The Third Person

by Emily Anglin

  “And what do you see when you look in the mirror?”

  “A door.”

  “You see a door?”

  “Oh, no. Sorry. That’s not what I see, but a door is part of the problem. Part of what my looking is about.”

  “What does the door symbolize for you? Where do you think it might lead if you reached out and turned the

  handle?”

  “That’s the problem. It doesn’t open. I should clarify. It’s a real door I’m talking about. I can be direct about that. A real door that’s locked, holding a space I can only look at and never enter.”

  “Where is this door?” I asked, still unsure if she was speaking metaphorically or literally.

  “It’s here, at the Institute. Like I said, I’ve been coming to work at night, and sometimes when I need a break I go out wandering, walking around, sometimes at three or four or five in the morning. The Institute and its grounds are so beautiful late at night. Have you seen it? In the dark, you can see how this place has gone back to nature. The flowers and weeds shine in the moonlight, the concrete crumbles, the ivy holds the buildings up. The architecture here is astounding, but we just step around and through it. Have you ever noticed all the unused spaces—the sunken courtyards? The staircases stacked on top of each other? The outdoor landings the size of ballrooms? The balconies, dry moats, gardens that are underground and open air at the same time? The fountains and pillars? This style of architecture was meant to make people congregate, and when you’re alone in it, you can feel the power of the idea when it was in its pure form, before anyone knew it was bound to fail.”

  Her words made me recall my dad saying that the brutalist vision had been conceived to echo and encourage the ways groups of people move, to make them come together, but that it had failed disastrously, creating spaces that people could only stare at. “It’s as though by thinking too long and hard about the problems that keep people from coming together,” my dad had said, “the architects managed to capture not the way people congregate, but the isolation of working on a project that isn’t really succeeding.”

  When I was young, we would walk around the campus together, and he would point out the odd features and details to me. I’m not sure if I would have noticed them as an adult if he hadn’t, since my tendency is to stay focused on my daily tasks when I’m at work, seeing only the steps ahead of me that need to be taken.

  “I haven’t seen the Institute at night,” I said to Eilidh. “I’m nervous being here after dark because of the security alerts. I don’t mean to worry you, but we should talk more about that, before you leave, or another time soon. Let’s not forget. But for now, about the door. Where is this door?”

  “One night I was walking past one of the buildings—I’m sure you know the one; it has the rose garden built around it—and I noticed a light glowing behind a shrub at the building’s foundation. I looked closer, and spotted the top of an outdoor stairwell. The entrance to the stairwell was overgrown, but I climbed into the garden and pulled some branches away. It was a steep, narrow staircase leading down the outer wall of the building’s basement. I went down the stairs. At the bottom, there was a door set in the wall, completely covered with ivy. I stripped away some of the ivy and tried the door, but it wouldn’t open. I pulled more of the ivy away and looked through the bars. The door leads to a courtyard. I know it all too well, even though I’ve never been there.”

  I felt uncomfortable. “The Institute is full of so many unused spaces, isn’t it? I’ve noticed that.”

  Actually, one day after I began working at the Institute, I’d been looking for a rag to dust my office with, and had opened what I thought was a broom closet at the end of the hall. I had found a room full of old furniture stacked in piles: desks, chairs, decorative ’70s textiles pulled tight across wooden frames. But also more personal things, things that you wouldn’t expect: boxes of letters and books; a large, jumbled box of old shoes and hats; a box of what looked like homemade children’s costumes. I closed the door and forgot about it.

  “You know what?” Eilidh said. “Just saying this all out loud has already helped. Thank you so much. I think I know what the next steps are for me.”

  “But I haven’t done anything. I want you to know I’m perfectly happy to keep talking, if you’d like. I’m here to listen. It’s my job, after all. And we should also talk about safety before you leave.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much. But I really should get going.” She stood up, collected her things. She slipped around the door frame and was gone.

  After she left, I went back to work. It was late afternoon before I noticed that Eilidh had left her notebook behind on the corner of my desk. I gazed at it in my late-afternoon torpor. In the lower right-hand corner of the page she’d left it opened to was a little line drawing, a sketch of some of the buildings clustered around mine, including what I recognized as the Social Psychology building. A small rectangle was labelled “Stairwell to Courtyard.” Beside the stairwell, a larger rectangle, contained inside the square of the building, was labelled “Courtyard,” and on the inner wall of the courtyard, lines spaced at regular intervals marked out a hallway of smaller rooms. They had been labelled “Offices Looking onto Courtyard,” including one that said “My Office.”

  I left the office later than usual. It was already starting to get dark. I always try to leave just before dark, with the security alerts in mind. The plan hinges on hurrying, shortening the transitional time between places, to allow more time for each place, each state, and less for the difference between them. But tonight, I’d pushed it. When I packed, locked up, and left the building, the light near the bottom of the sky told me that I had about fifteen or twenty minutes left before dark.

  I came to the building from Eilidh’s drawing. The sign outside read “Social Psychology,” following my dad’s name. This was the building where his office had been, and where Eilidh’s was now.

