Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

4.

Emily Mitchell lives in Cleveland, Ohio, or at least she is fairly certain that is where she lives. Some mornings she wakes up and isn’t sure. She looks out the window and the street seems different: it looks more like a street near the Bund in Shanghai, flanked by heavy Victorian hotels, crowded with bicycles and loud with car horns. Or one of the precipitous canyons in midtown Manhattan, which are perfectly designed for all kinds of animals, like peregrine falcons, rats, mice and cockroaches and for the significant percentage of people who dream at night that they can grow a reflective shell over their skin, become dark and shiny as an automobile and move through the world smoothly as if they were being drawn forward on a thread. Emily Mitchell is not one of these people.

Mostly, however, she gets up and looks outside and sees the old, once-grand houses and the tossing deciduous trees of northeastern Ohio and she is quite pleased.

What does it really mean to “live” in a place anyway? There have been some places where she’s resided for even years at a time that so flattened and enervated her that she felt like she barely existed, a sketch of a woman, a leaf skeleton with a smile that she pulled open like the tray on the back of an airplane seat. There have been other places that made her so dizzy she could hardly stand or places in which she felt like she was falling, hurtling downward at a steady, terminal velocity, flailing to grab hold of something that could stop her, a ledge of some kind, but was never quite able to lay hold of anything to stop her plunge. Can this really be described as “living” in the sense we usually mean?

She tries to avoid these places when she can. Someday she wants to go back and understand the nature of their poison, maybe dig a garden there. But for the moment she is content where she is.

Cleveland is not as crowded with stories that have already been told as the great cities of the US coasts or Europe, or as those places like Gettysburg or Selma or Hiroshima where history pivoted in ways that are very clear. For this reason you must peer at Cleveland a little harder to see it. Although it has since fallen on hard times, it was once a place of great, ostentatious wealth, the home and resting place of John D. Rockefeller. In those robber-baron days, so different from our own time, there was little restriction on what the rich could do with their money, and they lived in a world made of mirrors in which even their friends merely served to reflect back at them their sense of their own virtue and importance.

It is a less-known fact about Rockefeller that he loved to disguise himself as a working man and go into his own businesses and factories in order to see without being seen the running of his enterprises. One day when he had just started working in one of his refineries, he was ordered by the foreman to replace the man who oversaw the furnace that heated the oil before distilling, in spite of the fact that he had no experience at this work and no skill at it. When Rockefeller refused, the foreman threatened him with violence if he didn’t comply, saying that the furnace must be kept running at all costs to meet the quota set for the factory or they would all lose their jobs. Rockefeller then removed his disguise and revealed his identity, telling the foreman who he really was. But in those days before television, people did not necessarily recognize the faces of even the most prominent citizens and the foreman just looked at him and laughed.

“Sure you’re Rockefeller,” he is said to have replied, “and I’m Queen Victoria. Now get over to that furnace and get working.”

It is not clear whether the accident that occurred that day can be attributed to Rockefeller’s inexperience and incompetence because little is known about its details. It is the nature of explosions to erase the evidence of their own causes. It was close to midday. There was a sudden flower of fire and a roar and the furnace showered jots of liquid metal from its mouth that sewed flames wherever they landed. Fourteen men were killed including the newly hired man, whose name no one could quite remember — James or Jed or something like that — who was consumed so completely by the fire that afterward no one could recognize his face. It was only when Rockefeller’s personal secretary, hearing the news, raced down to the factory and made inquiries that the body was identified by the rings the man wore which, although they were disfigured by the heat, were still attached to the dead man’s hands.

Rockefeller is buried beneath a giant obelisk in a cemetery on the heights overlooking the city. From that spot you can see over the roofs of the houses where the millionaires used to live, to the places where the factories used to be, to where the workers used to live in crowded row houses, all the way down to the shores of the lake that used to carry boats that took the goods made there all around the country and the world. On a clear day, it is a wonderful view.

5.

Emily Mitchell lives with her husband, whom she sometimes loves so much that she’d like to climb inside his chest and stay there, curled up like a cat. She likes to lie against him so it feels as if their ribs have become clasped like fingers and when they try to get up they will have trouble pulling them apart. She couldn’t say exactly why she feels this way and she is frequently surprised by the persistence of this feeling over so many years. Her husband is often charming, smart and considerate. But he can also be melancholy and cantankerous from time to time. He has been known on occasion to worry too much about something that really wasn’t so terrible after all.

Nevertheless, she seems always to come back to her underlying enduring affection for him. Since they are both writers, they have moved around a lot and they don’t own very much material stuff like furniture or durable goods or electronics. Sometimes Emily Mitchell finds this frustrating. She will look at the empty rooms in her house and imagine all the things that could go in them. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an Empire chair in that corner? Wouldn’t a Danish modern coffee table be just the thing in the living room? She longs to own furnishings for which she knows only the names and not the functions, like an armoire or a credenza, an ottoman, a secretary or a chifferobe. But then she wonders whether all these things would look good together and she thinks that perhaps it is better to imagine them than to have them, so that other people can’t see how badly they clash and judge her for having bad taste or lacking any sense of design. Her husband doesn’t care much about furniture or the names of furniture.

For a while a few years ago, Emily Mitchell and her husband lived apart because they had jobs in different cities. They would call each other every night on the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello!”

“He-llo. ”

“ Hello .”

In the background of these calls, they could sometimes hear the weather where the other one was. Sometimes Emily Mitchell could hear a police car drive past her husband’s apartment with its siren blaring or a bus rumble or a rainstorm begin. On the phone, heavy rain sounded like hot oil crackling in a pan. Sometimes they would leave their phones on after they had nothing left to say so that they could hear each other turn the pages of their books while they read themselves to sleep. The turning pages sounded louder on the phone than they would have if they had been lying side by side; in fact, it sounded like they were each reading a giant book, maybe about the size of a bed, with huge, heavy pages. Emily Mitchell would listen to the sound of her husband turning the pages of his giant book. Eventually the sound would make her sleepy; she would relax listening for the next page to turn. She would feel less lonely and more comfortable until at last she could put her head down and go to sleep.