dark age days

The test involved slides:  a minute for each slide – to look and write down what was pictured.  Name of work, artist, date.  I am not good with tests or most games.  Not just the ones one knows about.  There are tests and games you only feel. They are given at any time.  I refuse if I do know.  And you can only avoid someone’s friends for so long.  In fight or flight, I usually flee.  How strange then, not to be scared.

This was not because I had someone watching out.  I had my system, I had done the work.  It’s hard to describe, being behind my own recognition. Cues inside associations…. songs, streets, colors or a rhyme. Expressions and sayings.  Animal, vegetable, mineral …. that open query.  The first thing coming to your mind. I put this together, it became my world: happless incongruity falling into place. Something not to talk about but know.  Private meaning.  A code.  I was ready, my mind in place.

I imagined the allignment of a sun dial, beam of light onto metal. I looked up across the room at the tops of heads. Coming back from getting water, he looked up at me and smiled. This moved through my body, a pang.  My freeing thrill.  I continued my work, so brilliantly not quantitative.  Long since sleeping having slept, I was going on the energy beyond being tired.  I felt good. This happens even when the brain is on its own.  After the test he had a break. We took our tea behind the building.  I went home to bed, still in the test, still at school.  And back behind the building with him, beneath a tree.

There is a way I was always with him, knowing his voice, a definite smell.  But there is a way he was only in my mind.  He took the place of all I longed for.  I would catch myself catching my breath.

I liked the buildings. It was the disappearance of architecture, with sun through windows. I spent more time. Like infants still want to be enclosed, I wanted to be indoors, the outside coming in. Autumn, so easily remembered; this one now recalling many others. The chill just right. How dusk came to mirror the previous dawn. It was that liquid range in light, orange to amber. Forgetting time. Something had started, and was ours.

He was not some letchurous professor. Wide plank floors underfoot, part of it was being conscious of more. Continually. Aware of myself, being myself more. I would watch, learning to know he was privatly there. This once, someone noticed things I hadn’t known about myself, and then told me. He knew.

We didn’t make plans, it just happened. So much started making me think of him. Walking. The trees. Linseed oil. Things made of cotton, wool or paper. I kept a list, which of course is a primitive device. He brought apples and I fried them in butter. I remember, then. I saw us in my place, as though I were outside myself but still adjacent to him. We ate, and it had suddenly become Indian Summer. We opened the windows and took a nap, had dreams.

I HAD NO IDEA he was watching me, that he even knew I sat where I did. When I wasn’t watching the slides on the screen, I was watching him, and not once did I see him look at me. It is true what they say – some people are able to see without even having to look at all.

The older, two suburban women had been there every week, but had I known this before? I thought they might require smelling salts. When he came over, it looked like their bodies spun around 180 degrees without any effort at all, just to see. They distracted me. Dark lipstick and face powder. Strong perfume. At first I could only see his mouth moving. Then I noticed his eyebrows in the air. He asked me if I would have tea with him.

Did he know I did not drink coffee? It’s unusual not to be a coffee drinker. He drinks tea. He talked in a rush, like he was trying to get over the preliminaries, get to something more immediate. I couldn’t imagine. He told me he didn’t sleep at night. I told him I was the same. Neither one of us had a car. I was surprised how things like this could happen when you’re not thinking they could.

Even that day, I think I feebly tried to explain to him the devices I used for remembering the art. What I couldn’t understand was how he seemed to already know what I was going to tell him before I had finished. When we walked through the door and out of the building, later, he took a wool cap from his pocket and put it on with one quick, curved motion. I knew then.