WIP [Visitation]

A night in December, nothing unusual about it, high summer. Sharkie and Paul-Paul and Rog and I met at Hollocks after work. The rest of us grabbed a table and chairs out back beneath the jacaranda, same place we always sit, while Sharkie went in through the front to buy the first round. The sun was still up but the crickets were singing. Sitting with our backs to the bar and the parking lot and the buildings in the distance, we wiped the sweat from our faces and talked about the day, same day as always, enjoying the view without really noticing it. I was the last of the crew to hire on at the mines and that was five years ago. Rog had fifteen years under his belt,  Paul-Paul nearly twenty. They’d started working in the mines when they were teenagers, their fathers had worked there, in Paul-Paul’s case both his father and grandfather. Rog had started one summer then when it was time for school to start again decided to drop out. Paul-Paul had quit school against his mother’s wishes, he hated the classroom, absolutely loathed it, so decided to “go underground” he said, and work with his hands. Sharkie had seniority over all of us. Twenty-one years at the opal mines, the last ten as a foreman. This was why he insisted on exercising his largesse, direct quote, because he was the biggest earner. He knew what beers we each preferred, especially if he was buying. Slowly over the past few years, each Friday, he won us over to a fancy Dutch lager that came in a squat brown bottle, with a classy gold label with an illustration of a windmill on it, a reproduction from a sketch made in the sixteenth century by a Dutch master painter. Sharkie had a weakness for trivia and would elaborate about the drawing on the label, the painter, his life and works. None of us knew much about art so had no point of reference to tell whether he was telling us the straight truth or exaggerating. 
This particular evening, call it the Night of the Visitation, began in the late afternoon, hot out, crickets singing, three of us sitting on plastic lawn chairs out by the jacaranda, crappy plastic table between us, clutches of fake flowers arranged around a concrete sculpture of the Virgin Mary in a grotto, the barest decoration for what was supposedly a miraculous figure, someone who’d achieved the impossible, impregnated on her lonesome own without aid of human touch. Uncle Row, the owner of the establishment, called it his Tranquil Garden. Sharkie came out the back patio door with his fancy beers, binoculars hanging around his neck. The binoculars he kept on the passenger seat of his jeep, if it was late evening and he was out in the open air, he always made a point of grabbing them. He frequented racing tracks in his youth and said the habit of bringing binoculars wherever he went began back then. The air was crisp and dry and across the burnt flat lands between our jacaranda and the hills miles out in the distance a fragrance of warm hay carried across the breeze. From where? There wasn’t a haystack to be found two hundred square miles of the place, at a race track more than likely, something to cover the floors of the stables, and even then imported by truck or cargo plane. 
We were sitting out in the Tranquil Garden, in full view of the edge of the world, at the beginning of another weekend. We were above ground, as Sharkie said, but brought the darkness up with us. In hindsight it was either luck or fate it was a Friday, one evening of the week when we were permitted by our commitments to stay out past nine. The night came on in stages. During the first round of drinks, the sun edged towards the horizon. During the second, it blazed along the hills. Third round it submerged itself beyond the horizon. The sky darkened and dusk airbrushed pretty colors above the hilltops, orange and salmon and lavender. By the fourth round the stars and moon were out. It wasn’t a conscious thing, marking the progressive stages of a sundown that way, but we took our time with our bottles, drink too much too fast, as we had on previous occasions, we’d risk bringing the evening to an early conclusion, yawning and rubbing our eyes, sleepy. 
Sharkie was sitting at his usual angle, facing west. I sat next to him. Paul-Paul and Rog had their backs to the sunset and were arguing about something the English Prime Minister was supposedly to have said on the topic of surveillance satellites. They were unapologetically conspiracy theorists so it was their tendency to believe wherever they were, someone was watching. Sharkie assured them they were not so important but ribbing them would look up to the sky and its evolving darkness and wave. It’s true, he agreed, those weren't all stars up there. Some had long-range vision and intelligence, a motivation to snoop, and at this very moment were on the move, orbiting the planet. Say hello, he’d joke. Tell them where to stick it. Somewhere in a brightly lit room someone was sitting at a bank of computers watching them on a live video feed, focusing in to read their lips. Within the hour word of their slander would make its way to the Prime Minister and he’d give the go-ahead for a drone strike. 
We had each bought a round and duties had come back around to Sharkie, so he excused himself and walked back to the patio, screen door clapping behind him. He must have been gone five minutes. At a few tables closer to the building some other evening drinkers had found chairs or were standing around in loose groups, smoking and coughing and laughing. I remember there’d been a lull after Sharkie got up and left, as if he’d taken the conversation with him. Paul-Paul unbanded his hair, shook it out, pulled it back again, retied it. Rog uncrossed his legs, fished a bandana from his back pocket, wiped sweat off his face. Some wiseacre at the bar had paid good money to play, honest to God, “I Love a Rainy Night” on the jukebox. I thought about commenting on that to Paul-Paul and Rog but let it play, a fresh burst of volume as Sharkie came back out the back door, two beers per hand. The song ended before he reached us. And then a weird sensation, a certainty born of intuition, something had changed between his leaving and arrival. The sky was dark, the land was dark, Paul-Paul and Rog sat just where Sharkie had left them, so what was it? It took the song ending for me to feel it and a few breaths before the next song began and in retrospect I noticed, the crickets, they’d gone quiet. 
A few paces before he reached us, Sharkie stopped. Following Paul-Paul and Rog’s line of sight, I turned in my seat to see him standing there looking hypnotized. What’s got you, Sharkie? Paul-Paul asked. See that? Sharkie asked. See what, Rog said. Out there, the hills, Sharkie said, look at them. We all stood to study the hills eye-level with Sharkie. Beers clinked in his hands as he talked and it’s only now I’m realizing his hands might’ve been shaking. 
Look there, a few inches from the left, he said, handing a beer to Rog to free a finger so he could point to what he was seeing. The hills, they’re jagged for a bit, but see, they flatten out, then after a bit they go jagged again? Paul-Paul said he saw it and Rog said he did, but squinting with bad eyes, I said I couldn’t see anything. Sharkie handed out the rest of the beers, his own for me to hold, lifted binoculars to scan the distance. He walked from beneath the jacaranda, towards the edge of the dead grass where the so-called civilized world ended and wilderness began. That’s it, he told us. I swear on my poor dead mother’s rancid little life, it’s come our way at last. It’s our turn, just like I’ve been telling you. Have a look. 
When the binoculars met my eyes and the dark enlarged, everything we’d heard about the wandering prison, the apparition of H.M. Pennington, was there firsthand. So you could say I was seeing what I already knew. The silhouette of a large presence out there three, four miles across the land, blotting out the stars and hills behind it. The prison had been popping up across the country’s interiors a good decade, first seen by locals near Parson Springs. It’d been a big deal at the time, a conundrum, the prison that appears at twilight, lasts in one place for a night, then thins and vanishes before sunrise. It took some time before people came to realize they recognized the shape, the standing shadow of it, most identifiable by the outline of its ramparts set against a night sky. The thirty-foot walls, the main gate, the turret to the left of the gate taller by fair measure than the one to the right of it. This had been the distinguishing feature, the uneven height of the turrets. At each corner joint of the hexagonal outer wall were guard towers. Once that was decided, it wasn’t long before the first eyewitnesses recognized the structure’s similarity to the country’s oldest, longest-running prison, closed a quarter of a century ago, torn down not long after. Its original location was near the edge of Cleeway, once a colonial town that outgrew itself to become a city. Gradually the city’s outskirts expanded to include the prison. A prison in a residential area, that wouldn’t stand, so they tore it down. I’d been too young at the time to remember but Sharkie, once the prison had begun its second life as an apparition, talked of watching live on television its walls, turrets, guard towers buckle and crumble when they'd been torn down. In its place they built a parking lot and mall. Sharkie’s niece had visited the mall a couple of years ago, bought a pair of sneakers and fifteen minutes in a massage chair. For a solid century men died by hanging there in the kill building, he said, but at the snap of the fingers it was gone and in its place was a massage chair. 
Now’s our time, Sharkie said. I’m heading out there, who’s with me? Other drinkers had walked over to join us. A steady stream of indoor people were stepping out the back door of Hollocks to confirm the rumor, the remains of H.M. Pennington had taken shape on the horizon, first appearance in their far corner quadrant of the barrens. Rog said he was game, Paul-Paul swigged the last of his beer to allow for a few seconds of more careful consideration. A breeze arrived from across the open land, a soft force made visible as hairs blowing across our foreheads, jacaranda leaves jittering on their stems. I’m with you, Paul-Paul said, but lemme call Win first. Win was his wife, two young kids also, Win often after him to solve her nervousness about his vanishing underground five days a week to pay their mortgage, better ways to earn a living, she said, and especially as a family man, than putting not just your head but your whole damn body into the lion’s mouth, all to forage around its stomach, see what’s worth salvaging there. I was due back at the house in an hour, I told them. Knowing Sonocia, my girlfriend, she would want to come along. Alright if I gave her a call, invited her? People were already tossing empty bottles, striding to their trucks, driving their headlights out of the lot and around the starved tangle of barbed wire fence that terminated at the edge of the property. Give an hour or two, he said, it won’t be a matter of who to invite but who not to. Don’t doubt half the town’ll be waiting by the time we get there. 
Inside at the bar so many regulars had rushed in at once to ask for a telephone, Uncle Row had pulled two from behind the bar and let them sort out who got to make their calls first. After Paul-Paul called Win, I called Sonocia. Get here fast, I told her, and bring the flashlight, not the small one in the kitchen drawer, the large red one in the garage. Sharkie and Rog had headed off in Sharkie’s jeep, large cloud of dust barely creeping, almost motionless across the lot. Paul-Paul held his bandana over nose and mouth while I stood watching headlights bounce and trickle across the open dark towards the hills. Look, Paul-Paul said, pointing south and west towards Tanjeers, New Cora’s sister town, only other sizable outpost in the territory. Out there individual lights were on the move, breaking away from the town constellation, heading the same direction. Like a race, isn’t it, he said. Bet you one or the other gets there before either of our ladies show. 
