* * *
It troubled me that I was a threat to my husband. Violent impulses slumbered in my limbs. I brought this dilemma to the attention of my psychic in the small hours before dawn. She emerged as a shimmer from the dim of her office, draped in a satiny dress. Percy, you hidden gem. Take a seat, she said. I complied. I had not always been the sort of person who consults the stars, the positions of the planets, who links her menstrual cycles to phases of the moon, but recently I found myself receptive to any ideology that might tame my life. Perched plushly on a pouf, I traced idle patterns on the upholstery and explained how I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, how exhausted I was all the time. That there was this impulse in me to flee— My psychic sent me a long look, as if I were withholding information. I stared at my palms, where life lines splintered. I was obedient by nature, she herself had told me as much. What reason had I to lie? My psychic kneaded her lips, deepening the red. Okay, she said. Then she lowered the lights and took the pouf across from mine. I sat very still, surrounded by clichés, globes and Ouijas and tarot cards, the red velvet curtains on the walls. She thought I had a spirit in me, and the idea was to coax it out. I nodded. I watched as she extended both hands and reached for the air between us, like a weaver for her loom. I felt something dislodge in me and slide an inch her way. It pressed right up against my throat and made it hard to swallow. Then it stopped. My psychic opened her eyes, shook her head. It’s blocked. You’ll have to come back, she said.
* * *
Later, as I was traipsing through the abandoned playground across the street, I realized she might have been detecting the nebula all along. I paused and closed my eyes. It seemed to me a life ought to register all at once, like an anchor sinking into sand. In practice, however, it’s more like swallowing a single grape and trying to detect a shift in appetite. There isn’t any change.
* * *
After a night wandering the streets, I often came home to look things up online. Misha had installed the computer in the kitchenette in late September, carrying it up the stairs like a wounded pet and plugging it into the wall. That’s it, he said. And so a quiet revolution began. I had a sort of love affair with Microsoft Encarta. I looked up facts, learned the lingua franca. Lol. Boolean logic was a bit of a thrill, sorting the world via OR AND NOT—I was a natural surfer of the internet. Once, with a previous lover, I’d visited a deserted island off the coast of Nova Scotia. The day was endless and grim, and as the boat pulled away into the dark waters of the Atlantic, I looked back and was overwhelmed, really, by the idea that I would never see this place again. I looked up that island now. There it was, only slightly less worth the journey than I recalled. I searched for Misha and found his results were mostly in Cyrillic. His picture loaded slowly on the screen. A younger version of himself, standing tall on a rock, addressed the camera with disdain. By way of an internet translator: Local Chess Champion Wins Graduate Scholarship in United States. I was very proud of Misha’s brain.
* * *
I myself made little impression on the internet. I spelunked Napster. Visited beauty blogs. I still harbored hopes of becoming beautiful one day, and because such fantasies are more difficult to restrain online, at night, I indulged in searches for cosmetics. I researched waxing kits, DIY. The pink box glowed on the screen. I scrolled to the bottom of the page and in the comments recorded a footnote of my own: How often do you have to, you know…? I shouldn’t have had to ask. I worked for an author of self-help books on intimacy and sex, and she was prolific on any number of subtopics in her field: how to touch, how to talk, how to commit to oneself. Somewhere, I’m sure, she’d covered how to wax. I handled her fan mail, the filing, the bills. I proofed the drafts. No matter how many self-help manuscripts I edited, however, I remained immune to the genre’s premises. On-screen, the pink box made a quarter turn. It quarter turned again. I would have liked to consult my employer about waxing kits, my abuse of Misha’s airways in the night. Only I was too shy, and she was too close; she lived just downstairs. I navigated to her website now, where we’d engineered a message box for fans to write to her directly, anonymously. The anonymity was key.
what does it mean if someone accidentally tries to suffocate a husband?
(unsuccessfully, of course.)
I paused. The cursor blinked.
i’m really not a violent person, i don’t think.
My missive folded into itself and disappeared. I was less than hopeful about receiving a reply. The task of responding to such inquiries had lately been delegated to me.
