The Children(57)

Nisha departed with her giant cup. The girl reading on the bench beside them was gone, too, leaving her book behind. A cheap lighter weighted its whiskered cover and Guin picked it up.

She skidded her thumb over the spark wheel, one of the habitual gestures of Ennis’s adolescence. Thinking of the last time she saw him do it. Thinking again of that show in Zurich, years ago. The tiny flame was colorless in the summer air. She kept it alive until pain made her let go.





Interstitial




Conflagration (2011)

Ennis Sharpe (1991–)

Kopfraum Galerie, Zurich





For a long time after the Farmhouse fire, Guinevere couldn’t think about her brother in words. Only color and light: strikes of red fury, pools of blacklight-purple regret. And when she did regain her words, she found the things she needed to say to him weren’t expressible over the phone or in a letter.

Not that Ennis called or wrote. Nor did he visit Bitsy and Grandpa Cooper’s place on Eighty-Sixth Street, not in summer or even at Christmas. So, a year and a half after the fire, Guinevere stole Bitsy’s credit card and took the four-hour journey—by subway, train, and cab—to Ennis’s boarding school.

It was gated, but she was small. She slipped in and wandered awhile, cowed by its rain-fed beauty, its hovering trees, the boys who moved among it all with the entitled physicality of cattle. Eventually a security officer found her and passed her along to the headmaster’s office, where she was informed that Ennis Sharpe would not see her. He could, it was stressed, say hello if he wished. He did not.

This was almost a kindness. A necessity, anyway: her persistent belief that there must’ve been some misunderstanding, that her amputation from his life could not have been intentional, was finally crushed.

At least she knew where he was. Guinevere didn’t know how much comfort she took in this until, midway through his senior year, Ennis turned eighteen and promptly disappeared.

She felt like a spacewalker whose tether had snapped. At the same time, she was filled with a ferocious vindication: it had been an act, all this time. Ennis wasn’t the brother she thought he was. He wasn’t some obedient boarding school boy, either.

So. Who was he?

Two years after Ennis disappeared, Guin turned eighteen herself, deferred college, and set out to find him. She dug up some of his former classmates, a glittering knot of interconnected wealthy people who recalled Ennis as their prep school’s resident iconoclast. With their help she tracked him from a hostel in London to an artist assistant’s job in Berlin.

Using what currency she had (blonde hair, blue eyes, the reputation of the American girl as a sexual freewheeler), she managed to get an audience with the artist. From him she learned her brother had fallen in with an older woman who made clothes for the opera. According to the artist—breathing blue smoke, hitting on her with the unsmiling determination of a man going to prison in the morning—Ennis followed this woman to Paris, where she got him a job painting sets. In Paris a theater employee who recognized Guin on sight told her Ennis had moved on to Zurich.

On her second day in the city, Guinevere saw her brother’s name on a wall.

She was sitting at a rambling vegetarian café. The name’s familiar shape struck her first, meaning came after. It was on a card pinned to a bulletin board, amid a collage of flyers left by people in search of rideshares, piano students, roommates, sex. She crossed a sea of hiking boots and carabiners and rickety tables weighted by bowls of lentil soup to pluck it off the wall.

CONFLAGRATION: PAINTINGS



Ennis Sharpe

Kopfraum Galerie





She dropped some euros on her table and hurried out to the street.



* * *




The shadows lengthened as she walked. The streets narrowed and curled. The compass arrow on her maps app spun dizzily, stalled and hopped, sending her deeper into the unfamiliar city. It was almost night when she found the gallery, a buff brick box like a miniaturized temple.

She was too late. Its lights were out, a girl in a cropped Madeline coat was locking the door. Turning, lighting a cigarette, its cherry brightening between the pale wings of her hair. Her eyes widened when she saw Guinevere speeding toward her.

“I’m sorry, we are closed.”

She said it in Swedish-accented English. Because it didn’t matter what Guin wore or how she cut her hair. No one ever thought she was anything but American.

“Please.” Guin spoke in a rush, breathing hard. “Conflagration, by Ennis Sharpe. This is the gallery, right?”

The girl glanced at the locked door. “You’ve missed it. Today was the last day.”

Guin bore up hard beneath despair. “Oh. Okay. The artist, is he in town? Can you reach him?”

She clocked it, the moment the gallery girl saw her. Gasping a little, she crouched to put out her cigarette and pocketed the butt as she rose. “You’re Guinevere! I should have known you, your faces are the same. This is exciting, meeting you.”

She turned, bent back over the door with her key. “For you, I will stay late. I love your mother’s books. We have them in Denmark, of course. But he doesn’t like to talk about her.” By the heavy glance she cast over her shoulder, Guinevere knew she’d slept with Ennis, or wanted to. “Are your rules the same? No talking of the Ninth City?”