The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  “But you haven’t known anything else,” Dorothy said to the raft children. One little girl’s hair had flown into her face, but because her hands were tied to the mast she could only furiously toss her head to try to whip the hair back; Dorothy wanted to help her but knew her touch would be unwelcome. “Whereas I was raised to expect a future. Everyone said that to increase my standard of living, all I had to do was follow my dreams.”

  “No one said that,” the little girl said from behind her salt-crusted hair.

  “What is a dream?” asked the other raft children. “What is the future?”

  They rowed closer to shore—and now Dorothy was on her own raft, which for some reason had a mermaid on its prow, which doubled as a charging station. She plugged her phone into the mermaid and checked her email. Junk. Receipts. Fundraising appeals. Even in her apocalyptic fantasies, no one ever emailed her. The age of email was over.

  * * *

  —

  The train arrived, crammed. She stood, then sat at the first opening. A fat woman in a puffy coat squeezed next to her. At first Dorothy stiffened to make room, then found herself mindlessly relaxing against the coat’s shoulder, sinking into it until she encountered the meaty resistance of arm beneath pillow. The woman in the puffer elbowed her gently but firmly away. Even if some coat-to-coat contact was unavoidable in the subway crush, it was still bad manners to touch strangers. Dorothy, conceding her error, but unable to take up any less space, stood again and leaned her shoulder against the pole. She took from her bag the Kafka story she had started reading on the train into Manhattan that morning. Dorothy always read on the subway. It was the best way to absent yourself from your surroundings. The human sublime was worse than the garbage sublime. It would kill you to confront the agonies and joys pressed together in the crowd, in one single subway car. Each person with their disappointments, their millstones, their pleasures, their loves. Each person living a life only they could live. The only recourse was to hide somehow, to deaden oneself to the cacophony of pulsing, repulsive existence.

  The story was narrated by a dog. Where Dorothy picked it up, the dog was explaining dog-nature, its desire for intimacy and the strictures put upon it. We are impelled to be together, the dog said, and nothing can prevent us from satisfying that urge; all our laws and institutions, the few I still know, and the numberless ones I have forgotten, they all go back to the greatest happiness that exists for us, our warm companionableness. And now the obverse. Dorothy looked down at the woman in the puffer, who had closed her eyes. Her head was lolling back against the wall beneath a poem about roast chicken that the Metropolitan Transit Authority hung in the subways as a public service. The woman was older than it had first seemed; her skin was wrinkled as a walnut shell. Dorothy returned to her book.

  All this poor dog wanted was to be near other dogs, to greet them and sniff between their legs, and yet for obscure or ungiven reasons there was a prohibition against it. An event of some kind had separated the dogs from one another. We, who want to be together…we of all creatures live remote from one another, in curious callings, which are often hard for the dog next door to understand…

  Maybe it wasn’t an event. Maybe it was just history. At some times some things kept the dogs together and at other times other things tore them apart. Or maybe the separation had to do with temperament. The narrator-dog was one of those who asks too many questions, who focuses on the negative, who allows himself to be irritated by what doesn’t quite fit. Withdrawn, solitary, entirely taken up with my small, hopeless—but to me—indispensable inquiries…This dog had to stand apart. But he was too porous, that was his problem; he let everything in. That was why the musical dogs, the pack whose every step was singing, had such power over him. They annihilated him with their music, forcing him into sensations that did not, strictly speaking, belong to him. Feelings, Dorothy often tried to explain to her students, could be catching as a cold. You never knew ahead of time how sick they could make you.

  * * *

  —

  The shoes were in a heap, the unread magazines were piled on the table, the dust was visible on multiple surfaces, and no one had done last night’s dishes. Several minutes of life that Dorothy would never get back were passed swirling a piece of toilet paper over the bathroom floor to gather and discard the strands of hair she had missed that morning. Holding open the refrigerator door, she took a long drink of seltzer directly from the bottle, closed the refrigerator, and checked her email. Nothing. Waiting time was agony, particularly when one had no idea what one was waiting for.

  She got up from the couch, walked ten feet, and threw herself onto the bed. She looked at the window and saw reflected against the dark background an indistinct human shape. She opened the bank application on her phone and checked the balance. Scrolling through the account, she felt the usual rising tide of panic accompanied by the also-usual numb sense that her decisions were bad because they could not matter; as she would never get ahead, there was no reason not to fall behind. She got out of the bed and tugged shut the gray curtain, wiping her own face from the windowpane. On her way out of the room she caught sight of her midsection in the mirror that rested against the wall between the bed and the dresser. The ancient notion that art holds up a mirror to reality was complicated in the eighteenth century by the idea that the mirror of art ought to reflect only certain parts of reality, those that people should imitate. Then there was Oscar Wilde: It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

  “Okay!” said Dorothy out loud, stressing the exclamation. She retrieved the toolbox from under the kitchen sink and located nails and hammer. A change would do her good. She hung the mirror on the wall, horizontal-wise. She stepped back and noted with satisfaction that she could no longer see below her neck.