* * *
Percy Q, I should mention, is not my real name. One night, not long after my psychic had tugged at some metaphysical handle in my throat, I came home from wandering the streets and searched for myself—my legal self—online. I was nowhere to be found. There were only the other women with whom I shared a sobriquet. The name my mother gave me is in fact unremarkable, plain to the point of cruelty, as if she wanted me to disappear. It is a name to share with many others. There was a porn star in Arizona, we looked not at all alike. (Indeed she’d been waxed thoroughly.) I found a scientist at the NIH who’d won awards for cancer research. A librarian in Alabama who’d waived a deceased woman’s fees. They were doing important work, these women. Even the porn star, I thought, brought daily into this world some kind of urgent joy. And what had I achieved? I looked around. At the papers strewn about, the notes posted to the wall, reminders from Misha to me, and from me to him, to buy potatoes, bread, to do the laundry on Saturday, when we had no other plans. On-screen, by contrast, the porn star struck a powerful beachside pose, her smooth knees sparkling in the sand. I wondered if anyone had ever thought to look me up and mistaken me for one of these women. Not this buxom siren, maybe. But the librarian, the scientist? I asked Misha in the morning, when he woke up. Misha, I said. Do you think I could have been a scientist? He was brushing his teeth. He thought for a moment, spat a bit of foam. I can see this, he said. You have an investigative streak. He dried his face by bringing his mouth straight to the towel hanging from a ring mounted on the wall, then kissed my cheek. The door sighed shut. I always felt Misha’s absence most acutely right after he left for Insta-Ad. I loved him, I really did. Only I didn’t want to kill him. That was all.
2
I did not need to check my horoscope to know that this was not a particularly promising moment to bring a nebula into the world, not for me specifically, nor for the nation in general. We were at war. The skyline had thinned. Anthrax accented the nightly news, and frankly, it was not hard for me to imagine why or how or whether terror would strike again. Don’t say that, Misha said. It was Saturday, and we were at the credenza, sharing an afternoon tomato. The sheets were at the laundry, set to tumble dry. Misha was reminding me that I lived in one of the safest countries in the world, in one of the most powerful empires known to man. I nodded. This was less comforting than it might otherwise have been, considering the assaults that Misha himself had endured, unknowingly, in bed.
* * *
In the fridge, I found two fruit-on-the-bottom yogurts: dessert. I peeled away the silver skin from one and set the other aside, plus a spoon. Misha was on the bare bed, deep in thought, arms and head draped over the edge of the mattress in a posture designed to promote blood flow to the brain. I wondered if he looked different. Dark curls brushed the hardwood. The whites of his eyes were wide. But everyone looks a little alien, I thought, when his face is upside down. I considered the armory he had brought with him when he moved in, the glass jars, the metal detecting wand, the textbooks and CDs. My feelings for Misha had not changed. They were still there, like a bowl on a shelf. An impossible shelf, too high to reach. I pushed the empty yogurt cup into the trash, paused. Then I lifted it out, added it to the milk jugs in the recycling bin.
Misha, I said. Do you feel different at all?
He thought for a moment.
I don’t think so.
I nodded.
Me neither, I said.
* * *
I do not know whether insanity attracts more of the same, or if it only serves to bring an extant excess into focus, but either way, in the months leading up to the attacks, it seemed to me the whole nation was under construction, page not found, the open source codes of common sense irrevocably hacked. I remember one morning, in late July, I watched a woman spill a drop of coffee on her cream-colored blouse. She looked down at the modest stain, the light changed. She pulled the silk away from her body and poured the remainder down the ruffled bib. Later, I looked into the air shaft outside our window and found a deposit of paper cranes; they gathered against the brick like bright and fallen leaves and were soon pulverized by rain. The world had become the sort of demonic place where lattes and cranes and even buildings fall, such that when they did, a part of me resisted any feeling of surprise, as if I ought to have expected it all along.
