passed differently; words or gestures meant more than themselves. If you’ve never had this experience—but who has not been visited by love, laughing?—then you can’t understand. And if you have, you don’t need me to say another word.
4
In late January, or perhaps early February, Sirena began to build her world in earnest: Wonderland. She’d spent the fall making the smaller bits—the soap and aspirin flowers in all sizes and in a rainbow of colors, the rainstorm of slivered mirror shards that would hang from the ceiling on near-invisible wires, stored in bags and boxes in her end of the L.
Now what had looked like an artist’s equivalent of doodling was revealed to be purposeful: she unfolded for me, one early evening when we both stayed late, her blueprint. Like being shown the inside of her head, it made those little currents, those jolts, tickle all down my spine. This was surely an intimacy greater than any nakedness: to see this page spread out upon the worktable, with its erasures and its smudges and, given that it was Sirena’s, a coffee ring or two, and all of it overlaid by her notes to herself, tiny, tiny insect-writing possible with only the sharpest of pencils and legible only, by anyone other than herself, with a magnifying glass.
She was building a Wonderland for everyone. Each of us would be Alice. And while it was, in part, about the mysteries of the imagination, it was also about a spiritual discovery of the existing world: Sirena was mixing together Lewis Carroll and the vision of a twelfth-century Muslim named Ibn Tufail, who wrote a story about a boy growing up alone on a desert island, discovering everything—including himself, and God—for the first time.
Sirena wasn’t, like me, constrained by reality, by what actually was or had been. She took on storybook worlds, plundering other people’s imaginations but not their histories. Maybe it’s what made her—what makes her—a real artist in the eyes of the world, whereas I count as a spinster with a hobby, the sort of person about whom appalling words like “zany” are used. But there’s nothing zany about it. My Emily Dickinson room is exactly that: Emily Dickinson’s room, constructed to replicate as precisely as possible the room as historians have determined it actually was, but in miniature. Always, I have an engagement with Death—because my art isn’t, after all, about what is or what might be, but about what was. You could call each of my boxes a shrine.
Sirena, on the other hand, is engaged with the life force. We all want that, really. It’s what attracts us: someone who opens doors to possibility, to the barely imagined. Someone who embraces the colors and textures, the tastes and transformations—someone who embraces, period. We’re all after what’s juicy, what breathes. If you’re really clever, like Sirena, then you create a persona—or maybe, more disturbingly, you become a person—who, while seeming impressively, convincingly to eschew fakery, is in fact giving people, very consciously, exactly what they want. Wouldn’t you call the person who builds a Wonderland—a Wonderland that you can see and touch and smell, that both is and is not Alice’s Wonderland, and is also some twelfth-century Islamic Robinson Crusoe’s Wonderland, is both East and West, Then and Now, Imaginary and Real, and somehow, because of its freedom in not being wearingly faithful, becomes above all your Wonderland, or yours and Sirena’s at once, as though you were intimate with her in some way, wouldn’t you call such a person a Purveyor of Dreams? You would, and some Frenchie critic subsequently did, and if you’re wondering what could possibly be wrong with being a Purveyor of Dreams—I mean, you could say, isn’t that what Art is for?—you should keep in mind that the desire to be that, to do that—to be the fittest at artistic survival—requires ruthlessness. Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person. Which would explain why I don’t seem to make the cut.
That evening, when we stood over her blueprint and I marveled, she asked me again for help. It was only a couple of weeks after the babysitting request, because I remember that I’d been to take care of Reza only twice, then, and there was, in my heart, a particular rush of thankfulness to Sirena: this in addition to all my other complicated passion, because I thought in some way she’d finally given me a son, my