  * * *

  —

  Back on the couch with the bottle of seltzer. The couch creaking gently, like a boat at sea. Dorothy thought about the bleached-white coral. She thought about the icebergs and microplastics. The raft children were floating back into view when it happened, the turn of the key and Rog was in the room. He peeled her a clementine. One by one she curled off the white veins and collected them in her hand. The juice rinsed her teeth.

  “Hey,” Rog said, coming out of the bedroom in an old T-shirt, now stretched tight across the middle. “Did you hang the mirror sideways?”

  The foot pedal of the trash can was broken, so Dorothy pried up the lid with a finger and flapped her other hand over the bag until the pith floated down. Pondering lace, snow, feather pillows, and other softnesses she hadn’t seen in years. Tallying, for the umpteenth time, the kitchen trash times a billion. The landfills would be ancient ruins that the giant cockroaches of the future would revel in as palaces. She and Rog really did need to start composting. What they would do with all that fertile soil, Dorothy had no idea. Leave it downstairs on the free table in the lobby? Would their neighbors know what to do?

  “Why,” she said, “do people always ask if you’ve done something instead of asking why you did it?”

  “There are no ‘people’ here,” Rog said, too sweetly, like he was speaking for the record and wanted to be found blameless. “It’s just me. The actual person you live with.”

  The rage flared so suddenly that Dorothy closed her eyes to block it out. She exhaled and counted down like her therapist had taught her. The feeling passed.

  “Anyway,” said Rog, “now I’m just a head. I can’t see if my clothes match.”

  Dorothy shrugged. Like many of their interactions since the onset of the blight, this one was at once fraught and deflated. Dorothy was neither disappointed in Rog nor gratified by him. She had entered a period in which he did not pertain.

  She riffled through the stack of mail, and while Rog put spaghetti on plates she retrieved her phone from the rug and checked the bank balance again. They ate the spaghetti on the bed wh
ile watching a cartoon about a depressed horse. Dorothy liked the show’s theme song, which played over the end credits, but the Web-based streaming service automatically started the next episode before the song ended, so while Rog looked at his phone she paused the second episode, navigated back to the menu, selected the episode they had just concluded, fast-forwarded through it until the credits, and quickly double-clicked to prevent the next episode from playing. It was perverse, the effort a person had to exert to achieve closure.

  “You know how we used to joke about how we wanted to be the first to die in the apocalypse?” Dorothy said, when the brief and poignant song had faded. “Because our glasses would break?”

  “Do we have to talk about this now?” Rog asked, standing up with his dirty plate in hand.

  She rubbed the tops of her feet, which ached from causes she could not identify, and followed him into the kitchen. While in the past, she said, it would have made sense to die in the first wave—to burn up in a nuclear holocaust, for example—in the present, ongoing, mobile disaster one should aspire to survive, hide, and migrate. To be the tiny rodent darting among the corpses of dinosaurs. To be the rat with the fun-size chip bag.

  Rog’s head was in the refrigerator. “Did you do any work today?” he asked.

  “This is what my class is about,” said Dorothy. “There won’t be one sudden and final end everywhere but many small ends in different places. The world is ending all the time but only in a limited and immediate radius. It’s not the nuclear fear we were raised on.”

  “Who is this ‘we’ you’re referring to?” asked Rog. “What decade were you born in?”

  Rog cracked a beer and winced at the sound. Dorothy ignored him. Rog was a minimizer, and while minimizers had their usefulness re: tamping down mass hysteria, it was important not to be derailed by them. What a strange and old-fashioned collective experience, she said, the idea that people could all die together in one heaven-bound moment; today you had to first watch other people, some of whom lived very far away and others of whom were technically neighbors, die online, and you couldn’t save them, and all the while you could be next. It almost made you understand the appeal of a cult. And although it was redundant to wish for your own death at the first sign of trouble, she went on, pulling a piece of semi-hard spaghetti up from the bottom of the unwashed pot and chewing it contemplatively, although one had to seek habitable ground, one could not let geographic strategy blind oneself to the overwhelming power and machinations of fortune. Resigning oneself to fate was the key.

  The spaghetti was chewy and also crunchy. She pried up another piece (only a little starch got lodged in her fingernail) and ate that one, too. Water was running in the sink while Rog told the dishwasher, with a little smile, that he was glad Dorothy no longer intended to kill herself as soon as she ran out of contact lenses, which for years had been her solution, back when worst-case survival scenarios were the subject of a popular board game.

  “Do you ever think about being dragged for miles in a mudslide?” Dorothy asked the empty Tupperware container Rog had taken out of the cupboard to store the extra sauce, making no move to put sauce into it.

  “The people who die in natural disasters are the people who don’t heed the warnings to get out,” Rog said, not unkindly.

  “I’m asking what it feels like,” said Dorothy. “Not who deserves it.

  “What about the people who get burned alive in their cars driving from the fires?” Dorothy pressed on. “The fires start so fast, they don’t have time to be warned.”

  Rog’s idea of comfort was to say the same thing over and over until Dorothy capitulated to reason. “We don’t live in a fire zone,” he said. “And if we are ever warned to evacuate, we will evacuate right away.”

