To Understand Light

When Porter sits on his favorite bench in late afternoons in March, there’s a quality to the square’s palette that takes him to the faux Eliseu Visconti painting he did while bored in his thirties. A lady wearing a red hat, drinking tea before one of the obelisks along the path, distracted by some pigeons, in the Luxembourg Gardens. Is that what’s happening in the painting? That Porter was able to reproduce it perfectly without having the answer only proves to him that light is its own language. The contrast between the bright obelisk and the dark tree trunks, the green of the leaves’ tapestry dialoguing with the red hat, the shade and the sun engaged in a dance significant enough to produce life, if you wish. How did he achieve that? With mirrors and intuition, which is just another word for knowledge that presents itself as the clarity of night.

“I bought this Eliseu Visconti painting years ago,” he said to his assistant Thomas one morning long past, wiping off nonexistent dust from the frame. “Never hung it, never will. Auction it, will you?”

Porter didn’t care whether the whereabouts of the original painting were known. If the auctioneers or anyone in the buying public questioned anything, he’d say he himself had been duped, or else he’d confess that he was the copyist. Which would be harder to believe? He didn’t get the chance to find out.

Thomas was barely younger than him, but he felt like a son. To serve is so easy. Biding time, waiting for instructions, delivering according to specifications. A machine for the fulfillment of wishes.

“Will you book all the tennis courts in the club, Thomas?”

“Yes, siree.”

“Will you get rid of my entire wardrobe and replace it with Issey Miyakes?”

“Of course, siree.”

“Will you cover the backyard by the pool with fresh proteas?”

“Right away, siree.”

Porter’s requests were side whims of his mind—or of his daughter, in the case of the proteas. But they were the substance of Thomas’ days. The adult self is manufactured through responsibility, people say. It’s not. It’s through free choices. If someone never finds himself in a condition to choose, it’s because heaven doesn’t trust.

Porter nods to people passing by him on the square. Mikey, carrying an orange surfboard and biting his beaded necklace. Rose, pulling her folding shopping cart filled to the brim with fruits and vegetables. Julian, squinting through the thickening dusk to locate his grandson riding his bike, cursing to himself. What a few years of nodding will do to you. Porter finds comfort in greeting the everyday faces, in recognizing their life patterns.

He once instructed Thomas to communicate to the executive team that nodding was henceforth forbidden.

“Siree, wouldn’t they find it strange to receive this communication from someone who doesn’t work for the company?”

Porter added Thomas to the company’s payroll, gave him an ID badge.

“Siree?” Thomas moaned when Porter put the badge in his hands.

“If you’re in the office you’re not leading,” Porter argued. He worked from home by then, when this was still an eccentricity, a cause for concern. “Work is an activity, not a place. Offices are interruption factories. You don’t need to see people to trust them. Break the office, build the circus. Let people surf.”

“But siree, why the non-nodding rule if you’re not coming back?”

“If I ever decide to come back, the rule must already be in place and self-enforcing.”

Thomas went away, shaking his head.

A fleet of cars and the people who drive them. How hard can it be to oversee that? It doesn’t engage the spirit. Not for someone who understands the ambiguities of light, the materializations of philosophy, the hidden wisdom of management theory. Maybe if Ann hadn’t left him, he’d have kept his energy, and his time. But there was Maggie.

“Papa, look, a depleted mine in the desert,” she said, showing a picture in a magazine. “Can we go?”

What can’t a jet and helicopter achieve? The complexity of a request has nothing to do with its practical implications. Not if you have the means to carry it out, anyway, Porter thinks, seated on his favorite bench, checking whether his shoes are properly polished. It’s always the emotional aspect that matters. And, in the end, if you parse and discard the incidental, you see that a request is, in every case, a test of one’s loyalty.

Porter imagines himself climbing on one of the few unused granite chess-and-domino tables and starting a lucid, quiet lecture on requests as a referendum on a relationship. Every act of asking confers power, he’d say, and every act of granting reveals allegiance. Requests demand attention, and isn’t attention the rarest, purest form of generosity? He taught students ideas like these when he was a philosophy professor. He’d like to teach the people at the square now. He can’t afford it. He’s not even dressed for it. Ideas don’t have a force of their own. It doesn’t take much more than an unfortunate outfit to convert deep ideas into the laughable thought balloons of a loony, especially if one is standing on a granite chess table, among children running around playing a game of tag.

Context. The ability to read it and act accordingly is the only key to happiness and success. And it all starts with light. There’s still plenty of it at the square, but a lonely boy flicks on a flashlight anyway and points it at the Indian almond trees. He lives in one of the nearby buildings, but Porter doesn’t know his name. The boy spots a monkey perched on a branch above Porter and follows it.

“Hear,” Porter says to the boy, “the sound of the leaves as it moves can also be your guide.”

The boy directs his flashlight towards Porter for a second, blinding him.

