Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Alice raises her eyebrows, genuinely interested. “A painter?”

“For advertisements,” Linno says.

“You know the Princess Tailor Shoppe?” Melvin asks. “That painted window?”

“Hah yes! That? You did that?”

“Yes,” Linno says. Alice nods slowly, with new appreciation. Linno wishes that Alice would look away so that she could go back to her napkin, where she has been inking the fins of an ornate fish.

“These days you can quickly get a relative visa, once you have your own,” Kuku explains to no one in particular. He snaps his fingers to demonstrate the quickness of it all. For the first time, he turns his vague gaze on Linno. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

“For some people,” Linno says.

Doubt flickers over Kuku’s smile. “Which people? You wouldn’t want to go?”

Melvin looks at her with slight amusement and fear for what she might say. The clink of Linno’s cup against the saucer seems to echo.

“But why not?” Kuku asks, almost offended.

Linno hesitates. The only reason she ever really wanted to leave was so as not to be left alone. Instead of this, she says, “I heard that in the cities, you can no longer see the stars.”

With a short laugh, Kuku says he hasn’t seen the stars in years.

“Ha ha,” Melvin says, as if reading his laugh aloud from a cue card.

Beneath the table, Linno twirls and twirls her pen until it falls to the floor and rolls toward Alice’s chair. Alice retrieves the pen and hands it to Linno, but not without squinting at the scribbles on Linno’s napkin, which Linno quickly covers with her hand.

THE AUTO-RICKSHAW LURCHES over the rutted roads, with Melvin and Linno jostling in the backseat, not a word between them. Across the sky, a sifting of grayish purple begins to darken, and the auto-rickshaw’s single headlight gives the impression of tunneling through a black cave. It seems that Linno’s own life is equally murky. There is nothing she can promise herself, fifty years from now, the way other girls do— I want a house and two children, boy and girl . For herself, she cannot see the husband or feel the rapturous weight of a baby in her arms. What does she want, then? Smooth, weighted paper. A new set of soft pencils. A room in which to draw. A window of time. She is no genius, but sometimes she entertains the thought of someone finding her sketchbook, paging through it to learn that she is more than what the limited light has thus far revealed.

Linno searches the inside of her purse. Only a comb and a folded handkerchief. The napkin. She left behind the napkin.

Melvin asks what is the matter. “Nothing,” Linno says.

“Well, I am not going to force you into anything, if that is your worry.”

Linno imagines Alice finding the napkin, showing it to Kuku. We had her to our house, and this is how she thanked us? By doodling?

“But if I were a woman,” Melvin continues, “I would think he looks pretty good. Had a good head of hair on him, didn’t he?”

“I suppose so.”

“And he doesn’t seem that blind either. I kept watching to see if he would pick up someone else’s cup by accident, but he didn’t. Not once. He always knew his cup. Berchmans told me that blind people have a very advanced sense of smell. Did you know that?”

“I don’t think he could smell his own cup.”

Taking her curtness as the early percolations of love, Melvin pats her on the back. “Give him time, molay . Give him a chance.”

T SCHOOL, Anju imagines herself chugging along as if on a conveyor belt, from one destination to the next. In this way, time does not seem to pass. She forgets about Bird and the business card tucked into her assignment book, focused instead on making sense of the English class bulletin board, which displays a large cutout of a cannon on wheels, and in front of this, a dozen black cannonballs inscribed with names like MILTON and JOYCE and JAMES and CONRAD. Where homework is concerned, Anju attends to what must be done for the next day and the next, and much prefers vocab exercises to green card forms.

For some time now, her faith in the elliptical odyssey has been lessening. This country is a puzzle in which she will never quite fit, and if she stays here too long, her own country will become a puzzle as well. Yesterday, Ammachi informed her that St. John’s Bakery would be gutted by the time she returned, to be replaced by a shoe shop. And though Anju always hated that bakery — they undercooked the fruitcake and always ran out of payasam — she grew depressed at the idea of changes taking place without her there to witness them. Of course, she knows that such erasures take place in every growing town, and newcomers arrive and settle without knowledge of the city’s antique imperfections. But a town truly belongs to those who can see the stretch marks. A town belongs to those who are there to watch it change.

DURING THE NARROW POCKETS of time between classes, Fish leans against the locker adjacent to Anju’s and talks about his literary heroes, none of whose names have appeared on the cannonballs. They perform at Brooklyn bars and cafés, dark, classy dens to which Fish gains entry by way of a false ID and a twenty-dollar bill if the bouncer gives him a look. “You could come, too, you know.”

“I am not twenty-one,” she says.

He looks at her wrist. “Where’s your bandage?”

“My wrist is not paining me for now.” In truth, the skin of her wrist had been growing paler than her hand, and she hadn’t liked the contrast. Also, it was becoming increasingly annoying to have to borrow notes and balance her lunch tray on her left arm.

“Oh. Well anyway, about the ID, I’d get you a fake. I know tons of girls who could pass for you.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Not that there’s anyone like you exactly. Except you, of course. Obviously. Anyway.”

No itch needs to be scratched for this long. She turns back to her locker. Lately, whenever Fish has said anything to her, his sentences have begun to trickle into sheepish, monosyllabic utterances.

There is something unnerving about his invitation, the ease with which she could cross over into a world of smoke and illegality. She imagines a roomful of Fishes, young and quietly furious, so many eyes like slow-burning stars. She feels a thrill in her stomach, a tiny well of warmth.

ONCE A WEEK, the English instructor is replaced by the creative writing instructor, and the students release a collective sigh. They are not expected to know dates or write essays or suffer pop quizzes. No one is forced to speak, only encouraged.

Mrs. Loignon, the teacher, says that her name means “onion” in French. She is thin and onion-pale, with permanent crinkles around a mouth that is always working on a cough drop. She keeps an infinite supply in her purse, that fat, forlorn pouch of battered pleather, always spilling pens, empty Splenda packets, and once, in front of the whole class, a packet of Marlboro Reds. Swiftly, slightly shamed, Mrs. Loignon stuffed the Reds back inside, shocking proof of some cynicism beneath her perpetual cheer.

The class, as a whole, has an anesthetized quality. Using his thumbs, a boy meticulously flips his eyelid inside out. A girl paints her pinky nail with a black Sharpie. In the chair next to Anju’s, another boy is drawing a cartoon of himself, in the margin of his notebook, a cannon growing from his crotch.

Mrs. Loignon begins by reading aloud the first stanza of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” She performs with melodramatic gusto, the book held to her chest like a palette, her free hand wildly painting the air with her words. Her reading makes it impossible, and unappealing, to imagine any kind of carnal persuasion intended by the poet.