Burn Season
Fires had been lit at approved intervals all around the edges of the city so that it was possible to stand at the top of the tallest parking ramp in town and know exactly where the border was. This happened once a year and even though she lived in an apartment where she wasn’t even allowed to have a grill or a fish or a waterbed or any other extra-elemental feature—no garden, no aerosol cleaning products, no unattended candles, no heated blankets or mattress pads, no smoking, no pets (including lizards), no in-home laundry devices, no wet vacuums or Swiffers—Rose received a letter from the city informing her of the dates of the “Official Outdoor Burning Window” at the end of every August.
The window was opened for the two months that Rose thought of as the year’s Point of No Return: the critical juncture at which turning back or reversing becomes impossible. During this window, she considered dropping out of college and moving to a state that did not have seasons; these two things, school and seasons, were inextricable for Rose. She had a fantasy about a place where there were no bells or stop signs and the sun and moon were always in the sky at the same time.
It was just the start of the Burning Window, two weeks into classes, and the windows were open in the lecture hall where her philosophy professor who might have actually been a TA—she went to a Big Ten school, it was really hard to know who was who—started talking about the clearing. He kept calling it Da Sign, like a song by a nineties R & B girl group and pointing to a circle he had drawn in chalk on the blackboard. For a while, Rose had not been focused on anything but the weirdness of this circle that the professor kept tapping his chalk on emphatically, as if the students in front of him were unfamiliar with the shape.
Eventually, he wrote the word for Da Sign in the middle of the circle: Dasein.
“German, capital D,” he said and then he confirmed he was a TA by reading enthusiastically from his lecture notes, “There is a clearing, a lighting. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.”
Rose looked out the open window at the sky veiled by smoke from the controlled fires at the edges of the town. The school had sent out an email telling the student body to wear masks, carry eye drops, and offer assistance to anyone coughing uncontrollably. She flicked the elastic strap of her surgical mask against her cheek once and then turned to the TA. She would, she decided, stay in town at least through the semester. She wanted to know everything there was to know about the clearing so she would know it when she got there.
Because it was maybe the last really hot day of the year, most people had given up on trying to embrace the season. Mouths had been overexposed to the acidity of farmer’s market tomatoes and eggplant and skin had been burnt by the sun that, like a civil war surgeon on a busy day, sliced the ozone open and left it.
Rose was practicing a style of living she had seen a lifestyle blogger post about called Anti-Surging. It was similar to off-season vacation travelling, but it applied to everything. The basic principle was that if most people are not interested in doing a specific thing in a specifically place at a specific time, Rose would do it to avoid those people. She went to the movies in the morning, shopped in big box stores in the middle of the night, and studied in the library during sport’s games her university was involved with.
Anti-surge living hadn’t really started intentionally. It had begun as an insomnia treatment that didn’t work. If she was still awake when the sun started to rise, Rose would get out of bed and go to the grocery store. It was here that she learned she loved the world with no one in it. She loved how, if she got up early enough, it really did seem as if it all started over every day. The freshness of the dew-covered earth, the cleanliness of the just-mopped grocery aisles, the pyramidal orderliness of the newly-organized piles of fruits and vegetables.
She thought it was a fantastic thing to be able to walk in the middle of the street. She always had. When she was a kid, if she or any of the other kids in her neighborhood found themselves alone in the middle of the subdivision’s streets they were obligated to wave a stick and yell, “I’m the King of Summer!” She didn’t know who started that trend. Maybe it was her. It was great, though, to be alone like that. In fact, that’s how she regarded The Clearing: a space of aloneness, untouchability.
Because it had been such an insufferably hot summer—one struck through with dry thunder and crackling branches—her Anti-surging had led her to hot yoga in a damp room. It was the only place she went where everyone knew her name, but that’s because it was a part of the yoga instructor’s job description to greet every customer personally when they walked in the door.
The girl behind the desk sat on a big blue inflatable ball. She bounced with excitement at the appearance of Rose in the doorway.
“Mimi, Rose is here!” she yelled into the studio. The schedule said Mimi was the teacher for that evening’s Lunar Flow class.
“Roooose!” Mimi trilled from the swampy depths of the studio.
They were excited because only three people had signed up for class, and Rose was one of them. They thought she was there because she was committed to hot yoga. They didn’t know about Anti-surging and judging from the Rumi quotes they read at the start of class, Rose didn't think they’d be interested.
She unrolled her mat at the distant edge of the studio, as far as it was possible to be from the woman lying prone on the other side of the room. Rose had seen this woman before: her name was Jill and she was in her sixties and had probably spent her life in an ashram. Her arms looked like tree roots busting through the sidewalk.
There was a thermometer in the studio Rose liked to keep her eye on because if it got over a 103 degrees, she would go ahead and just lie down on her mat in corpse pose for the rest of class. There wasn’t supposed to be time in the yoga room, but maybe they couldn’t find a thermometer without a clock and that’s how Rose knew it was only one minute to the moment when Mimi would swirl her wooden wand around in her copper sound bowl and the class would start. She felt a little bit of excitement at the prospect of being almost alone in the studio, of all the room on one side of her and the mirror on the other, when a man in old red basketball shorts and a white tank top—the kind that’s supposed to be worn under a dress shirt and never seen—walked in.
His only real option was to unroll his mat right in the center of the room, equidistant from Rose and Jill. It was unspoken yoga etiquette.
Instead, he walked across the room and unrolled a black mat directly next to Rose’s, two palm-widths away. That was spoken yoga etiquette: mats must be at least two palm-widths apart.
Wide-eyed, Rose looked to Mimi, but Mimi was sitting on a cushion at the front of the room with her eyes reverently closed, her wand dipping into her noise bowl, preparing to vibrate.
For a second, Rose thought about rolling up her mat and moving to the middle of the room but that would involve moving her cork blocks, her blanket, and her bolster. It would take more than one trip and she had never seen anyone move their mat after class had started. It would be a Thing and then she’d have to endure the awkwardness she had produced for the next seventy-five minutes.
The man was sitting quietly with the backs of his hands resting on his knees, his thumb and pointer finger pressed together in what Rose knew to be called a mudra. It was impossible, now, to move.
Mostly, Rose spent the class reminding herself that this was Okay. He didn’t glance at her as her clothes dampened like some of the older men at the studio did. In fact, she was probably the one looking at him too much. He was one of those people who managed to keep their eyes closed through the entire class, like they were having a public dream.
During trikonasana, Rose stared openly at the rainbow colored tattoos on his inner-wrists. On his right: EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT and on the left: SO IT GOES. She knew the font was Garamond and she guessed the quotes were from some early 2000s band: Neutral Milk Hotel or Modest Mouse or something else morose that her parents had in their record collection. Something she twirled to as a child.
Distantly, she watched as his stray drops of sweat flew into her space. She stepped all the way off her mat when he, eyes still shut, did not scoot to one side or the other during forward folding. Staggering, they called it. When we stand up I’ll see what the temperature is and then maybe I'll just lie down for the rest of this she thought, and then she fainted.
The last thing she remembered hearing was them saying her name again and again like a command in the wrong tense: Rose, Rose, Rose.
Actually, it was a landfill fire.
That’s why the air was so thick, why everyone everywhere was coughing up grey film scrapped off the walls of the lungs like algae from the sides of a dirty aquarium. One of the controlled burns hadn’t been controlled enough. Or, it had, but the fire spread anyway. The fire department wasn’t assigning blame: it happened like that sometimes, no matter how much a farmer wetted the dry grass around the property, a freak blade could catch and drift. It was more likely in drought conditions, of course.
Rose’s landlord had taped the notice to her door that informed her the landfill was now on fire. “Please hold your waste until further notice,” it read cryptically.
The landlord, Mr. Green, was a retired attorney, so all of his correspondence was so clear and singularly interpretable that it passed over into confusing, like looking too close at your own reflection in a magnifying mirror. Rose placed the note back on the door for the downstairs tenant to see. When she came out tomorrow morning, she knew the note would be gone but there would be no evidence that the downstairs tenant had ever walked on her porch. She had never met him and only knew his name because he occasionally received mail in their adjoined mailboxes.
He was the best neighbor Rose had ever had: totally silent. When her friends came over, she joked that he might actually be a ghost because she had never seen or heard him. Then one day, she had stopped in the shared parking lot behind their house to take a photo of herself in the spring light because she had spent a long time doing her make up in such a way as to appear that she wasn’t wearing any. Normally, she would never stand in her backyard with her phone extended as far away from her face as possible while trying to keep her face relaxed, as if unaware that she herself was taking a photo. But that day, she did, and when she got in the car to look at her pictures, she gasped. The neighbor was there in her photo, looming in the background, looking at her looking into the camera.
She hurried from her car to her house and vice versa after that, often leaving the old Honda unlocked so she wouldn’t have to pause before getting in or out. It just seemed safer.
When she heard him say her name from the end of the grocery store aisle, she felt like she was in a play in high school. Like it had been rehearsed, even though it should have been a shock to see the guy from yoga class in the Kroger in the middle of the night. It should always be a shock to hear one’s name from a stranger’s lips, but for some reason it wasn’t. Rose felt resigned even before she turned to face Kyle Johns amongst the cereal boxes.
She knew his name was Kyle Johns because after she had fainted, he had stacked up a bunch of yoga rugs to make a sort of low couch and sat with her in the lobby until she felt better. It was the yoga studio’s rule that if anyone fainted in class, they had to stay in the lobby with someone else for half an hour before they could leave. Mimi had wanted to stop class and sit with Rose herself, but Jill had looked amazed, potentially enraged, at the prospect of not completing namaskar B on her left side and so Kyle had quickly volunteered.
Rose had never fainted before. Upon waking, her first instinct was to repeatedly tell everyone in the room she was okay while trying to sit up. She was possessed by a deep animal instinct that compelled her to hide while she was weak and it was in this state of confusion that she tried to get Kyle to let her leave by assuring him that she felt “fine” and had simply “not slept much the night before.”
This information had the opposite effect she had intended. Instead of agreeing that she probably was fine and letting her slink off to her car where she planned to sit in a stupor until she felt like not sitting in a stupor any longer, Kyle had leaned forward intently and looked her deeply in the eyes. Then he took one of her wrists between his fingertips like the nurse at her high school used to do to the anorexics after gym. It was really awkward, more awkward even than when he had placed his mat right next to hers only thirty minutes before.
Presumably, he was taking her pulse. She wasn’t sure though because he didn’t remark on the rate of her heart after letting her wrist free. Instead, he very seriously said, “Sleep is the foundation of life.”
“No, I know,” she hastened to agree, as if she, too, believed her insomnia was both a choice and an error.
“Sleep disorders are extremely serious,” he added gravely.
She both took offense to and felt relieved by the phrase sleep disorder. The urge to give what had been happening—or rather, not happening, the not-ness of never falling asleep—a name was strong. The offensive part was that this strange man presumed to know her well enough to diagnose her. Rose had spent hard hours in psychiatrist’s offices explaining that she had endured no trauma, had never been molested, never been assaulted, really, never even been insulted in a way that stuck with her. Her mother was the same, she would offer by way of explanation. Her mother didn’t sleep either. In fact, Rose would tell them, her earliest memory was of standing outside her mother’s bedroom door, locked during midday, and wondering when she would come out. She wasn’t allowed to knock, in case her mother was asleep. One doctor had steepled her hands and nodded sympathetically before diagnosing Rose with PTSD, which, she said, could be caused by the insecurity felt by a child with a distant mother just as easily as it was commonly understood to be caused by “bombs and battle.”