He was wrong on that count. Sonocia and Win and Win and Paul-Paul’s twins, Lee and Megs, pulled into the lot. Neither Paul-Paul and I should’ve been surprised. Sonocia and Win communicated by way of “New Cora telepathy”, what we called it, if one caught a bit of news or a passing thought, the other had a knack for becoming aware instantly. From the passenger’s side window Win explained the obvious, the twins were fourteen, stubborn, if she said no, they couldn’t come, they would've slipped off on their own anyway, so best to invite them along and at least keep an eye on them. Sonocia leaned forward, raised a hand from the steering wheel, “a dead wave” the older locals called it, hand raised but no wave. Once there’d been a time when people moved their hands back and forth when they waved, the complaint went, then a new generation came along, then another, and somewhere along the way hands died on the vine and hung there, in lifeless greeting. The twins stood up in the pick-up’s bed, motormouthing amazement at what they were seeing, tiny lights gathering into a semicircle across the land. Paul-Paul and I climbed in with them. Sonocia slowed the truck off the lot and onto the scrabble, nervous to hit a bump and send Lee or Megs tumbling. I had my own modest measure of telepathy with her, so felt her nerves sparking under my own. Soon we were out on the Crisp, old local term for the bushlands, following the contrails of fresh tire tracks, twins hollering wordlessly to each other over the whip of the wind and the engine. 
A new town materializing from nothing, its phantom pull siphoning people from Tanjeers and New Cora, what it must have looked like from above. At ground level, us driving towards it, it looked more like what it was, a scatter of vehicles gathered in the middle of the barrens. It’s a drive-in theater out here, Paul-Paul said after we pulled up and Sonocia cut the engine. Some trucks brandished floodlights, others kept their brights on, an acre of hardpan and scrub brush caught in a sustained flash. Many kept to the cabs of their trucks or like us stood up from the beds, a few stepped out and walked into the light, hesitant to step further until enough of the others had joined them. It was simple, what we saw, but would be difficult to describe, other than to say the collective brightness projected towards it passed through it much the way light passes through water. The full-grown ghost of a prison, vacant, depopulated, dimly outlined, semi-transparent, half in two worlds at once. Walls and a gate and turrets and guard towers overlayed as a kind of night mirage over the ground, hills half-visible beyond them. Dozens, hundreds of times before we’d seen footage of this on television, a few in town had even travelled through the night to see for themselves years before, the prison losing its aura of uncanniness through frequency of appearance and spatial ubiquity. Over the years it had ceased to surprise or terrify, had been consigned to a lower order of miraculousness, like a circus wayfaring town to town. It was something else to view it firsthand. Whatever had been lost to familiarity as an idea, an image repeated on television, regained a soft power to unsettle, by sheer size and quiet, stillness of it filling space without quite owning it. 
Paul-Paul and I jumped to ground. The twins protested against their father’s orders to keep put. Win and Sonocia asked us to hang back, wait until word circulated it was safe to step near. At the edge of the light some Tanjeers people were talking with New Cora people, Sharkie among them. Paul-Paul and I apologized to our betters then walked over. 
Another face from the mines, Jules White, stood with Sharkie in speculation of what hung before them. He greeted us with a dead wave. It’s real after all, he said. Not that I ever doubted it. But it really checks a man’s skepticism to stand and look at it. We’d crossed twenty, thirty feet of ground and in a trick of nearness the apparition’s dimensions seemed to multiply several times its scale. If it had a shadow to cast, we would’ve been standing in it. Maybe that accounted for the feeling that flowed into me, low-grade giddiness, a sort of animal charge that courses through a person when they step to a cliff’s edge, no railing. 
Where's Griz Polkman, Sharkie asked Jules. Anyone bring him? 
Not sure, Jules said. Lemme ask around. At that he turned and passed back into darkness. I made a mistake turning to watch him go, shocked blind by headlights, me wincing, rubbing eyes, Sharkie smiling as he made a mock-show of trying to hand me his sunglasses. A pair of trucks pulled out of the pack, cut right, swung wide around the faint outline of the north-facing wall, disappearing for a breath then rematerializing as faint outlines themselves, reversing for a sustained moment the logic of motion, headlights seeming to lead them along rather than the trucks carrying them forward. Someone make a pot of coffee, Sharkie said, I’m making a night of this. Halfway around, or as it appeared, halfway through, the trucks stopped and their people took shape as tiny apparitions themselves, waving with live waves this time across the interiors, through walls and buildings, yards, cell blocks, doors and more walls, to the faint image of us on the other side standing and watching. I raised a hand high and signed back a even larger wave, arm sweeping right to left overhead. Belly of the whale, Sharkie said. Lookit what it swallowed. After which Paul-Paul asked, Who’s Griz Polkman? 
An old timer who keeps a trailer out near the range, Sharkie said, the range being Swayland’s Yield, southwest of Tanjeers. There were people of the towns and there were the wild types who lived in country around them. Griz Polkman had worked in the mines way back when Sharkie had started, quit a year later with a broken hip. Ex-con, no idea how he made his living until he quit working, calling it retirement. Not honestly, Sharkie was sure. But if anyone should be in their company to savor the strangeness of visitation, it was him. He had spent five years at Pennington, in Block A, where they kept the short-termers, arrested for breaking and entering suburban homes in Galawa. Had a bad drug habit, so went fooling about thieving people’s homes, then of course got caught, sentenced, put in with truly rough specimens in the Clink. Used to talk about it and would spit a lot while doing so, as if the evil eye was present among them and needed warding off. After his release he left the coast and fled to the interior, smallest furthest town he could find, which was Tanjeers. Even New Cora had been too big for him. When he broke his hip, he collected worker’s comp a few months then slipped into some form of mystery employment, most likely dealing more benign sorts of drugs. His trailer was where teenagers and working parents and seniors alike in Tanjeers scored their dimebags. A quarter of a mile down the dirt road leading to his trailer was an intersection with another dirt road, and there stood a mailbox, and word is, in that mailbox, if money was left in the morning, by evening a bag of marijuana might be retrieved. There was a kind of honors system in the set-up, Griz watching from binoculars, for per instructions the person pulling to mailbox had to step out, stand to be viewed from a distance, give a hand signal. If they met necessary criteria for an exchange, they would be granted privileges to become a regular. If they stole a bag that they hadn’t paid for, they would bear a mark of disapproval. Their name and license plate would be introduced into circulation among the townspeople and they would suffer the repercussions, shunned, banned as future customers of Griz’s contraband. In the early days a few had stolen from him then soon regretted it. Griz rarely left his trailer but asserted a subtle influence on the town. 
If anyone could confirm with their own eyes this is it, Sharkie said, it’d be Griz. By then a mixed crowd had joined us, Tanjeerians and New Corists. New trucks pulled up as trucks already arrived began to empty. Sonocia and Win and the Twins were among them. Hello, Charles, Win said greeting Sharkie. Evening, Winnie, Sharkie said, matching Win’s formality. Gawking at the sizable hush before them, the Twins were awed silent. Sonocia laid fingertips on my shoulder, hand hovering as if hesitant to lay full weight of its palm there. She was spooked, I could tell, edged half a step back from the vision before her, putting distance between herself and the fear in her, rest of us closer to the apparition so more likely to be taken should it suddenly grow arms and reach for us. So far, same as always, Sharkie reassured her. Every night, no deviation. It’ll sit here through the evening and we’re free to walk around it and through it. Then when first light comes it’ll fade, dissolve as the sun comes up, on to the next evening and location. 
Down the loose standing line of onlookers I saw faces I knew, people from around town and the mines. I saw William Sharp and Bella Quinley, Jim Vey’s son and Jass Mellibinder’s daughters. Some looked my way and nodded, others just shook their heads, eyes wide in disbelief. It was an odd sensation but I was feeling it also, pleasantly terrified by what had long been practiced in the mind, unprepared to stand before what we’d so long imagined. H.M. Pennington, main gate, bluestone walls, hospital and exercise yards, max-security and psych unit, each transparent overlaying the other, blending features subtly and seamlessly. When Sonocia found words, she described it perfectly.  A kind of full-scale blueprint hologram. Who would be brave enough to take a first step into it? 
Don't call me brave but I’m willing, Sharkie told her. Sonocia’s hand found mine, grasped it. From past experience I knew if Sharkie started walking and I tried to follow, the hand would grip and Sonocia would stay put. So I kept beside her. Against Win’s protests, though, Paul-Paul followed, the edge in her voice not enough to stop him. Ten, fifteen, fifteen, twenty feet the two of them crossed the no-man’s-land to where the prison’s walls lingered, crowd quieting as they walked. When they were within reach of it, Sharkie paused, Paul-Paul stepped up next to him. Sharkie spoke low to Paul-Paul and Paul-Paul nodded. Then he turned to report across no-man’s-land to the rest of us, the air here, it’s got a chill, a little breeze breathing off the thing. Later he’d describe the sensation that bloomed within him when he stepped a leg into the wall, like dipping into less-than-lukewarm water. No rippling along the apparition’s skin as he broke its surface, a clean and subtle absorption. There it stood, still a part of him, in two worlds at once. His leg and the prison’s. Next he eased a hand into it, then the other, then leaned his whole head, shoulders, chest through. From where we watched, it looked as if the apparition had glided forward to enfold him, a faint brightness of outline around his body. Then the body turned, still Sharkie as we knew him, gave a thumbs up, beckoned us over. 
It’s fine, I feel fine, he called out, who's joining? Soon we were standing shoulder to shoulder, gingerly taking turns dipping a finger into it, noting the chill that ran through the finger, hand and wrist, to cool the whole arm. Sonocia gripped my hand tight, so I lifted it along with mine for a first plunge into the wall. Feel that? she asked. Like somebody’s blowing on the back of your hand. Her description was accurate enough I had to double back through my own nervous system to make sure I’d hadn’t had that sensation until she’d put words to it. 

