Jen opens her journal to a random blank page and as her vision blurs she can see beyond its lines to the back cover. Blurring more, she sees the table beneath it, and her legs beneath the table, and the chair beneath her legs, and the floor beneath her chair. She sees the room beneath her room, her father sitting in a chair reading Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently.
Time passed. She writes “opaque” at the top of the page. She writes it four times more along the top line, making five columns. She writes it again and again and again down the lines, aligning each instance with the five columns. The page fills but she can still see the cover to Dirk Gently under her page when her vision blurs. Except now if she stares – just a little more – she can see beneath that room beneath her room, and into the basement where Sam fell asleep on the couch watching The Adventures of Superman. She can’t hear it but she knows this is the part where Charles Lyon talks about bending the course of mighty rivers, and of mild-mannered disguises.
I just—I just want.
Her body dilutes in her home. This place isn’t a composition of people and bricks and books and doors; it’s a single entity. Opaque only from the outside. She read a book like this once, veiling and unveiling in one motion. It was about a world turned flat, then to lines, then to space. All the same land but turned and squished and stretched and turned again by an unnamable stranger who wanted to understand.
I just want to express this.
But she can’t. She tells herself it’s alright to not express things sometimes, that sometimes languages don’t have the right words for a reason. She sees her father closing Dirk Gently, covering his mouth with his hand, holding back the words that she looks for. She watches him watch the clock, watching time pass as she does. Sam sleeps, ignorant of the words she and her father look for, and why those words are needed in the first place. For a moment, she sees them blurred into the same room she’s in.
How can we tell him that—
Jen thinks of flashing lights, of her mother, of time passing. Her father looks past the clock into the kitchen beyond the wall. She thinks of how those silhouettes in white jackets must have terrified her mother; wrapping her in sheets, pushing her past double doors, writing on clipboards. Then her father looks up and their eyes meet, blurred and watering with anguish; or, not anguish, but anger; or not anger, but fear; or not fear, but frustration; or, more accurately, all of them in quick succession and sorrow. She and her father look at the floor, and the floor beneath the floor, at Sam and the television. Jen can’t be opaque, she can only have disguises that blend identities like her vision blends her home. Disguises that create chaos and calm in an illegible palimpsest.
