Sketch

If anyone should read this story, even if they should read this first sentence, get halfway through then stop, abandon it, it will be too late, they will already have allowed the story to enter them, a parasite of sorts, no, not quite the metaphor because it doesn’t require a host to survive, it can get along fine without one, more a spirit entering a body in order to live a while as a stowaway to some other consciousness, think along its thoughts, feel what it feels, remind itself of the chaos and confusion of being incarnate and mortal, the story is in them, one sentence deep, then two, three, paragraphs unfolding like dried or paper flowers dropped into water, they were mummified, abstract, arid, then absorbed a live element, flourishing after long hibernation, so the paragraphs float on the surface to suggest there are depths to the person thinking and feeling inside the story, but how could that be, they’ve just now sat to read it, their memory and attention sculpted into imaginary figures as they do so, persons, places, things, these combining into events, rising action, tightened into little knots of conflict, eye tracking the words and sentences and multiple regions of the brain working in coordinated complex fashion to visualize the goings-on of the characters, their thoughts, their feelings, coming alive in the hypothetical, made real in the consciousness of the reader where only moments before they were ink on a page, the story is what happens in the privacy and busy silence, the head stilled and the eyes tracking, this is the very story they’re reading, they the character they’re asked to imagine, the action a very minor one, subtle, person sitting alone in a parked car on a lunch break or before work, book open on lap or resting against steering wheel, a little introspective adventure before giving their mental energies over to the practical involvements of their employer, the smallest act of defiance really, maybe futile, to be a place where a genuinely new occurrence might become manifest without need of a witness, valuable for its own sake, that a category of experience as provisional and fugitive as a story might flower in the head and then spread throughout the body, shading its mood, its attitude, orientation in space and time, seatbelt still banded across its chest, one story before work, five, seven, nine pages long, a lifetime travelled from beginning to end, excerpt from a whole cosmology of character and action that will happen once then never again, not exactly this same way nor under similar circumstances, they finish and float off into the white space beyond and feel themselves dispersed like seedlings or pollen, after which there is the sound of a car door slamming, a coworker nearby, hand raised in a wave, so a hand has to be lifted from the book and raised in turn, thought with a different sort of a hand, a secret one, hybrid, part story, part person, that being the feeling that will last a few seconds, a few minutes at most, after the book is closed and tossed to the passenger’s seat, seatbelt undone, door opened, locked, closed, person walking with a story closing its many blooms within them, dormant and historical to their consciousness, despite their abandonment of its brief world for more immediate distractions and worries, a more real array of unrealities, more important supposedly because shared by others explicitly, talked about, argued over, joked about, asked after, explained, until each skate on the surface of an opinion, none held too long because they emerge too easily from conviction, no room for quieter places where it’s permissible to remain undefined a while, mutable, half-formed, a compliment to their own very nature, instances of return from they know not where, unmoored and so home. 

Breeders

The quiet man and the even quieter man were sitting poolside, at dry reach of a tumult of water and cannonballing children. There were amazing sights within view, all about on the other sides of their sunglasses. Women of various ages with bodies that returned them briefly to the freshness of long-lost years of teenage gawking and fantasizing. All winter long where had these figures been hiding? Like the bulbs of tropical plants lying dormant in hard cold ground, spring rains and consistently warm weather had brought them alive again, complimented gloriously by swimwear. It was impolite to stare, so they sufficed with glances. For anyone helplessly beholden to the female form, a bikini was a masterpiece of charged suggestion. For those who weren’t, two-piece, one-piece, it was nothing more than an overpriced contrivance of peekaboo. 

