Hyperbola Stories

##The Hyperbola Stories <div class="row"> <div class="container"> <img src="images/House.png" alt="House" class="image" style="width:100%"> <div class="middle"> <div class="text">[[Remarkable Curves]]</div> { (set: $str1 to "Rachel Horst ") (set: $str2 to "Susan Sechrist") (set: $count to 0)} [by]<c1| []<description|{ []<code| (replace: ?code)[(display: "click_macros")] } </div> </div> <div class="container"> <img src="images/Bus.png" alt="Bus" class="image" style="width:100%"> <div class="middle"> <div class="text">[[Flash Forward]]</div>{ (set: $str3 to "Susan Sechrist ") (set: $str4 to "Rachel Horst") (set: $count to 0)} [by]<c2| []<description1|{ []<code| (replace: ?code)[(display: "click_macros1")] } </div> </div> </div> <div class="container"> <video src="videos/lemniscate.mp4" width="1000" height="480" controls autoplay style=" opacity: 0.5;"> </video> <div class="middle"> <div class="text">[[Entanglements]]</div>

They moved into the [[house]] one vacant and capacious afternoon near the end of winter. Through the uncovered windows they could see wide swathes of a bleached and dull blue sky that was like construction paper left out in the sun too long. All the doors in the house were open when they arrived, as were some of the windows, and they wondered what spirits or smells the previous tenants were airing out for them. The hallways felt impartial and bland and the children ran through them, shrieking and laughing and filling up the house, ahead of their things, with the promise of their hilarity. The mothers had already discussed the geometry of the house ahead of time, over glasses of Merlot at a suburban restaurant nearby. It was a chain restaurant that served artichoke dip in ceramic boats and wine in enormous, long-stemmed glasses with cups as big as grapefruits. They had planned out the gridwork of their shared existence and how they would navigate the kitchen, one of the many pivot points around which, they agreed, people became a family. They would share groceries and household duties and alternate the cooking between them with the sort of amiable flexibility that would be indicative of their household. [[Next->RC1]]

[[A woman fainted on the bus today.]] Fell face first into the man sitting across from her. That’s a reason not to sit in those sideways seats, the ones that face the center axis of the bus. I don’t like them because I prefer the future to be in front of me when I’m riding, not wheeling past unintelligibly. I’ll sit in a sideways seat only if there are no front-facing seats left; if only back-facing are available, I stand.\ The young man pushed at her dead weight like she was a particle board bookshelf that had fallen over. He seemed surprised that she was so heavy, and that she was bendy and squishy instead of stiff and planar. When he realized he couldn’t just lever her into an upright position, he rolled her on to the floor of the bus.\ “Bus driver!!” Someone yelled and the bus stopped. I reached for my phone and yelled out, “Call 911!” Someone else was already on it. The woman regained consciousness, but her young face was yellow-grey, her eyelids unbuoyant. \ [[“I feel hot and tingly,”]] she said. A man on the phone with the 911 dispatcher relayed questions to her and then gave her answers back to 911. A rangy, dark-haired woman with full sleeves of flowers stepped over her, asking “does anybody have Narcan?”\ “I just gave blood,” the prostrate woman said. People stepped over her to get off the bus, spilling on to the curb. \ “I have a piece of chocolate in my bag,” I said, wanting to help, but anxious about being late for my appointment with Dr. Jimenez.\ “Dispatcher is saying to wait for the ambulance,” the man on the phone said.\ Outside of the bus, the future is at a standstill.\ [[Next->FF1]]

Alexis would prepare Kai’s lunch in the evening, Wynn would prepare Nic’s in the morning – that way they wouldn’t be competing for counterspace. Alexis and her daughter Kai, who was six years old, would take the two eastern rooms with access to the bathroom and a view of the neighbour’s nasty monkey tree, the scaly branches of which hung low over the fence into their yard. Wynn and her son Nic, who was four and a half, would take the two western rooms.\ One of Wynn’s rooms, the one she decided would be her bedroom, contained an enormous [[chandelier]] that hung from the ceiling by a cord woven through the links of a golden chain. It was not the chain that held the weight of the chandelier, but the thin and delicate-seeming cord. They had discussed this fixture ahead of time, the merits of moving it into a more appropriate location, but ultimately they decided to leave it in Wynn’s room.\ Wynn now stood in her empty bedroom, wondering about the proper orientation for her bed when Alexis peered in through the doorway and noticed again, the strange chandelier. Its pelting of crystal and the plumpness of its shape reminded Alexis of a muskrat. [[Next->RC2]]

