Her Here by Amanda Dennis

Author:Amanda Dennis [Dennis, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2020-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

26

PURE NERVES, NO SKIN, oddness of channeling the hot season in the dead of winter. Her world springs to life: Scenes crack the cold with their meanings, charging the grayness. How boring it must have been when I had only one body. Now I’m Ella most of each day. Checking the address in my phone, I step into the cold, feeling the oddness of my own skin again in the winter air.

Buildings on the narrow street hunch forward slightly, as if to listen. Cold chalks the concrete. Flurries hang in the frigid air. Time is out of sorts in the journals. It’s worst in the black and green books, but what I missed on my initial read are these first cracks. The yellow and red books contain the etiology of what comes after. It starts, perhaps, with Ella’s conviction that all time is contained in the present moment. Buddhist commentaries I found call this “presentism.” (If time is present before it’s lived, are Buddhists fatalists? Commentaries say no.) But if Ella were testing this simultaneity of time in her writing, it’s possible that her first disturbances are deliberate. What is sense but agreed-upon order, a separating of then and now?

The Japanese tea shop where Zoë works is in a part of the city near the Louvre, on a tiny street webbing out from the rue Sainte-Anne. The idea to consult her came from a conversation we had about Nulle part ailleurs. She told me she wished she had titled it in English: Nowhere Else. She liked that the coordinate of presence—now/here—contained its opposite. We remember and imagine all the time, she said, but these pasts and futures don’t exist except in the present from which we access them. Her way of collapsing photographed and painted space in her artwork was inspired by a book she’d read about religious philosophies of time. It discussed presentism as elaborated in the most arcane of the tripitakas, the Abhidhamma. Zoë said she retained only what interested her and was far from expert, but she agreed to talk with me further.

The tea shop is airy and bright, and the shelves of the tasting room are lined with ceramic bowls, teapots, yuzu vinegars, sake, and tea canisters. An English-speaking couple watches Zoë mix matcha with a wooden whisk, her polished nails matching the bright pink of her lips. The couple detects herbaceous notes in the tea. Zoë tells them they have sensitive palates and should return for a sake tasting.

—Herbaceous, she says when the couple leaves.

We laugh, and she makes us a pot of sencha.

—At first, I thought Siobhán hired you to work in the gallery. She needs help desperately and won’t accept it from anyone but Aidan when he’s here. You’re not doing that, are you?

I frown. Zoë never asked what I was doing, so I assumed Siobhán had told her. And Siobhán had never asked for discretion. I didn’t have the sense our work was secret.

—I’m not a gallerist, I say. Siobhán hired me to find her daughter.

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