Authors: Alexandra Kleeman
At this, my sister stops suddenly and makes a motion as if to dive in and leave us separate, lonesome. I grab the back of her dress and hold tight but she is so hard to hold still, my hands finding no place to make of her a handle or a knot. She whines low and mournfully, signaling as though she would like to crawl inside. Small, silly sister. She has not
seen that the spell of play lasts only so long as one pretends not to wish to grasp the things that we have played into being.
In one house, they make snowman versions of themselves, which come slowly to life and begin slowly a series of ordinary things that the family watches, entranced. The snowmen notice us watching, then all the inhabitants of the house turn to us and wave.
In another house, they invent a device to control the weather. When I look into this house and count the number of persons inside, I begin to cry.
WITH TWO
The fact of two sisters allows an escape into situations that could not be accommodated by only one. With two, we may hide in the cupboard for hours, pretending we are somewhere else entirely, without ever having to feel ourselves alone.
From the cupboard, I gaze at her and beckon her in. My knees hunched up by my ears.
The fact of two sisters allows for escape within a situation that is hostile or unfair. Certain species of cicadas lie dormant in their burrows for seventeen years of hibernation, before bursting forth to eat and eat and fly about in the air.
Certain species of birds time their own hatching to meet the soft new cicadas when they emerge.
I set the table, four plates and four sets of silverware for our small careful family.
With her face set in a shape of preoccupation, my mother removes the fourth plate and places it back in the cupboard.
I see my sister's face grinning back at me from the cupboard, a space so small I cannot imagine how I would fit with her in there.
EACH ONE LIKE THE NEXT
I can see my sister crouching in the living room, playing over something I cannot see.
A toy?
The reasons for a sister are manifold, and if we could persuade her to speak she would give them for herself. The house is emptier every day, less populated, the doors all shut, the objects seem to disappear from tabletops. It is like a leak has opened up someplace we cannot see or sense; there has been no one to watch or be watched by. The eyes grow restless, finding faces in the folds of curtains, crockery, closets.
For another, too few games can be played alone.
I played a game alongside my parents at breakfast. It began with all players picking up a section of the newspaper and opening it up at the fold. My father shakes it three or four times, with a disappointed sound. My mother begins with the headlines and then the little sections, then the longer articles. We went through it, piece by piece, until all was read. We consumed the little letters in their little blocks, then we turned the page for the others.
My newspaper was imaginary, and I finished first.
I watch from the doorway, an empty frame. This door has been taken off its hinges to prevent it from being slammed shut. The resulting air flow, expelled at the velocity of anger, could shake a house to dust. The door has been taken off and taken where?
UNHABITED
A house at night should not be woken into alone, if other methods can be made available. The presence of a parent via effigy, by means of photograph or even an object that they have been seen to love, hate, or merely hold, may be presented to the darkened house as evidence of the presence, past or future, of others with an investment in your existence. The notion of a linkage between yourself and another, by means of structure or form, will impress the house and render it less likely to target you with unidentified sounds and shadows.
We play a game involving the description of the walls, but we are both so good at it that we cannot but fail to surprise each other.
Are there ghosts in the house, and if there were, how would they have gotten in? I tuck the quilt in under my feet, I close the closet door and turn on three different nightlights. These things will yield, if not safety, then an allusion to the idea of it. If there were ghosts in the house, how lonely would they be? With no one to see me, I become like a vapor.
The emptiness within the house populates what lies beyond it. Lightning walks the plain like a tall, glowing man. He looks toward me and at once he is gone.
WE COULD DO IT ALONE
I explain to her the mechanics of daring. She must step outside the door. Outside the door, the day roils with temperatures that would touch our skin.
I explain it. Gameplay proceeds by turns, with each player advancing the series by one. One player's proposal for action on the part of another is balanced by a counterproposal for a different sort of action by a different person. She must step outside the door. But when will the action be performed? The emphasis is upon daring, not doing. If it were only about doing, we could do it alone, in our separate rooms, with the door closed. I explain to her that this process may bring joy nevertheless, though she remains impermeable to this point, sprawled sideways on the carpet and staring deeply into it.
As I watch her stare under the couch or into the cabinets, I imagine that she may be dissatisfied with the network of beings and objects that she is required to live among. Escape from the scale she was born into could be achieved by burrowing into phenomena of a different scale, belonging to the world of much larger or smaller things.
