Mamihlapinatapai
He nods again, and I know he can’t possibly understand what it is like to own something that takes you over completely. Perhaps he unexpectedly became the legal guardian of a young child, or was very sick at one point. But that isn’t really the same because those things would have been out of his hands, whereas I am able to walk back into my old life but the thought paralyzes me. He is peeling a green apple with a pocket knife, the pocket knife has mother of pearl inlay and the initials J.R inscribed onto the handle. I imagine it was given to him years ago by his father, on his birthday.
“What’s your job like?”
“It’s very consuming.”
“How long have you been at it?”
“A couple months. I sort of fell into it.”
He reaches over the wrought iron divider and hands me half of the apple and I am overwhelmed by the gesture. I am a grain of sand on a very large desolate beach and the man is a marine biologist who comes along and says ‘you are beautiful, you are deserving, you are one grain of sand and you matter.’ The apple tastes sharp.
“Do you sleep at night?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you sleep?”
He has stabbed the bottom of his apple with his pearl knife and is eating off of the blade. No. The honest answer is no. I take scalding hot baths in the dark, I re-arrange all of my furniture and flick the lights on and off to watch my pupils dilate. But I do not really sleep.
“Sometimes.”
“I don’t sleep either. I’m an infomercial operator.”
“What?”
“You know at the end of infomercials when they say, “Call now! Operators are standing by?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s me. I’m the operator. I’m standing by.”
It is 2:16 AM and someone is rapping at the door. I am sitting on the floor of my kitchen with a mirror propped up on the refrigerator, cutting my hair. I have thrown the cake in the trash. I am considering becoming someone else entirely, it is easier than it seems to slip in and out of lives. I take the scissors with me to the front door, if it is a burglar or a Jehovah’s witness, I would like to be perceived as aggressive. Not like someone who chops their hair off in the middle of the night. I hide the yellow plastic handle under my palm, exposing only the harsh blade so that whoever is on the other side of the door does not think I am in the middle of a craft project. I knew a woman who’s life revolved around her home-craft-business. She made calendars out of delicate printed paper and pastel ribbons, then affixed tiny palm fronds in the shape of crosses onto the backs of each calendar. I was friends with her devastatingly innocent daughter until the woman called me a hussy and demanded I leave her house. Perhaps it is her on the other side, perhaps she is selling them door-to-door.
“Who’s there?”
“The operator.”
I un-latch the chain,
“Hi.
“Hi.”
“You cut your hair.”
“I couldn’t get May’s smell out of it.”
“Would you like to see the infomercial ware-house.”
It isn’t so much a warehouse as it is a very large, dark room. Cavernous and damp, there are towering stacks of cardboard boxes labeled with things like,
“INSTA-CLOSET”
and
“MR.CLEAN PRESSURE WASHER”
Operator sits on an olive-green pleather chair with deep cracks in the cushion, leaning over a desk which has three phones and a computer. There are two laminated sheets taped to the face of his desk, one lists the appropriate phone dialogue protocol:
HELLO AND THANK YOU FOR CALLING E-Z SHOP, HOW MAY I HELP YOU
WE ONLY HAVE A LIMITED QUANTITY OF (PRODUCT) LEFT, ORDER NOW!!
I OWN A (PRODUCT) MYSELF, DON’T KNOW HOW I LIVED WITHOUT IT!
ORDER ONE FOR MOM!
and the products currently available for shipment:
BIG-LETTER KEYBOARD
BACON GENIE
BIBLE ON DVD
FUZZ WIZARD
“Most infomercials are played between the hours of two to six in the morning because most people are asleep then.”
Operator swivels in his chair to face me.
“Isn’t that counter-productive?”
“No. Because normal people who are up and about during the day don’t have the patience to watch the whole thing, which is on average five to fifteen minutes long, or they have the sense to move on, do something, know that they don’t really need a clock in the shape of a cat that meows on the hour. But people like us who are awake from two to six are in deep enough of a daze to watch the whole thing. We have poor judgment. And some of us order. This industry is dependent on insomniacs.”
