The Speed of Light
by Elizabeth Rosner
Summary
The Speed of Light tells three interwoven stories. Paula is an opera singer, an extrovert who lives in the same building as her brother Julian, an obsessive-compulsive genius who edits a scientific dictionary and prefers the company of a collection of second-hand televisions rather than actual people. Sola, Paula’s housekeeper, is a poetic visionary trying to forget the massacre of her entire village but feeling the ghosts of her past everywhere. Sola moves into Paula’s apartment to keep an eye on Julian while Paula travels in Europe. When Paula returns, the roles of brother and sister have reversed; Julian finds his voice even as Paula is losing hers.
Excerpt
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.
I 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.
Copyright © 2003 by Elizabeth Rosner. Reprinted with permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House.
Author's Biography
Elizabeth Rosner is a poet, essayist, and the author of two highly acclaimed bestselling novels: THE SPEED OF LIGHT, winner of literary prizes in the US and Europe, and BLUE NUDE, named one of the year’s best by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.