  “Trust me,” Dorothy said. “I would be only too happy to be forced to abandon everything.”

  Rog shot her a wounded look. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Not you,” she said. “I just mean, imagine if you came home one day and the apartment had burned to the ground. Imagine how free you would feel.”

  “If you want to declutter,” said Rog, “that’s a different conversation.”

  Dorothy reached down and rearranged the plates in the dishwasher to maximize the space. In the drying rack the knives were sticking blade up at attention. She asked which glass was hers and Rog couldn’t remember so she dumped both and took a new one from the cupboard and filled it with water from the sink and drank it. She retrieved her phone from the couch. The rainbow was all over Instagram. She liked photos until she ran out of photos to like. She raked her fingers through her hair and spun the strands into a little clump that she thrust into her pocket to deal with later.

  “When’s the last time you disinfected your phone?” she yelled to the kitchen, but he was saying something about the rainbow.

  Rog sat down on the couch and looked at his phone. Dorothy sat next to him and looked at her phone.

  “Hey,” Rog said, glancing up. “Did you have therapy today?”

  Dorothy shook her head. “I canceled it,” she said.

  “But she’s the cheap one,” he said, and, when Dorothy didn’t laugh, asked in his serious tone, which was lower and more deliberate, if she was okay. Dorothy shrugged.

  “It’s none of her business,” she said.

  A good thing about Rog was that he knew how to respect someone’s privacy. He believed in the ideal of protecting the solitude of the other. He didn’t say, “You pay her to make things her business,” or, “You can talk about it with me,” or even, “It was mine, too.” He had a tact that was rare, or maybe he had other things to do. He kissed the top of Dorothy’s head and went into the bedroom. Dorothy stayed on the couch and took out the Kafka story. She had to finish it; she had to finish something. As she read she took notes to make sure she was paying attention. The little dog wanted answers but could not get them. Something unspeakable forbade the singing dogs from making contact, even though greetings seemed to be fundamental to dog law. And why did they keep standing up and showing their genitals? Why were they so compelled to expose their shame? Was it an act of aggression or abjection? They bared themselves, and exposed their nakedness to full view and in so doing had been expelled from the community, lost their status as dogs, which would explain—

  Suddenly a crash.

  “Fuck!” Rog exclaimed.

  He had been taking the mirror down when it slipped and banged on the floor and cracked. There wasn’t any broken glass to be swept away but now whichever way you hung it, it split you in two—like a magician had come along, dazzled the crowd with half a trick, and forgotten to put you back together.

  “I’ll order a new one,” said Dorothy.

  She put the story aside and opened the browser on her phone. She found the same mirror or one close enough and bought it; she checked her email for the confirmation and marked it as read. Productivity begat productivity. She plumped the pillows on the sofa and put away Rog’s shoes that were littered across the rooms. She got a paper bag out from under the sink and collected all the credit card offers, magazines, catalogs, and notices from congressional representatives that were spread across two tables and a credenza. She threw away their bank statement, first ripping it into tiny strips to protect their personal information. She swiped under the sofa with a paper towel to collect the stray hairs and dust. She straightened the piles of books and hung Rog’s jackets and belts that were draped over the furniture and after that she felt much better.

  It was too late to think any more. Dorothy changed her panty liner (she wore the kind with wings) and rinsed out her nightguard, which no matter how much warm water she ran it under, remained a yellowish shade of tartar and permanently speckled with black. She clicked it over her teeth (it trapped saliva onto a coat over the teeth, which seemed to counteract re: hygiene whatever benefits it conferred re: grinding) and swallow
ed. She got under the covers, curling herself into a ball so tight that Rog would not dare touch her anywhere but on her head. He put her to bed, petting her like a cat, saying, “Sweet dreams” and “shhhhh.” Four hours later she woke fully rested from a successful REM cycle, sat at the table, and finished “Investigations of a Dog.” She didn’t understand why the dog ended the story by talking about freedom. What, she thought, does freedom have to do with anything? She had never been liberated by investigation. How sad, she thought, to be jealous of a fictional dog. She went back to bed, wearing earplugs this time, to block out the snuffling noises that emanated from Rog’s mouth. An hour later, when she woke up to pee, she popped out the nightguard and left it, sticky with saliva, on the dresser that doubled as a nightstand.

  Her eyes were slow to adjust to the harsh bathroom light. When she wiped, something stringy was on the paper and she felt it snap back a little, so she put a finger inside and pulled. A short elastic band of gunk came out, looped around the first knuckle. She rubbed her fingers together and deposited it in the toilet, where it settled on the surface of the water like kelp. The blood on the panty liner was jewel red and gelatinous and a little thinner and underneath it was brown like dead leaves. She rubbed a finger on the red part and put the finger on her tongue.

  She had never tasted menstrual blood, but she had to assume it was the same taste, although it was possible, of course, that pregnancy hormones had saturated the blood and affected the taste. Maybe she was tasting hormones, or stale hormones. Dorothy didn’t know enough to know if that was scientific or not, and anyway she couldn’t think of anything to compare the taste to. Without a comparison she had no way to understand what was happening and no way to remember it. She wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.