The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  Was it time? It was almost time.

  She opened her laptop, promised the system prompt that she would attend to it tomorrow, removed the electrical tape that usually covered the camera lens, opened Photo Booth, and checked how she appeared onscreen. The lighting in the room was dim, which made her face appear yellow and mottled with shadows; when she turned the light brighter, her face brightened into a sickly gray. She tilted the screen down-up-down again. She opened the heavy curtains but the sky was overcast and the pale imitation of sunshine drained the effectiveness of the electrical light rather than enhancing it. She closed the heavy curtains again and tried to enjoy a reprieve from diurnal time, but it was too depressing; she finally settled on opening the heavy curtains but leaving the white scrim closed.

  Her face looked artificial, stricken. She seemed to have a moustache. She knew it was the shadow cast by her large nose over the divot in her lip but that didn’t change the fact that it appeared to be a moustache. There wasn’t time to fix the situation, or rather, time wouldn’t be the thing that fixed it. She went to the bathroom, where she expelled the brown lump.

  The lump, as stated, was resiny.

  “Resin” always made Dorothy think of the year she had taken violin lessons. She had hated playing the violin. Her arm wasn’t strong enough to hold it up. She never advanced past “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  It could be a clot but Dorothy had a feeling it was fetal material. Like how an egg was a deconstructed—preconstructed—chicken. If everything had been different these matted-together cells could have been molded into kidneys, lungs, cartilage, all the stuff. The nails. The gray matter of the brain.

  When exactly did the fetus pass into humanity? It was a question on which people could not agree. It involved a gory transition, things that were slippery and malformed. Dorothy was afraid of fetuses. They were creatures from a horror movie. If you saw one lying on the bed you would run from the room screaming. But maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe your maternal feelings would be so strong that you would tenderly wrap your fetus in a blanket and press its frog-like mouth to your breast. Dorothy’s heart raced. She longed to encounter the abominable horror of creation, to test herself against its power. But she was no mad scientist, no Victor Frankenstein. No hands or feet had come stillborn out of her. It was not that extreme. Hers was a situation, not a trauma. A trauma implied an event, a shock, before and after. The situation persisted; it ground away, day by day, with an ordinary, odorous, calendrical drip. It was tissue, all the way down.

  The light in the bathroom reminded Dorothy of the department-store dressing rooms her mother had dragged her to when she was young, where women in various states of undress asked one another for marital advice and threw unwanted items onto a pile. She yanked her pants up like it was their fault they were so tight. In the mirror she gathered up her hair. One strand did not follow. She tried to brush it again and it fell back. Inching closer to the mirror, she saw the strand was connected to the front of her neck. A long hair was sprouting out of the middle of her neck. It was a monstrous length. She dug through her toiletry kit and found the tweezers. She plucked the hair and didn’t notice where it fell.

  * * *

  —

  The nine clicked to zero and Dorothy opened the app on her phone and waited to receive the call. When the therapist had first suggested a virtual session, Dorothy had assumed they would use FaceTime or have a “hangout,” but the therapist had instead asked her to download a HIPAA-compliant messenger service called VSee. The fact that it rhymed with “VC” felt portentous but was probably coincidental.

  The phone rang, or rather, the computer inside the phone manufactured a ringing noise. Life was increasingly filled with melancholy sounds like this, digital reproductions or replacements of analog sounds, reminders of historical periods gone by. One day these digital tones would not harken back to anything else; they would not be heard in reference to the past. But for Dorothy they were incomplete, shadow tones. Dorothy was of the generation that experienced the digital as a postscript to the analog and adulthood as a simulacra of childhood—a callback, flatly rendered, compressed into a narrower range of frequency.

