The Third Person

by Emily Anglin

  “I am. You must be Nancy. Are you looking for your mom?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Is she here?”

  “She’s gone. She’s been coming and going, and I’m not sure when she’ll be back. She’s been working a lot, staying late to do paperwork.”

  “Oh, okay.” Why did it seem as though she felt this exchange was perfectly normal? Her serenity was unnerving. She should have been yelling.

  “Would you like some tea? I was just watching a movie, but I was about to switch it off anyway.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. She gestured to me to sit down in one of the chairs, and I did, not knowing what else to do and needing to collect myself. She sat across from me and took a sip from the cup on the table.

  There was a black-and-white TV on a low table against the far wall. The image on the screen was of a person sitting on a couch as though mid-interview. The person was saying something in their own defence. Rosalind got up and turned the TV off, and then sat back down.

  “I’m happy to have company to distract me from that documentary,” Rosalind said. “It came on while I was watching the news channel. I wanted to turn it off, but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was an exposé about a fake alcohol treatment centre. There was an Alcoholics Anonymous sign on the lawn of the centre, but it turned out to just be this man’s private house. A scam.”

  “That’s so awful,” I said. I wanted to ask her about my mom, but I saw that Rosalind looked upset, almost distraught.

  “It really is. I don’t know how people can do things like that to each other. The guys running the scam, of course, but the relatives too, who brought their loved ones there. Why would they trust a stranger to care for someone they love just because of a name that claims to be some kind of an authority on people’s lives, without any proof? I know your brother drinks—that you all worry about him. I know it isn’t easy. But I can’t imagine you’d turn him over to strangers.”

  “That’s very true,” I said. I looked at my watch, wondering if I could call Glen, get him to come over and meet Rosalind, to help me sort things out, if he was awake. It had been an hour and a half since I’d left him. I wanted him to come meet me here and interrupt this strange conversation. He owed me that help, I thought. I shouldn’t have to do this alone—why should he leave the worrying to me?

  “Can I use your bathroom, Rosalind?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s just down the hall, at the front of the house.”

  I thanked her and went down the hall to the bathroom. It had a bathtub in it, I noticed, as though the floor had, at least at one point, been set up as an apartment separate from the rest of the house. I sat down on the edge of the tub and turned the water on in the sink beside me. I called Glen’s phone. It rang its full twelve rings before going to voice mail. I called again. After eight rings, Glen’s voice answered.

  “Nancy,” he said. “Where are you? I’ve been looking for you. I have to tell you something.” His voice sounded slightly thick but better than I would have expected. I heard a car go by in the background on the wet pavement. He was up and walking, outside, so that was good.

  “I have to tell you something too,” I said. “Why didn’t you answer a minute ago, the first time I called? It’s kind of urgent—”

  “I’m in the rain and it’s loud out here with the cars going by. I have to tell you something. I fell asleep for a bit on the couch, and when I woke up I found an insight just sitting there in my mind. I think it was there before, but I just couldn’t bring it into focus. Until I slept and woke up.”

  “I’m sorry, Glen,” I said, suddenly flushed with anger, my hands shaking slightly. “But drunken dream insights aren’t the kind of help I need right now. I’m at Rosalind’s. You have to come over here.”

  “Why do you think I’m drunk?” he said. “I’m not. I had one drink, and then I had a nap. I’m still waking up, if I sound out of it. I’ve had enough of this from Kali, planting seeds of doubt so I seem unreliable.”

  “Okay, fine, you’re sober. I know. Then you have to come over here,” I said.

  “I’m already here. I’m right outside, walking down her street toward the house. I was coming to join you. I’m telling you, I have to tell you something. I know who Rosalind is.”

  “I know too,” I said. All of a sudden I did know. It had been creeping up through my consciousness and now it was there, clear and obvious. “She’s mom’s old friend, her co-worker from the library, the one who first discovered spontaneous subjectivity transfer. She had a different name before, but it’s her.” My subconscious couldn’t let Glen know it if I didn’t.

