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Without opening my eyes, I carefully and with a sense of controlled terror extended my other hand…

I lay curled up like a cat and I could feel the curve of my spine, I could feel my knees against my chest and my hand underneath my cheek. Without opening my eyes, I carefully and with a sense of controlled terror extended my other hand to feel the surface of my quilt. I would know the stitching of its pattern, the softness of the filling having long since relaxed against the fabric. My fingers gently touched the surface. I hesitated. It felt grainy. Not grainy like cookie crumbles. Grainy, like sand. When I thought “sand”, I shoved my fingers deeper into the surface. They did not meet much resistance. I pushed easily into the sand like I would, aimlessly, on a beautiful day on the beach. All the while the surface underneath me was breathing. I had to open my eyes to find myself. I wondered whether I was still dreaming, and for a moment considered trying to drift back into nothingness, but I felt wide awake, too awake.

So I did. I opened my eyes. It was not dark at all as I had fully expected, yet the sun was pale, far away in the winter sky, just so illuminating the grey mists rising up from the water. I knew where I was. I was most definitely not on my bed in Summerville, NJ. I was curled up, like the sole survivor of a ship wreck, on the shore of a lake. I sat up, stunned, on the wet sand, numb with cold as much as with surprise. I knew the beach. It was small. I had spent many summers here with my family. I was sitting on the North Shore Beach of Lake Willoughby.

All things considered, it was strange that my mind accepted this truth so readily. I didn’t think: I must be dreaming. I didn’t look for an explanation.

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the earth itself, underneath my body, was a breathing organism, like a gigantic whale you find yourself stranded on

How hard my mind had to work to keep control, to still try to make sense out of a wealth on information that had long stopped to be apprehensible by any rules I had been led to understand applied. But only submission to the world of grown-ups would have you believe that they were – in general – truthful about the world. I didn’t believe this anymore but tried to rely on my own senses instead. It was treacherous ground.

For example that night. As I lay in the dark, eyes closed though wide awake, the surface of my bed felt soft as was to be expected, but it felt soft in the way I had experienced and shied away from before. It seemed to be soft in an organic, breathing way. I tried to distinguish between my own breathing pattern and the breathing of that soft, pliable surface I felt underneath my body.  It was an uncanny feeling – but just ask yourself how many sensations you can really clearly distinguish besides soft and hard, warm and cold, pain and pleasure. Truth is, you constantly rely on additional sensations and context to tell you about the thing you are experiencing through just one of your senses to make sense of something.

What was it that I was feeling? Something that I feared, but I didn’t know why I feared it or whether I had reason to fear it in the first place as I was completely unaware of its nature. All I knew was that last time I checked my bed had not been breathing. As before it felt actually – and it made perfect sense to think those words as irrational as they might seem – that the earth itself, underneath my feet, my body, was a breathing organism, like a gigantic whale you find yourself stranded on. It didn’t make sense and I couldn’t explain to myself where that strange idea actually orginated. Nothing I had read or talked about lately had pointed in that direction. Remember, there was no internet and but little TV. None in our house, by the way.

And yet, I just felt it, right there and then, the surface underneath me belonged to something alive, and I knew I had to open my eyes to find out what was going on, but I was entirely too scared to live up to my own imaginative ability. All I could manage to do, pathetically,  was to continue breathing slowly just as I had done during those long ago nights when I had led some non-existing intruder to believe that I was asleep. And with each moment the sensation of a sighing, breathing surface underneath my body was getting stronger.

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space, void of people

I woke up when a hand was gently nudging my shoulder. My neck was stiff. I was still sitting in the library chair. Dr. Hausner was gone. “Miss, I am afraid we are closing.” A woman’s voice. I looked up. Ms. Clarice stood right next to my chair, smiling. All other visitors were gone. I got up drowsily and carefully checked the window reflections, too. All visitors were gone. “Are you alright?” Ms. Clarice inquired. I looked at her closely. Her small golden earrings reflected the fluorescent library lights, transforming the miniature reflections of the library on the convex mirror of the gleaming curves  into a warmer, more elegant version of the actual space. An alternate space more suitable for someone like Dr. Hausner than the mundane space of Summerville library.

“When did Dr. Hausner leave?” I asked. Ms. Clarice narrowed her eyes. She ignored my question.  “You must be very tired,” she replied, “go home and sleep.” “Did you see him?”, I insisted. “Go home and sleep, Miss, I have to switch off the lights now.” I wanted to protest but she anticipated my notion and gently shoved me along. “Come back tomorrow,” she repeated, not unfriendly. We walked down the staircase together.

There was nobody downstairs either. From the winding staircase I could see  the lower floor breathing calmly. The tessellation of the carpet tiles looked like the exposed skin of an ancient creature. An empty library is a marvelous space. Really any space empty of people holds some kind of promise that seems to disappear once it gets populated. When I slowed down to linger on the staircase, I felt Ms. Clarice’s warm hand on my shoulders again, encouraging me to continue down the last few steps. I sighed. “It’s beautiful, the library, “ I said apologetically, “at night, I mean. When all the visitors have left.” We reached the ground floor. I took care not to step on the lines of the irregular tile pattern. I have never been quite able to just move without paying attention to the rhythm of any kind of tile, responding to it in some way, and today was not the day to start with it. Ms. Clarice remained silent while I gingerly crossed the open space. I wondered if I ever would get used to people not answering. Strictly speaking, I had not asked a question though. Ms. Clarice looked the kind of woman who did not have an appreciation for idle conversation.

