The Invention of Ana Read online

  You know, they say knowledge is a threat to the powerful, he said, his fingers coming to rest on the Russian dictionary. If there’s a revolution tomorrow, we’ll probably be the first ones they come for.

  The next week he signed Ana up for the chess club, and every Sunday they’d hop onto a bus or a tram and go lurching off to a museum or nuclear power plant or bridge made of pre-stressed concrete. He talked and she listened. She learned it was a privilege to study mathematics, that back home in his village her father had been beaten because he always had his nose buried in a book. She learned he’d fled a drunken, illiterate father and lived in a basement at the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy, surviving thanks to the potatoes his sisters sent him on the train. In return, Ana told him about the bullying and Violeta Mincic, who ruled the schoolyard with an iron fist, and she asked: Dad, how old do I have to be before I can start at the high school with you?

  How old? he said, and laughed. Oh, love, age is just something people have invented. Time’s imaginary anyway. Quantum mechanics proved that ages ago.

  They spent the rest of the spring wallowing in quadratic functions and going to town on combinatorics. Ana said it was like a veil had been lifted from her eyes. Not particularly original, true, but that was the metaphor Ana used. It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes, she said to me, and suddenly she saw math all over the place. Geometry in pine cones, wave functions when she threw a stone into the pond, topology in the belt she folded and put on a shelf in her wardrobe. Ana saw order and predictability everywhere. Everything in the world could be explained by mathematics, everything operated according to fixed rules that no one could alter, and although she didn’t understand all or even half of what her father said, it filled her with enough peace and purpose to pad the longest, empty afternoons.

  One evening in early April, when Ana had settled down with a system of coordinates, her father came into the room. He wore a scarf and hat, at least three sweaters and a jacket, or two coats, a couple of pullovers. It looked like he’d swelled up, as if he’d been fermenting, like grape juice left too long on the windowsill in the sun.

  Put some clothes on, he said. You’ll freeze in that.

  What are we doing?

  Well now. If I told you that, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Come on, up you get.

  The chill of night was settling as they emerged onto the street, and through the open kitchen windows they could hear the hum of the apartment block and the clinking of dishes and coffee sets. It was April 9, 1989, and Ana’s father didn’t know he had less than a year to live. Ana didn’t know that either, which was just as well. Cutting a slanting path across the road to the bus stop, they took the first bus to Gara Nord. They were headed to the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy under cover of darkness.

  I know this building like my own body, he said forty minutes later, as they picked their way among the trash and construction waste that surrounded the Institute. This was where I met your mother, did you know that?

  Ana shook her head. It’s all dirty, she said.

  Don’t be silly, he said, taking out a key, but the door was already open. Inside, candles lit the way upstairs, and dusty bits of paper floated along the corridors. A chair had been caved in, and a typewriter chucked onto the landing, scattering the letters of the keyboard down the steps. The staircase curved up through the building, and on the top floor a ladder led up to the roof. Ana climbed up with her father’s arms around her, smelling the evening air as it drifted through the trapdoor, and when she stuck her head out the other side she saw the lights of the city.

  Just take a look at that, said her father, but before Ana could admire the whole view, she heard the sound of men gathered noisily around a telescope. It was identical to the one she’d studied at the Technical Museum, and she gazed nervously at the instrument as the men hailed her father, before the lights beneath them all went out. Darkness swept like a wave across the city as the power was cut, from Otopeni in the north to Titan in the south, and the men clapped and cheered. The whole city twinkled as if the lights and lamps were putting up a fight, but the men didn’t care about electricity. Uninterested in the cheap falsity of bulbs, they were pointing at the night sky, adjusting the telescope and jostling to peer through.

  Do you see that? asked her father, crouching down on his haunches. He pointed to a big star in the west, and said, Can you tell me what that is?

  Ana looked up at the sky. She thought it over.

  Well, is the answer coming or not? Get washed away by cherry soda, did it?

  I don’t know, she said at last. What is it?

