Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

ADELEINE RARELY CONSIDERED the ventures at which she had failed in the days when she was able to leave the house, and instead threw herself into the task at hand every day, grateful for any paycheck.

She had met the woman by the 59th Street entrance to the park, by the swan pond and the stone bridge that arched over the passing reflections of families, the New York Adeleine felt she could still love. Settled on a bench in the fading autumn light, which appeared to stir its colors in protest of evening advancing, Adeleine had wished for the winter, which would forgive her, cradle all her could-nots. The woman at the other end of the painted green planks snuck glances periodically before finally remarking on the rarity of Adeleine’s hat, dark blue felt with a netted veil that hung over her face and fluttered like a hesitant wing when she sighed.

“I used to have one just like that,” said the woman. “In fact, my father was a milliner. One of the largest in New York.”

“That must have been wonderful,” said Adeleine, “watching someone you love make beautiful things with his hands. I often think if I’d had more of that, I’d be someone else.”

The old woman spoke in sentences that seemed fixed, repeated and perfected over time, and said her name was Miriam and fussed often with the ring on her wedding finger. As their shadows grew longer, couples rose from the grass behind them and retreated to the nearby subway, and the birds in the chilled muck began to return to each other. Miriam seemed enlivened by what she saw as Adeleine’s willingness to listen — a tendency to nod excessively that actually indicated social discomfort — and unfolded her personal history in various directions, unable to decide which aspect held the greatest importance: the friends she’d lost to swift diseases, how money had made her husband sad, why she had stayed when the New York she understood began shifting identities at an accelerated clip. Looking out at the man-made swamp and the geese idling there, Adeleine felt some maternal urge to place a warm hand on Miriam’s neck, or just to call the old woman by her name.

By the end of an hour and a drop of three degrees, the arrangement was settled. Adeleine would receive a generous rate by the page, as well as an ample initial fee, to transcribe the journals Miriam had begun keeping at age ten, as well as the twenty-four shoe boxes of letters and postcards. They would speak on the telephone when necessary to discuss the project’s evolution. Miriam told Adeleine her new job was to make sense of Miriam’s life — she couldn’t herself, not ever or anymore.

“Something to speak for me when I can’t,” she said.

And so it went that Adeleine spent her days even more consumed by old things and transferred memories. She would see later it was this chance proposition, this agreement formed in a park in autumn, that allowed her to fully retire into her third-floor island, the place she had built to ask very little of her.

THE FIRST TIME the doctor had informed him of the term for the precursors to his migraines, the prohibitive clouds of sound and color, Thomas couldn’t help but sneer. “An aura?!” he’d said. “Think of it like a warning sign or a stoplight,” the physician had said. “It’s your cue to grab some aspirin and have a seat.”

Eventually Thomas grew to like the auras, thought of them as a unique part of his life, a bittersweet drug his body sometimes produced. He had learned to enjoy the sensations that came before the pain: light stretched and brightened playfully as his hearing hummed and sharpened, and his body felt lifted, excused from duty. Then darkness crowded and bubbled at the edges of his vision, and he knew to lie back and let the monster have its way. Over time he came to recognize the signs so clearly that he would put down his paintbrush or stub of charcoal or pencil without frustration. He liked to move to a space that was free of clutter, shove open a window and lie flat, and enjoy the corporeal deviations, try to filter questions through them. Sometimes during the pre-migraine oddities he chanced on the direction he needed to finish a work, or saw a vivid smear of the precise color for which he’d been looking.

Because of the reverence he had cultivated for these shifts in perception, the afternoon that would leave him disabled for the rest of his life did not alarm him as it should have. The aura lasted longer than it typically did — hadn’t the doctor said no more than twenty minutes? But having worked all morning, having endured a particularly soul-hollowing conversation with his mother, he took the excuse for incapacity gladly. When he’d felt it coming, he had managed to draw the linen curtains, stretch out on the couch, and place a pillow under his head. The March sky through the window, he would remember, was a covering of gray on a growing blue.

Later he couldn’t remember: was it one hour or two before he’d succumbed to panic, began to miss the light as it would appear naturally, to fear that he would never see it again. How much time until he had tried to make a call but couldn’t recognize the symbols on his touch screen, and curled his knees into his ribs and began praying for the migraine to hit. His pleas were absent of God; he was petitioning himself, scouring his mind for the corrective mechanism. But the headache didn’t come until dark, and when it did it took hold with the swift efficiency of a team of movers: whole parts of his body emptied in minutes.

He had eventually managed the three emergency digits, had heard himself report that one side of his face and half his torso and left arm were not responsive, heard himself describe his symptoms with the clinical acuity he’d developed as a strange child studying the habits of backyard birds. While he waited, he looked around his apartment politely, like an uncomfortable guest early for dinner.

The medical term for the type of stroke he’d had, he’d learn later, was a migrainous infarction, something signaled by changes in sensorium that persisted too long. He arrived home from the hospital, bit off the patient bracelet with his canine teeth, and didn’t speak for eight days.

—

GIVEN HIS INABILITY or unwillingness to work on anything new — the first being his own belief and the latter the suspicion of his crueler acquaintances — Thomas took to things he found beautiful in only the purest sense. For the first time in his life, he appreciated photographs of mountains, saturated paintings of cornfields. He liked to tell friends who called that he had misplaced his taste somewhere, that they could forward any and all snapshots of rainbows and glaciers his way. His growing fascination with Adeleine followed from this naturally.

She seemed made of words often paired together, and observing her helped Thomas to understand the hackneyed couplings: creamy skin, shining eyes, flowing hair. He hadn’t truly noticed her in the year and a half she’d been across the hall; perhaps he had found her perfection boring. The women who had stomped across his life before had always been jagged in their appearance and furtive in their intent: a sculptor who wore gray exclusively and brought him back to a charcoal-painted apartment twice a week for silent, brutal sex; a jilted pregnant woman with coarse eyebrows who only wanted to be held and fed; several who drank too much and stood by his canvases nodding before becoming bellicose and picking circular fights.