Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

You imagining it swollen with seawater and jellyfish stings in your hotel bed in the middle of the night.

Unable to shut your eyes, year after year.

Honey or auburn blond.

Either way, your parents never pronounced her name again.

Hair the shade that used to be referred to as dirty blond but is now referred to as honey or auburn blond.

Either way, Andi rolls over and curls into you.

You remain in this position five minutes, forgetting.

Forgetting being the opposite of a passive activity, general wisdom on the subject notwithstanding.

Now you roll over and curl into her. You remain in this position three or four minutes. Now she climbs on top of you and lies there. You lose your sense of time. Now she rolls off and you climb on top of her and lie there.

It could be two in the afternoon.

It could be eight in the evening.

Now you roll off and you both lie side by side, holding hands, fully clothed, and when you check the clock it is 11:11.

Holographic projections in a virtual world that only looks like the world you are familiar with, to cite another possibility.

Another possibility among many other possibilities.

Someone else’s dreams.

Your dreams, inhabiting your sleep, which you mistake for a state of wakefulness.

It could happen.

Anything could happen.

Anything does.

Always.

At the front desk, you ask for change for a ten-dollar bill tonguing from your hand.

On the way back to your room you and Andi duck into the startlingly lit vending machine cubicle burring like inside your head and buy four cans of Pepsi, a bag of high-sodium-and-saturated-fat butter-flavored popcorn which you nuke in the microwave next to the dispenser, and two more Snaggy Screes.

Somehow you cannot eat enough of them tonight.

When you enter the long windowless carpeted corridor, you hear what sounds like passionate love-making going on behind the door to your right, room 333.

You and Andi come up short, arms stuffed with junk food.

Then it dawns on you that the same sound is issuing from room 334.

335, 336, 337, 338.

The same woman is saying Yes yes yes fuck me harder baby fuck me harder and the same man is grunting like a water buffalo and there is a thwacking noise that grows in moist intensity.

All the way down the hall, like mirrors in a barber shop, only aural.

Pay-per-view, Andi whispers.

What? you say, too loud, then adjust your voice. What?

Channel eighteen. Channel nineteen.

You consider this.

Who are these people?

The faithful, most of them. I’m sure there are a good number of businessmen, truck drivers, and cosmologists mixed in as well.

This is what they do after what they’ve been through?

What else would you expect them to do? They’re frightened.

You stand there a minute, contemplating.

Wow, you say after a while, and recommence walking.

Wow? says Andi, matching your pace.

Making your way down the long windowless carpeted corridor that smells like the inside of a new car.

Affirmation climaxing all around you.

What the camera does not know is that Genia’s first joke will sound like this.

Would have sounded like this.

Gen:Knock knock.

Dad:Who’s there, sweetie?

Gen (tentatively):Knock knock.

Dad (patiently attentive):Who’s there?

Gen (more tentative still):Knock knock.

Dad (vaguely concerned):Who’s there, sweetie? Who is it?

Gen (almost a whisper):Knock knock.

Dad (openly concerned):Who’s there, honey? Who is it? Who’s out there?

Gen (in a very small voice):I forget, Daddy. I forget.

What the camera does not know is that most people employ universal babytalk when addressing the elderly.

They speak to them in disproportionately cheerful tones.

They use the royal we .

They repeat themselves as if repetition were a cure for deafness or the inability to concentrate.

Did we just spill our juice? they say, never anticipating an answer.

What the camera does not know is how Grannam was more like Gen than she at first appeared to be, the only real difference being that Grannam knew people were treating her like an infant but could not help it.

That is what cousin Karla tells you on the phone a week later, looking back.

For Grannam, she says, life was one patronizing slowing down.

That flash in the movie theater when the film begins slipping in the projector and the actors’ words relax into thick dream-speed and the image stutters and you know two seconds later the world will freeze and darken.

Again and again.

Again and again and again.

Bibs, diapers, unselfconscious farting in public.

Farting and burping.

Gas creep, Karla calls it.

She remembering the last time they were together before the last time.

Grannam wheelchairing through the gleaming Safeway with her, a pair of Depends taped in place beneath Grannam’s pantsuit, pulling everything at eye-level off the shelves and chucking it into the shopping cart Karla pushes beside her.

Safeway or Red Lion.

Canned green beans.

Neosporin.

Rust remover.

Macaroni and cheese.

Macaroni and cheese.

Macaroni and cheese.

The sky becomes a pink-streaked exhibitionist in drag. The sky lowers. The sky thickens and opals into an upside-down topographical map.

And now misty drizzle laps over northern Idaho.

Late every drizzly afternoon Andi greets you with a handful of collages, shards of photographs of her at various stages in life, some scrawled across, some with huge mouths pasted over small mouths, some torn, some neatly scissored, some almost nothing but white space interrupted by a shred of elbow or ear.

When Jesus walked among us on earth , the condolence card one relative sends you reads, He took special care to nurture those who were sick. I pray that He will hold you close now as you make your way through this difficult time .

Hunters patrol your road in flat-green pickups, firing randomly into the trees.

The wind hurls against your house. The walls creak. The blinds clack even though the windows are shut and latched.

One night you are awakened by Genia wandering through the murk, talking with imaginary friends.

Your consciousness trembling between sleep and not-sleep.

Her sour milk breath.

Her hair like sweaty child skin.

That real.

That unreal.

You reaching out to pat her arm and then Andi announcing from the shower I have literally hundreds of ideas. Virtually every day I think of another ten .

Good, you say, finding yourself hunched over the sink, waterpicking. That’s good.

Photography , it strikes you as you stoop there, means Drawing with light .

But it’s the choice that scares me, she says. How many lives do we get to lead? How many people do we get to be?

You’re amazing, you say.

Oof, she says as if she just punched herself.

What? raising your head, waterpick suds spilling freely from your mouth.

Drawing with light or Writing with light .

Either way.

I just had another one, she says. While I was talking to you, I just had another. They keep coming. They just keep crowding me up.

You learn visual receptor cells called cones function during the day while those called rods are extraordinarily sensitive to dim illumination.

When the cones function, you see colors.

When the rods function, you see everything in black, white, shades of gray.

How seeing is living in two places at once.