Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

The way things simply stop at the photographic edge so that your memory often stops there, too.

What you think of as your memory.

Andi walks over to you one evening while you are watching television, places this photograph in your lap, and stands back, appraising.

Two days and two nights after cousin Karla’s call.

Two days, two nights, and twenty-two hours.

Appraising, waiting for your response.

One set of fingers holds her belly in place, one set picks her lower lip.

There is Kool-Aid-purple damage beneath her eyes. A greenish-pale hue to her skin that reminds you of how the skin on certain people automatically turns unhealthy sometime past midnight. An inverted pinkish triangular patch encompassing her nose and mouth that reminds you of someone who has been wearing an oxygen mask.

Her eyes are smaller than you remember them.

She has not been eating.

Eating or sleeping.

She has been crying, instead.

Crying and walking.

Because if there is no one to remember a moment in the past, the past ceases to be the past.

Crying and walking and working in her studio most of the night.

You do not pursue her down there.

She presents you with an expression at the top of the stairs that says this would not be a wise idea.

But you hear things.

Things falling. Breaking. Things being rummaged through.

You hear her talking aloud to herself as she weeps and walks and works.

And so you watch television.

You watch television pretty much around the clock.

You do nothing but flip channels, go to the bathroom, flip channels, consult the blue digital clock on the VCR atop the console, flip channels, nod off and then lurch awake again two minutes later as though someone just elbowed you in the head, begin flipping channels once more.

All with the sound turned down.

All with the sound turned down so as not to disturb her.

With the mute on, now off, on, now off.

Look at her break-your-heart smile.

Look at her dark eyes feeling more than they have a right to feel at that age.

Look at her lips, always parted as if words wanted to escape but could not, the perplexity, the glistening mouth standing on its head, the way the collage changes emotion if you hold it upside down.

How there are, if you examine this piece closely, two collages in one, a perceptual cleft between them, two voices trying to inhabit the same emotional and aesthetic space.

Living in two worlds at once.

As in Kirlian photography.

Three.

As in a CAT scan.

You put down the remote and you put down the collage and you rise and enfold your wife in your arms, wishing you were taller than you are.

She continues picking her lower lip.

Bracing her belly.

You hug her and think about how you cannot think of anything else to do so you hug her.

She continues picking her lower lip.

And now you hear it.

At first you believe you are not hearing it, that it is an aural fata morgana originating in the pith of your brain, but now you hear it and you know you are hearing it.

You are hearing something so weak and high-pitched and unnatural coming from the back of your wife’s throat that you begin palming her head instinctively, rubbing her occipital lobes, trying to calm down whatever it is living inside her, trying to let it know everything is safe, it is okay, it can come out now.

You keep changing dreams.

Your television tells you that thirty thousand years ago in the Chauvet cave in southern France an eight-year-old child slipped, its skid mark in the hardened clay eight-and-a-half inches long.

A photograph in rock.

Twenty to thirty thousand years ago.

It is difficult to say without further information.

You keep changing dreams and your television tells you that kids whose mothers smoke a pack of cigarettes a day during the third trimester are twice as likely to become chronic criminals because of nervous system impairment than those mothers who do not smoke a pack of cigarettes a day.

You do not feel any better.

No matter what you do.

Not, for example, when you locate Nickelodeon.

Not when you see the camera on a public-access station panning the dim high-school gym somewhere in Wenatchee, Washington, documenting the congestion of the faithful.

Especially not then.

The Swarming, the newscaster who is not a newscaster but perhaps a wannabe actor is calling it.

The loyal multitude in the bleachers, in the aisles, pouring out onto the polished floor, dangling off window ledges, pressing against the doors.

The immense murmur of hope.

The low drone of conflicting prayers recited three days on end.

Especially not when you see the bright ring of light in the center.

The bright ring of light surrounding Anya Sanchez draped on her bed like a broken marionette in a white robe.

Her parents in the front row, dignified, stiff.

Marissa in a frilly flowered dress like Easter morning and Juan in an eye-achingly white shirt with the top button buttoned.

The top button buttoned and no tie.

That white.

That sad.

Kids in wheelchairs. Kids on crutches. Kids in bandages.

Noseless kids. Neckless kids.

Kids with flippers instead of legs, legs instead of arms, too many arms, not enough fingers, plenty of fingers but each of them shaped like a hammer, plenty of fingers and each shaped perfectly but curled into their chests like claws.

Burned kids, bald kids, bug-eyed kids.

Kids with lizard skin, with elephant skin, with blotched or peeling or carbuncular skin, with exquisite skin but heads three times too large for their dwarfish bodies, old before their years, brainless, unable to hold up their torsos, unable to bend their torsos, unable to say their names, unable to stop saying their names, swollen, emaciated, hooked to stoma bags, droopy eyed, bent legged, in possession of more holes than a human body should have, not enough, exactly the right amount but arthritis at eight, nephritis at nine.

This is what hell will look like.

This is what Hieronymus Bosch saw when he went to sleep every night.

Now the rush of carbonation at the base of your skull.

The camera panning.

The rush of carbonation at the base of your skull, the familiar face, and the twinge of televisual recognition.

Monet’s world turning yellower and redder as cataracts grew over his eyes.

You can see it in his paintings.

Next thing you are leaning forward.

Next thing you are out of your seat on your knees in front of the set, touching the screen, realizing precisely how pixilated broadcast images really are, how difficult to decipher, why personalities never appear the same in real life as they do on TV.

Monet’s world turning yellower and redder and more abstract and Francis Bacon’s faces looking like cysts on ham.

And there is Jared among the throng.

An impressionist cloud of photons and electrons that is also your friend.

He is holding Nadie in his lap. His hands around her cloudy waist. Her eyes making her seem distracted, as if no one else exists around her, as if she is sitting by herself in her own bed, contemplating what to do on a rainy afternoon.

You can distinguish or think you can distinguish the expectation in Jared’s eyes, the excitement, the sense of being in a special place at a special instant in history.

Now:

There you are, on your knees, late at night, touching the radiance of your television screen, the special moment somehow already behind you.

Because you expected it to be Grannam when the phone stuttered awake at just past five in the morning.

Because behind the blinds, outside your open windows, magpies were screeching in the yard like always and Andi breached from beneath the quilt like always and she grabbed the receiver like always.