Rose and the therapist spent a lot of time talking about making meaningful connections with others and being “wholehearted” after that. No matter how many friends Rose made, though, or how whole she felt like her heart was getting, Rose didn’t sleep.
That phrase the doctor had used stuck, though: bombs and battle. She imagined it rolling across her brain, slow and heavy, like the tread of tank as she lay in bed, not sleeping.
No, she didn’t have PTSD. She didn’t have anything with such a clear origin, such an articulate branching out.
This sweaty man with the sad tattoos was right: she had a sleep disorder.
She could see Mr. Green’s note affixed to her door from the driveway.
The downstairs neighbor had disregarded the original note instructing them both to hold their waste and instead had continued to put his heavy-strength Glad bags in the shared trashcan. For her part, Rose had begun to fill grocery sacks with non-recyclables—banana peels, coffee grounds, eggs shells, bones—before placing them in her freezer. She carefully rinsed hummus containers, paper wrappers from the tacos she sometimes bought, and the aluminum shells take out from the Thai place came in. She could make it another month, at least, before she took out the trash.
So it was in no way her fault that the immaculate backyard had begun to smell. Rose had seen a possum scurry across the yard that morning. In advance, she resented the implication that this was in any way her responsibility since surely the note on her door regarded the trash.
But it didn’t.
“Due to the recent unseasonably dry summer, a large branch on the oak tree at the northwest corner of your property has cracked and disturbed the electric cables connected to the downstairs floor of your shared property. In order to restore power to the property beneath your own [Apt A], an electrician [Dale Williams of Homewood Electric] requires access to the power supply closet located in your kitchen. Please expect Mr. Williams between the hours of 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. on September 8th.”
Rose blinked and looked at her phone. It was 4:30 and today was September 8th. The correspondence was dated September 6th, 4:00 p.m.
All of Mr. Green’s requests to enter her home were delivered precisely 48 hours in advance, per the state’s landlord-tenant agreement.
Somehow, she had missed the note.
She was surprised, but not really. She had been missing a lot of things since she had gone to the student health center and announced very confidently to a doctor she had never met before that she had a Sleep Disorder. He was a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist, and so he didn’t try to talk to her about “underlying causes” like the physiatrists had. He wrote her a prescription for a pill with a lime green moth on the box.
“Don’t take this until you’re in bed, lying down,” the pharmacist had told her. “Most people don’t realize it’s working until they’re asleep, so it’s dangerous to take the pill before you’re ready.”
The pharmacist was right. Rose had no memory at all of the space between believing the pill was not working and waking up the next morning. She felt hazy, like she was covered in sleeping bags, and she realized the pill had a moth on the box because it made you feel like you were trapped in a cocoon. The thought came to her very logically. Later that day, though, she couldn’t remember how to navigate between buildings on campus. She stood outside the philosophy department and had no sense of the edges of the university. It was like jumping off the diving board and hitting the pool’s surface too hard: she knew she was surrounded, but had no sense of which direction to go. Eventually, she opened Google maps on her phone and let the electronic voice guide her the quarter mile to the library.
The pill quit working after the first night. The Internet said that meant she wasn’t “metabolizing” it correctly: it was in her system, but she couldn’t get it out.
Dale Williams of Homewood Electric was imperturbable. He was not perturbed to find Rose standing on her porch, staring at her own door and he was not perturbed to find that the house was locked and Rose could not locate her key. He had his own key to the property, given to him by Mr. Green, which he cheerfully slid into the lock before walking into Rose’s home. She followed behind him like she was a guest, trailing him up the steps and through the house as he looked for the power supply closet. She had forgotten that Mr. Green had mentioned it was in the kitchen.
After walking around her bedroom, pushing aside a row of dresses in her overstuffed closet, and opening the cabinet in the bathroom where Rose kept her uncontained DivaCup, nude and womb-ish, he had finally located the small door to the power supply closet behind her microwave.
Dale remained cheerful throughout the search, commenting on the items in Rose’s house, and, at one point, lighting a cigarette. Once he had done what needed to be done in the cabinet, he leaned against her kitchen counter and ashed in her sink before coughing pointedly.
“Dry out,” he said.
“Oh,” Rose followed his gaze to the mostly full carton of Vitamin Water she had purchased at the CostCo before the trash ban began.
“Would you…like a drink?”
He selected XXX, which was fine with Rose because it was no one’s favorite flavor. Who wanted to drink black water?
Dale Williams did, apparently. He tipped his head back and poured the water into his mouth in such a way that the long, cartilaginous tube of his throat was exposed. It was milk white and it undulated right in front of Rose like a snake digesting. She wanted to look away, but she was horrified and the sleeping pill was dulling her flight impulse. It was dulling all her impulses, actually.
When he finished the bottle, his eyes fell to Rose’s, which were still transfixed on his throat. The kitchen was narrow, “galley style,” and somehow whilst trying to locate the power supply closet, Rose had gotten herself positioned at the dead end of it, trapped between the stove and a wall.
When Dale’s body began to lean towards hers and his head dipped down, she was confused. Was he fainting? His eyes were opened. When his mouth began to pilot towards her, already opened a little bit, like it had a broken hinge, she realized he meant to kiss her. Her first impulse was to laugh; it struck her as hilarious that he had mistaken her dead-eyed stare for attraction.
She had never actually laughed in someone’s face before, right up close. It happened and then she heard herself apologizing for it, watching as his face passed from stunned to angry only inches away from her. His fingers were suddenly digging into her waist and before she registered that he shouldn’t be touching her, she registered that she was going to have a five small bruises imprinted on her left ribcage. Then she heard screaming, high and raw.
It was herself, Rose realized, as she watched Dale Williams lift his palms in front of his chest in the universal gesture of hands off. He backed away from her with his eyebrows raised, incredulous.
“Hey, you were looking at me, lady,” he said as he picked up the toolbox he had carried in with him.
Rose stood frozen in her kitchen as she listened to him let himself out of her house, listened to him mutter, “Crazy bitch,” before locking the door behind him.
Rose wondered if the downstairs neighbor had heard her screaming. She wondered where her house keys were. She wondered if it was time to quit taking the sleeping pill.
Everything OK?
Rose’s mother actively cultivated an aura of omniscience, a mundane clairvoyance. For most of Rose’s life, it had been a normal mom thing; an I-have-eyes-in-the-back-of-my-head low-level form of domestic surveillance. After her parent’s divorced nearly ten years ago, though, her mother had begun to casually assert that she was an actual psychic and had begun to call Rose in a panic because of a dream or a bad feeling or an omen. Anything could be an omen. The wrong arrangement of numbers on a receipt or a dog with a weird bark or the death of a child who resembled Rose in a movie had the potential to serve as a weird portent.
So Rose was not surprised by the text from her mother that awoke her that morning. She ignored it because she knew her mom would call to follow up and she did, mere minutes later. Rose was surprised to find out that her mother was returning a call Rose had made to her the day before.
“You sounded pretty out of it in your message, Rosie. Are you sure everything is okay?”
“Out of it? No, I didn’t.” Rose could not yet remember calling. She may have sounded out of it.
“You said you couldn’t find your building? On campus?”
Oh. Rose remembered now. She had gotten disoriented from the moth pills and had made the mistake of calling her mom.
“Oh. Well, I found it.”
She was more concerned that she had panicked enough to appeal to her mother for help than she was that the pills had locked her out of her own memories.
Her mother asked one more time if Rose was okay and then she sighed and told a long story about how she had been on a date when Rose called and that’s why she hadn’t answered. She had recently “registered” herself on a dating app and was going out with “all kinds of real cooks” who she frequently had “a bad feeling” about.
Rose had grown up watching crime shows with her mother. The shows were usually structured around a vivid reenactment of violence against women, so Rose was not surprised to hear that her mother’s telepathy was now manifesting as suspicion of strange men. The man she had gone out with the day before had, apparently, talked about his ex-wife too much. Rose considered, briefly, telling her mother that her friend Diane had gone out with a man who revealed midway through the date that he had been possessed by demons since a séance went wrong a few years before or that her other friend Christy had gone out with a guy who lived in unincorporated territory to avoid laws that might regulate his snake farm and so talking about an ex too much didn’t qualify as malicious, but she didn’t.
She counted to thirty and then said she had to go to a yoga class. This was her usual excuse; as far as her mother knew, Rose was obsessed with yoga.
“Rose?” Kyle said her name like it was an astonishing question, like people do when they run into someone they knew from kindergarten at the airport. He said it like he was trying to recognize her across both time and space.
They met in the middle of the cereal aisle, next to the oatmeal.
“Hey, Kyle,” she responded casually, as if her calm could diffuse his excitement.
He was holding one of the little red baskets that single men always took at the door of the grocery store, no matter how many groceries they intended to buy. A frozen pizza, some avocados, PowerBars, and a bag of Epsom salts were spilling over the sides.
“Can’t sleep, either?” he asked.
She leaned against her empty cart and opened her mouth to say that it was too hot to sleep, but instead she said, “I feel like I’m just living whatever life.”
He nodded like that made a lot of sense.
“There aren’t any edges,” she added and gestured, weirdly, to the aisles on either side of them.
“It can be hard to find your bearings when your circadian rhythms are off,” he agreed.
“No, it’s not that,” He was still wearing his yoga clothes. Not the same ones from class, but similar. “Well, maybe. What’s a circadian rhythm? The waves your brain makes when you’re sleeping?”
“Sort of. But more like a calendar your body stays on for 24 hour cycles.”
“Like my body has appointments?”
“Sure. Good sleep hygiene means making sure the appointments don’t get disrupted.”
“But what disrupts them?”
“Lots of things,” he said, “Excessive darkness, excessive light, alcohol, stress, fear. Anything that punctures the surface of your sense of being in the world.”
“But I’m normal,” Rose extend her arms a little ways out from her body as if to display how whole they were. Her left side twinged, momentarily, “There are no punctures.”
He looked her up and down for a moment as if measuring her for an invisible gown and then he reached out his hand, “May I?”
She stared blankly.
“May I take your hand?”
Rose had heard rumors that the philosophy midterm would be just one short question. She was ethically opposed to listening to rumors, but she wished she had made an exception on this one because it was true; there were just three baffling words at the top of a sheet of unlined white paper.
WHAT IS MEANING?
A 35-cent bluebook from the University Bookstore, purchased especially for this exam, sat on her desk. Rose hovered her pencil above the extra-thin bluebook paper and wrote: Meaning differs from human to human, philosopher to philosopher. She then wrote down the names of all the men they had talked about so far that semester on different spots on the page in front of her, so that KIERKEGAARD, NEITZCHE, HEIDEGGER, JAMES, and TOLSTOY were positioned across the page like stars in a constellation. Next, she connected the stars with grammatically bloated sentences which led to whatever idea she could remember about each man: DENY, OBEY, POWER, FAITH, and AUTHENTICITY. Once she had filled any additional whiteness on the page with everything else she could remember (dates, cities of birth, superlatives) she assessed her writing and decided it looked pretty much like an essay. It had the same shape, anyway: square, lined left to right.