WIP [Holly]

In Pasadena from the years 1982 until 85 there lived a woman named Holly Carver. A series of small decisions had brought her there, but for reasons soon described she would be compelled to leave and move to the northern suburbs of Chicago. During that time Holly rented a second floor apartment on Goodlawn Avenue with a girl she’d met in college. Looking back on their time as friends and roommates, Holly would wonder whether they’d been brought together not by fate or coincidence but by assonance. Polly Masterson, Holly Carver, Holly and Polly, “Hollypolly” as their friends had called them. This apartment on Goodlawn had been given a nickname also, one they admittedly enjoyed when their friend Cash had coined it: “Hollypollywood”. Such improvisations one can expect among people in their early twenties with a measure of inherited wealth, a talent for boredom, for resolving it, and a lifetime of aspiration and confusion ahead of them. No sooner do they invent a shared argot to insulate themselves from others’ understanding them too often, too well, than they obscure one another’s true feelings for each other along the way. Sometime during the three years they lived together, Holly tired of being playfully bonded to her roommate by tricks of speech. She was her own person. She was to be taken seriously. At her twenty-fourth birthday party, a gathering of old and newish friends at the apartment, she’d blown out all twenty-four candles Polly had somehow managed to stuff into a single cupcake, with the wish that the next year would liberate her from safe established patterns, retrograde habits of living. New city, new apartment, new job. New self. That above all else: new self. Intuition told her it wouldn’t be as easy as drawing in as much air as her lungs could hold, pursing lips to blow out every little flame dancing atop every little candle. She’d have to change the fundamentals of her life bit by bit, dismantle the exoskeleton so softer parts of herself might grow into fresher, more liberating dimensions. 

Two months later one morning she walked into the kitchen where Polly sat sipping coffee, reading a trashy romance novel, told her: she had taken a job as a paralegal at a firm in Chicago, would be moving out at the end of the month. She was sorry to leave Polly so little time to find another roommate. So she hoped Polly didn’t mind, but she had taken the liberty of talking with their mutual friend from college, Shay, who she knew had been planning to move to the area. Shay was looking for a place to live and Holly had mentioned the apartment as an option. “Yeah, that works fine, I like Shay,” Polly said. “But why?” Holly knew what Polly was asking, but chose to feign innocence on the matter, reaching instead for the neutrality of platitudes. “This was nice, it was great. But we both knew it wasn’t going to last forever. Next year I’ll turn twenty-five. I need to switch things up if I’m going to get anywhere by the time I’m thirty.” Then: “God, why do I feel so old! Do you? Do you feel like you’re cheating yourself all the time allowing yourself to feel so damn old already?” Polly didn’t feel this, but theoretically it made sense to her. She wished her friend well. By the end of May, Holly had packed a U-Haul trailer full of her belongings and left to cross the West then the Midwest, towards an even smaller apartment a few blocks from the shore of Lake Michigan, in Wilmette. Holly would never see Polly again and sadly but with some satisfaction knew it. 

