Last Night in Montreal (2 page)

3.

The problem, Eli used to think before he met her, was that he’d never suffered, except insofar as everyone does: the stalled trains, the alarm clocks that don’t ring when they’re supposed to, the agony of being surrounded by other people who all give the impression of being way more prolific and considerably more talented than you are, wet socks in the winter, being alone in any season, the chronic condition of being misunderstood, zippers that break at awkward moments, being unheard and then having to repeat yourself embarrassingly in front of girls you’re trying to impress, trying to impress girls and failing, girls who can be seduced but remain unimpressible, girls who can’t be seduced and/or turn out to have boyfriends in the morning, girls, being alone, paper grocery bags with falling-out bottoms, waiting in line at the post office for a half hour and then being snapped at because you don’t have the right customs declaration forms to send the birthday gift to your perpetually traveling brother, waiting in line anywhere, phone calls from a disapproving mother who doesn’t understand, the crowd of overeducated friends who understand too much and can’t resist bringing up long-dead philosophers and/or quantum physics over an otherwise perfectly civilized morning coffee, girls, an overall lack of direction and meaning as evidenced in your inability to either finish the thesis, abandon the current thesis and write a different thesis altogether, finish the different thesis, or heroically give up the whole thing completely and go work at a gas station somewhere upstate, stepping in things on the sidewalk, lost buttons, most kinds of rain, standing in line at the grocery store behind the lady who just knows there’s a coupon in here somewhere, girls, and the sense that all of this adds up to a life that’s ultimately pretty shallow and doesn’t really mean that much, particularly in comparison to the older brother saving children in Africa. The situation wasn’t helped by the mind-numbing job; he was paid a reasonable salary to stand in an empty art gallery four days a week, surrounded by art that he found incomprehensible, and there had even been a time when he’d considered himself lucky to have found a job like that, involving standing instead of doing, but lately the state of standing still instead of doing things had begun to seem symptomatic to him.

“There’s this artist in Asia,” Eli said. “I know how to pronounce his name, but I won’t. Call him Q. What Q does is he strips down to his underwear, then he coats himself with honey and fish oil, and then he goes and sits next to a latrine in this rural village in China, and so of course then he gets covered in flies because he’s hanging out next to the latrine covered in all this honey and fish oil, and so he’s sitting there, all covered in flies and all greasy and stoic-looking, and a photographer takes pictures of him, and this is the thing . . .” He realized that he was speaking too loudly and took a quick sip of water to calm himself. “The thing that gets me,” he continued in a quieter voice, “is that the pictures then sell for up to eighteen thousand apiece.
Eighteen thousand dollars
. For a photograph of a guy with a hundred or so flies on his skin. All he’s doing is sitting there in a G-string, with flies, staring off into space, and he’s considered an artist.
He’s considered an artist
.”

“Okay,” said Geneviève, “he’s considered an artist. And? Why would that bother you?” She was sitting across from him at the café table with an incredulous look on her face. He had been lingering at the Third Cup Café with Geneviève and Thomas for years now, discussing art and their Brooklyn neighborhood and the meaning of life, but it had been some months since he’d spoken at all passionately on any one of these subjects.

“It’s the word, I guess.” He was silent for a moment. Thomas had put down his magazine. “Yeah, it’s the word.
Artist
is the word we use for Chopin, for Handel, for Van Gogh, for Hemingway, these men whose art required a lifetime and unprecedented talent and blood and sweat, these men whose art eventually rendered them dead or insane or alcoholic or all of the above, and we use this same word,
artist,
for a guy who smears honey on his skin and then sits around till some flies show up and then gets his picture taken and makes eighteen thousand dollars for his efforts. If he were mentally ill and did the same thing, you’d lock him up. But because he issues a statement saying that sitting there covered in flies is an act of, of subversion against the, I don’t know, some kind of political statement against Chinese communism or Western capitalism or whatever, you call him an
artist.
And they’re all like that. Every single so-called artist at this so-called gallery I get paid to stand around in. There’s this other guy who dances naked around his tripod with the camera on a timer, and it’s supposed to represent, I don’t know, his African heritage or his
joie de vif,
and
. . .
”

“Joie de vivre,”
said Geneviève.