All around the lecture hall, other students were writing rapidly, flipping the pages of their blue books quickly. It struck her as supernatural, suddenly, to be here with all of them and know she would never know what they had written. The night before she had dreamt that she was here, in this lecture hall with these people, but everyone was still wearing their surgical masks from the burning season. The T.A. was at the lectern, gesticulating toward the chalkboard, but no noise came from his mouth. Rose stood to approach the T.A., to tell him he wasn’t speaking, and realized the floor was smothered in autumn leaves, wall to wall. She couldn’t see anyone’s feet or ankles and the room was very hot. Not hot like July, hot like fire. Smoke was sifting up through the leaves all around her and she knew the floor was aflame. It was brushing against her face like fur, like an animal she was very allergic to. Her eyes watered and her throat began to shrink and as she lifted her hands to remove her mask and tell the class that they were engulfed in flames, she simultaneously realized she would die if she removed her mask but she could not speak with it on.
She regarded her blue book once more and then tore it in half. In the whiteness of the blank sheet of paper upon which the exam’s single question was posed, she drew a circle that touched, and went beyond, the edges of the confines of the page.
I must have slept last night, was her only thought as she placed her exam on a stack of bluebooks at the front of the lecture hall. She wondered what had happened next in the dream, she wondered if she had taken off her mask and smothered or if she stayed silent and let them all die.
Kyle had pressed her hand so deep into the soft space beneath his sternum that her fingers had touched the edges of his ribs on either side.
She hadn’t really agreed to let him to take her hand, but she hadn’t disagreed either.
“This is the third chakra,” he said meaningfully, “It is from here that you manifest your power in the world. Its element is fire and its energy at high frequency burns bright gold.”
“How do I know what…frequency I’m at?”
Rose had never wanted a bright gold stomach before, had never though at all about the volume or color of her energy. In fact, she had never really thought about her energy at all, but standing in the blue-bleak halogen lights of the Kroger in the middle of the night, as far as possible from sunset and sunrise, she wanted to be gold very much.
“Your frequency is very low,” Kyle said without hesitation. “Women with a healthy solar plexus chakra radiate their sense of power into the world around them. In Sanskrit, this chakra is named Manipura, which means Seat of the Gem. A woman with a high frequency in this chakra knows her worth. She manifests. Her breath smells like rosemary and bergamot. When she dreams, she dreams of walking into a cave of citrine and tiger’s eye. Her element is fire, the most radical and transient of energies.” Her hand remained pressed into his stomach even as his eyes glazed and his tone took on the dogmatic lull of a prayer or pledge or any other sacrament repeated unto oblivion. Abruptly, his voice lilted and rose until he almost sounded like he must have sounded as a child, clever and uncertain, and he made direct eye contact as he repeated, “Your frequency is very low. You have no idea how much you’re worth. You don’t even know what you mean to you.”
Yes, I do, Rose thought, but she didn’t say it aloud.
He shook his head slowly from side to side, as though he had heard her thoughts and disagreed. The overhead light shone oddly on his cornea, a metallic green, like sun glinting off of a lizard’s eye.
She meant to say, “I’ve got to go” and to turn and walk decisively down the cereal aisle, out the sliding doors, and to her car, but instead she jerked her hand out of his clasp and said, “But I dream of fire.”
“You dream of annihilation,” he corrected, “Your dreams want you to believe you should fear your own power. Your dreams keep you separated from yourself, and from others.”
“You don’t know me,” she said, but she wondered if somehow he did.
Her therapist had said something similar but she had used lots of self words: self-worth, self-esteem, self-love. She had said that the adult children of withdrawn parents sometimes doubt they exist. “You must learn to be your own mother, Rose,” the therapist had pronounced gravely.
“You’re right,” Kyle agreed, “No one knows you, Rose, because you do not want to be known. You’ve made yourself invisible.”
Rose was so exhausted that her mouth had begun to taste like another person’s mouth. Another person who did not brush their teeth; who sucked on batteries. A crazy person.
But she sat through her philosophy lecture all the way to the end and even waited after while the T.A. handed back the bluebook exams. It was a surprise to her when she flipped over the sheet discreetly placed face-down in front of her to discover a large red question mark in the middle of a circle that touched, and went beyond, the edges of the confines of the page.
She had forgotten her answer, forgotten it completely.
Anti-surge living became simpler and sleeping became more complicated after the seasons changed. The darkness had a way of punctuating the rhythms of other people’s lives, of creating nodes of sociability—holidays and football games and preparation for emergency weather—that Rose found easy to avoid. She quit going to her philosophy lecture and she gave up her hot yoga class, but she wasn’t able to stop thinking about her encounter with Kyle in the cereal aisle.
Without sleep, her memory began to mutate the very shape of her existence. Her life became a pearl necklace knotted again and again by worried hands until it again began to resemble something more oceanic, organic; its original state. In this way, she could no longer remember exactly what had happened in the grocery store. Instead, she tangled parts of the meeting with other events and some non-events: she palimpsested lectures from her class atop dreams atop her waking life.
She had an image in her head—of a sort of orb, a demonic snow globe—in which she saw her apartment from above. In the apartment she watched Kyle walk not on her floor, but on the surface of a bluebook. His feet left dirty prints that she knew to be the correct answers to her philosophy exam. She watched as Kyle walked through her walls. In a layer above this image, she saw herself in her own attic, belly pressed to the floorboards as she listened to his feet move through her rooms. In a layer below, she saw her downstairs’ neighbor’s apartment burning.
In her dreams, the snow-shovels scraping the sidewalk outside her apartment sounded like God’s fingernail trying to pry the lid off the world. The snow emergency had been declared days ago, Rose guessed, and only now was it being addressed. She had left the apartment in the middle of the night a few times and walked right down the middle of the empty streets, leaving behind prints in the unbroken snow, the signature of a living person. Then she had come back home and somehow she had begun to sleep. Now that the world itself was set to anti-surge, Rose could rest.
Her therapist said this was normal for people with PTSD. She claimed ER doctors slept more soundly during the new moon, when there was less light for people to hurt themselves in. She alleged that former combat soldiers lay awake all night until their families got up and began to pop the toaster, flush the toilet, turn on the television. It was the constant noise of living that allowed them to sleep. She said it all had something to do with gravity.
When Rose finally left her house in the light of day, she saw that there were several notes from Mr. Green taped to the door. They were dated December 27th, December 28th, and December 29th. Today was December 30th. This relieved Rose because it explained her mother’s cryptic morning text: Happy Eve’s Eve!
In each of his notes, the landlord expressed an urgent need for Rose to allow a maintenance man access to her home for the purposes of checking the house’s pipes, which he claimed were frozen.
Rose swished the saliva around in her mouth to confirm to herself that she had indeed just brushed her teeth, that she surely turned the faucet in the bathroom on to do so. Her mouth tasted just-brushed, like mint, artificial sweetener, and chalk and she assumed the maintenance man had come in while she was asleep, or, possibly, she had left the house and forgotten.
This revelation came as an enormous relief because recently objects in her apartment had begun to move on their own. A picture in the hallway was askew. The contents of her trashcan appeared disarranged. A kitchen timer she had not set had begun to ring from within a drawer one afternoon.
In the moment of realizing how completely mundane, how explainable, the phenomena of her home’s shifting contents really was, Rose also realized how deeply unexplainable it was that she had not worried more. She had not even mentioned it to anyone.
What would she have said that would not have made her sound insane?
Even now, she didn’t really know if it had been the maintenance man. Perhaps, in her half-sleep, she had set the alarm herself. Perhaps she had bumped the frame in the darkness. Perhaps she had moved through her apartment, invisible even to herself, and disarranged her life.
She collected the notes from Mr. Green and, already exhausted, retreated back inside the house.
Rose hadn’t returned to the Kroger since the encounter, but as the clock neared the final minutes of the year, she found herself boldening.
The streets were filled with the kind of silence that is actually the muffling of noises, the kind of silence awarded during snowstorms and airlift. Rose stared into other people’s homes as she drove to the grocery and saw their outlines illuminated like a cheat sheet written on one’s palm before an exam: blurry and spare.
She saw the borders of the outlines touch and merge until they were only one idea and she knew the grocery would be empty. She tried to remember the text her mother had sent the day before, but could only come up with welcome to the edge’s edge, which was nothing. It was too unreal for even her mother to manifest.
That word, manifest, was the last vestige of her meeting with Kyle. She had never used it prior and had since been trying to exorcise it from her vocabulary but it remained like the scar from an appendectomy: a remnant of a thing with no purpose.
“You fail to manifest,” he had informed her opaquely.
“What does that even mean?” she had asked, “I’m right here. I exist.”
“Your spirit has not yet become real.”
“Are you trying to say that I’m a ghost?”
He shook his head as if he were very sad for her. The memory of his pity hadn’t stayed with her, but it had changed her. “No, I’m saying you haven’t yet stepped into your body. You’re outside yourself.”
She had fought the urge to cry when he said that. Not because it was true, but because it was too personal for one person to say to another. It was the kind of sentiment that was only appropriate said to oneself, in the mirror, late at night.
The word for it, she realized days later as she swept a thin shell of ash from the landfill’s overflow off the windowsills of her apartment, was invasive.
He must have read her crumpled face as a sort of defeat, as an agreement, because he then pulled a square-shaped card out of his wallet and handed it to her in the close-fisted way that teenagers employ when paying for drugs in a high school bathroom.
“There’s help, Rose.” Then he turned and walked away quickly, so the last image she had of him was of the tattoo on his inner-wrist as he handed her the piece of paper: SO IT GOES.
The card was a deep violet, inscribed with a many-petaled silver flower. On its reverse side were the just the words Divine Center for Actualized Living and an address located outside the city limits: 111 Sunlight Street.
Rose had dropped the card in an ashtray outside the Kroger, but the address stayed in her head. It was harder not to Google than to Google, and eventually she found herself in front of her laptop just before sunrise, looking at a Google Earth photo of a small white house. This was all the information she could find about the Divine Center for Actualized Living. There was no website, no Yelp review, no phone number. Just a picture taken by a Google cam of this isolated house and a list of directions that led down a series of county roads that went from concrete to asphalt to gravel to dirt, winnowing into anonymity in less than ten miles.
To remind herself to study for the philosophy midterm Rose placed the blue notebook she took notes for the course in on top of the coffee maker. There were only four places in the apartment she was certain to encounter on a daily basis: her pillow, the bottle that held her green moth sleeping pill, the toilet, and the Mr. Coffee.
She knew she wasn’t eating everyday because the note that reminded her to pay the rent was affixed to a jug of almond milk in the refrigerator that she had managed not to see for at least two days. She realized it was October when Mr. Green called to tell her that her check had not yet arrived.