“Now there’s a fancy muskrat,” she said, noting the afternoon light diffracting wetly in its crystal fur. \ Wynn experienced a sudden flash of anger and laughed. She didn’t want the chandelier to be a muskrat and worried it would make the room seem silly to her later, when she was alone and trying to sleep, or when she brought home a lover later, something she planned to do with some regularity now that she had left her husband. Wynn had nothing against muskrats and, in fact, thought they were a noble and industrious sort of animal, not unlike herself. She just didn’t want to look up from her bed and see the chandelier and think about whether it did or did not look like one. Ideas had a way of taking hold and shaping the way things went. (Nicolas, for example, had whipped himself into such terror for the spare bedroom at Grandma’s house, because of the way the shadows moved across the walls one afternoon, that the terror had spilled out of the boy and into Wynn, who, to this day, could not stand to be alone in there, though Nic was over it now and on to other terrors.) Wynn also [[worried]] she was worrying too much about the muskrat comment and what that meant for things to come. [[Next->RC3]]

Alexis saw all these thoughts move through her friend’s face, just beneath the skin, and felt a rushing of appreciation for her friend’s obviousness and satisfaction at her own effectiveness. The past years with her husband had produced a sense that she was under a glass jar; nothing she said had any effect on him or on Kai, who could ignore Alexis with such conviction that it made her doubt her very presence. When Alexis spoke, rather than effect the world, she found her words only obscured her view by clouding the walls of her jar. \ Wynn’s sudden attentiveness to Alexis was exhilarating. \ “I’m happy we’re doing this,” Alexis said.\ “Me too,” Wynn said. \ Then one of the children [[screamed]] and the women smiled simultaneously.\ “I’ll go,” Alexis said and left the doorway. Wynn noted how very far away the child sounded, and that it was impossible to decipher who had screamed.\ Alexis found the children huddled together on the basement couch, with a large book in their laps. Except for a headband and one pink sock, Kai was naked. Nicolas, who was also naked, turned the page of the book thoughtfully. The enormous sectional couch they sat upon had been left by the previous tenants and Alexis worried about the childrens’ exposed orifices and the unknowable residual of past lives teeming in the fabric beneath them. [[Next->RC4]]

“Why are your clothes off kids?”\ “We were playing dress up, but we couldn’t find the dress up clothes,” said Kai.\ “Who screamed?”\ Kai shrugged without looking up, and Nicolas turned the page. Alexis recognized upon the page an expansive wheat field photographed by Bergson Cuthbert. Farms, skies, fields, space – Cuthbert had a way with vastness. “I [[screamed]],” Nicolas said and looked up.\ “Are you okay?” Alexis asked. Nicolas blinked at her and nodded, and she saw that the boy had soulful and yearning eyes; eyes that were difficult questions and she said, “Let’s get your [[clothes]] back on, okay?”\ Behind her, the movers came down the stairs, sidestepping like nervous crabs, sharing the wait of her potter’s [[wheel]]. She directed them down the hall, to the nook by the laundry where she planned to set up a little studio. The wheel had been in storage since college, since before Kai, back when she was going to be an artisan for a living and wear kooky scarves and learn to speak French and sleep with women. She bought the wheel but had only ever used it a handful of times. “I don’t even know if it still turns,” she said, but the movers couldn’t hear her or didn’t know how to respond. [[Next->RC5]]

The house, the friends agreed, was a natural solution to their parallel life circumstances. They could afford more space together than they ever could apart- such was the housing and rental market in a city they both had become ambivalent about and yet were hesitant to abandon completely. The friends had met three years ago at the birthday party of a child who neither could remember properly. Each friend had her own reason for thinking the other needed her slightly more than she herself did; that she was providing a kind of support for the other, and that this made her a finer and more righteous person. Wynn, for example, was always broke. Last year Alexis had lent her two thousand dollars and though Wynn had paid it all back within a year in $500 increments, Alexis’s generosity had been established. Alexis, for her part, was very lonely. She could not stand to be alone on evenings when Kai was with her father. She would call Wynn to come over, just to hang out and watch a movie and fill the space. “If it wasn’t for you, Wynn,” Alexis often said, “I’d be breaking up with another asshole.” \ It was a large house built in a perfectly reasonable neo-eclectic tradition in a perfectly reasonable neighbourhood. There was more than enough space for both partial families to live tandem lives, creating a kind of whole of their parts, the children could come together and move apart within that space. Maybe they would get a [[dog]]. [[Next->RC6]]

Spring came along, the household continued to flutter and settle and undergo a million micro-shiftings, like so many feathers in the breezes of their lives. If the house were a bird, and a chicken has 8000 feathers (Kai had once inquired), then this house had ten times as many– and each was susceptible to its own subtle changes. The children moved in and out of this shared geography: to daycare and kindergarten and their fathers and their lessons and their grandparents. The house breathed the children as they fought and played and shared secrets and toys. In a similar way, but more completely, the mothers breathed each other and the house: they shared meals and clothing and thoughts about things that happened in their separate lives. Their perspectives were different. Wynn might shed light on something Alexis had not considered. “Maybe he has a [[crush]] on you?” she once suggested when Alexis, who was a high school English teacher, complained about a boy in her English 10 class who sat in the back row and could not look at her in the eyes without tearing up. Alexis reminded Wynn, who was a certified arborist and ran a landscape company with her ex-husband, to invoice clients. “You’re too trusting,” Alexis warned. “People won’t volunteer to pay you what they owe.” \ [[Next->RC7]]

