Intimations

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “Great,” he said.

  His name was EJ, and the vehicle he owned was an old motorbike painted construction-cone orange. The rattle of its worn-down motor clashed alarmingly with the deep, serene green of the jungle around them. When EJ slowed down to avoid potholes or clear a curve, the engine sputtered a deeply unwholesome gray smoke.

  “I’m Karen,” Karen said, shouting into the rush of air.

  “What?” EJ shouted. “I can’t hear you!”

  The groves of palm trees and bananas were a broad smudge around them, as EJ made alarming decisions about when to barrel through piles of palm debris and when to swerve suddenly, wrenching around them. Absolute time and absolute speed were difficult to gauge on a motorbike, Karen thought as she tried to cling to EJ’s sweat-soaked back without digging her fingernails into the flesh, but it seemed as though they could die on this ride. In her left hand, she clutched the Styrofoam box packed with awful pizza: she would have dropped it, but it was still possible that EJ would turn the bike around and make them go back for it.

  “Where is it?” she shouted.

  “Soon!” he shouted back. “Can you try to sit still?” They were both visibly annoyed, and annoyed with the other person for showing it. Each time she shifted on her piece of the seat, EJ let out a grunt and made a big show of correcting for the wobble Karen had created as she struggled to rebalance herself.

  “Stop wiggling around!” he shouted over his shoulder.

  “What?” Karen shouted back.

  Out of nowhere, EJ made a sharp left turn onto a dirt road. Gravel crackled beneath motorbike wheels as they barreled down the narrowing path. And then, abruptly, the ocean splayed out before them, gray-blue in the deteriorated light, more real and less pretty than the toothpaste water the resort was built to exploit. EJ dismounted and kicked his thong sandals off in the sand. “Holy shit,” he said, “glad that’s over!” He did a couple cursory stretches of his hamstrings and went into a downward dog. Now it was like Karen wasn’t even there: he pulled off his shirt and jogged toward the water with an easy stride. From time to time, she saw him punch at the air with his right fist in a gesture of triumph.

  Karen walked slowly up to the water. She had no idea whether she was supposed to follow him in, but she didn’t care. EJ was only a fleck in the distance at this point, bobbing among waves. If she squinted her eyes into the shifting surface she could see the notion of his head or arm or leg as he swam around in the deeper water, among the cold currents or other such bullshit. She set the Styrofoam box down on the sand, dropped her tote bag. She slid off her sandals and piled some sand onto them, so they wouldn’t blow away: Dan had taught her to do this, last summer at Fort Tilden. She walked into the sea gingerly, step by step, the water lukewarm and smelling of brine and tar. Once when she was eighteen she had done something like this: she let an art professor from the college next to her own drive her in his car to a beach she didn’t even know the name of. He wore a black, full-body wetsuit; she had walked waist-deep into the waves fully clothed. As he dove and surfaced like a seal in the clear water, she had realized that she knew almost nothing about him. She had looked down at her skirt swirling around the dim, disappearing legs and hoped that she’d make it back to the car, back to town, to live free of mistakes like this one. And now, almost a decade later, she had made the exact same mistake.

  Knee-deep in the surf, Karen willed herself to take another step, and another. She would move to Boston if she had to. She would get back to the bungalow, somehow, and she would say all of this to Dan: they had made the right decision, she was happy, she was ready to become even happier. Waist-deep in the warm gray water, she saw something wobbling beneath the surface. It was Styrofoam-white and resembled a piece of trash, suspended between the surface and the sand. She looked to her left, to her right. As she stared into the water, the floating shapes came into view all at once: like constellations they were there, venomous and drifting, more numerous than she could even have imagined.