For several days, Rose had removed the notebook, made her coffee, and dutifully put it back on top of the coffee maker but now it was the day before the exam and there were no more chances to make coffee without studying, so she pushed the Mr. Coffee’s On button and opened the notebook.
In it, there was nothing but sketchings of geometric shapes. On the first page was a circle, followed by a circle inscribed with a triangle, followed by a circle inscribed with overlapping triangles, followed by a series of increasingly complicated images until the last page of the notebook, which was just a coat of graphite, a page entirely obfuscated by darkness.
For a second, she wondered if it was someone else’s notebook but there was her own name on the front upper-right hand corner. The letters of her name wiggled like they weren’t her own, like the tail of lizard after it has detached from its own body. She gripped the counter’s edge and felt her head bow forward. She was overwhelmed by a smell similar to hair burning in a curling iron and just as she was about to sit down on the kitchen tiles she realized one of the dials of the old gas stove was turned, but the burner wasn’t on.
She had no idea how long it had been that way. In fact, had no memory at all of turning on the stove, although it was possible. Obviously, it was possible.
Through the floorboards, Rose heard the downstairs neighbor cough.
In that moment, it became her own home that felt like a surge and Rose felt a strong compulsion to leave, to go anywhere else.
She flicked off the stove dial and scanned the apartment as if she could commit it to memory. Then, she drove to the only place she could think of.
It wasn’t until the door to the little white house began to open that it occurred to Rose that the Divine Center for Actualized Living might just be Kyle’s house. There was no sign in the yard or plaque on the door, nothing to indicate that this might be a school or a church or a place of divinity. It isn’t even a center, Rose thought hysterically as the front door hinged and a wave of Palo Santo and weed cut through the clean morning air. The house was darker inside than outside, lit from within by candles. More candles than Rose had ever seen together outside of a church.
Randomly she thought of thousands of lighters lifted in the darkness of an amphitheater during an encore: secular worship, mundane deification.
But then her eyes adjusted on the figure framed by the door of the white house and she realized it was just a girl dressed in yoga pants and a T-shirt that was too big for her. She looked young, maybe only fifteen, so it was disarming when she used the voice of an adult woman to welcome Rose into the house.
Later, Rose would think that if it hadn’t been a child who invited her to sit on a folded up blanket in an almost empty room so that she could provide her personal information on a form attached to a clipboard like at a dentist’s office, she would have just left. But instead she was as polite as she would have been to a Girl Scout selling cookies door-to-door. She felt a weird obligation; almost as though it would be herself she was letting down if she didn’t do as the girl, who introduced herself as Misty, asked.
Misty explained that morning meditation would not end for another hour so there were no “facilitators” available to welcome Rose. The, she excused herself to prepare a “medicinal tea” while Rose filled out her “intake form.”
Rose filled in the first page, which asked for ordinary details: her full name, address, phone number, etc. It was information she had given out hundreds—possibly thousands—of times in her life on the Internet. It barely felt personal. Neither did the next page, which requested information about her health. It included a small outline of a human body and asked that she circle any areas where she felt physical pain. The next page posed the same image, and asked that she circle areas of emotional pain. After that there was a series of statements that she was supposed to rank from “very likely” to “very unlikely.” The statements said things like: I enjoy the cold or I am purposeful and intense. Rose quickly bubbled her response to several pages of statements, but by the ninth or tenth page she began to hesitate in response to statements such as I have strange sexual compulsions or I believe my organs are not shaped like other people’s organs. It was a statement on the twelfth page, I enjoy the taste of ash, that stopped Rose entirely.
After the TA had returned her bizarre philosophy midterm, Rose retreated to her apartment with a renewed resolve to sleep. She didn’t blame herself for failing the exam and she wasn’t even embarrassed about the specifically odd way in which she had done it. She had some hope that she could explain the answer to the TA and get an extra credit assignment to make up some of the grade. He would understand when she explained that she had not slept the night before the exam; she would use the phrase sleep disorder and he would sympathize. If necessary, she would explain to him that something disturbing had happened to her the day before the exam that had prevented her from studying. She could not picture, exactly, how she would convey that a mere questionnaire had so disturbed her.
“What happened after that?” he might ask and Rose would have to admit she had simply left the white house, unhindered. That she had put the survey on the floor and slipped out the front door, thoroughly unharassed.
Nevertheless, she flipped open her laptop to write the TA and arrange a meeting to discuss the exam. The thought left her head entirely when the screen lit to reveal that her Internet browser was not just open already, but that it was opened to more tabs than she could count. The first page was a search for her own name. Had she done this when she couldn’t sleep? She clicked it closed, but the same search was opened on the next tab. She repeated this a few times until she realized there were too many tabs to bother closing, that she could not keep seeing a search for herself that she couldn’t remember conducting.
It was believable that she had tried to find herself and forgotten.
“You just need to sleep,” Rose said to herself, aloud, as if she were her own mother and then she took double the dose of the green moth pills. She forgot what the pharmacist had said, though, about not taking the pills until she was in bed and so she woke up she slumped on her couch, laptop open in front of her.
She had fallen asleep while searching the phrase Divine Center for Actualized Living. Mid-keystroke, she had lost consciousness and so when she awoke she saw that Google had auto-filled her result so that it now read Divine Center for Actualized Living really a cult?
Rose hated auto-fill, hated how the collective dictated the meaning of the collective.
Firecrackers and the closing bars of Auld Lang Syne drifted across the silence of Rose’s porch. Collectively, the world had decided to cross the boarder into another year.
She knew she hadn’t locked the door—she never did if she was returning home with groceries because she hated to linger on the porch, looking for her keys, setting down and picking up bags. Although it had never happened before, anytime could be the time that the downstairs neighbor decided to check his mail in her presence.
Therefore she was not surprised that her door was unlocked, but she was a little disturbed to see that it was opened just a sliver. Mr. Green, she remembered, had told her to spray the locking mechanism with some kind of aerosol that would prevent the door from sticking and refusing to latch in the winter. Of course she had not done this.
Fresh, cold air infused the normally stale hallway. The January air had leaked into the house quickly and Rose could see her own breath puff out of her mouth as she climbed the staircase. By the time she reached the top steps, though, a gust of heat and the smell of gardenia or hydrangea or geranium—some out-of-season springtime flower—pushed against her face and made her eyes water.
At the top of the stairs, her picture frame was once again tilted. Rose paused and stared at it as though if she looked long enough she would remember the moment she had bumped the photo askew. Beyond the photo, there was something flickering in the living room. An organic glitching; it was the flame of a candle, Rose realized.
Slowly she set her grocery bags down and stepped further into the living room. She was certain everything was as she had left it, except for a candle given to her by her mother for Christmas, which she had placed high on a shelf in a far corner of the room, was glowing.
But Mr. Green says I’m not even allowed to have candles, was Rose’s first thought upon opening the gift and, now, upon finding it lit in her living room.
Her mouth actually opened to call out for her mother, her lips pushed together and her tongue pressed to the back of her teeth to form the bitter pronunciation of Mom she employed when annoyed with her mother. Then Rose felt another wave of heat, this time more clearly drifting towards her from the kitchen, and she felt the word die in her mouth.
The oven, she thought simply.
The oven is burning.
* * *
Life’s perimeters altered after that in the sense that there was no longer any way to see to the edges of anything, no way to know if anything ended or began.
Her mother, for instance, extended much farther than Rose had believed she could. She proved this by standing on Rose’s porch in her New Year’s Eve gown and explaining decisively to the officers she had called to Rose’s apartment what had happened. Rose would never quite understand how her mother had deduced so much from the hysterical message Rose had left for her, but she arrived with a full narrative that the officers noted diligently.
“My daughter has a stalker,” Rose had been most impressed by her mother’s ability to say the word so certainly--stalker—as if it were a thing that existed outside horror movies, “Who has been breaking into her home for several months. He was here tonight.”
Then, she had demanded the officers thoroughly search the house and appoint an hourly patrol to check the premises for the following week while Rose packed her things and moved back home.
And the officers also possessed a largess, a sense of the wideness of experience, Rose had not anticipated. In the end, she did have to explain to them that she did not lock her own doors. She had to tell them about the picture frame that kept moving, the tabs opened on her laptop, the trashcan that had been dug through, and the kitchen timer that sounded on its own.
“When did you begin to suspect a break in, miss?”
The two officers, Rose, and her mother had stood in a tight circle in her living room, as if they were not surrounded by places to sit.
“Tonight,” she admitted.
The officer looked like someone’s dad and he nodded with understanding. Unprompted, she admitted, “I haven’t been sleeping. I thought it was me. I thought I was…haunting myself, or something.”
“That’s common,” the officer said, and he wasn’t kidding. “A lot of cases we see, there’s no apparent malice.”
“Some guy tries to make his ex-girlfriend think she’s going crazy by moving her stuff around,” added the second officer.
“Do you have an ex-boyfriend?” asked the original officer and when she shook her head no, he prompted, “Anybody you might suspect of this?”
No, no, she shook her head no.
Unfazed, the officer asked, “Anybody who knows you live here that you don’t know very well?”
On their phones, the officers searched her downstairs neighbor and the maintenance man in a national database. It was oddly painful to spell out the names of these men that she barely knew; it made her feel guilty, like she had been gossiping with an especially nasty group of friends. She felt even worse when the officers told her that each man’s record was clean.
“Anybody else you can think of? Is your address listed publically anywhere, like for a school club or something?”
And then she remembered The Center for Divine Enlightenment, the paperwork, the card handed to her in the Kroger by Kyle Johns.
They searched his name and announced, “Four priors.”
Her mother filled out the paperwork for the restraining order and the officers explained to her that they would go to Kyle’s home in person and deliver him with the order, that they would say her name aloud to him and he would know it was she who had filed the restraining order.
Her first thought was but what if he doesn’t even remember my name? But before she could think through the potential embarrassment, the humiliation of assuming that this man she barely knew might be obsessed with her and being wrong, her mother had placed the order and she found herself signing a piece of piece of paper that looked as legal as traffic ticket; serious and permanent.
And in that way the perimeters of her life narrowed, excluded strangers, dark streets, and empty clearings. She began to, for the first time, appreciate clear boundaries: sidewalks, full moons, carrel desks, laws.
By the time the burn season began again, Rose was reenrolled in all her classes, going to the pool on hot days, and shopping for groceries on Sunday afternoons with all the other college girls. She stayed in the middle of safe spaces, aware always that the edges of life were filigreed by a thin gold fear that glinted and shone as the sun rose and set.
She avoided dawn, dusk and any other uncertain light. It was important to know she knew what she knew for certain: she tried never to think of Kyle Johns.
Her things quit moving around and she lost the sense that she was being shadowed after the TRO, which her mother insisted was evidence in itself that Rose had not been being merely paranoid. Unhelpfully, she reminded Rose to trust her intuition and suggested that perhaps Rose had inherited some of her own psychic capabilities.
Worse, though, than the idea that someone had come into her home, touched her things, and tried to make her think she was going crazy was the idea that no one at all had come into her home and touched her things and she was going crazy. She found herself standing at the top of the mall’s parking ramp and peering into the distance at the controlled burns at the town’s perimeters and then feeling her eyes blur and swell until she no longer trusted her own sense of depth, until she could not say with any certainty at all where the edges of the city were.
