My mother was only two years dead, that fall. It felt like an immense distance then, but now, in time’s accordion folds, the two events—my mother, unable even to move her head, wheezing in her elephantine breathing machine, sliding her eyes to the light, then closing them a final time; Reza at the supermarket, leaning over the bench to laugh at my spilled apples (who has upset the apple cart? I have, I have!)—seem almost contiguous. As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life’s passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar. My mother left here for an unknown there; and then Reza and Sirena and Skandar came to me.
9
The studio Sirena had found was deep inside Somerville, in a former warehouse, all brick and windows, abutting a largely disused railroad track and separated from it by a black stretch of garbage-strewn tarmac and a high chicken-wire fence, in which fluttered the tattered remnants of plastic bags, like flags of the apocalypse. Next door stood a functioning factory that produced millions of tiny Styrofoam beads, a particularly noxious undertaking that seemed destined to cause horrible cancers in those who worked there. Its chimneys blew clouds of chemical fumes into the neighborhood air, on account of which the insides of the studios harbored a lingering tang of melted plastic.
The building was a sprawling four-floor warren of such studios, some tiny, carved up by plywood and nails, and some vast, unspoiled. At the stairwell of each floor hung a huge mottled door, on rollers, like a giant’s door, sealable with a great metal bolt. These doors gave me the creeps: they, the creaking floors, the padlocked cubicles, enclosures hiding who knew what—possibly paints or jigsaws or sewing machines, but just as possibly acid baths or ax murderers. Who knew what violence could take place down the alley by the train tracks on a Sunday night? Even by day, the building looked abandoned.
Following Sirena and the toothless real estate agent to the third floor—I’d never seen a realtor so battered by life as Eddie Roy, a lanky, greasy-haired man in his late sixties, only two steps from the homeless shelter—I felt nothing but misgivings: the whiff of burning plastic with an undertone of mouse, or rat; the trippable hollows in the steps from decades of trudging feet; the dim, high bulbs shedding light like dust in the corridors; the spatter and rattle of the rain upon the windows and the windows in their ancient sockets, surely like the rattling of the agent’s teeth before they fell—it was all of a bleakness unimagined. I marveled that Sirena didn’t seem to notice, and more than that, she seemed actually excited, her crinkled eyes glittering.
“I hope you’ll like it too,” she confided, her hand again lightly on my arm, apparently unaware of my discomfort. “It is perfect.”
And once Eddie Roy fumbled the padlock at the end of the dank hall, I could see straight away that she was right. It was—even for two; especially for two—perfect. The space, L-shaped, was vast, the ceilings easily fourteen feet high. It had windows, huge, paned, smeared, wet windows, along both sides, windows with deep ledges and loose sashes—but somehow, in this room filled with white light even on that dark fall Saturday, unlike in the scary stairwell, the rattling sounds seemed alive, exciting, like the building breathing. The wood floors, scored and beaten, were beautiful, big enough to skate on. A filthy utility sink hung in the corner of the L, a long paint-spattered metal table beside it. Aside from this, the room, like an enormous, perfect incubator, was empty.
“Yes” was all I could say, and Eddie Roy grinned, revealing his dark gums.
The rent was a stretch, but I didn’t pause to worry about it then. I didn’t stop to question why Sirena wanted me there—that hers was quite possibly a mercenary invitation, a matter merely of halving the cost; that she may even have imagined our paths would barely cross. I saw the light and the space and felt the auguries gathered for me, to bring me back to life, back to my art. I didn’t ask myself if I needed the studio, if I would use it; I blocked from my mind the filthy alley, the echoing stairwell, the smell. All I could think was “Yes, yes, yes.”
We signed the lease by five o’clock, at Eddie Roy’s cinder-block office next to the chicken shop