  You’ve got to guess, he said. If you want to be a mathematician, you’ve got to be willing to hazard an opinion. Come on—is it a comet or a satellite or what? A galaxy?

  But Ana didn’t say anything; she knew nothing about astronomy.

  Yes, no, short, long, don’t know? Rather be a plumber, would you? Come on, just guess.

  A satellite, she said. I think it’s a satellite.

  Are you bonkers? Satellites aren’t that big. Try again.

  A plane?

  No, no, no. It’s Jupiter. It’s the biggest planet in our solar system. What d’you think of that, then? Isn’t it fantastic how clearly you can see it?

  Is it Jupiter? she asked. Are you sure it isn’t a plane?

  It’s definitely Jupiter, he assured her. Jupiter was so big you could fit all the other planets in the solar system inside it, he said, and he explained the difference between gas planets and terrestrial planets. He explained how time worked up there, and how long it took Jupiter to turn on its axis. Everything weighed two and a half times as much, and a single day on Jupiter was only nine point eight hours long.

  If you lived on Jupiter, he said, it would take eight hundred ninety-four days for you to get a year older. Isn’t that funny?

  Ana nodded, trying to keep up.

  Yes, it might sound strange, he continued, but it’s true. Time is a relative concept, love. You can’t take it for granted. And I don’t want you thinking it’s just about rotation periods, because it isn’t. It’s also about mass—and I haven’t even mentioned what happens when we get to huge extremes, I mean, Jupiter’s nothing. Time passes at a different speed on a very large star than here on Earth, which is small. You’ve got to understand, time is determined by the objects around it. So if there were no mass, there would be no time or space either. See? Picture it like a stage at the theater. The props we put on stage define time and space. Before that, the stage didn’t even exist. If there are no props, there’s no stage either. Isn’t that utterly insane, and wonderful?

  But Ana didn’t understand a word. It was confusing, all that stuff about time, and difficult to concentrate while the lights of the city were glinting on and off beneath her as if signaling in Morse code, as if the whole city were trying to send her a message; it wasn’t, but that was how it looked. A twinkling, signaling city, and above it: a gas planet.

  Don’t you believe me? he continued. I’m not making this stuff up, you know. It’s not a joke, it’s not science fiction. It happens in laboratories.

  He chattered on and on while the remaining lights were put out. The bulbs flashed their last for that night, and around them it grew dark. Jupiter and the stars brightened, and it was like the night sky tucked itself around them, the dusk lying heavily over them like a snowdrift after a storm, so dark it nearly made her shiver, and oh, how nice it felt to stand there in the dark with her father’s stubble scratching at her cheek, so sweet it almost made her cry, yes, soundlessly at first, but suddenly it was impossible to curb, it rolled out and through her, made her whole body quiver.

  Hey, my little sweetheart, he said. What’s wrong?

  But Ana couldn’t answer that question. She couldn’t do anything but cry and feel her arms and legs and the world around her, so big and beautiful and full of love it was unbearable.

  Oh, sweetheart, he said, putting his arms around her. I
shouldn’t be asking so many stupid questions, I’m sorry. No more of that nonsense now.

  It’s okay, she sniffled between gasps.

  No, it’s too much to ask, he said, kissing her. There now, sweetheart, it’s true. I just forget sometimes. It’s not easy being the daughter of a father.

