Noah Leventhal

There are certain questions everyone has about the nature of the universe. For some, these questions effervesce like bubbles in a bottle of sparkling water, while for others they are more infrequent and difficult to raise, like bubbles in a puddle of mud. I had always wondered about things like origin, though that is a weighty word with big connotations. This makes me seem like some sort of philosopher and this really couldn’t be any less the case. I wasn’t someone in pursuit of heavy answers to deep and persisting questions. I wondered things, as someone might idly wonder what the weather was like outside without really wanting to look, or what was on tv that night without wanting to turn it on. I sometimes thought to myself, is it really possible that the universe came from nothing at all, but I didn’t care about the answer. Wondering was just another way to pass the time.

But as I was in the cabin, holding a small bird in my hands as though it were one of my own fingers, I noticed the slow buildup of pressure within the room. The man and I had refused to acknowledge each other past certain basic niceties and perhaps a shifting glance here or there to make sure the other was still present and that the sounds we each heard the other make were not simply the wind or a wild animal. The two of us, together, or not so much together as simultaneously, were allowing nothing to accumulate into a wall each passing moment made more difficult to surmount.

The rain was still falling outside of the cabin and in truth I was not sure where I was, so I figured I might as well wait out the storm and see what I could discover when it was over. The man meanwhile had set about some basic chores which might have included folding bits of fabric or lifting things and setting them down, though I was far too disinterested to give his actions any real attention.

Still, the situation seemed ridiculous. It was eating away at me and I had a sense that I wasn't really acting the way I usually did, though in the moment it was hard to remember what that way was. I tried to articulate it to myself, but I didn’t have the words for it, which was surprising until I remembered that it wasn’t often that I felt the need to take stock of such basic actions, and so I gave myself a break and decided to sit on the couch.

I had become significantly drier, but I was still damp and so I put the towel underneath me. In a strange act of symmetry, and apparently independent of any decision I had made, the man came and sat in a small armchair beside the table with the glass figurines on it, but he still didn’t acknowledge my presence with anything more than a quick glance in my direction.

He had an interesting face. Not handsome exactly, though I’m sure he was someone’s type, but ageless. He was bearded and there might have been small traces of gray, but for the most part it was brown and it was thin, with a bit of red revealing itself when he would turn to catch the light. It was strange that we were in his home together and that we had been sitting here for so long and he had yet to say anything. I initially thought of our silence as a mutual agreement, but as we sat there, nearly facing one another, and as I wanted more than anything for something in the room to change, I found myself beginning to resent him for the neglect of his implicit duties as host.

I thought of being the one to break the silence, but I felt it would be a failure on my part. The two of us had drifted somehow into a preexisting dynamic. I had knocked on the door and he had let me inside. I was dripping on his carpet and he had brought me a towel. Now I was sitting on his couch and he was sitting in a chair across from me. He was the provider and I was the one who was provided for. To have spoken first would have broken something in what we had become to one another, and to make myself the cause of this breaking would have been a form of death, or even blasphemy, and I would be consigned to a sort of purgatory I could not at this point even begin to imagine.

I looked to a small side table beside the armchair, not the same one the glass figurines were arranged on, but one quite similar in size and appearance such that the two were easily confused and for a moment I wasn’t sure where I was in the room or felt that the room had perhaps rotated around me as I sat perfectly still. But I rediscovered the table with the figurines on the other side of the chair and realized my mistake. On this new table was not much of anything at all, an ornamental dish of frilly potpourri and a single framed photograph that seemed to have been taken in the past ten years, though likely not the last five.

The photograph showed a woman and a man with their arms around one another. The pose was intimate, but with firm walls set around the boundaries of their intimacy. There was no implicit sex in this photograph, though something in both of their expressions suggested it had been discussed on more than one occasion.

The woman was taller than the man and had a pointed chin and fierce eyebrows. Nearly everything about her was angular and her cheekbones were so jagged she reminded me more of a cubist painting than a real person. If it weren’t for her pallid complexion, I might have thought her completely unreal.

The man in the photograph was likely the same man sitting before me, but I again felt that there was some inexplicable incongruence between the two. Whatever distance there was between this man and the man in the dark gray suit was replicated in the photograph, and I found myself similarly intrigued by this alternative representation. In the photograph he wore a fleece vest and a long sleeved button-up, and as far as I could make out he was happy. So happy that he seemed to have earned himself a name.