“How many people call? Do you ever sell out?”
He points to a flat of boxes labeled WEIGHT LOSS BELT.
“These have been here for three years.”
The light is flickering on and off.
A fly is crawling on the wall.
Operator is staring at me.
“I hear you in the middle of the night sometimes.”
I stare at the fly crawling, I never kill houseflies because I know that their life-spans are only twenty days. This could be the last day. It should die on someone’s sandwich bread. Not under an EZ-SHOP Catalogue with a picture of Tammy Faye Baker on the cover.
“You take baths with the lights off.”
“How can you tell?”
“The lights in our building make a buzzing noise. When you turn the water off the buzzing stops.”
I sit down on a plastic crate.
“You listen to Vivaldi on vinyl records. There’s a scratch a couple minutes into your ii adagio. You have the volume up all the way, but no one ever tells you to turn it down.”
The fly lands on his knee and he doesn’t notice.
“Don’t be bothered by this. It’s not that I’m listening for it, I just don’t sleep either.”
“Why did you ask me to come here.”
I grip the edges of the crate like they are the last thing I will ever touch. Someone is listening for me, someone is sitting in their apartment noticing that I take baths in the dark because I am terrified of finding a patch of cancer or a tumor. I leave records on as loud as possible because then I may not hear the phone ring, then I will not have to answer it.
“You can’t understand what it is to really be an island until you live in Nevada. The desert pulls you out like a rip tide and before you know it, it has been three months since you’ve had a conversation with anybody.”
There is a roaring, swollen silence.
“Can I just feel your pulse?”
I look at Operator. His eyes are two different colors. Brown and blue. Heterochromia iridium. I’ve read about things like this. Ancient civilizations believed these people had an evil, unborn twin living in their body. I understand why someone would want to feel another person’s pulse. I own a stethoscope, I stole it from the emergency room when I had alcohol poisoning. I listen to my pulse sometimes with it in the bath, in the dark.
“Yes.”
We are lying on a flat of Lucite crosses that are filled with holy water, which is really just tap water from a warehouse very similar to this one. All warehouses are similar, all water is holy if you need it to be. We are lying in the dark with our fingertips on each others jugulars. The phones are off the hooks. Our clothes are on the floor. It seems perfectly natural to be lying naked in a warehouse listening to a strangers pulse. It seems necessary, medicinal even. I think of how we might look from far away, and I can see it because I am far. I am asleep in a nebula in the depths of outer space. I am not really here. Most things do seem wonderful from great heights, the world is best viewed from a ferris wheel or the top of a very tall building.
My beeper goes off.
Mamihlapinatapai
The inside of an aluminum mobile home is like a womb. It is small and warm and curved on all sides, it is usually dark and if it is particularly windy it will even rock a little bit. The call is out in the desert between an abandoned church fashioned out of crumbling mud-brick and faded mosaic tiles, and a brothel called SHERRI’S RANCH. The dispatcher says, ‘Look for a plaster statue of a lion, the trailer is about 80 yards to the left’. There was the lion, it’s left ear bashed off leaving a gaping hole in its plaster skull, there was the dim buzzing pink lights of SHERRI’S RANCH, and there was the trailer. I approach trailers gingerly, perhaps because I grew up in one, so I understand the wariness of their residents. People often walk into trailers without knocking, they don’t see them as homes. Just pods. Also, this person is in the midst of a crisis.
I knock.
Wait two seconds.
“Hello? This is Lydia Lynch from EMS Crisis Services. Is everything alright?”
There is a flurry of footsteps, breathlessness.
The door creaks open just an inch.
“Hi.”
“Hi. May I come inside?”