  I don’t think Ana told me all that, not with all those details. Still, that’s how I remember it, and I can’t tell how many gaps I’ve filled or how much of it’s in Ana’s own words. I’ve got the broad strokes, though; this was the story she told me at the diner, and when I got back to Greenpoint late that night, to the studio apartment nestled above the screeching door of an industrial garage, I jotted it down in a notebook. I brushed my teeth and drew the curtains, sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the phone charger, its cord sticking out from under the mattress, but I didn’t feel tired enough to sleep. A kind of tension was vibrating inside me, the evening’s chatter had evaporated and left an urge to hear Lærke’s voice. It had already been a day or two since we’d last spoken, and I pictured Lærke in the Copenhagen dawn, Lærke’s unconscious face resting against the pillow after a late night at the restaurant, her mouth slightly open and her fingers quivering through a dream about elderflower preserves or hares or Mexican poets. I envisioned sitting on the edge of the bed, waking her with a cup of coffee while I told her about my night, and how she’d laugh at my stories from Romania and I’d feel my nerves dispel with her laughter. When I couldn’t bear imagining any longer I got up and opened my computer, clicked on her name and stared at the picture that emerged. It was morning in Copenhagen. Lærke was bathed in white light on her green sofa, her hair wasn’t tangled at all, her eyes not the least foggy with sleep. The downstairs neighbor had woken her up early, she said, and when I asked which downstairs neighbor she told me about a man who’d just moved in, a new divorcee with a stereo system. The evening of the move he’d thrown a housewarming party with a disco theme, or what Lærke thought was a housewarming party, but the following night the lush strains of a violin had once again whined up from his apartment, and an organ bleated through the papier-mâché floors. She knew she could kiss sleep goodbye, so she’d put on her dressing gown and gone down to knock, but before she got that far the neighbor opened the door and invited her inside, like he’d been waiting for her all evening. Over his shoulder, Lærke could see the apartment, deserted apart from a table covered with empty cans, and the sound system, of course, its speakers blaring flügelhorns and keyboards and rhythm guitar, and Lærke asked if he could turn the music down, but he didn’t understand her, or maybe he couldn’t hear her over the synthesizer and the syncopated bass, because he offered her a beer, and Lærke said, No thanks, but could you keep it down a little, and then he offered a cup of coffee or maybe tea—Lærke couldn’t hear over the high-hat and layered vocals—and she felt sorry for him, unearthing his fossilized youth all alone like that, so she went inside and drank the beer while she tried to piece together his sentences, his sentences cleaved by the beat of Chic and The Supremes and Sylvester James’s soaring vocals, and it was only during a lengthy outro that Lærke managed to explain that her visit was about the noise level, about the disco he’d forgotten or hadn’t noticed, and which he’d gladly switch off, no problem.

  I laughed and said it was good she was nearly done with that apartment, and then I told her about my evening with Ana, about the nighttime breakfast and the tale of the appendix. Lærke wanted to know more. Why was Ana at the office so late, why did she go shopping in the middle of the night? Her I’ve got to meet, said Lærke, springing up from the sofa. She’d just gotten her passport back from the American embassy—she wanted to show me her visa with the photo where she looked like her mom—and she flicked through the pages of red and blue stamps while she told me about a border crossing in the Balkans and a transnational bridge in Central America, and about the time she’d fallen asleep on a tropical beach, from which you could see or imagine the stippled line of a border stretching out across an azure sea, a hypnotically blue sea with waves that sloshed so lazily against the coast that soon she’d fallen asleep. She’d only been wearing SPF fifteen, so it could have been disastrous, she said, but luckily she was woken by a hungry coati, a curious coati rummaging through her bag and saving her from burning and sunstroke and malignant melanoma, a heroic coati she fed out of her hand and followed deep into the jungle, the jungle that sat astride the border, which the cosmopolitan coati probably crossed each day, and I laughed and promised to take Lærke to the zoo as soon as she came over, so she could show me the animal herself.

  Lærke nodded enthusiastically and asked how my job at the festival was going, and I told her about Ana’s work, about the coin she wore in her shoe and how she was trying to shape her dreams, and about the task she’d set me.

  Why do you think she asked me to write that story?

  No idea, said Lærke. Does there have to be a reason?

  Maybe she’s just lonely.

  Yeah, maybe.

  She probably wants attention, somebody to talk to.

  Sure, we all want that.

  Or maybe it’s part of some kind of art project, some sort of performance.

  Yeah, maybe. But honestly, that coin thing is moronic.

  I agreed it was a silly thing to do, but it was precisely its moronic-ness that made it so fantastic. In any case, it was no mean feat, invading your dreams with a coin like that, transferring the real and the concrete into the virtual and the imagined. Ana had to keep a logbook, Ana had to be methodical about writing down her dreams. There was something almost scientific about her practice that was impossible to ignore.