She waited patiently while I balanced over to the cubbies to pick up my bag. I pulled out my jacket first. A small piece of paper trundled to the floor like a feeble bird. Folded from yellow legal paper. I bent over and picked it up. Ms. Clarice was still waiting for me at the door, so I simply slid it into my pocket, shouldered my bag and walked over. She still smiled, never once complaining about the delay. “Good night now,” she said simply. I nodded. She locked the door right behind me. It was cold outside. When I turned around, the lights in the library had already been switched off. The building looked deserted. I started walking into the evening.

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lunacy

From that day on my world has been different. Even though I have lost some of the feverishness that I lived with back then, a feverishness that brought on a clarity about which I knew nothing as long as it lasted, I still hold it for possible that at any moment in our lives just about anything can happen. I still know that we are like divers in a deep ocean finding access to different currents and tides, each one of them distinctly different in temperature, clarity and speed. Accepting the reality of the girl in the window I acknowledged that I preferred to be raving mad to inhabiting a world without surprises. A suburban world where everything was designed to be stagnant or at least to create the never to be questioned illusion of stability. Even my free spirited artist mother surfed the tide of that illusion. That day I rejected the comforting hand of a reality created by others for needs I didn’t even knew I might have one day. Instead I allowed myself an unfiltered acknowledgement of the impulses that my brain felt inclined to produce. I did not know whether or not there was anything out there at all, I didn’t know if we possess any kind of objective reality but whereas before that had horribly worried me (along with the question how to prove to oneself that one exists at all outside the universe of our own brain), suddenly I was intrigued by the freedom of it. So what – if this girl in the mirror did not exist, I could still see her bright and clear, she looked like a normal kid.

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perfection and love

When the boy was about five, old enough to overhear grown-up conversations, Iris had told him in carefully phrased sentences that she and her husband were not his biological parents. She told him that he belonged to them and that they considered themselves to be his parents just as if he would have been born to them. He had listened to her rehearsed words with an expression of inward contemplation. She had looked at his face while she was speaking, overwhelmed by the insufficiency of her own words, their stupidity even. How was he supposed to know what the term biological parents implied? When she had finished nervously and had braced herself for questions or tear or anger or resent (even though she could find no reason why he should feel resent against them learning that they had taken him in to be their son), he had stayed quiet for a while and they had looked at each other as two grown adversaries would, appraising the other’s strength and resources. Then, suddenly, his face had lost the frozen expression, and he had smiled at her, an overwhelmingly bright smile, and had asked her whether he could go outside to play with the mud people.
If they fullfilled their parental obligation towards him without ever truly finding the kind of love a parent might feel for a child, he did love them as a child loves his parents without contemplating nature, extent or meaning of his love. If he ever felt that he was missing something he never betrayed such a feeling through his behaviour or his words.
Sometimes there was a strained look in his eyes when his father left the room as if he recalled being left behind which of course was impossible as he had only been a few hours old when the custodian had found him. At other times Iris caught him looking at her inquiringly. But whatever question he was expecting her to answer he never put it in words. How could they have suspected that there were moments when sudden terror would overcome him, like a feeling of unmendable loss, how could they have known as those were moments when he was at his quietest, looking at a page in a book, an illustration, a word, waiting for the moment to pass. In time the random words he had stared at when the feeling had overcome him came to stand for the darkness. Solanum tuberosum. Common potatoe. Dampness and desperation. Polygala Alba. Milkworth. Sudden death. The word stood for the thing as much as the thing stood the word, even the spoken word. He saw the lines of letters when these words were spoken, and the letters formed the words in an inexorable logic and the words frightened him. The feeling never lasted for longer than a few seconds, seconds that questioned his whole existence and spelled extinction. It was not in his nature to display even this intense fear, he was separated from it as if it happened to another person, and the stillness in his own heart prohibited to revolt against the stranger who took over a five year old to feel what the child would have had no reason to feel himself. Unless memory holds those first few dramatic hours when it is decided whether we shall live or die before knowing even our parents. It was as if he had to carry a glass full of water without spilling a single drop – he literally held his breath while he lived ever so carefully. Only that he didn’t hold a glass but that it was himself who contained something that he was afraid to spill by sudden movement.
Maybe it was his composure that made it so difficult to love him. It didn’t help that he was completely self sufficient. Or that he did not seem to be aware of the extent of their generosity in accepting him as their son. And as it is difficult to love what is complete in itself and beyond the need for protection, it is equally challenging not to resent the person, even a child, who receives a gift with an air of leisure acceptance. He certainly did not behave as if they owed him any care but it was as if he accepted the gift of their being his parents as a favour and generosity towards them.
«But after all», Iris wrote in her journal «isn’t it quite normal that children are not grateful for their existence, and isn’t it indeed true that they are a gift to their parents? » And yet it felt as if there was a mistake in her observation. If there were none of the disturbances children will cause willfully or by the pure fact of their existence, there was little laughter either. Disturbances of the kind that children cause shake the core of life and make it vibrant. The average child will break the rules, not keep them, and this unwillingness to obey rules as much as it may annoy and exhaust a parent lies the true reason for love. We cannot love what follows us blindly, in our hearts we want to be reminded that there is life outside the prison of our self imposed rules. We do want to laugh at ourselves and at the world that we have build and have considered good while we knew better. And yet it is almost impossible to admit not to love someone due to the fact that they are – perfect.