Lance Olsen - Girl Imagined by Chance

Near midnight, you set up the sprinkler and let it run.

Just out of range of your beam, you hear deer picking their meticulous way through the undergrowth.

Lingering.

The first ten minutes in Kathmandu airport or how smoke from your father’s cigarettes flooded the Land Rover as you drove over thousands of crabs.

Crabs or the backbones of frogs.

It was a long time ago.

The windows rolled up.

Even after the rains.

Even on nice afternoons.

Even on nice afternoons he would roll up the windows and open the air vent, which only had the effect of circulating the cigarette smoke through the cabin more efficiently.

One elbow pressed against the closed window.

One hand on the steering wheel.

Cigarette dangling from his lips like a movie star from the forties.

You cannot remember him being happier than during those particular moments.

The cells in his lungs already beginning to go awry on a molecular level, presumably.

Minute genetic damage already beginning to accumulate.

Like dawn gathering bluely across the Finnish countryside in December.

That subtle.

That haunting.

Andi wanders from room to room in the summer house, white light fogging the air, exposing her large dangling breasts to sunshine and oxygen.

It stops raining.

It stops raining and the sky adopts a glassy blue, day after day.

Millions of silver salt crystals breaking down into black silver.

Leaves clitter on bushes like paper.

Duststorms pursue cars on the gravel roads. Patinas collect on top of your refrigerator and stove. Dust stings your eyes, stings the back of your throat. It makes your sinuses drain without warning.

You do not know any chemistry, either.

But still.

Sunsets become breathtaking north-to-south expanses of oranges, yellows, pinks.

You start letting your hair grow.

It seems like a good idea.

It seems like a good idea and soon it covers your ears and feathers your lower neck.

Scratch-resistant coating, emulsion, base.

The stuff of black-and-white film, the thickness of your fingernail.

Andi finds a steady line of customers: gawky brides, beefy grooms, gleeful chefs.

You begin bumping into people in Moscow much like yourself: programmers, artists, academics from somewhere else.

Several invite you to dinner.

You invite a few to your house.

You discover that they, too, want to be the last people to arrive in this state.

They want to be the ones to lock the gate behind them.

You limb the felled trees and chain saw them into seventeen-inch logs, buy a maul and wedge, split the largest pieces, stack them in the barn.

Virginia Dentatia slips into a coma.

Far inside her web site, you embed a video feed so viewers can witness a close-up of her wasting face, translucent pale-green oxygen mask over nose and mouth.

Close-up: Andi’s toes wriggling on the edge of the shiny wooden coffee table, each digit with a mind of its own.

Pan back to include her tanned calves.

Her shiny whitish kneecaps.

Her muscular thighs disappearing beneath her shiny black silk robe.

Pan back farther to include you sitting on the carpet, her across from you on the couch.

You are eating breakfast.

Both of you are eating breakfast and recounting your dreams from the night before.

Andi has taken to keeping a journal of the best ones.

She is writing as you speak.

A beach, you say between bites. A silver-white beach of the over-zealous imagination.

And on the beach?

A resort. A resort which exudes plushness. All the paths are lined with fake Easter Island heads. All the waiters are black and extremely polite. I’m sorry, of course, but they are — both black and polite.

You take another spoonful of banana slices, vanilla yogurt, and granola.

You and I are sitting on a veranda, sipping Piña Coladas. Below us, on the white beach, good-looking people with good-looking bodies are sunning on a good-looking day. Every once in a while a swim-suited man with a thirty-eight-inch waist and twenty-one-inch inseam moseys among the sunners, carrying a small red plastic pail and shovel.

For playing in the sand?

It would seem so. But the man isn’t the same man. There are many of him. They are all carrying the same red plastic pails.

What are they doing?

Heading in the same direction, minding their own business. Businesses. They’re all on the same mission, ambulating from the lefthand corner of your view to the right.

What happens?

That’s it, unfortunately. I remember the dream dissolving just like that: on a certain note of ambiguity, a whiff of uneasiness pervading the otherwise pleasant scene.

That’s good, Andi says, jotting. That’s very good. But I can top it.

You sip your organic kiwi-and-strawberry juice, wipe your mouth, lean back on your palms.

It’s the peace of the countryside, she begins. It’s open windows and a chaste breeze. I’m reclining in the bathtub, our bathtub, I’m fairly sure, when I understand, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, what Death’s name is.

I didn’t know Death had a name.

It’s Anita, as luck would have it. Nothing fancy. Just Anita.

You have to admire Death’s simplicity.

Reclining in the bathtub, I hear the doorbell ring. I’ve been reading, though I forget what — something embarrassingly trashy yet engaging — so I’m understandably annoyed. I stand. Towel off. Slip on a robe. This robe in fact, I seem to remember. As I approach the front door, I can see through the wispy curtains a cute little Girl Scout with a tray of the kind hotdog vendors at ballparks use. It’s fastened around her neck by means of leather straps. In the tray are boxes of chocolate fudge cookies. She’s so cute she looks like a child actor.

Anita.

She’s trying to lure me outside with one of my favorite foods. But something in me turns to… what? Something in me turns to goo. Without thinking, I reach for the doorknob. I feel its cool aluminum presence in my palm. I begin to rotate my wrist joint. It’s all I can do…

Just then someone knocks at the front door.

The real front door.

The dreamless one.

Someone knocks that instant.

Andi’s sentence snags on the noise. She stops writing and peers at you over the top of her journal.

You return her stalled look.

The someone who just knocked on your front door clumps over to the window on the porch, pauses, clumps back to the door and knocks again. The someone clumps down the stairs and around the side of the house and back up the stairs and opens the screen door and steps right up to the inside door and knocks.

Andi and you sit perfectly still.

You hear individual drops of rain ploick off the gutter.

The screen door whacks shut.

The someone clumps across the porch and down the stairs.

A minute later, and you hear Jack Pederson’s ATV catch in your driveway.

You hear gravel chewing slowly beneath tires.

Andi retracts her neck.

Now she begins to laugh.

Andi begins to laugh.

She topples onto her side, hands tucked between her legs, thick dark hair obscuring her face, laughing and laughing.

The scene fading out.

You call Benn and Branda after dinner.

From New Jersey.

Benn was your first roommate at Rutgers and you have stayed in touch with him ever since, on and off, more off than on, though you admit to Andi that, all things being equal, if you ran into him on the street for the first time tomorrow it would never cross your mind to strike up a friendship with him.

When you knew him, he was a funny freshman who studied philosophy and took Nietzsche seriously and played guitar. Folk guitar. After college he worked as a street singer in Manhattan.