The Speed of Light - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Rosner is a graduate of Stanford University and received a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, and Another Chicago Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Berkeley, California.

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Excerpt

The changes began on a Wednesday, miércoles, the day that sounds likemiracles.

My younger and only sister, Paula, had gone away, leaving the apartment directlybelow mine to test the reach of her voice. I stayed behind, with my eleventelevisions, waiting for her to come back.

I was teaching myself not to feel.

In the room with the televisions, there were no voices: I had silenced them all.Instead I heard: a clock that ticked like a snapping twig; the hum and push ofcars passing on the street; a neighbor’s dog barking at the arrival ofmail; the refrigerator purring; my own breath, in and out. All the rhythms, inand out. And inside my head: a melody from before, when my sister trained hervoice to soar, when I listened to the notes float and resonate. I believedsometimes that I could see them.

Paula was auditioning, sending her hopeful music into the arms of Copenhagen,Prague, Vienna—places I had never seen and never expected to. I lived inthe safe embrace of my apartment, whose windows overlooked a park and aplayground and a street.

I had collected broken televisions and fixed them, one by one, sometimesguessing at the way to put things back together. I had no manuals to follow, nomap. I made good guesses, I had a feel for those things, a kind of blindinstinct. In the end, they all worked, although the colors were never exactlyright. Some were always a little too green, others a little too violet. Itdidn’t matter. The scratchy growl of their voices didn’t mattereither, because I often kept them very quiet. I spent most of my time watchingthe images, letting them tell me stories. I let them distract me from everyterrible truth until nothing touched me at all.

It was never a decision, never something I asked for. It simply belonged to me,like a second skin. No. Like my only skin. There was no choice, no letting go.And if there had been the chance to refuse?

If I’d been asked?

I would still say yes.

It was my father’s grief. It was what he gave to me, his only son. Hedidn’t mean to, but it came to me without his permission. He gave up hislanguage and his homeland, everything he could leave behind. But he carried hissadness with him, under his skin like blood. It wasn’t his fault. He wouldhave taken it back if he could. But it was mine now, as if I had lived it all.

At times, even my dreams felt inherited, as if someone else had owned themfirst. There would be dogs barking, murderous voices in the distance, smokefilling the dark air.

His actual stories I never heard. My father held all the shards of glass inside,where the edges cut him to pieces. When he looked at me, it was not so much intomy eyes as through them, as if I were a clear window to the past. I looked backat him, I listened to the wordless dark. What else could I do? I believed thiswas what I was here for, to be the receiver of that gaze, to swallow itcompletely. The broken glass? I swallowed that too.

Here is what I knew how to do: how to get away. How to save myself by takingflight, by vanishing. My voice was a ticket of escape, one way to anywhere butwhere I was. I tried to take my brother, Julian, with me, to help him escapetoo, but it was more weight than I could carry. Only one of us could make it outalive. I didn’t choose myself, not exactly, but the truth was, I had aticket and he didn’t. I had to use it or die.

“I’m going away for a while,” Paula had announced the previousMonday over lunch. For once she didn’t try to prepare me for a shock.“I’m taking myself on a Grand Tour,” she explained, her armsflourishing, “hoping some opera company will give me a chance. Accordingto my agent, I’m going to become quite famous.” She sighed a little,eager or worried, I couldn’t be sure.

“When?” I asked.

She came over to my chair and wrapped her slender arms around herself wishing, Iknew, that she could hug me with them but knowing I couldn’t bear it.

“I’ll miss you too,” she whispered, not looking at me. Then,in another voice she added, “I leave this Wednesday, early in themorning.” She struck a dramatic pose, one arm up and one to the side, herhead thrown back to expose her ivory neck. “I’ll write youpostcards,” she said.

I would place them beneath my pillow and memorize them in my sleep. I woulddream in languages I’d never heard.

At the door of my apartment, leaving, Paula stopped with her hand on thedoorknob. “What’s it like, Julian? What’s it like to liveinside your body?” She leaned against the door frame, frowning a little,waiting for me to answer.

I aimed my gaze above her head, at the place where the wall met the ceiling. Intwo days she would be gone. “It’s very quiet,” I said.

“Quiet,” she repeated softly. From the corner of my eye I could seeher frown grow deeper. She didn’t know what I was talking about.

“What’s inside yours?” I asked her.

She shrugged and said, “Music.”

I nodded. “Think of plants,” I said. “They’re breathingand growing, eating and drinking. We just can’t hear them.”

Paula looked at me, and I tried to look back, tried to stay right there withher. She was far enough away that I couldn’t see the color of her eyes.

“No wonder you have to be so careful,” she said. “They’dhave you for breakfast out there.”

“Who?” I asked, although I knew who.

“All of them,” Paula said, shaking her head. “Every goddamnone.”

Every goddamn one, I silently repeated. Then out loud I said, “I wonderwhat I’d taste like,” and Paula flashed that wide-open smile ofhers.

“Like sweet potatoes,” she said.

“In bocca al lupo,” I said to Julian before I left. Mouth of thewolf. It was backstage code from the Italians, their way of saying break a leg.I blew a kiss into the air, not aiming at his face but somewhere high, over hishead, where he wouldn’t be afraid of it.

“Forget the wolf,” he said back to me the way he was supposed to,the signal for courage and faith. But Julian needed it more than I did. He musthave thought I was always leaving him, as if it were easy for me. I opened doorsand slammed them behind me, never letting myself check if anything had crackedfrom the blow.

On the morning of Paula’s flight to Europe, I stood by the window in theearly light and watched a white taxicab pull up in front of our building. Paulastood beside the trunk while the driver loaded her luggage, and a breeze liftedthe ends of her dark green scarf as she turned to look up at my window. Her lipswere painted the color of raspberries. She waved and smiled, tucking the scarfinto the collar of her coat. I put my hand flat against the smooth glass andheld it there. Paula disappeared behind the opaque windows of the taxi, and thenthe taxi disappeared too. Below me, the ginkgo tree was full of green,fluttering its fan-shaped leaves.

I adjusted all the sets, fine-tuning their brightness and vertical hold, wipingthe electric dust from their screens. I turned up the volume for a while,filling my room with too many voices, all of them and none of them talking tome. Inside, where I lived, it was still very quiet.

My earliest memory is the sound of crying—my father waking up from anightmare. Or was it my brother? A nameless sobbing in the dark. Julian told meI cooed like a bird before I learned to speak; I made my mouth into an O and Ibegan, with no reason, to sing.

When I was still very young, before my mother died, we kept a pair of canariesin a cage by the kitchen window; at night, the cage was covered with a towel.Such a simple script: In the daylight,...