“Whatever.” He used a coffee-stained napkin to blot sweat from his forehead. “He’s just a blurred naked guy.”

“Maybe you just don’t
get
it,” said Geneviève helpfully.

“Jesus—” said Thomas, but Eli cut him off.

“No, she’s right. I don’t get it. I work in a gallery, I’m supposed to sell this shit, which I consider the work of frauds, I actually
do
sell this shit, which clearly makes
me
a fraud, and I don’t get it. I don’t think it’s good enough. I don’t believe we should be calling it art.”

“Then what
is
art?” Geneviève asked. “Let’s get to the bottom of this. It’s eleven
A.M.
; we can have this figured out by lunchtime.”

“Look, I’m not saying I know,” Eli said. “I’m not saying I’m any better. I just think you have to do more than take your clothes off in front of a camera. I think you have to have some talent, not just a clever conceptual idea. I think you have to actually create something. They’re artists because they issue statements saying they’re artists, not because of anything they actually do or produce, and that’s really where my problem begins. I’m not claiming to know the answer here.”

This quieted Geneviève—she only liked arguing with people who were willing to claim that they
did
know the answer, for the sheer pleasure of tackling them. At a loss, she got up and went to the counter for a coffee refill.

“And this is what’s been bothering you lately?” Thomas asked while she was gone. “You’ve been a little off.”

“I don’t know. It’s not just the artists in the gallery. They’re only part of it. I got a letter from my brother the other day.”

“Zed?”

“He’s the only one I have.”

“I haven’t seen him around in forever. Where is he these days?”

“Africa somewhere. Working at an orphanage. Before that he was building a school in some village in Peru. In between he went hitchhiking in Israel. And the thing with those letters is, they come from these unbelievable places, and you know why?”

“Because he’s somewhere else. Are you feeling okay?”

“No, look, what I
mean
is the letters come from these unbelievable places because one day years ago he decided to travel, so he travels. He doesn’t talk about travel. He doesn’t theorize about travel. He just buys a ticket and goes. It isn’t the gallery that’s been bothering me, it’s the inaction,” Eli said. He was watching Geneviève returning to the table with her coffee. “All the theorizing we do. Everyone talks about being an artist, everyone theorizes about their art, but no one actually
does
anything. No one ever takes the leap.”

“What leap?” Geneviève asked. She was considering him over the rim of her coffee mug.

“They never
do
anything.
We
never do anything. I’m not saying I’m exempt from this. I always thought that once the thesis was done I’d be a writer and write, you know, really groundbreaking stuff in my field, but let’s be honest here, I’m never going to finish my thesis. I’ve been writing my thesis for six years, and I’ve been a third of the way in for four and a half of them. All I can do is talk about writing, theorize about writing, but I can’t take the leap, I can’t just
write
. But I still call myself a writer. What the hell do you call that, if not somehow fraudulent?”

“And the rest of us?” asked Geneviève dangerously. She hadn’t painted anything in a while.

Eli realized he was about to step on a land mine, and retreated.

“Sorry. I’m rambling. Ignore me,” he said. He drew a long breath. “Look, I’m not naming names here, I’m not saying I
know
anything, it’s just hard not to notice that none of us are actually . . . I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Forget it.”

“It’s cool,” said Thomas warily.

“Why is it bothering you
now,
” Geneviève asked unpleasantly, “if you’ve been a third of the way in for that long?”

