Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014

by Carmen Johnson

  And yet this behavior was precisely the cause of the fight with Mandy, or I should say it precipitated the large and (for us) unprecedentedly vicious fight that exiled me to this unorthodox bedroom. Mandy was used to my spending a few hours each night relaxing in front of the television, but had apparently never seen me engaged in my regular defocusing exercise. I hadn’t been hiding the hobby, at least not consciously, but she was nevertheless shocked when she found me that night. She gasped and shouted something like Are you all right? in reaction to the sight of me squatting there, in front of the television set, back arched, nose pressed to the screen, and a piece of floss hanging from my mouth. (I’d threaded the floss around a tooth moments before a particularly intricate shade of green appeared on-screen, and I’d rushed to examine its makeup without considering how the floss would add a certain disheveled quality to my appearance if someone were to walk in just then, as Mandy did.) She said she thought I was having a stroke. And though I tried to defend the innocence of the activity by comparing it to the widely accepted practice et cetera, she remained shaken. This led to a conversation not about gestalt properties, as one might expect, but about certain changes in my behavior these last few months, behaviors connected in her mind by nothing more than their so-called creepiness. She argued that I should never have taken Jon up on his recommendation to the board, that my promotion to editor-in-chief, far from increasing our standard of living, was obviously decreasing our standard of living, and would no doubt lead to a heart attack or some sort of mental breakdown. That instead of improving our life the promotion was sure to end up completely destroying our life. And the harbingers to this supposed breakdown and life destruction were all of the creepy behaviors she now counted on the fingers of one hand, behaviors including (index) the abnormal posture and proximity to screen in my TV-watching habits, discovered by her only that night; (middle) certain prolonged silences she had noticed, which were paradoxically coupled with (ring) volatile emotions, such as anger or frustration, even rage, which contradicted or belied my formerly stoic personality and mimicked my predecessor’s own unstable moods; and finally (pinky) a newfound reluctance to discuss any matters relating to Midweek. She recounted these so-called creepy behaviors calmly, as though she’d been rehearsing the speech, but despite this show of neutrality, I could feel throughout the bedroom the sheer viciousness of her feelings toward me. Maybe, I suggested, she didn’t understand the stress that naturally accompanied my new position, and should talk to Jon’s wife, or rather widow, for a better understanding of how to support a beleaguered editor-in-chief of a husband. Surely Jon’s widow would prefer an occasionally stressed or beleaguered or even creepy editor-in-chief/husband to a dead editor-in-chief/husband. Or did she, Mandy, prefer a dead editor-in-chief to a live one? We went back and forth like this, moving from bedroom to kitchen and back, and at a certain point Mandy began to softly cry, which so upset me that I left, also crying, and I only barely had the presence of mind to retrieve the old air mattress we’d used on camping trips in the early years of our marriage. When Mandy called the next day, I lied and told her I’d slept at a hotel, and that I needed a few days to cool off. Of course, I had no intention of going to a hotel, not after the phenomenon of that first sublime, sleepless night. Not after I had reason to suspect that Jon had perhaps not left me, his second-in-command, in a hopeless position, abandoned by coworkers and wife alike, had not left me in the paper’s hour of need, but had manufactured some intricate form of posthumous communication—something to save us all.

  I stare down to where my toes hold up a sagging tent of sheet. One of my more benign recent discoveries is that my office gets chilly at night owing to those rattling windows, which have no curtains, only the sort of cheap plastic venetian blinds whose angle is controlled by a plastic rod on the left-hand side. Twisting the rod causes the louvers to tilt one way or the other, which is the only method I have for adjusting the levels of natural light in the room; the apparatus for raising or lowering the blinds—a white string on the right-hand side—is hopelessly knotted. The blinds thus sit permanently half-raised, exposing my room at night to the alternating, and later blinking pink, light as I am trying to sleep. Moreover, I can’t but wonder why the strings that control the venetian blinds’ height are so knotted: Did Jon never lower his blinds? Did he perhaps intentionally knot the string so as to force permanent light into his office? To what end? When I think back, I find that I can’t remember the blinds ever being lowered during his tenure, but then he wasn’t the sort of supervisor to spend his day fiddling with louvers. In considering the phenomenon, I can take nothing for granted. Anything in the office might be part of the setup. And I’ve already learned that I did not know Jon nearly so well as I thought. Certainly I was unaware of the genetic time bomb that was his family’s history of cardiovascular disease and early death—not until Jon suffered his fatal heart attack, thereby precipitating all or nearly all of my domestic, vocational, and hauntological problems. My colleagues have surely noticed that my clothes haven’t changed since Monday, and that my face wears the blotched-and-greased look of the ejected husband. I suspect I do appear haunted, in a sense.

