Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,72

know that what I see matches what you see when we both say red. Comparisons of redness aren’t possible. Redness is ineffable: it has to be experienced to be known.”

“Big deal,” Jack said. “Perception is variable. If you perceive a speeding car to be forty feet away when it’s really four feet away, and I perceive it to be four feet away, I’ll jump, and you’ll get hit. Relative perception doesn’t change the position of the car, and it doesn’t affect the color of a rose. The rose doesn’t care what color you think it is.”

“I’m not saying that physical absolutes don’t exist,” Dan said. “You’re right—the rose is the color it is. I’m saying absolute perception doesn’t exist. That no one interpretation is more valid than another. Like redness, or jazz, or—”

“Nationality,” I added. “Or race.”

“What’s your point, Daniel?” Jack wanted to know.

“Well, I’m just thinking about the candle again.”

“That’s it!” Jack swatted at Dan. “Get rid of that fucking thing!”

“I’m just saying,” Dan said, defending himself with crisscrossed hands, “Evie has a point: art doesn’t have to be held accountable to accuracy, and there’s no one right way to look at things. Clearly, the candle’s artist was not looking to ‘prove’ a bird.”

“In terms of the ‘ineffable,’ we’re not talking about the birth experience here,” Jack said. “We’re talking about a piece of shit candle. Maybe there is no bird, but, for all we know, there was no artist either.”

Kate wanted to know what happened to the rose.

Jack said, “Exactly, Kate.”

And for a long time we were silent. I felt bad for Dan. It was nice of him to try to defend me, but he should have known better than to argue with Jack.

By three-thirty in the morning a curtain had closed on the house. The snow fit like a second house on the house, or a skin, and inside was bright without lights, snow bright. Shortly before Jack and Dan went home, Denny and Michelle arrived. I gave them my room, which was biggest. Michelle took my bed, and Denny took the floor, as usual, just lying flat on his back with his long legs crossed and his hands behind his head. It was a funny way to sleep, as though staring up at the clouds on a summer’s day.

All things through the living room window were pale cinder. My palms and cheeks left cool dripping circles on the frost-covered glass as I measured the frailness of the membrane that shielded me from the universe. I wondered by what accident of chance I’d been blessed with shelter. There were creatures whose only sanctuary was the flat valentine heart of night. If I looked, I believed I could see them, with their nestling necks and heavily lidded eyes, huddling in clusters between twigs and rocks, sharing fur and feathers, breathing in shallow puffs to make heat.

“You’re seeking to control your world,” my mother speculated when I told her that I always wake up at night to look out the window.

I didn’t disagree, because my mother seldom fawns on me. When she does, she does so excessively and briefly, like a toddler mothering a baby doll. But, in fact, control is not a requirement of mine. It’s just that I’m in awe of the darkness, and reassured by it—its obstinacy, its unmovability—so many things happen there. Beyond the metropolis of any night is a new day—beyond that, a new night to follow. If you look, you can see them, stacked like panels one behind the other. If you listen, you can hear them move. And you can think about your part to play being so very small.

The phone rang. I lifted the receiver and walked with it from the desk to the front door, pulling until the cord could stretch no farther. I stepped out into the snow, my bare legs vanishing to the knee.

Was I clear from the sky? Was I a speck, a stain, a tiny spot to spoil the white—tiny, so tiny—the eye of a needle, the head of a pin, a nick in the void, aimed like a compass through the inaugural waste to the place I knew Rourke lay? Or did I not appear, was I incapable of being seen, was I nothing to no one? Was I wrong to feel manifest, wrong to feel seeable? Wrong to feel like a giant just to know he was alive?

“Evie,” Jack called. “You there?”

“Hey,” I said, barely audible.

“They’re still there,” he informed me, meaning the tracks.

I