  I climbed over the garden to step into the ivy-lined concrete stairwell. Just like Eilidh had said, there was a door standing at the bottom of the stairs, a tall ironwork door set into the wall, with ivy recently torn away from it.

  The door stood open, and its lock stuck out at an angle, as though it had been prised. I went down the stairs and inspected it.

  There was a plaque on the bars that must have dated back to the ’60s. “The Garden of Myth,” it said in calligraphic script, and then: “Please enjoy this statue garden. You are welcome to this place of reflection.”

  I pushed the door open and stepped inside the courtyard. Three of its walls were pitted concrete, and completely overgrown with ivy that stained and gripped the grey surface. The fourth wall, opposite me, was glass, the wall of the Social Psychology building, behind which lay a bank of basement offices that looked out onto the courtyard through their thick windows. The offices were all dark.

  Placed at regular intervals within the courtyard were short concrete pedestals, each affixed with a plaque. I walked from block to block reading the plaques. “Narcissus,” said one. “Oedipus.” “Prometheus.” “Medusa.” They must have once held statues.

  I faced the pedestal where Medusa had stood. She would have been positioned to look into the office furthest to the right. I peered into the office, making out bookshelves and chairs and a desk, wondering what poor soul had sat in Medusa’s line of sight when the statue still stood. As I looked, the door inside the office opened, and a tall figure stepped in, removing a pale scarf while entering and throwing it on the back of the chair. I could only see her silhouette, moving around and then freezing in place, as she spotted me. It was Eilidh. She turned the light on in her office and the courtyard was illuminated by the glow. She gave me a brisk smile and a wave, and then sat down at her desk and began writing by hand on a pad of paper. Was she just going to sit down to work like this, I thought, with me standing out here watching her? But she stood up and pressed the paper
against the window and waved me over. I read her note:

  “I opened the door. Now I can work again.” Then, under it, in larger, loopy writing, she’d written: “P.S. The workday is done now! It’s time for you to go home.” She smiled. I nodded, but then shook my head a bit, as though to say, “Not sure.”

  I waved to her and headed toward the stairs, as though we were cubicle-mates in a shared office saying goodnight at the end of a long workday. I could tell she felt our meeting and what we’d talked about was wrapped up now, our project done, our collaboration complete. Her need was met, and I supposed my job, at least as it involved Eilidh, was also done. I felt in my legs how tired I was as I went up the concrete stairs, and wondered if I should just sleep in my office to benefit from the cool of the basement, to save myself the long ride home, and to allow for an early start the next day. And to resist the insistent order, from the president’s office, and now from Eilidh, to go home, to never linger, to draw a line to step over between this place and the rest of our lives, as though that line would make things clearer and hold things apart.

  I looked around at the campus like I’d never seen it before, among the summer evening sounds of cicadas and the voices of people coming out in search of the cooler air. Small clusters of people were gathering on the grounds at varying distances, talking, eating, like the area was a part-time park—an empty space in need of use. I wandered toward the bus stop.

  Trying Not to Worry

  Seven months ago, my mother left our family home and moved into a room in a stranger’s house. She said she had found the room through a sign posted in the house’s window. She also said, shortly after moving in, that her new housemate, Rosalind, is strange. More details came out during a difficult family conversation a few weeks after she left. One of these details was the possibility that Rosalind was what some people would call a sociopath, because of her unfixed personality that you couldn’t quite get a handle on—her shifting, flat surface. But I still can’t quite recall which of us had offered this reading of her based on the information my mom had offered.

  Nonetheless, my mom says she’s never been happier, so I’m trying not to worry. There’s never been anything flat about my mom. She’s faceted. She’s lived separately from our family before, and has worked at a number of jobs, some of which have taken her far away from us from time to time, but in all her comings and goings, she’s always been on her own except for us. No other name was ever mentioned as a co-habitant or companion, at least, until she told us about Rosalind.

  I still live at home, even though I’m thirty-two. In the eyes of some, my story should probably be about my own kids by now, but at this point it’s still about my parents and their kids. Since my mom left to move in with Rosalind, I live with my heartbroken dad and my older brother, Glen, who is also heartbroken, which is why he also lives at home: he just got divorced. Now I’m the woman of the house.

  My dad still loves my mom, and she says she still loves him. She tells me they aren’t divorced, not like Glen and Kali are. “He has no reason to worry. I love him just as much as he loves me. Actually, I’m quite sure I love him more than he loves me.” It’s about space, she explains. Not love or the lack of love.

  Up until just recently, my mom and I would talk on the phone a few times a week, and chat about how my work is going, and how Glen’s doing. She would tell me about her new place with Rosalind, but I wasn’t gaining much of an understanding of who Rosalind was. It might be because I hadn’t asked her much about it. I’d been withdrawing, thinking about how I needed to plan my own next step toward some kind of life for myself outside the house I’d grown up in, inspired by my mom.

  “I’m okay,” I’d offer, when she would ask me how I am. I’d curse myself as I said those closed, cold words, staring at the flesh of my forearm, picturing the words for what I was appearing there letter by letter, in the shaky script of a self-inked tattoo: “Traitor. Fraud. Failure.” I’d rack my brain for a word that means all three.

