Like a Dead Man

In my studio, looking out from the holes in my head at my thoughts on the wall, I noticed projected, the shadow of Simone entering the room. She’d been staying at my apartment, like a cat, coming and going for a month or more. When I invited her to stay I’d been too guilty to live alone. I felt she could validate my right to life with her need for me, her desire for me. At face value, I was doing her the favor of a great friend. But feeling her shadow slide across my back in its coolness, I wished her away, feeling really all my work to go required the silence of solitude. Always she waited for me to initiate conversations and always I had, but now I refused her existence, offering only my back. I sucked at the surface of my coffee, barraging the silence, pretended to read my open journal. Her shadow held still against the wall as though painted upon it.

“Do you want me to go?”

Yes! I screamed inside my skull. Go! Or I’ll be stuck like this until at last I’m granted the mercy of death!

“I’m going to go.”

I turned then as her shadow glided again over me and slid along the wall.

“Have I not provided a comfortable home for you? Have I ever asked about why and where you go? Why you return?”

She stopped again. “Sometimes,” she chose her words as one chooses their steps over stones across a stream, “I think—a person resists asking questions—so that—questions are not returned.”

Now we were two magnets of a like-charge, hovering un-touching between the studio walls. “And what do you think I’m afraid of being asked?”

She steadied, finding firmness in her footing. “I’m not sure yet. I would have to ask questions to find the ones off-limits.”

I set down my notebook. Closed it. “So you don’t really know me at all.” I released an exhalation, pink and wounded. “You’re questions away from the questions that count.”

My accusation passed right through her.

“I know you feel the ground below you lifts with little bids for sympathy such as that. I’m sure it’s worked for you with other women. But you should by now understand I’m not so dull as to’ve missed your commitment to obscurity.” Then, as though sinking her teeth into my flesh and chewing, “To evasion. And so although I know a few things about you: You like your meat and your women blue, you believe a big cock is preferred to a controlled one,” My heart hammered, “And could guess at more—you’re unafraid of the world outside yourself, but deep down you know you’ll never master your own body, your emotions, your use of time. Like so many men you’d sooner crawl back inside your mother’s womb than face yourself.” I imagined my hand swinging and her shadow splashing across the wall. “But really, Ivan, we’d have to have some honest talks for me to know.”

I sat there then, placid as her shadow before. Said nothing. I felt that if I didn’t move or in any way acknowledge her words they would dissolve from history.

“So,” she began again. “Do you want to talk? Or should I just go?”

Flinching like a robot with a busted fuse, I lifted the lip of the ceramic mug to my mouth, drawing the muddy water between my teeth. Said nothing. Turned back to face the wall and heard her bustling around collecting her things, her rucksack growing full, thinking I’d cede and spill some words when she paused for a final au revoir, but she didn’t. At some point she was gone, quiet as she came—that cat—I didn’t even hear her go.

The victory of lonesome silence was mine at last. I floated in the great vacuum of creation, staring at where her shadow had been. I waited for words.