Among the many reasons to move to a city or country, some practical, others existential, a desire to be thrown into the unknown is not unusual, with the hope it will accomplish a more implicit, maybe even illicit desire: to revise oneself into a new person. Some will even go so far as to change their name and life story, to complicate ties to a past they’d rather not acknowledge, shed an identity a judge’s verdict had placed on them: thief, dealer, murderer. People rarely bear the power of fostering another’s reputation with grace or charity, for a good reputation is rarely interesting, whereas a bad one is exciting, and circulating that excitement through gossip is a pass-time not yet soon to outwear its welcome among the human species. To her knowledge, Holly didn’t leave behind a clutch of unfavorable opinions. She was popular among her friends and far as she knew flattering descriptors clung to her memory. Smart, funny, kind-hearted, occasionally mischievous. But who did that describe exactly, she was inclined to ask. It could describe any number of people and not her specifically. So it was maybe the first truly interesting thing Holly had done in her short, already long life—to abandon a good reputation. And moreover, to do so without a solid reason. Chalk it up to the wisdom that supposedly came as a consolation prize to the successive indignities of aging: a good reputation was but a subtler burden than a bad one, determining the course of a life through incentives instead of punishments. Since she’d been a well-mannered rule-follower in her teenage years, she considered this her first true act of rebellion. She would chose to contradict the incentives that had been seemingly laid out for her to take, one after the other, each along a path leading through marriage, family, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Instead she forced a detour and moved to a forgettable pretty town on the outskirts of Chicago. She knew no one in the city. She was a stranger though a neighbor, a new co-worker, a commuter. Over the telephone her parents informed her they were terrified. Over the same telephone her older sister told her she was bewildered to see her suddenly so adventurous, but encouraged her. What a gutsy move, she said. If she was younger and could do her twenties over, she’d do the same. 

Five days a week Holly drove to a parking lot on edge of the city, at the northernmost train station. From there she took an El toward the downtown loop. At North and Wacker, she stepped off and walked five blocks to the large glass office building where she worked. It was as if through various stages of grogginess her morning commute woke the entire city up along with her. A few people standing politely at the northern station; stop by stop, the train gradually filling with more people; city busier and busier out the window; stepping onto the platform amongst a wild bustle that flowed up stairs and onto sidewalks. By the time she strode among others in a crowd, keeping pace, she was wholly anonymous sipping coffee from a travel mug. This sensation, of being one small part of an energetic many, what to call it? It was, she couldn’t find another word for it that wasn’t pompous or embarrassing, metaphysical. A big concept with humble beginnings, Holly carrying purse and coffee into Sears Tower.

To arrive at her office door on the 75th floor required a kind of metaphysical travel, riding an elevator among a mixed company of workmates and strangers, each stepping off at an appointed floor. The interiors of the building floated past unseen, but Holly could imagine a few people she had just seen, shared an elevator ride with, walking through hypothetical offices, beneath hypothetical florescent lights. Some worked in law offices, others in accounting, real estate, generic domains of trade that offered few details to distinguish one from the other, each employee dressed in slacks and button-down shirts, skirts and blouses. It was a modest self-same business, devoting hours of one’s life to working on a specific floor of such a building. But this is what she’d sought, wasn’t it, moving halfway across the country? To live as herself in novel surroundings. Which is to say: an office in Pasadena was not the same as an office in Chicago. Here she found the environs of paralegalhood transformed by sheer numbers, law practices, offices; here just lifting a bagel off its napkin, taking a bite of it, setting it back down, she partook in a hive-mind plurality. The lawyers she was assigned to, Fable Green, an associate, and Charles Thrasher, a junior partner, “Charlie”, as he’d requested she call him, though she never did, warned away from the invitation by another paralegal, Dana, who’d advised stricter collegiality with the man. 

Her first month working in the building Holly caught panoramic glimpses of the city through the windows of her work-lords. Handing a folder to one of them, waiting for feedback or future orders, she’d allow her eyes to wander beyond tinted glass to view the sheer spread of  city blocks to the south and west, streets trickling to vanishing points. It was a view any one working in such offices were doomed to grow accustomed to. Lucky her, to be granted audience with it only a few minutes at a time, every day or so. It would take her longer to lose the low-key feelings of enchantment that stirred when she watched a metropolis reduced to a trillion tiny intricacies. Her office, it should be said, was windowless and cramped, large enough to contain a desk, chair, and file cabinet. 

Of the lawyers she worked for, Thrasher and Green, the former was more tolerable, the latter a bit irritating. Fable Green had also insisted Holly address her in the familiar but Holly sensed any response that deviated from the request would be taken as a slight, a modest subtle rebuff. The dance between professionalism and overfamiliarity began here, with names, Holly knew, but soon extended to work hours, personal information, a capacity to say yes or no without being made to feel guilty, or worse, criticized. Fable’s office was the smaller of the two but more organized, no loose papers as in Charles’ office, certainly none arranged in random stacks on the floor which, entering the door, she’d have to step around to reach the chair she’d then have to wait standing beside before receiving formal invitation to sit. The invitation would often not come, Charles distracted by a phone call or some nuisance of information on his computer screen, and she’d be left to stand, his eyes not lifting yet to acknowledge her. High-strung, fiercely caffeinated, Fable cut a disconcerting figure for she rarely would be found sitting or behind her desk but pacing, “dancing in circles” in her words, fingers of one free hand typing the air while the other hand held a sheaf of pages. She was brilliant but acute in her style of address, quick nips at the recipient of whatever request or observation or query she was making. Did the woman sleep? Did she ever reach a state of calm enough to sit, much less lay down? When Holly stepped into Fable’s doorway, door usually open, nine times out of ten Fable was already staring doorwards, stark blue eyes wide and wired. Out of habit Holly would knock on the door and this would snap Fable from intense stillness, get her gesticulating, talking. The woman, Holly thought, would be a court stenographer’s nightmare. 

Then came the needling questions. Had Holly had lunch yet? (Prelude to inviting herself to lunch along with Holly.) Did Holly think it was chilly in the office? (Possible foray into Holly’s honest feelings about her.) Was that draft of Simmons filing ready yet? (Test of Holly’s ongoing internalized awareness of Fable’s own anxiety-driven priorities, since the filing was due for a week, and Fable was one to work ahead.) To converse with the Fable Greens of this world is to forever be put on one’s back foot, knocked off balance. Holly had learned from early experience working for demanding task-masters that dodging direct inquiries with non-committal pleasantries wouldn’t do. You had to be simple and clean with your excuses and most importantly had to hew close to the factual. No, she always brought her own lunch. No, the temperature seemed just fine. Yes, the draft of the filing was almost finished. In fact, she’d come by just now to let her know Fable could expect it done by early afternoon. Did Fable need it finished, though, before lunch, or could it wait an hour or so? 

It was a shame Fable was always in the office but rarely distractable, since the view from her window was ideal for amateur omniscient contemplation. The first day she’d visited Fable’s office in company of the secretarial manager, a tall broad-shouldered woman named Zuzanna, among their introductions the woman had commented on the sight of the Neo Center, second tallest building in the city, a dark gleaming finger poking from the rainy hazy horizon outside. Fable hadn’t turned to acknowledge it then nor did she since. It’s as if she couldn’t see beyond windows or had never been taught to care. What was jittering on inside her nerves and mind was the most immediate thing, the most acutely tangible. The rest was decoration and she could do without it. 

Holly didn’t risk offending Fable by allowing her eyes to wander. Fable’s blue eyes demanded full reciprocity of attention, so breaking away from them to satisfy curiosity at the window would be read as dissent or at the very least a subtle power move. Since it was forbidden, this made the view all the more alluring. On overcast days she’d attempt to catch a glimpse of the cityscape reflected just over Holly’s shoulder in the glass of a framed photograph, but the reflection was vague, unsatisfying, out-of-focus. More than once she felt aggravated to the point of turning to admire the view, regardless of consequences. If she did, she knew she might never be allowed in the office again. Reassigned to a different attorney, she’d lose access to the city seen from this specific height, this particular angle. All the more alluring because impermissible. 

Finding there what you’ve been looking for? her sister asked across two thousand miles of telephone wire. 

First time the question was asked, she didn’t have an answer. A few months later, she felt confident enough to report: wait, she had. Perspective, a birds-eye view, the kind only tall buildings can provide. Life in Pasadena had kept her low to ground. Here she was in the clouds, looking down, surveying the melee of living from an immortal height. 

But you’re afraid of heights, aren’t you? 

Her sister wasn’t wrong. Holly couldn’t step on an airplane without swallowing two Valium. 

That might be changing, she told her. Maybe there was something about these heights viewed from office windows. 