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They admired each other for qualities they were relieved not to possess. Wynn was pragmatic, Alexis philosophical. Wynn optimistic, Alexis cynical. Alexis could make Wynn laugh until her stomach hurt, but she could also worry her and make her feel she was wrong about something important but too obvious to name. Alexis loved Wynn and needed her, but also found her physically appalling. Wynn could actually turn her stomach sometimes; the scent of her after work, for example. It was as though she could smell right through Wynn’s skin to some private, subcutaneous nether region where her true mind resided, and this mind smelled fungal and [[rotten]].\ Wynn had no desire to try the potter’s wheel, though Alexis often offered her a lesson. Wynn’s work was in soil and earth all day, and she had no desire to muddy her hands in clay once she’d cleaned them. But she admired the circularity of Alexis’s pots; the vessels seemed elemental in their geometry. Alexis churned the vessels out when the children had gone to bed, or on evenings when they’d gone to their fathers’. The shelves along the basement hallways were full of these remarkable curves: from tiny vessels for toothpicks or single stemmed flowers to large vases whose openings could accommodate large branches— all in various gradations from wet to dry.\ [[Next->RC8]]

Alexis had yet to find somewhere to fire these vessels, and often would drop the driest of them into a garbage bin full of water at the end of the hallway to recycle the clay and make room for newly turned pots. The shelves were thus always full but always [[fluctuating]]. The children were not allowed to play along this particular hallway, because the tiles were slick with a velvety paste that powered to dust at the edges. The mothers knew when the children had broken the rules because they could see their tiny ochre footprints patterning the floors throughout the house, marking the geometry of their play.\ “This is a modern family,” Alexis said one evening over the dinner she’d prepared: baked potatoes with cheese and black beans, a side salad with grated beets and carrots.\ “I can’t seem to get full,” Wynn said, “no matter how much I eat.” And she reached for another potato. Wynn and her ex, with whom she still worked, had spent the week digging out a goldfish pond for one of their clients. It was strenuous labour. They’d had to remove large boulders and stones from the earth where the pond would be. They did not have a backhoe and so had to use their prybars and muscle. The hole for the pond ended up much larger than intended as they’d unearthed an ancient cedar [[stump]] that reminded Wynn of a complicated fetus. Its snarled and sightless face had stones for nostrils and the sight of it took Wynn’s breath away. She would have preferred to burn the stump where it lay, but burnings were against city bylaws, so they managed to hoist it into the truck and take it to the city dump for composting. \ [[Next->RC9]]

She thought of the [[stump]] as she ate her second potato. From where she sat, she could see behind the fridge, which stood away from the wall at an angle. They’d pulled the fridge away from the wall last Tuesday, due to the escalating heat in the house. The house had been steadily heating for weeks now, so slowly they had not realized it until the backs of the books along the lower shelf of the bookcase in the living room began to smoulder. Upon realizing the books were burning, they moved everything – furniture, couches, beds — away from the walls, where the heat seemed to concentrate, and this solved things for a time.\ “If it gets any hotter,” Wynn said, regarding the dusty metal coils behind the fridge, “we’ll have to soak the floors to keep them from burning.” She decided to make herself a burger later when Alexis had gone down to turn her pots in the cool of the basement. She didn’t like to eat meat around Alexis, who would sigh and breathe in a recriminatory way, ruining the taste for Wynn, who was sensitive to her noises.\ Kai had skewered black beans onto each one of the tines of her fork and stroked her cheek with the beans and fluttering her eyelashes at Nic, who ate his potato quietly, and sweat at the hairline.\ “Do you think it’s our fault or was it something the previous tenants did?” Nic asked.\ “I think there’s something wrong with the boiler,” Alexis said. “The landlord will be back from vacation in a couple of weeks. He’ll sort it out.”\ [[Next->RC10]]

Most nights Nicolas would get out of bed and pad down the hallway to Wynn’s room and they would sleep together with all the blankets kicked down to the bottom of the bed due to the warmth of the room. On weekends they would sleep together sometimes until noon. Both Alexis and Kai were early risers and, on the weekends, Alexis would take great pains to keep Kai quiet playing with her or watching movies. When Wynn finally awoke, Alexis would be ready to discuss the state of the world with her, but Wynn would blink and breathe and shuffle back to bed and it drove Alexis to distraction. \ “Why does Nicolas get to sleep with his mom?” Kai often asked. “Why can’t I sleep with you?”\ “Because it’s not good for kids to sleep with their parents,” Alexis would tell her. She thought sleeping with his mother was making Nic dependant in a way that was problematic. “Nobody gets a good night sleep when they sleep together, and everyone goes around feeling tired and grumpy and miserable.”\ “You used to sleep with Dada all the time.”\ “And remember how grumpy we were!” Alexis said. \ “You’re still grumpy,” said Kai, “and you don’t sleep with anybody but yourself.” \ Alexis laughed and pinched her daughter’s thigh and marvelled at her brilliance and wit.\ [[Next->RC12]]

Leaving her husband was the best, most important thing Wynn had ever done. She loved him more now than she ever had when they were together. She could see him better with a little distance. They still worked together every day and were able to laugh together in a way they hadn’t done for years. The shape of his quiet no longer oppressed her. She could ignore his silences now and this made their friendship easier. Sometimes she found him looking at her in a way that satisfied her desire to be seen. She realized she had no present need for sex. And sleeping alone with Nic was a revelation. It was her favourite thing in the world, sleeping beside her son. She knew that Alexis did not approve of her sleeping with Nic, and she did not care. In fact, the more Alexis did not approve, the more committed Wynn became to a philosophy of co-sleeping.

