Strange Moons
by Annie Raab
Let’s not bother ourselves with origins.
Move to Chicago, they said. The pizza is great, the drivers are levelheaded, and the winters are beautiful! It is hurts-to-breathe cold when I move into the apartment on the fourth floor, the first available in a twenty-unit building—a classic architectural Goliath with lead paint on the walls and hot, clanging radiators. I spend the first night taking stock of items the previous tenant left behind: a sponge under the sink, a sock in the bathtub, three beers inside the fridge, and a spider plant on the windowsill in the living room that has been, all this time, thriving in solitude. As for my own possessions, I have very little. A box of winter clothes, kitchen oddities, books. But all this can be replaced and I wouldn’t mind so much. I feel I have already set along the path of leaving no mark at all, and I have come to terms with this gradual anonymity.
Across the street from my doorstep, there is a fenced-in park, where a birdbath stands frozen beneath a cap of white snow, the stone an identical color to the trampled slush in the road. For now the sky is low and empty. One gray tone across the whole swath of city tinted a different gray. I pull on my winter layers and exit down the switchback stairs to check the mail. There’s nothing inside my little brass door embedded in a wall of little brass doors, so I walk to the overpriced bodega. The older of the two men calls me dear. “Hello, dear.” “Thank you, dear.” “Have a nice evening, dear.” The younger one speaks soft and in a flirty way. The shelves are arranged in a confused system: Chapstick by the Gatorade. Toiletries chipside. An embarrassment of salsa con queso crowding out stacks of cheap eyeshadow. The store is arranged as if to remind the customer that everything lost can be replaced. I buy a tube of Aquaphor.
“Thank you, dear,” the old man says. I wave goodbye from the door.
January.
When I stay inside, I pass the days like this:
I eat oatmeal with peanut butter.
I watch snow fall outside the window.
I smoke weed.
I write reminders to myself.
I listen to ELO while cleaning the apartment, and, sometimes, I feel a rare elation.
For twenty minutes a day I like to stretch by planting my palms on the floor between thin, dried rings of boot-dragged slush. I do headstands against the wall. The room flips over and I am balanced up and nearly straight. I hum the notes of a song. It sounds like “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” at first but ends in a tuneless uncertainty. I kick my feet up backwards. First, I had to convince myself there was nothing to lose, which is its own type of work. This is all life is: a cycle of beginnings. New origins create new sensations, down to the faint taste of radiator air, down to the daily tasks and reminders and brief wish to reverse the circulatory course of blood by living upside down.
I write down my reminders on little paper scraps that I lose on the train. Losing them isn’t a problem—I remember what most of them say.
Laundry detergent-green. Job at CTA?
Book idea: two dishonest people.
A dog thinks the purpose of everything is for her (use this?)
Next time I will (incomplete)
The winter has revealed the essence of a new reality—a truth is discovered, but behind that is another truth, a truer truth. And behind that truth is another. Some might say this truth theory imitates the structure of an onion, where every new layer is more potent than the last. Maybe not infinite, but more layers than an onion should contain. But I say this is more like finding mold behind the wallpaper and finding rot behind the mold, and maggots writhing beneath the rot. I dress for the bitter cold like the smallest nesting doll, the one who protects herself with thin replicas of herself, and the train takes me and my little reminders away over the city as every layer all at once.
When I leave the apartment, I ride the train to the sculpture park and walk the narrow paths between arrangements. There is a bronze sculpture by an artist who died in the 1980s. I know, through my observant, solitary walks, that there is a partial impression of his fingerprint on the inner curve of the bronze, just about the height of my knees. The snow stops falling when I arrive, and I crouch down to examine the fingerprint and think about how inside that fingerprint lies man’s desire for immortality. On my knees, I rub the fingerprint until the snow comes off and the bronze glows like a January sun behind the clouds. I press each finger into the dent to interpret the artist’s mark, but the casting has altered the impression, made impenetrable a thing so soft and fleeting. I stay at the park rubbing the sculpture until my fingers go numb and then walk back to the train station, back to the apartment to do more sloppy headstands and wonder what happened to my boundless ambition.
There are mornings when it does not matter what the room looks like before I open my eyes, the backs of my eyelids themselves a vivid, open room. It is an ultra-temporary amnēsia. There are mornings when a cough in a dry room calls forth the word aspirare—to breathe. Opposite of, yet related to, angere, yet both exist at once inside the anxius. The anxius experience episodic panic. Panic—with the coy etymological Pan—who lurched out of sleep in a fit one noon hour and was thereafter linked to sudden discord in lonely places.
Snow falls in little flakes down the cones of light along the street, and I take this to mean the snow will fall heavy until morning. And then I think, I need provisions. I get stoned and walk to the bodega, weave through shelves of food packed together like good friends, dense and abundant. Hello, dear. Good to see you. Thank you, dear. Along the counter, the older man has itched through various scratch-offs. The penny is still pinched in his hand. I thought I’d be a lot richer by now. Thought I’d be a whole lot smarter, too. I pay for my Cheetos and mints. The street light sets the falling snow ablaze.
Is this what it feels like? To slough off identities overnight, wake up oily and raw to a new persona—or worse, the one you’ve been hiding all this time? It is a cold combination of guilt and fascination to live inside this peeled form. What was I hiding? Why won’t it go back in? Where are those protective layers?
There is an art to it—to changing very quickly. The art is paucity, in creating a deficit in all your inner dimensions. I am at a point in my life where everything I thought I could do didn’t quite work out, and I’m still here. That makes me invincible.
