Ben Lerner - 10:04 - A Novel

Was I drinking quickly in part because I felt a little awkward about staying the night at Alex’s, something I’d done countless times before? I was just uneasy about the storm, I said to myself, as I cleared the table and did the few dishes. As was our habit, we decided to project a movie on the bedroom wall; a former employer had given her an LCD projector into which she plugged her computer. Because the Internet could go out at any minute, we selected from the few disks she owned. The Third Man looked best to me, maybe because it’s set in a ruined city, and I put it on while Alex changed into pajamas, then we got into bed together, although I remained in street clothes, storm radio and flashlight near me on the bedside table for whenever the power failed.

The shadows of the trees bending in the increasing wind outside her window moved over the projected image on the white wall, became part of the movie, as if keeping time to the zither music; how easily worlds are crossed, I said to myself, and then to Alex, who hushed me — I had a bad habit of talking over what we watched. We watched until Alex was asleep and Orson Welles was dead by a friend’s hand in Vienna and I could hear rain intensifying on the little skylight I was worried might soon be shattered by flying debris. When the movie was finished I looked through the other discs and put on Back to the Future , which I’d found at some point on Fourth Avenue in a box of discarded DVDs, but I played it without sound, so as not to wake her. I plugged earbuds into the storm radio and put one in my left ear and listened to the weather reports while Marty traveled back to 1955—the year, incidentally, nuclear power first lit up a town: Arco, Idaho, also home to the first meltdown in 1961—and then worked his way back to 1985, when I was six and the Kansas City Royals won the series, in part because a ridiculous call forced game seven, Orta clearly out at first in replays. In the movie they lack plutonium to power the time-traveling car, whereas in real life it’s seeped into the Fukushima soil; Back to the Future was ahead of its time. As I watched the silent film I began to worry about the Indian Point reactors just upriver.

Suddenly I became aware of a strange sensation: a faint echo of the radio in the unplugged ear. It took me a while to realize the downstairs neighbors were tuned to the same station. I turned to Alex and watched the colors from the movie flicker on her sleeping body, noted the gold necklace she always wore against her collarbone. I tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then let my hand trail down her face and neck and brush across her breast and stomach in one slow motion I halfheartedly attempted to convince myself was incidental. I was returning my hand to her hair when I saw her eyes were open. It took all my will to hold her gaze as opposed to looking away and thereby conceding a transgression; there was only, it seemed, curiosity in her look, no alarm. After a few moments I reached for my jar of wine as if to suggest that, if anything unusual had happened, it was the result of intoxication; by the time I looked back at her face her eyes were closed. I put the jar back without drinking and lay beside her and stared at her for a long while and then smoothed her hair back with my palm. She reached up and took my hand, maybe in her sleep, and pressed it to her chest and held it there, whether to stop or encourage me or neither, I couldn’t tell. In that position we lay and waited for the hurricane.

At some point I drifted off into strange dreams the radio penetrated and I woke with a start, convinced I’d heard shattering glass. It was 4:43 a.m. according to my phone, the menu screen of the DVD still on the wall, so we hadn’t lost power. I focused on what the voice in my ear was saying: Irene had been downgraded before it reached landfall, moderate flooding in the Rockaways and Red Hook, the phrase “dodged a bullet” was repeated, as was “better safe than sorry.” I got up and walked to the window; it wasn’t even raining hard. The yellow of the streetlamps revealed a familiar scene; a few branches had fallen, but no trees. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water and glanced at the instant coffee on the counter and it was no longer a little different from itself, no longer an emissary from a world to come; there was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm.

I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, “Everything is fine, I’m going home now,” said it just so I could say I’d said it in case she was upset later that I’d left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.

* * *

When we uncoupled I thought I saw Alena’s condensed breath slowing in the air, but the apartment was too warm for that; regardless, her body returned to homeostasis, it seemed, much more rapidly than mine. She rose from the mattress and smoothed the dress she’d never taken off and I gathered myself and followed her onto the fire escape and took in the lights of the taller buildings that loomed around us, all of which were haloed now. She removed a cigarette from a pack that must have already been atop a sand-filled paint can and lit it by drawing a strike-anywhere match — whose provenance was obscure to me — across the building’s brick exterior. “Oh come on,” I said, referring to her cumulative, impossible cool, and she snorted a little when she laughed, then coughed smoke, becoming real.

“The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.” —Walter Benjamin

We chatted for the length of her cigarette about the show — the opening started in an hour or two — most of my consciousness still overwhelmed by her physical proximity, every atom belonging to her as well belonged to me, all senses fused into a general supersensitivity, crushed glass sparkling in the asphalt below. After she stubbed the cigarette out against the brick, a little shower of embers, I followed her back into the apartment, which was the gallery owner’s pied-à-terre. Alena went to a bathroom without turning on a light and I listened as she pissed; she didn’t flush, wash her hands, or, in that dark, consult the mirror.

We left the apartment together, but, by the time we reached the street, Alena had explained that she’d prefer to arrive at the opening separately, as a jealous ex would be there, and she didn’t want to deal with the interrogation. I was a little stung, but, trying to mimic her nonchalance, said sure, that I’d planned to meet Sharon first at a café not far from the gallery anyway, then head over to the opening with her; we kissed goodbye.

Alena worked alongside Sharon and her husband Jon, two of my oldest New York friends, at a small production company that specialized in editing documentary film. It was a job Alena held part-time in order to support what she called her “artistic practice,” a practice Sharon had had trouble describing and about which, because of the phrase “artistic practice,” I’d had grave doubts. But it turned out Alena was serious, in spite of being hailed as a rising star by a postmedia art world that so often valorizes stupidity. Her current show, which, unable to do any of the heavy lifting, I’d watched her hang, consisted of images and a few objects she had deftly aged: she’d painted a portrait from a contemporary photograph and then somehow distressed it— I couldn’t understand her reluctant explanations of her process — so that it was networked with fine cracks, making it appear like a painting from the past. There was a painting based on an image downloaded from the Internet and then enlarged of a young woman whose eyes are lined with running shadow and upon whose face a man beyond the frame has ejaculated; she stares at the viewer as if from another century, the craquelure confusing genres and lending the image tremendous gravity; the title read: The Picture of Sasha Grey . Alena had painted several magnificent Abstract Expressionist imitations and then subjected them to her method; the Pollocks appeared compellingly unchanged, others seemed as if they’d been recovered from the rubble of MoMA after an attack or had been defrosted from a future ice age. There was a small self-portrait, also painted from a photograph, that had not been altered, had suffered no crazing, and the immediacy of its address in the context of the other work, I mean the directness of the sitter’s gaze, was so powerfully located in the present tense that it was difficult to face.