  Though Mandy didn’t mention it during the fight, I wonder whether she thought (when she came into our bedroom and found me there with my face against the screen) that I was hoping to pass through the glass into the televised world inside, as characters sometimes do in cartoons, or in a film I happened to return to a few weeks prior to my promotion, the 1982 horror blockbuster Poltergeist. (Here the passage occurs off-screen, which renders the notion not at all cartoonish but eerie and, in an odd reversal of the usual viewing conditions surrounding horror movies, actually more frightening to watch on television than in the movie theater. I remember seeing the film on its release with my newlywed wife and finding it manipulative and emotionally leaden. But when I rented and watched the film alone in our bedroom a few months ago—Jon was still alive then, of course—I had to admit that the depictions of the supernatural were quite disturbing ((especially when I pressed my face against the pixels, the images simultaneously filling and obliterating my vision)) and I have since lost some sleep in replaying its scenes of increasingly destructive spectral pranks, culminating in the abduction of Craig T. Nelson’s daughter through the television set—through the portal to the afterlife.) Obviously, I wasn’t expecting to physically penetrate the television, but I wouldn’t blame Mandy for mistaking my nose-against-screen activity as any number of things, just as I wouldn’t blame someone for believing my office’s carpet to be uniformly blue. I would not fault anyone for what are ultimately automatic, interpretive processes of the mind, and though I have been unable to bear a discussion of the fight itself, or even hear Mandy’s voice for more than a few moments each day while assuring her of my adequate health, I hope that soon I will be able to tell her that I forgive any and all of the interpretive processes of her wonderful mind. I would forgive her anything for a few more of the fine years we’ve shared.

  Buried somewhere beneath the strata of my papered wall is a picture of her on our honeymoon. Just an old keepsake. We spent a week in Las Vegas, and in the picture Mandy is leaning against the base of a model of the Eiffel Tower, maybe four stories tall. I’m not sure if this tourist destination still stands in the inconstant skyline of the Vegas strip, and I admit there’s something tacky about such a replica, but it’s the closest Mandy or I have ever been to Paris, and in the photograph she is visibly happy, one leg bent playfully at the knee. I’ve never been so happy, she even said to me around the time of the picture. I haven’t forgotten that. The base of the scale tower is finely gridded and latticed in a truly eye-catching way—the tower’s shrunken size creates an even finer texture of grid than on the full-size original—such that focusing on a particular spot in the latticework brings patterns and shapes to the mind’s eye. While the structure of the tower does not change, the principles of visual perception are such that my seeing of it does. It was on this trip, p
erhaps even on the occasion of the photograph, that Mandy, a psychology major at the time, taught me that the phenomenon of finding faces in random or unstructured stimuli is known as pareidolia. She mentioned the case, well-known at the time, of a woman in New Mexico who had seen Jesus’s face in a tortilla, prompting thousands to undertake a pilgrimage to her house. Some people—the religious or paranormally inclined, for instance—are particularly susceptible to it, Mandy said. Although she added that the most common case of pareidolia was neither paranormal nor religious, was rather the universally recognized man in the moon, which is not visible tonight, or at least not from my vantage on the office floor. After that vicious fight two nights ago, once I’d packed the air mattress and retreated to the office, I found that my thoughts were racing uncontrollably. I kept replaying moments of the argument over and over in my head. To induce sleep, I employed the same method I’d used to relax in front of Poltergeist, except instead of staring at the television set, I stared at the carpet. Whereas previously I had attempted to see into Poltergeist’s cellular mosaic, into the television’s constituent atoms, now I attempted to see into blueness’s mosaic, into the carpet’s constituent atoms. I concentrated on the carpet’s perceived blueness vs. the carpet’s objective piedness for a few hours, hoping to shut myself off from the world, and from my own mind’s racing. And it was this—the meditative unfocusing, which I am doing just now in the appropriate way—that allowed me to discover the phenomenon. A phenomenon that I strongly suspect is not meaningless or hallucinogenic or man-in-the-moon pareidolic at all, but which does depend on my knowledge of emergence and gestalt properties. It can be no coincidence that I am in this office and none other, and that these messages have appeared to me, Harold Fitz, someone whose interests very much include the gestalt and pareidolic. I am even beginning to think that it is no coincidence that the window’s blinds are stuck at half-mast—not only giving a sleepy appearance to the room’s corner face but also enforcing the presence of low, reddish light in the room at night—or that the carpet pops in and out in such a seemingly randomized way. It may be no coincidence that the light and temperature are so finely controlled, that a wind worries constantly across my face, that each hypnotic shadow is placed just so. For all I know, these may also be necessary conditions for the phenomenon. In other words, the knotted cords may be intentionally knotted. The carpet may be intentionally mislaid. The order, the form, the texture of the office may constitute for the initiated some representation of its former owner—the office itself a coded message, waving at me as surely as the pages of my papered wall.

