passed out by the toilet. In another, his mother shakes her fist in anger. The apartment is filled with clutter and filth.’ Disgusting isn’t it?”

  “The filth, yes. I don’t mind a bit of clutter.”

  “It’s a matter of degree, I guess. ‘But there are also moments of...joy. Do you think the artist is celebrating the people he loves, or is he asking us to pity or condemn them?’ What do you think?”

  “You’re not supposed to think. That’s the point. The answer is right here on the wall. ‘The answer,’ ” she read, “ ‘lies in our own sense of what constitutes a good life and family.’ ”

  The next exhibit was a plaster cast of a child’s bedroom turned inside out like a photographic negative: the spaces around the objects were made solid and the missing objects were represented by empty space. “The resemblance to a tomb is inescapable,” the card read. “Could the artist be creating a monument to her childhood, perhaps mourning its loss? It’s as though she has sealed off her memories. And we are locked out, left only with traces from which we might try to guess what once took place inside.”

  He glanced at Renata as if they’d known each other for some time. “Could she be doing that?” he asked. “What’s your opinion?”

  “My opinion is I’ve seen enough.”

  They were near the end of the show. He pointed to a final statement emblazoned on the wall. “ ‘Do we let these artists offend us? Or do we just laugh and walk away?’ Lets just laugh and walk away. And have coffee.”

  All right, but she had to copy some more cards first.

  “Take your time. I wanted another look at the self-portrait in frozen blood anyway. Are you an art critic?”

  “No, a librarian. It’s for my...files.”

  “What
ever turns you on. I’ll be in the vicinity. Find me when you’re done?”

  She nodded, then returned to the first item that had caught her eye, a painting of the notorious Myra Hindley, known as “the most hated woman in Britain,” who, together with her lover, strangled at least five children and buried their bodies on the moors near Manchester. “The hundreds of children’s handprints that define Hindley’s face remind us of her victims, yet they almost seem to be stroking her face,” she copied carefully and with repugnance into her notebook. “At the same time, the large scale of the piece implies a heroic status. But when we know Myra Hindley’s history, the work suggests, and in a very powerful way, that the most banal face—the face of a friend or neighbor—can hide terrifying evil.”

  Twenty minutes later she found him in front of an exhibit illustrating the life cycle of maggots; the eggs, then the flies, were displayed on rotting cows’ heads made of latex.

  They got their coats and braved the January cold. The wind was bitter and they longed to cling together for warmth, but both were too discreet and too old for such impulsiveness, or maybe too young. Jack was thirty-nine but might be taken for older—a bit worn, a bit frayed, yet staunch and durable. Renata was five years younger but prematurely wary. Over coffee they discovered that they lived only a few blocks apart, in Brooklyn Heights. Kismet, he declared. But being careful people, they said good-bye at the subway exit and didn’t go to bed until the following day.

  At home, she curled up on the living-room couch with her Transformed Lives or Everyone Wants to Be Changed folder, her collection of metamorphoses—lives that took an unexpected turn. When she first began clipping those tales from the newspapers she wasn’t sure why she wanted them. After a while she understood she was saving them as an act of faith, hoping the growing stack would prove that lives could indeed be transformed. By now she’d read them so often that their subjects had become her mind’s companions. She liked to imagine herself leading their lives, owning their pluck and ingenuity. She wanted to change as they had changed. Like them, she wished to begin anew.