***

I named the man, or whatever he was, Georg – pronounced with two syllables, the Eastern European way – after a writer I had meant to read once, even borrowed a book of his poems from a mentor and then forgotten about, or lost interest in and never really read. And it seemed strange to me then, thinking back to a time I had rarely thought of, that certain associations should begin to occur so organically and so without sense. Perhaps I half remembered a line in a poem I had briefly looked at and then put away, intending to one day return. And maybe a line in the poem, which I could not remember, reflexively emerged when a small fiber of the memory was triggered, as when a cough enters a throat.

“Who is Georg?” I asked.

And Georg said, “I am not the man I resemble, but I cannot have nothing to do with him. We share a point of origin, or overlap. Pick an attribute of his and I will share it.”

“I don't really know him,” I said. “What I remember is he has never been far from home.”

“Then this is true of me as well,” said Georg. “Tell me pieces of the world.”

“Have you ever been on a train?” I asked

“No.” he said, “though I have a fascination with subways.”

“Subways in particular?” I asked

“Yes, in particular,” said Georg. “Trains forget.”

“But subways remember?” I said. 

“They branch and diverge and intersect,” said Georg. “Or so I have been led to believe.”

“I remember a story,” I said, “which I might have read in a literary magazine that died out when all the online journals were coming to life. Supposedly it was true, though who can really say? It was written, if I remember correctly, by a small-time documentary filmmaker, one of the ones who never really knew what their films were about but thought of the lens as a perpetual, teary eye. He observed and he never cut. And he wrote of a time he went on the subway intending to be lost.”

“Can loss be intended?” asked Georg.

“He made a rule,” I said. “He would ride the train he was on for four stops, then get off, board another train in any direction, ride it for three stops, get off, board another train in any direction, ride it for two stops, get off, board another train in any direction, ride it for one stop, get off and then see where he was.”

“And?” asked Georg.

“And then he’d be nowhere, I suppose. Considering our understanding of where we are suggests an equal understanding of where we aren’t. And without proper attention, neither rises to the surface.”

“Continue,” said Georg.

“He got off the subway where the numbers had deposited him and found he recognized nothing. But this was only because he had expected to recognize nothing. All this time he was filming, placing the camera between himself and the world. He walked up out of the subway and into the street where he devised another rule. He liked pyramidal numerology, so he walked four blocks, turned left, then three blocks, turned right, then two blocks, turned left, then one block, turned right, and found himself in front of a building.”

“What sort of building?” asked Georg.

“The kind with doors and ceilings and windows and walls,” I said. “And this was the filmmaker’s answer, not my own. He came upon a door and walked through it. And when he walked through the door he found that everything began to look familiar. Reality, or so he said, must exist in a state of perpetual suspension. All objects are, but are not themselves without recognition. The camera had changed them. They had thisness, but no relation. But then he walked through the door and saw for a moment without the camera, then everything came crashing into place. He realized he was at work.”

“At a film studio?” asked Georg.

“He wasn’t that sort of filmmaker,” I said. “It was a department store, or a meatpacking warehouse, or maybe he worked deboning fish in the back of a market. It doesn’t matter, he walked into his workplace but he wasn’t working. Everyone was wearing costumes, and this further suspended reality. It seemed everyone had decided to disguise themselves behind elaborately constructed, false identities by some spontaneous and esoteric directive. Or perhaps he had missed an email. Regardless, the gathering was a masquerade, and all he wore for a mask was his camera. He felt, in that moment, he must have innately received the same directive without understanding it. Each person had become a new object – and most of them were in fact dressed as objects, inanimate things like houseplants, telephone booths, refrigerators, and one even as a rock – and he had worn his own truth as though it were another object itself. He became synonymous. A voyeur receding into a voyeuristic eye.”

“Beneath the body,” said Georg, “is the consciousness.”

“The rest were all body,” I said. “But the filmmaker couldn’t put the camera down. The camera distorted things. It gave him a sense of vertigo. The edges moved nearer while the center fell away. He went out a back door and down a stairwell. He found a door at the bottom of the stairwell he had never been through before and pushed. It wasn’t locked, but it was extremely heavy. Heavy as time, he said, and at first he could not move it at all. But it finally gave, and he squeezed through the narrow opening, and the door shut loudly behind him.”

“Like the end of a poem,” said Georg.

“Like the end of nothing,” I scoffed. “On the other side of the door, tucked into the back of this meatpacking warehouse, or department store, or marketplace there was a furnished study, and in a large, leather armchair sat an old man. Even from a sitting position, the filmmaker could see the man was a giant. At least 6’8”, if not taller. He was dressed in all black with a lined face, and a great beard that descended to the middle of his chest and no mustache at all. The filmmaker found him monastic, bearing a great resemblance to the old martyr Rasputin, if it could be said that Rasputin was a martyr. Though there are those who think Rasputin never died. And as the Filmmaker said, anyone who entered this room would quickly find themself a convert. The man was sitting in his chair and he was reading as though this were a natural thing to be doing in the back of a meatpacking warehouse, or wherever he was, and he was furious at the disturbance.”