  I was thinking about this intricate tissue of effects today when Bernice came into the office without knocking to hand me the daily wire-service summaries, and to discuss the matter of her most recent paycheck, which had bounced. Jon’s ancient and perhaps eternal secretary—now the office secretary by order of the board of directors—appeared in the doorframe to ask whether there wasn’t some reasonable explanation for the obviously a mistake, Mr. Fitz. And while I assured her that it must be nothing, in my head I knew it was not nothing. I asked that she not read anything into what was really just an accident, a meaningless data point, but I myself was reading furiously into what was clearly a meaningful data point, the ultimate data point, the point that pointed directly at both Jon and (by proxy, since I’d been suppressing the evidence of his embezzlement) me. And what’s worse, Bernice replied—croaking in that half-dead voice of hers—was that she’d already emailed the board to alert them of her concerns, and hoped I wouldn’t mind. To which I said no, while indeed thinking yes, for I did mind. Maybe I should have raged at her, as Jon would have. Maybe I did rage. Maybe, because I did not rage, or raged only a little, it appeared as though I was haunted by guilt. Maybe Bernice had already surmised that Jon and I had worked together, chief and assistant, to cook the books for our personal gain, or even that I had done it all under Jon’s nose. Could I disprove it, I wondered as she shuffled out the door, her back hunched and her entire bearing like that of the shadowy medium who interprets the paranormal event in Poltergeist once the family has finally accepted the existence of their eponymous haunters. So I was forced to accept Jon’s embezzlement, even though it made no sense to me, and still makes no sense. The importance of tonight’s defocusing exercise was thus brought home as Bernice left the office, shutting the door so that it startled the thumbtacked papers. It was at once clearer than ever, as I was overwhelmed by the scene framed in the window, as tears collected in my tear ducts, that my studies in emergent properties—such as blueness or Craig T. Nelson eyebrowness—had been necessary steps toward learning to see the coded message in the office, a message I believe, with increasing certainty, is the remainder or shade of Jon Friedman, come to confess his crimes, and to show me the way out from under them.

  Ah—I’ve just remembered something. Earlier tonight, I imagined that the Nelson family’s young daughter crawls into the glass-paned eye of a television set, crossing that threshold into the realm of the undead. But on just now espying the small supply closet in the corner of my office, I am reminded that this moment of television penetration is not just off-screen, but nonexistent. In fact, I’d constructed the imagined scene out of other textual and paratextual elements of the film. (First, the movie poster, which depicts a young girl sitting in front of a television, her hands flat against the screen as though she might pass into it. ((Incidentally, one tagline for the film—They’re here—is written just above the television, while another—It knows what scares you—appears below the film’s title. This has always seemed strange to me: that the poltergeist(s) of the film is/are referred to as both singular and plural entities, on the one hand they but on the other hand it, as though a poltergeist might shift or increase in identity in a way so contra to our understanding of objects that our grammar cannot consistently describe it/them.)) And second, the film’s off-screen abduction of the girl into the spirit world, which takes place in the children’s closet, not via TV, and which is a rather more pedestrian horror-movie trope. The abduction-via-TV was my mind’s own gestalt, a conflation of suggestive elements surrounding my memories of the film.) It is also creepily true that the images on a television are not, ontologically speaking, really there: when I watch Poltergeist, Craig T. Nelson is as spectral as—is no less a blocky mosaic than—the supernatural beings who haunt him. Since the phenomenon first appeared two nights ago, I have quelled my fears by imagining that I am just such a Nelsonian patriarch, composed of courageous bricks, confronting the unknown for the sake of my family: for Mandy. I would redeem myself in her eyes, would make her reconsider the cruel, flat intonation of her voice as she washed the dishes and sat across from me at the kitchen table, staring straight ahead and turning a coffee cup around on a napkin, twisting brown rings into the white, uttering the trivially true cliché not the person I married.

  I glance at my office door, which is able to shut until only a sliver of space remains between the door and jamb, but cannot form a complete seal—with the click of the knob’s tongue entering the door’s mouth—due to a tectonic ridge of carpet that juts out over the thinner strips lining the hallway. The backward C of the door’s silhouette casts rippled striations across the blinking—yes, at last blinking—glow of the streetlight. The blinking bathes the room in urgent periods of dark pink. Supernatural beings are commonly thought to have an urgent message for the living that they/it mean(s) to communicate. Perhaps Jon will show me the location of a written confession, or some other piece of incontrovertible proof that I could take to the board. A piece of evidence explaining that I had nothing to do with the paper’s imminent, unavoidable demise. Or perhaps the embezzlement was indeed part of something big, some paper-saving scheme the details of which Jon (the shade of Jon, through the portal of an office Jon erected before his death) means to inform me. Not that I have any way of knowing how closely my own experiences approximate the ontology of those fictional worlds. In this world, at least, what happens first is an
unnatural darkening of the light around the doorframe—just like this—like slowly steeping tea water, and a reddening of the already pinkish objects in the room—