Fiction Short Story
The Color of the Year 2022
It’s blithe, seductive, yet innocent. The color of soulfulness, it has been chosen for its ability to give people hope.
It is neither the so-called real color, nor the conventional color that truly colors the object . . . Life itself creates contrasts, without which art is unimaginable and incomplete. —Marc Chagall
High in the Chartreuse mountains, between a pair of birch trees garlanded with moss and lichen, she touches snow for the first time in three years, unlacing her hiking boots and carefully stepping onto the pure white patch. Her toes sink into the snow and grip the mossy rock beneath it, and she steadies herself, placing one hand on each tree. The morning sun breaks through the clouds drifting and dreaming over the peaks. She thinks then that she was always meant to be here at this moment, sharing the roots of these trees and drinking in the snow of the Alps. It has taken her six hours of flight from New York to London, another two hours to Lyon, another hour and a half bus ride to Grenoble, then four hours of hiking in the mud to see this. To touch the purest thing created by the sky. She laughs, sniffles. Small tears leak out of the corners of her eyes, spreading a wash of mascara over her face.
From beneath her feet, the Chartreuse range rolls out and joins with the Vercors on the right and the Belledonne on the left, their benevolent blue peaks hatted with snow. A pale sun looms, and an icy wind sifts the meringue-like brume in the basin between the mountains. The vertiginous silence goes through her jacket and pricks her in the ribs. It’s almost painful, this happiness, hovering just a shade above loneliness. She holds an imaginary brush in her right hand and paints the sky.
But the snow disappears quickly on the way down, and the trail manages to be both boggy and jagged; she has to pause several times to kick off the bowl-sized mud crusting on her boots. She had heard that even the sides of Mont Blanc are running brown with melted glaciers. When the highest peak in Europe runs out of snow, where and how many hours will she have to fly to see winter?
As she wonders, a flame-colored fox jumps off a cliff and dashes right in front of her onto the trail. It’s surprisingly huge—the size of a broad husky, with twice as much tail. Before she can cry out, it turns around and leaps effortlessly away.
When she’s collected herself and begun walking again, she hears a noise from behind her and thinks the animal might have returned. It turns out to be a cross-country runner, sprinting recklessly down the muddy, rocky trail. She steps to the side and he gives her a nod in acknowledgment, disappearing like a train skipping an unimportant station. Then, because she’s just had a moment , and because she hasn’t talked to anyone in almost a whole day, she shouts to the back of his head: “J’ai vu un renard là-bas!”
At first she thinks he’s going to keep running, but he slows down and stops, breathing hard. She thinks he throws her an accusatory look over his shoulder; he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed. “Pardon?” he growls hoarsely.
She instantly regrets her overture, but it is too late to take it back. “I saw a fox just now. It ran down from that cliff, turned around and disappeared back up there,” she says haltingly in French, trudging toward him.
“Ah, they live around here. I see them sometimes.”
The runner trains his eyes on her face, and she wishes she hadn’t washed away her mascara with tears of joy. “It was much bigger than an American fox,” she stammers.
“That’s funny. Everything’s bigger in America except for foxes, apparently. And you weren’t scared?” He props his hands on his hips and shifting his weight imperceptibly to one side. Toward her, it seems.
“No. Not even a little bit.”
“You’re not scared hiking alone?” he asks again, insistently.
“No. Not even a little bit. Are you scared, running alone?”
He laughs, crinkling both his green eyes and his boyishly upturned nose. He’s wearing a pair of those black performance leggings that make most men look vulnerable or confused, like they pulled on their girlfriend’s yoga pants by accident. On him, the spandex is a supple armor, stretching over a body accustomed to either agility or relaxation and nothing in between. All nonchalant, Spartan grace, she thinks. If she hadn’t stopped him, that body would have kept running forever.
“No, I’m not scared either. On se ressemble,” he says, extending a hand. “Benoit, enchanté.”
“Enchantée.” She accepts the warm hand. Immediately, she thinks, why here, how now, what next, where to.
*
She measures out the days in Grenoble not by coffee spoons but by cups of herbal tea. Each time she goes over to his place, that’s what he serves her. Benoit isn’t like most Frenchmen. He doesn’t drink coffee or wine. He doesn’t smoke. He’s a professional climber, so with it comes all the training and the healthy lifestyle. So after they have sex, after she licks his perfect abs and squeezes her thighs around his taut hips, they have herbal tea in his kitchen. She begins to associate the flavor of lavender and licorice with making love.