  The screen coughed up the therapist’s chin and most of her neck. She was nodding and looking vacantly up, which meant, Dorothy knew, that she was looking at herself in the inset screen rather than “at” Dorothy—though what it meant to look “at” someone through the video format was no simple matter. In general, etiquette dictated that you keep your eyes relaxed and forward-gazing, with a pleasant half-smile on the lips. The therapist suddenly dropped down into focus, her face larger than it had been. She was probably doing this on her computer and had pulled the screen in closer, or moved her chair. Dorothy flipped her phone to the side so her own video was in the corner and the therapist was now stretched bigger. Her hair looked wet, like she had just gotten out of the shower or applied hair product, which made Dorothy uncomfortable, like a boundary had been crossed. The lines of her makeup appeared a little cracked, and when she opened her mouth, which she did before she spoke, out of fear of interrupting, because it was harder to gauge the length of silences over the distance, she looked unsure and stupid, something she had never appeared to be in person.

  “Hi,” the therapist said. “Can you hear me?”

  Her skin looked different on the screen—thinner, dryer. Dorothy’s eyes scouted the hotel room. There was nothing to look at. There should have been a painting somewhere, a child in a cornfield, a woman yanking her head off, but instead there was just a soft wall, slightly distended, stitched with black thread in a pattern reminiscent of a Tetris game, staring dumbly at her. She knew that some people only did therapy this way, but this was her first time. Her lips felt dry and like they might crack and bleed. She thought how appropriate it would be to begin bleeding from the mouth in virtual therapy. She stretched her mouth a little to see if she could get the bleeding started. Nothing. With her fingers up near her face she noticed the lines of dirt lodged under the fingernails.

  “Hold on,” said Dorothy, and moved from the chair, where she had been positioned at the table, to the bed, where she settled upright against a bank of pillows. The lighting here was worse but she couldn’t move again without looking foolish. She found herself missing the African masks, the South American flutes. The video session was more mediated but also more restrictive. One was less free to look away. She trained her eyes on the black pinprick of the camera opening while she explained that she knew she was supposed to have something to say about being in Las Vegas but had nothing to say about being in Las Vegas.

  “Why are you supposed to?” asked the therapist.

  “I know I’m supposed to have, like, a ‘take,’ ” Dorothy said, making and immediately regretting making air quotations with the fingers of her free hand.

  Dorothy tried to make eye contact with her therapist, but when she looked into the place where the eyes were, it was impossible, there was something wrong with it, the gaze wasn’t returned. And anyway, her therapist’s eyes were moving around all the time, darting around her office, thousands of miles away. Maybe they always did.

  “There’s a lot of…spectacle,” Dorothy tried.

  Her therapist’s face froze mid-nod, with her mouth open. Her voice continued. “Do you enjoy the spectacle?” the voice asked.

  “I’m losing you,” Dorothy said, and then the therapist stuttered back to life.

  “It’s back,” Dorothy said at the same time that the therapist said, “We can move to the phone,” and then, “Oh, okay.

  “There are interesting challenges to using this technology,” her therapist said, peering into the screen with an intentness that she never displayed in their in-person sessions, as if the distance made it so they had to compensate with moments of more intimacy, greater scrutiny. Dorothy gave up trying to create the illusion of eye contact and talked to herself, ad
dressing her professional anxiety to the square mirror in the corner of the screen. At last, there was a person listening who really got it.

  The light in the room was changing as the sun traveled across the sky, burning holes in the clouds, and illuminating the room through the thin barrier of scrim, making her unattractively backlit. When Dorothy got up to close the curtains, she carried the phone with her.

  “The last time we talked you had some concerns about your paper,” the therapist said.

  “Yeah,” said Dorothy.