I am sitting, facing Temple Teagarden, on a thread bare turquoise velour loveseat. She is perched on a piano bench, biting her nails which are uneven lengths and painted in coral. Her hair is bleached and teased into a brittle cloud and she is not overweight but close to it. Temple wears geranium lipstick that bleeds into the crevices around her mouth and false eyelashes which are crooked. I find myself wondering if this is due to the crisis or if she just doesn’t care.
“Can you tell me what caused you to call tonight?”
She smoothes the creases out of her white cotton shift and stares intently at her knees.
“I gave my daughter up for adoption twenty years ago.”
I nod expertly. I notice Temple has an EZ-SHOP plastic crucifix tacked on the wall and feel like it is a message from Operator, ‘anything can be holy if you need it to be’ I bet there is a bible on cassette somewhere in this trailer, I bet Tammy Faye Baker did the voice over.
“I was sixteen, I couldn’t keep her.”
“I understand.”
“She was so fragile. She was the smallest thing I’d ever had, but I still didn’t have any room for her. Does that make sense?”
All I can think about is the cake in the trash, Darren and Maeve under a quilt somewhere being twin-souls, the apple half. How do you become a twin soul? Are we born as jagged halves with the one other fitting piece orbiting around the other end of the earth, or is it something you might convince yourself of being with the aid of self-help books and motivational thinking? Perhaps we can re-shape ourselves to fit into any other piece, perhaps it has nothing to do with the cosmos.
“I have always regretted it. I named her Tanya but I don’t know if they recorded that at the hospital. They never let me hold her, I think the nurses assumed I would give her up. I mean, they were right but they could have asked.”
“Of course they should have asked.”
“The worst part was never getting to hold her, and I know that if I saw her again she wouldn’t know who I was, she wouldn’t feel anything about me. But she did hear my voice, because when they took her away I said ‘Tanya’, you know they say if a baby hears it’s mother’s voice just once it will recognize it forever? Do you think that’s true? Do you think she would recognize my voice?”
Temple dissolves into tears, her shoulders heave and wobble with every quake of her body. She has the eyes of a pig, blue and round and watery. Her breasts are visible through the cotton shift, they are burgeoning against the strain of the fabric and seem too heavy to hold up for a lifetime. They are large in a way that suggests dismal maternity instead of sexuality. There is nothing sexual about them, they were meant for Tanya.
“I am sure she remembers your voice, its obvious that you love her.”
“She came here today.”
“Tanya did? To your home?”
“This afternoon. Once they turn eighteen they’re allowed access to their biological parent’s address. I didn’t think she would ever come, I mean I didn’t even sign anything. I thought about her every day but I didn’t think she would come.”
“So what happened? Did she come inside, did you talk?”
Pig eye tears again and heaving cow breasts, nicotine yellow nails rake over the wailing moon face. Her waxy, geranium lips are stretched over her teeth. Grinding. I feel sick, this is my job. To always be available, to suppress overwhelming nausea.
“Would you like a tissue?”
What a question. Tissues, Kleenex brand facial tissues. Lavender scented.
“No, I’m fine, I’m fine.”
Temple digs dirt out from under her nails.
“I didn’t say anything. I pretended to be someone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she came to the door and said, Temple? Mom? And I didn’t know what to do, I panicked and I said No, sorry. Wrong trailer. And she looked at me for a real long time.”
I think of the time I lay on the floor of my mother’s kitchen when I was seven years old, pretending to be dead. A heap on the grimy linoleum for at least three hours, I stayed perfectly still and chiseled my breathing down to a shallow hush. I let ants crawl over my arm, I let the dog lick me, I held back a sneeze. My mother came through the front door with a vase of yellow roses which she dropped, the cloudy water pooled in the cracks of the floor and rolled toward me. The flowers were crushed, the dog stepped on the glass and there was blood. She shook me, she laid me on the couch and called 911. When her back was turned I ran out the door and hid in a watershed down the street until sunset.
“She looks just like her father.”
“Where is he?”