* * *
Misha and I met during this time. A few months before the towers sublimated into a too-blue sky, I responded to an ad at the library. Thesis editor needed. New and exciting opportunity! I was always on the lookout for lucrative, undemanding tasks. I applied. I took the train to Astor and followed Avenue B to the HQ of Insta-Ad, LLC, which at the time was also Misha’s home. It was a different world in there. The attic office had once occupied the rafters of an Orthodox church, and the windows were still fitted with stained glass. Now computers lined the walls, and wires sprouted from every outlet. Ethernet cables in red and yellow nuzzled into notches meant for phones. His bed was by the window. He sat on the mattress. I sat on the chair. He apologized for the mess. But we are not getting many visitors, he said. He swept an arm toward the rows of monitors, and this was the full extent of an office tour: Behold the future of online shopping. Insta-Ad. I looked around. There were only two people in the entire company, Misha and his thesis advisor, and I wondered how many computers a single employee could reasonably use at once. The idea, he explained, was to close the gap between a click and the time it took a web page to load and—wham!—shellac the sidebar with a billboard meant just for you. I nodded, not understanding at all. He planned to publish and defend a dissertation on the collection and sale of consumer data. And that is where you come in, he said. I’m afraid my grammar is not so good.
* * *
I had okay grammar. This was how I made my living. I wrote odd copy for websites and galleries, anyone, really, in need of public-facing prose. The self-help author kept me on retainer. I worked out of her apartment one, two, seven days a week. Sometimes there was no work at all, and so it wasn’t my fault if I seemed to be without responsibilities or income, if I had time on a weekday afternoon to voyage to the library, the Met, down the 4-5-6 line to the electric offices of Insta-Ad.
* * *
I took Misha’s thesis home and brought it back marked up in red. I said, I have no idea what it means, but the grammar should be correct. He flipped through the pages I had proofed. Fantastic, he said. He thought everything I did was worthy of applause. And I liked spending time with him, marking up sentences I couldn’t understand. I sensed in Misha’s life an order absent from my own. He woke each day in the twin bed by the office window, stretched, spooned grounds from a Café Bustelo tin and poured the freshly brewed joe into another—there were a great many Bustelo tins around. I filled them with flowers. Absorbed at his computer, he reminded me of my psychic before her crystal ball. And mathematics itself was a language, I was learning, with a grammar all its own. Notation unraveled into incomprehensible words: product of 1 through k over product of 1 through (n−k) times k to the power of n. As you can see, there is something seriously wrong with our random number generator, Misha said. He transliterated my name. There were two Discmans between us, and whenever I fell into a forlorn mood, Misha slipped CDs into both and brought me down to the street, where we pressed play as one. Just to try, he said. The music that streamed through my headphones was Hungarian Dance in G Minor, by Brahms. I smiled. It was true, as Misha said. Everything became a little comical, a little absurd, when set to the soundtrack of Hungarian Dance. I felt superior watching other people hurry through their lives. The city became a length of reel snipped from silent film, melodramatic, halting, and poorly spliced. It never occurred to me that was how I looked most of the time.
* * *
I felt less superior listening to Hungarian Dance alone, without Misha. When I returned home from my midnight rambles, I stood in the street and slipped the headphones from my ears. I looked up at our building. I thought of Misha inside, asleep. I wondered, sometimes, what others might make of our present predicament, whereby we were rarely in the same room at once. A limestone ledge jutted like a sore lip from the brick facade and ran around its girth. I followed it to Harold’s former window, still surprised, after all this time, to find it dark.
3
I’d moved to Morningside long before I ever met Misha. Then, too, I never slept. I had a can opener and a desk and a mattress on the floor, too many thoughts in my head. I got up to walk them off in the night, like muscle soreness, or love handles. You girls are always exercising, said my neighbor across the hall. I went to the cathedral, the seminary, Grant’s Tomb. There was a residential high-rise scheduled for Columbus and 107th, but development had stalled due to a spike in crime. I walked to the wasteland of the construction site, where the maze of steel beams rose into the floodlights.