  Her therapist looked at her blankly for what felt like a long time and then a wave of comprehension passed over her face as Dorothy’s word, which must have been delayed, came through.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  As a matter of fact, her paper had been very well received. But it was impossible to admit this, because the attention had been awful and so undeserved—all those people thinking that she had something to say when she knew that the ideas didn’t hold together. The Christminster cookies, for example. Her paper went on and on about ingesting the city of Christminster, and when Dorothy delivered the paper, she did it like that, with an emphasis on the word “in-ges-tion,” as if pronouncing the word slowly and emphasizing its syllables was the equivalent of having something to say about it. Dorothy’s paper was filled, too, with rhetorical questions: What is the meaning of this ingestion? was how one long section began, a section that did not ultimately resolve the meaning of anything but indicated, by certain very long digressions about the Eucharist, baking, nineteenth-century discourses of the digestive tract, and the cholera epidemic, that the meaning, forever deferred and desirable, was profound.

  Her therapist was waiting. She kept her head still, as if she didn’t want to create unnecessary interference for the connection, but her eyes darted back and forth.

  Dorothy shrugged. “Fine,” she said. She remarked blandly that conferences were difficult, that she felt lonely without a respectable institutional affiliation, that she liked the Las Vegas architecture and the charming signage, that the presence of so much energy-inefficient neon light haunted her and made her feel closer to species death, and that being in constant air-conditioning made her bones ache. Then they talked about Dorothy’s mother.

  “It looks like we’re—” her therapist said a while later, freezing. This time the picture did not stutter back to life. It was eerie seeing her caught like this, like catching her in dishabille; she seemed, not vulnerable, but less capable—a victim of time rather than a master of it.

  Are you there? Dorothy would have said to the image on the screen, except there was a chance that the audio connection was still working, and she didn’t want to sound desperate.

  “I’m going to hang up now,” Dorothy said instead, touching the red circle to end the call. As soon as she did another call came through, and she touched the green circle, which she couldn’t stop thinking of as “picking up.” They spoke only as long as it took to confirm that they had used all the time they had.

  * * *

  —

  Playing for pennies in slotland was depressing, so Dorothy put fifty dollars on a plastic logo card. Fifty dollars was an amount she understood to be flushing away, and yet not an amount that would irreparably harm her or leave her feeling ashamed of profligacy, an amount equivalent to the amount she might flush away on any given night of eating or drinking. She chose a machine in unoccupied territory that accepted dollar credits, and whose design was a replica of an old-fashioned three-reel slot machine, where the numbers rolled around. But it was digital, as everything was. You touched a button on the screen instead of pulling a crank, and the game progressed very quickly.

  It was noisy on the floor, even though there were no other players in Dorothy’s immediate vicinity. The machines themselves, whether or not they were occupied, looped through various sound effects designed to entice passersby, rather the way that a crying baby gets himself fed. But the noise was background noise, soothing in its way, and receded as she settled into her play, as if Dorothy and her machine were enveloped in a private pocket of air. She had no interest in the other machines, was not moved to investigate their siren beeps and whistles. She was loyal to her machine; she had picked it out of all the others, and would not be tricked into jumping from slot to slot; that’s how they got you, with the false hope that some other gamble might be more profitable than the one you had already lost on. Also, the other machines looked complicated; they involved multiple lines of betting; they were for experienced players. Dorothy knew her limits. She had been playing only a few minutes but had already pushed the button—she did the subtraction—thirty-five times.

  There was no sensation involved at all, except when the touchscreen did not respond, causing her to jab her finger harder against the unresponsive—was it plastic? Some sort of microbead? Why did she think all the inorganic materials she couldn’t name were made of microbeads?—careful not to jab too quickly, because the machine’s sensitivity was such that it might lag or suddenly catch up to repeated touches, registering the loss of several dollars instead of one. On her next push, the lights flashed and the recorded noise of clattering coins cut through the ambient racket, alerting Dorothy that she had won five dollars. Intellectually she recognized that this win really represented a greater loss, but she could not deny the explosion of good feeling she felt up at the top of her skull, which she figured was the experience of feeling lucky.

  “What are you doing?” said a woman in a voice so low that you would have mistaken her for a man if not for her strange laugh, which came out high and cackly, like a bird’s chitter. The laugh had something automatic about it, suggesting that it was not controlled by conscious choice but was emitted due to biological or, perhaps, environmental factors, the sonic equivalent of a mating or migratory dance.