“Hell if I know, took off with a casino girl named Candace. But he had huge green eyes and red hair, and so does Tanya.”
“Did she leave then?”
“No she said, ‘You really aren’t Temple? This is the address the agency gave to me, I’m actually trying to find my birth mother.’ I couldn’t really talk, I just shook my head and shut the door a little more. She left a letter.”
“Have you read it.”
“I could never. I can’t read that letter. I don’t know what to do with it, it’s in the oven.”
“Burned?”
“No, it’s just sitting in there on a cookie sheet.”
“Why is it in the oven?”
“Because I can’t see it if its in there.”
“Why did you feel you couldn’t let her know who you were?”
Temple heaves a sigh, lights a Virginia Slim and combs her sausage fingers through her yellow scrub of hair.
“I was a different person then. Sinful. After I gave my baby away I found Christ.”
She motions to a crude oil painting of Jesus tacked up on the wall, his heart throbbing with veins radiating from the center of his chest.
“I did that in rehab.”
“It’s lovely.”
“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior?”
“I was raised by an atheist and a Jew.’
She clicks her tongue, blows smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“Well, when you’re ready, he’ll be waiting. He’ll always be waiting for you.”
“If you’re a different woman now though, why couldn’t you let Tanya back into your life?”
Temple ashes into an empty can of Pabst,
“You know, I’m just too busy.”
“With what?”
You would never guess she had been sobbing a moment earlier.
“My country singing career.”
“I see.”
“It’s really taking off.”
“Well are you happy?”
“I’ve got Christ.”
She stands up and reaches into a paper grocery bag,
“I’ve got my demo, here. Would you like a copy?”
“Of course.”
She presses the disc into my hand, there is a paper sticker on it with a close-up of her face and an illuminated cross. The title reads, “DESERT ROSE”
“That’s my stage name.”
There are four tracks, FAITH FROM ABOVE – HE WHO KNOWS – BLUE RIBBON FRIED CHICKEN- MAMA KNOWS
“Five dollars.”
“Sorry?”
“For the album.”
My God. Of course. Perhaps I will listen to it in the car, perhaps I will give it to Operator and he can listen to it when I’m not taking a bath. Perhaps I will listen to it when I’m not. Or we may even listen to it together next time on the fire escape. If there is a next time, which I suspect there will be. Once someone has listened to your pulse it is very likely you will see them again. Probably in a similar situation. I pull a crumpled bill from my pocket and hand it to Temple,
“God Bless.”
“So are you alright?”
She stares blankly, detached like the helium balloon.
“Why, I’m just fine.”
“Do you think you’ll read the letter?”
Pig eye stare.
“Okay. Here is my card, I’m available most nights.”
“Christ is available twenty four-seven.”
Operator sits on my bed, which is a mattress in the corner of my hallway. There is a bedroom, but it is stifling and there are windows in it. Which are undesirable for two reasons. I sleep-walk, and am liable to open one and fall out. Also, I am terrified of being watched. The envelope is on the mattress, DESERT ROSE is playing from a stereo in the bathroom. I am sitting on the floor, cutting off more of my hair.
“How did you get the letter?”
“I took it on the way out.”
“Didn’t she see you?”
“Yes, but she didn’t stop me.”
“Should we read it?”
“No, but someone should. You could slip it into a box about to be shipped at the warehouse.”
“What the fuck is this music playing?”
“Desert Rose.”
Operator squints, his glasses are crooked. Probably because his ears are uneven.
“Did you take this, too?”
“I purchased it. Unwillingly.”
“There’s a lot of freaks in the desert.”
I stare at him.
“Yes, there are.”
“Are you saying that because I told you about listening to the bath from my apartment?”
“Not consciously, but probably. I am an intensely private person.”
“We should write each other letters.”
“Saying what?”
“Things that we didn’t say at the warehouse.”
“Will we ever read them to each other?”
“Maybe. It depends on how real you want this to get.”