  “I still love your dad,” she tells me. “And all of you. Why should Housing always necessarily be one of Love’s departments anyway? The bureaucracy is ready for restructuring. I’m still right here.”

  I work part-time at the university teaching Victorian literature and composition, when courses come up that no one else can teach. When courses come up at universities in nearby towns, I drive there to teach them. Our family lives in a mid-sized university town surrounded by small to mid-sized university towns within about an hour’s drive of each other. In the summer, the cornfields of the surrounding countryside roll in wavy hills toward groves of distant trees that dot the banks of small rivers.

  I moved away to do some of my degrees, but I came back to this place and its somehow constant aural backdrop of flapping and cawing from crows that gather in large groups in the trees around the university. My students don’t know that I still live in the house I grew up in.

  My dad works at the university too; he’s a psychologist. He started out in a relatively conventional area, with studies that analyzed how accurately people imagine the lived experiences and inner lives of strangers. But as his career developed, his research took a sharp turn into experimental and theoretical territory. He’s become best known for conceiving of a theoretical phenomenon that he and his lifelong collaborator, Georges, have termed “spontaneous subjectivity transfer”: a phenomenon whereby an individual becomes aware of a sudden, visceral understanding of another person’s felt experience of being alive, an understanding that comes from out of nowhere—a kind of physical, automatic empathy. As they describe it, it’s essentially as though one person’s consciousness gets instantly thrust into the body of a stranger, to become part of their lived memory or understanding. The person experiencing this spontaneous empathy may know the person whose subjectivity they receive—or they may not know them at all; they can receive the subjectivity of someone who lives in the same city, or someone who lives hours, even continents, away.

  My dad and Georges have done over two thousand interviews, compiling a database of scientific evidence for the phenomenon. They get called “occult” but they say there’s nothing occult about what they see as a newly discovered form of intersubjectivity.

  It’s always been hard to tell what my mom really thinks of their work, despite the key role she played in its development. It was actually she who first brought the phenomenon to my dad’s attention. A colleague of hers at the public library she used to work at had experienced something strange, and had confided in my mom about it.

  As she explained it to my mom, my mom’s colleague had been lying in bed one night and suddenly became aware of thoughts running through her mind—and feelings attached to those thoughts—that she didn’t recognize as her own: she felt aware of a different body, one not lying down but standing, pressing against a wet kitchen counter, washing the dishes; she felt the rigidity of this other woman’s body; she could feel this woman worrying about her son, until her worry pushed her to leave her house to go out looking for him in the rainy night, down distinct streets.

  The colleague had told my mom about this, and had shown her the sketch she’d drawn of this unknown woman’s house and the street names she’d seen. My mom, in turn, shared this story with my dad, whose curiosity was piqued. He and Georges did some investigating, and they discovered that this woman really existed, at a house matching the woman’s sketch and description. They started doing some new studies, and found an avalanche of other examples, named the phenomenon, and began to build their career on investigating it.

  A few years after this original experience came to light, my dad and Georges founded a research centre for investigating spontaneous subjectivity transfer; they’ve run it since then from the basement of the Social Sciences building. A plaque on their door says, “Understanding Is a Relationship,” a line my mom came up with, and which I often think about. It’s more complicated than it sounds. The lines of the pl
aque are etched in the metal very finely, so that you can hardly see them: at first the plaque looks blank, like a decorative metal rectangle, until you shift from one foot to another and the light catches the grooves.

  My dad and Georges thank my mom in the acknowledgments sections of their books for typing and editing all their manuscripts. But as a family we acknowledge—if not in words, then simply through knowing—the more complex contribution she made to their work.

  My dad and I have the same name at our workplace: we’re both “Professor Rosin.” But I tell my students to call me Nancy.

  My students seem to feel comfortable asking me questions, maybe because I’m young. “Did these writers even want us to read their books like this? Didn’t they just want us to read them for pleasure, like how we watch TV or movies now?”

  “That’s a good question,” I say. I tell them about the crowds of people that would throng at the docks on the morning a ship was due to arrive bearing a new installment of Dickens’s latest novel, some of them stampeding and some disappearing into the waves.

  “Then why do we have to talk about themes?” they ask. “Why would you want us to do this? Why would you want to do this?”

  I ask them what they come to know about other people through their own reading, watching, and listening. I become more and more aware of how little I actually know about the students or their lives—what responsibilities, work, worries they carry—and the fear of making assumptions makes me almost faint, as I try to tell them in various ways that I believe love and art are all we have. When my voice grows thin I let them talk to each other; I sit on my desk nodding and writing notes, as though I’m jotting insightful summary observations that will tie everything together, until I let them leave early.

  I had been in the habit of talking to my mom about my classes at the kitchen table, after I’d gotten home and she’d returned from the doctor’s office where she’d been working as a receptionist for the past few years. One such night, we were drinking tea together and my mom told me she had found an affordable room for rent and had signed a lease.