Same Same

by Peter Mendelsund

  Everyone clear, the door is closed and locked. A small card in a scuffed, wall-mounted, Plexiglas holder next to it reads “ROYAL, D.”

  Through the door, weakly: “Who appointed you, you mutherfucking peons?”

  The onlookers disperse now back to their own rooms.

  Above, up in the cantina, the admins are mopping up: retrieving all those wrinkled little white cups, the floral printed, embossed napkins; the beige plastic sporks. These admins also wear chic pale blue gloves. They count each utensil before returning it to the locking bin. And then they tally up the sum. One missing. Not too bad.

  (PURE, THRILLING)

  The work today is pure, thrilling. I can feel myself ascending, transcending, disappearing almost, into free-flowing gavottes of creativity. Now that I have found my legs in the project, there’s no stopping me. The sheer inventiveness is overwhelming. Power and thrust. Energy and movement. Goddam, it feels great.

  I’m naked to the waist, sweating like an idiot, hair a nest. Sounds from the Ocean Floor is on loop, blasting full volume. The flat is now entirely covered with my renderings, including a precise picture of the very walls on top of which these renderings sit. (All of which will be obviated when I’ve completed my rendering of the building itself from its exterior, the rendering which will supersede all this, etc.)

  Other of my renderings include life-size ones of several admins, as well as a sketch of the Director (incomplete), some elevations of various other buildings, a map of the entire Freehold, the renderings of (as previously mentioned) Dennis and Ousman Al’Hatif and the Enclave’s concierge, Miss ☺, the Philosopher, 鼎福 the Architect, some of the other fellows (though most of these are drawn in groups, roughly indicated through a rush of strokes, two-dimensionally, scribbled rather than accurately depicted in detail), and now: we get Miss Fairfax. Miss Fairfax, admin5; here she is, coming into being, into focus, disparate lines finding meaning in juxtaposition to one another, multiplying into life on paper. I have exercised my happy skill, such that Miss Fairfax’s body—its S-curves, U-turns—is coming into palpable existence, her dancerly, turned-out feet, her buttery calves and strong legs, her proletarian arms, now her alabaster neck (isn’t that right; alabaster? Idk) and finally the face, always the most difficult, but here I have help in that single signifier of her black-framed glasses, which I illustrate in darkest lines upon its own sheet of paper and then carefully (carefully!) cut with scissors along their outline. They are perfect.

  And what of the mysterious Miss Chatterton? I’ll make her too.

  And I do. Make her through patchy memory and guesswork. An hour later and there she is, though I can’t remember clearly what her foreign eyes look like, so I just punch two ragged holes with my pencil in her face, where her eyes should be. I now try to prop her up on a chair so I can get some perspective on what I’ve made, but she keeps sliding down again, and as I am holding her up, one hand under each of her sharp-edged armpits, I briefly get a glimpse through those pencil holes, and see what she sees, as it were. And what does she see? Well that’s just the thing—I can’t decide. It is up to me of course, it all is now, which is wonderful but also a burden, and the possibilities, the infinite possibilities, lead briefly to a creative impasse. Standing behind this 2-D manikin, the back of her head scraping against my occasional lashes, I contemplate what it is like to be Miss Chatterton, that is, what it is that Miss Chatterton experiences and how she experiences it, what she contemplates of this seeing, and finally I come up with an obvious answer and go back to work with my trusty (unleaky!) pen this time, take it out, denticulate, from my mouth where it was clamped during the scissor-cutting and contemplation, and I begin, on another sheet of paper, to render myself.

  Percy Frobisher. Self-portrait.

  Ping!

  A message on my device and you’ll never guess who it is from….

  (Shershay la femme.)

  46

  THE FUNDAMENTS OF MY PROJECT

  Fundament 18. The project will turn out less wonderful than I had hoped on my best days, yet not as nerve-rattlingly terrible as I had feared on my worst.*

  Fundament 19. As the project nears completion—as it begins to take a final shape, find a more or less permanent form—my attachment to the project will fall off. The project will ease its way out of my thoughts; no longer dominate my internal conversation. What this new detachment will lead toward, only the future will divulge.

  Fundament 20. What the project is, only the project knows. It reveals itself, not the other way around. My job here is to remove anything which is “not project,” i.e., to clear a path for its arrival.

  Fundament 21. In the end, no one will care. (Caveat) Unless the project incurs general disfavor, which it undoubtedly will. People will just hate it. I know it, you know it. The project will be poorly received. (Best to separate oneself from a project sooner rather than later, so as to suffer less from this inevitably poor reception.)

  Fundament 22. The only things which will matter are those things which the project will leave completely as they were. Untouched, unmolested. (The project does not, will not: edify.)

  Fundament 23. The whole “Alterburg” (sp?) thing continues to plague me and I do indeed wonder if there are natural receptors in our minds to which certain ideas—phrases, words, gestures, phonemes even—adhere. The word has set its hooks in, and I can’t manage, no matter how I try, to distract myself; to dislodge it. It’s like that song, you know the one, which is always playing, which everyone loves; playing, even now, somewhere, on a device, a radio, or leaking from someone’s headphones, faint, metallic, from out past the windowsill, far away…

  Fundament 24. Okay, maybe not everyone will hate the project. Someone might actually like it. Let’s not fetishize its awfulness. If, say, maybe, a small fraction of the project’s potential audience finds in it something to recommend, then this should be deemed a success! (Take some damned pride.)