Our father, for example, has escaped us, has escaped deeper into the house or laboratory, to a position behind a final door through which the sounds of shouting are audible. Our mother proceeds laterally, walking her eyes around at their much greater height, as if in a walking form of sleep. They exist for their work, and are lost to us now.
Experienced by a much smaller being, this day would glow with the excess beauty of certain of its shorter intervals.
The moment, for example, when a spoon fell from the table and onto the kitchen floor in the brilliance of an unlonely afternoon. Stretched to a beautiful length, the resulting sound would have rung out for nearly an hour, rung out like a force of nature, a piece of the air. We would not have had to think of a new game, living our joys in the shadow of this long, loud sound.
Even with all this in mind, she must step outside the door.
I AM LIKE I AM NOT THERE
Standing before the door, I speak to her. I explain to her the ultimate aim of the game of daring: to dare someone to do what is impossible to do, and thereby undo themselves. With this in mind, I dare her to open the door and step through it. Into the murderous gales of the sky, I say, though I cannot see the sky from in here. She looks at me glassy-eyed. She has become more doll-like day by day, spending her hours heaped sideways and still, looking under the furniture at things I can only infer. I repeat myself and wait for surrender.
My sister looks toward the door and places one small hand on the lock. I hear a small, clean turning sound and the rush of air. Then she is over the threshold and moving. I run to the door to close the air out. But I open it again slightly, I watch her through the gap in the door.
Both arms out straight and extended, she walks like someone on a balance beam, down the driveway, teetering away from the door, away from me, twirling around, hopping on an imaginary hopscotch grid. The sunlight draws a yellow haze around her, her hair, her small false hands. Watching her walk away is like watching myself depart, though when I look down, I find I am in place.
At the end of the driveway, she turns and looks back at me from a distance.
Then she is gone.
YOUR MOVE
I plunge my whole fist into the jam jar. I write my name, and your name, all your names, on the wall. I tidy the china with a soft dustcloth. I rage and rage and rage and rage at the furniture that still resembles human beings, at the ones shaped like people I shout my language. There seem to be fewer. I am picking the blueberries out of the muffins, the toppings off the frozen pizzas, still frozen. Ever ever fewer. I am shiny, sticky. I run around and around, trailing berry-colored handprints, and when I get back to the start I grow silent and track myself, quietly, through the halls, soundlessly, I am like I am not there, I am there like I am not there, I am my own ghost trailing my own ghost to some indeterminate point in time, forward and backward on a track made of iron. I plunge my fist into the jam jar. I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich of the fatherly armchair. Where have you all gone? So I write your name on the sticky surface. So I dust the furniture, even lifting the vases, plates, etcetera, to clean under them. But no one is pleased. No one is bothered. There is no one to be pleased. I rule these lands, and there are none that could dare question these acts, or declare them unjust, or affirm that they have come to pass or have not. As a result, do they come undone? I try to do a thing so large or heavy that it recognizes itself, that it does not need someone else to see it to make it endure. I try to carve my name into the wall. I tie all the things to one another with red string. It will not guard against their leaking, slowly, from inside these walls and out, who knows.
FACTS LIKE FACES
I play a game of making it rain. I fill the sky with clouds, I label and describe them one by one. They are all different types, collecting at the ceiling of the living room. I check the forecast in the newspaper, I comment on the dark storm brewing overhead. I hold my hand out, but I feel nothing.
It is necessary that “the child find him or herself confronted by his or her own increasingly âordered' behavior as, from the world of practice and play, the world of the adult is grown into.” Is it necessary for this world to be so quiet, its contents captured between parentheses?
When the actual shape of the liquid's breakage was discovered, there were two basic tactics that could have been adopted. The first was to reshape the preferences of the liquid, training it toward a manageable complexity that would reveal itself legiblyâas a hexagon or a torus, for example. The second would have been to reshape ourselves.
In the context of the development of an organism into an organism that masters its surroundings, reshaping ourselves would have been to “grow backward.”
Backward was the more populated direction, and had a tendency to look beautiful as a result. The orientation of our faces on the fore side of our bodies, luckily, made it more difficult to see and long for that direction, which was becoming farther away all the time.
OUT OF DOORS
I wake to a Mother standing by the bed, a Father by the window with his hand on the cord, pulling the blinds open. The blinds are never open.