The quiet man had been talking about The Hague, about email exchanges with the lawyer of a war criminal serving a life sentence in one of its affiliated prisons. The quieter man had just finished talking about curses, his great-grandmother’s strong conviction they were credible, though how feeble a curse could become when laid on the head of a non-believer. The quieter man’s great-grandmother had lived half a life in dread, for as a girl her own mother had placed a curse on her, may you suffer a family, may you keep fertile until you’re old, eternally pregnant, and that’s what’d happened, the quieter man swore, from age sixteen until her thirties and past her thirties through her forties, then beyond that even, not long after giving birth to yet another kiddo she’d find herself pregnant again. Two months after the pregnancy curse had been laid on her head, her period had gone missing, the worst kind of morning sickness began hitting her, morning after morning, and her mother, wholly unsympathetic, actually smugly pleased by her daughter’s confusion and stress and growing dread, suggested they visit the family doctor. The mother made sure to sit in the room, not holding the daughter’s hand as the doctor delivered the news. In hindsight the mother had known her daughter had been carnally tempting fate with a boy she had foolishly called a boyfriend, so the curse was more a gamble against the odds repeated unprotected sex wouldn’t turn up punished by Mother Nature. How else had she gained an education on such things, except by a youthful first pregnancy herself? She’d hoped to cultivate a healthy fear in the girl by supernatural means, since the force of natural lust had come upon her, a boy eager to undress her and bed her. Alas, she should’ve chosen a curse that wasn’t so likely to fall on a girl, because she’d brought hardship on herself, once-removed. A grandmother at thirty-one. The mother of a young mother will usually carry half the burden, she should’ve considered before casting curses against her own bloodline. But that hadn’t been the consummation of the curse but merely its beginning. The girl was unholy fertile. Her loins were cruelly prolific and couldn’t be held in check by established folk preventions, continual breastfeeding, consumption of abortioning herbs and roots. No, these only seemed to anger the girl’s womb, stoke its appetite for generating children from nothing. Twins, triplets, three sets of the former, two of the latter, babies burst from the girl and stole her youth from her, leaving her exhausted, feebly at the mercy of her own fruitfulness. 

Wait, the quiet man interrupted. How many kids she end up having?

It depends. Counting stillborns and miscarriages or not counting them? 

Not. 

The quieter man leaned a head slightly to the left, blind to the beautiful bodies before him and many children swimming and running. Fifty-four, I think it was. A few died before they made it past their tenth year, but counting those, I think fifty-four. Hard to believe, I know. Don’t blame you if you don’t. 

They’d arrived at the topic circuitously, as they arrived at most points of shared irritation or curiosity, never quite progressing along a linear path, digressions springing up as certain details caught their interest. Their wives characterized this as distractedness, a lot of noise extracted from a mere whisper. The husbands quiet and quieter would of course point out the plain case that the wives were no better, conjuring all sorts of thrashing semantic energy from analysis about so-and-so’s comment the other day, or speculation about some recent retread of public outrage over some endlessly recurring political jackassery. The men were simply quieter, so often from across a room their leaning towards one another was mistaken for conspiratorial commentary on the women, judgment over what they were loudly talking about. It hardly ever was, the men would claim. It was never, actually. The wives would cap off such exchanges with an ironic uh-hmmmm, nodding to each other rolling their eyes. What the husbands could be sure of then was, returned to their corner of a room or pool, their wives would certainly be talking about them. 

Babies. Neither the quiet man or quieter man had wanted them and it was good fortune they had fallen in love with women who didn’t either. But someone who had, somewhat surprisingly, was this man indicted for crimes against humanity, sentenced by the Hague for ordering the murders of upwards of two hundred women, children, and elderly villagers some thirty years ago. The quiet man had heard from a friend, a lawyer familiar with the case, the man had lived in hiding in a city not far from that very village, grew a beard and disappeared, supposedly. Though the war had been settled the hard way and the people whose will he’d served had been arrested, tried, imprisoned or executed, this man had somehow become a figure of admiration and sympathy among the defeated. This is where the legend started, with perceived nobility in defeat, that the man was moved from town to town to city every few years, given shelter, protected by loyalists, the last surviving leader to evade capture. Providing for his needs became a form of soft protest. From his middle years into his sixties, he enjoyed their protection but also, it was said, the comforts of their daughters. Mothers and fathers encouraged their young women to visit the man’s room, to lay with him, believing it a high honor to bear his babies. Two and half decades of knocks at his door, women waiting on the other side convinced they shouldn’t be repulsed or afraid but proud to be worth his time and attention. Impossible to estimate the numbers of women who shared a bed with him, coerced or willingly, so impossible to say approximately how many babies born during those decades were his. Father of an aborted nation, literally. 