Benoit hands her a mug and sits across from her, leaning back in his chair. He asks her questions, and she tries her best to not mix up her masculins and feminins. “Why did you leave New York? And what are you doing in France?”
She wonders how she can describe the changes in her city. When she first moved there, she had gotten a one-bedroom apartment for $800 a month in Bushwick. New York is a harder place to live now than before: the tropical nights, the millionaire condos over rat-infested subways, the art crowd gnawing on the bones thrown by the Guggenheims and the Gagosians. There was the circle of self-actualizing, coke-loving and costume-wearing Burners, of which her Brooklyn friends were a part. There was the circle of cool, young curators who had done their PhDs at Harvard or Penn and were now working at MoMA, like her friends from college. There was an art-tech contingent. For example, a guy had gotten funding from one of the G’s and created some startup that now employed hundreds of people in an entire glass-walled building in SoHo. It was changing the world, according to the founder, whom she dated once upon a time. These groups gathered and dispersed across town, mesmerized by silver body paint or EDM or 3D-printed fungi or crystal dildos or scent-art journeys, and she didn’t understand any of it. Didn’t like any of it.
And then the seasons changed. First, the summers became unbearably long and hot, stretching from April to October and then March to November. She slept completely naked over her sheets while the temperature never dipped below ninety degrees for twelve straight weeks. She felt drained waiting for autumn to begin, but the bright foliage never came; the leaves went straight from green to a mothy brown.
Then, two years ago, she realized a whole winter had passed without a single snowfall. No one else remarked on it. Her friends looked strangely at her while they dined al fresco in shorts on Valentine’s Day. Why was she complaining? they asked. It was nice not having to wear a coat.
Every morning, she woke up and wondered whether it was worth making another painting given the circumstances. Before deciding to leave, she hadn’t worked on anything new in over three months.
It’s all too hard to explain in French, so she gives another answer.
“I realized that in New York, I was never going to fall in love again.”
*
This is how she spends her month in the mountains: Some evenings, she goes over to Benoit’s house and he makes her dinner. Sometimes she cooks instead, and he wraps his arms around her from behind in a way that makes her feel adored, if not quite loved. While watching a movie, he massages her bare back in a new way, catching the flesh between his forefinger and thumb and slowly rolling up her spine like the world’s tiniest snowplow. She helps him stretch his hip flexors. He takes her on a night hike with headlamps and they gaze down on Grenoble, a tapestry of lights beneath their feet. She introduces him to American music of more recent vintage than Pink Floyd. The fact that he approves of her musical taste excites her. They listen to her playlists, one earbud apiece, bundled under a Marseillaise quilt in front of an ancient fireplace.
Two years ago, she realized a whole winter had passed without a single snowfall. No one else remarked on it. “So what are you going to do after Grenoble?” he asks when the music stops, too casually. She takes careful note of his lack of anxiety.
“I’m going to the Côte d’Azur. Nice, Antibes.”
“And then after that?”
She has been thinking about this herself, wondering whether she will return to New York. She has already imagined, dozens of times, living in this country house with its French-blue shutters and spawning beautiful half-French children. But she’d rather run a stake through her heart than let him know how often this scene has played inside her brain.
“I guess I’ll go back to New York. Will you come visit me?”
The way he looks at her makes her regret wanting to extend whatever it is they’re having. Once, a critic from an online art journal wrote that she wills her paintings to go beyond the canvas. At the time, the comment had satisfied and flattered her. Now she thinks that it’s her fatal weakness. She is always confusing the boundaries between what’s real and what’s not; always crossing the line and then getting broken, never mind the lessons from the past.
Benoit doesn’t like saying things he doesn’t mean. He takes in her hopeful brown eyes, high cheeks strewn with freckles, the shadowy hair that falls across her face. From the first time they met, what has struck him most about her is how unafraid she is of anything. Even now, when her whole face is red from nerves, she actually seems braver than he is when he’s free-climbing in Mont Blanc. Although he hasn’t seen a single one of her paintings, he is certain she is an artist from the way she sees the world, her amazement at life. He is amazed by her .
But is it love when it is so finite? He isn’t sure.