[[I’m ten minutes late]] for my appointment with Dr. Jimenez, but he’s understanding. He goes through the same ritual as every week—as I come in and put my pack down, he leans back into his leather chair as if recalibrating his shoulder blades, aligning them, resetting the empty space between them. Then, he moves his tie so that it blots out the buttons on his button-down shirt. Today, he’s wearing light blue with a dark charcoal woven tie.\ “You had some excitement today. Was the woman okay?”\ “I don’t know, the ambulance arrived just as the next 25 bus came.” \ Dr. Jimenez nodded and hummed. “So, how was your week?”\ “Good,” I said. “I practiced my relaxation techniques, and that was helpful.”\ “I’m glad to hear that. Any questions about the techniques?”\ “No, I don’t think so.” \ Dr. Jimenez smiled at me. I enjoyed that when it happened. It was a sign that I was improving, that I was balancing the real and the imagined properly. He was an attractive man, mid-50s, greying in the tips of his curly hair and at the compass points of his beard. He was a compassionate man, a smart man. So like the many men who populated my daydreams, the daydreams that I was being cured of. \ “I miss them, though,” I said, as suddenly as the woman fainted on the bus into the lap of the man sitting across from her. \ Dr. Jimenez flattened his smile. “You miss the fantasies? How so?”\ “Well, I know I have a problem. An addiction, of sorts. I know that it gets in the way, of me living a regular life. A productive life.”\ “You’ve made such wonderful progress this past six months, the promotion at work. And you’ve been dating?”\ “Yes, of course, all good things. I’m grateful to you, and to your program. Your techniques. I just wonder, how do I make myself feel… authentic now?”\ [[Next->FF3]]

Dr. Jimenez’s office was papered and upholstered in soft browns and ochres; no overhead lighting, just warmth from several lamps with tasteful cloth shades. From the braided rug on the floor to the leather chairs to the art on the walls, everything was designed to soak up dysfunction and rage and sadness, to tare the scale back to an origin from which to begin again, to start clean. Dr. Jimenez was a cognitive behavioral therapy specialist who dealt with all kinds of addiction—substance abuse, food, sex. I was his only maladaptive daydreamer, however. It was a field that fascinated him, he said, when we first met, after I refused medication and my psychiatrist Dr. Lewis referred me reluctantly to an expert in CBT. Dr. Jimenez wanted to learn more about what MD patients struggled with, how the constant fantasizing interrupted their normal lives, sequestered them from normal things like work and love and hobbies. \ Dr. Jimenez has a framed picture in his bathroom, the only item that broke with his understated tastefulness. A quote from Carl Jung: “Those who look outside, dream; those who look inside, awaken.”\ “What you do makes you authentic,” he said. “We talked a bit about how you could make changes at work, take more risks. Take on more responsibility. That would help you feel more authentic.”\ That would give me leadership skills, I thought. \ “Yes, I know. We did talk about that.” \ [[Next->FF4]]

I scanned Dr. Jimenez’s warm, calming office, looking for anything out of order, a grain of sand to irritate the flesh of the oyster. Something that I could coat and lacquer with my daydreaming mind into something, anything that was more interesting than comfort and normalcy.\ “We’re just about out of time,” he said, reaching for his date book. When he asked as he did every week if I wanted a card to remind me of our next appointment I said yes, despite the fact that we met every week on the same day at the same time. \ No one fainted on the bus ride home. No one even coughed or sneezed. It was an uneventful trip. I got a forward-facing window seat from which I could make forests out of landscaped gardens and ruined cathedrals out of new construction. In my backpack was the monograph by the Israeli psychiatrist who defined the term “maladaptive daydreaming disorder” to separate it from schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Medication was helpful for those who suffered from extreme cases. Dr. Jimenez agreed with me, that medication probably wasn’t necessary. I was a good candidate for dialectical behavioral therapy, my particular fantasy-proneness would respond to the philosophical approach of hypothesis, antithesis, and synthesis.\ [[Next->FF5]]