  Fundament 25. Anyway, is success not synonymous with the concession of defeat? (Vide supra.)

  Fundament 26. The project shall comprise a series of representations. The project’s ideas, sounds, words, images, etc. shall replace other, meatspace ideas, sounds, words, images—much as :) stands in for delight, and the words “et” and “cetera” stand in for any and all manner of things. But more than this, the project shall comprise a series of transformations. These very ideas, sounds, words, images, etc. will be redirected, projected, distorted, denatured, merely by virtue of being presented in the form of the project. These “project ideas” cannot replace these other Irl, “non-project ideas” without altering them indelibly. So rather than thinking of this subject matter as being replaced, or even represented, I think of it all as being recast.

  Fundament 27. Even the project itself will eventually become fodder for, and duly enter into the body of: the project. Viz, the accumulation of paper is now mapping exactly, one-to-one, with the project’s advance toward completion. And, not coincidentally, I have become simply replete with ideas. I cannot stop them coming. Is this what a project is? What it feels like? This cacophony? What is happening to me? (Time will tell.)

  * If the state of happiness serves to confirm the inevitability of joy, and the state of sadness reaffirms the inevitability of sorrow, then the only intermediary positions left to one are worry and hope, both of which are delusional disorders. Therefore I bind myself to nullity and flatness, so as to reaffirm a total commitment to the present moment or w/e.

  47

  (HE PRACTICES HIS FRENCH)

  My meeting with Charlotte Chatterton aka the Mysterious Woman takes place on the fourth floor of a special housing unit set apart from the Residential Enclave. I arrive at its double doors promptly at the appointed hour and climb its stairs until I begin to see a small, shod pair of feet, a loose pair of socks, bundled into a ragged foreskin around the ankles, out of which arise a pa
ir of spindly legs—yellowed, taut, spreading at the knees, knobby and veined like a giraffe’s. Then a white tee, comically oversized but flat all the way up (if not concave) until the hugeness of the garment reveals the brutal wings of her clavicles, an uneven fringe of hair, a ropy neck, set jaw, long nose, the valley of the face—full of sorrowed dells and hollows. The full (albeit thin) aspect of a woman. Younger now, it seems, seen up close. Younger than I thought she was. A young woman, prematurely aged.

  Also, her eyes. Now that I am getting a long look, they don’t seem so “foreign” to me, at all. Nothing so exotic. Just “regular,” if active eyes, perhaps made brighter by an encaved, shadowy context.

  She’s looking me up and down, her face moving rapid-fire through a series of expressions: 1. Quizzical, 2. Alarmed, 3. Angry, 4. Doubtful, 5. Resigned, 6. Resolved. Having settled on “resolved,” she gestures to me to follow her, leading me along the elevated pathways above the main atrium. She moves gingerly, as if recovering from a procedure. She concentrates hard on walking upon the sticks of her legs—a concentration which forestalls conversation. We walk through a set of double doors into a hallway I’ve never seen before, a hallway which is a kind of catalog of cheap tile—linoleum, ceramic, particleboard ceiling—past more doors with external locks and windows, and finally we arrive at what is, I suppose, her project studio, Miss C. kicking aside a largish mail-pile of white paper which paws up like a dog against the door; a door which like the others contains, at head height, a single, fine-graphed window, and I am shown through it, and into her work space, and we close the door behind us.

  I turn to look back, and see another fellow—someone I don’t know—look in from outside of the door’s porthole. He points at me, tapping on the glass, laughing his ass off, before moving along.

  There is only a single chair, and a little bed. On the bed, some pillows, and a stuffed bunny, tucked down tightly in the coarse white sheets.

  A pretty small, barren set. The walls, the floor, the ceiling: all white(ish). Light comes in through gray glass window. The only color in the room is hanging on the wall above the bed: a decorative quilt in depressing pastel panes.

  “Can a quilt discourage strong emotions, do you think?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure.” It is so miserable. Full of disappointment.

  She slouches on the bed; I sit in the chair.

  “I suppose it is supposed to encourage docility, but honestly, it’s hideous and I find it quite disheartening. If anything, it makes me want to scream and tear it off the wall. But I can’t speak for anyone else. There is, perhaps, a fine line between innocuous and repressive. Do you have a pointedly inoffensive tapestry on your wall, Percy?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well then. Lucky you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “I’ve seen you watching me, Mr. Frobisher. It spooked me, to be honest. I keep to myself, and people mostly just leave me be.”

  “You piqued my interest. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “There isn’t much to learn I’m afraid. Anything specific you wanted to—?”

  “What do you do? What’s your project; I never see you working at it.”

  “Project?”

  “Everyone has one here.”

  “A project, really? Self-improvement, I suppose. Does that count as a ‘project’? Some kind of recovery. With a little luck, maybe a discharge—”

  “No, no. We all have a project,” I insist. “A real one.”

