Saturday, August 05, 2006

A. W. I. A. 11: Telephone wires.

I was telling the man who claimed to be a doctor about my walk. I was trying to make a little observation about telephone wires--that they never look the way you picture them, and they're actually a mess--and move on, but this brought him up short.

"How so?" he wanted to know.

"None of them are stretched neatly between the poles. There's always some nonsense mixed in."

He raised his eyebrows. "Nonsense?"

"Yes. Black vinyl bladders that look like half-inflated blood-pressure cuffs. Or some horrible box with vicious diagonal ridges on it. Some of the poles have these garbage can-sized cylinders stuck to them like ticks, only with wires all feeding into them. The black boxes have a strangle of wires plugged into them, too. And some of the wires are stripped. And their casings hang down like the limp leftovers of some sick ticker-tape parade."

"Why sick?"

"Because what's there to parade about in the decay of communication?"

The man who claimed to be a doctor was looking at me like what I was saying surprised him. But they knew I had taken a walk. They had seen my route. They would have seen the same telephone wires I saw. The man had either been inadequately briefed or he was a very good actor. Was it possible he did not know any of this already? No. He was a very good actor indeed.

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A. W. I. A. 10: The return of the man who claimed to be a doctor

Shortly after I mistook another set of footfalls for his, the man who claimed to be a doctor returned, bearing a cup of liquid he claimed was coffee.

He set it before me and reached into the pocket of his pants for something, which he dropped on the table, too. It turned out to be two sealed cups of cream substitute and some mixed sugar and saccharine packets.

"I didn't know how you take it," he told me.
"I just take it as it comes," I answered.

He did not answer, just resumed his seat on the other side of the table, facing me.

He picked up the pen he'd left at a studiedly casual angle on the pad in front of him. He put it down again. He folded his hands. He looked at me.

"Let's try something different," he said. "Why don't you tell me what you did this morning."

Did he know the answer already? How long had they been watching me before they came to get me? At this juncture, I deemed it prudent to tell the truth. "I went for a walk. First thing. Right when I woke up. Around my neighborhood."

He nodded. I assumed, then, they had been watching me. "All right," he said. "Why don't you tell me about that."

"I noticed that telephone wires don't look anything like what you picture. Or what I picture, anyway, when I picture telephone wires. They're a mess."

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Friday, August 04, 2006

A. W. I. A. 9: Is it time to continue with the interview?

The man who was supposed to be a doctor may have been right after all. This is beginning to look like a broken story. Still, I mean to tell it.

What happened next, after they came and got me and took me away for no reason at all, and after I had been talking for some time to the man who was supposed to be a doctor, and getting nowhere with him, was that I asked for a cup of coffee and he said he'd get me one.

Then, he stood and went to the door and turned the knob and walked out. Whoever was standing guard in the hall--if that's where they stand guard, and not somewhere else with a bank of monitors--was out of sight. He did not close the door and I could see a bit of the wall in the hallway, and nothing else, while he padded away.

I didn't know where he'd gone for coffee or how long it would take him to return.
I looked at the pad he'd left. The page I could see was blank, but I felt sure I'd seen him write something, and one page was folded backwards over the binding. Maybe that was the page he'd been writing on. I started to reach across the table, then stopped and let my hand fall to its enamel surface: his pen lay across the blank page.

I didn't know how many cameras were watching me, or whether he'd simply marked the angle at which he'd placed the pen across the pad; there was such a choreographed quality of unconsciousness to that angle, though, and to the entire situation, that I could only conclude this was another test.

I decided to pass it. But I was still figuring out whether that meant stealing a peek at the pad or leaving it be when I heard footsteps again. I pulled my hand to my chest so fast that whoever was watching me might have supposed I'd gotten a shock from the table. My heart was pounding, but I tried to look composed as I prepared for him to reenter the room. But he didn't come. Instead I heard a door nearby open and the hum of voices or perhaps a radio before it closed again.

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Monday, July 31, 2006

The rest of Minnie

All right, I want to wind this up, because there's still so much else to say. But the end of Minnie's story went like this:

I was still in the stylist's chair when the cameraman got a call that it was time to go check on Ray, and he just left, before my hair was done. She cut off eighteen inches, and I thought it was strange he didn't stay to take a picture of what it looked like. But then I thought the new haircut would be on the tape when I showed up at the house. But I thought it was weird.

The make-up lady asked me what the show was called again, and I couldn't remember. And then when it was all done, it was just over. And no one came to pick me up. And so I decided to take a cab home. And when I got home,the trucks were all gone, and the house looked very quiet.

I thought, Well, they're all inside getting ready to surprise me.
I even thought I saw someone moving by the window. It must have been a reflection. But, by then there were so many things that didn't make sense that I kept making up more and more bizarre excuses. Isn't it funny how your mind can come up with explanations for anything?

And so I was even really kind of self-conscious about how to walk into the house, I felt so sure there was a hidden camera recording the first look at the new me.

I tried to look pretty and confident and not touch my hair, or mess up my make-up. And I walked up to the house, so sure it was going to be unlocked, and everyone inside. And it was locked, so when I started to turn the knob and walk in, I just sort of walked into the door instead. And I thought, I hope they edit that out.

When no one opened the door even then, that was when I started to tell myself something was wrong. Maybe not tell myself, but feel it, because I did feel it, sharply, like a pain in my stomach. But I took out my key and unlocked the door, and I remember once the door was unlocked, I froze for a second.

I think I wanted to take that last second before it all became actually true. Do you understand? Before I had to say to myself, Yes, this was not what it looked like. Or how it was originally explained to me.

And also, maybe I've added this, or my memory sort of mixed everything together, so that the emptiness that was waiting for me on the other side of that door, it's been added to the me that was on the outside, getting ready to meet it, but I don't think so. Sometimes you can feel the emptiness of a place. It makes a sound, like the opposite of the hum of a television somewhere down a long hall or upstairs, that you can just feel.

So I walked in and of course I saw right away that everything was gone, except the TV, actually. And there was a videotape with a sticky note on it that said "play me."

And I put the tape in, standing on the bare floor in my empty living room, and it was a tape of them throwing my looms out of the back of the truck into a dump. Then it showed Ray and the perky host laughing while they cut up the sweater I made, and then Ray said, "I hate pullovers, Minnie." And then the two of them kissed.


Kelly still does not believe it, but I do. I really do.

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Sunday, July 30, 2006

Minnie, for the third time

I had to go suddenly yesterday because someone came to get me. This is what it's like to be a pilgrim in the age of convenience: the saints come to you.

I had to stop telling Minnie's story in the middle, but I was up to the part where she signed all the releases that the video crew gave her. She continued:

Anyway, the gist of it was that I was going to be whisked away in a limo for a day at a spa, and all the neighbors came out and were laughing. I mean you should have seen them. And asking questions. Carol and Melody waved me off when the limo drove away. And them taping the whole time.
I wasn't really comfortable with it, but I wanted Ray to be happy with his anniversary surprise.
At the salon, they cut my hair. Only a cameraman had come with me, and I thought that was strange, but he had the stylist say who she was and she read me a note from Ray, saying "My love, you're so beautiful and I want you to shine on this special day. Time to cut that hair!" Well, I didn't want that, but I was thinking, he went to so much trouble.


The man is here again. More questions. I will finish typing this up in a bit.

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