Alexandra Kleeman - Intimations - Stories

By exerting my own energy, I was able to combine the ingredients of this cake together in the mixing bowl. This was done freely, of my own will. Why, then, could no amount of effort or will unmix the ingredients, make them as they were before, whole and full of potential? If I could unmake this cake as neatly as I could make it, I would be able to stay here in this separate room forever, making and unmaking and never having to deal with the man in the first room who seemed to have ideas about me that I didn’t share.

It was at this moment that I realized I had forgotten the baking soda, and without it I knew the cake would turn out wrong, though I did not know in what way, exactly.

I went back into the living room to ask him if he had any baking soda in some nook I hadn’t checked, but when I entered the room I saw him hiding something under the dining table.

What’s that? I asked.

What are you doing, trying to ruin the surprise? he responded.

I would have asked about the surprise, but I knew it would go nowhere or go somewhere I didn’t want to go. So I asked, instead, about the baking soda. He looked uneasy.

You should have everything there that you need, he said. Maybe you got the recipe wrong, he added.

I looked angry, and then I picked up one of the plates and smashed it on the floor.

It seemed as though, being the only two people in this small, closed-in space, we couldn’t help but have a relationship, and if we couldn’t help but have a relationship, I felt that it was important to be upset now so that he would not shift the blame to me in the future.

Suddenly he also looked angry, and he picked up a larger plate and smashed it near mine.

We stood there, pieces of plate scattering the ground between us. Then he spoke.

Sorry, he said.

There was nothing else I could do but say sorry myself. His apology had left a residue in me, a residue on my thinking, and continuing on in this house without saying it would be entirely awkward. It would turn the small space toxic. So I said it, though I tried to lessen the potency of the apology by mumbling.

I have something to ask you, he said.

I shifted my position to one more suitable for being asked a question. I was now curled up on the couch with my knees pressed up against my body, my knees shielding my face from seeing what was going on.

My question is, he began. I think I knew from the first time I met you that I would not be meeting another person quite like you ever again. You are unlike anyone else around here. I have not seen anyone like you in quite a while. So, should we be exclusive?

Everything seemed to be moving so fast. I had to stall.

When did we meet again? I asked.

It feels like forever ago, he said.

Wouldn’t you say that this is still part of the first time that we’ve met? I asked.

He shrugged. You’re being avoidant, he said. You probably have a history of it, he said.

I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn’t a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?

What I really wanted was to opt out of the causal relation between myself and this cake, the causal relation that I couldn’t seem to avoid, living in this house that I now appeared to live in. The proximity was changing me: I couldn’t avoid seeing or noticing things that happened in this place, and because I was the only other person around, things couldn’t help but involve themselves in me. I decided to think about the orbital motions of the moon around the earth, and of what might happen if the force of one on the other ever exceeded expectations, pulling the two uncomfortably close, causing them to crash together in a fiery and highly destructive event. But he was taking up so much space in me now, I could no longer think around him, peer around him to the shapes of things I had known before I entered this place. What had he meant by a surprise, and what had he meant by something to celebrate? How much time had elapsed in his experience, and was it really different from how much time had elapsed in mine? Or was I instead just a highly avoidant person with serious difficulties connecting to others? I didn’t want to be so difficult, but that difficulty felt like a part of me, a part that I didn’t want taken over by new features belonging to a me that did not yet exist.

I heated the oven to 350 degrees. In this house events seemed to move unusually quickly. Would the cake still require the usual twenty-five to thirty minutes of baking? Or should I try to calculate the temporal properties of this home and scale the time appropriately?

I slid the cake into the oven and walked back into the room. I missed you, he said.

I missed you too, I said.

That sentence came as a real shock. It felt as though it were spoken from some point farther down my throat than tooth or tongue or gag reflex. It felt as though it came from someplace deep within my body, from some speech organ that I had never heard of, that had never been discovered, and that probably didn’t actually exist at all.

He smiled warmly and took my hand. It felt strange at first, both colder and softer than I had expected. But when I reexamined that feeling, I found that I couldn’t remember ever having expected something else.

Now we were standing around holding hands and not much was going on. I began to think of words I had known, just for fun, just to fill up the blank space in my head. Couch, I thought. Cuisinart, I thought.

The words felt different right now than they had before. They meant a little less, held a little less, but seemed somehow fuller: I had never really noticed how much sound there was in a word. The way it filled your mouth up with emptiness, a sort of loosened emptiness that you could tongue, an emptiness you could suck on like a stone. Stomach, I thought. Variety, I thought. Expectation. Intimation. Infiltration. Infiltration: I tongued that one further. I knew it had a hostile aspect, like someone breaking into your house or posing as someone that you should trust. But it also had a lovely sound, a kind of tapered point and a gently ruffled edge, and as I repeated it over and over in my mouth it took on a really great flavor and I thought of water filtering in and out of a piece of fabric, back and forth, moving between, soaking it and washing out, soaking in and taking with it pale tremors of color, memory, resistance, all that stuff, until I felt like one of those pieces of cloth on the television commercials that got washed with the name-brand cleanser and is now not only white, but silky and mountain-scented.

Suddenly, I remembered the cake.

I think I have to get the cake out of the oven, I told him. Hurry back, he said.

I walked across the room to the kitchen and I hoped that the cake would be okay. Certainly it wouldn’t be pretty, but hopefully it would taste like something full of butter, sugar, and cocoa, which was what it was, and how bad could that be?

In the kitchen I took the cake out of the oven with two nice new oven mitts and I carried it back over to the dining-room table. As I set it down, I noticed something written on the top in pale blue icing.

Congratulations? I read.

Congratulations for what? I asked him.

It’s your surprise, he replied. I had a very strange feeling in my stomach.

He advanced toward me holding something in his arms. As he got closer, I saw that it had a face. Look who it is, he said, smiling down at me.

Who is it? I asked.

Can’t you tell? he replied.