The
changes began on a Wednesday, miércoles, the day that
sounds ike miracles.

My younger and only sister, Paula, had gone away, leaving the
apartment directly below mine to test the reach of her voice. I
stayed behind, with my eleven televisions, waiting for her to come
back.

I was teaching myself not to feel.

In the room with the televisions, there were no voices: I had
silenced them all. Instead I heard: a clock that ticked like a
snapping twig; the hum and push of cars passing on the street; a
neighbor's dog barking at the arrival of mail; the refrigerator
purring; my own breath, in and out. All the rhythms, in and out.
And inside my head: a melody from before, when my sister trained
her voice to soar, when I listened to the notes float and resonate.
I believed sometimes that I could see them.

Paula was auditioning, sending her hopeful music into the arms of
Copenhagen, Prague, Vienna-places I had never seen and never
expected to. I lived in the safe embrace of my apartment, whose
windows overlooked a park and a playground and a street.

I had collected broken televisions and fixed them, one by one,
sometimes guessing at the way to put things back together. I had no
manuals to follow, no map. I made good guesses, I had a feel for
those things, a kind of blind instinct. In the end, they all
worked, although the colors were never exactly right. Some were
always a little too green, others a little too violet. It didn't
matter. The scratchy growl of their voices didn't matter either,
because I often kept them very quiet. I spent most of my time
watching the images, letting them tell me stories. I let them
distract me from every terrible truth until nothing touched me at
all.

It was never a decision, never something I asked for. It simply
belonged to me, like a second skin. No. Like my only skin. There
was no choice, no letting go. And if there had been the chance to
refuse?

If I'd been asked?

I would still say yes.

It was my father's grief. It was what he gave to me, his only son.
He didn't mean to, but it came to me without his permission. He
gave up his language and his homeland, everything he could leave
behind. But he carried his sadness with him, under his skin like
blood. It wasn't his fault. He would have taken it back if he
could. But it was mine now, as if I had lived it all.

At times, even my dreams felt inherited, as if someone else had
owned them first. There would be dogs barking, murderous voices in
the distance, smoke filling the dark air.

His actual stories I never heard. My father held all the shards of
glass inside, where the edges cut him to pieces. When he looked at
me, it was not so much into my eyes as through them, as if I were a
clear window to the past. I looked back at him, I listened to the
wordless dark. What else could I do? I believed this was what I was
here for, to be the receiver of that gaze, to swallow it
completely. The broken glass? I swallowed that too.

Here is what I knew how to do: how to get away. How to save
myself by taking flight, by vanishing. My voice was a ticket of
escape, one way to anywhere but where I was. I tried to take my
brother, Julian, with me, to help him escape too, but it was more
weight than I could carry. Only one of us could make it out alive.
I didn't choose myself, not exactly, but the truth was, I had a
ticket and he didn't. I had to use it or die.

"I'm going away for a while," Paula had announced the previous
Monday over lunch. For once she didn't try to prepare me for a
shock. "I'm taking myself on a Grand Tour," she explained, her arms
flourishing, "hoping some opera company will give me a chance.
According to my agent, I'm going to become quite famous." She
sighed a little, eager or worried, I couldn't be sure.

"When?" I asked.

She came over to my chair and wrapped her slender arms around
herself wishing, I knew, that she could hug me with them but
knowing I couldn't bear it.

"I'll miss you too," she whispered, not looking at me. Then, in
another voice she added, "I leave this Wednesday, early in the
morning." She struck a dramatic pose, one arm up and one to the
side, her head thrown back to expose her ivory neck. "I'll write
you postcards," she said.

I would place them beneath my pillow and memorize them in my sleep.
I would dream in languages I'd never heard.

At the door of my apartment, leaving, Paula stopped with her hand
on the doorknob. "What's it like, Julian? What's it like to live
inside your body?" She leaned against the door frame, frowning a
little, waiting for me to answer.

I aimed my gaze above her head, at the place where the wall met the
ceiling. In two days she would be gone. "It's very quiet," I
said.

"Quiet," she repeated softly. From the corner of my eye I could see
her frown grow deeper. She didn't know what I was talking
about.

"What's inside yours?" I asked her.

She shrugged and said, "Music."

I nodded. "Think of plants," I said. "They're breathing and
growing, eating and drinking. We just can't hear them."

Paula looked at me, and I tried to look back, tried to stay right
there with her. She was far enough away that I couldn't see the
color of her eyes.

"No wonder you have to be so careful," she said. "They'd have you
for breakfast out there."

"Who?" I asked, although I knew who.

"All of them," Paula said, shaking her head. "Every goddamn
one."

Every goddamn one, I silently repeated. Then out loud I said, "I
wonder what I'd taste like," and Paula flashed that wide-open smile
of hers.

"Like sweet potatoes," she said.

"In bocca al lupo," I said to Julian before I left. Mouth of the
wolf. It was backstage code from the Italians, their way of saying
break a leg. I blew a kiss into the air, not aiming at his face but
somewhere high, over his head, where he wouldn't be afraid of
it.

"Forget the wolf," he said back to me the way he was supposed to,
the signal for courage and faith. But Julian needed it more than I
did. He must have thought I was always leaving him, as if it were
easy for me. I opened doors and slammed them behind me, never
letting myself check if anything had cracked from the
blow.

On the morning of Paula's flight to Europe, I stood by the window
in the early light and watched a white taxicab pull up in front of
our building. Paula stood beside the trunk while the driver loaded
her luggage, and a breeze lifted the ends of her dark green scarf
as she turned to look up at my window. Her lips were painted the
color of raspberries. She waved and smiled, tucking the scarf into
the collar of her coat. I put my hand flat against the smooth glass
and held it there. Paula disappeared behind the opaque windows of
the taxi, and then the taxi disappeared too. Below me, the ginkgo
tree was full of green, fluttering its fan-shaped leaves.