  “Nancy? Are you okay?” Rosalind was at the bathroom door. I hung up the phone, not wanting her to hear me talking.

  “I’m fine, thanks!” I called. “Be out in a sec.”

  I turned off the water, opened the door, and saw Rosalind walking back to her room. She turned to face me, standing in the hall.

  “Rosalind,” I said. “Did you ever actually experience spontaneous subjectivity transfer?”

  “That’s what your dad calls it. Your mom and I understand it in a broader way,” she said. “We were the ones who felt it, or I was, anyway, and she understood what I meant.”

  I heard a bang downstairs, the sound of the front door opening.

  “Nancy?” It was Glen.

  “Who’s that?” Rosalind said.

  “It’s my brother,” I said. I went down the stairs and met Glen on the landing. He was wet, and still wearing his muddy tennis shoes. Rosalind came down the stairs behind me.

  “Hi, Glen,” Rosalind said. “Are you okay?”

  “Hi. Yes, I am. Nice to see you again,” said Glen. “Nancy, let’s just go home. I came to get you.” He started walking down the stairs and I saw that he was drunk, after all. Or at least very tired. I followed him outside onto the porch. Rosalind stood behind us at the door. As I walked down the walkway, I almost thought I heard my mom’s voice, and Rosalind’s responding, but I didn’t want to go back into that house when I hadn’t been invited.

  Glen and I walked down the street together in the middle of the road under the street lights, like the nights in high school when we’d walk home together from parties, bumping into each other and linking arms—except this time only one of us was drunk. I looked at Glen’s face beside me in profile and noticed how tired he looked, how much older he’d gotten, and how parallel and straight our walking paths had become, never crossing. Maybe he wasn’t drunk, after all, but just tired—I couldn’t really say.

  The Third Person

  My former roommate and friend once warned me that it’s never a good idea to socialize with neighbours who live in the same apartment building as you, because if something goes wrong you’re stuck with the situation. While I found her warning unnecessarily cautious, I’d nonetheless never made a habit of turning to my neighbours for friendship in the apartment buildings I’ve lived in. But I’ve since learned that neighbours can offer an inviting kind of readily available company, especially if they’re lonely too. That’s how I ended up spending time this past fall with my neighbour, a lawyer named Jolene. Jolene made a good salary, but despite her job, for reasons she revealed to me, her housing budget was similar to my own.

  Since quitting grad school a year previously, with the plan of starting my own business selling fabric, and since the plans for the fabric business had been put on hold, I’d been working at the university for two professors in the history department who were co-authoring a biographical monograph. Essentially, I was a transcriptionist, paid to work part-time typing the content of the handwritten letters of the biography’s subject, working from digital photos of the letters that my brother Mark had taken when he’d held the job before me.

  I’d inherited the transcriptionist position from Mark when he had finished his own degree and got a job as a professor at
a university in Oregon. He had recommended me to the professors as a replacement; I’d studied history in the same department, and I typed even faster than him.

  I missed Mark and couldn’t afford to go visit him, so doing his job felt like a way of keeping in touch. He and one of my closest friends—my roommate, actually; the one who had warned me about socializing with neighbours—had gotten married shortly before they moved away, and it had been hard to find times to talk to either of them on the phone since then; I was finding it more and more difficult to picture them in their daily lives, and I peered after the image of them in my mind with what felt like dimming eyes.

  The apartment I rented next door to Jolene’s was on the second storey of a two-storey building above a row of three street-level storefronts; the storefront below Jolene’s apartment was occupied by the office she worked out of. It was there in her law office that I first met her, just before I moved in; my landlord had asked me to meet with them both there to review and sign my new lease. After she’d taken the landlord and me through the lease, item by item, and the lawyer had left, Jolene and I chatted in her office, and she suggested that we have dinner sometime. “I live just up there,” she said, pointing at the ceiling’s fluorescent lights. When she looked up to the ceiling, I saw that she had a constellation of faint freckles along her jawline that reminded me of my brother Mark’s crooked row of distinct freckles on his cheek, the origin of his nickname: Beauty Mark. I guessed Jolene was in her early to mid-fifties.