In her philosophy class, the new T.A. explained Dasein and Rose was pleased to remember the term but it occurred to her that there was no clearing without edges; no access to the space where she might meet herself.
The window was opened for the two months that Rose thought of as the year’s Point of No Return: the critical juncture at which turning back or reversing becomes impossible. During this window, she considered dropping out of college and moving to a state that did not have seasons; these two things, school and seasons, were inextricable for Rose. She had a fantasy about a place where there were no bells or stop signs and the sun and moon were always in the sky at the same time.
It was just the start of the Burning Window, two weeks into classes, and the windows were open in the lecture hall where her philosophy professor who might have actually been a TA—she went to a Big Ten school, it was really hard to know who was who—started talking about the clearing. He kept calling it Da Sign, like a song by a nineties R & B girl group and pointing to a circle he had drawn in chalk on the blackboard. For a while, Rose had not been focused on anything but the weirdness of this circle that the professor kept tapping his chalk on emphatically, as if the students in front of him were unfamiliar with the shape.
Eventually, he wrote the word for Da Sign in the middle of the circle: Dasein.
“German, capital D,” he said and then he confirmed he was a TA by reading enthusiastically from his lecture notes, “There is a clearing, a lighting. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.”
Rose looked out the open window at the sky veiled by smoke from the controlled fires at the edges of the town. The school had sent out an email telling the student body to wear masks, carry eye drops, and offer assistance to anyone coughing uncontrollably. She flicked the elastic strap of her surgical mask against her cheek once and then turned to the TA. She would, she decided, stay in town at least through the semester. She wanted to know everything there was to know about the clearing so she would know it when she got there.
Because it was maybe the last really hot day of the year, most people had given up on trying to embrace the season. Mouths had been overexposed to the acidity of farmer’s market tomatoes and eggplant and skin had been burnt by the sun that, like a civil war surgeon on a busy day, sliced the ozone open and left it.
Rose was practicing a style of living she had seen a lifestyle blogger post about called Anti-Surging. It was similar to off-season vacation travelling, but it applied to everything. The basic principle was that if most people are not interested in doing a specific thing in a specifically place at a specific time, Rose would do it to avoid those people. She went to the movies in the morning, shopped in big box stores in the middle of the night, and studied in the library during sport’s games her university was involved with.
Anti-surge living hadn’t really started intentionally. It had begun as an insomnia treatment that didn’t work. If she was still awake when the sun started to rise, Rose would get out of bed and go to the grocery store. It was here that she learned she loved the world with no one in it. She loved how, if she got up early enough, it really did seem as if it all started over every day. The freshness of the dew-covered earth, the cleanliness of the just-mopped grocery aisles, the pyramidal orderliness of the newly-organized piles of fruits and vegetables.
She thought it was a fantastic thing to be able to walk in the middle of the street. She always had. When she was a kid, if she or any of the other kids in her neighborhood found themselves alone in the middle of the subdivision’s streets they were obligated to wave a stick and yell, “I’m the King of Summer!” She didn’t know who started that trend. Maybe it was her. It was great, though, to be alone like that. In fact, that’s how she regarded The Clearing: a space of aloneness, untouchability.
Because it had been such an insufferably hot summer—one struck through with dry thunder and crackling branches—her Anti-surging had led her to hot yoga in a damp room. It was the only place she went where everyone knew her name, but that’s because it was a part of the yoga instructor’s job description to greet every customer personally when they walked in the door.
The girl behind the desk sat on a big blue inflatable ball. She bounced with excitement at the appearance of Rose in the doorway.
“Mimi, Rose is here!” she yelled into the studio. The schedule said Mimi was the teacher for that evening’s Lunar Flow class.
“Roooose!” Mimi trilled from the swampy depths of the studio.
They were excited because only three people had signed up for class, and Rose was one of them. They thought she was there because she was committed to hot yoga. They didn’t know about Anti-surging and judging from the Rumi quotes they read at the start of class, Rose didn't think they’d be interested.
She unrolled her mat at the distant edge of the studio, as far as it was possible to be from the woman lying prone on the other side of the room. Rose had seen this woman before: her name was Jill and she was in her sixties and had probably spent her life in an ashram. Her arms looked like tree roots busting through the sidewalk.
There was a thermometer in the studio Rose liked to keep her eye on because if it got over a 103 degrees, she would go ahead and just lie down on her mat in corpse pose for the rest of class. There wasn’t supposed to be time in the yoga room, but maybe they couldn’t find a thermometer without a clock and that’s how Rose knew it was only one minute to the moment when Mimi would swirl her wooden wand around in her copper sound bowl and the class would start. She felt a little bit of excitement at the prospect of being almost alone in the studio, of all the room on one side of her and the mirror on the other, when a man in old red basketball shorts and a white tank top—the kind that’s supposed to be worn under a dress shirt and never seen—walked in.
His only real option was to unroll his mat right in the center of the room, equidistant from Rose and Jill. It was unspoken yoga etiquette.
Instead, he walked across the room and unrolled a black mat directly next to Rose’s, two palm-widths away. That was spoken yoga etiquette: mats must be at least two palm-widths apart.
Wide-eyed, Rose looked to Mimi, but Mimi was sitting on a cushion at the front of the room with her eyes reverently closed, her wand dipping into her noise bowl, preparing to vibrate.
For a second, Rose thought about rolling up her mat and moving to the middle of the room but that would involve moving her cork blocks, her blanket, and her bolster. It would take more than one trip and she had never seen anyone move their mat after class had started. It would be a Thing and then she’d have to endure the awkwardness she had produced for the next seventy-five minutes.
The man was sitting quietly with the backs of his hands resting on his knees, his thumb and pointer finger pressed together in what Rose knew to be called a mudra. It was impossible, now, to move.
Mostly, Rose spent the class reminding herself that this was Okay. He didn’t glance at her as her clothes dampened like some of the older men at the studio did. In fact, she was probably the one looking at him too much. He was one of those people who managed to keep their eyes closed through the entire class, like they were having a public dream.
During trikonasana, Rose stared openly at the rainbow colored tattoos on his inner-wrists. On his right: EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT and on the left: SO IT GOES. She knew the font was Garamond and she guessed the quotes were from some early 2000s band: Neutral Milk Hotel or Modest Mouse or something else morose that her parents had in their record collection. Something she twirled to as a child.
Distantly, she watched as his stray drops of sweat flew into her space. She stepped all the way off her mat when he, eyes still shut, did not scoot to one side or the other during forward folding. Staggering, they called it. When we stand up I’ll see what the temperature is and then maybe I'll just lie down for the rest of this she thought, and then she fainted.
The last thing she remembered hearing was them saying her name again and again like a command in the wrong tense: Rose, Rose, Rose.
Actually, it was a landfill fire.
That’s why the air was so thick, why everyone everywhere was coughing up grey film scrapped off the walls of the lungs like algae from the sides of a dirty aquarium. One of the controlled burns hadn’t been controlled enough. Or, it had, but the fire spread anyway. The fire department wasn’t assigning blame: it happened like that sometimes, no matter how much a farmer wetted the dry grass around the property, a freak blade could catch and drift. It was more likely in drought conditions, of course.
Rose’s landlord had taped the notice to her door that informed her the landfill was now on fire. “Please hold your waste until further notice,” it read cryptically.
The landlord, Mr. Green, was a retired attorney, so all of his correspondence was so clear and singularly interpretable that it passed over into confusing, like looking too close at your own reflection in a magnifying mirror. Rose placed the note back on the door for the downstairs tenant to see. When she came out tomorrow morning, she knew the note would be gone but there would be no evidence that the downstairs tenant had ever walked on her porch. She had never met him and only knew his name because he occasionally received mail in their adjoined mailboxes.
He was the best neighbor Rose had ever had: totally silent. When her friends came over, she joked that he might actually be a ghost because she had never seen or heard him. Then one day, she had stopped in the shared parking lot behind their house to take a photo of herself in the spring light because she had spent a long time doing her make up in such a way as to appear that she wasn’t wearing any. Normally, she would never stand in her backyard with her phone extended as far away from her face as possible while trying to keep her face relaxed, as if unaware that she herself was taking a photo. But that day, she did, and when she got in the car to look at her pictures, she gasped. The neighbor was there in her photo, looming in the background, looking at her looking into the camera.
She hurried from her car to her house and vice versa after that, often leaving the old Honda unlocked so she wouldn’t have to pause before getting in or out. It just seemed safer.
When she heard him say her name from the end of the grocery store aisle, she felt like she was in a play in high school. Like it had been rehearsed, even though it should have been a shock to see the guy from yoga class in the Kroger in the middle of the night. It should always be a shock to hear one’s name from a stranger’s lips, but for some reason it wasn’t. Rose felt resigned even before she turned to face Kyle Johns amongst the cereal boxes.
She knew his name was Kyle Johns because after she had fainted, he had stacked up a bunch of yoga rugs to make a sort of low couch and sat with her in the lobby until she felt better. It was the yoga studio’s rule that if anyone fainted in class, they had to stay in the lobby with someone else for half an hour before they could leave. Mimi had wanted to stop class and sit with Rose herself, but Jill had looked amazed, potentially enraged, at the prospect of not completing namaskar B on her left side and so Kyle had quickly volunteered.
Rose had never fainted before. Upon waking, her first instinct was to repeatedly tell everyone in the room she was okay while trying to sit up. She was possessed by a deep animal instinct that compelled her to hide while she was weak and it was in this state of confusion that she tried to get Kyle to let her leave by assuring him that she felt “fine” and had simply “not slept much the night before.”
This information had the opposite effect she had intended. Instead of agreeing that she probably was fine and letting her slink off to her car where she planned to sit in a stupor until she felt like not sitting in a stupor any longer, Kyle had leaned forward intently and looked her deeply in the eyes. Then he took one of her wrists between his fingertips like the nurse at her high school used to do to the anorexics after gym. It was really awkward, more awkward even than when he had placed his mat right next to hers only thirty minutes before.
Presumably, he was taking her pulse. She wasn’t sure though because he didn’t remark on the rate of her heart after letting her wrist free. Instead, he very seriously said, “Sleep is the foundation of life.”
“No, I know,” she hastened to agree, as if she, too, believed her insomnia was both a choice and an error.
“Sleep disorders are extremely serious,” he added gravely.
She both took offense to and felt relieved by the phrase sleep disorder. The urge to give what had been happening—or rather, not happening, the not-ness of never falling asleep—a name was strong. The offensive part was that this strange man presumed to know her well enough to diagnose her. Rose had spent hard hours in psychiatrist’s offices explaining that she had endured no trauma, had never been molested, never been assaulted, really, never even been insulted in a way that stuck with her. Her mother was the same, she would offer by way of explanation. Her mother didn’t sleep either. In fact, Rose would tell them, her earliest memory was of standing outside her mother’s bedroom door, locked during midday, and wondering when she would come out. She wasn’t allowed to knock, in case her mother was asleep. One doctor had steepled her hands and nodded sympathetically before diagnosing Rose with PTSD, which, she said, could be caused by the insecurity felt by a child with a distant mother just as easily as it was commonly understood to be caused by “bombs and battle.”
