What do I remember? Who are those two figures in the photograph, lying on their sides, the dog Obus at their feet? Time is short. I must tell you.
—
“Do I look exactly like her?” Clementine asked when she was six or seven years old.
“No, darling, not exactly. Like me a little too.”
“Will I be bald like you?”
“Probably not, Clem, but you might be tall, taller than your mother.”
“She was as small as me?”
“She was a grown-up like me, but not very tall. French people are not very tall,” I said, and held my hand flat at the level of my collarbone to show her how tall Miriam had been. I remember how Miriam would tilt her head upward and lift her heels to kiss me, how when I clonked my head against one of the beams in her apartment, she gasped and then pressed her temples in reflexive sympathy. I remember her small hand resting on a page, index finger extended, as she followed a line we were reading together. I remember how, when she switched from French to English, her whole being changed, the suppleness of her mouth stiffened, as though checked with a bit.
How much also I must have forgotten. Would I recognize that world if I were to revisit it, her building, its front door? What was the street number, the street? Surely it has all changed, all except the smells, the linden trees flowering in the park below, the damp rising from the swept streets, combining with the odor of her bedding and the atticky exhalations of the beams, the worn parquet.
Her apartment: a wedge of steep space under the mansard roof. By her bed, Miriam had a compact disc player she used for her alarm clock. She never changed the CD, so that when the alarm went off, the song was always the same, like a Delta blues, but sung by an African voice, Malian, maybe, or Senegalese. Beneath that keening upper voice, someone tapped out an intricate beat, as though with a pencil on a gourd. But it is no use trying to describe it: the music seems now half-submerged in our dreams and like those dreams soluble in daylight, a part of the sweet, momentary confusion of not knowing where we were, or whose body we lay beside, her head hidden under the pillow against that daylight and that recurrent song.
How impossibly remote it all seems, but I think now that that distance is not one of time, though eighteen years have passed, or of the space between Paris and New York. It is instead an inner distance, as though those smells, those sounds, have retreated to the darkest interior of my body, distilled and condensed within a tiny ampoule of toxin. Though the capsule is small and impossible to detect, were it to crack open, releasing that tar-black suspension of memory, mere seconds (I am certain) would bring death.
But why lethal? you will ask, Father. For the love of God, Abend (you will ask), your story may be dark, may be bitter, but how does it outstrip the common lot of human misfortune? Your unremarkable share of fate was to fall for a girl in Paris, a girl more closely acquainted with despair than you knew. Sad, yes—but lethal? These elements are nothing but ordinary, the familiars of a thousand stories: the pregnancy, the desperation intolerable to her and paralyzing for you, your complicity, unwilled and unwitting, and yet participating in single-minded collusion in her self-annihilation. That she worked it out and accomplished it, drowning herself in the Loire, that she left a child behind, all this is sad, yes, tragic, yes, but surely the Loire (you will say) is used to this sort of thing.
How could I object, Father, were there not more to say?
What the ampoule holds is lethal because it contains a separate, distinct resin, darker and thicker, as pungent as tar. When I look at the most recent photograph, when I consider its overlapping shadows and compacted masses—alleviated only by the pale oblong that is Obus, asleep with his forepaws held straight out, like a superhero in flight—when I stare into that picture, I can taste it, that acridity in the back of my throat. The figures in the picture (you see now there are in fact figures in the picture) lie on a crude pallet on the floor, the recently paved floor of a half-built parking garage, to be exact. The air is heavy with an asphalt odor, and compounded with that odor the vinegarish reek of heroin, heroin cooked in a spoon before injection, or heroin torched from below on a sheet of foil, the smoke inhaled through a glass tube. And there is the odor of stale garments, hair, and bodies, and the inexpungible odor of blood.
This darkest smudge here is the hair of a girl. The paler patch is her face in profile, turned away. She too is lying down, the dog asleep at her feet, her knees pulled up and arms folded around a shadow in the hollow between her knees and chest. Who took this picture, its grain coarse, the camera’s perspective elevated, its shutter staring a long moment to draw in what little light it could? Who is the girl, hugging