“You’re so, so beautiful, ma jolie américaine,” he says, which is how he really feels. He takes her hand, plants a kiss on her smiling lips.
*
The Cape of Nice, she thinks, is like a white sailboat jutting out into a sea of memories. She stands at the prow, her hands falling open to the sun-scented breeze. Her eyes are full of bright rocks and deep emerald waves.
She strips down to her bathing suit and picks her way to a cove. There is an iron ladder fixed to the side of the cliff, its last step hovering about four feet above the water. She dangles for a moment, and then lets go—disappearing into the sea, leaving in her wake a circle of shimmer like spilled sugar.
After swimming around for a while, she comes back up the tangle of rocks. Someone else has arrived there, she notes with displeasure. It’s a man working on a laptop, which feels insulting to the scenery. From his expensive shirt, crisp cotton pants, and fake-spiritual bracelet, she thinks he looks like an American.
Every morning, she woke up and wondered whether it was worth making another painting. In the water, she thinks about Benoit. He never did promise to visit her or even to keep in touch, other than almost reluctantly trading Facebook accounts on the very last night. It crushes her, not just his indifference but the unfairness of the whole affair, like exchanging dollars for Euro and seething at the reduced sum. But of course, the money changer asks, that was the deal to which she agreed, wasn’t it?
So she thinks about him, his cedary smell and his dark-blond locks of hair, because she knows that the sea will help exorcise his memories. In February, the water is cold, so she can’t really hold any thoughts other than keeping up her body temperature. Love is too complicated to contemplate, and in due time it is physically overcome. It seeps out of her and rejoins the sea.
The American with the fake-spiritual bracelet is there when she comes back up, dripping in ever-paler shades of green water. She has wondered whether the intense cobalt of the cove could be retained in smaller and smaller amounts, until the drops left on her body sparkle with the tiniest particles of green. The American takes a sip from his coconut water without lifting his eyes from the laptop. The whole time she is toweling off and getting dressed, he doesn’t glance once in her direction. He forces her to leave by not acknowledging she exists.
When the church bells ring at nine o’clock, she wanders down to the flower market in Cours Saleya. The vendors arrange into perfect pyramids the glistening strawberries and the tightly wound endives like sealed letters. The gnarly, huge lemons from Corsica tumble around in wooden crates; anemones and ranunculuses are beaming next to topiary kumquat trees.
She pauses in front of a young Senegalese who has spread a piece of fabric on the slight emptiness between the florist and the fishmonger. Sitting cross-legged, he is carving animal figurines out of a piece of wood. A menagerie of elephants, zebras, lions, and rhinos quietly stands guard around him, marking a tablecloth-sized continent. Wood chips fall away and roll around his feet like popcorn. She considers getting a piece, but walks away because she has once read somewhere that Westerners buying these figurines is causing a massive destruction of a rare and precious African tree.
A few blocks from the market, she walks straight into a miraculous little art supply store. The sign outside in flowing cursive claims that the shop was founded in 1850. In a glass cabinet filled with vintage paint tubes, she discovers a real Sennelier emerald green watercolor from the 1920s. It’s still usable, the shopkeeper assures her.
The next morning, she sets up her easel on the white rock and carefully squeezes the Sennelier onto her travel-sized pan. The coil of paint is surprisingly rich and supple out of the century-old tube, like a small lizard. On paper, it becomes translucent and reflective, as though she is painting with seawater. She thinks, careful, careful , even as she falls under its spell.
Her hand moves, following the direction of her eyes, bypassing her mind. When it’s finished, she stares at it, dazed. She’s never painted anything like it before.
“How much?” says a voice from behind her, in English.
She turns around and sees that it’s the American with the fake-spiritual bracelet. He is gazing at her watercolor, his arms crossed over his chest.
“It’s not for sale. It’s for me,” she answers curtly in French. She has just realized he reminds her of the art-startup ex, down to the knuckle-sized silver ring that surely is from a life-changing trip to Latin America.
“Ah, I didn’t mean to bother you.” He switches to a perfectly bourgeois French. “I just really love this work. The composition, the energy. And this color is so . . . I can’t put a finger on it. What is it called?”
“It’s called emerald green. It was discovered in the early nineteenth century and was a favorite of all the Impressionists. Picasso used it during his Blue Period. But it’s been banned since the mid-twentieth century.”
