Lance Olsen - Girl Imagined by Chance

Things are one way, then they are another.

This seems like an obvious statement.

This seems like an obvious statement, only it is not.

Your sudden awareness of the big reddish-brown indistinctness bounding by you on your right and your father beginning to shout.

This is what you will never forget.

That quick awareness.

Upstate New York, southern Vermont, or Maine.

Maine or Pennsylvania.

Specific location sometimes not being central to a given narrative.

Magritte retrieving, in any case.

You half-dream yourself downstairs, composing a bowl of granola, vanilla yogurt, and banana slices.

You half-dream your father abruptly shouting — first to get back here, get the hell back here, then to stay away, stay the hell away.

It is that easy to change.

Pouring yourself a glass of organic kiwi-and-strawberry juice.

Abruptly yelling and now abruptly grabbing your parka hood and starting to run in the opposite direction from retrieving Magritte, Magritte no longer retrieving, needless to say, but in fact returning from retrieval.

Taking a few minutes to arrange everything pleasingly on a brown turtle-shell plastic tray.

Your legs buckling.

Your father dragging you across the dream.

The wind in your ears like a waterfall.

The last thing you see over your shoulder being Magritte.

Traveling, traveling.

You grinding some coffee beans and scooping the residue into a filter, putting on your sunglasses, heading out to the swing on the front porch in your white terry cloth robe, feeling like an actor in a commercial for healthy living.

The last thing you see over your shoulder being Magritte ducking under the cab of the rented pickup, gray in the icy wind.

A different pickup.

Not the one central to your current story, that is.

Magritte’s tail wagging like mad.

On the swing, you taking out your stylus and PalmPilot from the pocket of your white terry cloth robe and, feeling culpable, trying to think of something to write.

What you are remembering this second, say.

The orange-black fireball.

The orange-black fireball and you being airborne.

In the act of pitching forward.

Your father and you being airborne.

The sound of a steam whistle in your head.

You wiping your mouth with a sand-colored napkin and noticing how the sun striates through the trees like a lush painting by a sentimental Italian.

The last thing you see over your shoulder being the orange-black fireball followed by a huge black-blue hole in the whiteness.

A sentimental Italian or a sentimental Frenchman.

The last thing you hear being the sound of lakewater sloshing out.

Heavy aquatic gurgling.

The storm inside your ears.

Now you boot up the computer in your office.

Sipping coffee, you sort through twenty-three e-mails, almost all of them from Auztin, his tone especially sardonic today.

Some messages are cc’s from your boss’s boss, Zach.

Zach accentuates his irony by bracketing all key words in his memos with quotation marks.

If it’s not “too much trouble” for you, could you please “think” of a “new strategy” for the Williamson “project.”

The voice in his messages is not recognizably anthropoidal.

You work on a site for an artist who chews broken glass with what is left of her demolished teeth.

And for another who has himself shot with small-caliber handguns by his ex-girlfriend.

The visitor to Virtual Digitalus makes his or her way down a long darkly-lit hall with 3-D photographs of the various performers floating around him or her like rotating sugar cubes.

Touch one, and jump to the performer’s exhibition.

You see someone on the street , Diane Arbus once said, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw .

The visitor will see the artist performing in miniature on three sides of the sugar cube. He or she will see the artist’s name on the fourth. The top of each cube will bear a blinking eye.

If the visitor looks closely at the pupil, he or she will see a beating heart inside.

You would assume Diane Arbus did anything for a living other than being a fashion photographer.

But that is what she did, be a fashion photographer.

For a living, she took photos of perfect people.

More rumors about Virginia Dentatia appear in the chat rooms.

None is good.

The famous photographer understanding, conceivably, that freaks are just like us, only more so.

At noon you take out two paper-wrapped salmon steaks, lay them on an earthenware plate, and set the plate on the counter top.

Now you wander the house, eating an apple for lunch, impressed the phone has not rung once today.

One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid , Diane Arbus once said, was that I never felt adversity. And the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one .

The people with your new riding mower in the back of their rig drive up almost the same minute as the people with your new refrigerator in the back of theirs.

You answer the door, still in your white terry cloth robe, and show them where the machines should go.

As they are unloading, the water-heater man drives up in a dusty flat-gray van unmarked except for a bumper sticker on the front that says, red letters on white, FIGHT CRIME: SHOOT BACK.

An hour later, and they are all gone.

An hour later, and you throw all the dirty clothes you can find into the washer and initiate a cycle, then meander back to your office where you work until three, when you decide to putter in the garden.

So you change into a pair of torn jeans, white t-shirt, faded black-and-white Keds, and bandana, and step through the back door into a cool dry summer day.

Thinning lettuce sprouts and weeding around the baby potato plants suffuses your head with gauzy pleasure.

No water.

No ocean anywhere.

A photograph is a secret about a secret , Diane Arbus once said.

You watch your right thumb and middle finger pincer and pluck, freeing pale thready roots with which you fashion diminutive heaps, and your mind starts sweeping leisurely across web site ideas to an image of Andi on the day you first met her almost seventeen years ago, raising her camera to do a shoot for a story on your company (then a graphic design firm), and now someone is talking to you.

You squint up into the sun’s custard-colored incandescence and make out the silhouette of Jack Pederson, your neighbor from down the road.

His ATV hunkering in your driveway fifty feet behind him like a large dumb pet.

Jack dressed in the same cowboy hat and sharp-toed boots he wore the day he took your photo.

Your and Andi’s photo.

Jack is seventy-two yet refuses to give up ranching.

His father homesteaded the land on which he runs cattle and he is over a foot taller than you but he is still — you search for the right word— lanky .

He is telling you about how he can remember when he was a boy the Indians used to cross this area on horseback, migrating north in the summer and south in the winter.

When you ask him a question, he frames his reply in a maximum of two short sentences as if every word costs him ten dollars.

His skin is foliage brown and reminiscent of dried eel.

He aims his comments over your shoulder, at the lodgepoles behind you, or sometimes at his pet ATV.

He is telling you about how difficult calving can be in February and how, if you are not careful, the cows birth directly onto bare patches of ice, the wet newborns freeze down, and the coyotes sidle in during the night.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know .