Streets and cars and buildings and trains and tiny, tiny people. It was like staring at a painting whose details were forever in movement. So much to consider. So many sights to zoom in on, track a while with squinted eyes, zoom back out to appreciate its place in the larger pattern. Enough to give an atheist like her a brief taste of divine intelligence. Though she didn’t believe in god, she could enjoy the view. 

Her firm, Schiff, Hardin, & Waite, rented the 74th, 75th, and 76th floors. On windy days, her little windowless office would creak and sway. Doing their tour of the offices her first day, Zuzanna had warned from time to time the building rocked like a ship on water. Many employees, her included, kept dramamine in their desk drawers to ward off motion sickness. One afternoon, after fighting back nausea to complete a brief, Holly conceded she’d have to do the same. Knocking on Zuzanna’s door frame, she asked to borrow two dramamine. There’s only a few left in this, Zuzanna said, keep the whole bottle, I have another unopened. Holly said it’d help if she could look out a window, see ground. Zuzanna thought a second then suggested she go to the library on the 76th floor. Until then Holly hadn’t had an occasion to visit. It should be quiet up there, Zuzanna told her, Bobby will be at the desk. Tell him you need a carrel. 

Holly called Fable then Charles to let them know she would be taking an early lunch. To avoid unwanted conversation, she took the stairs. The 76th floor was quiet, unlike the others, empty foyer, elevator doors reflecting the emptiness. Through double glass doors she saw rows of shelves, chairs and tables and no one sitting at them. In the library, behind the desk sat a middle-aged man in glasses photocopying paperwork. Holly asked for a carrel and he lead her to one, but seeing it was facing an interior wall, clarified she was looking for one with a window view. This was no trouble. Bobby led her to a seat and carrel next to glass and left her. No food, no water, the sign at the library entrance had read. So Holly dry-swallowed Zuzanna’s pills and waited. 

The window faced east, an angle of the city she hadn’t enjoyed before. At first glance it offered recombinations of the usual: buildings and more buildings, a small park, cars parked or driving, people walking along in miniature. She let her eyes wander, settle on some figure, follow it a while, switch focus then follow another. She wasn’t quite sure this was meditation but it calmed her. Reminded her of illustrated picture books she poured over as a child, fantastic tableaus depicting creatures and people in a landscape, too many to examine at a glance. As her eyes wandered from one to another, they improvised a narrative, first this happened, then this, but depending on how her eyes scanned the pages, left to right, down to up, just as easily it could’ve happened otherwise. In a few hours she would grab her purse and coat, ride the elevator to ground floor and join them. 

To the right, down a few floors, a few hundred feet from where was sitting, was the rooftop of the Metropolitan Correction Center. Law and order. Here she was sitting, representative of the law, over there, down below, was order. 

On the way to work every morning, she passed the building without noticing—it stood on three points, not four. Triangular in construction and atop it, something she certainly wouldn’t have had opportunity to notice at street-level, a prison yard on its rooftop. A tall triangular wall topped by razor wire, incognito in the heart of the city. 

A bright winter afternoon. Windy but cloudless. 

In the yard orange dots in groups or in pairs. Prisoners. Prisoners in orange jump suits. 

 

Joji's Mission

Out in the wild lands of the material world, no two things genuinely connect by association. But Joji believes the mind can do otherwise, can make it so. Morning coffee steaming at the window. He holds the mug to light. Ghost-wisp-tendrils not unlike hair. But look, he thinks so. So the comparison has been accomplished, leaving behind not a single visible trace. Split second, happened, behind his eyes, like a migraine. These are very private acts, these comparisons. Ephemeral. Unless he wrote them down, and maybe not even then, they’d vanish like drizzles of rain on a pond. Since Joji has a sentimental regard for fragile phenomena, he has long kept a log of such visions in a series of notebooks. Begun on a whim when he was nineteen. 
That was over thirty years ago. There, suddenly, no sooner does this realization occur to him than an image of a young man follows. He’s sitting at a makeshift desk built from cinderblocks and a wooden door. A clay flask rests by his right hand. It arrived by mail earlier that morning, a package sent from a friend in Portland. The flask filled with homemade Kahlua. Joji’s so green about liquor he doesn’t know this is meant to be mixed with milk. He drinks it straight, shocked by the force of the flavor. Scene complete. Time retracts back into present moment. Had he really been that boy once? He had, never to be that boy again. Instead here with coffee in hand imagining himself as a fresh unrealized future. So go the zigzag parlays of the mind, wandering.
Should we mention one of Joji’s current fascinations? He’s very excited this morning. Please remember, from the look of his face none might register the exact dimensions of his excitement. Merely a guy with bare feet propped on a windowsill, hands cradling the coffee. He’s recently come into awareness there’s a radiant being among the human scene, living somewhere in Japan (which island? which city, town? what prefecture?). The radiant being in question is Katsuyoshi Takenaka. A young man, well, more a middle-aged young man who found his calling some time ago after wandering into an artist’s studio for people with disabilities. His radiance is very exclusive in its interests. Over and over and again, it takes pen in hand to meticulously draw networks of skeins on paper. When finished they convey a consummate striking image: towers of various shapes and height, some fully visible, others obscured by clouds of mist. Such busy kinetic excitement looking at these towers of Takenaka! Just a day before, Joji had been unaware they had existed. 
These were not ivory towers. They were seemingly made of chicken wire. There were dozens to choose from, too many, Joji was resigned to appreciate them all equally until he flipped through the small book which had brought him the good news of Katsuyoshi Takenaka’s existence. Yes, it was possible, he could claim a favorite. An outlier among his parade of towers, page after page. Inversion of his established habit, black wires on white paper. Against a solid black background, white lines wriggled and interbraided into a fantastical construction, acrylic paint and marker. This our radiant being titled, as matter-of-fact counterpoint to the farfetched elegance of his vision, Tower Series II. This was too good, this was plenty. More than enough for one day!
As was usually the case, soon as Joji proclaimed he’d had enough, fate would complicate the situation, send him another signal from beyond his quiet window. Toes touching the chill of winter on window glass, the sensation of toes were added to these visions of towers. Then, at random, a song began playing in his head. One he’d first heard earlier that morning lying in bed. As a humble servant to the cosmos, its plentitude of coordinates and reference points, he had long observed the practice of searching out a song he’d never heard before, to listen to while he wrested himself awake. Earlier, before he’d made coffee a reality, he’d chosen one at random, sinning against working musicians everywhere by consorting with an algorithm on his phone. A nearly fourteen minute song from 1986, of all years, an Algerian chanteuse living in Egypt, depicted in digital copy of the album cover resplendent with big 80s hair. Warda Al-Jazairia, stage name “Warda”. The song one of her most famous, “Batwanes Beek”. Took a few minutes to gather and unfold, orchestral strings and cheesy synth and traditional live percussion. Whimsical, mysterious, edging sexiness in a goofy way. This version of Warda had died many, many years before, followed by the woman herself more recently, but she was elegant and alive again, slipping melodic lines through the music. 
Joji rebuilt the towers of Takenaka in his mind as he listened. Here was a new relation, Ms. Warda and Mr. Takenaka. A “Wardanaka” of his own making, hybrid in nature, as he often felt himself most days. Was this the reason he’d been created? Carried to term half a century ago, birthed, raised, pushed through adolescence into adulthood and confused most of the way? To provide occasion for a duet between two figures more than likely unaware of the other and more than likely to remain so. What a privilege to be the one to introduce them! A fresh link between vibrancies.
Was this his mission, Joji wondered. To create conversations between good things of this world, secretly his but also everyone’s? It took so little effort but did not happen naturally. Nature merely evolved such beings, Takenakas and Wardas, so by happenstance he might join them.

