Robert Coover - John's Wife

Déjà vu, as Ellsworth could have told anyone who wanted to know, was French for “already seen,” and was properly used to describe that uncanny but illusory experience of feeling that something that was happening for the first time had actually happened before. It was in this sense that he had used it in his novel-in-progress when the Artist, leading his Model down to a riverbank and perching her on a stone there, has the sensation suddenly, as the Model leans forward to peer down into the gently flowing river, that he has witnessed this entire scene before, perhaps in a dream or a vision, but certainly at some psychic level profounder yet less concrete than the literal prospect that confronts him now. Alas, this was another scene largely obliterated by the Stalker: only the barren stone remained like an unoccupied pedestal, or something hard fallen into reality, inexplicably, out of a dream. Dreams and déjà vu often seemed to go together. The preacher’s wife Beatrice tripping or Lorraine in the middle of her histrionic nighttime theater often felt that they somehow “recognized” the scenes they were in, as though from another life, just as Floyd, slicing the throat of the redhaired faggot outside Wichita, had the uncanny feeling, and not for the first time in such matters, that it had all happened before, as if in a crazy dream he’d had. Or, weirdly, was still having. What caused Veronica to faint in church when Reverend Lenny quoted from the Second Letter of John the Elder to the Elect Lady and Her Children, if it was not this sort of déjà vu? When Opal remarked to Kate, back before the librarian died, that sometimes she felt like she’d dreamt her whole life before living it (she’d only meant to suggest how simple and predictable it all was), her friend had frightened her by replying: “You probably have some childhood story you don’t want to tell me, Opal…” That Kate. She’d also told Opal once that falling in love in a dream and then meeting that love in real life, an example of déjà vu often reported, if seldom believed, should not be regarded as an uncanny experience at all, and that those who did so held to an outdated, mechanistically passive theory of perception. “The percept is, always, a creation,” she said, or something like that. Over Opal’s head, really, and when she said so, Kate said: “We see what we want to see.” “Oh yes.” When Clarissa and Jennifer asked Uncle Bruce if he believed it was possible to fall in love in a dream, he said it was the only way he had ever fallen in love, all the women he had loved and even some of those he had married he had met first in dreams, and it was just a matter of recognizing them when they turned up later. In fact, he was still waiting for some of his dream loves to show up in the real world. Then a wink their way: or grow up.

That dreamlike “I’ve been here before” feeling that occasionally overwhelms travelers to strange realms was one that, with all its force, struck young Turtle, alias Maynard III, alias Little, alias Nerd the Turd (at the moment he felt most like Little), when he found himself at last face-to-face, so to speak, with that which he was certain he had never seen before, and by a route unavailable to him until just recently: a keyhole. He supposed there were a lot of houses in town with keyholes you could see through, but the houses his parents always lived in were too new, and maybe that was why they were so unhappy. Ever since his best buddy Fish pointed them out to him, Turtle had been peering through all the keyholes he could find, but mostly at the manse where he hoped he might see Jennifer in her underwear or Zoe taking a pee or something; there weren’t any girls in his own house either, just his old mom. Usually he did this when Fish was not around, because it seemed to make Fish mad for reasons Turtle could not understand, not after he’d told him about keyholes in the first place. For all the time he spent stooped over and squinting through them, though, it seemed that all he was going to get out of it was a bad reputation around the manse, since he’d seen nothing, but they’d all seen him (Jennifer snuck up from behind one day and gave him a terrific kick that made him wham his eyebrow into the doorknob, and she called him a turdy nerd and a jerkoff and a sick little weirdo, it was as bad as what his mom was calling his dad these days, and about all he could do, and it wasn’t much, was stick his tongue out at her and silently wish her pitched straight into hell on the end of a hot fork), but then one day there it was, like a magic show. It was the first thing he saw as he bent down to peek and at first he didn’t even know what it was until he finally recognized the big fat legs sticking out on both sides of it. Wow. It — she — was lying out flat on a bed with her knees over the side, completely naked except for a pair of bright red boots with paired horses’ heads burned into the sides as though with branding irons, and her eyes were wide open, but it was like she was asleep. By now, he was inside the room (that was how he could tell about her eyes), but he didn’t remember opening the door and coming in and he was pretty sure the door was still shut behind him. She didn’t seem to mind that he was there or maybe she didn’t even see him, so he leaned down to get a closer look and this was when he had that powerful sense of having been here before though he knew he hadn’t. Maybe it reminded him of something he had seen at the state park where they had all those funny rock formations and tall skinny caves. It was dark and damp-smelling and hairy all around, which made it seem secretive and hidden, but the thing itself, as best he could tell where the inside began and the outside ended, was soft and pink and puffy with a little lidded bump on top which he knew the name of from the books Fish had shown him but which felt different than he expected when he touched it. Under the bump, it seemed to become paler and paler in color the more toward the middle you got, almost like, deep inside, at, like, floor level, there was a light on. As Turtle knelt down as to a keyhole to see what he could see, he suddenly remembered old man Floyd hooting out in Sunday school: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away!” Yikes. So he changed his position and, pushing her heavy legs apart so as to get in closer, peeked in with his left.

