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  “Why?” he asked.

  “Spit it out! Just do it! It’s bad, it’s not ice, it’s not water, it’s dangerous!”

  “I can’t, I swallowed it already. What do you mean it’s dangerous?”

  “Nothing.”

  I was upset that my little cloud had been eaten alive, while it was in a paralyzed, helpless state.

  My brother looked at me angrily, as if expecting an explanation.

  So I gave one: “It’s just that it was my ice cube, which I brought from home, and I didn’t want you to eat it. It was my ice cube.”

  I hung my head low and mourned my cloud melting in his stomach. I wondered if it would harm him. I was nervous about that, actually. More nervous about it than about the fate of my cloud. But maybe it wouldn’t harm him. Maybe it would become part of his person in a helpful way.

  The following night I had dinner with my family again, still needing a break from Chriskate and even from Nathaniel, and feeling too lonely to have dinner alone. Suddenly, in the middle of dinner, my brother let out a big fart, and my little cloud came out intact and rose above his head. Not having yet seen the cloud, my brother looked at us sheepishly and said, “I’m sorry, it had a mind of its own.”

  Seeing the direction of our gazes, he looked up and saw the cloud. I jumped to my feet, overjoyed, and grabbed the cloud and put it in my handbag.

  “Hey, do you mind!” said my brother. “Give that back.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. It’s my fart.”

  “No, it’s mine.”

  “Oh really? How do you figure that?”

  “Someone gave it to me as a present.”

  He looked at our parents. “Everyone at this table knows that this is my fart. They heard me make it and they saw it come out of my body.”

  “That’s enough now. Calm down,” said our father.

  “But she stole my fart!” My brother stomped his foot and looked as if he were on the verge of tears. “I produced something extraordinary for the first time in my life, so I should have a right to keep it. Or at least examine it, for God’s sake!”

  I quickly left the apartment, apologizing to my parents and telling them I’d call them later. My brother didn’t try to wrestle his fart from me, which was a relief.

  The following day I did agree to see Chriskate again. We had lunch, but this time our encounter was not pleasant. She asked too many questions. She looked at me too intently, studied me too studiously. She even took notes. And she asked the same questions again and again. She didn’t believe my answers.

  “What is it about you that Nathaniel likes so much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know. He must have told you.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you want to tell me? Because you think it’s pointless? Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind telling you if there was something, but I don’t think he said anything.”

  “You don’t think? That means he might have. That means you’re not sure. Can you please think about it harder?”

  “I have, I think. I swear, I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure he never told me what he liked about me.”

  “Do you think it’s your looks or your personality? Is it mental? Does he think you’re smart?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please, Anna, think.”

  I sighed and mumbled, “I am thinking. But why do you want to know this?”

  Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, so you don’t want to tell me, is that it? Cause you don’t approve. You think it would do no good. But you said you would tell me. You assured me you would tell me if you knew.”

  “Yes, I would tell you if I knew, even though I also think it would do no good. But I would tell you.”

  “Well then guess. Why do you think he likes you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m hideous compared to you. I’m not successful. I’m an aspiring actress who’s not even a waitress in her free time: I’m a Xeroxer and an ear piercer. I’m not strikingly witty or gentle or even fun. I may be a little strange, but he didn’t see that side of me. Take your pick.”

  “I’m sure you have some assets you’re hiding.”

  “I wish.”

  “No, no, you must have. Either you’re not telling me on purpose, or you’re just not trying hard enough to think of them.” She then added musingly, “Or maybe you take them so much for granted that you don’t realize they’re there and remarkable.”

  I couldn’t wait for the lunch to be over. She insisted that we go get a drink somewhere, to continue the search for my hidden assets, but I declined and said good-bye. She would not accept that. She would not say good-bye. So I started walking away, and she followed me, begging me to tell her my secret. Then some photographers recognized her and started taking her picture. She was loudly asking me, “Why are you special? How are you remarkable? What is it that you do?” Embarrassed, I started running away, and she ran after me, and the photographers ran after her.

  “Just tell me, what is it that you do?” she repeated.

  I shouted back: “I don’t do anything! Leave me alone! I just am.”

  I finally ditched her and went home, panting.

  I was not special and I was not remarkable. Anybody who thought so was deluded.

  I took a hot bath when I got home and relished the silence. I had never relished silence as much as then.

  All I cared about was for Damon to come back. I wanted to see him again. I wanted him to take me away from this insanity, into a world of fantasy.

  As I was getting out of my bath, he called. A perfect ending to a perfect bath.

  “I’m back,” he said.

  “Great!”

  “But I have to leave again.”

  “When?”

  “In an hour or two.”

  “For where?”

  “The same place.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason. Work.”

  “Oh. When will you be back?”

  “Not for a while. Two or three weeks, perhaps.”

  “Oh.” I was crushed and disillusioned. I said nothing.

  “But would you like to join me for dinner this evening in the country?” he said. “We could drive out together. Although I realize it’s short notice.”