WIP [Curses]

Bright secular sunshine, trees nibbled down to their essentials, forest with name unknown to us, we ambled the trail with our backs to the monastery. It was winding and sluiced us like thread through eye of a needle. Through the woods it lead us towards a large commonplace hush where something holy supposedly might be savored. Didn’t happen that way, of course. 
Immersed in the chilly cosmology of a late January afternoon, we breathed and witnessed puffs and vapor trails and we joked these were second-rate spirits leaving our bodies. Could be Mother Nature sensed there were a pair of atheists in her presence, fellow atheists, so she humored us. A mile or two into her interiors she presented us with a neat little shack. We stepped inside to find a ledger book on a rostrum, a cup filled with pens and pencils. Which to select—ink or graphite? Already we were being tested. Opting out of this dualistic trap, we abstained from writing our names, the date, a little hello note or proclamation. 
Didn’t stop us though from reading the ledger’s recent or more ancient history: a long list of people offering petitions to some hypothetical totalizing intelligence that cared about their worries and hardships. One entry was greedy, ran several pages, handwriting switching from tight cursive to LARGE BOLD BLOCK LETTERS under the grips of SOME STRONG EMOTION. The message that suffered under such penmanship was bitter, angry, generous with condemnations of various impious minorities. Per usual homosexuals were singled out as particularly deserving of damnation. In one vivid passage were described as OPEN SORES upon the FACES of ANGELS. These were weeping, but not with sorrow. With offensive putrescence, so goddamn them.
Might’ve been enough to sour the day but some joker had lightened the pages with doodles of penises. From urethras of a few were speech bubbles filled with silly comments: “LIGHTEN UP, FRANCES!”, “ME SO HOLY”. The talking penises of Gethsemane, we called them. To honor the obscurity of the moment, we each took a pen and drew one, urethra #1 upcurled into a toothy smile, phallus #2 with little arm and hand from which it blew many friendly kisses. There, done. Closing the ledger, we left the shack and afternoon to disguise these signifiant changes we had made to the universe. It was good. 

*

I’m reminded here of another. This from a friend who, though he prided himself a rationalist, couldn’t sever his helpless subservience to superstition. 
A month after their wedding, he and his young wife had purchased a house. Call it a year of gifts: first the wedding, then the house. Several people from his home country gifted them twice, burying them under an embarrassment of well-wishing. An acquaintance of one of his aunts, a woman who had on two occasions cut his hair as a worker in his mother’s salon, had presented them with a large potted plant. This he placed in the corner of their new living room. Once a week either he or his wife watered it until its long spiky fronds splayed and grew. A year passed, another. Three years passed, four. In its corner the plant grew large enough to become a fifth member of the family, along with two cats that occasionally bothered it. 
One summer afternoon on a whim he and his wife felt the itch to rearrange furniture. By then their honeymoon was long past and they recognized the need for a refresh of surroundings. Paintings were moved then chairs were, the couch, the bookshelf. To make way for a floor lamp, they shimmied the plant from its corner and in the effort it toppled over, spilled wholesale—dirt, roots, and all—across the floor. 
Working to pull it back together before righting it, they noticed something odd clatter from the pot. A long rusty nail with lengths of human hair wrapped around it. 
The wife was bewildered but amused, the husband paled and mock-spat between forked fingers. 
What was that? she asked. 
Protection against The Evil Eye, he told her. 
For in his home country this was a gesture of ill will, a curse, and hidden as such could only mean the woman who’d gifted them the plant had wished harm upon them. 
But why, the wife asked. She seemed so nice, genuinely happy for us. 
Genuinely shaken, he paused again to fork the fingers of a hand, pointed to the floor before him, spat dryly between the horns. 
The woman still lived in their city, he noted, still visited his mother’s salon on occasion. 
Was it that she was not hired on as a stylist, years ago, by her mother?
It hadn’t been personal. Her mother couldn’t afford to offer a chair and styling station to just anyone? There were so many younger women with beautician certificates, who brought new clientele into the salon. 
Should they tell his mother, his wife asked. 
Never, he told her, because it’s impossible to know whose hair this is, or how it’d been obtained. 
Instead they took the hair and nail into the furthest corner of the back yard and buried it. The tree beneath which they buried it did not die. But in the following years it did not flourish much either.

*

Game of Spirits

An old beginning, look up at what you’re rising to meet, what’s falling to enfold you. As all existing diaries in the world, even those yet to be written, are tossed in a wood chipper. Shreds flurry into the air and flutter like snow. Deja vu, you’ve seen this before. Where have you seen it? Everyone’s internal monologues copied onto very private paper then destroyed without a pause for sentiment. Mixing on the high winds, a cloud imitating old school Biblical locusts. It doesn’t come to ravage crops or bother the silence of some rural heaven; rather it floats down softly, impossible to read now, in this new form. These were once worries, desires, complaints, paranoiac ramblings. So diverse were their beliefs and concerns it could be said the only credible similarity that joined them was their fealty to literacy, that a child had been taught to have an internal life through learning how to read and write. Watch how easily that tradition can be churned into blizzard, a flotsam that sputters from the exit-maw of a thresher. 

You’re thinking yes, this is the way to enter. This is the beginning. A confusion of expired miracles rendered unto compost or mulch.

It’s the same cold lesson returning to be unlearned so it can become human again. No spirit is future-proof, for it’s doomed to be blessed a child of flesh. Take a bow. Honor the co-authoring of quiet fate with this strange form you were conjured from. It has grown a few gray hairs. Skin has begun to sag at its throat. Every morning it wakes a little more haggard. But the spirit within! It fights to resist the early onset of wisdom. Hold on, hold out, don’t let acceptance of your condition catch you until your final head lays to rest on its final pillow. Defeated into static wisdom at last, one second before the heart stops and brain dims to necrotic matter. 

Everyone loves a beginning and resists an end, unless, that is, the going has been terrible. Wandering through a wilderness of identities, confused to find they all fit to one degree or another, yet none quite so perfectly as none at all. You, for example. About you it could be said: I hid you in my mind and there, at my leisure, casually grew you. Ambidextrous in referential power, you could be singular or plural, a little more singular or even less so, a little more than just one of you, two, four, a dozen. Having grown from the whereabouts and whoabouts of my garden mind, you were generous with approximation: a you for the few and a you for the many, a you for the friendless and singularly alone. I thought and felt you out into the world in many directions, nothing common to your many origins except that you were driven subtly from a self that asked no tracks be left behind to be followed. “All roads lead away from simplicity,” a foolish sage might say of this. Gladly, then, you branched out without need of paths worn by predecessors. You were original in that you were commonplace, unaware of your complexity, that you advanced at each step through a life that relieved me of a past. I watched you go, relieved of having to track your progress into the known, proud as a man relieved of fatherhood, its demands and subtle anxieties. Here I wait, the prodigal father, never to return asking forgiveness of daughters or sons. Epistemological humility, how to describe it, it tastes like, like…freshly chewed raspberries. Soft parts, sweet flesh, mixed with hard tiny kernels, seeds. Tart. Almost too much so. 

Daydreaming while locked in the grips of headache. What it feels like. Figures wandering through perpetual inferno or ambient heart-attack, braiding new lives through interaction, friends, lovers, competitors, enemies sworn and unsworn. You are each of these yet relieved of having to be all of them together. As it stands, that’s my role. How to guide these many lives without becoming more than myself? All praise forgetfulness. Out of sight, out of mind, out of myself. Squint the eyes, rub the temples. Picture wildly hypothetical but specific freedoms beyond the blast circumference of this brain’s current migraine. I was this life, lives, this person breaking perpetually down into more and more persons. You. You and more you. Dispersed across every corner of the earth armed with a loneliness that can’t be solved except by rejoining with this maker forever-in-hiding who imagines them. A mere mortal who lives to grow and lose his hair. 