Early in my work with Dr. Jimenez, we tried to figure out where my overthrown imagination emerged, what traumatic event triggered my insular drive to build worlds out of nothing rather than contribute to a world made of something. There was no violence in my childhood, no irrevocable loss or abject poverty. We decided it was neglect. \ “A bright, curious child is often too much for an inexperienced young mother, or an overworked older one.” Dr. Jimenez had theorized. “You were the last of four, a late in life baby. A surprise,” he said, softening the truth that I was a failure of birth control, an accident. My mother had called me a surprise, but a pleasant one. She used to tell me that I was a happy baby. The eight-millimeter film of my first birthday shows me smiling and laughing, rocking back and forth in my high-chair, stopping only to contemplate the mound of birthday cake that my mother placed in front of me. In the next frames I’m covered in icing, smiling and laughing and rocking. \ [[Next->FF7]]

Maladaptive daydreamers often rock or pace or twitch while they are crafting their insular narratives. Some whisper or move their lips. The kinetic component serves as a meditative practice, like the whirling of the Dervishes. I was a highly functional dreamer – I held down a decent job, I had friends. But I walked out of an airport seven months ago; for the first time, my anxiety made it impossible for me to get on a plane. At first, I thought all I needed was one of those fear-of-flying seminars, but my primary care physician put a few other symptoms together – trouble sleeping, tingling in my hands and feet, palpitations – and diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder.\ I started going to support groups. But not support groups for those with anxiety. I dropped into community centers and churches for sessions with alcoholics and sex addicts, mothers against drunk driving, alien abductees, overeaters. I learned from people overthrown by all kinds of excesses: excess consumption, excess grief, excess imagination. All the things that made staying within the confines of a normal life difficult. Some groups were about curing the loneliness of excess – kicking the habit of booze or food. Some were about accepting the unknown or the unreconcilable, the painful loss of a loved one through death or divorce. In every case, I went to these groups thinking I could learn something from these people and their excesses, learn how they combatted exception and abnormalcy, how they controlled themselves. But I left with more stories to tell myself. Like how an alcoholic leaves the bottle for the Bible. Both are addictions that hide pain, soothe against fear; one is just easier on your liver.\ [[Next->FF8]]

The alien abductee group was the hardest one to gain entry. These were people vulnerable to intrusion, reluctant to allow anyone to just to sit in. The facilitator asked me to leave the first time I came in, saying that I should contact him first by email. Tell him my story. Then, I might receive an invitation to participate with the group. The story I told was an honest one, a memory from childhood of being taken out of the house in the middle of the night by a strange little man with big eyes. He was wearing a long coat and a top hat. The little man took me to the copse of lilac trees next to our house. My brothers had similar late-night visitations, I told the facilitator, a soft-spoken man named Douglas: one brother saw a robot peer in his second story window, another was chased around the house by a white monkey. Doug invited me to attend the Friday night session at the end of the month. These sessions were for new members.\ I took the bus to the St. Anselm’s Catholic Church on Friday night. In the fellowship hall in the basement of the building, I sat next to a middle-aged woman named Carol. There were 13 people in the circle, including me, another new member, and Doug. For two hours, the group bifurcated into two camps—those who thought their experiences were a good thing and those who wanted them to stop. No one pressed me for my story as a tiebreaker. \ [[Next->FF9]]

As the group broke up, Carol approached me at the coat rack.\ “These people, they think this is a religion. Some kind of salvation. Megalomaniacs, they think they are chosen for some mission. This is outright assault. Kidnapping.” She shook her head as she shouldered her wool coat. \ “I’m tired of being terrorized,” she continued, pulling gloves out of her pockets. There wasn’t anything here that was going to help me with my generalized anxiety disorder. This support group wasn’t the unconditional love of mothers who’d lost children. \ “I didn’t ask for this, the terror, the ridicule.”\ Her story was typical—awakened in the night by a bright light, levitated out of bed and into some craft. Taken away and tested, prodded, poked. Returned home with a vague memory of a bad nightmare.\ “Maybe it would be better if we had better science fiction stories,” I said.\ She glared at me, “You think I’m making it up?”\ “No, no, that’s not what I mean,” I said.\ She continued to glare at me with a then-what-did-you-mean look.\ “Well, so many of your stories, all of your stories…”\ “Experiences,” Carol corrected.\ “My apologies, experiences… so many of your experiences, all of you, all of us, I mean… so many of our experiences are framed by what we know, how we think.”\ Carol stared at me impatient. “Yes? So? I’m not making this up, I’m not crazy.”\ “No, of course not, that’s not what I’m saying.” Doug was hovering around us, sensing that this new member might not have been worth inviting.\ [[Next->FF11]]

