Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

You assumed he was arresting you.

You imagined he was about to hit you.

At the St. Petersburg railway station you saw a soldier clipping an old man behind the knees with a billy club.

The old man would fall, painstakingly rise, and the soldier would clip him again, he would fall, painstakingly rise, and the soldier would clip him again.

Over and over.

Over and over again.

Until you noticed this soldier was not pointing at the off-limits sign behind you.

He was pointing at your light blue windbreaker.

It occurred to you he was trying to tell you you had put it on inside-out that morning.

Some narratives becoming switchbacks or Gestalt images in which background and foreground swap without warning.

Two seconds, and the phone stutters awake.

It is just past four on your digital clock.

Behind the blinds, outside your open windows, magpies screech in the yard like irradiated monsters in Japanese science-fiction films from your youth.

What seems like two seconds.

Andi breaches from beneath the quilt and grabs the receiver.

Two seconds or four hours.

You cannot make out the particulars of the conversation because you have rolled onto your stomach and are bracing your pillow over your head, but when she hangs up you wait long enough for her to sink back under the quilt, snuggle against you, and exhale comfortably, then you make the announcement that this cannot go on.

She thought the time zones went the other way, Andi explains somewhere above you and to the right.

This has to stop, you say into the mattress.

She wants to feel part of our lives. She says it seems like we’re speaking to her from Jupiter. She can actually detect an electronic lag between our words and hers.

You have to take care of this, Andi.

She worries she’ll never be able to enjoy her grandchildren growing up.

She’s your family, technically. It’s technically, therefore, your responsibility.

I should tell her… what? What should I tell her?

You waiting, cheek pressed against the sheet.

They thought you were making it up. You cannot get over this. How you had to stop telling the truth and start telling lies because the truth seemed so contrived and lies so much more credible.

Okay, okay, okay, Andi says. Okay.

Truth perhaps being too strong a word.

Good, you tell your mattress. That’s good.

Which is where your story begins to begin.

Where the camera commences its work.

Overexposed sunshine, looking into the aperture of a slide projector, or the high beams of a pickup truck in morning fog.

That white.

That utterly vacuous.

EXAMINE THE PHOTOGRAPHas closely as you like, and ultimately it reveals whatever you want it to reveal.

Her eyes, for instance.

Her eyes could plausibly signify genuine happiness.

But they could also signify the customary happiness of posing before any camera anywhere.

They could signify a private joke.

A private joke or a communal joke.

An almost imperceptible modesty before the act of being photographed or an awkwardness at finding herself on the wrong side of the viewfinder.

Depending on the light source, this photo could have been snapped in the morning, in the afternoon, or at dusk.

Under certain manufactured conditions, it could also be a night shot.

A sunny day, a cloudy day, or a partly cloudy or mostly rainy day.

Reading a photograph, you think, reading this photograph, all comes down to choice.

Choice within certain parameters.

Choice within a certain wide playing field of choices.

This obviously could not be the photograph of an airplane.

This obviously could not be the photograph of an airplane except to the extent that an airplane could have been passing overhead at the moment it was snapped — in which case in a certain sense it obviously could be the photograph of an airplane.

While in all likelihood the photo was taken in Idaho, it is equally possible that it was taken in British Columbia, Finland, or Utah.

In a city park, natural woods, someone’s overgrown backyard.

Outdoors or on an indoor set.

Today or last year.

Last year or half a decade ago.

The point being there is no context to privilege one reading over another.

Vision turning out to be all about the boundaries of vision.

Is the photographer trying to hide something by framing the subject the way he or she did, by employing black-and-white instead of color film, by drawing attention away from the subject’s body to her face?

Or is he or she simply following the conventions of portraiture, though not especially well?

Is it innocence or artifice that accounts for the overexposure and fuzziness?

And what is that in her hands?

A flower, a tissue, a chemical blur?

The intimate detail of how your eyeballs move.

Andi slips out of bed two hours later.

You hear her trying to be quiet at close range, rummaging through the closet, sifting through the bottom drawer of the armoire.

She closes the bedroom door behind her and clumps downstairs.

Lying there, you remember for no reason how your father once took you ice fishing in upstate New York.

Upstate New York or southern Vermont.

You forget which.

Just you and Magritte and your father and his cigars, just the men in the family, just his smoke filling the cab of the rented Chevy pickup as you crept across the pancake landscape white as a dream at dawn.

Magritte being your dog.

Your dog being a golden retriever.

Your golden retriever having acquired stomach parasites in Venezuela.

You have not recalled this in years.

You hear the shower hiss on briefly, then tunk off.

It sneaks up on you Andi drew a blank about the hot-water heater.

The three of you standing in the middle of the empty lake, Magritte, you, and your father, hunkering against the fierce wind, you and your father reminiscent of over-sized puffer fish in your bulky orange parkas.

A thin fishing pole in your gloved hands.

A stick of dynamite with a long fuse in your father’s.

Magritte sometimes raising his head in your living room, apropos of nothing, and vomiting finger-nail-sized white bugs on your sagebrush wall-to-wall.

You come awake again to the sound of your car crunching down the gravel driveway and you lie there listening, feeling culpable.

Your father extracting the cigar from his lips and using its tip to kiss the fuse.

His body a break against the wind.

You resolve to wash all the laundry in the house today.

Men’s men.

Men’s men’s men.

That is what you and your father and Magritte were trying to be.

Wash all the laundry and have dinner waiting when Andi returns, at which time you will tell her to forget about all this grandkid stuff.

Your father reaching back and hurling the stick like a famous baseball pitcher his baseball in order to blow open a hole in the ice through which to fish.

This grandkid stuff and this Grannam stuff.

Because it stands to reason that all the bad stuff will pass.

You being unable to name a single famous baseball pitcher, it occurs to you, lying there, listening to your car gain distance.

The little red dowel bouncing on the white dreaminess maybe thirty feet out.

The wind whipping so hard you suspected your eardrums might implode.

Give it time, you will tell Andi, when she returns, be patient, and it will pass, all the bad stuff will recede into the past.