I adjusted all the sets, fine-tuning their brightness and vertical
hold, wiping the electric dust from their screens. I turned up the
volume for a while, filling my room with too many voices, all of
them and none of them talking to me. Inside, where I lived, it was
still very quiet.

My earliest memory is the sound of crying-my father waking up
from a nightmare. Or was it my brother? A nameless sobbing in the
dark. Julian told me I cooed like a bird before I learned to speak;
I made my mouth into an O and I began, with no reason, to
sing.

When I was still very young, before my mother died, we kept a pair
of canaries in a cage by the kitchen window; at night, the cage was
covered with a towel. Such a simple script: In the daylight, they
sang, and at night, they slept. I used to wonder if they knew that
outside the window lay a world they could never reach.

At exactly one o'clock on that Wednesday of Paula's departure, a
cola-skinned woman came to my door with a lunch tray. I had been
warned by my sister to expect her; Paula knew better than to
surprise me twice in one week. Still, though I'd already unlatched
the door for her, I felt unprepared for her arrival, needing to
back away and sit again in my leather chair. I was holding my
breath, waiting for her to go away.

Standing in the doorway, before she entered the apartment, she took
a slow look around. I found out later that she was taking
photographs in her mind of where everything belonged, even me in my
chair, even the way the cords of the televisions snaked across the
floor. She was taking care of Paula's apartment for the month, and
she was bringing me a sandwich for lunch. Paula had shown her just
how much mustard to spread, just how to place the pieces of cut
bread on the plate, how to fold the napkin. Without the design on
the plate I couldn't eat, I couldn't even take a bite.

He could drown in a glass of water, the woman thought.

It was what she told me much later, that this was her first thought
when she saw me. But what she said out loud was, "My name is
Sola."

I guessed her to be close to Paula's age, maybe thirty, but I
wasn't about to study her face, even from safely across the room.
Instead, I imagined myself as she must have seen me: pale and
elongated, my brown hair unevenly trimmed, my disheveled clothing,
my sleeves too short, exposing my bony wrists. On Paula, the
related features were so photogenic: liquid blue eyes and a
full-smiling mouth, a heart-shaped face, brown hair that fell in a
sweet disorder of waves. In mirrors I had discovered that my own
version was blurrier, less coherent, stretched too far. Behind my
glasses, I felt Sola watch me.

She offered the tray to me exactly the way Paula must have shown
her. She didn't even try to look me in the eye when she introduced
herself, and I was grateful. I thought Paula must have told her
that too.

Did I need to say that my name was Julian? I decided it wasn't
necessary, so I said nothing and began to eat my sandwich. Avocado
and Swiss. Sola walked toward the kitchen to collect Paula's dishes
from the week before. As always, I'd washed and dried and stacked
them beside the sink, with the silverware wrapped in a paper towel
on top of the pile. I heard Sola's footsteps pause, begin again,
and then stop.

"Excuse me," she said, forcing me to turn around in my seat. I saw
her eyebrows lifting on her forehead, her mouth stretched into an
almost-smile. She was holding the pile of dishes out in front of
her, her brown hands dark against the white ceramic. "You do not
have to wash these," she said. "I can come back later and do them
downstairs with my own washing up."

This was her first mistake, although I knew she meant well. I shook
my head, my mouth full of sandwich. She had an accent I couldn't
quite place. I chewed and swallowed, completing what I had begun,
and turned back to take a gulp of water. Still turned away from
her, I thought about how many words it would take to explain
things.

"I like to," I told her.

I think she said "Oh," and then she did a surprising thing: She
laughed. It was very quiet, but I heard the flutter in her throat.
I thought a long time afterwards about that laugh. There was a song
buried inside it, or a story. Maybe both.

At first I am at Paula's apartment once a week to clean, which is
easy because even though she seems not to care about how she
scatters her clothing and leaves piles of papers around the rooms,
in fact there is a kind of order in her mess. Once I learn her
system, once I memorize each room, I am able to clean around her
things without disturbing them. When I am finished, it is like
nothing is changed but looks like everything belongs exactly where
it is.

She gives me my own key because most of the time when I come on
Friday afternoons she is somewhere else, singing. The first time I
see her brother, Julian, he is on the sidewalk in front of the
building, staring for maybe half an hour at a tree twice as high as
his head. I am cleaning Paula's living room, and I see him from the
window.

It is the end of October, and the leaves on this tree are a
beautiful shade of yellow, the color of an egg yolk. Julian stands
in one place very close to the tree, close enough to touch it, but
not touching it. The yellow seems to splash onto his face. He just
stands there, for all the time it takes me to vacuum and dust. I
see that the tree is starting to drop its leaves onto the ground,
and there is a pool of yellow at the foot of the tree that Julian
looks down at, like someone doing a study, like he is trying to
make sense of something. He has his hands in his pockets, and he is
wearing a black sweater and a pair of blue jeans, his hair is
blowing from the breeze.

I take that picture of him in my mind and carry it around with me
the rest of the time I am cleaning and part of the next day too,
the yellow of the leaves, Julian's face covered with light. When I
come back the following Friday, the beautiful pool of leaves is
even bigger than before, and I am glad no one is sweeping them away
but letting them keep drifting there as the tree gives itself up.
And what I feel is that the tree is dying and alive at the same
time.

Excerpted from THE SPEED OF LIGHT © Copyright 2011 by
Elizabeth Rosner. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books, an
imprint of PUB2NAME. All rights reserved.