The CD skips, Temple’s voice warbles again and again ‘I put my faith in you-I put my faith in you-I put my faith in you’ I pull the cord from the socket with my toes and it is too quiet. I hum to cover up the silence, I play the neurotic’s wild card and pretend I never noticed it in the first place.
My beeper wakes me up at four AM, the window in the kitchen is open from when Operator climbed out of it to get back into his house from the connecting fire escapes. What kind of people go to such lengths to avoid going through the front door? The same kind of people who sleep in their hallways and slip in and out of other people’s lives like a fugitive or a protected witness. The dispatcher sounds tired and hopeless on the other end of the radio waves, he says
“Good news is that the call is in your building, can you believe that?”
Of course I can believe that.
“Bad news is the woman is suicidal. Apartment 16a”
“That’s right next door to me.”
“Even better.”
The door is open, all of the lights are on. I know this is where Operator lives and I already know that after tonight I will have to find someone else’s life to fit into. I could create my own, but as you might imagine I don’t have any references.
“Hello?”
I proceed with caution.
“This is Lydia Lynch from EMS Crisis Mediation Services. I’m here to help.”
The bathroom door is open, and there is a woman. A frail woman with a puff of wiry black hair combed into a hive on the top of her small, fragile head. She wears large circular glasses rimmed with red plastic and is sitting in the bathtub, curled into herself.
“I know who you are.” She says this flatly, and my breath gets caught in my throat and begins to curdle.
“You’re the woman from next door.”
“I do live next door.”
“You know my husband.”
I know from prior experience that this is the point where I can either deny everything or apologize profusely and slowly segue the conversation into something about growing together as women, and how we can sabotage “the man”.
“I didn’t know he was your husband.”
She shakes her head.
“I actually don’t even know his name.”
Her eyes widen, “You fucked someone who’s name you don’t know?”
“Well, no. I mean I had a name that I called him. So it wasn’t like I didn’t have something to refer to him as,”
“What did you call him?”
“The operator.”
“That’s sick.”
“But he is an operator…I think you should get out of the tub.”
“I’m waiting for him to come home.”
“Okay we can wait on the couch.”
“I don’t want to move. Did you know he was married?”
“Of course not. He didn’t seem like the type.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well his work shift is from two to six in the morning and he is obviously unstable. You must know that. Has he always been that way?”
“Did he take you to the warehouse?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I should leave him?”
“Probably. I think I’m moving out of this place pretty soon, so if we both cut out at the same time it will be even worse for him.”
“Are you leaving because of him?”
“And other things.”
There is a very dense silence, I turn the sink on and wash my hands to cover it up. I use the woman’s soap. Vanilla scented. Our worlds are composed of miniscule things. What if all soap were un-scented, what if there were no color choices and we had numbers instead of names? I would not even have a job because everyone would have killed themselves already.
“I have an idea.” She says mostly to herself, but I am entitled to it as well because I appreciate her choice in hand soap.
“What is it?”
“Packing up all my stuff then setting this place on fire. I’d like to move to Oregon.”
I have had a hand in the upheaval of this woman’s life, so I must comply. I also like the idea of doing something that would force me to move on from this place.
“Then let’s do it.”
I run to my apartment and throw the Vivaldi records, the stethoscope and the yellow scissors into a bag. I don’t need a lot of things. I would do very well as a Franciscan monk, except I am a woman and prone to bouts of moral bankruptcy. Red Glasses is already dousing the place with lighter fluid.
“I hope this doesn’t hurt any one else in the building.”
“The sprinklers will go off before it does.”
She nods and empties the last of the container onto the bed. She removes her glasses and tosses them onto a pillow.
“These have glass lenses, anyway. My vision is fine.”
“Why did you wear them?”
“He liked them.”
With that she lights a match and the bed erupts into flames. I hook the stethoscope around the door knob before leaving. I just don’t have room for it.