* * *
I often forgot my keys on those walks. For years I hadn’t needed them. I’d lived with other people, and they were always there to let me in. Things hadn’t worked out, and so I was going through a bit of an adjustment with respect to entrances and exits. It wasn’t long before I found myself stranded on the stoop in the nether hours between midnight and dawn. I went around back to look up at my darkened window, a little black square that meanly reflected the light of the moon. How easily identifiable my window was. And yet, like a satellite, unfathomably far. I walked a little more, to the void of the park, stamped into the city grid like a second night. Then I returned home to my new address and sat on the stoop to wait. It must have been three or four in the morning before I finally decided to try ringing my neighbor across the hall. At the time I didn’t even know Harold’s name. He was no more than an alphanumeric phenomenon, 4C, who’d once helped me to carry in a chair I’d nicked off the street. I looked up at his window now and saw it glowed softly with the light of a lamp. What did I have to lose? I laid a thumb into the call button. A pause. A question crackled on the intercom. Hi, I said. Then the door buzzed, the lock clicked, and I was on the stairs.
* * *
Most of what I knew about my neighbors I’d picked up by accident. The psychiatry student one door down watched soap operas on the weekends and on weekdays vomited after breakfast, again after lunch—I could hear her through the walls. The notary public who lived upstairs couldn’t swallow properly, he had a click in his throat. We shared an umbrella one snowy evening while walking home from the train, and afterward I couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said, I’d been so distracted by the way he seemed, quite literally, to be choking on his words. As for Harold, he had a cat, or so one assumed—the umbrella stand outside his unit was cast in a feline shape—and he struck me as the sort of person who wouldn’t forget to knock on a hapless woman’s door (e.g., mine) if there were ever sign of a gas leak in the night. One morning I rose to find him in a pair of red rubber gloves in the hall, holding both his recycling and mine. He pointed to the milk cartons shifting softly in the plastic sack. These go separate, he said.
* * *
He became, for a time, my only friend. I took care of his cat on weekends he went away. I babysat his niece. He was a cartoonist who lived alone, and while it’s possible I appreciated his company more than he did mine, sometimes, when I went over to return his key after he’d been gone, he seemed content to let me linger. He’d pause in the door, then step aside. There’s no getting rid of you, Percy, he said. I liked to poise at the drafting table
by a bowl of fruit while he emptied his pockets and unshouldered his bags. On the drawing boards, he was forever investing household objects like teacups and saucers with life, illustrations bound for the pages of a children’s book. I wondered why it was we encouraged, in children, the substitution of the human with the inanimate world. He ran comics, syndicated cartoons: the perspective panned from one water tower to another, another, alternately thin and squat and fat, while in the final frame a distant fellow atop a wedding cake high-rise called, Potluck over here, one hour! His other characters were all police. He had his hood up, an officer protested, still waving his gun, I couldn’t tell he was white! I sat soberly by the fruit, officers juxtaposed against a tea service that talked. Harold polished an apple, patted my sleeve. Come on, Percy, lighten up.
* * *
Hey, I said. Can I have a can opener? You know how it can be. There are neighbors who make love so loudly you can hear them through a set of earplugs and even the floor; who walk indoors all day in heels, clacking above your head; students on Ritalin or E, and men who indulge in lecherous stares, who ask to borrow a hammer, a screwdriver, a blender, an endless list of items that are transferred from your apartment to theirs in the hope that one day you, too, will stay behind (and indeed I’d relinquished a great many useful tools to 6F this way, including my own can opener, although this was no real loss; I preferred my apartment spare, and by now I was mostly eating out of jars). I figured I was more or less par for the course, as neighbors went. Believe me, you’re not, Harold said. I had a friend once who, hearing violent sounds from the other side of her bedroom wall, a chorus of screams and curses and the hollow thump of bodies colliding with solid objects (like the wall itself), assumed a crime drama, turned up her music, and went to sleep. This terrified me. What if she was wrong? What if that woman had been me? It wasn’t you, she said. And what if I was right? I’d be that idiot knocking on the door at night … I was grateful, in other words, to live so peaceably across the hall from Harold, especially in those years when I still lived alone. He was the sort of person who could tell the difference between television and real life, he’d let you in when you found yourself locked out. And I was always locking myself out. Night after night, I buzzed. Harold replied. We carried on a silent back-and-forth at odd hours of the dark. Even after Claire, his wife, moved in, I depended on Harold to unlock the door. Then one night he didn’t answer. I buzzed. I buzzed again. I waited a long while. In frustration, I planted my hands against the glass. The bolt gave way to nothing more than the soft force of my palms. I simply drifted in.
The Exhibition of Persephone Q Page 2