  Dorothy pushed away from the machine and blinked, resisting the urge to rub her eyes. She did not want to give the impression of being woken from a haze. Her mouth felt dry. Weren’t the people who worked here supposed to come around with free drinks? Or did that only happen if you were a high roller? She looked up and made a weak joke about Lydgate’s gambling mania, and the woman, Judith Robinson, her former dissertation adviser, laughed again with the birdish cackle.

  “Nice save, Dodo,” she said, placing her hands on her waist in an exaggerated pantomime of discipline.

  Judith was tall and gangly and bent over at an angle, like an ostrich ready to run. Her cheeks were lightly flushed and her lips were thick with fuchsia and her eyes had the shine of afternoon drinks. Dorothy knew Judith well enough to know she was not a drunk, merely an academic on holiday. It was typical, thought Dorothy—eyes taking in the unfathomable and helplessly rapt senior citizens feeding the slot machines with arthritic fingers, feet fighting the instinct to flee in panic as if from a fire—that her conversation with her therapist had happened just before running into the person who was more or less the reason she had gotten into therapy in the first place. The time, as ever, was out of joint.

  “Let’s get you out of this midnight sun!” Judith chirped, and clapped her hands like castanets above her head, an action that caused the sleeves of her kimono to billow dramatically. She didn’t look back to check that Dorothy was following her. (Judith always operated in total confidence that her orders would be obeyed.) Dorothy fumbled to extract her card but pressed the wrong button or too many buttons and had no choice but to leave the card behind. The fifty dollars was, as she had predicted it would be, a waste, a wash.

  * * *

  —

  To get to the Palazzo, where Judith was staying, they cut through the Venetian. Dorothy hadn’t been inside any casinos other than Harrah’s. She was shocked at the niceness of the Venetian. The Venetian was spacious and creamy. It was a beautiful mall with celestial ceilings. It was tacky, yes, but compared to the smoky low-ceilinged dark of Harrah’s, this tackiness wa
s effervescent; it made her feel weightless. Dorothy saw how attractive, in the right environment, blown glass could be. It needed space. It couldn’t be crowded. It had to be free to explode, fungally.

  There were families everywhere, and everyone, even the children, carried shopping bags. And the drinks—the frozen, neon-colored, twisty-strawed drinks. There were waterfalls and tiles and from the bottom of every fountain, coins flashed. A huge sign spelled LOVE in glittery red letters.

  “We forgot to hug!” said Judith, or actually, she sang it, like a doorbell chiming, making two syllables out of one. “Huh-ugh.” She pulled Dorothy in. Dorothy’s face collided with Judith’s collarbone, a not unwelcome respite from Judith’s aggressive eye contact, which she maintained even while walking in tandem, as if her eyes did not divide into the usual forward/peripheral functions, but had fully spherical, panopticon-like mobility.

  Dorothy liked hugging. Hugging was a way of demonstrating affection that also involved hiding your face. It had always been hard for Dorothy to look at Judith’s face. There was something wrong with it. It was like a face that had buckled under too many surgeries, except that wasn’t it at all; the face had its natural sags and its natural wrinkles. If some women’s vanity compelled them to seek enhancement from the knife, it was the nature of Judith’s vanity to preclude intervention. Surgery gave a face a spooky, cadaverous quality, whereas the problem with Judith’s face was that it had too much life. It was like a living organism that sucked the life out of your face in order to sustain itself, so insatiable was its need for face-energy, which it took in through the greedy straws of Judith’s probing, unusually round eyes. Her body had no smell. Dorothy knew from experience running her errands that Judith used a perfume that was so fancy that it did not layer artificial scent on top of human scent but somehow, through a patented combination of botanicals, neutralized the scent of the body entirely. (It ate it.)