Intimations

by Alexandra Kleeman

  When the rain falls, bit by bit it becomes broken. I watch the rain falling on it, falling on its body and its back, falling into the funnel from which it acts out, falling all over it so it makes a sound like a thousand drums and I know suddenly that as heavy as it is, it is hollow past the shell. All is different kinds of gray. It gives off small stars as the rain knits it in water.

  What our family has done, the rain undoes in a matter of minutes. The color of the sky and the ground, it undoes. Undone, the dryness and smooth feeling of the air. If it could undo also the year or two years that have come before, would we be as we were, or would we be something new, wetter?

  I hold my ruined pet, looking out the window at the rain, the rain, the substance that would either bring my pet back, or turn it into something more distant, untouchable.

  PLAY HOUSE

  Outdoors, water soaks the ground and is lost. Indoors we live with rules that prevent things from becoming lost or broken, from leaking outdoors and coming loose.

  These are obstructions that redirect absences before they unfold, closed spaces in which things are not forced to pass out of view in time like everything else, like a sudden dissipation replacing the light with its hollow or the objects of the day with their opposites, a flower with its absence or the shape of a pet with a thin, tasteless vapor. We pass these things from our view instead with willed movements away, we leave them by force and when we return to them in several minutes or hours or days, they remain.

  In this way, our house resembles a life tied in a knot, or a passage of time spread out in all directions. There are long spaces unfilled by anything, then sudden clumps of familiar and unfamiliar strewn as in a salvage yard, portions that have “stepped to the side, safe, rather than eliminating themselves violently.” Indoors we may construct our lives from tissue paper, from brittle thread, from confectioner’s sugar, if we wish. Materials that crumble at the touch or sag under moisture live like magazine images beneath our ceilings, they will not wish to stir within our thick walls, repaired constantly with special tools we have made to preserve their form. We might be anyone, and our undoing just another thing rolling around like a marble through the halls, waiting to be found and left and lost and forgotten.

  My mother sits, making small scratching motions with the fingers to coax the meanings from flat objects. I run from the room. I run back into the room. I run from the room and make small scratching motions at the wall, yielding little. I run through the house. I search my father, to go to him for the words to fill these descriptions. He stands in front of the window, practicing his speech. I run from the room. I run back into the room. These are the things we make possible in an environment salvaged from its own predisposition toward destruction.

  NEVER HAVE I EVER

  I lie in the center of the emptiest room of our emptiest house looking from right to left. The room breathes around me as I lie more like a floor than the flattest, deadest floor. Looking down over the belly, I see the sockets and lights rise up and down, up and down steadily, and I can make it breathe more quickly by breathing more quickly, until I feel dizzy and my head rolls over in circles.

  We study the weather from within this house, and we are the weather within this house. Outside this house there are weather and weather patterns, stretching for miles in any direction. We cannot control the weather from within this house. But in this house we are working on it.

  We study the weather in a house that keeps the weather out, we watch the weather outdoors from indoors, through the windows. We can see rain through the windows, sleet through the windows, hail, snow, partially cloudy, cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms, partially cloudy with isolated thunderstorms. We can see fog through the windows, but we cannot see what lies past it.

  Indoors we have cataloged the indoors, named its parts and recorded their number and location. We remove their ability to surprise us, even as they relieve us of our astonishment. It seems as though this indoors is held up by these numbers: if they were to become lost, it would vanish like pots and pans when one forgets they are playing house.

  Weather covers the length of a wooden fence. It covers over our backyard and the backyards of our neighbors, who have all disappeared. Where did they disappear to, and how?

  They disappeared like weather, like weather the day after weather.

  UNTIL SOMETHING HAPPENS

  We approach the cold like the water approaches the bottom of a hill. It makes itself felt through the holes in our airtight windows, six inches of solid plastic. He rolled everyone in thick acrylic fleece, I saw nothing but white and a small circle of mixed color. We roasted and ate large wheels of meat, meat being “the command given to another body, setting it in purposeful motion with knives and grinding.” There was nothing to do and there was less of it every day, the husks of board games drained in the corner of every room, their only use brief and saddening. Pick it up, look for something new to appear printed on the reverse side, try to use the game pieces on another board, grow heavy, carry to another room and leave in that corner, a new corner. The winter “like an abomination paralleled only by the flaccidity of spirit with which it has been met with in response.” The winter “the gravest threat to productive and life-affirming activity to enter these walls since the homequake of three autumns prior,” but making a sound more like that of mice inching under the floorboards or of fire scratching at the outer shell. One night, they read and I look at pictures in a large atlas of other places to be. On other nights, I read and Father argues about great inventions of the past. Or we listen to forecasts over the radio.

  The first idea was a house without weather, says Father. The same idea as a roof, but bigger. Better, he says. Mother looks up from her work. She is making a blue scarf out of woolen yarn, another blue scarf to add to the piles of blue scarves, hats, mittens, muffs that sit over there in the closet, getting older.