He frowns. “Banned?”
“It’s very beautiful and very lethal. A mixture of copper and arsenic. Napoleon is said to have died from poisoning by his emerald-green wallpaper.”
He winces slightly, gesturing at her painting, and she enjoys his discomfort. “So what is this?” he asks.
“Well, nowadays you can find synthetic emerald green, or use cobalt or viridian. This, however . . . ” She smiles, her finger hovering above the paint coil in her pan. “It’s the real thing.”
“I’m now glad the painting is not for sale.” He smiles. It’s an objectively good-looking face, but somehow the expression hides rather than reveals who he is. She is familiar with that smile, knows how to play the game.
“After it’s dry, it can’t really harm you unless you have a thing for licking your art,” she tells him. “If you still want it after all I’ve told you, it’s yours. A gift.”
She is surprised by her friendliness to someone she has secretly despised for close to a week. It’s just that she’s trying to fill a void, she reasons. She needs distractions. He isn’t what she wants, but at least she wouldn’t be alone.
Still smiling, he says, “Volontiers”— I’ll take it.
*
His name is Leo and he’s not an American, as she had guessed, but French-German—originally from Strasbourg. After Sciences-Po, he got his master’s in engineering at Stanford and worked for Google before founding his own startup. This company is doing so well that it is no longer accurate to call it a startup; it has offices in both Americas, Asia, and all over Europe. It’s headquartered in Sophia Antipolis, the so-called French Silicon Valley just outside of Nice. All this he explains over dinner, where candlelight dances over the black-polished mirrors and the giant marble urn of mimosa flowers in bloom.
Once, a critic from an online art journal wrote that she wills her paintings to go beyond the canvas. She thinks that it’s her fatal weakness. “So what is it that your company does?” she asks, setting down her glass of champagne. “Changing the world, right?”
“Ah, you’re making fun. But yes, we are changing the world. Tell me, what is it that Google did that no one else had ever done before, in the history of humanity?”
“Changed the way we find information?”
“Very good. But it’s more than that. It’s changed how we get information, but also what learning means—even how our brain thinks.”
“And your company is going to be the next Google.”
He leans back into the banquet and smiles. “Better than Google. I said they changed the human brain. My company is going to change the human consciousness.”
“Aren’t they the same?”
“No, of course not. You didn’t paint with your brain, did you?”
She blushes and concedes defeat. “So how are you going to change human consciousness, exactly?”
“We’re working on a project. A new invention,” he says, and she isn’t sure whether it’s just the candles or something else that’s making his eyes glow so suddenly. This is the first expression that reveals something about him.
“Listen, Leo .” She stabs her fork into the bowl of linguini, and laughs without smiling. “What I wish for is technology that solves real problems, not some new way to order food or share selfies with strangers. Don’t you see? The world is being destroyed as we sit here in this chic restaurant drinking champagne.”
“In what sense?”
“Have you read any papers? Seen the news? California, which used to be as beautiful as the Côte d’Azur, is burned to a crisp. They’re saying we will have an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the next year. There’s the giant garbage patch the size of China, floating in the middle of the Pacific. What about the millions of refugees from the famine and drought in Africa and the Middle East getting stuck in border camps or drowning in the Mediterranean? And it’s not like Europe is free from harm—last summer, Berlin was 120 degrees, as hot as Baghdad.”
“These problems have always existed throughout time,” he says, taking another sip. “All you can do is play your part and wish for the best.”
“It’s too late for that now. Say we manage somehow to survive as a species. There won’t be any beauty in it. I would like to see it all before the world ends . . . that’s why I’m here.”
“As for beauty, that’s a matter of opinion. But the world won’t end.” Leo motions the server for the check. “Technology will advance exponentially in the next few years. We’re about to see a massive economic and societal disruption—the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There will be winners and losers, just like always. But this is not the end. Come,” he adds, rising. “I’ll show you something.”
From the first time they met, what has struck him most about her is how unafraid she is of anything. When the valet fetches his black Ferrari, she thinks they are going to his place. The car accelerates in an explosion of speed, growling lustily. Leo changes gears and turns up the music, finding sensorial pleasure from manipulating the machine to his liking. When it is finally just so, he thrums his fingers on the wheel and cracks a smile in her direction. To their right is the glistening black sea, breaking up the moonlight into tiny gold shards. A hillside park appears to their left. He stops the car near the entrance that says Grotte du Lazaret, jumps out of the driver’s seat, and motions for her to follow him to a locked gate.