The sky outside is strange, its papery surface, its white flank. Be handed a coat, a hat, a set of galoshes. We are going outdoors. We never go outdoors.
We have one driveway and it is never used. It leads from the garage with its one shiny car, down past our door, past a little path that leads from our door, past our door, down to a mailbox that we have not looked inside for quite some time.
Mother on one side, Father on the other, a family walks down the driveway to the end of the driveway. It is as though we have never used our eyes before, we are looking right and left, right and left.
Today is a day without weather. We don't know where it went, but it has gone and thus we walk around, soft-skinned, into the air. Is this walking the ultimate aim of my Father's efforts to cancel the weather? Are we achieved at last?
There is no wind, there is no water. There is light. There is no sense that something in the sky will heave or change color. The only air that moves is air we push from our lungs.
Karen watched him waiting, standing, shifting in place at the counter and sliding his pale dry hands in and out of his pockets. The coffee shop was noisy, but she could still hear the hands as they burrowed into their stiff cavities, making a sound like safety razors scraped across a leg. She could hear something about this man's life in that sound, or she thought she could hear itâthat was the only way to explain why she was beginning to dislike him even though he had done nothing to her, said nothing to her at all. She imagined his chapped hands caressing the stubble on his own face, she imagined his fear of speaking in public or giving a presentation. A small, rubbery tongue twisting within the dry mouth. Karen hadn't been near people for some weeks, and now when they were around their presence was almost unbearably sensual. He looked toward her and smiled stiffly. He had a compact and tightly formed skull.
Karen looked back at her computer reflexively. She was working on an article about a dairy farmer in northern New Jersey. The article was three weeks late. To her left, a young woman with streaky blond hair pasted a cover letter from one Internet browser window into another. A man hunched over a small laptop erased the nipple from a
photo of a woman. Karen had signed on to do the article last summer, when she was living in a different apartment and still had a boyfriend. The article was a slam dunk, a home run, as her friend Vanessa had put it drunkenly the other night. It profiled a man who others in the business of rearing dairy cattle referred to as the “Holstein Einstein.” Ned Regan was the epitome of a caring, humane dairy farmer, one who could make you feel good again about using the bodies of animals. His small herd of about 150 hormone-free, antibiotic-free milk cows had names and nicknames, family trees drawn up by hand and tucked away in Ned's old khaki green filing cabinets, and homeopathic dandelion compresses applied to their engorged nipples to soothe sore udders. Ned's competitors spoke of him with reverence: his cows gave the most milk and this milk, like a fine wine, had notes of cherry and smooth oak. Karen had been doing fairly well at the Regan farm up until the last few days. Since she had been back she worked only when it was dark outside, writing for ten minutes at a time and then napping out the rest of the hour. She went out only after midnight to buy a meatball sandwich at the corner deli. She had written eighteen different first paragraphs.
Now there was nobody waiting at the counter. She looked around her at dozens of bodies spaced one foot, two feet apart. Then she noticed him there, in the rightmost seat, holding an unopened bottle of water out toward her.
“This is for you,” he said.
Karen looked at it. It was beautiful water, the sort she didn't buy.
“I saw you were empty,” he said.
He indicated a little plastic cup on her table. To her left, someone released a loud sputtering laugh at a vigorously animated figure on their computer screen.
“It's good,” he added, nodding.
She reached out slowly and took it in her hands. The bottle of water was a tiny diorama, heavy and plastic-cool. Clear, pure water tipped back and forth across a tiny photo of a tropical landscape. In the foreground, a little waterfall plunged from the top of a mossy cliff into a deep, refreshing lagoon the color of toothpaste. The tropical water was festooned with little white glints of sunshine, small sharp waves. She looked into the distance at the miniature mountains, shrouded in pixelated mist. But where were all the fish, the birds, the vacationing tourists with their bikinis and cameras? They've all drowned, Karen realized suddenly. She put the bottle down.
“Thank you,” she said.
The man smiled again, his little mouth smooth and slightly pink. She felt bad for having disliked him while he was standing up there at the counter, buying water for her. She thought of buying him something. Saying something pleasant to him. She felt thick-brained and inept at the delicate choreography of being nice to people. She had been watching two movies a day, sometimes more. There were almost enough movies around to live your entire life in them. But there were not quite enough. Last night she had watched all six installments of a miniseries about espionage during the Cold War. In this series, people were terrible and the protagonist was boring. The plot centered on finding out who within the bureau was a double agent, and
though there was ultimately only one double agent many of the main character's friends betrayed him in small, inconsequential ways. When at last the protagonist returned to the orderly apartment where he lived alone, alone despite having resolved a major national crisis, Karen felt so angry, without reason or direction, that she cried in the loud way, the way that sounds like choking.
