Ignoring her, the regal woman turned to Hel. “Hi. I’m Ayanna Donaldson.” Her hair, elaborately coiffed, rose in a crest up the center of her head. The fabric of her sheath glittered in the light.
Hel felt unbearably frumpy in her death dress. “I know you by reputation. I’m very pleased to meet you.”
Donaldson shook her hand. “How are you enjoying the party?” she asked. “Have you checked out our silent auction, by the coat check?”
“Yes, the items are… yeah, great. I’m sorry—I’m Helen Nash.” She should have said that during the handshake. “Dr. Oliveira put me down as his plus-one.”
“Right, Carlos. He collects nonrepresentational line etchings, doesn’t he?” Donaldson sipped at a clear, still liquid in her narrow champagne flute. “Are you interested in contemporary Asian, too?”
At a party like this at home, with nothing to prove, Hel would have just said no and moved away. Here, she was conscious of the strap of her bag on her shoulder and the weight of the book inside, and she thought of all the other books, big volumes on the coffee tables of her vanished friends, books left behind on bookshelves and on library shelves and in extinct bookstores. Thick volumes with their pages of photographs. Photographs of canvases, sculptures, and assemblages that no longer existed in physical reality, which had no home anywhere outside the memories of her people.
The picture books she’d read to her son.
“I’m not a collector. I’m a doctor, a medical doctor—by training, anyway—and I don’t know much about… I’m not really… It’s sort of hard to explain. I was hoping Dr. Oliveira would be here. He said he’d introduce me to you. I’m like him—one of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand.” Behind her, Hel heard Angelene release an appreciative gasp. The others in the group quieted. Even the laughing man, caught in the middle of a story, finally shut up.
“That must be very difficult,” Donaldson said after a minute. “To be so far from home.”
“Yes. It is.”
Donaldson put down her drink on one of the small tables scattered around the room. Hel felt the weight of the woman’s full attention on her, all at once, as if Donaldson were a sleepy cat and she a squirrel who’d just been noticed in a nearby tree.
“Usually, people expect me to be grateful,” Hel said. “And I am. I’m grateful for my life. But everything is different here. People ask me what I think. I want to be able to tell them, but there’s so much, and I’m only one person.” Donaldson was nodding along; this was Hel’s chance. “I want to teach them. I want to be able to show them. I know you’re the director of the Museum of Modern Thought. A lot of us, we have things. Things we brought through the gap. Things like this.”
She opened her bag. Thankfully, the leather flap had protected the volume inside from the spilled drink. She hadn’t really intended to show The Pyronauts, but here she was lifting it into the light with careful hands. Around her in the room, the party seemed to have gotten even louder than before.
She flipped to the title page, then turned the book so that Donaldson could see it. Angelene and Leslie and the man who’d laughed moved nearer so that they could see too. “I’m not a literature person, but where I’m from, Sleight is canonical, like Poe. Like your Lovecraft. He wrote five novels, all of them gone now except for this. This is the only copy of any of his work that anyone has, as far as we know.”
She and Vikram, disalike in every way. When he was going through his hardest times, she would come to his apartment, where they’d lay themselves out on his duvet together like corpses, holding hands, the cold wind blowing in through the open window. She was just a visitor, she told herself—a visitor to this grief, this building, this street, this world. The two of them would share a benzodiazepine, bought from a kid down the hall and cut in half, and once the anti-panic drug took effect, he would relate to her, in detail, the plots of the four missing novels of Ezra Sleight. Chinese Whispers. The Pain Ray. What to Do with the Night. The Poorhouse.
He did them all, in order. He did them each more than once, over the course of months. This was their ritual. They were strange to her, these novels she could only ever know through Vikram’s words. In his former life, he’d been an adjunct, assigned every semester to teach introductory survey courses on American literature in general. Only once had the department head deigned to allow him to lead a final-year seminar on Sleight.
Here, Vikram was the world’s de facto expert.
“Look at the publisher,” she said now, pointing to the title page. “That imprint doesn’t exist here. This isn’t a hoax.”
Was she boring her audience? Maybe Donaldson didn’t like books. Hel herself never had. “I mean, there’s other stuff, too.” She shut The Pyronauts. “This is the tip of the iceberg. People saved all kinds of things, carried them through. Thousands of people and their keepsakes. Statistically, some of it must be art.”
“You have access to these things,” Donaldson said. “To people’s treasures. And you want to put together an exhibit.”
“I want to make a museum. Not just for the stuff itself. The stories. There are so many memories behind each physical object. A museum of vanished culture.”
“A museum,” Donaldson repeated. “Do you know very much about what that would entail?”
“No, I don’t. But this is the hook, I think,” Hel said. “Sleight. I think he is the perfect focus for all of this.”
“Why?”
Hel reached out and took a drink from the tray of a passing waiter, buying herself a minute to think. The drink tasted not unfamiliar. Champagne and peach. Maybe something harder underneath. She wasn’t going to say anything about 1909 this time. Every time she did, people said she was crazy. She had to win Donaldson over more cleverly than that.
She could tell it like a story. If she had a son still—if Jonas were here, if he’d somehow magically remained that tale-craving age he’d been when she last saw him—she might have told it to him as a ghost story.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy whose mother died. His father, a busy and important man, loved him very much, but did not know how to raise a child on his own. He arranged to send the boy to a large estate in the country. Years before, it had been a rich man’s house, but now it was a school. There, the boy would learn to become old enough not to frighten adults.
In the grand entranceway of the school hung a painting in a heavy gilt frame, the centerpiece of the dead rich man’s collection. Actually, there were half a dozen paintings displayed there, but the boy only ever looked at this one, the biggest.
The sky took up the top two-thirds of the canvas, a morning rendered in transparent layers of blue and gold and white and pink. Sun shone behind pillars of dramatic cloud, the brushstrokes of the master hard to see. The boy might have been immersed by that sky, if that were all there was to it, but his eyes were always dragged lower, where two icebergs sat at the horizon, much smaller than the cloud towers. Even smaller, at eye level, a ship floundered, broken in an Arctic sea, its masts tilted at a horrible angle. Men in sailors’ clothing crowded the deck of the sinking vessel.
When the boy looked at the painting, he imagined what these men were doing, imagined their hurry as they ran from stern to bow. He imagined how they must be trying to remain calm. But that wasn’t what scared him. In the water in the foreground, in front of the ship, a hand extended out of the water. It was tiny, in relative scale, but it was the most important thing in the painting, the most important thing in the whole big sea. The skin was very white against the dark water. That pale hand and part of the forearm were all that showed, the rest of the man invisible beneath, groping blindly for a rope the others had tossed futilely in his direction.