“This place is closed,” she whispers. “We should go back.”
“Where’s the fun in that? Besides, I have a key given to me by a friend who works here.”
He opens the gate and guides her inside, his hand resting on the small of her back. They walk for a while on a garden path leading up the hill. The outdoor sculptures of animals seem to be gazing eerily at them.
“Where are you taking me?” she asks.
“You said the world is ending. I’m going to show you that it’s not.” They stop at an entrance to a cave, also gated and bolted. “We’re here.”
Another key opens the lock, and mercifully the first thing he does is turn on the lights. He motions for her to follow him to the mouth of the cave, which is flooded by orange light.
In front of the stalactite walls, there are some pointy rocks that hardly look like anything—but video projections recreate how they were once used to kill and skin reindeer and woolly rhinoceros. Holograms of the earliest bipeds rise in Africa seven million years ago and follow the animals into Europe. The sun burns orange over the Alps, its slopes covered in a fine down of savannah grass. The grotto is right on the Mediterranean and fills with water as sea level rises. The Ice Age comes and the water goes down, exposing the grotto to the humanoids that shelter in it between hunting for elephants, hippos, and giant deer. In a snowstorm, the lions, the leopards, the spotted hyenas, the wolves and the bears eye their human prey—but humans are dangerous; they have fire. The snow recedes again and the conifers are replaced by oak and palm. The water level rises and deposits another layer of sediment inside the grotto. The stalactite drips down over the bones of animals and humans, entombing them for more than a hundred thousand years. And on and on.
“So you see,” Leo says, turning her to face him. “The South of France has been as hot as Africa and as cold as the Arctic over the millions of years. Yes, all those Paleolithic humans have gone extinct, and so have the animals. But the Earth is separate from what lives on it. No matter what happens to us, it will regenerate.”
“So you do think we will all die.”
She steps closer to him. He pulls her in by the waist and slides his hand underneath her T-shirt in one motion—there is no tenderness nor urgency in that touch, only the feeling that they both know what they are doing and are watching from above. Since she offered him her painting, weren’t they both in complete understanding?
“Death is what makes life interesting,” he says, just before covering her mouth with his.
*
It’s almost ten o’clock when she wakes up in her apartment. She makes coffee and sinks back in bed, replaying the scenes from last night in the cave. It was the kind of curiosity-based sex that she used to have in her early twenties when she knew, going in, that she wouldn’t come. He didn’t seem to care, either. But for what it was worth, they both performed the hell out of it, as if the millennia of fossilized sediment weren’t shredding their backs black and blue. It’s always nice to get out there and have some unusual sex, she reasons.
She wonders if she should text Leo and realizes they haven’t exchanged their contact information. Instead, she sees that Benoit has sent her messages late last night, asking how she’s enjoying Nice. She decides to wait to respond.
She puts on a newish bikini and a flattering dress and heads down to the Cape, but Leo is not there. She cuts off swimming early and goes down to the flower market instead. The mimosas are in season, and people are walking around with a bouquet of sunny yellow blossoms tucked under their arms or sticking out of their bags. Next to the flower vendor, she sees the Senegalese wood sculptor on his knees, picking up his elephants and rhinos. Around him, three policemen are standing and gesturing bureaucratically at the wood shavings tossing around in the wind. The sculptor doesn’t protest or show any emotion as he gathers his animals inside a garbage bag. No one seems to remark on his departure, not the flower vendors nor the fishmonger next to whom the sculptor had positioned himself.
She thinks that even her sadness is cheap, believes that she should at least be decent enough to not buy her way out with casual sympathy. Still, all the holding in of emotions makes her feel like a scuba diver taking measured breaths out of an oxygen tank. She can almost hear her own heart beating hard against the pressure.
“Say we manage somehow to survive as a species. There won’t be any beauty in it. I would like to see it all before the world ends.” When she sees the black Ferrari in front of her apartment, she feels more buoyed than she would have guessed.
“What are you doing here?” she asks Leo, peering into the front seat.
“I thought I would say hi. And see your other works, if that’s possible,” he says, only just lifting his eyes from his phone—as if she has come to his house to bother him.