WIP [Kinderfolk]

They were kinderpaul, cohabitants of small design. Like the most vulnerable creatures, mice or voles, were experts at hiding. Being quasi-human, they had to accomplish this with an added touch of subtlety, within the confines of mere bodies. At first glance a kinderpaul might seem an aunt or nephew or coworker, a person caught up in satisfied acts of personhood. If the ruse was successful, none might know. If truly a success, even they might forget who they were and fool themselves. Having left the company of people, secured their safety, they might wake from the spell of a performance, float to the surfaces of their face again, blink and look around. Who had they been while deceiving others?
Since they could never quite know what it was like to be otherwise, it was not a question that could be answered.
A secret race. Integrated among the rest. Who could say how long they'd been circulating without detection, quietly accomplishing their work, whatever that might have bene. Much of what’s known about their motivations was attributed to testimonies of defectors, kinderkind who chose to expose themselves, admit their otherness, describe the movements of their subspecies among people. Why would these few step forward? Tired of hiding, some said, embarrassed by the trust and goodwill extended to them, said others. People were undeserving of such deceits, they explained, should know who they are keeping company with. 
What did they want? 
To be accepted. 
Why did they feel they weren’t?
Fear they were born from said they weren’t. 
And why the fear?
Persecutions of yore, public burnings, stonings. Exiled from their families and towns into hungry wilderness. 
One kinderkind shivered as it described itself. Appearing as a middle-aged auto worker, brawny, taller by a head than its interlocutors, it admitted the unease it stirred to talk from a genuine distance. Not a person as they were, not indistinguishable from the common ilk. It’d worked at the factory for five years. Had eaten lunch with them, drank alongside them at the bar after second shift. It’d savored the warmth of their kinship and for brief stretches in their company had forgotten the misfortune of its difference. Buying another round and complaining about mortgages and upper management and the fuckuppery of children. Look, who would say it hadn’t been in those moments a real person? It would do anything for its brothers, except sacrifice its place in the family. So it kept the secret of its otherness for years, attending weddings and funerals, until a certain feeling fell upon it, a kind of emotional snow. Guilt. It felt guilty. The goodwill it lived for had been gained dishonestly.
To relieve itself and cross the last threshold between kinderhood and personhood, it confessed to friends, coworkers, loved ones: it was more than what they felt or believed. It was like them but different. Sorry to keep itself secret for so long, could they ever forgive it? It didn’t intend harm. Did not mean to insult the trust they extended to it. 
Foolish turncoat, the kinderkind thought, deserving of every punishment. Had it forgotten what they’d taught it? Sentimentality was a luxury afforded to those who could take belongingness for granted. Had it spent too long a time among people, as a person, and lost touch with its fear. Now it would know what it was truly like to be kinder. And did. Sitting in that kitchen at 2 A.M., surrounded by friends and six beers deep, it asked for silence and offered its confession. The friends changed as they listened. Harder, weirder, colder. By the time it’d finished, they’d been pushed far away, observed it from a skeptical distance. What’s that, one asked. What now, asked another. When morning came, it was found beaten to death in an alley two blocks from where it’d last enjoyed its anonymity. 
Such were the cautionary tales kinderfolk circulated among one another. Never trust the warmth of assimilation. Keep hidden, keep apart while remaining close. 

Rosalie The Obscure

  

Her eyes were dark brown and wary, nervous to share a glance. She’d look away quickly should another pair of eyes catch her. Easy to misread that. Stuck up, some judged, weird, others would decide, and both would be wrong. Just run-of-the-mill shy is all she was. 

Rosalie was the name her parents gave her and like the others with their judgments they’d decided before she’d even had a chance of being born this name above all others best suited her. The eyes of unborn Rosalie in the womb, closed though they had been those nine months, were virgin brown and thoughtful. She was thoughtful even then, I’d wager. Her mother was unhappy the entire pregnancy but she wouldn’t know this until later. Twenty-four years she’d have to live and grow before she would be deemed worthy of bearing that knowledge. A common situation: her parents had merely been young when they’d conceived her, hardly aware of who they were as separate people, so should it have surprised her when her mother sat across from her at a kitchen table years after the divorce, in the earliest year of recovery from alcoholism, to tell her—the miracle she was had been the natural outcome of a juvenile misunderstanding. Rosalie felt guilt hearing her mother’s confession. Was that how confessions were supposed to land? One person admits a sin so another can bear the guilt? Luckily she’d been raised beyond reach of any stubborn ancient religion. She was sorry to have caused a premature end to her mother’s youth but not so sorry she needed forgiving. 

I met her at a party, in the back yard of a mutual friend. An August brighter and hotter than any in memory. Lawn chairs and a fire pit and a grill and people drinking and sharing a smoke, a train track within earshot but out of sight. Every hour a recurrent explosion of cars would barrel past, so people had to lean and shout into each other’s ears. Someone introduced us as train-thunder ricocheted between houses. I mouthed a hello and greeting. A stressed confused look as she tried to make out what I was asking or telling her. The booming lasted five, ten minutes at least, so I did what I usually would when nerves got the better of me—made attempts to channel awkwardness into playfulness. This must have been a welcome turn for her because she played along. Like actors in a silent movie we conversed naturally, feigning words, gesturing as if working to break free from the confines of a disagreement. People at the edge of the yard glanced our direction, concerned. What was going on over there? Were they arguing? Train passed, train trailing off into the distance, volume receding to a low rumble, we continued faking conversation, taking enjoyment in their confusion. Once the game was finished, we were left exposed with nothing much to talk about. So we excused ourselves, wandered to stand at the edge of other groups scattered on the lawn. In that company beer and bourbon and weed did much of the talking. Bored most the remainder of the evening, I wondered what the worried-looking unusual woman and I might have been discussing, buried under several hundred tons of passing freight. 

In hindsight I think this: “Where do you think these trains are headed?” / “From where we’re standing and where the sun’s angled in the sky, looks like west, southwest slightly.”/ “What do you think they’re carrying?” / “They make a mighty booming sound, so I’d guess, what, livestock or automobile parts or tanks filled with some species of lethal chemical.” / “When do you think these rails were first laid?” / “Anytime between the middle of the 19th century till now.” / “And who specifically laid them?” / “Unknowable anonymous souls with strong backs and time to spare.” / “Always there’s graffiti scrawled along the sides of these freight cars. Who do you think sprayed the oldest messages?”/ “Better to ask: how many people on a daily basis happen to catch their meaning?” / “If it’s graffiti, isn’t it more a matter of who notices and is inspired to wonder?” / “Huh, true. Just like this fake conversation we’re aping. People stand within earshot but because the sounds of our voices are drowned out, they’re inclined to wonder what we’re saying.” / “If they could hear us, they’d lose interest quickly enough.” / “But since they have to strain to listen, study us closely to guess what we might be saying to each other, suddenly we’re worthy of their interest.” / “Doesn’t matter, then, what we’re saying, or that we’re even saying anything.” / “Just that all this play-talking inspires a strong desire to eavesdrop.” / “Meanwhile the trains head west without a care for who or what they’re leaving behind.” / “And not even much of a care for what they’re carrying.” 

If she were to hear this, Rosalie would look at me, down a bit and to the side a bit from direct eye contact. As if wondering what I was getting at, hesitant there might be veiled criticism in it; then I’d have to reassure her it was just my way of creating a little deviation from the expected path. The day we met was an idea so I was playing with it. Walking a step behind me but beside me in the cemetery where we’d meet to catch up with how life had been shaping us since the last time we’d met, she’d look down at the leaves on the walk, then up at a bird in the branches, and I’d be left to wonder whether this was intended as a sign I should change the subject. We’d dated a few weeks years before, not long after we met at that summer party; she’d chosen to end things in the same manner: no actual admission I wasn’t someone she cared to share her time or body with. Instead she went quiet. Brief responses to texts, then no responses at all. Weeks passed before we met at a bar, separately visiting the same shared group of friends. She apologized for disappearing but didn’t offer an explanation for why. I suppose it was understood I shouldn’t ask, that that might be a cross-examination at the expense of her comfort and maybe mine also. Once it was clear I accepted her terms and conditions, in her eyes gradually I was able to become harmless and frivolously affable again. Why tense up when I came around, if I didn’t seem to take issue with her silences and didn’t seem to want anything from her? 