That’d been my pitch I’d made to his lawyer, the quiet man said, I didn’t want to talk about the war or about the tangle of ideological nonsense that’d caused it, I wanted to talk about his life as a stud set out to pasture. Flatter him with questions about his priapism, gain trust that way, get him talking, then once inside his personality, explore its dimensions, take measure of it. 

You eventually score in-person counsel with him? 

Nope. Never could get past the lawyer. We went back and forth with emails for better part of a year, an endless string of conditions tacked onto the prospect of a first meeting. I’m sure they read up on me and learned a bit about how I felt about the war and decided I wouldn’t interview in good faith. The lawyer only ever forwarded along one direct quote by his client, in their most recent and probably final email. My adventure in beds is a matter of privacy. Tell the young professor asking after me to create his own fun and leave me out of it. 

Fair enough then!

I’ll say. 

The quiet man shooed a fly from his right nipple, the quieter man raised a chin to enjoy the sun’s warmth on his throat. This cloudless sky and sun the same sky and sun that had overseen the executions of villagers and the births of countless hypothetical children. Here it was doing peaceful work toasting their bodies with ultraviolet radiation. Number this one among many subtle indulgences to be enjoyed by terminally comfortable men, the warmth of a sun that promises to only gradually harm them. 

In the shallows a group of children had begun another round of Marco Polo. Both men had played the game when they were younger, the quiet man on his birth continent, the quieter man on his, summer days long gone and mellowing the present moment with nostalgia. There were six or seven, boys and girls, each wading away from a kid who’d turned his back to stand in a corner eyes closed, counting to ten. Count finished, when he turned the game would rely on the honor system, that his eyes would remain genuinely shut, no peeks or cheating. The kid in question was skinny, not much sweep or reach to his arms. Marco! he’d shout then listen with head tilted, gauging approximate angle and distance of the Polos coming back to him. Some kids waded closer, just out of reach, to tease him, others submerged themselves and swam to a fresh spot from which to call back to him. When’d they last played the game, the quieter man asked. Poignant to consider, one summer decades ago unbeknownst to them they’d played their final round of Marco Polo, unaware the following summer they’d have outgrown it, the pool surrounded by something far more interesting, female figures conjuring to dominate their imaginations, breasts, thighs, hips, asses. Testosterone emboldened them while their boyishness still shamed them. They wouldn’t have dared been caught indulging in children’s games, though that was the real shame, because both of them agreed at the time they’d still wanted to play, looked on the younger kids in envy. 

What’s changed? the quieter man noted. Here they were sitting watching the children still, hindered by their will to impress or at least not embarrass themselves. 

The hunt before them continued, skinny boy creeping towards the voices taunting him. Another boy waded carefully to bob head above water behind him. Bold, the quiet man said. That kid’s toast, the quieter man predicted. Sure enough, at the next Marco the boy was tagged before he could swim beyond reach. The skinny boy opened his eyes and words were said and somehow an argument had started among the children, rules invoked, some infraction claimed, skinny boy opening his eyes at the critical moment just before calling Marco. Arguing over the rules, the quiet and quieter man recalled, had been central to enjoyment of the game. 

What I’d really like to do is run a paternity test on the whole county, the quiet man said, finishing aloud some thought he’d been having. Their earlier conversation, the lawyer, the prisoner, his gracious inseminations of daughters of men and women who admired him. He got more ass as a fugitive than most free men can ever hope to get! The quiet man’s jokes usually swung from the gallows, not to delight in heartlessness but to stand in shadow of whatever swung above him with neck through noose. His cousins, first, second, third, could be girls he’s talking about, but would he know, given how divided his family was in their affiliations about the war? 

The fly was back again, flirting with the quiet man’s nipple. Look at this, the quiet man complained, pointing a finger down at his chest. Lifting sunglasses for brighter scrutiny, the quieter man followed the finger to the offender in question. Climbing through a tangle of hairs, the fly nervously sniffed the baby-soft pink of an aureole. What sustenance could it possibly find there?

Breastfeeding? the quieter man joked.  

One of my many many offspring, the quiet man deadpanned. 