Pan wakes up from sleep and riots. Sirens wake me up in bed. Over the phone, my mother says this: “You are getting to know the real adult version of yourself.” All at once, pieces of the new self now appear to orbit around the old self, as if I’ve birthed strange moons.
What happened to all that abundant time?
“Hello, dear. Thank you, dear,” the man says with a nod. The snow covered the street all night. I awoke again with a bloody nose, a burst of red shards in the tissue. An excretion from the body, from the cellular walls inside. Excernere, the matter sifted out. Plows scrape along the street and the door chimes as it slams shut behind me. Goodbye, dear. Thank you again.
The spider plant now lives in the kitchen. I yank at the brown leaves and poke fingers in the soil, soft with a layer of dust on the surface. I run the sink and leave the plant under the tap while I tie my boots to leave again. Water bubbles up to the surface and runs over the sides of the pot, making dark flecked rivers in the basin.
Many eons ago—I’m not sure how else to mark cosmological time—a little life blinked a steady, reliable light. Now when I look at that life in the distance, it appears faded and lost in the surrounding dark. There are few stars above so close to the city, but if you have ever lain on your back in an empty road and turned your dry eyes upwards, you might have seen these disappearing stars. The ones that shine bright until you look at them straight on. Or maybe they’re moons.
I am not a careful woman. But I work at it each day.
I do simple exercises when the snow melts. I jog up and down the back steps of my building, my boots clanging against the metal stairs, past the wide windows of the four flights over and over until I break a sweat that chills my brow. I jump rope in the alley behind the bodega, under the bare paradise apple with a wind chime missing two tones. I jump for four minutes when the air warms up midafternoon, and each time the rope swings the compressed arc above my head I hear a sound like nuts falling to the pavement. When I stop to catch my breath I turn around to face the paradise apple and a large pile of shit—human or dog, I do not know—on the ground beside the dumpster. There are cuts in the shit. Shit on the rope, shit scattered in several directions. Early spring snow comes down in fragile blossoms. I go inside.
The sun comes out for six days in a row. The spider plant has grown. It sits in the north-facing window above the radiator, drying out, hoarding daylight. A little shoot has overshot its reach and rests on the windowsill, a scrawny bit of green vine. I bike to the lake and travel along the path. A cold wind blows across the sand, but I take off my shoes and socks, push up my jeans. The water is a sharp, arresting cold. I splash my face and forearms, slap it on my forehead, the back of my neck. Gulls drift over the distant white knife of a sail. Inside me, a quiet charge is building. Out comes the paper scrap and pen. The wind whips it from my hand. Do not cling to the old world.
Now that it is spring, I no longer take the train. I smoke a partial joint and ride my bike around the city. Everyone is beautiful on a spring evening. Hello, gorgeous. Hello, handsome. It occurs to me I am probably not leaving a mark as permanent as the sculptor, but that I will leave something behind. Little scraps of paper, maybe. A very old spider plant. Or maybe the mark I leave behind is not part of me at all—a wayward electron that spins away from my private gravity, becomes attached to something new.
I stop at the other bodega ten blocks away from home and buy a can of beans, two large tomatoes, and a four-pack of craft beer.
“No fui el primero ni último que le ha tocao, me queda clara ya,” the cashier sings with the radio. He bops his head along and holds the beat with finger guns. The propped door lets the music outside and the spring inside. “Eighteen thirty,” he says. I swipe my card and he points his dancing fingers at me. “Mala costumbre!” he continues at the register, rips the receipt off the teeth, gives me a finger-gun beat goodbye. I flip the sunglasses up from my chin and mount the saddle, point my spinning tires home.
I take the side roads and drink a beer at the park. Sections of it are rewilding. The pond fills up with lily pads and stiff green cattails poke through the water’s surface. Proud wood ducks swim their ducklings around the beer cans, the algae blooms, the vagrants hidden among the tall grass, asleep. I do not know if life contains a secret key which will unlock meaning if we find it in a hurry. But I do think the key to happiness is curiosity. And I do think the key to curiosity is slowly coming to accept that our fingerprints will not last forever. I drink the beer while propped on one elbow in the grass. I shed a layer and wipe mud from the bike with the toe of my shoe. Sun dogs line up in a planetary row above.
I was wrong—the sculpture was not a permanent fixture, but part of a year-long loan. I might have known had I paid more attention to the signs, which certainly is not the first time I have neglected to see the details. But it is sad to see the sculpture go, sad to know the artist’s fingerprint will be there for the whole life of the art and I may have been the last to think of it for a long, long time.
Perhaps it’s not so bad. The sun is too orange on the day the sculpture is moved and the bronze has been defiled by spray paint. I lean in close to read the text—a wonky glyph in powder blue. It says “$NAKE EYE$” on the flattest plane. I copy the writing as close as I can on a little scrap of paper and put it in my pocket. The preparators haul the artwork away on a crane and I wave goodbye from the ground, watch it orbit out of view onto the back of a truck. And then the truck carries the sculpture away and I think if the artist were alive to see this today, he might insist on riding too, on pressing his finger gently into the divot untouched by time and material. He fits his thumb into the flesh of the bronze, and artist and sculpture become electric—at last—with the bonds of a long-separated valence.
Annie Raab is a writer and art critic who tries to eat 100 tiny local apples each year from September to November. She lives in Milwaukee, partly on a sailboat.