“Won’t we blind the hyenas?” Maggie asked him once during a nocturnal game drive in Kenya, as he worked the light from the truck.

“But how can we see them otherwise?”

“Let’s just experience them, not see them.”

She fell asleep on his lap.

Porter tries to experience the square with his eyes closed. The popcorn vendor is talking to customers. Kids scream at their soccer match. Someone whistles to summon his friends at the surrounding apartment buildings. A girl is singing the chorus of a pop song, laughter breaking around her. An electric wheelchair buzzes by. Porter’s eyelids still flare with fireworks from the flashlight. No, not that. He opens his eyes.

Maggie didn’t quite take the idea of let’s experience, not see to heart. Still in her tweens, she developed a taste for pyrotechnics. Porter bought her supplies and some manuals and joined her in learning how to build small-scale explosives. Maggie loved the precise setup of the pieces, the strict causality of the mechanism, the urgent presence of the boom and the flare. At first, Porter relished seeing her as the creator of small, sparkling feats in an otherwise mute, broken childhood. There was an entrepreneurial element to it, an artistic sensitivity, an imposition of the will. But couldn’t it develop into higher crafts?

Thomas would sit with Porter on the balcony and watch Maggie set up the artefacts. Or not quite watch, for Thomas would squint through it and only relax after hearing one, the bang, and two, Maggie scream out of happiness.

“I fear for her delicate fingers,” he’d explain afterward.

“So help me.”

“How, siree?”

Couldn’t a young man so composed, dutiful, and well-groomed serve as a role model for an edgy girl? Porter invited him to move in, not to the servants’ quarters, but to one of the upstairs guest rooms. He complied with one of his photographic smiles. In the evenings, they’d meet in the rec room in the basement, and Thomas would report his conversations with Maggie.

“She’s intrigued by her classmates’ lack of interest in the Fermi paradox,” he’d say. Or,

“She’d like every day to have the beauty and the thrill of New Year’s Eve.” Or,

“She’s unsure whether she should look for her mother or simply follow her lead and disappear.” Or,

“She’s unhappy with the speed of life and its events, because she likes endings more than build-ups.”

Porter would send him away. Alone in the rec room, he’d consider ideas for a new sprint of child enlightenment: incentives, lectures, lessons disguised as stories, books, visiting specialists, field trips. The nature of Thomas’s reports wouldn’t change, though.

“Is she stuck in the ingenious but ultimately wrong mind of a bright kid?” Porter asked one evening, over glasses of tomato juice.

“I’m not sure there’s an answer to that, siree.”

“Try again, know her better.”

The square is now swarmed by winged termites. Birds come to feast as people disperse. For a few minutes, except for the odd person carrying shopping bags or a zipping bicycle, Porter has the place to himself. He’s become intimate with this kind of exposed solitude, which is now part of the structure of his life. But when it comes unexpectedly like this, it unsettles him. He checks his watch. Not the time. Not yet.

Porter pictures himself taking the elevator to Maggie’s apartment, pressing the doorbell, watching the peephole go dark. Would they open the door? Or scream on the other side, sending him off? Would they simply walk away? Maybe he wouldn’t even be allowed upstairs. To introduce himself as her father at the front desk—is he prepared for it? A former CEO, philosophy professor, art copyist extraordinaire, and investor, harboring such petty dreads. Who is he now? He checks the creases of his trousers.

“Everyone seems to be inside now,” Thomas would say from the rec room door on Tuesdays, for some reason the quietest night of the week. They would then leave for a walk up and down, up and down, until everything had been discussed. Porter no longer wanted his funds to lie inert in bonds and stocks. “Let’s move from properly safe into properly uncertain,” he explained to his assistant on their very first walk. “No more stationary capital. Public bonds do not produce new worlds.” Thomas would come up with weekly lists of funding requests. Porter didn’t demand concrete details. He wanted the essence of the vision, the shape and size of the desired impact. “Let me lose my footing for a moment, so as not to lose myself,” he’d say as a mantra. Thomas managed to slip a request past him from Maggie.

People, different people, return to the square. Young children are no longer to be seen. Teenagers spring up in tight groups, bringing a mix of hushed conversations and loud banter. A sense of things going wrong creeps in from the borders. Just a feeling. All calm under the scent of the night-blooming jasmines. Lighters flare up like fireflies, bringing cigarettes or worse to life. Misplacing one of those smoking stubs is all it takes to create an unfixable mess. Porter corrects his posture, stretches, fails to control his mind. He curses the associative nature of human thought.

“I dream of an uncaused cause that is not God,” he said to Thomas while sipping litchi juice in the kitchen after a Tuesday walk.

“Or the universe, siree.”

“Everything can be traced, even if burned to ashes.”

“Maybe not in a literal pile of ashes.”

“Do you think we can achieve that?”

“Well, it’s boxes on top of boxes, explosives all the way.”

“Do it. You do it.”