But once inside the apartment, he turns out to be an appreciative visitor. She hasn’t brought many tools and oil paints take too long to dry, so she’s been mostly doing watercolors. She has felt increasingly drawn to the idea of synesthesia, so on her canvas the sound of waves dragging on pebbles and the peal of church bells has become aquamarine concentric circles enclosed in a yellow pyramid, and the resinous aroma of mimosas is a squiggle of green-earth paint.
“And what does emerald green signify?” Leo asks, pausing in front of a large piece washed almost completely in the pigment and nothing else. There’s something in it that makes it impossible to look at anything else. It seems to exude its own radiance, even in the waning light.
“That one is a secret,” she says.
Leo smiles and re-crosses his arms. “You’re a mysterious woman. That’s fine, keep your secrets. But even if you don’t tell me what it means, I’d like to buy it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I want to buy this piece, and all the other pieces too if you are okay with it.”
“I haven’t named my price,” she says. “It could be very high.”
“Try me.”
She digs in her memory for how her pieces sold at the last exhibit in Greenpoint. She decides on a number halfway between those prices and what she thinks he would pay for a first-class ticket to one of his side offices. He nods, and nods again when she names the prices of the smaller pieces, and calls his assistant, Myrta, who will arrange the wire transfer to her account.
“It’s probably not what I should say, but I’m still not really sure why you’re so interested in my work,” she says as she carries the tubes of rolled paintings out to his car.
“The short answer is that they inspire me. But it’s more complicated than that.” He dumps the tubes inside the trunk and slams it shut. “If you really want to know, come with me for a drive.”
Theirs is the only car on the road to Sophia Antipolis at six o’clock on a Friday evening. Sophia, meaning wisdom, and Antipolis, the Greek name for Antibes, explains Leo. And so the research park is now the center of technology, bioengineering, and entrepreneurship in France, attracting companies and talent from all over Europe. As they park the car, bats fly by, swirling like a windmill over the darkening trees. They walk along a concrete footpath, and it dawns on her that his office isn’t just a building, but a whole campus of white edifices tastefully arranged throughout the scrubby woodland.
In the last light of the dusk, she sees something cross their path and disappear into the bushes. She grabs ahold of his arm. “Did you see that, Leo? It looked like a fox.”
“Yes, they live in these woods,” he says, unfazed.
She shudders. It’s colder here in the woods than in Nice. “But it wasn’t red-brown, like the one I saw in the Alps.”
“Because it’s dark right now. Here we are—our lab.”
He hovers his knuckle-sized silver ring on the security scanner next to a glass door. It slides open as the interior lights up, revealing mid-century leather sofas and recliners positioned around a fireplace. Leo explains the rooms they pass through, each one sleekly furnished with monitors, wooden blinds, and Italian cantilever chairs. She doesn’t see anything even approaching a lab until they reach a concrete door, where he hovers his ring over a scanner again.
When the concrete door opens, they walk into a white room surrounded by glass. At first she thinks the walls give out to the forest outside. Then she realizes they are enclosures.
Leo smiles. “Sorry. I didn’t want to give it away when you saw the fox.”
In each enclosure, she sees an animal—a fox, a boar, a cat, a rat, an owl—sleeping or stirring restlessly. They are all the same color, which she has never seen before. It has never been seen before by anyone . If she had to describe it, she would say it falls halfway between green and pink. The beauty of the animals is terrifying.
“We’ve invented a completely new color in the history of humanity,” Leo says, his voice gleeful. “This is a color that can only be achieved by bioengineering on a living being. Just like something organic can’t be metallic, and acid green doesn’t exist in nature . . . ”
“So why didn’t you use insects, like carmine for red?”
The fox in its enclosure is pressing its snout against the glass—looking at her , she thinks. With irises of phantomic brilliance.
“We tried a lot of insects. And plants, too, as a matter of fact. But none of those worked.” He shakes his head, exasperated. “It appears that the pigment can only be created on beings with souls. That’s the element required for this chemical reaction—that, and warm blood. Like copper and arsenic.”
“We’ve invented a completely new color in the history of humanity.” The owl has begun to flap around in its enclosure, and she feels sick to her stomach. “So what does this have to do with changing human consciousness?” she asks.