Rose and the therapist spent a lot of time talking about making meaningful connections with others and being “wholehearted” after that. No matter how many friends Rose made, though, or how whole she felt like her heart was getting, Rose didn’t sleep.
That phrase the doctor had used stuck, though: bombs and battle. She imagined it rolling across her brain, slow and heavy, like the tread of tank as she lay in bed, not sleeping.
No, she didn’t have PTSD. She didn’t have anything with such a clear origin, such an articulate branching out.
This sweaty man with the sad tattoos was right: she had a sleep disorder.
She could see Mr. Green’s note affixed to her door from the driveway.
The downstairs neighbor had disregarded the original note instructing them both to hold their waste and instead had continued to put his heavy-strength Glad bags in the shared trashcan. For her part, Rose had begun to fill grocery sacks with non-recyclables—banana peels, coffee grounds, eggs shells, bones—before placing them in her freezer. She carefully rinsed hummus containers, paper wrappers from the tacos she sometimes bought, and the aluminum shells take out from the Thai place came in. She could make it another month, at least, before she took out the trash.
So it was in no way her fault that the immaculate backyard had begun to smell. Rose had seen a possum scurry across the yard that morning. In advance, she resented the implication that this was in any way her responsibility since surely the note on her door regarded the trash.
But it didn’t.
“Due to the recent unseasonably dry summer, a large branch on the oak tree at the northwest corner of your property has cracked and disturbed the electric cables connected to the downstairs floor of your shared property. In order to restore power to the property beneath your own [Apt A], an electrician [Dale Williams of Homewood Electric] requires access to the power supply closet located in your kitchen. Please expect Mr. Williams between the hours of 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. on September 8th.”
Rose blinked and looked at her phone. It was 4:30 and today was September 8th. The correspondence was dated September 6th, 4:00 p.m.
All of Mr. Green’s requests to enter her home were delivered precisely 48 hours in advance, per the state’s landlord-tenant agreement.
Somehow, she had missed the note.
She was surprised, but not really. She had been missing a lot of things since she had gone to the student health center and announced very confidently to a doctor she had never met before that she had a Sleep Disorder. He was a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist, and so he didn’t try to talk to her about “underlying causes” like the physiatrists had. He wrote her a prescription for a pill with a lime green moth on the box.
“Don’t take this until you’re in bed, lying down,” the pharmacist had told her. “Most people don’t realize it’s working until they’re asleep, so it’s dangerous to take the pill before you’re ready.”
The pharmacist was right. Rose had no memory at all of the space between believing the pill was not working and waking up the next morning. She felt hazy, like she was covered in sleeping bags, and she realized the pill had a moth on the box because it made you feel like you were trapped in a cocoon. The thought came to her very logically. Later that day, though, she couldn’t remember how to navigate between buildings on campus. She stood outside the philosophy department and had no sense of the edges of the university. It was like jumping off the diving board and hitting the pool’s surface too hard: she knew she was surrounded, but had no sense of which direction to go. Eventually, she opened Google maps on her phone and let the electronic voice guide her the quarter mile to the library.
The pill quit working after the first night. The Internet said that meant she wasn’t “metabolizing” it correctly: it was in her system, but she couldn’t get it out.
Dale Williams of Homewood Electric was imperturbable. He was not perturbed to find Rose standing on her porch, staring at her own door and he was not perturbed to find that the house was locked and Rose could not locate her key. He had his own key to the property, given to him by Mr. Green, which he cheerfully slid into the lock before walking into Rose’s home. She followed behind him like she was a guest, trailing him up the steps and through the house as he looked for the power supply closet. She had forgotten that Mr. Green had mentioned it was in the kitchen.
After walking around her bedroom, pushing aside a row of dresses in her overstuffed closet, and opening the cabinet in the bathroom where Rose kept her uncontained DivaCup, nude and womb-ish, he had finally located the small door to the power supply closet behind her microwave.
Dale remained cheerful throughout the search, commenting on the items in Rose’s house, and, at one point, lighting a cigarette. Once he had done what needed to be done in the cabinet, he leaned against her kitchen counter and ashed in her sink before coughing pointedly.
“Dry out,” he said.
“Oh,” Rose followed his gaze to the mostly full carton of Vitamin Water she had purchased at the CostCo before the trash ban began.
“Would you…like a drink?”
He selected XXX, which was fine with Rose because it was no one’s favorite flavor. Who wanted to drink black water?
Dale Williams did, apparently. He tipped his head back and poured the water into his mouth in such a way that the long, cartilaginous tube of his throat was exposed. It was milk white and it undulated right in front of Rose like a snake digesting. She wanted to look away, but she was horrified and the sleeping pill was dulling her flight impulse. It was dulling all her impulses, actually.
When he finished the bottle, his eyes fell to Rose’s, which were still transfixed on his throat. The kitchen was narrow, “galley style,” and somehow whilst trying to locate the power supply closet, Rose had gotten herself positioned at the dead end of it, trapped between the stove and a wall.
When Dale’s body began to lean towards hers and his head dipped down, she was confused. Was he fainting? His eyes were opened. When his mouth began to pilot towards her, already opened a little bit, like it had a broken hinge, she realized he meant to kiss her. Her first impulse was to laugh; it struck her as hilarious that he had mistaken her dead-eyed stare for attraction.
She had never actually laughed in someone’s face before, right up close. It happened and then she heard herself apologizing for it, watching as his face passed from stunned to angry only inches away from her. His fingers were suddenly digging into her waist and before she registered that he shouldn’t be touching her, she registered that she was going to have a five small bruises imprinted on her left ribcage. Then she heard screaming, high and raw.
It was herself, Rose realized, as she watched Dale Williams lift his palms in front of his chest in the universal gesture of hands off. He backed away from her with his eyebrows raised, incredulous.
“Hey, you were looking at me, lady,” he said as he picked up the toolbox he had carried in with him.
Rose stood frozen in her kitchen as she listened to him let himself out of her house, listened to him mutter, “Crazy bitch,” before locking the door behind him.
Rose wondered if the downstairs neighbor had heard her screaming. She wondered where her house keys were. She wondered if it was time to quit taking the sleeping pill.
Everything OK?
Rose’s mother actively cultivated an aura of omniscience, a mundane clairvoyance. For most of Rose’s life, it had been a normal mom thing; an I-have-eyes-in-the-back-of-my-head low-level form of domestic surveillance. After her parent’s divorced nearly ten years ago, though, her mother had begun to casually assert that she was an actual psychic and had begun to call Rose in a panic because of a dream or a bad feeling or an omen. Anything could be an omen. The wrong arrangement of numbers on a receipt or a dog with a weird bark or the death of a child who resembled Rose in a movie had the potential to serve as a weird portent.
So Rose was not surprised by the text from her mother that awoke her that morning. She ignored it because she knew her mom would call to follow up and she did, mere minutes later. Rose was surprised to find out that her mother was returning a call Rose had made to her the day before.
“You sounded pretty out of it in your message, Rosie. Are you sure everything is okay?”
“Out of it? No, I didn’t.” Rose could not yet remember calling. She may have sounded out of it.
“You said you couldn’t find your building? On campus?”
Oh. Rose remembered now. She had gotten disoriented from the moth pills and had made the mistake of calling her mom.
“Oh. Well, I found it.”
She was more concerned that she had panicked enough to appeal to her mother for help than she was that the pills had locked her out of her own memories.
Her mother asked one more time if Rose was okay and then she sighed and told a long story about how she had been on a date when Rose called and that’s why she hadn’t answered. She had recently “registered” herself on a dating app and was going out with “all kinds of real cooks” who she frequently had “a bad feeling” about.
Rose had grown up watching crime shows with her mother. The shows were usually structured around a vivid reenactment of violence against women, so Rose was not surprised to hear that her mother’s telepathy was now manifesting as suspicion of strange men. The man she had gone out with the day before had, apparently, talked about his ex-wife too much. Rose considered, briefly, telling her mother that her friend Diane had gone out with a man who revealed midway through the date that he had been possessed by demons since a séance went wrong a few years before or that her other friend Christy had gone out with a guy who lived in unincorporated territory to avoid laws that might regulate his snake farm and so talking about an ex too much didn’t qualify as malicious, but she didn’t.
She counted to thirty and then said she had to go to a yoga class. This was her usual excuse; as far as her mother knew, Rose was obsessed with yoga.
“Rose?” Kyle said her name like it was an astonishing question, like people do when they run into someone they knew from kindergarten at the airport. He said it like he was trying to recognize her across both time and space.
They met in the middle of the cereal aisle, next to the oatmeal.
“Hey, Kyle,” she responded casually, as if her calm could diffuse his excitement.
He was holding one of the little red baskets that single men always took at the door of the grocery store, no matter how many groceries they intended to buy. A frozen pizza, some avocados, PowerBars, and a bag of Epsom salts were spilling over the sides.
“Can’t sleep, either?” he asked.
She leaned against her empty cart and opened her mouth to say that it was too hot to sleep, but instead she said, “I feel like I’m just living whatever life.”
He nodded like that made a lot of sense.
“There aren’t any edges,” she added and gestured, weirdly, to the aisles on either side of them.
“It can be hard to find your bearings when your circadian rhythms are off,” he agreed.
“No, it’s not that,” He was still wearing his yoga clothes. Not the same ones from class, but similar. “Well, maybe. What’s a circadian rhythm? The waves your brain makes when you’re sleeping?”
“Sort of. But more like a calendar your body stays on for 24 hour cycles.”
“Like my body has appointments?”
“Sure. Good sleep hygiene means making sure the appointments don’t get disrupted.”
“But what disrupts them?”
“Lots of things,” he said, “Excessive darkness, excessive light, alcohol, stress, fear. Anything that punctures the surface of your sense of being in the world.”
“But I’m normal,” Rose extend her arms a little ways out from her body as if to display how whole they were. Her left side twinged, momentarily, “There are no punctures.”
He looked her up and down for a moment as if measuring her for an invisible gown and then he reached out his hand, “May I?”
She stared blankly.
“May I take your hand?”
Rose had heard rumors that the philosophy midterm would be just one short question. She was ethically opposed to listening to rumors, but she wished she had made an exception on this one because it was true; there were just three baffling words at the top of a sheet of unlined white paper.
WHAT IS MEANING?
A 35-cent bluebook from the University Bookstore, purchased especially for this exam, sat on her desk. Rose hovered her pencil above the extra-thin bluebook paper and wrote: Meaning differs from human to human, philosopher to philosopher. She then wrote down the names of all the men they had talked about so far that semester on different spots on the page in front of her, so that KIERKEGAARD, NEITZCHE, HEIDEGGER, JAMES, and TOLSTOY were positioned across the page like stars in a constellation. Next, she connected the stars with grammatically bloated sentences which led to whatever idea she could remember about each man: DENY, OBEY, POWER, FAITH, and AUTHENTICITY. Once she had filled any additional whiteness on the page with everything else she could remember (dates, cities of birth, superlatives) she assessed her writing and decided it looked pretty much like an essay. It had the same shape, anyway: square, lined left to right.