“Why anyone else, siree?”

Maggie liked to sleep at her company’s downtown office at the time—Apogee Works Inc., located on the top floor of a skyscraper.

“It gets really hot in the afternoon and we must set the AC to full blast, I admit,” she said when showing the place, unknowingly, to her shadow investor, “but, Dad, we can see the fireworks from here when we are doing demonstrations or tests at the depot. Look, you’ll see.”

She called someone, and minutes later, colorful confetti prickled a distant corner of the horizon.

“Isn’t it nice?”

“Beautiful and fleeting. If only we could capture it.”

“You can’t domesticate everything, Dad.”

“If you understand something, you do.”

Maggie opened her arms, as if asking: Do you really want to understand it all?

Porter drove to her office on the night he’d agreed on with Thomas. He couldn’t think of an excuse for the visit, but did he need one? Both so unsuspecting. Not only them. Everyone. Snap judgments, unwarranted conclusions, confirmation bias, all sorts of biases, naïveté. Deception is the rule, and anyone can take advantage of that, if able to decipher the surrounding expectations.

“You’re always so lonely here,” Porter said to his daughter on the doorstep, holding a tray of decaf lattes and a bag of toasties and cinnamon swirls that he’d picked up on the way. “I figured I could spend one evening with you.”

Maggie embraced him and put two chairs next to the glass wall, so that they could eat looking at the dark, diminished town. They felt like two masters presiding over a scale model. Lights went on and off in miniature, like the lighters the teenagers fidget with now on the square. Porter looked at his watch then, waiting for the pocket explosion on the horizon. He looks at his watch now, waiting for nothing external, but for a subtle shift inside him that will take him to face his due.

How time can flip the rightful direction of an apology. Nothing needs to happen in the sequence of events that constitutes reality to trigger it. Time has a force of its own. It’s a judge, a magician, an alchemist of meaning. Porter drove his sobbing daughter to Apogee Works Inc.’s depot. Between two firefighter trucks, there was a smoldering pile of debris. Not a mountain of ashes. Debris. Was Thomas down in the rubble? Porter took Maggie home.

Silence. Solitude. Thomas never returned. Maggie left the next morning. Not to the pointless office, not to anywhere Porter could find her until many years later. Thomas and Maggie sitting in a square. Hand in hand. Laughing. Living off the insurance? What did they do? Porter still wanted them near. Always would. They didn’t. They abandoned him. Didn’t they need to apologize?

The board removed Porter from the company. Sold it for a dollar, the investors absorbing the debt, restructuring. Back to the simple machinery of making a living. The good thing: so much time to think. An empty human is time’s favorite playground. Arrows flipping, thoughts dropping, feelings shifting, duties transfiguring. The apology is his to make.

Above the canopy of the Indian almond trees, the windows of the apartment building number sixty are lit up like a checkerboard. The bright and dark faces of boxes, owned and rented by private, nodding people. Porter knows them all by name, gait, and routine. He has theories about their future. The specifics can be unfathomable, but not the general direction of achievement and attachment. Observation is the master key if you care, or if your duty is to care. The light that reaches your eyes contains all the information you need.

Porter has seen Maggie’s paintings in galleries and auctions, and Thomas’s daily back-and-forth to an oil company where he works as a PA. The friends they have over, the visits to a fertilization clinic, the early morning knitting lessons. The preferred times for exercise at the gym, the restaurants for the better and worse days, a binge gone wrong at the beach after a disappointment. Having a 1:1 map of a life is the safest way to insert oneself into it. Back into it. It’s just that no amount of observation, no impulsive order, no paid assistant can summon the necessary courage.

Sitting on a bench, recapping, brooding, approaching the decision from the side, as if he might stumble upon it as the action of somebody else. Is this it? Porter stands up, spins quickly on his heel, scanning the square. No sign of Ann. Whenever he feels close to fulfilling his duty, he senses the oblique presence of his ex-wife engaged in the same mission, except that it’s aimed at him. Human life as a procession of ghosts seeking to redress failures and unable to touch anything. If he no longer cares about Ann, do Maggie and Thomas no longer care about him? He must find out.

Porter walks through the square, nodding out of habit to whoever passes by him, singing teenagers and hunched workers alike. He doesn’t need to press the button at the gate, which slides open and lets him in. Grant is already standing behind the desk and says Good evening, right on time without looking at him.

“He noticed it, okay?” Grant says, putting his water bottle and keys into his bag. “But maybe he liked it, because he just looked at it and let it go.”

Porter just nods as Grant slips by and walks down the steps toward the exit. Before sitting at the desk to start his shift, Porter looks at the painting of a woman wearing a red hat in the Luxembourg Gardens. It was a steal at the auction, because the original by Eliseu Visconti naturally doesn’t have a police car dashing around the corner. It’s signed Maggie Bright, which is neither hers nor Thomas’s surname. She understands light. He gave that to her.