Leo is no longer smiling his concealing smile. His impatience shows. He has gambled years of his life to this sui generis endeavor; and the moment he shows anyone some animals in cages—a very nice plate-glass enclosure, by the way—they accuse him of barbarity.
But what he is doing is far more humane than creating a single hamburger patty. This painter, with her penchant for deadly pigment, seemed to understand the tradeoff between pain and beauty—that everything sublime has a price. He had found that sexy, along with her gameness.
Now he thinks she sounds just like an American.
“This is consciousness itself,” he says. “Don’t you understand?”
*
When Benoit realizes he is going to be in New York for his cousin’s wedding, he sends her a message. It makes him rather anxious—they haven’t seen or talked to each other in ages—but she readily replies. Would she like to see him for drinks one day? he asks. Yes, she would.
Now he is wandering around SoHo, in the rough vicinity of the hotel bar that she has suggested. There is something strange here, he thinks as he loses himself in the cobblestone streets slick with a tropical downpour. The hours seem to pass at a different pace. It feels as though he has just woken up in his hotel room, but it’s already late afternoon. This has happened every day of the trip, although he hasn’t overwhelmed his schedule and has stuck to his usual habits.
After a while, he stops thinking it’s the jet lag, this state of perpetual disorientation. To stave off the malaise, he had earlier made tea in his room and sipped it slowly, thinking of home. Despite the heat, he decides to order another one in a cafe buzzing with scents. Pu-erh-fect Purity is said to detoxify the brain of heavy metals. The young woman at the counter also suggests Peppermint Choco Chai-ngri-la, to help balance the chakras while celebrating Christmas.
As he holds a paper cup of steaming tea in his hand, sweat beading on his back from the humid air, Benoit realizes something. When the Americans shifted the months of the year—eliminated February and March, halved October and November and doubled June, July, and August—in accordance with climate savings, they had actually changed the way time runs. Here-and-now in New York is not the same here-and-now in France, separated by a nominal six-hour difference, but a totally unsynchronized place-and-time, dilated like a clock in outer space.
Twenty years ago, when Benoit visited London, he’d heard the birds start singing at exactly four a.m. In France, however, they start singing at precisely 5:00 a.m. Of course this is because, despite the two time zones with a difference of one hour, the birds of England and of France recognized the single right moment to start singing. They were simply side-by-side on the same merry-go-round.
Quantum theory suggests that now, birds and people of New York are living on an entirely different merry-go-round. But not just them— all these places of the world have fractured off into separate realities. This is only observable to an outsider, and no one else streaming through the fetid streets of New York appears disoriented or oppressed as he is.
He means to ask her about this. Perhaps this is why he is here, thinking of her—someone from his past—as though she is in his present. It finally dawns on him that he feels sorry for the way he treated her back then. He knew how she loved him, or could love him, and pretended he couldn’t see it. As if it weren’t perfectly visible—impossible to hide, like love always is.
A scorching twilight descends outside the cafe. He stops walking when his eyes get caught up by a strange, ineffably beautiful color filling a shop window like a fog. It’s displayed in the next boutique as well. Clothes, furniture, shoes, carpets, phones, and smart homes, all radiant in this ecstatic hue. In a chic ladies’ boutique, there is even a fur coat in the new color, although it would be far too warm to wear almost anywhere in the world.
Benoit shivers, wipes the sweat from his brow. He reads the block letters stenciled on the window:
Meet Knip, color of the year 2022. It’s blithe, seductive, yet innocent, symbolizing happiness and trust in the future. The color of soulfulness, it has been chosen for its ability to give people hope. It’s now almost five o’clock, their appointed meeting hour. He imagines her waiting for him at the hotel bar, but somehow finds it difficult to turn away from the shop window. He has the most irrational desire to bury himself in that coat. It would fill him with something he has lost forever—and he has lost much over the years. If he could just keep looking at it, he might recover the man he used to be, the man he once wished to become. The few people he had truly loved without cynicism. Frosted fall mornings that had yawned slowly over the mountains, glaciers on Mont Blanc, snow on Christmas Eve.
But now he takes a deep breath and wrenches himself away, turning his back on his dreams. He runs and doesn’t stop until he’s standing by the gleaming glass windows of the hotel. He sees her at the corner table, checking her watch every minute, hiding her nervousness behind tiny sips of wine and hair like a waterfall at night. She’s been waiting for him for a very long time.