  I accepted without hesitation. He asked me if two hours was enough time to get ready. He added that I might want to bring an overnight bag in case I felt like extending my stay a little.

  While I was packing, I could not help thinking about my plan to take the initiative romantically next time I saw him. I decided that the plan would remain in effect. After our dinner, I would try to kiss him, and if he responded by either (a) slapping me, like he did to the woman in the nightclub, or even just (b) gently rejecting me, I would leave. I would take the train home. Or a taxi, if I had to. But—clouds or no clouds—it would be over.

  I called the train station to find out at what time the last train left for the city, from the station near his house: 12:40 A.M., they said. This meant a move would have to be made by midnight. If not by Damon, then by me.

  Chapter Five

  The drive out was pleasant and uneventful. Damon asked about my social life, my friends. I didn’t tell him about Chriskate Turschicraw, or about my lunch with her. I only said I had had a miserable day, and that I didn’t want to think about it. In a little over an hour we arrived at his driveway, a long dirt road winding into the woods. The house was large and slightly elevated. A dozen steps led to the front door.

  He grabbed my bag and his, and asked if I could get a small bag out of the trunk. I sensed that this request was intended to postpone me, to allow him to get to the house first, because as soon as I went for the small bag, he sprinted up the steps and disappeared inside the house, leaving the front door open. Maybe he wanted to make sure the place was presentable, turn the lights on, or whatever.

  A few moments later I slowly followed him a
nd found myself standing alone in a small entrance hall. Extremely small, for such a big house. It was in fact a little room, completely enclosed, with a door straight ahead. There was a chair against one wall, and I was trying to decide if I should sit or knock on the door, or just open it. I felt like a frustrated Alice in Wonderland, because the signs were missing; it seemed to me that if the chair were not going to wear a sign that said “Sit on me,” then the door should have one that said “Knock on me.” Or vice versa. I was about to knock on the door, when Damon opened it and stood in the doorway, against a background that was astonishing.

  He was looking at me very intently, scrutinizing my reaction, while smiling in a shy, sheepish way. He seemed happy and alive, brimming with vitality. I, on the other hand, turned white; inwardly at least, and I’m pretty sure outwardly too.

  Behind Damon was a huge room with not much furniture, and the little of it I could see seemed to be made of marble and glass. But what was noticeable about the room, and let me stress that this was very noticeable, very visually striking, was that there were clouds in the air of it. Big clouds. About seven of them. There was one just to the left of Damon, shoulder level. And another, further back, was bigger than me.

  Damon stepped aside to let me in, but I didn’t budge.

  “This is a bit unsettling,” I explained. “You didn’t warn me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Are you uncomfortable? I didn’t anticipate this reaction,” he said, shooing away the closest cloud with a few waves, like a smoker realizing his smoke is disturbing another person. “The reason I didn’t warn you was that I wanted to surprise you. In a pleasant way. But come in. Don’t be afraid.”

  My footsteps echoed on the marble floor. “Is this what you’ve been working on this week?” I asked.

  “Is what?”

  “Making these big clouds?”

  “No. I’ve had clouds like these for a long time. Size was the first thing I figured out; it was the core of my invention. This week I was taking care of other matters.”

  I looked around, still nervous. There was a blue vinyl couch on the right, which I hadn’t seen from the doorway, and there was a glass clock against a wall. The room looked to be straight out of a Magritte painting. There was a staircase at one end, with a cloud halfway up the stairs, or halfway down; I couldn’t tell where it was going, if anywhere. There was another close to the window, as if looking out nostalgically. Another one’s top was popping out from behind the couch. Two floated near the ceiling. Some were very white and dense, like cotton; others were more loosely knit and see-through. They were all relatively motionless at this moment. I didn’t know names of various clouds, but one of them was sort of stringy and fibrous; sickly looking (the kind that looks majestically feathery in the sky, but obviously less so in a house). Most of the others looked plump, like well-fed sharks.

  I became aware of a strange sound, music actually, coming from a large object, or sculpture, standing in a corner. On closer look it seemed like a fountain, dripping drops on various surfaces, each one producing a different note, and each note sounding ethereal. The notes were not random; there was a definite melody. It was probably preprogrammed, like a mechanical piano.

  Before I had a chance to ask him about this musical fountain, Damon said he wanted to take me for a row in the boat on his pond while it was still light out. We went.

  He was beautiful, rowing in the late afternoon light. And he was calm. Not at all nervous, for someone who was hopefully on the verge of making a move on me. His shirt was transparent, like a sweating man’s shirt, except he was not sweating. His chest was heaving from the effort of rowing, and yet there wasn’t the slightest sound of breath. His full lips were slightly parted. He looked at me, looking at him, and I looked away. At least I think he was looking at me, with his white-blue eyes, but it was hard to be sure because of the hair hanging in front of them.

  He raised his face to the breeze and closed his eyes. The wind swept his hair aside. He then looked straight at me. I looked at the oar.

