Why I Killed My Best Friend (26 page)

“It was an accident, get it into your head. An ac-ci-dent!” Anna says. “We've gone over this a thousand times.”

“You may have, with your shrink, maybe you're over it now. But I just dug a hole in my head, dug a hole, do you understand? Inside me! And now it's all seeping out. It's coming back out, all of it! Like an overstuffed suitcase that just pops open on its own, you know?”

“So close the suitcase,” Anna snaps. “It's done, it's over.”

“I think we need to confess. We need to go to prison.”

“Have you completely lost your mind? You want to confess to the cops? Why don't you go and light a candle at the church instead, like your mother?”

“I have to do something, I need to figure out how to make sense of it.”

“I could kill you, you know. I've fixed my life, and you come along and tell me—”

“What do I care? I never fixed
my
life. I've felt dead for a long time now.”

“Forget the drama, Maria. I can't deal with any more drama.”

She hugs me in the only way she knows: tightly, asphyxiatingly, urgently. Her bones dig into mine.

“I know a good psychiatrist,” she says.

I know an even better psychiatrist: the National Library. I tell Saroglou I've come down with the flu and won't be in for a few days. But the truth is I've got another school to go to: the school of silence—silence, not hysterical aphonia.

I need peace and quiet, high ceilings and a sense of purpose. I sit at one of the tables devouring whatever I can find about caves,
prisons, even the architecture of metro stations. Anything having to do with underground life, darkness, or the attempt to escape into the light makes my pulse race, though it also holds a certain attraction. I read about Plato's cave, about the prisoners who have spent their entire lives chained to a wall, facing another wall, trapped and immobilized in the darkness, unable to see even their fellow prisoners. The only light comes from a fire burning behind them, lit by their jailers. On the blank wall before them they see shadows cast by objects passing before the fire. The prisoners have no knowledge of what light even is.

My tongue goes dry again, my palms start to sweat. I grab my bag and rush outside, run down the marble stairs of the library two at a time, relieved to be out in the daylight. On my way home I wonder how real the things are that the prisoners see. According to Plato, the prisoners' inability to orient themselves, to understand where they are, is a bondage far worse than their chains.

The next day I find a dictionary of sociology full of terms like society, competition, adaptation—“inherited structural and functional characteristics that increase the probability of survival.” I also read about an archaeological excavation in Chiapas, Mexico. The archaeologists who went there back in the 1960s claimed that before the Mayans, a tribe called the Zoque lived on the Rio La Venta and sacrificed children in caves. I'd first heard about this from Antigone, after she took a trip to Mexico with her CEO. I rush back outside. Whenever I'm confronted with the image of a cave, even if it's just a mental image, I want desperately to escape again into the light.

The following day I stumble across Piranesi's imaginary prisons. The name is already familiar—from Malouhos, not from any course on eighteenth-century art. In art school we learned about far more general trends, synoptically, as if centuries were bricks to be stacked one on top of the next. The imaginary prisons are
terrifying. The perspective in the drawings keeps shifting. Staircases and ladders that seem to lead upward in fact don't lead anywhere at all. If these were plans for actual buildings, the inspectors would nix construction altogether. Piranesi seems to have devised every possible way of escaping from Plato's cave, but in the end he pushes you even deeper down: into the captivity of an internal landscape, a nightmare with no exit.

Only this time I don't feel trapped. I shut my eyes and travel to the place where Aristomenis Malouhos found safety. I jot down in my notebook:
Is it possible to feel safe in a nightmare? Perhaps, if from the start you treat it as the site of an inner struggle. With Piranesi's sketches you're struggling to escape into the light. Freedom and justice are waiting somewhere inside the ruins he draws. An abyss of options. I like that
.

As the week draws to a close, I read about the caves in Lascaux. A charming story: in 1940 four teenagers found a cave in the south of France with remnants of Paleolithic art, which they discovered by the weak light of a lantern. I can imagine the irrepressible curiosity they must have felt at that age: teenagers taking turns goading one another a bit further, a bit deeper. At first all they could see was a hole, most likely opened by a falling pine tree. Then the most daring of the four suggested they widen the hole by digging, though he probably wasn't the one to start. He would have been more like Anna, a leader telling the others what to do. Soon they encountered a small cavity, and tumbled down onto a pile of stones covering the old mouth of the cave. That led them to yet another cavity, which later came to be known as the Hall of the Bulls. I can picture them holding their lantern up to the walls and seeing paintings of red cows, yellow horses, bulls, deer. How could they possibly have slept that night, and what dreams might they have had? The next day they went back and used a rope to lower themselves down through a narrow passageway. They ended up in the Shaft of the Dead Man, where a painting shows a man with a
bird's beak beside a bison with lowered head, in attack position, and what appears to be a rhinoceros. Which figure would each of them have identified with? I myself would have identified, not with either animal, or with the human, but with the particular shade of ochre used in the painting. A faded yellow, like an old jealousy. Odiosamato.

The news spread through the village and beyond. Archaeologists flooded the place. How must those four French youths have felt, having their discovery taken from their hands and transformed into a tourist site? In 1955 the paintings revolted, as Malouhos would say. They started to lose their characteristic colors. People said it was due to the carbon dioxide being released from visitors' breath. Scientists came up with a system to control the release of carbon dioxide, but the damage had already been done: green spots of oxidation started to appear on the walls. The development of the archaeological site had upset the ecosystem, the natural development of the flora and fauna alike.

I jot again in my notebook:
There comes a time when we need to leave the cave in peace. We're guests there, not owners
.

“What's going on with you?” Kayo asks, poking his head through the crack in the door. “Are you painting?”

“Kayo, can you leave me alone for a while? Can you just listen? A-
lone
.”