  I can ignore it just fine, said Lærke, cupping her hands over her ears, and she began to sing Hear the Little Starling. It sounded lovely, and I told her to keep going, so she sang I Know Where Lies a Lovely Garden, and she sang, How Fair Smiles the Danish Coast, and then she took her dress off, and I took my pants off, and we lay naked, masturbating in sync, swathed in electromagnetic waves or whatever it was that transmitted our pixelated bodies across Zealand’s grace and Jutland’s might, through rain and wind and the foaming swells of the Atlantic Ocean, and above the columns of vehicles shuffling inchmeal into Copenhagen and New York.

  At some point we must have fallen asleep. I forgot to set my alarm clock and when I finally woke I was already forty-five minutes late to work. I had to rush out the door without breakfast or a shower, but when I stood in DUMBO on the block of former factories and gazed drowsily at the island, wondering how Manhattan held the weight of all those towers without sinking into the harbor, I was pleasantly confused about everything that had happened over the last few days. I was glad Ana had taken me to the diner, flattered she’d asked me to write a short story, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. I’d just arrived from Denmark, I’d never met anyone like Ana, and as time went by our evening reminded me increasingly of a scene in a book or a movie, some story I’d once heard that lived on in my mind. The whole setup seemed implausible; how often, after all, do you meet a random woman and end up being asked to write her life story? No, surely Ana must have meant it ironically, the atmosphere must have run away with her, and I convinced myself she’d forgotten all about it.

  But then again. It was possible she’d been serious, so why not give it a chance? It’s not like I had anything better to write about. Certainly my own experiences weren’t short-story worthy. I was just an intern—white and male and middle class to boot—so when Ana served up a curious anecdote about her appendix, it seemed the obvious thing to give it a try.

  That evening I got down to work. Around midnight, as the one remaining light in the building opposite mine was switched off, I stayed up, because the story wasn’t half bad. In fact, the tale of the appendix was clever and bristling with conflict, just as I’d read good stories should be. There was something at stake between Ana and her father, something tender I didn’t understand, and the next few evenings I wrote late into the night, sitting at m
y computer or standing by the kettle in the kitchen, watching myself from the outside: A young man bent over his desk in the dusty glow of a lamp, poor and sleepless, as though living only for the text. A stereotypical image, of course, but one that made me dash back and write another page, filled with a shining or youthful or idiotic light that burned in the middle of my chest.

  It lasted four or five days. For a little under a week I tried to imagine Ana’s childhood voice. I envisioned her dead body on the operating table; pictured the parade of children marching through the frozen stadium while I stood eating pierogis in McGolrick or Transmitter Park, staring at the lewd monument to the beefcake seamen of the Civil War as the Brooklyn dusk pressed up against the river like it was jealous of the ever-glowing skyline of Manhattan. That week I wrote as if possessed, but when I biked home from the exhibition space the following Saturday, all the shine was gone. I’d just printed out the story to read it through, and I was biking up Vinegar Hill in the late afternoon, weighed down by the rough draft in my bag, clumsy and heavy and dull, without so much as a hint of Ana’s strange voice. This isn’t going anywhere, I thought. I’ve heard nothing from Ana for a week, she’s probably forgotten all about her suggestion. As I passed the Brooklyn Navy Yard and turned in along the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, my phone rang. I expected to see Lærke’s name on the screen, but when I fumbled it out of my pocket I found Ana’s three letters shining in my hand.

  Ana, I said, surprised. What’s up?

  Good morning, she said. Am I disturbing you?

  No, not at all. I’m just on my way home.

  So, yeah. Are you busy?

  No, not really.

  Good. Want to come time-traveling with me?

  Sure, sounds fun.

  Maybe, although it’s not as much fun as it sounds. But if you don’t have anything better to do, meet me at the gallery in an hour. Then you can come travel back in time.