“Maybe they are confused by your terror; maybe they are just using what we’ve given them to communicate with us. They are using our own stories to communicate. What stories do we have of contact with other beings? Fairies that take children, devils that possess people, aliens that probe us and experiment on us against our will.”\ Doug came to stand next to Carol.\ “They are terrorizing us with our own stories; and maybe our terror confuses them.” I said. “We need to give them better stories, to connect with us.”\ Carol huffed away. She neglected to button her coat. The camel-colored wings of it flew open as she stormed toward the door. Doug looked at me, two completely different sentiments mapped on his face: that’s an interesting idea and don’t come back.\ I got the last late bus home. It would be a long, long ride. But I had a forward-facing single seat by a big window. The suburbs gave way to the industrial waterfront which in turn morphed into the concentric rings of the city. We passed through the center of the city and back out toward the neighborhoods that bordered the sea and the mountains. People came and went on the bus. How many of them had lost a child to a drunk driver, or survived an addiction or life-threatening disease? Had any of them been abducted by aliens?\ I began a story, I could sense it would be a good one. It might keep me up late tonight. Carol and Doug were in it, and my doppelganger along with Dr. Jimenez’s proxy, a man I called Simon. I planned out the plot and set the scene. I would let the dialogue flow naturally, I wouldn’t control what my characters said. I could fix anything that didn’t fit later. In five days, when I visited Dr. Jimenez again, I don’t think I would tell him about this daydream. But I would stay in therapy, I would keep doing my meditative exercises, to try to calm my overactive, fantasy-prone mind. I could work in dual genres, like an artist who wrote both prose and poetry or painted in oils and also carved wood cuts. \ I could do both.\

//From the bathroom emerges a bleached smell; the previous tenants airing the place out, killing the virus. The place is vacant except for the ceramic branches of some unfinished construction project, an amateur attempt at a fountain or planter? Alexis can’t tell. Wynn is obsessed with the counterspace in the kitchen and the chain of poorly painted blue frames around the living room windows. She says, “these look like those square glasses my mother used to wear in the 70s.” This won’t be home, but it is a good house. It can be their household together.//

//Alexis wished she could accidently break Wynn’s crystal muskrat, a souvenir from years ago. In the dim light of afternoon, the strange artifact made a diffracting golden shape on the ceiling, that reminded her of the broken chandelier in the dining room.//

//The shadows in some rooms had an unsettling irregularity, cast from abandoned, yet industrious, unfinished projects shaping the house in unexpected ways. The people who’d left this place were not experienced or handy; they left a chandelier unwired in the dining room that had Wynn worried. One afternoon, she flipped a switch only to be startled by a flash of uncontained electricity arcing from the open wiring. She went to sleep that night with her grandma’s terror of fire.//

//A jar of beach glass; \ a rushing doubt simultaneously sounded with impossible satisfaction.\ Alexis screamed, her skin a conviction obscured by the doorway\ Beneath her husband\ Obviousness, attentiveness\ The face of her child\ Far from happy, a presence to decipher//

“Why are you naked on the couch?” Alexis screamed. Nicolas wore only a headband stolen off Wynn’s dresser.\ “You can’t take her things,” she pulled the stretchy fabric band from his head, as he huddled there, exposed.\ “Go outside, play in the fields, walk to the farms. This place is teeming with things to do. You can’t just hang out here in the basement.”\ “I was looking for a book,” he said. His enormous eyes photographed everything.

//The wheel movers came, taking crabs and the boy, while we blinked and nodded, folding laundry that was nothing but scarves… How was this okay?\ No one could sleep, eyes everywhere, living like the soulful artisan with his potter’s clothes, spattered and torn. No one planned this, the outstretched handfuls of sharing, the nervous sidestepping.\ Kai and her little questions; Alexis didn’t hear.\//

//Perfectly apart, and in this reasonable space, they could afford a dog, a birthday, a father. Wynn was kind, her generosity broke over all of them like a drowning wave. If the circumstances had been different, Alexis might abandon her, but she was hesitant, the dollars only came in small increments and housing was just insanely expensive. They were broke, even together. Another friend lent her 500 to make the situation last another month, but they wouldn’t make it through the year. \ “Just come back to the city,” he said. “So we’re not together, we can still be friends. We share a child, and I’m not completely an asshole.” \//

//The boy had a bird crush, on a chicken that would run and flutter into the yard. It was a Rhode Island Red, with feathers that caught the breezes and breathed, like his lungs were a geography mapped on the outside. \ “This fucking house,” Wynn complained. “Who has a chicken here? This is suburbia. Not the English landscape.”\ She came and went with an arborist who came for dinner and gave them lessons on changes they could make to the garden and the grounds.\ “We rent, we’re not interested in buying,” Alexis fought back, wanting to be out of the house before the children were in kindergarten in the fall.\//

//Skin subcutaneous; rotten stomach; appalling mind. It hurts when I laugh…//

//Gradations of evenings, curves of desire, large pots broken, their circularity dry. The children make fluctuating vessels, the lesson of our tiny hands and our accommodating geometry. \ The earth is dust at the edges, elemental footprints or garbage that will pile on the basement floors and in the hallway, marking play until we are gone. \ “You allowed this,” Alexis said. \//

It was difficult to tell whether the heat in the house caused the disagreements, or whether it was the disagreements that caused the heat, but things became increasingly more uncomfortable in both the house and the friendship, and it was difficult sometimes to distinguish between the two. If it wasn’t for the lease, the mothers might have considered another arrangement, but because that was not an option, they dug in and hoped for the best. Wynn, for her part, did not want Nic to experience another dissolution. The breakup of her marriage had been difficult for Nic. He still sometimes asked after the old ways: “Remember how you used to get Dad to chase the flies out. Didn’t you think that was funny?”\ “Of course, I did, sweetie. You can still ask Dad to chase the flies out you know.”\ “It’s not as funny without you there laughing too,” he said.\ [[Next->RC13]]