  “Then I guess I don’t know what you mean by ‘project.’ ” She’s grabbed a loose thread from the offensively drab quilt and is slowly teasing out the bottom row of stitches.

  “Come on, are you the, the what? Weaver? Cosmological Modeler? Larper? Data Mystic? Bibliographer? Hagiographer? Hunger-Artist? What?”

  “You mean, like, a profession? I don’t work anymore. And I certainly don’t work here.”

  “But then what, what are you actually for?”

  She slides a bit away from me, and the bed whinnies under her.

  “I’m sure I’ve no idea. What the hell are any of us ‘for’? What the hell are you ‘for,’ Percy?”

  “I’m the Novelist.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Novelist.”

  “Yes, well. A novelist. That explains a thing or two.” (Laughs. Laughs turn into coughs.) “Kind of figures.”

  One last tug on the thread, which snaps off. She wraps it around an index finger. Indicates that she would like to stand. Holds out a hand. The gentle weight of her pencily fingers. And I notice again how young she is. Younger even now. And that huge uniform: she’s swimming in it.

  Disquisition on the symbolic resonance of the small woman in the big garment—swaddling blanket/daddy’s jacket/boyfriend’s jersey/ husband’s dress shirt/grandma’s shawl/corpse’s death shroud etc.—to be indicated by carets

  Holding hands is nice.

  “Miss Chatterton—” I say.

  “Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you a guest here?”

  “Obviously.”

  “What brought you?”

  “My family.”

  “Is your family here too?”

  “No. No, they are not. Are yours?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not.”

  She cranes to look at the door; the knuckles of her neck.

  She chews her nails.

  “Where is your family?”

  “Back home.”

  “You left them?”

  “They left me.”

  “Why.”

  “No one knew what else to do with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Someone else appears in the door’s porthole, sniggers, and leaves. (What is it about me that’s so goddam funny?)

  “Jesus, stop apologizing,” she says. Sucks her teeth. “It’s actually pretty nice to have someone to speak to.”

  “For me too, Miss Chatterton.”

  “Do you want to tell me about your novel? It would be nice to hear a story.”

  “Not particularly. I don’t want to. It doesn’t really, it’s hard to…well there isn’t really a story, not in the normal way. No real ‘short version.’ And it isn’t really, like, ‘a novel,’ not in the traditional sense. It is kind of a grab bag. There is little in the way of development. No dramatic turns of event. And the narrator may be unreliable.”

  “Too bad.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  On the windowsill of her room are some crude pots. None of them symmetrical, all mottled and unevenly glazed as if covered in thin layers of toothpaste. I pick one up. Nothing in it. Turn it over, as one does, see her signature etched on the bottom. C.C. Oops there was a paperclip in there after all. Pick it up.

  “The pottery is nice,” I say.

  “Big on arts and crafts here, aren’t they. It does help to pass the time. I get so bored.”

  “We could head over to the Recreation Center if you’d like,” I suggest.

  “The rec room. God that place is so unbelievably shitty. The smoke…and you’d think they’d get a net for the Ping-Pong table at least.”

  “We can stay here, too. Checkers?”

  “No thank you.”

  “What about a short walk?”

  “I don’t have much energy these days and don’t venture too much farther than the end of the hallway,” she tells me, and droops her shoulders, her eyes reflexively and wearily heading toward the window.

  The windows don’t open here. Not in this wing.

  We look through it.

  The view: Fellows walking below. Fellows speaking to one another. Fellows alone. Fellows smoking. A few sorry, leafless trees. Pale. Brown strok
es. Brick wall. Trash, blowing.

  Paper.

  Time.

  Time passing in this manner.

  “Do you write about this?” she says. “All of this?”

  “No.”

  More time now.

  Later, at some point, she says, “I almost died on the drips.”

  “Terrible,” I reply, thinking this is what is required.

  Miss Chatterton coughs some more.

  We look again at the down-below. She smiles a dead smile.

  She says: “It’s so ugly, isn’t it? I’ve seen you collecting all the garbage around the grounds, which is generous of you. I like that. It’s one reason I asked you to visit. I wish others would do more to help out around the place. It is all so grim.”

  Wind and scattering paper. Distant rattles.

  “I am not cleaning, Miss Chatterton, I am making something.”

  “With trash?”

  “No. I’m making a great collage. A bricolage. That is what the novel is, sure—but it’s more than that. It’s hard to explain, but there’s all kinds of stuff in it. And you are part of it, Miss Chatterton. You are part of it. An important part, in many ways—ways which will most likely only become clear toward the end of it all. But it will make sense. I’ll figure it all out, and I’ll figure you out too.”

  Her focus finds my eyes, and then darts around.

  “I suspect that you won’t, in fact.”

  And just now, the door swings open.

  Her admin has come in. Her admin looks angry.

  Miss C. and the admin confer.

  “No, I’m fine. Really. Michelle, I’m fine.”

  The admin is now pointing me back toward the elevators. The admin gives me a kind of “don’t fuck with me” glare. The admin is calling someone on her device. Time is up for today.

  The M.W., Miss Chatterton, tilts her head, takes me in one last time.