This was it, the volta, the volte-face, absurd remark that inspired the turn towards the quieter man’s great-grandmother, Appalachian matriarch from early last century. The curse of unceasing pregnancy. He’d never met the poor woman but there were photos of the clan taken back in the late 60s, early 70s. Gathered for a family reunion barbecue, most of the children still living standing and kneeling around a blasted tindersticks old lady in ankle-length gingham dress. Sitting there like exhausted royalty, lawn chair making do as her throne. At a glance anyone would be forgiven for mistaking the clan as extended family. But no, this brood was hers alone. The youngest knelt at her side in the grass, a boy fresh from his teens. This is what he had been told. Describing it now he was inclined to doubt it himself. 

You thinking what I’m thinking, the quiet man asked his friend. 

What?

My prisoner, your great-grandmother. Imagine if we could collapse the decades and bring them together, her curse and his appetites would’ve complimented each other perfectly. 

A cursed race and a master race evening out their respective bloodlines. 

There they were again, swaying on the gallows, laughing modestly at expense of their ancestries. This had somehow caught the attentions of their betters across the water, wife unquiet and wife unquieter, mock-accusatory fingers pointing in the men’s direction. They missed nothing, these psychic wives. With them hypervigilance was casual as a hobby. Before the husbands could mime shrugs of innocence and pleading, the women were out of water and sauntering over, their shadows following them like worshippers.  

What’re you talking about? they asked. 

Not about you, if you can believe it! 

Either side of their husbands were chaise lounges waiting, but for dramatic effect they remained standing. 

He was telling me about his great-grandmother. 

Oh, Jesus, the one wife said to the other, ever heard that? 

The other wife nodded no, which lead to the details of the poor woman’s life inventoried again for inevitable disbelief and horror. 

It almost doesn’t even need to be true, the other wife said after the story had ended, leaving all four refreshed in their gratefulness to be childless. 

They’d had such conversations before. The topic of children would come up and off they’d go, rehearsing yet again the many high-toned nuanced talking points about why children weren’t for them. The conversation was working in that direction when the quieter man cut in, a thought he’d been having bursting into comment. 

That photo of my great-grandma, I just remembered, it wasn’t a family member who took it. It was a crew member of a T.V. show popular in Japan. They’d heard about our family and had contacted one of my grandmother’s older brothers, offered to pay for the reunion, food, liquor, rental of the hall, on condition they could film it. All these Japanese guys showed up with their gear, just one of them speaking understandable English, gathered my great-grandma’s kids around her and snapped a bunch of photos, a few which ended up in tabloid papers. The headlines claimed the truth, ninety-year-old woman with her fifty-four offspring, the whole lot of them slotted comfortably among stories of alien abduction and recent sightings of Rasputin. 

There she was, conjured four separate ways, the matriarch described. In the quiet man’s imagination she appeared somewhat familiar, with features of his own long-dead beloved grandmother. In his wife’s mind the woman sat in full color, whereas the quieter man’s wife envisioned her in black-and-white. None reproduced with any true fidelity the details of the photograph, not even the one who had seen it and studied it, describing it decades later to his wife and two friends. No myth without distance, the quieter man quoted to himself, a phrase he’d landed on during one of his many conversations with his friend, timid hunter of war criminals and antagonist of flies. Put distance between yourself and others, hide your vulnerability, protect it that way long enough you’ll appear inhuman enough to qualify as mythic. Pick a king, an art hero, a celebrity—each case, always the same. 

He considered whether these were sentiments worth sharing, then considered that if he had to consider, he had the answer. 

What was her name? the quiet man’s wife asked. 

Who?

Your great-grandmother. 

A pause. Picturing her again. 

Annabelle. 

Hmmm, the quiet man’s wife hummed, as if the name was worth savoring. 

Now here’s a real challenge for you, the quieter man’s wife said. Can you name all her children, in order of birth, eldest to youngest?

The quieter man lifted his sunglasses to show eyes to her question. 

The old old woman still wavered in their minds, hazy sitting in a lawn chair once removed from this summer day all four were sharing with her, other people’s children splashing and screaming within view of her own small portion of eternity. 

Choose a name at random, the quieter man sighed, good odds you’d accidentally name one. Same with these kiddos here too, right? 

At the suggestion four names came to mind, four minds, each with a name. 