  “By the way,” she asked, as she walked me out onto the sidewalk. “What kind of project are you working on at the university?” I’d listed “Project Manager” on the lease as my profession, instead of “Transcriptionist.”

  Standing on the sidewalk, I told Jolene about my bosses, and about the monograph they were writing. The monograph was on Sarah Manning, a fairly obscure nineteenth-century American diarist, unpublished novelist, and friend to famous Romantics. I explained that her letters described her descent into a complex spiral of debt that the professors were arguing shed light on the lives of some of the important American Romantics.

  “Interesting. Do you enjoy that work?” she asked.

  “I’m a fast typist, so it’s easy,” I said. “And I learn a lot about the period, and about Sarah Manning. That is, when I can read her writing.”

  It wasn’t so much my typing as it was my ability to read Sarah Manning’s handwriting that had made me valuable to the professors writing the biography. I’d trained myself to glance across dips, lines, dots, and whirls to catch Manning’s intended meanings that often glowed out from behind the lines as much as from the lines themselves. It felt like a relationship I’d built with Manning herself, based on compromise and effort, that afforded me special access to her: the professors had focused in recent years not on the photographs of the letters that I was working from, but on the transcribed documents I’d been giving them. Only Mark, who had photographed the original letters in a museum in a small town in New England, had a closer connection to Manning than I did.

  “It doesn’t sound easy, working with letters that old. Is her writing hard to read?” Jolene asked.

  I found myself telling Jolene about the legibility problem in detail. I had hit a roadblock in deciphering Manning’s writing—not in interpreting the meaning of the words, which wasn’t my aim, but the decoding of the shape of them, the physical letters and words on the page. In my progress through her papers, I’d come to a slightly frenzied series of letters about money, which were mostly proposals to friends about funds she wanted them to lend her, and her plans to pay the money back when she sold her novel. One of the letters, which the professors had asked me to prioritize, was part of a series that Manning had written to her sister immediately before, on, and just after the date of the death of a man who had been a source of both patronage and pain for Manning. She referred to and addressed this man as “Suzerain,” an old word for a feudal overlord. She used archaic language when writing to her sister, seemingly almost as a kind of code, a fact that made the job of deciphering them even harder. The professors expected that this letter would be especially revealing about her life, maybe even a kind of climax in her personal narrative as told by her papers. I had deciphered most of the letter, but there was a whole paragraph of it that was proving stubbornly hard to read, even for me, to whom Manning’s handwriting had become as familiar as a voice heard daily.

  The problem, as I found myself telling Jolene on the sidewalk, came down to a single perplexing sentence, which I had memorized despite its unclearness. This sentence appeared to read: “My planet’s orbit is now not only quick but has also become in its travel cross blast, hurtling not warmly abound but in its cracked way headed straight for the fine of its century star.”

  “I wish I could help. I don’t think I can but I know who might be able to. Bring the letter with you when you come for dinner,” Jolene said. “Russel has sharp eyes. He’s a writer himself. He can have a look at it. He hasn’t had an easy year and I know it would make him feel good to help out.”

  I wasn’t sure who Russel was, but I felt like I’d talked too much already.

  “How does this Friday sound?” she asked.

  I told her that would be fine and she asked me to come by at seven.

  “Russel will also be happy to meet you,” she said. “He loves literature, and history. Be sure to bring the letter you were telling me about. He loves a puzzle.”

  When I arrived at Jolene’s apartment, it was she alone who opened the door, and there was no Russel in sight. In fact, it was hard to see much of anything in there, coming in from the still-bright September evening. The apartment’s living room, the mirror opposite of my own, was dimly lit. The sole lamp sat on an old rolltop desk that looked recently worked at, strewn with papers, pens, and a calculator. The only other light came from candles, which were placed on a coffee table, a side table, and a dining table. To my surprise, the air inside smelled like stale cigarette smoke.