All around the lecture hall, other students were writing rapidly, flipping the pages of their blue books quickly. It struck her as supernatural, suddenly, to be here with all of them and know she would never know what they had written. The night before she had dreamt that she was here, in this lecture hall with these people, but everyone was still wearing their surgical masks from the burning season. The T.A. was at the lectern, gesticulating toward the chalkboard, but no noise came from his mouth. Rose stood to approach the T.A., to tell him he wasn’t speaking, and realized the floor was smothered in autumn leaves, wall to wall. She couldn’t see anyone’s feet or ankles and the room was very hot. Not hot like July, hot like fire. Smoke was sifting up through the leaves all around her and she knew the floor was aflame. It was brushing against her face like fur, like an animal she was very allergic to. Her eyes watered and her throat began to shrink and as she lifted her hands to remove her mask and tell the class that they were engulfed in flames, she simultaneously realized she would die if she removed her mask but she could not speak with it on.
She regarded her blue book once more and then tore it in half. In the whiteness of the blank sheet of paper upon which the exam’s single question was posed, she drew a circle that touched, and went beyond, the edges of the confines of the page.
I must have slept last night, was her only thought as she placed her exam on a stack of bluebooks at the front of the lecture hall. She wondered what had happened next in the dream, she wondered if she had taken off her mask and smothered or if she stayed silent and let them all die.
Kyle had pressed her hand so deep into the soft space beneath his sternum that her fingers had touched the edges of his ribs on either side.
She hadn’t really agreed to let him to take her hand, but she hadn’t disagreed either.
“This is the third chakra,” he said meaningfully, “It is from here that you manifest your power in the world. Its element is fire and its energy at high frequency burns bright gold.”
“How do I know what…frequency I’m at?”
Rose had never wanted a bright gold stomach before, had never though at all about the volume or color of her energy. In fact, she had never really thought about her energy at all, but standing in the blue-bleak halogen lights of the Kroger in the middle of the night, as far as possible from sunset and sunrise, she wanted to be gold very much.
“Your frequency is very low,” Kyle said without hesitation. “Women with a healthy solar plexus chakra radiate their sense of power into the world around them. In Sanskrit, this chakra is named Manipura, which means Seat of the Gem. A woman with a high frequency in this chakra knows her worth. She manifests. Her breath smells like rosemary and bergamot. When she dreams, she dreams of walking into a cave of citrine and tiger’s eye. Her element is fire, the most radical and transient of energies.” Her hand remained pressed into his stomach even as his eyes glazed and his tone took on the dogmatic lull of a prayer or pledge or any other sacrament repeated unto oblivion. Abruptly, his voice lilted and rose until he almost sounded like he must have sounded as a child, clever and uncertain, and he made direct eye contact as he repeated, “Your frequency is very low. You have no idea how much you’re worth. You don’t even know what you mean to you.”
Yes, I do, Rose thought, but she didn’t say it aloud.
He shook his head slowly from side to side, as though he had heard her thoughts and disagreed. The overhead light shone oddly on his cornea, a metallic green, like sun glinting off of a lizard’s eye.
She meant to say, “I’ve got to go” and to turn and walk decisively down the cereal aisle, out the sliding doors, and to her car, but instead she jerked her hand out of his clasp and said, “But I dream of fire.”
“You dream of annihilation,” he corrected, “Your dreams want you to believe you should fear your own power. Your dreams keep you separated from yourself, and from others.”
“You don’t know me,” she said, but she wondered if somehow he did.
Her therapist had said something similar but she had used lots of self words: self-worth, self-esteem, self-love. She had said that the adult children of withdrawn parents sometimes doubt they exist. “You must learn to be your own mother, Rose,” the therapist had pronounced gravely.
“You’re right,” Kyle agreed, “No one knows you, Rose, because you do not want to be known. You’ve made yourself invisible.”
Rose was so exhausted that her mouth had begun to taste like another person’s mouth. Another person who did not brush their teeth; who sucked on batteries. A crazy person.
But she sat through her philosophy lecture all the way to the end and even waited after while the T.A. handed back the bluebook exams. It was a surprise to her when she flipped over the sheet discreetly placed face-down in front of her to discover a large red question mark in the middle of a circle that touched, and went beyond, the edges of the confines of the page.
She had forgotten her answer, forgotten it completely.
Anti-surge living became simpler and sleeping became more complicated after the seasons changed. The darkness had a way of punctuating the rhythms of other people’s lives, of creating nodes of sociability—holidays and football games and preparation for emergency weather—that Rose found easy to avoid. She quit going to her philosophy lecture and she gave up her hot yoga class, but she wasn’t able to stop thinking about her encounter with Kyle in the cereal aisle.
Without sleep, her memory began to mutate the very shape of her existence. Her life became a pearl necklace knotted again and again by worried hands until it again began to resemble something more oceanic, organic; its original state. In this way, she could no longer remember exactly what had happened in the grocery store. Instead, she tangled parts of the meeting with other events and some non-events: she palimpsested lectures from her class atop dreams atop her waking life.
She had an image in her head—of a sort of orb, a demonic snow globe—in which she saw her apartment from above. In the apartment she watched Kyle walk not on her floor, but on the surface of a bluebook. His feet left dirty prints that she knew to be the correct answers to her philosophy exam. She watched as Kyle walked through her walls. In a layer above this image, she saw herself in her own attic, belly pressed to the floorboards as she listened to his feet move through her rooms. In a layer below, she saw her downstairs’ neighbor’s apartment burning.
In her dreams, the snow-shovels scraping the sidewalk outside her apartment sounded like God’s fingernail trying to pry the lid off the world. The snow emergency had been declared days ago, Rose guessed, and only now was it being addressed. She had left the apartment in the middle of the night a few times and walked right down the middle of the empty streets, leaving behind prints in the unbroken snow, the signature of a living person. Then she had come back home and somehow she had begun to sleep. Now that the world itself was set to anti-surge, Rose could rest.
Her therapist said this was normal for people with PTSD. She claimed ER doctors slept more soundly during the new moon, when there was less light for people to hurt themselves in. She alleged that former combat soldiers lay awake all night until their families got up and began to pop the toaster, flush the toilet, turn on the television. It was the constant noise of living that allowed them to sleep. She said it all had something to do with gravity.
When Rose finally left her house in the light of day, she saw that there were several notes from Mr. Green taped to the door. They were dated December 27th, December 28th, and December 29th. Today was December 30th. This relieved Rose because it explained her mother’s cryptic morning text: Happy Eve’s Eve!
In each of his notes, the landlord expressed an urgent need for Rose to allow a maintenance man access to her home for the purposes of checking the house’s pipes, which he claimed were frozen.
Rose swished the saliva around in her mouth to confirm to herself that she had indeed just brushed her teeth, that she surely turned the faucet in the bathroom on to do so. Her mouth tasted just-brushed, like mint, artificial sweetener, and chalk and she assumed the maintenance man had come in while she was asleep, or, possibly, she had left the house and forgotten.
This revelation came as an enormous relief because recently objects in her apartment had begun to move on their own. A picture in the hallway was askew. The contents of her trashcan appeared disarranged. A kitchen timer she had not set had begun to ring from within a drawer one afternoon.
In the moment of realizing how completely mundane, how explainable, the phenomena of her home’s shifting contents really was, Rose also realized how deeply unexplainable it was that she had not worried more. She had not even mentioned it to anyone.
What would she have said that would not have made her sound insane?
Even now, she didn’t really know if it had been the maintenance man. Perhaps, in her half-sleep, she had set the alarm herself. Perhaps she had bumped the frame in the darkness. Perhaps she had moved through her apartment, invisible even to herself, and disarranged her life.
She collected the notes from Mr. Green and, already exhausted, retreated back inside the house.
Rose hadn’t returned to the Kroger since the encounter, but as the clock neared the final minutes of the year, she found herself boldening.
The streets were filled with the kind of silence that is actually the muffling of noises, the kind of silence awarded during snowstorms and airlift. Rose stared into other people’s homes as she drove to the grocery and saw their outlines illuminated like a cheat sheet written on one’s palm before an exam: blurry and spare.
She saw the borders of the outlines touch and merge until they were only one idea and she knew the grocery would be empty. She tried to remember the text her mother had sent the day before, but could only come up with welcome to the edge’s edge, which was nothing. It was too unreal for even her mother to manifest.
That word, manifest, was the last vestige of her meeting with Kyle. She had never used it prior and had since been trying to exorcise it from her vocabulary but it remained like the scar from an appendectomy: a remnant of a thing with no purpose.
“You fail to manifest,” he had informed her opaquely.
“What does that even mean?” she had asked, “I’m right here. I exist.”
“Your spirit has not yet become real.”
“Are you trying to say that I’m a ghost?”
He shook his head as if he were very sad for her. The memory of his pity hadn’t stayed with her, but it had changed her. “No, I’m saying you haven’t yet stepped into your body. You’re outside yourself.”
She had fought the urge to cry when he said that. Not because it was true, but because it was too personal for one person to say to another. It was the kind of sentiment that was only appropriate said to oneself, in the mirror, late at night.
The word for it, she realized days later as she swept a thin shell of ash from the landfill’s overflow off the windowsills of her apartment, was invasive.
He must have read her crumpled face as a sort of defeat, as an agreement, because he then pulled a square-shaped card out of his wallet and handed it to her in the close-fisted way that teenagers employ when paying for drugs in a high school bathroom.
“There’s help, Rose.” Then he turned and walked away quickly, so the last image she had of him was of the tattoo on his inner-wrist as he handed her the piece of paper: SO IT GOES.
The card was a deep violet, inscribed with a many-petaled silver flower. On its reverse side were the just the words Divine Center for Actualized Living and an address located outside the city limits: 111 Sunlight Street.
Rose had dropped the card in an ashtray outside the Kroger, but the address stayed in her head. It was harder not to Google than to Google, and eventually she found herself in front of her laptop just before sunrise, looking at a Google Earth photo of a small white house. This was all the information she could find about the Divine Center for Actualized Living. There was no website, no Yelp review, no phone number. Just a picture taken by a Google cam of this isolated house and a list of directions that led down a series of county roads that went from concrete to asphalt to gravel to dirt, winnowing into anonymity in less than ten miles.
To remind herself to study for the philosophy midterm Rose placed the blue notebook she took notes for the course in on top of the coffee maker. There were only four places in the apartment she was certain to encounter on a daily basis: her pillow, the bottle that held her green moth sleeping pill, the toilet, and the Mr. Coffee.
She knew she wasn’t eating everyday because the note that reminded her to pay the rent was affixed to a jug of almond milk in the refrigerator that she had managed not to see for at least two days. She realized it was October when Mr. Green called to tell her that her check had not yet arrived.
For several days, Rose had removed the notebook, made her coffee, and dutifully put it back on top of the coffee maker but now it was the day before the exam and there were no more chances to make coffee without studying, so she pushed the Mr. Coffee’s On button and opened the notebook.