Thinking of one? the quieter man asked. The other three looked over at him, face turned to the sun. 

Maria, one of the women said.

Claire, said the other, offering her own name. 

Paul, the quiet man suggested. Matthew and Mark also options. 

Emily, the quieter man said. He had been thinking Grace but somewhere between thinking and speaking it had become Emily. 

Look then, he told them. We’re parents now. Which kids here playing in the water are ours? 

Take all or take none of them, his wife said, modestly surprising herself with the rightness of how that sounded. She hadn’t said it loud enough for the others to hear, not over the chaos of child-noises, so none agreed. Maybe she would say it again. Maybe then they’d hear and voice their agreement. It was at that moment, on the cusp, in tune with her thinking before speaking, a fat brittle fly landed pat like a kiss on her cheek.

Thieves of Height

 

A light drizzle outside. Four travelers already at the lodgings, boots off, socks hung up to dry. Large fire, stone hearth. Three attendants, a middle-aged man, his wife, their son. 

“Tell us—what’s the weather like below?”

The teahouse master asks them. 

“Quiet, slow-moving. Green fields. Rice fields. The middle of summer.”

The teahouse master’s son takes a seat on a large stone by the hearth, all the better to listen. The world below, maybe, his favorite story?

“What’re the people like?”

The four travelers take turns describing.

“Kind.”

“Hospitable.”

“Humble.”

“Hard-working.”

The teahouse master’s wife nods, the son doesn’t, the husband and father, the master, doesn’t nod then does. 

“When’s the last time you’ve traveled down the mountain, to visit the village at the bottom,” one of the travelers asks. 

“Thirty years ago.”

“My god—a long time!”

“We came up here together,” the teahouse master’s wife added. “We were teenagers when we married.” 

None of the travelers spoke their minds on this kind of life, how they might feel should they have been made to live it. There was the son nearby listening, watching. Had he been allowed yet to descend? Did he envy travelers who arrived, told their stories, then once warmed and mellowed by tea, gathered their belongings to leave? 

Fire-shadows played about the boy’s face but the face itself expressed no particular emotion. This was his listening-face and he was merely listening.

“Does it get lonely up here?”

“Shhh! Lu-Shan!” the others admonished. So the travelers were not all the same after all. Among them was one who broke etiquette to ask uncomfortable questions, the others helpless to apologize for him by admonishing him. 

The teahouse master’s wife eased back on her heels, said nothing. 

The son hung his hands from his wrists, elbows pressed to knees. 

The master, setting down a tray with a fresh round of steaming tea-pots, waited in the silence between all involved, before turning to answer. 

“It doesn’t. It never has, when we’re together and alone. When visitors arrive and bring news of the world, though, sometimes.” 

Lu-Shan, forgetting his friends’ chiding just a moment before, followed this response to the next impossible-to-suppress question. “Why not leave then? Why not travel down the mountain from time to time?”

“Because I remember what it was like to be there. And the thought alone’s enough to make me even more lonely.” 

Some kind of monk? An amateur renunciate? The travelers could be forgiven for wondering; but in this instance all were considerate enough to ask outright.

The fire flowed upward and the room wobbled with shadows, the teahouse firmly built from logs of mountain pine into rock-face. Outside wind played mournful sounds against the edges of the house, at times loud enough to drown out conversation. 

“Who brings you supplies?” Lu-Shan was curious again. 

The teahouse master poured tea from pot into tiny clay cups, four to the table. 

“Porters from the village.”

“How long have they worked with you?”

“Several generations.” 

“What do they bring?”

“Jugs of water. Caches of dried tea leaves. Provisions for us.”

“How long do they stay per visit, usually?”

“Not long. It takes the larger part of a day, sunup to sundown when the days are shorter, sunup to mid-afternoon, when longer. They rest, have tea, then go.”

“Is that who you get news from the world from?”

“What news?”

Lu-Shan paused, caught on the barbs of the question.

The teahouse master, noting discomfort, softened the reply with elaboration.

