Come On In
by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON
“You’re sort of breaking up, just — hold on. So — ah — so you’re theorizing that social conformity and transgression exists in mice —”
“Not mice with this one, we’re using actual people now. Just really little ones. Babies, darling. OK, the bus just came —”
“Hey sorry, I didn’t mean to —”
“I’m not frustrated with you —”
“I know, hey, I’ve been a little short with you too. It’s just I’m pretty hungover.”
“Oh, right. How’d the party go?”
“Wild — I got too drunk. Like to the point where you lean back and brood. People could tell, because nobody mentioned you, or the States even.”
I had brought your umbrella to the party, and gripped it all night. I kept shrinking away from mirrors, remembering when once I’d caught you glance in a mirror as I joked and you laughed, flashing your teeth at your reflection, dazzled by your own performance of self.
“Your last letter. The paper was different.”
“Stolen from the Xerox machine, but I borrowed my coworkers’ nicest pen for it. You flattered?”
Today I rush through my morning work, carving out some time to close my office door to write today’s letter, arranging my day around you. Since you’re studying really elevated things I remember all the academic stuff we’ve talked about and try mentioning them in your letters:
I remember when we discussed our earliest ancestors triumphing over Neanderthals — our mysterious set of advances that devastated & extinguished them, and which almost certainly centered around the birth of human consciousness.
I pause, watch my coworkers bare their teeth at one another.
The birth of articulate selfhood and its barrier between self & everything else marked our separation from animals, as documented — (you argued) — through lively painted animals that still dance along thousands of cave walls in France. For thirty thousand years, we kept fervently going, painting animals over & over. You thought it was amazing, these sustained and collective meditations, a new intermediary between life & death.
Yash, knuckle-cracking and leaning against my door, says how about this rain, and I’m like ho yeah, and then rotate the pen in my fingers, pointedly.
But life & death are all that’s real, & animals cannot contemplate, they only embody. So now, darling, I find it terribly sad & romantic: tens of thousands of years of mourning an inexplicable loss which came into being as soon as it was understood.
It’s no fun talking about consciousness when the truth of my entire life is that, since you left, I think about you, write to you, gchat you, wait to call you, and do almost nothing else. I wake up feeling the rhythm of the day’s letters; before I know the sentences semantically, I see the shapes of them, the undulations of the words. Soft words with thick middles, soft sounds and few consonants, perfect for you. I could whisper them all in shhs, water-speak, to you, and it’d be primal as sleeping.
Yash comes by again, watches me lick the envelope, then asks if I’m into grabbing dinner or whatever — Where was I? Where are you? — and as I’m getting my coat on, folded in a waterproof flap of your umbrella, I find a scrap with your writing — 121 Rideau. Where did that come from? You know what I did? I Google-mapped it and went there.
Leaving the office and shucking my sweat-lined coat, I post one more letter. I open your umbrella and pass a bright yellow and orange hot dog stand, its steel sides gleaming with rain. The man inside darts glances both ways, then lifts a cigarette from below the counter and sucks deep, then exhales thick, white smoke — he looks at me and I jump. On the bus I squeeze past bodies that are limp with staring, and I grip a hot infected bar as the windows blaze with sunset, and people flash their white necks, turning their faces around to meet an Every Thing Must Go sign – and nothing can be done. And as empty as hours and hours can be, the buses come and come, and weeks can pass this way.
You know who I found at 121 Rideau, of course. He leans against the doorframe like Yash did, only he’s big and long, built like a lion. Auditions are over, we’ve already found our Olivia, he says, and I glimpse, taped on the banister behind him, a grubby piece of paper with All Wounds & a Quiet Place: Auditions This Way PLEASE & THANKYOU block-lettered in red.
“No, I’m Victoria,” I say. “Uh, Chris’s girlfriend?”
He reads my face and I read his, and I see kindness there. Victoria, of course — great to finally meet you. Come on in. We sit out back on a ratty couch covered in rattier blankets in the air with its trace of frost and its persistent twilight and graceful naked trees spread behind us, still sparsely decorated with brown leaves. He rolls a joint one-handedly and we get high all evening, all night, with a revolving cast of his friends, roommates, and clients (he sells out of his tiny bedroom with a dirty white desk packed with illicit items), plugging their phones into a big, ashtray-covered speaker for music. “What do you think,” his roommate muffles, pinching a new joint in his lips, “it’ll be like to remember websites like places?” Everyone huhs and he lights the joint, his downturned profile sticking out from his folded-up coat.
Another roommate shows us different kinds of repurposed tanks on his iPad and I think, I want to leave evidence of my presence like you do with the mice, the babies, and like these guys do too; I want to have forever the unspooling, quick-melting specificity of today. Eventually it’s almost 2 a.m., and most of his friends and clients have left; we’re slumped on the couch by ourselves. He leans in to kiss me but then hesitates, and decides against it — melancholy has a smell. I don’t mind. I know I’m welcome to huddle here forever with these grown-up kids, resisting the tides of ambiguous change that are, I am realizing, an unacknowledged part of adult life.
Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. She last wrote in these pages about doing it over the birdbath. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.
Paintings by Ian Hartshorne.
"Angel, Please" - Ra Ra Riot (mp3)
"That Much" - Ra Ra Riot (mp3)