  PERCENTAGE OF CLEAR SKY

  Of the types and the shapes. Of arranging them in groups by height, weight, or self-similarity. Of the types of children they once were and could someday give birth to. Other people and their ability to pass freely through the space that you take up, to pass to and through and away from it in a way that you were not designed to do.

  Once upon a time other people were around. You could see them through the window. They were washing their minivans, vacuuming debris up from under the car mats. They were playing with a dog, or tousling its ears, or scratching the scruff of its neck under the collar. You could see from their faces that they loved soccer, or horses, or mornings. They had preferences for large things over small, or the opposite.

  What happened inside their houses, besides a choreography of lights going on and off and, eventually, entirely off?

  How did they know when to turn which lights on and off, and to what end?

  Distance and knowledge are nearly the same thing. Or so my family tells me, demonstrating this by covering my eyes with small pieces of white paper and asking me to identify what I see. Children have been visible outside the window, playing in the snow as though unaware of its crystalline structure, each one fragile and irreproducible. I have watched the snow melt in their hands, though I have not felt it melt in my own.

  ONLY SLIGHTLY

  My mother watches the storm from the kitchen window of this house, watches the storm fall over roof and yard. It falls from the sky through a fiberglass frame of approximately a foot in diameter, suspended outside the kitchen window by a hermetically sealed plastic pipe, the pipe’s opening governed by vacuum pump, ending in an airtight seal.

  When it rains good, clean rain, when it rains types of rain that we have not encountered previously, or familiar types that can replenish our collections. Then we will make it sleep, we will put it under ether.

  I watch her at the window, loading a canister of gaseous substance, checking air pressure within canister and pipe, preparing the pump for operation and checking its parts for leakage and wear. At the peak of the storm, when the
sounds of individual raindrops falling upon the roof are no longer distinguishable one from the other, she presses the button and the frame fills with mist.

  My mother dons raincoat, gloves, galoshes, and an oversize hat. She opens the umbrella and steps outside, gingerly over the cobblestones, gingerly to the collection tank. The plastic frame is filled with droplets of water suspended in midair, shaped like downward momentum, but paused there. Paused. She takes the large glass jar from beneath her coat and fills it with sleeping rain. The cap again atop the jar.

  We have learned that the weather cannot be kept outdoors and must be brought indoors, dragged indoors, before it brings itself indoors. We create the image of a house where the outside must ask to be let in, where it rings the bell and wonders what to do with its hands while it waits for someone to come to the door. Through such preemptive tactics we show it that, though it may cover the whole world, we cover the world inside our house.

  When my mother comes back, she leaves the jar on the kitchen counter. The raindrops inside look sad or exhausted. They stir, but only slightly.

  LEARNED MOTIONS

  We maintain a constant temperature of 73 degrees within our house, counteracting temperature drops with baths and warm foods, counteracting rises in temperature with meals of ice and cold water.

  We gather in photographs in triangular formations, the hands of the two larger on the shoulders of the smaller, as if we could become a single solid structure.

  Nineteenth-century physicist Arthur Worthington photographed drops of milk at their moment of impact with a hard surface, providing irrefutable evidence of “the deeply lodged gimpishness of nature at her core.” While scientists had previously imagined the splash patterns of liquids to be regular, symmetrical, crystalline, the photographs taken within Worthington’s laboratory revealed ragged blooms that threw themselves up into the air with “indiscrimination worthy only of a pratfall.” They surged up upon impact, or seemed to reach outward with irregularly sized pseudopodia. With this material proof of their irregularity, naturally occurring phenomena entered the category of “trainable effects,” like “the squelching and spattering sounds that emerge from a mouth in the process of doing other than generating meaningful speech” that we silence with practice and much cloth.

  The walls of our house are to its space as the rules are to a game. In between lie air, and everything allowed. We run circles from the kitchen through the den through the bedrooms through the kitchen.

  Controlling the weather will be the first step past building descriptions that cannot hold it in. It could be the first step out of this house that we have lived so far into and through.

  MANY QUESTIONS

  At dusk, we play a game of thought and guessing. This is recreation, which fills the spaces between moments of productive friction, moments in which we create. In the dusk, the space within takes on a color to which it is difficult to respond. We want to turn the lights on but it is too early, we want to keep them off but it grows too late. We want a space in which we could half do, do halfway, but we are forced to be one thing or another, except within the act of hoping.

  Our family, like other collections, possesses a nested structure. My father has known the most and thus could know us better than we know ourselves: he could dream us and we would not know the difference. My mother has seen less and knows proportionately less, and I know the least possible. I could fold up into her, and her into him. We would live inside him like a house, one large white house with two tiny windows on the front. In this house we would have all the things we have now, but we would have no father.

  The game is called Many Questions. It happens like this:

  I’m thinking of an object, my father says.

  Is it a refrigerator? asks my mother.

  No, it is not, he replies.

  Is it my kitten? I ask.

  No, no, he answers.