“What I mean is: news suggests significance. What might that be? A new governor for the province, a fresh famine to contend with, another war? Those are the broader concerns. But there are the smaller, more personal ones. Any children born in the village since the last visit? Any of its elderly passed into the spirit world since? They’re all the same and come and go as they should, but from up here, it doesn’t quite move a person. The view from up here, so close to the sun, is often that clear. The people below seem very, very small. A man running from one end of a field to another appears to inch across it at the slowest pace. Way up here, we honor the view but don’t enjoy it, and out of respect to those below, certainly don’t pity it.” 

For once Lu-Shan was speechless.

Awkwardly, and maybe even humbled, the others sipped their tea. 

The son rose, walked out of view into the back room of the teahouse. The master’s wife attended to cups and plate, prepared parcels of food for the guests. They wouldn’t be staying much longer, she seemed to know. Words had been spoken, as they always had, following on the heels of too many innocently curious questions, and the guests no longer felt fully welcome. It was a way of life at the mountain’s summit and they were treated to a view of how they appeared from its heights. 

This one of the travelers described while on the way down, a half-hour from earshot of their hosts and their isolate rest-house. 

Once the words had been spoken and the silence had followed, he’d watched the wife to catch a reading of what’d been expressed. No nod but no biting of the lip, no lowering of the eyes but no challenging or meaningful stare either. Just hands holding cloth and wiping-wiping the rims of cups and then hands folding tugs of jerky and biscuit into paper, tied tight by lengths of twine. 

It was a bright day with enormous sky above. Lu-Shan was speaking his mind in all directions and the others would on occasion catch it and give it a shake. 

“What a life! Can you imagine.”

This Lu-Shan repeated throughout the afternoon, the others hearing it at five thousand five hundred feet same as they’d heard it at five thousand, two thousand feet same as four thousand. The land below grew larger and larger and the four in their appalled gossip shrank to the size of the view. Once the path leveled into a dirt trail, berry bushes on either side, they turned to admire the remainder of mountain left behind them. The teahouse wasn’t visible among the grey-blue haze of rock and sky. There were three above, they knew, who subsisted now on what four memories could offer. Did the teahouse master, his wife, his shy, curious, wordless son provide the same? Four strangers vividly among them then sent on their way, tramping down switchbacks to vanish into a perpetual stillness of landscape. 

“Or a porter!” Lu-Shan added. “Imagine. Up, down, up, down. Doing all the hard work to keep them high up there serving tea.”

Having completed one full circuit, the others didn’t think so didn’t think to say, they could. Their not thinking such a thing left them grateful they didn’t have to live it, whistling and joking one to the other, walking into the village they’d departed from just earlier that morning. 

Poor Richard B

Here’s the video, press play, here’s the past reanimated—a man, middle-aged, sitting hunched in a trailer. Ted Bundy’s younger brother. 

Here’s six minutes of Ted Bundy’s younger and only brother talking about their childhood together, how much he looked up to his brother. Long unwashed white hair. Crumpled t-shirt. This is years ago and he’s dead now but at the moment he’s talking, living out of a trailer, he explains, because he can’t bear to settle anywhere, believing people will soon realize who he is, what he’s related to by blood. He can’t bear to be near people because of the part of him that still hurts, having loved under the spell of deceit a killer of women. 

He wipes a hand down his face but the features remain. He reaches to pet a dog off-camera. 

The man vanishes, voice remains. Photographs now of Bundy camping with his younger brother, Bundy smiling with arm around the boy. Often he’d visit Ted wherever he was living, the voice relates, a week or so. Seattle, Utah. Once Ted cut one of the visits short and this much older version of this younger brother explained how the boy had been deeply hurt by that, bewildered. No reason given. No effort to apologize. In hindsight he believed his older brother may have simply been feeling an unbearable “urge to kill again.” 

The voice returns from photographs and blends with the face and shoulders and gesturing hands of its man again. He’s lived out of an R.V. for a decade, he says, jobless. Alone except for his pet cat (so correction—not a dog he reached for earlier, but a cat). It’s a life, so he’s living it. Can spend days simply sitting in the camper in a depressive haze, hardly able to think, so why try? A killer and rapist and torturer of young women; looked up to that; desired approval from that. The voice goes silent and leaves a face looking down at its hands. He’ll travel to a new town soon, a park on its outskirts where no one will bother him. He’ll walk in the woods if his legs will let him. But in the meantime, the last ten seconds of his life on camera—cat in his lap purring and his hands released from the story he’s finished telling, to smooth a path from head to  neck to hindquarters, cat the very image of trust and comfort. End of video. Man gone. On to the next one. 