  I wished I, too, had hair hanging in front of my face, to hide me. As I contemplated the oar traveling through the murky transparency, something suddenly struck me as odd, as not quite … realistic, about Damon’s rowing: There was no sound to it. Not even the sound of a ripple when the paddles entered the water. Yet I was not hard of hearing; from this boat, I could hear the birds in the forest. If Damon had been rowing slowly, the silence would have been somewhat more conceivable, but we were advancing swiftly, and his movements were powerful. I don’t mean to sound corny, but it was as if he and the water were one, as if he knew it as well as himself, knew how to touch it without disturbing it, without clashing with it.

  He was still looking at me, and instead of allowing myself to wallow in self-consciousness, I decided to be courageous. I looked back at him and did not look away. After a moment, he smiled slightly. I reciprocated, almost imperceptibly, and I felt myself relaxing. It wasn’t so hard.

  I hated the idea of destroying this thrilling, loaded silence, but I couldn’t resist venting my new boldness.

  “You look like a ghost,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Your rowing is so quiet. You make no sound with the water.”

  “If you ever, one day, know something well, it won’t make any sound either.”

  I chuckled, a bit disappointed by the silliness of that statement.

  “Don’t laugh,” he said. “It’s true. What you know well grows silent.”

  “True of everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even of people?”

  “Most obviously of people.”

  “How sad.”

  “No. But what’s more interesting for you is that it is also true of art.”

  “Even of music?” I asked, wanting to trap him.

  “Yes. Great composers make very little sound with their music.”

  “You mean good music is minimalist?”

  “No. I mean good music is silent.”

  “No notes?”

  “Yes, it has notes.”

  “So you mean metaphorically silent.”

  “And also literally.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, come now, Anna, you know what I mean. No matter how loud a piece is, no matter how many notes it contains, it is silent if it is great: it is pure, it is essential, it is wholly itself, and it makes no sound.”

  At the risk of irritating him, I said, “I take it you don’t like music.”

  He stopped rowing and came toward me, crouching low, like a lion stalking its prey, which may not have been an intended effect; I think he was just trying to avoid rocking the boat. He sat down next to me, straddling the bench. “I like music fine,” he said softly, so close to my face that I could feel his breath on my cheek. We stared at each other for a while. He said, “Look up.”

  I looked up, while his eyes remained glued to me.

  “Are there any clouds?” he asked.

  “A few.”

  “Do they please you?”

  “Yes,” I said, looking back at him, wondering if this meant he had made those too.

  “More than mine?”

  I looked back at the sky and said no.

  “Why not?”

  “Yours are inside a house.”

  His face became cold, as if disappointed. He looked away.

  I quickly added, “And, your clouds are also more substantial, more dense, some of them, and more … puffy-like.” I made some gestures to illustrate just how puffy and cottony his clouds had struck me. “And their color, also, is more beautiful, more bright, more sharply white.”

  He laughed, affectionately I believe, even gratefully.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He rowed us back to shore, and we went for a walk in the woods.

  We treaded over slightly rough terrain. He led the way, parting the branches, and was considerate about not letting them whip back in my face. A couple of times, his flimsy shirt and p
ants got caught on some thorns and I helped deliver him. I could see he was not in his element here, like he had been on the pond. But soon we arrived at his element. A river. Along the edge of which we sat.

  First moves are an interesting subject. A male friend of mine once told me that the first move between himself and his girlfriend was made when they were sitting on a bench and it became more awkward to not make a move than to make one. Damon and I were sitting on a rock and I waited for the move that would make the situation less awkward rather than more. He must not have shared my outlook, however, because no move was made. I could have done it myself, of course, but wanted to give him a chance to do it first. The evening was still young and I was still optimistic.

  “Dinner must have arrived by now,” he said, after a while.

  We walked back to the house and went in through the living room’s sliding glass doors. Damon walked straight through to the front door. He unlocked it and entered that horrid, instructionless entrance hall I had waited in earlier. Now waiting for us on the chair and on the floor was what, in a moment, was revealed to me as our dinner, in large paper bags that Damon took to the kitchen, saying he’d be back soon.

  I didn’t mind being left to myself, to relax and feel unselfconscious, after a whole afternoon of his intense presence. Few activities in life are as tiring as that of hoping to be liked. I felt like a smile, frozen for hours by politeness until it twitched from exhaustion. My charm muscles, wherever they were located, were aching.

  After impersonating a jewel all afternoon and aiming my sparks of brilliance at Damon’s heart, mind, and groin, I was dying to stop.

  In case it isn’t clear what sparks of brilliance I’m referring to, I must explain that some people’s attempts at being charming consist in not doing many of the things they would normally do; in other words, repressing large portions of their personality. I was such a person. Taking this route to charm, I realize, is misguided. At least in my case I think it is. I hope it is. But it’s also instinctive. So when I refer to my sparks, I largely mean my few repressed words and gestures. If such a phenomenon were to exist in physics or cosmology—and maybe it does—I imagine it might be called something like: positive absences.