“Okay, I get it. But Anna's called three times today. She says for you to call her back as soon as you can.”

I lock the door of my room and regress to the time when I thirsted for black. Only now, instead of using black paper, I draw in black on a white background. Black, and ochre, too. I sketch the prehistoric animals in the Lascaux caves, as I remember them from the books I pored over at the library. Horses, bison, cows, deer. I practice doing feet and tails for a while, then start to draw little
creatures in miniature. Tiny animals entering enormous caves. Or gigantic animals trying to squeeze through the mouths of microscopic caves. The mismatched proportions transport me straight into the realm of fairytale, offering me that particular comfort of children's drawings. As a child, you're presented with a rigid world of predetermined sizes and power relations. You lie down on the floor with a piece of paper and deconstruct it all—you draw blue roots on the trees, people with no fingers, see-through bellies with babies inside; you bestow life and take it away again with your colored pencils. With faith and with rage you change the world.

“Daphne, eyes on your own paper, please. Leave Natasha alone!”

She obeys immediately, a spitting image of the bison: head down, tongue out. Today she's drawing a cave with babies flying all around, like little airplanes.

“Why are the babies flying?” I ask.

“They're not babies, they're storks. The babies come out of their mouths.”

“Who did you learn that from?”

“Svetlana. She thinks a stork is going to bring her baby. She doesn't even know how babies are born!”

Daphne has gotten much sweeter since our tea party in her room. She became infatuated with the idea of the cave, of a place where you can hide something that's all your own.

Today the whole class is drawing caves. Daphne has worn out their ears with stories of mud and witches—and children are natural imitators. Natasha, as always, draws rainbows all around her cave. Panos puts his whole family inside and himself outside doing cartwheels. Sandra draws a wild dog at the entrance, barking red bow-wows. Aris draws soldiers with machine guns. The mouth of his cave is full of barbed wire, and land mines are exploding in the background.

Of course none of them draw men with stockings over their faces, or headless dolls, or a child with a severed finger. To each his own cave.

She slaps the desk with her hand and her silver bangles clatter.

“Why didn't you call me?” She's smoking and coughing by turns. I don't answer right away, and she stands there kicking the leg of the desk with one pointed boot.

“I want to be alone for a while,” I say eventually.

“What does that mean?”

“What does solitude mean?”

“Can we go for a coffee in that awful place across the street?”

“No, Anna. I'm busy. I'm going home.”

“I'll drive you.”

“No, I'll take the metro.”

“But—didn't you say you'd never go back into the metro? After your panic attack?”

“You're the one who said that, not me.”

“I'll come with you, then, in case something happens.”

“No.”

No. It's the first time I've ever said no to her and stood my ground. The leather of her boot is scratched from constantly kicking at the leg of the desk. It's scary, as if her soul has dropped down into her shoe. As if she's lost something of her shiny self-sufficiency.

I head underground somewhat gingerly. I take the stairs, not the escalator, which is packed with people. I walk to one side, keeping hold of the metal railing.
You're one of the prisoners in Plato's cave
, I tell myself.
Don't deny it. Find the limits of your cell
. On the platform my palms start to sweat. A woman gives me a look that manages to be both absentminded and severe. The train is equally severe, rushing
toward me at great speed. The platform shrinks and expands, pulsating: a heart, cruelly illuminated by fluorescent lights.

You're in an imaginary prison
, I say to myself.
You're Piranesi. You're the one who has sketched this distorted perspective, this overflowing platform. You've drawn in those dark stairs climbing into the sky, you added whatever crossed your mind—corners, curves, labyrinths. Get in the train. Unbutton your jacket if you feel hot. Take the kids' drawings out of your bag and fan yourself with them. Before you can count to ten, you'll have reached your stop. Trouble breathing? Just remember that word from the dictionary. “Adaptation: inherited structural and functional characteristics that increase the probability of survival.” You're seeing shadows? That's only natural, the prisoners haven't ever seen light. Hold on, hold on. This is the only way—from captivity to freedom
.

I step out of the train car and set off almost at a run. The light rushes down the stairs to meet me. A warm, comforting light. It's as if the staircase is a mouth spitting me out into the springtime Attic sky. I'm one of the youths in the Lascaux cave, who saw the prehistoric animals and is running to share the discovery with others. Or perhaps not. Not with others just yet. I'm a combination of the kids in Natasha's and Panos's drawings, doing cartwheels outside of the cave, with a rainbow overhead.

Specks of dust and freedom.

“Will it bother you if I go and stay with her?” Kayo reaches out and pulls me theatrically into his arms, as if we're about to break into some impressive dance move. Only we just stand there, motionless. Then we sigh at exactly the same time. It happens to us all the time, and always makes us laugh. We call it our simultaneous orgasm.

“Was I too hard on you, Kayo? I didn't really mean it when I told you to move out.”

“I've gotten used to you snapping at me. We've been doing that to one another forever. Don't worry, this has nothing to do with you. Svetlana is having her baby and Anna can't find anyone to take care of Daphne.”

“If she thinks she's found a way of keeping tabs on me . . .”

“Why should she want to keep tabs, Maria? Just let it go.”

I peel myself from his embrace and open the balcony door. I rest my knee in the gap between the bars. The mark made by my very first rebellion.

“You have no idea,” I say softly, as if talking to myself.

He packs a suitcase, whistling some pop song that's all the rage on the radio. It's perfectly clear, he's happy he's leaving. He oppressed me in New York, and I'm oppressing him here. Property is power, what can we do? You give someone a room to crash in but demand emotional ransom in return. And what about me? Am I happy he's leaving? I'm not sure. I've never been alone in my life. There was always family, friends, bodies in motion that occupied space, talked, shouted, watched television, listened to music. Shared space, a communalism I believed in.