The New Intimacy

It’s forever raining indoors and maybe this has always been the case. It says something about the state of things that only recently have people begun to have difficulty distinguishing indoors from out, clouds from ceilings. Some have been investigating their own confusions on the matter and have come out the calmer end of innocence with a new conviction, which they believe would be appropriate to share now. The way through a person towards others too infrequently leads through a shared privacy. More a natural condition of things than a dilemma. 
What happened? Was there some kind of collapse between the ages, so past and present have become indistinguishable, and strangers walking in from an adjoining room do so with a touch of the familiar, making it easier for us to greet them? Once long ago it’d been deemed a virtue, to be a private person, to maintain privacy. It wasn’t disparaged as an attempt to hide or withhold but was a courtesy extended to oneself and others. This from a time when the desire to track and describe individual instances of quiet were limited by certain technological insufficiencies. A phone could be held in the hand then set down on its receiver then walked away from. A person could turn key in an ignition and drive off and meld seamlessly into a horizon. These had been assumed to be expressions of estrangement; little did we know they were gifts and privileges. The future has come to pass and rendered nearly every disappearance as a surface that one can splay one’s hands across, palms down, fingers splayed. Like a glass table. 
A maelstrom of data, shards of world recorded and collated. From the vantage point of satellites we have been afforded visions of hurricanes and have laid claim to their spiraling by naming their untroubled cores after our own organs of witness. The eye. Whereas hurricanes are cyclopean, we are blessed or cursed with a pair, which collaborate and create balance, stereoscopy, which in turn blends rearwards in the brain’s occipital lobe as what’s recreated to pretend it has been seen. Is two better? Is one? Two centers would mean two stillnesses, therefore no true loneliness in privacy. This would make as fine a metaphor as any for people bonded in their distances and nearnesses. A hurricane with two eyes. 
The house is quiet. The lights are out. In an upstairs room four cats lay on a bed waiting for their owners to return. Why is this not deemed significant? The lives of these beings extend beyond mere rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, begging for food and eating it. They’re four mysteries disguised as commonplace personages, claws and tails and ears and whiskers, leaping at a ball of aluminum foil thrown from the kitchen to skitter across the floor into a room unseen. They’re born for play and will do so, no matter how feebly, into old age, even after they’ve abandoned grooming for daylong napping. If we should want to know more about the lost art of maintaining a privacy, we could do worse than to ask a cat, for it's certain we’ll receive no answer. It’s not enough to be happy with oneself, or at peace, but to be relieved of foremost awareness of self, to flow beyond boundaries of the first person singular and plural, to subtly move with the ensemble of a landscape or room. That would be a pleasant transformation; funny it’s nearly unachievable. At every turn we have to organize our surroundings according to the priorities of what we carry within ourselves from one moment to the next. Who knows how it could be any other way, but too often that’s what we seek to outmaneuver or eradicate. 
A truism: everything recalled enjoys a rapid reinvention. The truism’s terminally ill doppelganger: everything forgotten has suffered irretrievable deconstruction. Creation and destruction are that close, nearer than our noses, submerged beneath faces. So close we can’t see what we’re projecting onto scenes we move through, living and aspiring for more of what we can’t exactly claim as our own. Our nearsightedness is a poor compliment for our farsightedness, so we conjure our purposes as if they were dreams. Ones we can wake from at moments of our choosing. We invent to destroy, lay waste to rebuild not cities or civilizations but one another and ourselves, and somewhere between shifting between extremes we maintain by sheer accident our birthright in solitude. Who can account for it so who can ever accurately or fully describe it? Most can only maintain it like gardeners without sight or hearing or miracle of recognition within touch. Almost all tend to it so it might live as something eventually beyond them. It was never ours in the first place, so it’s appropriate we should never quite know it, to consider ourselves owners or distributors of it. We permit it means of existing, no matter how briefly, unaware that's what we're for, an exchange between fates without knowledge.