While the experiences of Little, Floyd, or Ellsworth’s Artist were classic examples of déjà vu, the term was also often used, more loosely, to take note of cyclical or repetitive behavior or occurrences, or to describe one’s sudden awareness of the similarity of events distant from one another in time. This was the sort of déjà vu Dutch was experiencing when he heard Daphne deliver a line much like one he’d heard a decade or so earlier but had since forgotten, a line with dramatic consequences then, perhaps again now. Or that which Nevada felt a short time later when, looking into the boyish face of a new sexual partner, she thought she found traces of an old love there. It was the sort of déjà vu that the police chief Otis suffered on that earlier occasion when dead Winnie’s expression behind the shattered windshield of the wrecked car recalled one he had been confronted with the day before when she was still alive, an experience that, for a while anyway, changed his life. It might well describe that initial shock that Pauline felt that same day when, her husband preoccupied with his photos of the wreck, she saw those pictures in his secret albums that he’d taken of his mother years before: déjà vu. Even Alf, much less superstitious or susceptible to emotional reactions than either Otis or Pauline, experienced something not unlike déjà vu that night of the wreck when, somewhat drunkenly, he was helping his driver haul old Stu out through the sprung door on the driver’s side and worrying how the hell they were going to extricate the pinned and crushed body of Winnie from the other side. Everyone else out there at the humpback bridge that night was wandering around in a state that reminded Alf of shell-shocked war victims, and when that dwarfish clubfooted woman, later known to him as Cornell’s new wife Gretchen, came stumbling down the side of the ditch to help, he had sudden total recall of a battle scene during the war when a limping gnomelike creature, apparently out there scavenging from the dead, took time out from corpse robbing to help Alf dig a survivor out from under fallen debris, and afterwards he could not remember if that battle scene had ever taken place or if it was something he had seen in a movie or read about or only imagined. As for Gretchen’s husband Cornell, gripping the steering wheel of his car up on the road that night of the wreck as though suffering a sudden seizure, whether or not he was experiencing anything like déjà vu at that moment, as his alarmed expression might have suggested, will never be known. Certainly the confused young man would have had no idea what the strange phrase meant, having repressed what little of that unfriendly language he learned in school after his postgraduation trip to Paris, retaining only a single French word, picked up over there on that awesome occasion, a word he never learned the meaning of, though forget it he never could. Returning with his bottle of wine that last night, though not the one she had in her perversity sent him out to find, he discovered that Marie-Claire had sprayed it gaudily on her studio wall: HINK. Probably there was meant to be another letter afterwards, but Marie-Claire’s paint ran out, so to speak. There was just a long red swath down to the floor where Marie-Claire lay, her naked body, cooling, whiter than one of her fresh unpainted canvases. All now slashed to ribbons, the painted ones as well.