Knee-deep in the surf, Karen willed herself to take another step, and another. She would move to Boston if she had to. She would get back to the bungalow, somehow, and she would say all of this to Dan: they had made the right decision, she was happy, she was ready to become even happier. Waist-deep in the warm gray water, she saw something wobbling beneath the surface. It was Styrofoam-white and resembled a piece of trash, suspended between the surface and the sand. She looked to her left, to her right. As she stared into the water, the floating shapes came into view all at once: like constellations they were there, venomous and drifting, more numerous than she could even have imagined.
In the summer between high school and college, Karen’s father was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer was malignant, but not incurable. Curing it would, however, involve a great deal of pain: the pain of incision, extraction, and then days of radiation battering the flesh invisibly. Her father underwent the course of treatment almost without comment, so that the only visible trace of its effect was his body lying on the couch for most of each day, silently watching baseball on a dizzyingly colorful TV screen. That summer, Karen stayed away from the house as much as possible. She walked for hours around their town and the banks of the creek, picking up pebbles and putting them in her pockets, emptying them out someplace different but equivalent. And when she came home for dinner she joined her parents in choosing not to speak about the cancer, though it wasn’t clear what else there was to speak about.
Even while it was happening, she sensed that she was living in disaster and failing to make herself adequate to the situation. What she wanted to say to her mother and father she couldn’t say, what she wanted to ignore she couldn’t ignore. After the remission, Karen promised herself that she would be ready for the next true disaster, she would identify it and react appropriately. She was haunted by the feeling that, even though her father had lived, she had let him die.
Since then, Karen had looked for disaster at every step in her life, but had discovered that each disaster she thought she had discovered was inadequate to the concept. This walk home, alone, on an unlit foreign road lined by deep, rock-filled gutters could end up being a true disaster — but it unfolded so slowly, so ponderously, and out there on the dangerous peaceful street the air smelled ecstatically of blooming plumeria. There were no clear signs to react to: peril was everywhere, intermingled with the mundane. Karen felt that all her life she would be moving from positions of perceived danger to positions of perceived safety without ever knowing which impressions were correct. And as she had this thought, her mood abruptly inverted: now she was feeling relief, joy, even something close to euphoria. Inhuman calls echoed through the vegetal thick; a siren went off far away.
On a road like this one, with no shoulder and no speed limit, any car that came along could hit her. If she was on the right road, she wouldn’t be back at the bungalow for hours. Poisonous animals lived in this area — snakes, scorpions, centipedes. The moon was large and bright overhead, and smooth like a stone. She didn’t know what she’d tell Dan when she got back to him, but she knew he’d be there, passed out on the bed with his laptop still open and his teeth unbrushed. He’d have fallen asleep believing she’d be back soon. On the table there’d be some cake or a cookie as an apology for whatever had happened by the pool that afternoon. And on her nightstand, there’d be a fresh glass of water.
Intimation
I was trying to think of all the different things I liked about doors. Their size, their heft, the sense that they were made for bodies to pass through them freely. The way they put holes in spaces in which you would otherwise be trapped forever, looking for some way in or out. All of the best moments in my life had been preceded by entering or exiting a door, or maybe just having a door waiting there in the background, offering the possibility of escape. They were the only things I could think of that were truly reversible: no clear beginning or ending, passing endlessly through a series of midpoints and temporary stops. They were beautiful in this revocability, flexible and soft.
All except this door, which seemed to be unidirectional.
From the outer side it had looked like any other, but here I was running my hands over it and looking for the seam, clawing at it, pounding my hands against this faint echo of a door that lacked all the features I had heretofore prized among its kind. The doorknob was fixed in place, and when I ran my fingers over the line, it felt of paint, thick and dark, on a smooth surface. If this door offered hope, it was only in trompe l’oeil form, a thin veneer of it laid planlessly. I turned to look for another way out.
Behind me lay the insides of a small house: coffee table, sofa, then a dining table and chairs. What looked like a kitchen to the right, then a long, narrow hallway that probably ended in a bedroom or bathroom. The apartment was small, and it seemed to funnel off into a point too small for anyone to step into, or out from. A man was seated on the sofa. He watched me, and he tilted his head.
What are you looking for? he said.
What’s wrong with this door? I said.
That’s a really strange question, he responded.
Something about his statement really irritated me. Yes, I was able to see how it could be considered a strange question. But in this situation, this strange situation, it seemed to be the only reasonable question to have. The fact that he wasn’t asking the question himself made him the strangest element here. At least by the standards that existed outside this house.
Look, sorry, where are my manners? he said. Have a seat, would you like anything?
I had just walked into his house, a complete stranger, and began clawing at the walls, tearing at the empty form of the door painted on it. I wanted him to feel as I did, trapped and hungry for answers. He should have been demanding information from me, demanding to know why I was here and who I was.
Don’t you want to know how I got in here? I asked.
He laughed a little. Okay, he replied, I’ll bite. How did you get in here?
I’m not sure, I said.
Now that we’ve settled that, he said tolerantly, do you or do you not want something to eat? A beverage? He stood up and headed over to the dining table.
I used to have a pet mouse that was actually just a normal mouse that had been living in our kitchen, someplace behind the oven. My mother caught it in a Havahart one weekend and I begged her to give it to me instead of crushing its head with a hammer and flushing it down the toilet, as she had threatened repeatedly to do. This mouse was cute, but it never got used to the fact that it now lived in a cage. It smelled bad in a feral way and wouldn’t learn to groom itself. You couldn’t play with it because it was wild, dirty, and fierce, but I used to like to press my face up to the clear plastic walls of its habitat and watch it digging furiously at the bounds, and when I did this I tried to make sure that my face showed a similarly desperate expression just so the mouse would know that it wasn’t crazy.