  In the summer between high school and college, Karen’s father was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer was malignant, but not incurable. Curing it would, however, involve a great deal of pain: the pain of incision, extraction, and then days of radiation battering the flesh invisibly. Her father underwent the course of treatment almost without comment, so that the only visible trace of its effect was his body lying on the couch for most of each day, silently watching baseball on a dizzyingly colorful TV screen. That summer, Karen stayed away from the house as much as possible. She walked for hours around their town and the banks of the creek, picking up pebbles and putting them in her pockets, emptying them out someplace different but equivalent. And when she came home for dinner she joined her parents in choosing not to speak about the cancer, though it wasn’t clear what else there was to speak about.

  Even while it was happening, she sensed that she was living in disaster and failing to make herself adequate to the situation. What she wanted to say to her mother and father she couldn’t say, what she wanted to ignore she couldn’t ignore. After the remission, Karen promised herself that she would be ready for the next true disaster, she would identify it and react appropriately. She was haunted by the feeling that, even though her father had lived, she had let him die.

  Since then, Karen had looked for disaster at every step in her life, but had discovered that each disaster she thought she had discovered was inadequate to the concept. This walk home, alone, on an unlit foreign road lined by deep, rock-filled gutters could end up being a true disaster—but it unfolded so slowly, so ponderously, and out there on the dangerous peaceful street the air smelled ecstatically of blooming plumeria. There were no clear signs to react to: peril was everywhere, intermingled with the mundane. Karen felt that all her life she would be moving from positions of perceived danger to positions of perceived safety without ever knowing which impressions were correct. And as she had this thought, her mood abruptly inverted: now she was feeling relief, joy, even something close to euphoria. Inhuman calls echoed through the vegetal thick; a siren went off far away.

  On a road like this one, with no shoulder and no speed limit, any car that came along could hit her. If she was on the right road, she wouldn’t be back at the bungalow for hours. Poisonous animals lived in this area—snakes, scorpions, centipedes. The moon was large and bright overhead, and smooth like a stone. She didn’t know what she’d tell Dan when she got back to him, but she knew he’d be there, passed out on the bed with his laptop still open and his teeth unbrushed. He’d have fallen asleep believing she’d be back soon. On the table there’d be some cake or a cookie as an apology for whatever had happened by the pool that afternoon. And on her nightstand, there’d be a fresh glass of water.

  Intimation

  I was trying to think of all the different things I liked about doors. Their size, their heft, the sense that they were made for bodies to pass through them freely. The way they put holes in spaces in which you would otherwise be trapped forever, looking for some way in or out. All of the best moments in my life had been preceded by entering or exiting a door, or maybe just having a door waiting there in the background, offering the possibility of escape. They were the only things I could think of that were truly reversible: no clear beginning or ending, passing endlessly through a series of midpoints and temporary stops. They were beautiful in this revocability, flexible and soft.

  All except this door, which seemed to be unidirectional.

  From the outer side it had looked like any other, but here I was running my hands over it and looking for the seam, clawing at it, pounding my hands against this faint echo of a door that lacked all the features I had heretofore prized among its kind. The doorknob was fixed in place, and when I ran my fingers over the line, it felt of paint, thick and dark, on a smooth surface. If this door offered hope, it was only in trompe l’oeil form, a thin veneer of it laid planlessly. I turned to look for another way out.

  Behind me lay the insides of a small house: coffe
e table, sofa, then a dining table and chairs. What looked like a kitchen to the right, then a long, narrow hallway that probably ended in a bedroom or bathroom. The apartment was small, and it seemed to funnel off into a point too small for anyone to step into, or out from. A man was seated on the sofa. He watched me, and he tilted his head.

  What are you looking for? he said.

  What’s wrong with this door? I said.

  That’s a really strange question, he responded.

  Something about his statement really irritated me. Yes, I was able to see how it could be considered a strange question. But in this situation, this strange situation, it seemed to be the only reasonable question to have. The fact that he wasn’t asking the question himself made him the strangest element here. At least by the standards that existed outside this house.

  Look, sorry, where are my manners? he said. Have a seat, would you like anything?

  I had just walked into his house, a complete stranger, and began clawing at the walls, tearing at the empty form of the door painted on it. I wanted him to feel as I did, trapped and hungry for answers. He should have been demanding information from me, demanding to know why I was here and who I was.

