Visitations

Caroline Fernelius

Everything in the city had bent to the will of old rain. She woke up like that, eating toffee, pretending the book in the limp clasp of her left hand had been there all along and was not in fact a surprising relic from the hours she’d just spent awake, trembling, cleaning the disposal with orange peels, not knowing it. Pit, pat—that old rain making its amends, murmuring at the windowsill all the while. The windowsill was cold and white, and it kept most things in and dry, and for that she was grateful. For that she kept the sill clear of items and other riffraff, which was hard to do—a flimsy, if ultimately viable, form of respect.

The other square meters of the room were not so lucky, objects everywhere, a scene of continual breaking and entering. They (the objects) were moving all the time, still stranger considering the relative immobility of their purveyor. Once, on a quest, maybe, for a self-denying minimalism, she had decided she wanted to pay someone to come and remove them all. She went so far as to earmark the money for the procedure, went down to the bank in the part of the city overrun with reeds and half-clothed children. She pressed her cool hard mouth into the receiving end of the operating system outside the single-storied building that came up out of the reeds. “I’d like two hundred dollars,” she said.

The next portion of the story continued to elude her; she could not remember where the requested money had then materialized. She could not recall any further dialogue with representatives of the bank or curious passersby. The ordeal, in all honesty, felt like nothing. It is hard to know if this nothingness is what ultimately dissuaded her from putting the cash towards its original end, but, in any event, she quickly forgot the idea. Though on occasion—particularly when the rain was older than usual, with a delicately corrosive element that branded tiger stripes into the exterior paint of the building where she lived—she thought about the absurdity of this ill-remembered expedition. And it was hard to know where that cash was now, where the babies were now, if anyone in the city had called yet to complain about the frightening growth rate of the reeds.

An overwhelming majority of the time she was thankful that the removal of her objects had not come to pass. She reasoned that if she should suddenly find herself alone in that room in that building, she might have done something unreasonable, such as leave the premises immediately and depart the city of old rain for good. This would not have necessarily been a poor choice; she had no qualms about travel (in theory), but practically, she knew she was ill-prepared for the disorientation of moving. One foot in front of the other, the humiliation of hauling a bag around all kinds of incorrect paths.

She had last contemplated leaving the apartment on a Sunday afternoon approximately a month prior. She remembered that it had been threatening to rain all day, but the rain never came. She also recalled experiencing an intense craving for lemonade, but—and this was the odd part—specifically the kind made from a powder. She had envisioned it (the powder) dissolving in a tall glass of water; she had envisioned her own fingers picking out the indigestible clumps clinging to the rim of the glass. She was attracted to the idea of licking that residue from her fingers. She thought about how she would take a blank piece of paper and smear whatever of the pink stuff still remained. There was just one problem with this daydream: she did not know what she would paint, or more generally, where she stood vis-à-vis representational versus abstract art. To her mind, there was something unmistakable and even dirty separating the two. She knew she’d have to choose, except she didn’t, just stood there with this slimy, nearly translucent image, caught somewhere between thought and feeling, that burrowed deep between her thighs. This was not pleasure, she decided, nor its opposite.

In that particular place she had only known one person. Their friendship of sorts ended on extremely bad terms, and it was an episode that embarrassed her to revisit, which she did, nearly daily. They had been at the train station in the center of town. It was transcendently hot. She was sitting in the heat and vaguely bored. They blew, fast, on the undersides of their wrists, but ultimately that did nothing. Eventually, their mutual body heat dampened the effects of an already debilitating atmosphere; she warned that she’d like to remain as physically apart as possible. She had gone to use the vending machine on the opposite side of the tracks when a scuffle of some kind broke out across the way. It was hard to discern details, where her companion and the built environment coincided with and retreated from each other, but she’d seen enough. When she went back to her apartment, it was just beginning to rain. She found no meaning whatsoever in this and immediately dialed her friend. She wanted to ask about acidity levels, participation charts, the formula for determining the approximate age of the rain. When no one answered her call, she immediately made the puzzling decision to devote herself to her study and to her study alone. She would abandon pursuits previously avowed. She would abandon whatever it was inside of the thing that the two of them had made, the thing that had drummed twisting images of deceit and desire into the chambers of her heart. No more. Her study, broadly speaking, would be the study of the lived environment. Essentially, she would pay attention to the objects and phenomena which she could most readily distinguish from herself, those which gave shape to her existence. Her sample size would be one; she would study only herself and accept the relevant consequences. She would fend off any and all charges of solipsism with accusations of misogyny. Though she was predisposed to regard ambition a thing that drips, an endless source of numbing disappointment, she found to her surprise that she only grew in these convictions. One night, only a few nights after the dissolution of her friendship, she unconsciously walked into the bathroom, put in a tampon, and woke up several hours later face-down in the bathtub. Nothing else in the apartment seemed to be out of place. Getting out of bed at all she barely remembered, just some wispy half-imaginings, but knowledge of the pursuant act left her feeling itchy and confused: she hadn’t had a period in years. She thought a little bit more about it. In the end, she decided there was no use seeking medical attention—for the sleepwalking and whatever else—since the visitations were here to stay, nothing to do about that. She would watch out for them and record them in a blank book. She would look at the blank book, one of the many objects in her possession, and through careful cultivation of her thoughts, she would begin to fortify her former, matte mind and then, when her study was complete, she would begin to transcend the universe.

“One foot in front of the other, the humiliation of hauling a bag around all kinds of incorrect paths.”

