The bus rolls to a stop, and Beth darts from the enclosure to the top of the boarding stairs. Even the short climb leaves her winded. As usual now, the bus is almost empty, and she has no trouble taking a window seat. Not that it’s worth looking out. It’s a night in late June but it doesn’t feel like summer, not with the air so close. The anxiety is gone, Beth thinks, the clear gold glimmer that used to come with summer twilight, when everything is so fresh and open that it takes your breath away, when the sounds of traffic and sirens and thunderstorms made your stomach flutter with excitement.
It doesn’t feel like June without a sudden burst of agoraphobia.
The Third Match
She gets back to the apartment, finds Farah curled on the short couch in the corner of the front room, seemingly asleep. The sight makes her chew her lip, and she’s not sure why. Farah looks sickly, almost transparent these days, her thick hair pulled back with a bit of elastic, no make-up on her round, dark face. When she took the second bedroom three months ago, Farah warned Beth that she never eats when she’s working on a project, just sticks to liquids, and it’s starting to drive Beth mad. There’s a gallon of milk uncapped, souring on the kitchen counter, half a pot of coffee grounds clogging the old sink.
The door at the back of the narrow kitchen has been left ajar, and the back room is a complete disaster. Farah’s crutches lean against the asthmatic air conditioner, which has been hastily patched with blue electric tape to stay as airtight as possible. A stack of books has been accumulating around the ironing board for weeks, staggered and tilting like a bizarre art piece. Architecture books, landscape, interior design. Neuroscience textbooks and monographs on alternate reality.
What do you work on? they’d asked each other during that first phone call. Computer games, Beth had said. Memorials, said Farah Karimi.
All of Beth’s cookie sheets, plus all of her muffin tins and a loaf pan, cover every available surface. Each holds a tiny sugar landscape, dunes and valleys, a few toothpicks rooted in clay. Trees? Supports for something larger?
I need to work with my hands, Farah said. To touch things, mold them. I can’t start on a sheet of paper.
Beth takes a deep breath, goes back into the front room.
“What is all that about?”
“That is an entire afternoon’s work. Don’t touch.” Farah’s voice sounds distant, sleepy. Her hands are steepled and pressed against her lips. She doesn’t open her eyes. “You had extra sugar in the back of the pantry. I still need the aquariums, though. And matches.”
“I’m not sure you should have anything with sharp edges or anything that catches on fire until you explain what’s going on with my cookie trays.”
“Here.” Without lifting her head, Farah fumbles amidst the mess of legal pads, printouts, magazine pages and napkins on the coffee table, grabbing something that has drifted to the edge. She holds out a sheet of what looks like paper towel. Blue ink has bled through from the page behind, and Beth can’t read any of the labels on the diagram, but it’s clear enough what she’s looking at. Seven miniature landscapes, like elementary school terraria, set in glass boxes.
Beth studies the page without taking it from Farah’s hand. “Does something live inside these?”
“Of course not. It’s just a model. No animals were harmed, et cetera.” Farah rolls her eyes. “Moving on. I can get most of that from the florist: sand, gravel, clay, distilled water, lots of plants. I’ll find the miniatures online. I’ll need your help setting it up, though.”
“Back up,” Beth says. “What is this? Setting it up where?”
Farah makes a low, irritated noise in the back of her throat. With a sudden burst of energy, she tosses her sketch on the pile, raises herself up on the couch, hooks her hands under her knees and swings her legs over the side of the couch. Beth has missed something important, but she has no idea what.
“Look,” Farah says. “It isn’t commissioned or anything. Who would commission a memorial for the end of the world? But I want to do this, and I want to do it here. So it has to be small-scale.”
“Okay.” Beth is mentally calculating the odds of being stopped by security if they attempt to assemble Farah’s memorial on the National Mall. Another part of her is thinking that this must be the reason Farah came to D.C. in the first place. “That explains the aquariums.”
A very faint smile twitches at the corner of Farah’s mouth. She can smile prettily when she wants too—full lips, teeth hidden. “I’m calling it Houses Without Air.”
“And that explains the matches.” Beth chews her lip. She isn’t sure what else to say. “Well, at least it isn’t a Hans Christian Andersen reference,” she says finally. “I hate that story.”
“Pardon?”
“‘The Little Matchgirl.’ This girl’s selling matches on New Year’s Eve, and she’s freezing, so she tries to warm herself. She lights each match and imagines these little scenes while it burns. Christmas trees and family dinners, all that. But the visions only last as long as the matches do. And when she runs out of matches, she freezes to death.”
Farah responds with the world’s most dignified snort. “If she froze to death, how can we know what she was imagining?”
“Because it’s a story,” Beth snaps, exasperated. “The people who come after have to figure it out somehow.”
“Want to know a secret?” Farah leans back against the pillows, but she’s smiling fully now—almost mischievously. And this, Beth thinks, is the problem with Farah. She’s reckless, selfish, destructive of property, critical and dismissive of others. And she knows exactly what to say to make Beth forget all of it.
“Of course.”
“I never worry about the people who come after. If they can make sense of the memorial or not. It’s enough for them to know that something happened here, something important, that it mattered. Give them something they can feel. But telling the story? One story, with all its specifics? I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“I don’t know if I’d want to,” Beth says.
Farah nods, closing her eyes. “Exactly.”
The Fourth Match
Farah Karimi has lived in dozens of houses over the years: an apartment in an old palazzo in Venice where the stucco flaked from the moisture and where the elevator walls were black with mold; a cottage on the coast of the North sea where her chair’s wheels used to stick in the damp sand if she rolled too close to the water. She feels called to places on the edge of disaster.
She won’t build memorials for soldiers, battles, anything of that sort—not that she’d be invited to. She has a reputation for keeping things private. Nothing too obviously patriotic, although she’s made exceptions, as everyone has; she lets the land influence the design, and there are still places in the world where love for the land remains the highest expression of patriotism.
She has built memorials after terrorist attacks. Many refugee camps. Hurricanes and earthquakes are something of a specialty; she loves wind and fault lines, in glass and concrete, though she hates dealing with the rubble. She’s built memorials after Ebola outbreaks, and smallpox when it came back, although she was advised not to enter the areas both times.
The Venice Harbor Arch is Farah Karimi’s most famous work. The glass pillars catch the light of the rising and setting sun, spreading it in rainbows over the shallow water, still broken here and there by rooftops and church steeples. She’s never been fond of it; it’s too huge, too obvious.