Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

But she refuses to turn back, as she still has one last school assignment to complete.

Thus far, art class has inspired in Anju a vague but light distress, the kind of disaster that remains distant enough for time to resolve all things. On her second day of school, she found the class listed on her schedule, and when she tried to remove it, Miss Schimpf objected.

“My father would like for me to focus on studies,” Anju told her.

“Art is a kind of study,” Miss Schimpf said, looking hurt. “Besides, it’s an elective. You need an elective.”

Poor Miss Schimpf. Here among the smog-spewing cars, her skin has lost its tan translucence, her knuckles gone chalky and dry. Her lofty position as “visiting artist” has deflated to her previous title, that of “art teacher.” In Kerala, she cut through crowds like a celebrity, salwar-clad and fairy-tale blond, but here, walking the halls, she has returned to her usual state of anonymity. Sometimes she offsets her cardigans and khakis with wild rhinestoned bangles or a belled choker of black metal, the proud, noisy spoils of her travels. And yet Miss Schimpf is to Anju the same saint she always was, one who performed a miracle and exacted no debt in return.

“At least take your sketchbook around with you this weekend,” Miss Schimpf urged. “Draw anything that strikes you. I’m sure you can find something.” Anju agreed, not wanting to disappoint her.

Though Anju has never tried to draw before, she has considered using notebook paper to trace a picture of a tree, which she might then be able to transfer to the sketchbook. Or there must be how-to books that show how a circle becomes a nose becomes a lion in a jungle. Wasn’t Rousseau, untrained and self-taught, accused of a certain childishness of style? According to the school’s art history textbook: yes. In fact, she might try to assume his style as her own. To be brilliant, one must explode into the world with an unparalleled vision. To be gifted, one must simply borrow from someone else who is more gifted.

She continues on her journey down the island, such a tiny thing, changing its colors and contours from one mile to the next. Farther south, the buildings stand closely together, giant hives of industry. Outside the revolving doors, besuited men and women smoke and speak on cell phones, some of them Indian or maybe Pakistani. She is compelled to look at them as if they might recognize her, though it seems that they make a conscious effort to do the opposite.

When Anju can put off her task no longer, she sits on a bench and opens to a blank page in the sketchbook. The white of the pages nearly blinds her. Pressing her hand to the paper, she takes in the rough weave where Linno’s hand might have rested before she inked a dark dot — iris, eyelid, lashes, eye.

She remembers when the book, wrapped in brown parcel paper, passed across her lap from her father’s hand to Linno’s. She remembers the soft tear of paper, the strip of red that appeared, the twine knotted along the spine with what could only be love. When Anju saw the book, her own envy startled her, how it flamed up from a place she never knew existed. A feeling that tugs at her still, makes her doubt the very steps that brought her to this place, alone. Were her intentions ever clean? Her eyes grow full, reminded that there are untapped doors of the mind through which a person can fall and fall.

She shuts the book.

No one seems to notice her, engrossed as they are in the changing of traffic lights. Maybe each of them stepped on someone else to reach their cubicle of success, and maybe each is carrying his guilt, like a leaky pen, in a pocket of his heart. She watches the men with their ties like tongues over their shoulders, the women with their swollen handbags, their serious, sexy shoes. Anju could watch them for hours, imagining herself in similar footwear, expertly avoiding the treacherous grates through which a heel could fall. These are people who do not open doors; the doors automatically part for them. And if the doors do not part, these people fling them wide.

IRD PREFERS NOT TO think of herself as a stalker, not with all these policemen prowling the subways. Two of them, a male and female, stand behind a card table next to a sign that declares their right to search any bag at will. The male fixes his gaze on Bird, and she can picture the abacus of his brain behind the broad forehead, making its weary calculations. Perhaps it is the size of her bag that attracts his attention or the black kerchief tied over her hair. Men used to eye her for different reasons. She wears the kerchief because it is windy, and she has recently come to notice a thinning of hair at her crown, like ice melting away from a thawing plain. Were she a Muslim, she would be no more committed to keeping her crown covered in public, a devotion born of being beautiful in her youth. A cursed gift, that kind of beauty, which takes itself back over time.

The policemen do not make Bird nervous, so much as the duty at hand. To calm herself, she buys a bag of Raisinets from a nearby magazine vendor, a pasty, sullen man with covers of naked ladies lining the top of his booth like prayer flags. In each, the girl looks somehow both chesty and emaciated, in contrast to the row catering to black clientele, in which the rear plays a more prominent role. Bird lingers before the women, snacking, and the policeman looks away.

If he were to ask, Bird would unload the contents of her bag without complaint: a wallet, keys, an envelope. At home, in her bedroom, she stood for a full minute looking at the envelope, a pen in her right hand, wondering what to title its contents. One word gave way to another: A letter from your mother. To me. About you .

She left it blank.

A STALKER DOES NOT climb the subway stairs wincing, with one hand on her troublesome knee. A stalker moves along the current of people, does not slog through the masses like an oxcart taking up so much space. But on the prettied streets of the Upper West Side, Bird is fit to stalk, as she is at an age where trees win more attention. Some women, from a distance, seem to know how to live beyond the reach of age, an effect that is sometimes haunting. There are those with long, fawn brown hair or pert ponytails, who turn their withered faces and smile with shiny, graying teeth, ghosts of the girls they were.

Consulting her map, Bird finds her way to the Sitwell School and enters a shop across the street, whose storefront window will give her a clear view of Anju exiting her school. So intent is Bird on her object of focus that she hardly notices the interior of the store itself, until she is confronted with a lacy yellow bra draped on a hanger, each cup the size and depth of a salad bowl. Headless plaster torsos of the chesty/bony build are positioned throughout the boutique, each wearing a complicated lingerie set, one of which looks vaguely like a torture device with all its straps and buckles. Nearby, a young woman in a lab coat is showing a customer a brassiere, using words like “state of the art” and “invention” to explain its functions.

It seems that Bird has picked the wrong store in which to disappear. She explores a rack of white bras embroidered with cherries and squints at the tiny satin labels that warn against machine washing. When the bra doctor approaches and asks for whom Bird is shopping, Bird blurts out: “Myself.”

Dr. Bra seems warmed by the thought that a woman like Bird might be having sex. She offers to measure Bird’s bustline using the measuring tape around her neck. “You know, eight out of every ten women are wearing bras that don’t fit them properly.” Dr. Bra relays this statistic with dismay.