She made lists of things to look at. Her original plan involved eventually leaving the apartment building, but weeks had gone by, and still she continued to find new things to observe within the confines of her living space. On occasion, home-boundedness was almost frightening; she felt like an amphibian in a very tiny jar, but she pushed these thoughts aside with positive affirmations regarding her enterprise. Usually this worked, but more than once she found that her thoughts kept on drifting, all the way until they reached her friend, whose somewhat vague fate persisted in bothering her. There was no news in the paper, but then again she usually received the paper days late and often not at all. She regretted that she hadn’t known the friend’s other friends and was thus unable to contact them. This hadn’t been for lack of effort. She had often expressed a sincere desire to know some of the friend’s friends, a request that was met with anything from cool indifference to outright hostility. At some point, she began to imagine them, their little lives with overlapping circumferences. Utterly imageless, she decided that they were beautiful. She believed they possessed surprising and desirable objects. Her rage grew thick yellow horns, driving the study to a halt for an incalculable period of time. And then she stopped receiving the paper altogether.

She often dreamt widely at night, hungrily traversing the psyche and its innumerable possibilities, but one day she realized that all of her dreams were taking place against a single deeply familiar landscape. There was the opening sequence of getting into a car, bright twisting interstate crossing the sky, a slow rolling up to a wide, impressive building. Dirty red brick.

There’s no town surrounding it, just deep, deep green. She realizes suddenly that she isn’t alone; there are many cars with their own inhabitants in the same lot. The wide, impressive building is a sort of hotel. Everyone emerges from their vehicle and enters. Inside, all of the rooms are connected. They run, in order to claim the superior arrangements, the green velvet settee, the oaken bed with clawed feet. She runs and runs, but everything is claimed; there is nothing left. Usually the dream ends with her returning to her car after a night spent alone, fingering the banister in a hallway without end, but once, a bus pulled up in front of the hotel instead. She got on the bus. She realized too late that now she’d never get her car back. She didn’t know where the hotel was. She didn’t know how she’d gotten there in the first place. The interstate was every interstate. Her companions were only friendly strangers, utterly incapable of guiding her back to herself.

When she woke she scrambled to record the dream in the blue padded notebook beside her. But it (the dream) crept away, demurely at first, and then with wild abandon, thrashing about and demanding things. The speaker of the dream told her she’d been lying, that there had never been a friend, the train station, any of it. The cruelty of the dream exhausted her. It made nasty proclamations, which she resisted tempestuously in early daylight, twisting her head no as far as it could go. She somehow found the wherewithal to speak in self-defense. It’s not the way you’re looking at it, she said, and then she laughed, because it occurred to her that the sentence she’d chosen vibrated with indeterminacy; she’d managed to say nothing. Her laugh was a wide, hollow laugh, sunny and pleasant. The dream looked her dead in the eye. You could be a bit more precise with your language, it hissed, and then she was asleep again, deep down in the velvety green. By some glitch in the dreaming world, she got the green settee this time, no need to spend the night awake, walking, alone, but when she woke, there was no memory of this iteration of the dream at all. No faint resurgences of having secured comfort at long last, no residue upon the fingers that traced shapes in the iridescent upholstery. Nor that slightest whiff of dust, the scent of orange bitters. She thought for a moment, searching. Can a dream go missing? she wrote finally in the blue padded notebook.

She imagined that time occurred in the thimble-thin slope of a penny. Shiny, interminable, false, a stopping place for the meat of one’s restless finger. She thought hazily about the city outside as if it were no city at all, as if its inhabitants wandered in garments unseen, compositions of previously unknown color. The rain was as old as it had ever been and as old as it ever would be. Progress on the study had stalled indefinitely; what work she had done was subject to continual reversals and restagings, leading nowhere. In dreaming, for instance, she often encountered the materials of efforts long past, little sketches on the sides of empty soap cartons, forgotten architectural diagrams, but as for what to do with these relics of her thought, she didn’t know, and the dreams wouldn’t tell her. Far from conspiratorial forces in the pursuit of her knowing, the dreams, for their part, seemed mostly to want her gone, breathing incantations of a foreboding nature into the folds of her ear. Then one day after waking, she was astonished to find the apartment stripped bare. Even her incomprehensible, wayward notes, useless to their maker and printed feverishly on scraps of refuse, had been taken. Only the notebook remained. In thick red scrawl, someone, somewhere, had written a message on the next blank page: You are here! An inarguable and yet startling prophecy. She had to get out of there.

Outside, the light anointing the tops of the buildings was impossibly yellow, so much so that she wondered for a moment whether it was light at all, or if she had simply woken within the confines of a child’s dwindling sketch. At the intersection of two unnamed streets, she called her friend and, upon the machine’s prompting, left a voice message. She explained, as best as she could, where she’d been, where she was going. It was possible that soon they would meet again, that once she got to where she was going she’d call and arrange a reunion. Together they would obtain new objects to admire, objects worthy of attention and respect. Beneath the dewy tops of trees unwanted, banished to the outskirts of the city, which was no city at all, they would begin the study anew. They would record their thoughts in notebooks, and when the light surrounding them expired, fell to a dark, dumb hush, they would dream as if the dreaming alone might preserve jam jars arranged in thin little rows. All of this was possible. When she got to where she was going, she’d call again. The streetlamps, faithful to nothing, maintained by no one, did their dance of electro-mechanical failure briefly at dusk, and then it was dark and she kept walking. When she got to where she was going, she’d call.