The first time the house shuddered – a vibration that began in the depths of the foundation and ricocheted outwards like the wag that travels through the body of a dog — the children were downstairs, playing in the mud hallway, as they thought of it. The house clutched and seized and shuddered, sending the wall of drying pots cascading to the ground upon them in a wave of ceramic plumage. Alexis found the children emerging from a sea of pottery, both of them crying and frightened and ochre-hued and mewling out for their mamas. \ As the household shudders become more frequent and Kye realized they were beyond her control, the sudden fits and starts would cause her to laugh hysterically. Nic found the shudders of the house terrifying. Kye had taken to wearing a storm trooper’s outfit, replete with shoes and mask, and she was utterly unperturbed by the escalating warmth in the house. When Nic wasn’t following Kye around the place attending to her commands, he would cry quietly while cleaning the windows or vacuuming the carpet in the great room. If he was gentle to the house, he thought, it might cool a bit and stop with all the shaking.\

//Modern city stump, intended cedar evening\ Black goldfish dump\ Ancient beets burn\ Pond matter stones\ Baked fetus…\ “Stop playing with the refrigerator word magnets,” Wynn said. “Or at least make something nice.”\ “All we have are words like burnings and hoist and cheese…” “Make the best of it…”\//

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A woman [**fainted on the bus today.** Fell face first into the man sitting across from her. The sudden breaching of distance caused a collective gasp of shock among the seven evenly spaced passengers on the bus. The man recoiled from the woman’s body and she continued to fall ungracefully to the floor. On the floor, grotesquely unconscious, her shirt coming up in the back revealing the freckled flesh there, she lay like something made of wax and wood. Behind our face masks we breathed carefully. The bus slid through the emptied streets. Her consciousness wafted out through her ears and hung in the air between us. I looked across at the man, whose gaze was thin and unhappy. The woman sprawled on the floor, the ribbing along the end of her plastic blue gloves cut across the skin of her forearm. Her hair coiled outwards like fern fronds.]<fainted| (click-replace: ?fainted) [[**died on the bus today.** She sat on the floor and died.]<died| (click-replace: ?died) [[**was taken from the bus today.** She was sitting across from the exit, listening to a podcast about whales, with her plastic-covered hands folded in her lap. I could see the sides of her facemask moving in and out as she breathed and thought she could be some kind of aquatic creature herself, with those large wet eyes and her damp-seeming hair. The bus slid up to the shelter and a little man got on. He looked at me. I knew him instantly and was flooded with the memory of the scent of lilac. He had not come for me though, but for the whale woman, who stood up when he approached as though expecting him and smoothed her hair. She stood a full three feet taller than him. They held hands as they left the bus, so that the man appeared to be her child, but when the bus pulled away from the curb, I could see that she was crying. Her tears had dampened the face mask along the upper edge, as though the mask were bleeding ink. She still wore the earbuds. I wanted to tell her that the aliens are cool to touch and delicate as petals, that they bring only curiosity and will leave her like an empty room, and she will miss them forever when they’re gone]<taken| (click-replace: ?taken) [[**on the bus today fractalated before my eyes.** ]<fractal| (click-replace: ?fractal) [[[**on the bus today fell face first into the man sitting across from her.** The young man pushed at her dead weight like she was a particle board bookshelf that had fallen over. He seemed surprised that she was so heavy, and that she was bendy and squishy instead of stiff and planar. When he realized he couldn’t just lever her into an upright position, he rolled her on to the floor of the bus. “Bus driver!!” Someone yelled and the bus stopped. I reached for my phone and yelled out, “Her young face is yellow-grey, her eyelids unbuoyant!” ->Flash Forward]]]]]]

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[“You are alone and afraid,” I said.]<afraid| (click-replace: ?afraid)[[“I feel tingly and alone and afraid,” she said.]<alone| (click-replace: ?alone)[[“You are drunk and afraid,” I said.]<drunk| (click-replace: ?drunk)[[“I feel drunk and passionate,” you said.]<passionate| (click-replace: ?passionate)[[“I feel the future like the weight of the past,” she said.]<future| (click-replace: ?future)[[“You are unusual,” I said.]<unusual| (click-replace: ?unusual)[[[“I feel uncertain you feel,” she said. A man on the phone and a rangy, dark-haired woman with full sleeves of flowers gave blood as people spilled onto to the curb. “I have chocolate,” I said, wanting to help, but anxious about being late. Outside the bus, the future is at a standstill.->FF1]]]]]]]]

