“On the seventh day, unbeknownst to Mikael, his father followed him down to the basement. He tried to take that beautiful baby girl. All that was left of Vera.
“On that day, the boy from nowhere had a choice to make.”
He looked at Lilly dead-on. “Didn’t he.”
—
Lilly was not sure she had taken a breath in more than an hour listening to Mikael narrate his story. Narrate a past that was forever gone to him. A self that simply slipped, like those of so many foster kids who go violent or dormant with trauma, or those who stray when it becomes clear that no one and no place will have them. An image of her own brother, lost to unimaginable violence — Was he alive? Dead? — crept up her throat and lodged in her temples. A sea of lost children surged in her psyche; most of the minors she worked with were lost to the system or worse.
“You see?” Mikael said, his voice now hard again, as his teen eyes sank back into the cinder-block room. “He was going to take her.” The fact of it seemed to punctuate his sentences. “When he bent over, I hit him. In the head. I had a bicycle-tire pump, so I used that. Did it hard, four times, so he couldn’t come back and attack me. I hit him harder than he’d ever hit me, I think. The second time, I heard a cracking sound. There was blood everywhere. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t alive.
“Then I went and got her box, her little box on rockers, and I put it over by the door where I knew I could grab her quickly. I had an old plastic lighter, and I started touching it to everything in the room that would burn. Then I grabbed the girl out of the box and I ran, with her tucked against my body. Up the stairs, out of the basement, out of the door, into the night. She did not cry. I ran and ran.
“I made it to the railyards, and I climbed onto a train before it left. We rode that way all night till we were in another city. Where they found me. After the building burned and all those people died.”
Now he looked at Lilly again, as if somehow what he knew, the story he told, had restored to him some temporary grasp on his life.
“I left her there, in the new city. And I want you to look for her.”
He reached up to pull back his collar, twisted his neck to show Lilly something that wasn’t there. “She has a little tattoo, right here on the back of her neck. I gave it to her with a needle and ink and fire. It says indigo. She cried when I did it, but only a little. Like she knew. I would never burn her in that basement — but I burned a word into her, so she’d have it and no one else could take it.”
Lilly knew something too. From the file. She couldn’t say it, but Mikael could tell.
“I know about the skull they found. I don’t know whose skull that was, what baby it was. But I heard about the police report. Maybe someone killed their baby there because they couldn’t feed it. I don’t know. People in the building were always doing things for money. One man sold his wife, his young wife, Albanian.
“They said someone saw me with a baby, but no one saw me. Except my father.
“I want you to find her. I left her on the doorstep of a blue-painted house in that city. The one where they found me. You must have it in the notes. I told them all, but no one here believes me. Go find her. He was going to take her. My father was an animal. But only to children. Do you understand? My father is not my father. He stole me. He took a baby. To sell for money. Only no one wanted me. He was a fucking thief.”
Mikael slammed his hands onto the table, loud enough for the guards to hear. He picked up the twisted gray rope of umbilical cord, nestled it under his shirt, and dared her with his eyes to tell.
She would not. But neither did she have any clue what to do with what he’d told her. Who would believe a story like that?
The air in the room disappeared, as if some vacuum had sucked it away.
Lilly felt marooned — in a time between her life and his, between foster fathers and war-criminal fathers, between lost sons and daughters untethered from families. Mothers emptied out of children and left for dead. Lost in a scatter that was both ancestral and geographic.
Brother.
Was there really a baby out there? Or was Mikael just a hard teenager making up a story about a lost girl just to save his ass, a boy lying on his way to becoming a violent man?
Dearest Aurora,
I’ve had to position the hand in Madison Square Park to raise money.
She is beautiful, the isolated limb. The wrist rises to the tops of the trees in the park and above the rooftops. The torch tips are visible for almost a mile around.
I wonder what the casual passerby thinks — someone on his way home from work, some exhausted mother demoralized by worry over how to feed her children. Do they see it as a monstrosity, or does it spark just a bit of imagination? Are they tempted to drop their fatigue and hopelessness for a moment and venture into the park to see what stands there, amid the trees, or do they tell their children to stay away from it, as if it were some ghostly extremity?
This woman must emerge in pieces.
The hand in the trees needs money. Damn this gift from one nation to another without the funding of either.
I know what the papers are saying. They seem confused and act superior. They all snipe that the supposed gift from one country to another has apparently failed to produce a whole entity — that perhaps this is all there is, this giant hand and torch performing without a platform in a city park. Like an amusement park feature. I hate what they’ve written.
I watch the well-to-do stride up to the hand in all their silk and velvet, their parasols and cigars and shined shoes. They carry the look of people who feel obliged to perform some understanding of the object before them. Wealthy people always perform knowingness, whether or not they possess any. Vapid bubbleheads in colorful clothes, they tête-à-tête together as if exchanging brilliant observations. I don’t care. The object itself, even in part, creates mystery and suspense and interest; it is like a spider’s web. It’s not their understanding I want. It’s their attention. I want their lust drawn out by the object. I learned this from you.
You understand this, Aurora: The colossus is not for them. It is for a world that doesn’t exist yet. I want them to want. I want their want to be overwhelming — for them to demand, Give us this statue so that we may say that it is ours, that this vision is our vision. I want their desire to travel like fierce electrical current to those whose money shapes the world.
When Viollet decided upon the nature of the frame — wood-slatted, covered in plaster, that plaster sanded down to a texture that can approximate the curves and lines of a bodily form, carefully crafted wood ridges along the edges, sheets of copper hammered around the molds and structure — I felt giddy. I could see the body before the body even took shape. We have much to figure out still; chief among our questions remains how to get the body to stand. You will want me to say “her body” here, and so I wilclass="underline" we need her body to stand. Upright. Forever. In spite of construction, of its several distinct pieces; in spite of weather and time. In spite of the entire world.
To that end, we have created a system inside the studio involving ropes and metal. (I hope those two words conjure something in your body when you read them.) My beloved assistant Jean-Marie and the artist Monduit realized that we must render her in slices. The base, feet, and dress hem: one slice. The dress, shins, knees, another slice. Her head and shoulders their own slice. To accommodate the engineering and construction, we have assessed the model with strings and measurements, and replicated the entire system using hefty ropes dangling from the ceiling. Can you see them? Will you perhaps come to see them? May I show you how to wrap a body like an animal’s and swing it toward pleasure? Perhaps you have something to show me?