  Is it a stop sign? asks my mother.

  It is not, he replies. Now, why in the world would I think of that?

  THAT WHICH MEETS NO RESISTANCE

  The first idea was to build a house free of weather. Mother says Father was sleepless for weeks, drawing plans for houses without doors, without windows, houses without pipes for outdoor water to enter, houses without any air inside at all.

  The first idea was to build a house free of weather. But they discovered within the removal processes a secondary origin of weather. A house with nothing to resist—no rain, no wind—finds areas of resistance within, growing frustrated with its own stasis, shuddering and crumbling around its own stable shape. He formulated a rule: The shelter that meets no resistance shall resist itself.

  It was many days ago that Father’s rule was proven accurate and, conversely, that our house proved itself to be a rule. I curled around my warmth as the morning opened itself up, peacefully, without even drops of dew or the movement of birds outdoors. A sharp whine began from within the walls and floor, making items of furniture whine too, like a bomb about to go off. The things on the walls fell off during this whining, and the things on the tables fell with the onset of a chugging, painful sound from machines somewhere within the house. Around us, two gulps softly and one spasm like an attempt to hurl something from the throat. I said that it seemed the house felt we were alien, but I was told that was unlikely. The machinery, built to withstand high winds and violent events, was simply buckling under the weight of very little: through induced outer turbulence we would regain the internal stillness that comforted our objects and our routines. The floor was on a tilt and I watched the round things roll away and out of the room, and the flat and square things slide more slowly toward a similar exit. In another room the refrigerator was on fire, burning up from inside, smelling at once like charred meat and plastic.

  I open the freezer door and stare at the hail. It stays still in there. It looks back at me from next to the ice cream and some frozen peas, the hailstones beginning to stick to the freezer’s artificial frost.

  THE FIRST IDEA

  From one room I looked for another room to hold me, to change the things around me and leave this sharp feeling behind me in the sharp air. A feeling might claw you open with the simple intention of freeing itself, and it would be no one’s fault. I took the black marker from the top of the table.

  One arrives at the map room, taking long steps through the shuddering hall. Charts of yesterday’s weather and today’s weather and tomorrow’s weather cover the walls and windows. This is where we make the fiction of tomorrow’s weather, which we hope to make fact, where we draw the weather on the maps, draw the future on their flat faces.

  I drew storms on the maps of yesterday and today.

  There had been no storms yesterday or today.

  The world of the future will be “storm-free, an environment designed for utter compatibility with the needs of the many, as determined through a survey reconstructing the median desires of a high-quality section of inhabitants.” It will wheeze rather than roar. Instead of the storm, there will be a pocket of mild, warm wind. Instead of the rain there will be light and additional light, filling every corner of the empty sky. Instead of hiding from it as one, we will scatter, walking aimlessly away from a central point to a peripheral.

  I drew a storm with a warm front traveling north toward this house, a low-pressure center. I marked the origin of storm activity and the counterclockwise direction of wind flow around the low-pressure center.

  LACK OF WIND

  The clouds we make with the breathing machine are too heavy, and will not float in the air. For now, we strap a harness to them and hang them from the rafters, but we will run out of room, even in this house designed to substitute the sky.

  A small, simple game played using words printed on white note cards, and a small black-and-white board. Mother takes a card from the top of the deck and reads it out:

  Move back three spaces.

  It is my turn, and I move the piece that stands for me three spaces backward on the boar
d. Tiny, useless clouds roll by like tumbleweeds. Or would, if any wind blew within the walls of our house.

  I look toward my sister.

  It is Father’s turn and I read it out:

  Move back one space.

  Father moves his piece back one space, and takes the first card off the top of the pile:

  Move back two spaces.

  Mother moves her piece back two spaces. She takes the next card from the top of the pile. But I take myself to the map room, where I draw angry storms all across the midwestern United States, and both coasts.

  A SMALL, SIMPLE GAME

  I wander us to the room where clouds are constructed, and now we sisters look upon the same machines with similar eyes. Surrounding us are the freezing chambers, the artificial breathers, the cloud-molds and cloud-cutters.

  The first of our homemade clouds were made of real breath, sighed and heaved into the chambers through an air tube. These clouds were perfect and small and a child could name them, pretending that they were a pet cat or dog. These clouds achieved a maximum volume of 6.5 liters, the vital capacity of my father’s lungs.

  But larger clouds were required to replicate natural weather, and the artificial breathers were therefore invented to be larger than us, and better than us at accomplishing things they did not even want to accomplish. Like a huge plastic tube, a huge rubber lung, the mechanical breathers breathed all through the night, wheezing through dream after dream, collapsing themselves into flat rubber sacks and then drawing back up, well-oiled and smooth, and filling the chambers with a strange, moist breath that congealed into weird uncloudlike shapes.

  To achieve standardized clouds for my mother’s experiments, we took these clouds that felt a little wooly, a little wet, and pushed them into the molds, making the shapes of cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, stratus, fog.