That evening at the bar ended with us standing on the patio talking with an ease that hadn’t been possible when we’d tried to cross the lines of acquaintanceship into sex and couplehood. Maybe without knowing it we’d taken a wrong turn at a critical junction months before, I said. We’d mistaken a mutual appreciation for pantomime for flirting, so headed towards intimacy when the more appropriate turn should have been towards friendship. Easy enough to miss, she agreed, because when it came to the chase for the next partner most of us were inclined towards hopefulness. But look at us, I pointed out, standing at the edge of another group of familiars, making easy conversation again. Why was the ease there? She looked up then to the left, past a streetlight across the street and past the moon which floated subtle in the sky, the evening cloudy, the ambient lighting of the city a muted pinkish salmon. Curiosity, she said after a pause. We’re both curious people by nature but hamstrung a bit because we both have this strong dislike of small talk. It sounded true enough so I agreed. 

After that, we casually fell into a rhythm of falling out of touch then meeting up on random occasions. Somewhere along the way, we formalized that into seeking one another’s company every couple of months, a text message, a plan to walk in one of the city’s larger parks or, the increasingly more favorable option, in the city’s oldest cemetery. She lived three blocks from the cemetery’s main entrance and she walked there alone often. After a few years of knowing and walking alongside one another, our sporadic walks became more regular, once a month, and could last several hours, expanding their vocabulary of activities to include more than simple walking: sharing a bench, for instance, to watch people arrive in cars to lay flowers at a grave, or standing beneath trees or before certain graves ourselves, admiring the antiquated resonances within the names of people deceased for two or three centuries. Rosalie and I were both continual survivors of families with problems larger and stronger than could be solved by just one person. We’d both learned this over a painfully long period of trial and error, forced to accept the most reliable method of addressing those problems was to maintain a careful distance from mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Walking and standing and sitting among thousands of headstones, it didn’t pass mention that many of these were grouped into families, and that their togetherness underground might be one final illusion. 

The cemetery’s layout was tentacular, a mess of paths and sinkholes and hills and ponds surrounded by a winding ten-foot brick wall topped by razor wire. On one side of the main gate was a clock tower, on the other a guard house, and beyond those a long thoroughfare lined on either side by tall trees whose branches arched over the drive. At the entry visitors could acquire a map of the cemetery’s layout. Rosalie and I never opted for the map and never discussed the matter, because it was a given why we favored the cemetery above parks or neighborhoods: the point was to enter the same place, always, familiar with our surroundings, but then through conversation and wandering, only half-paying-attention where we turned, where we were going, to lose our way, arrive somewhere unfamiliar. Once we’d successfully become lost, we’d collaborate to solve the puzzle of the place with walking. 

The park was open seven days a week and always closed at 4:30. Eschewing phones and watches, we’d judge the time and our progress referencing the angle of the sun. Overcast days would make it more of a challenge and, venturing in directions where a main road might be found, or a gate, we’d end up in sections of cemetery we hadn’t discovered before. In those moments Rosalie would remind me, corners of her mouth up-curled into quasi-smile, the cemetery was a live thing, new graves added weekly and daily. Bound as it was by an ambling brick wall, its interiors were forever changing. While some sections were set and finished, others were in-progress, shapeshifters without a definite plan; on a fall day they may look one way, on a summer or spring afternoon another. We both enjoyed finding little pockets of lost-ness and, if time allowed, exploring them. Like our conversations in general, expeditions into the cemetery began with the familiar then, if we were fortunate, branched gradually towards the unknown. Often a turn towards the latter was sparked by discussion of what we’d noticed or read since we’d last come together for a walk. 

An example. One Saturday we enter the main gate on foot a few minutes past noon. We wave to the older gentleman in his seat, supposedly standing guard. He offers a map, we decline politely. He reminds us the cemetery closes in four and a half hours, we acknowledge the friendly reminder then move on. We stroll beneath the trees along the main thoroughfare until the road and path splits into three directions. Here is our first decision. We don’t deliberate, instead wander where our discussion takes us, in this instance left. This path takes us past a row of mausoleums buried half in a hillside, magnolia trees, a pair of peacocks dragging their tail fans along asphalt. Somewhere along the way we find a conversation about the recently late mathematician John Conway. Rosalie’s father, being an engineer, had inspired in her a fascination with mathematics by appealing to her love of puzzles. Think of numbers as puzzle pieces you can’t hold between your fingers, only in your mind, he said; for the girl she was, this was enough to win her curiosity. The afternoon her father made that comparison was thirty, thirty-five years ago, had dimmed in her memory for long stretches of erstwhile living, but just the other day, she says, it came back in an instant after she’d read a passage from a collaborative autobiography written between Conway and another mathematician. She couldn’t cite the page, but to illustrate the weirdness and fickleness of memory, she quoted the passage in question with help from a pocket notebook which she carried everywhere with her, opened to the page where she’d copied it out, for such these kinds of return visits: “This is something that perpetually intrigues me. There are these abstract objects that are as real as trees or cats, but we can only access them by thinking about them.” And now the mystery took on along layer, since the man had died himself of complications from contracting COVID. Like his beloved numbers, the same that were beloved by her father, John Conway was an abstraction that was nonetheless real, and made so by two strangers to him but friends to one another, strolling on a sunny afternoon in hopes of getting lost. This, then. This just one example of the kind of patterns Rosalie and I could make from the modest materials of a Saturday in late spring, trees in flower and people standing here and there around us visiting headstones and on occasion even talking to them. 

Twelve times a year we met and walked there, once a month. Conversation was a country we visited so we could comment on thoughts that emerged spontaneously from the sights around us. Never was it a solid number, the acres that were available there for us to wander. Very quiet, spare of visitors. Very little to distract us from standing near a drift of swans on the memorial pond where people were invited to walk to the end of a short dock, to empty urns of their ashes. Groundskeepers could be seen in the distance cruising among monuments and headstones on industrial lawn mowers, shearing grass from their edges with weed-whackers. It took minimal effort to keep death neat and bucolic. In country, we did the work of ghosts and drifted, making speech where it was no longer allowed. I think of unborn Rosalie in the womb, her eyes a fact in the world’s consideration but hidden in her mother’s belly, blinking maybe in the third trimester, closing to meditate on a future her already-thoughtful mind couldn’t foresee. Brown. The eyes were of a color, but one no sonogram could determine. Not until she was pulled through the birth canal, wiped clean and lifted to the light, eyes scrunched against the pain of its violent newness. Minutes after Rosalie had been born and duly named, it would be observed by her mother and father and the doctor that her eyes were a rich dark brown, like chocolate or coffee, delectables by turns sweet or bitter. Both, then. Bittersweet. Having felt myself received through those eyes a few years before she left town, moving toward a life near the mountains, in Denver, I can say this is what it feels like, to be felt by her. And now that we’re half a country apart and not longer often in touch, maybe this is also what it must feel like to be an abstraction come alive  on odd occasions when her thoughts wander back to the years that brought her to Denver. 

Whatever happened to Rosalie, friends ask, remembering back yard parties and late nights at bars before their lives became serious and they were made to raise families. They would have been reminded by a photograph posted online or by a story retold to make them feel old, though the attention in telling it had been the opposite, to allow them to feel young again, if only for a millisecond. It took longer to say Rosalie’s name aloud, so the feeling passed as they talked about her. Whenever they ask, I tell them: she moved west. After watching trains pass through town most of her twenties and thirties, one day she finally decided to follow them. Did we keep in touch? We never were in touch, I answer. We kept out of touch so we could keep talking. We still are, it’s just were too far away from one another to make out what the other’s saying. Of course that’s just a dodge, evasiveness pitched as a bid for cleverness. My way of honoring her wishes, though she could never quite feel comfortable enough to make them known. To leave no tracks, so no one would notice someone had once sat among us, then stood up one day, and left. So no one would think to follow.