[I am early.]<early| (click-replace: ?early)[[I never arrived.]<arrived| (click-replace: ?arrived)[[I click on the link and the screen filled with Jimenez.]<click| (click-replace: ?click)[Dr. Jimenez: he’s understanding, he goes through the same ritual as every week—as I become alit as he leans back into his leather chair as if recalibrating his shoulder blades, aligning them, resetting the empty space between them. Then, he moves his tie so that it blots out the buttons on his button-down shirt. Today, he’s wearing light blue with a dark charcoal woven tie. “You had some excitement today. Was the woman okay?” “I don’t know, the ambulance arrived just as the next 25 bus came.” Dr. Jimenez nodded and hummed. “So, how was your week?” “Good,” I said. “I practiced my relaxation techniques, and that was helpful.” “I’m glad to hear that. Any questions about the techniques?” “No, I don’t think so.” [Jimenez smiled at me. ]<smiled| (click-replace: ?smiled)[[He frowned at me.]<frowned| (click-replace: ?frowned)[[[Dr. Jimenez laughed and ignored me.->Ignored]]]]]]]

I enjoyed that when it happened. It was a sign that I was improving, that I was balancing the real and the imagined properly. He was an attractive man, mid-50s, greying in the tips of his curly hair and at the compass points of his beard. He was a compassionate man, a smart man. He was a man with many interests. He was a firm and demanding man. He was apologetic and uncertain. He was a man. He was a man with many qualities. He was an unsure man. He was confident. He was unpleasant. He was a man without qualities. He was a man in conflict with his surroundings. He was a man in unison. He was a man with gentle features. He was a man who filled the screen and my daydreams. He was a man I could lose myself inside, like a day with no schedule or lake in winter. So like the men who populated my daydreams, the men I was being cured of. [[Next->FD1]]

“I miss them, though,” I said, as suddenly as the woman fainted on the bus into the lap of the man sitting across from her. Dr. Jimenez flattened his smile. “You miss the fantasies.” “Well, I know I ought to live a regular life. A productive life.” “You’ve made such wonderful progress this past six months, the promotion at work. And you’ve been dating?” I see a botanist from Chicago on Tuesday evenings after dinner. His face fills my laptop screen with a gentle geography. He is kind, boring, and in the lulls when there is nothing to say I fill in the rooms beyond his screen: He is harboring a criminal, growing opium in the greenhouse, he has been widowed by a plane crash, he has ulterior motives, he is an unschooled inventor whose windows open at the touch of a button, he has another family in the Philippines and is in love with an illusion. “Yes, of course, all good things. I’m grateful to you, and to your program. Your techniques. I just wonder… how do I make authentic?” I have begun to forget Dr. Jimenez’s office beyond the screen. It has been two months since I visited the rooms: papered and upholstered in soft browns and ochres; no overhead lighting, just warmth from several lamps with tasteful cloth shades. From the braided rug on the floor to the leather chairs to the art on the walls, everything was designed to soak up sadness and start clean. “What you do makes you authentic,” he said. “I do dreams,” I said and filled the space beyond the screen with a rising tide. “A bright and curious child is often too much for an inexperienced young mother,” Jimenez theorized, “or an overworked older one.” “You were a failure of birth control, an accident,” he said when I walked out of an airport seven months ago. The plane was a pivot point of materiality: [[Next->FD2]]

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(hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [“Bus driver!!” Someone yelled and the bus stopped.] (hover-style:(text-color:#eb5ed8) + (text-style:'italic')) [I reached for my phone and yelled out, “Her young face is yellow-grey, her eyelids unbuoyant!” A rushing doubt simultaneously sounded with impossible satisfaction.] (hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [“I feel hot and tingly,” she said. Alexis screamed, her skin a conviction obscured by the doorway.] (hover-style:(text-color:#eb5ed8) + (text-style:'italic')) [“You are alone and afraid,” I said beneath her husband.] (hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [“I feel tingly and alone and afraid,” she said, obviousness, attentiveness, “You are drunk and afraid,” I said. The face of her child.] (hover-style:(text-color:#eb5ed8) + (text-style:'italic')) [“I feel drunk and passionate,” you said, far from happy, a presence to decipher.] (hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [“I feel the future like the weight of the past,” she said.] (hover-style:(text-color:#eb5ed8) + (text-style:'italic')) [“You are unusual,” I said. “Why are you naked on the couch?” Alexis screamed.] (hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [Nicolas wore only a headband stolen off Wynn’s dresser.] (hover-style:(text-color:#eb5ed8) + (text-style:'italic')) [“I feel uncertain you feel,” she said. “You can’t take her things,” she pulled the stretchy fabric band from his head, as he huddled there, exposed.] (hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [A man on the phone and a rangy, dark-haired woman with full sleeves of flowers gave blood as people spilled onto to the curb.] (hover-style:(text-color:#eb5ed8) + (text-style:'italic')) [“Go outside, play in the fields, walk to the farms. This place is teeming with things to do. You can’t just hang out here in the basement.”] (hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [“I have chocolate,” I said, wanting to help, but anxious about being late.] (hover-style:(text-color:#eb5ed8) + (text-style:'italic')) [“I was looking for a book,” he said. His enormous eyes photographed everything.] (hover-style:(text-color:cyan) + (text-style:'italic')) [Outside the bus, the future is at a standstill.]