“What was he reading?” asked Georg.

“A compendium of poems on crustaceans,” I said. “With entries by Eliot, Pizarnik, Vallejo, Notley, Celan, Mistral, and Scalapino. Though judging by his bookshelves, his primary interest was postmodern fiction.”

“And this was about subways?” asked Georg.

“I’m returning there,” I said. “So the filmmaker was looking into the camera which was looking at the man, and the man was looking at the filmmaker through the lens, and the man sighed and shut the book, muttering something to himself about simplicity, and the radical nature of straightforward articulation, so of course this brought to the filmmaker’s mind David Foster Wallace and his new sincerity, and he asked the old man, who still seemed wary of the camera, whether he thought simplicity could really be radical, and the old man who looked more and more the part of the crazed ascetic said only simplicity could be radical, that anything which twists itself into too many knots loses something essential in translation; there is nothing radical, he said, about an idea too layered to be understood, and then he started pulling books off the shelves – Infinite Jest, Oblivion and The Pale King – but other books as well whose titles now elude me, books, he said, which were written by Foster Wallace also but had never reached publication, or perhaps they had reached publication, but not widely, or perhaps widely also, but they were really by a different author – either I can’t remember or the filmmaker didn’t say – but the books kept falling from the shelves and the filmmaker began to hear a low rattle coming from the corner, but in listening more carefully it did not remain one rattle but transformed into an atonal cacophony of clicks and scuffs, clutter and movement, and he walked to the corner and found a small door maybe two thirds the height of a normal one, and he opened the door to reveal an unlit room where the sounds stopped for a moment, but then they started again and I guess the warehouse must have processed seafood of one kind or another because out of the door scuttled a militia of deep red spider crabs, and the filmmaker thought to himself – or added in after the fact – that this was reminiscent of a dream he had been given, or created, though he could no longer remember its details, where the room of the dream was also full of crabs climbing over one another and scuttling across the floor in their arhythmic sidelong two-steps, and in the real room – the one of the recollected documentary and not of the dream – one especially crimson crab tried climbing up the filmmaker’s leg but he kicked at it, flipping it onto its back, its plasticine limbs flailing in the air while other crabs scuttled across its body, and meanwhile the old man was still pulling books from the shelves and didn’t seem to notice, so the filmmaker ran, his camera pointed behind him, seeing what he could not make himself observe, and then the account of the filmmaker paused and the reader was left with the space of the page, a space hemmed in by geometric parameters that somehow sustained the impression of the infinite, the way a fragment of night sky glimpsed through a small square window lets in enough of the pinpricked light to imply the existence of the rest, and when the blankness of the page once again ceded space to the presence of language and the documentary filmmaker came back to himself he was on the subway again and he was heading back to his point of origin, and there were in reality only a few stops between the station he had set out from and the one where he ended up, and while he knew exactly how to get from one to the other, he wasn’t sure how he had gotten from one to the other on that day, and so he put the camera down and put his face into his hands and he rode the train all the way to his station like that, and he got off, and he went home, and only once he had locked the door did he realize he’d left his camera on the subway and that it was likely gone forever; for a moment he thought of running back to check, but in the end decided not to, and instead he wrote this account, so he started from the beginning, talking about pyramidal numerology, and trains, and expectations, and the way the world exists when we aren’t there to observe it, or maybe when we are there but we have forgotten to observe, and he finished it by saying he never turned the camera off, and that somewhere, undoubtedly, in one particular train car, that day was still ongoing, sustained by the eye of the camera, which is a testament in its own right to what a machine could possibly say about the unbroken continuity of experience.”

“Unless the camera died,” said Georg.

“An object cannot die,” I said.

But this wasn’t entirely true. It was at best a semantic argument, and if we’d had it out, I’d have lost. Georg knew it. And I knew it too. Objects cannot die, but really we were talking of things. When a phone runs out of battery, it makes an excellent paperweight. See how the hand becomes the hammer. The object is sustained, but its thisness inevitably alters. I could see that he was tired of hearing me speak. Tired of the twisted methods of my own mental occupation. I had tried to start a conversation, and instead I’d indulged myself again. “Forgive me Georg,” I had thought, but he had receded into the image, and I was sitting on the sofa with a man I did not know, wondering if any of this had actually been out loud.