“This water looks great,” said Karen. She nudged it on the table, but did not pick it up. She smiled tightly. “It's nice,” she said, feeling like she hadn't said enough. “It's pretty.”
“My name is Martin,” said the man solemnly.
“I'm Karen,” said Karen.
“I'm working,” she explained.
“Yes,” said Martin. “So am I. I'm sorry to disturb you.”
He had a slight accent, his words were blurry. He wore a blazer and a red and black striped T-shirt with a small, useless pocket sewn onto it. He was fairly attractive, with a face like an exsanguinated Jared Leto. While Martin turned back to his computer, Karen listened to the sound of his breath, even and calming, a foot and a half away.
Karen still hadn't settled on a title for the article, and she stared again at the list of phrases she had been able to come up with. At Home On the Range. The Holstein Whisperer. Some were just phrases: Milk-Fed, Whole Milk, The Milky Way. She opened the document up and tried to start again, this time beginning with her arrival at Ned Regan's dairy farm. The gentle green hills. The round smell of cow manure, the soft sounds of grass tearing and flat teeth chewing ambiently everywhere. She and Tim had broken up the week before she went to stay at the farm; was that
important? Would it add something? Ned Regan's hard jaw, handsome but set at an unhandsome angle, like it was sliding off the side of his face. And the cows, all the cows, their hipbones jutting up, moving past her at almost eye level. Once they were too old to produce milk, they would be eaten. Martin was bent over his keyboard, his back supple, while he scrolled down, down, continuously down, stroking the trackpad with one finger. He looked utterly absorbed. A feeling of loneliness overtook her. “What are you working on?” she asked, and tried to lean a little toward him. Karen's ex-boyfriend Tim hadn't written or called in over four days, even though he had said that he would check up on her once she got back to the city.
“I am re-creating a website,” said Martin, sitting up and blinking at her with his round, factual eyes. “It is an artist's website, a photographer. I create the infrastructure,” he said, drawing something like a box in the air with thin fingers.
“I am from Germany,” he said.
“Oh,” said Karen. “That's interesting.”
“I am here for work,” said Martin. “I am staying in the neighborhood, with a friend. We work together on this project. We had a great deal to do.”
“I'm writing an article,” said Karen. “Beginning an article,” she explained. She felt self-conscious. She could no longer talk about her troubles with the article without revealing herself to be a disaster. “It's on a farmer, a dairy farmer. Who is supposed to be a genius at cows.”
“You must have to go far to find a cow in this part of the country,” he said, “unless I am misunderstanding.”
He had a very gentle voice. He didn't seem to know much about agriculture. He asked about the size of the farm, the distance from the city, and about the cowsâwere they gentle? They were very gentle. They were tender with their young. But they weren't really interested in anyone. It made them easier to slaughter: up until the very moment of the act you could imagine they might not notice. Karen twisted open the bottle of water and took a small, polite sip. She was becoming interested in herself again after several weeks of wishing she could be anybody else. Did she like milk very much? Yes, she did, this is how she found the story, she drank the wonderful milk that cost $13 a bottle and then began to investigate where it came from and how it could be so good. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and the grayish winter light looked flat through the plate glass windows. She had a sense of her face as flexible, soft. This was the longest that Karen had talked to a person since Vanessa's birthday party last week where Vanessa had compromised herself with whiskey sodas and made Karen promise never to get back together with Tim, ever, because he was a sneak and a pervert, practically a stalker and she could do so much better, she was better off. Vanessa and Tim had been friends since college, but after the breakup Vanessa said she was choosing Karen. “I'm not saying Tim's a terrible person,” she said, “he's a mediocre person. But he's one of those people who won't let up. He thinks he can wear you down, and he can.”
When Martin asked her if she'd like to go next door and have a pizza, she didn't think about whether it would be awkward. She thought about how normal it was to talk to someone, to drink coffee, to thrust your face into full view
of other faces, to let the daylight grime up your skin. “I think I can take a break,” Karen said abstractly, like one being shaken out of deep concentration, “but I'll need to come back afterwards, I have a deadline coming.” They put their things into bags and stood up. He tried to carry her bag, but he kept dropping it.