  “Have a seat,” Jolene said. We sat on opposite ends of a long, low couch. The room was decorated with what looked like second-hand furniture in an ungainly mix of colours and styles. There was a wooden knick-knack shelf mounted on one wall, with six compartments, three above and three below, and I was distracted by the thought that the shelf could serve as the base of a diorama of our building, with its three units per storey and two storeys.

  “Russel apologizes for his lateness today,” Jolene said. “He’s been sleeping off a migraine this afternoon. He’ll come out when he feels human again. In the meantime, it’s Friday. That calls for a glass of wine, I think.”

  An open bottle sat on the table beside three glasses. Two of the glasses had smudges of red residue in the bases. She poured me some into the clean one, and filled one of the others for herself.

  “I hope you like red?” she said.

  “Oh, of course.”

  “This is our wine. We make it. Cheaper that way, especially if you go through as much as we do.”

  The wine was good, although it didn’t really taste like wine; it tasted like jam thinned with a mixture of water and wine. After three sips I could feel the muscles in my legs and arms start to relax.

  “You’re probably wondering why I live this way if I’m a lawyer,” she said. “Don’t worry, everyone asks.”

  I hadn’t planned to ask but I had been wondering.

  “I have some family I’m helping out. Plus some personal debts. Russel works freelance—writing, editing, consulting—and contributes what he can, but it hasn’t been easy. We make ends meet. We love to cook. In fact, dinner is all ready, and I think you and I should just go ahead and eat. I don’t have much hope for Russel’s appetite today.”

  The dinner consisted of whitefish cooked with butter, herbs and wine, rice, and a green salad with herbs and watercress from pots on the windowsill. As we ate, Jolene asked me questions and I told her
things: about my frustrated plans to make a business out of my fabric collection, about my brother Mark and my roommate’s marriage and move, and about how I couldn’t afford to visit them, and had a nagging feeling I might never see them again. She wove some vague outlines of her own story into the conversation, but it was oddly blank and I didn’t feel like I learned much about her. It may have been the wine, or her intent listening, but I shared details with her that I’d never spoken aloud.

  After dinner, Jolene opened another bottle of wine and we moved back to the couch.

  “I don’t want to impose my readings on you already,” said Jolene. “But I get the feeling you’re someone who cares about people. So I’m going to take a risk and tell you something about myself. A problem I’m having. I’m hoping that when Russel gets up he can help you by looking at the letter. I always like to give something in return if I ask for something, so I promise I’ll get him up if he’s not with us in a half-hour, but in the meantime, do you mind if I share something with you?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. I couldn’t help but feel distracted, unfocused, not only because of the third large glass of wine I’d started on, but because of her repeated mentions of the Manning letter, along with the seemingly imminent appearance of a third person in the room. I couldn’t help but wonder why she didn’t offer to look at the letter herself—since she seemed so interested in it, and because she was a lawyer, and I therefore assumed she was experienced in looking at documents in detail. I wondered what made her so confident in Russel’s abilities as an exceptional reader. In any case, I hoped I would be able to respond adequately to whatever she was about to say.

  “There’s no way of saying this that doesn’t sound dramatic,” Jolene said. “The reality is that Russel is in a bad way right now. The migraine is just one of the symptoms of what he’s going through—he’s weaning himself off the pills he takes for his insomnia and anxiety. I won’t tell you the name of the pills. I don’t want you to be tempted to look up the withdrawal symptoms that come with quitting and the nine hundred side effects, everything from tooth pain to hallucinations. God, it’s awful what they’ll prescribe, for years, without asking any questions. But the pills are just a secondary problem. He got started on them in the first place because he can’t sleep. The reason he can’t sleep is our money trouble. Basically, to speak plainly, we’ve been the victims of identity theft. Russel has, and I’ve had to pay and pay to bail him out. It’s ruined everything.”