  Don’t you want to know how I got in here? I asked.

  He laughed a little. Okay, he replied, I’ll bite. How did you get in here?

  I’m not sure, I said.

  Now that we’ve settled that, he said tolerantly, do you or do you not want something to eat? A beverage? He stood up and headed over to the dining table.

  I used to have a pet mouse that was actually just a normal mouse that had been living in our kitchen, someplace behind the oven. My mother caught it in a Havahart one weekend and I begged her to give it to me instead of crushing its head with a hammer and flushing it down the toilet, as she had threatened repeatedly to do. This mouse was cute, but it never got used to the fact that it now lived in a cage. It smelled bad in a feral way and wouldn’t learn to groom itself. You couldn’t play with it because it was wild, dirty, and fierce, but I used to like to press my face up to the clear plastic walls of its habitat and watch it digging furiously at the bounds, and when I did this I tried to make sure that my face showed a similarly desperate expression just so the mouse would know that it wasn’t crazy.

  He was pouring a glass of wine and didn’t seem to be looking at me at all.

  You have beautiful eyes, he said all of a sudden.

  I hated compliments like that, compliments that carved out one particular part of your body and put it on a platter for viewing. It always took a while for me to reabsorb that body part afterward, to add it back to the whole. The best kind of compliment to give me was something vague, plausible. You’re all right. Or, Don’t worry, it gets better.

  Eh, I replied.

  He handed me the glass and began saying things to me. He described his feelings on organized religion and organized sports, on organizations in general, on bodily organs (the liver was his favorite and, he felt, often overlooked), and the economics of organic fruits and vegetables. I felt invaded at first, but as he talked, I experienced a sudden swell of something calmer, more complacent. This was a feeling that he talked into me; it sank in through the skin. It wasn’t anything in particular he had said, just the fact that he kept saying it, whether I responded or not. This ceaseless stream of talk might seem aggressive from some perspectives, something I couldn’t affect except through participation, but I felt it more like light illuminating a room, a harsh and inescapable substance that was ultimately harmless.

  This feeling of lessening disturbance, coming from within myself, unexpected, was profoundly disturbing. As I sat still, growing less and less alarmed by the situation, I knew that I had to move fast, move as fast and as far as I could within this small, cramped house.

  Do you have a bathroom here that I could use? I asked.

  You don’t need to go to the bathroom, he said. He said it like it was a fact that he had read recently, in some news article. And it was true: nothing had changed for me physically since I entered this house. I had grown no thirstier or hungrier, though my mental parts felt increasingly in flux.

  What I mean to say is, I have to go into the other room by myself, I said.

  For what reason? he asked.

  I couldn’t think of a good answer. I couldn’t tell him that I was going to look for a functional door or window that I could sneak out of without seeming ungrateful for his hospitality. I couldn’t think of a way to tell him that I wanted to get away without sounding crazy, like a person not in command of her own life choices. I couldn’t think of anything at all, really: it was so warm in here, so much warmer than it had been outside, and the air seemed a bit thicker and sweeter than usual, like watered-down honey.

  I’m going to bake a cake? I said, testing this answer out.

  Well, that sounds great, maybe we’ll have something to celebrate in the future, he said, winking in my general direction.

  I left the room before I could figure out exactly what bothered me about his response. Was it the way it seemed to assume a future for the two of us? A future in which I would continue to be unable to leave this house? Was it the presumption that I was making a cake for him when, really, I had no idea why I was making a cake at all?

  Now I was in the kitchen and I could at least rely on the task to keep me from thinking of those questions. I took cocoa, sugar, flour, salt, baking powder, vanilla extract, and butter from the various storage places of the kitchen. What was strange was that all of these things were present in the room, everything I needed, but nothing else. The fridge contained one stick of butter and four eggs, no more. The cabinets were empty except for the dry ingredients of my cake, exactly one cake’s worth. This information seemed to have a bearing on my situation, and I filed it away to think about it later.