In it, there was nothing but sketchings of geometric shapes. On the first page was a circle, followed by a circle inscribed with a triangle, followed by a circle inscribed with overlapping triangles, followed by a series of increasingly complicated images until the last page of the notebook, which was just a coat of graphite, a page entirely obfuscated by darkness.
For a second, she wondered if it was someone else’s notebook but there was her own name on the front upper-right hand corner. The letters of her name wiggled like they weren’t her own, like the tail of lizard after it has detached from its own body. She gripped the counter’s edge and felt her head bow forward. She was overwhelmed by a smell similar to hair burning in a curling iron and just as she was about to sit down on the kitchen tiles she realized one of the dials of the old gas stove was turned, but the burner wasn’t on.
She had no idea how long it had been that way. In fact, had no memory at all of turning on the stove, although it was possible. Obviously, it was possible.
Through the floorboards, Rose heard the downstairs neighbor cough.
In that moment, it became her own home that felt like a surge and Rose felt a strong compulsion to leave, to go anywhere else.
She flicked off the stove dial and scanned the apartment as if she could commit it to memory. Then, she drove to the only place she could think of.
It wasn’t until the door to the little white house began to open that it occurred to Rose that the Divine Center for Actualized Living might just be Kyle’s house. There was no sign in the yard or plaque on the door, nothing to indicate that this might be a school or a church or a place of divinity. It isn’t even a center, Rose thought hysterically as the front door hinged and a wave of Palo Santo and weed cut through the clean morning air. The house was darker inside than outside, lit from within by candles. More candles than Rose had ever seen together outside of a church.
Randomly she thought of thousands of lighters lifted in the darkness of an amphitheater during an encore: secular worship, mundane deification.
But then her eyes adjusted on the figure framed by the door of the white house and she realized it was just a girl dressed in yoga pants and a T-shirt that was too big for her. She looked young, maybe only fifteen, so it was disarming when she used the voice of an adult woman to welcome Rose into the house.
Later, Rose would think that if it hadn’t been a child who invited her to sit on a folded up blanket in an almost empty room so that she could provide her personal information on a form attached to a clipboard like at a dentist’s office, she would have just left. But instead she was as polite as she would have been to a Girl Scout selling cookies door-to-door. She felt a weird obligation; almost as though it would be herself she was letting down if she didn’t do as the girl, who introduced herself as Misty, asked.
Misty explained that morning meditation would not end for another hour so there were no “facilitators” available to welcome Rose. The, she excused herself to prepare a “medicinal tea” while Rose filled out her “intake form.”
Rose filled in the first page, which asked for ordinary details: her full name, address, phone number, etc. It was information she had given out hundreds—possibly thousands—of times in her life on the Internet. It barely felt personal. Neither did the next page, which requested information about her health. It included a small outline of a human body and asked that she circle any areas where she felt physical pain. The next page posed the same image, and asked that she circle areas of emotional pain. After that there was a series of statements that she was supposed to rank from “very likely” to “very unlikely.” The statements said things like: I enjoy the cold or I am purposeful and intense. Rose quickly bubbled her response to several pages of statements, but by the ninth or tenth page she began to hesitate in response to statements such as I have strange sexual compulsions or I believe my organs are not shaped like other people’s organs. It was a statement on the twelfth page, I enjoy the taste of ash, that stopped Rose entirely.
After the TA had returned her bizarre philosophy midterm, Rose retreated to her apartment with a renewed resolve to sleep. She didn’t blame herself for failing the exam and she wasn’t even embarrassed about the specifically odd way in which she had done it. She had some hope that she could explain the answer to the TA and get an extra credit assignment to make up some of the grade. He would understand when she explained that she had not slept the night before the exam; she would use the phrase sleep disorder and he would sympathize. If necessary, she would explain to him that something disturbing had happened to her the day before the exam that had prevented her from studying. She could not picture, exactly, how she would convey that a mere questionnaire had so disturbed her.
“What happened after that?” he might ask and Rose would have to admit she had simply left the white house, unhindered. That she had put the survey on the floor and slipped out the front door, thoroughly unharassed.
Nevertheless, she flipped open her laptop to write the TA and arrange a meeting to discuss the exam. The thought left her head entirely when the screen lit to reveal that her Internet browser was not just open already, but that it was opened to more tabs than she could count. The first page was a search for her own name. Had she done this when she couldn’t sleep? She clicked it closed, but the same search was opened on the next tab. She repeated this a few times until she realized there were too many tabs to bother closing, that she could not keep seeing a search for herself that she couldn’t remember conducting.
It was believable that she had tried to find herself and forgotten.
“You just need to sleep,” Rose said to herself, aloud, as if she were her own mother and then she took double the dose of the green moth pills. She forgot what the pharmacist had said, though, about not taking the pills until she was in bed and so she woke up she slumped on her couch, laptop open in front of her.
She had fallen asleep while searching the phrase Divine Center for Actualized Living. Mid-keystroke, she had lost consciousness and so when she awoke she saw that Google had auto-filled her result so that it now read Divine Center for Actualized Living really a cult?
Rose hated auto-fill, hated how the collective dictated the meaning of the collective.
Firecrackers and the closing bars of Auld Lang Syne drifted across the silence of Rose’s porch. Collectively, the world had decided to cross the boarder into another year.
She knew she hadn’t locked the door—she never did if she was returning home with groceries because she hated to linger on the porch, looking for her keys, setting down and picking up bags. Although it had never happened before, anytime could be the time that the downstairs neighbor decided to check his mail in her presence.
Therefore she was not surprised that her door was unlocked, but she was a little disturbed to see that it was opened just a sliver. Mr. Green, she remembered, had told her to spray the locking mechanism with some kind of aerosol that would prevent the door from sticking and refusing to latch in the winter. Of course she had not done this.
Fresh, cold air infused the normally stale hallway. The January air had leaked into the house quickly and Rose could see her own breath puff out of her mouth as she climbed the staircase. By the time she reached the top steps, though, a gust of heat and the smell of gardenia or hydrangea or geranium—some out-of-season springtime flower—pushed against her face and made her eyes water.
At the top of the stairs, her picture frame was once again tilted. Rose paused and stared at it as though if she looked long enough she would remember the moment she had bumped the photo askew. Beyond the photo, there was something flickering in the living room. An organic glitching; it was the flame of a candle, Rose realized.
Slowly she set her grocery bags down and stepped further into the living room. She was certain everything was as she had left it, except for a candle given to her by her mother for Christmas, which she had placed high on a shelf in a far corner of the room, was glowing.
But Mr. Green says I’m not even allowed to have candles, was Rose’s first thought upon opening the gift and, now, upon finding it lit in her living room.
Her mouth actually opened to call out for her mother, her lips pushed together and her tongue pressed to the back of her teeth to form the bitter pronunciation of Mom she employed when annoyed with her mother. Then Rose felt another wave of heat, this time more clearly drifting towards her from the kitchen, and she felt the word die in her mouth.
The oven, she thought simply.
The oven is burning.
* * *
Life’s perimeters altered after that in the sense that there was no longer any way to see to the edges of anything, no way to know if anything ended or began.
Her mother, for instance, extended much farther than Rose had believed she could. She proved this by standing on Rose’s porch in her New Year’s Eve gown and explaining decisively to the officers she had called to Rose’s apartment what had happened. Rose would never quite understand how her mother had deduced so much from the hysterical message Rose had left for her, but she arrived with a full narrative that the officers noted diligently.
“My daughter has a stalker,” Rose had been most impressed by her mother’s ability to say the word so certainly--stalker—as if it were a thing that existed outside horror movies, “Who has been breaking into her home for several months. He was here tonight.”
Then, she had demanded the officers thoroughly search the house and appoint an hourly patrol to check the premises for the following week while Rose packed her things and moved back home.
And the officers also possessed a largess, a sense of the wideness of experience, Rose had not anticipated. In the end, she did have to explain to them that she did not lock her own doors. She had to tell them about the picture frame that kept moving, the tabs opened on her laptop, the trashcan that had been dug through, and the kitchen timer that sounded on its own.
“When did you begin to suspect a break in, miss?”
The two officers, Rose, and her mother had stood in a tight circle in her living room, as if they were not surrounded by places to sit.
“Tonight,” she admitted.
The officer looked like someone’s dad and he nodded with understanding. Unprompted, she admitted, “I haven’t been sleeping. I thought it was me. I thought I was…haunting myself, or something.”
“That’s common,” the officer said, and he wasn’t kidding. “A lot of cases we see, there’s no apparent malice.”
“Some guy tries to make his ex-girlfriend think she’s going crazy by moving her stuff around,” added the second officer.
“Do you have an ex-boyfriend?” asked the original officer and when she shook her head no, he prompted, “Anybody you might suspect of this?”
No, no, she shook her head no.
Unfazed, the officer asked, “Anybody who knows you live here that you don’t know very well?”
On their phones, the officers searched her downstairs neighbor and the maintenance man in a national database. It was oddly painful to spell out the names of these men that she barely knew; it made her feel guilty, like she had been gossiping with an especially nasty group of friends. She felt even worse when the officers told her that each man’s record was clean.
“Anybody else you can think of? Is your address listed publically anywhere, like for a school club or something?”
And then she remembered The Center for Divine Enlightenment, the paperwork, the card handed to her in the Kroger by Kyle Johns.
They searched his name and announced, “Four priors.”
Her mother filled out the paperwork for the restraining order and the officers explained to her that they would go to Kyle’s home in person and deliver him with the order, that they would say her name aloud to him and he would know it was she who had filed the restraining order.
Her first thought was but what if he doesn’t even remember my name? But before she could think through the potential embarrassment, the humiliation of assuming that this man she barely knew might be obsessed with her and being wrong, her mother had placed the order and she found herself signing a piece of piece of paper that looked as legal as traffic ticket; serious and permanent.
And in that way the perimeters of her life narrowed, excluded strangers, dark streets, and empty clearings. She began to, for the first time, appreciate clear boundaries: sidewalks, full moons, carrel desks, laws.
By the time the burn season began again, Rose was reenrolled in all her classes, going to the pool on hot days, and shopping for groceries on Sunday afternoons with all the other college girls. She stayed in the middle of safe spaces, aware always that the edges of life were filigreed by a thin gold fear that glinted and shone as the sun rose and set.
She avoided dawn, dusk and any other uncertain light. It was important to know she knew what she knew for certain: she tried never to think of Kyle Johns.
Her things quit moving around and she lost the sense that she was being shadowed after the TRO, which her mother insisted was evidence in itself that Rose had not been being merely paranoid. Unhelpfully, she reminded Rose to trust her intuition and suggested that perhaps Rose had inherited some of her own psychic capabilities.
Worse, though, than the idea that someone had come into her home, touched her things, and tried to make her think she was going crazy was the idea that no one at all had come into her home and touched her things and she was going crazy. She found herself standing at the top of the mall’s parking ramp and peering into the distance at the controlled burns at the town’s perimeters and then feeling her eyes blur and swell until she no longer trusted her own sense of depth, until she could not say with any certainty at all where the edges of the city were.
In her philosophy class, the new T.A. explained Dasein and Rose was pleased to remember the term but it occurred to her that there was no clearing without edges; no access to the space where she might meet herself.