A middle-aged man and woman were sitting at the tables closest to the exit. They sat separately, but had identical laptops. “You know what,” Karen heard the man say as she passed by. “I haven't dreamt in a very long time.”
In the pizza restaurant, Martin looked five years older. A waiter brought them ice water in green-tinted glasses of pebbled plastic, and straws. Karen watched as Martin tore the tips from the paper casings of the straws and gently pulled them off. He split the remainder of the wrapper down its seam precisely, like he was undressing a doll. She wondered whether this had to do with being German. Karen didn't use the straw he had prepared for her. She lifted the glass to her lips and drank the cold, slightly sour water. Ice tapped against her teeth. She felt like she was going to cry, but then inexplicably she felt okay again. Food was disgusting, but she had to eat it anyway. Martin was telling her that he, too, had been interested in writing for a brief time. He had become involved in film criticism during his time in the media studies program at Humboldt University in Berlin. In those days he used to watch a film each night, walking a mile and a half back home along the Spree River. He liked to see the other regulars there, although he never spoke to themâthe old man with the antique briefcase, the young
mother who brought her slumbering infant. He thought that he might even write a book on Carl Theodor Dreyer's work, in particular the film
Vampyr.
“Why Carl Dreyer?” Karen asked.
“Carl Theodor Dreyer,” said Martin. “This is like asking âWhy history? What is interesting about history?' It is not a matter of interest. There is no opinion on it.”
“I haven't seen
Vampyr,
” she said.
“Oh,” he replied. “It's quite all right.”
In her weeks at Ned Regan's farm, Karen had seen why they called him a genius. With a long, knuckly arm, Ned guided cows from field to shed, weaving them through the gates like huge, slow-moving agility dogs. When yield fell below Ned's expectations, he knew how to adjust the feed, supplementing grass with alfalfa, fenugreek, thistle. With firm pressure on the flank he could signal a cow to slow or stop, with a deep, low groan he could still an anxious mama and she would let him come close and take her knobby calf into his rough hands. In the empty restaurant Martin seemed to be having a nice time. His smile had grown easier, he was marveling at the menu. All of this was locally grown? Here, so close to the city, the marvelous towers of cold, hard glass? He suggested they order the “Bad Girl,” a pizza with four different types of cured meat on it, plus smoked cheese and green onions. Over by the register, their waiter was talking to a waitress in a black tank top. “That's terrible,” he said, patting the countertop instead of her hand. “That's not all,” replied the waitress. Karen told Martin that she would prefer a different pizza. The only meat that she ate these
days was beef: somehow, after having spent so much time with the cows, she felt certain that they meant her no harm.
When the pizza came, it was covered in mushrooms. They had the earthy smell of something that has been buried and then dug up. Martin said he would also like a beer, but Karen told him she had to write later. They were the only customers in the whole place, it was too early for dinner. The sky seen through the windows was a pale, even gray as though it had been scrubbed bare. Martin had nice skin. With his small front teeth, he nibbled at a mushroom, seizing it delicately and pulling it from the pizza. He was nice, and he asked good questions. He asked whether Karen had traveled much and if, when she did, she felt like a different person. He asked if she liked to know where her food came from, or whether she preferred to think that it had been created just for her at that moment. He asked if she often met strangers in the coffee shop and then went with them to eat pizza, and she told him honestly that she never had before. She didn't tell him that she hadn't spoken to anyone besides Vanessa in the past week and even that had been strange, stilted and vague as they spoke surrounded by Vanessa's other friends, hard-eyed young women from the world of television news. Martin would be here, in this city, in this neighborhood, for a few more days. He would be completing the project with his friend who also lived in the neighborhood, in a loft building overlooking the motorcycle-themed Biergarten. Perhaps Karen and his friend were neighbors. There was a gallery event on Thursday that she might be interested in attending. Or she could show him some of the other sights of the neighborhood, like the grocery store operated by the
Korean family that also sold martial arts merchandise and kung fu DVDs. Their waiter was no longer talking to the waitress in the black tank top, though they stood near each other still. Martin ordered a large can of beer from the waiter, and when it came Karen ordered one too.