  Ever since I was young, I had maintained a special agreement with myself wherein I was permitted to avoid thinking about whatever I wished, at that moment, to avoid thinking about, provided that I think instead about another problem that I had wished to avoid thinking about in the past. In this way, I would never be shirking my responsibilities entirely, but I also would not have to deal with the most difficult of the possible problems at its most pressing time. At this moment, I decided that I would try thinking about the problem of reversibility and irreversibility in physical processes. Why was it true that one could stir sugar into a cup of tea, but not stir it back out? Why did living things age only in one direction, and so unfalteringly in that direction, without pauses or stops?

  By exerting my own energy, I was able to combine the ingredients of this cake together in the mixing bowl. This was done freely, of my own will. Why, then, could no amount of effort or will unmix the ingredients, make them as they were before, whole and full of potential? If I could unmake this cake as neatly as I could make it, I would be able to stay here in this separate room forever, making and unmaking and never having to deal with the man in the first room who seemed to have ideas about me that I didn’t share.

  It was at this moment that I realized I had forgotten the baking soda, and without it I knew the cake would turn out wrong, though I did not know in what way, exactly.

  I went back into the living room to ask him if he had any baking soda in some nook I hadn’t checked, but when I entered the room I saw him hiding something under the dining table.

  What’s that? I asked.

  What are you doing, trying to ruin the surprise? he responded.

  I would have asked about the surprise, but I knew it would go nowhere or go somewhere I didn’t want to go. So I asked, instead, about the baking soda. He looked uneasy.

  You should have everything there that you need, he said. Maybe you got the recipe wrong, he added.

  I looked angry, and then I picked up one of the plates and smashed it on the floor.

  It seemed as though, being the only two people in this small, closed-in space, we couldn’t help but have a relationship, and if we couldn’t
help but have a relationship, I felt that it was important to be upset now so that he would not shift the blame to me in the future.

  Suddenly he also looked angry, and he picked up a larger plate and smashed it near mine.

  We stood there, pieces of plate scattering the ground between us. Then he spoke.

  Sorry, he said.

  There was nothing else I could do but say sorry myself. His apology had left a residue in me, a residue on my thinking, and continuing on in this house without saying it would be entirely awkward. It would turn the small space toxic. So I said it, though I tried to lessen the potency of the apology by mumbling.

  I have something to ask you, he said.

  I shifted my position to one more suitable for being asked a question. I was now curled up on the couch with my knees pressed up against my body, my knees shielding my face from seeing what was going on.

  My question is, he began. I think I knew from the first time I met you that I would not be meeting another person quite like you ever again. You are unlike anyone else around here. I have not seen anyone like you in quite a while. So, should we be exclusive?

  Everything seemed to be moving so fast. I had to stall.

  When did we meet again? I asked.

  It feels like forever ago, he said.

  Wouldn’t you say that this is still part of the first time that we’ve met? I asked.

  He shrugged. You’re being avoidant, he said. You probably have a history of it, he said.

  I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn’t a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?

  What I really wanted was to opt out of the causal relation between myself and this cake, the causal relation that I couldn’t seem to avoid, living in this house that I now appeared to live in. The proximity was changing me: I couldn’t avoid seeing or noticing things that happened in this place, and because I was the only other person around, things couldn’t help but involve themselves in me. I decided to think about the orbital motions of the moon around the earth, and of what might happen if the force of one on the other ever exceeded expectations, pulling the two uncomfortably close, causing them to crash together in a fiery and highly destructive event. But he was taking up so much space in me now, I could no longer think around him, peer around him to the shapes of things I had known before I entered this place. What had he meant by a surprise, and what had he meant by something to celebrate? How much time had elapsed in his experience, and was it really different from how much time had elapsed in mine? Or was I instead just a highly avoidant person with serious difficulties connecting to others? I didn’t want to be so difficult, but that difficulty felt like a part of me, a part that I didn’t want taken over by new features belonging to a me that did not yet exist.