“It’s my birthday on Thursday. I’ll be twenty-seven, and it dawned on me:
twenty-seven.
It’s been six or seven years since I’ve been a promising academic, or a promising anything, actually, and I think my school’s actually forgotten about me. I always wondered what would happen when I failed to meet my last thesis deadline, and then when it happened . . . my thesis deadline passed a year ago, and no one contacted me. No one. There was nothing. It’s like I’ve been struck from the school records, or like I don’t exist. And then when I think of Zed,
doing
things, I just don’t . . . Look,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about this. I think I’m going to go for the paper.”

“You can get it here.”

“And then sit in the park for a bit,” Eli said, ignoring this, “and then maybe go home and not write. Ciao.”

Thomas waved. And he did hear Geneviève’s whispered
What the hell’s wrong with him?
as he walked out of the Third Cup Café into the brilliant sunlight of Bedford Avenue, but he ignored it. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment and decided not to go to the park after all, then walked slowly in a diagonal line across the deserted intersection and under the blue awning of the Café Matisse. There was a girl who read books there whom he wanted to meet.

HIS THESIS DEADLINE
passed like a signpost through a slow car window, like the last sign before the beginning of a trackless wilderness. For several nervous weeks after the circled date on the calendar, actually several nervous months, he had a falling sensation in his stomach every time the phone rang. It took some time to realize that no one was going to call him. He wasn’t about to call them. He ceased any pretense of being just on the verge of completing the document and immersed himself as completely as he could in research.

Eli never felt particularly calm, or that he was moving even remotely in the correct direction. Still, he felt that the research in itself wasn’t without merit: he’d become somewhat of an expert in the study of absence. Specifically, dead languages, or if not dead, then at least terminally ill. He studied small languages on the edge of extinction: the oldest languages of Australia, California, China, Lapland, obscure corners of Arizona and Quebec, fading out for exactly the reasons one might expect—colonization, the proliferation of residential schools and smallpox, the dispersal of native speakers over vast distances, etc. He’d grown used to watching girls’ eyes glaze over when he started talking about it; that Lilia actually seemed to find the whole thing fascinating, watching him seriously across a table at the Café Matisse, came as a bright and exuberant shock.

The majority of languages, he told her grandly, will disappear. Since she still seemed somewhat interested, Eli flashed his favorite statistics across the table like a Rolex: of the six thousand languages currently spoken on this earth, 90 percent are endangered and half will be gone by the end of the next century. An optimistic few hope to save a handful of them; most hope for nothing more than a chance to document a fraction of the loss. His work was part reconstruction, part thesis, part requiem, he told her. She listened quietly, apparently rapt, and asked intelligent questions just when he thought her interest couldn’t possibly be sincere. She said lightly that she was used to much more localized vanishing acts: individual people, motel rooms, cars. She wasn’t used to disappearance on a larger scale. Imagine, he said, losing half the words on Earth. Although what he was actually trying to imagine just then, as he said that, was what it might be like to kiss her neck. She nodded and watched him across the tabletop.

Three thousand languages, destined to vanish. He’d become obsessed with the untranslatable: his idea, and the subject of his thesis (or what had been a thesis, some years earlier, before it suddenly imploded and went unfinishable on him overnight), was that every language on earth contains at least one crucial concept that cannot be translated. Not just a word but an idea, like the French
déjà vu:
perfect and crystalline in its native language, otherwise explainable only by entire clumsy foreign paragraphs or not at all. In Yup’ik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is
Ellam Yua:
a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as
soul,
or as
God,
but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K’iche, there is the
Nawal:
one’s spiritual essence but separate from the self; one’s other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned.

And if you accept this, he told her, this premise that every language holds something that exists in no other tongue, an entity far outweighing the sum of its words, then the loss takes on a staggering weight. It isn’t so much a question of losing three thousand words for everything. There
aren’t
three thousand words for everything; the speakers of Yup’ik have no reason to describe tigers in the high arctic; the speakers of the jungle languages need no language for the northern lights. It isn’t even so much about the words. His belief, the premise of the thesis, was that these are not just languages we lose in the gloaming, not just three thousand sets of every word, but three thousand ways of existing on this earth.