Nods ∞
Part II
Part II
Once
again, her body became a vessel for objects, a curious condition she
had not been afflicted by for years. During her adolescence, and
those ambivalent hours of dawn, she would often steal away and climb
on top of the hill overlooking the valley (maybe as a minor token of
rebellion or an effort to domesticate a growing array of confused
sensations arising and consolidating in her chest, which made her
mouth water and a faint smell of dried flower buds swell up in the
back of her nose). Her body motionless, hands limping alongside her
torso, yet her eyes wakeful; observing as the morning fog would rise
and billow in quiet translucent waves seemingly out of nowhere. It
traveled in a hunched mass across the landscape until it had folded
itself into every crevice leaving nothing untouched by its
obfuscating presence. As always, the sun rose in conjunction, at
which the fog would bulge upwards to greet it, all the while glowing
from the inside in bright red phosphorescence, like a giant deep sea
creature that had washed ashore and wriggled its vaporous tentacles
in elation at the introduction to a new world. However, she did not
habitually return to the high cusp of the hill because she found the
spectacle aesthetically pleasing. She was rather lured by arcane
thoughts on the vacillating being of the fog, its strangely wavering
structure, which seemed to straddle two worlds, or none whatsoever.
It was not of the earth, and not of the air, but marked the
condensation of the two, without properly being either: a
nexus of effusion, metamorphosis, obliteration, all at once. She
contemplated this as a pastel sheet made its way up the hill and
wrapped itself around her ankles, diffusing her feet, which made it
appear as if the two had merged. This would replace her earlier
ruminations with something entirely else. Filled with a brief sense
of weightlessness, only to be suddenly gripped a moment later by an
urge of being pulled down into the valley and swallowed by that
inordinate body. Of course, this scenario never presented itself.
Instead, she would nod in resignation and languish, drooping over the
hovering surface, until the fog had evaporated and she finally found
the courage to retreat back home. But this time, the last time she
ever returned to the hill, the fog did not dissolve, but congealed,
encircled her body and then entered through every pore of her being.
A river of objects followed suit, amassing like a wave on the horizon
and sweeping in roars across her visual field, then uncontrollably
pouring into her, each thing evoking a distinct sensation upon entry.
The world was attached to the fog as to an unyielding string, drawing
every object, every phenomenon in its wake, even her precious woods,
through which she usually found her way home, came tumbling toward
her, tree for tree. Until alone, amidst omnipresent quietude, and
before her, a plateau of barren and shapeless space.
Now that these spells had
returned to plague her, they never presented themselves in the same
manner as they did the first time, never the same enveloping
placidity. Each time, it brought with it as much distress as it did
satisfaction, though once contained, a richer quantity of the latter.
To avoid this, and to properly delimit the boundaries of her being,
she developed a method or tactic of sorts. A habit of nodding timidly
toward strangers, mostly men wearing the pattern of clothing that
seemed to trace a fortifying outline somewhere deep within her, an
almost tangible cord. When
night had fallen, she hid under its covers, and placed herself at the
precise center of the town square, a point in space she had gone to
considerable amount of trouble calculating the coordinates of. Moving
her head with the same integrity as a factory worker maneuvers his
limbs in concert to the machine invented to act as his servant. At
first, she stretched her hand upwards and blithely ran her finger
across a prefigured segment of the darkened sky in arbitrary
undulations rather than straight lines. Erratic, though circumspect,
strokes of a blinded calligrapher conjuring an orchestra of bizarre
figures from sand. Pulling back at times, as if to start anew, her
pace then quickened and steadily the glittering sketches grew
increasingly rigorous and systemic, the elegance of which would have
made a geometer weep. A flurry of stars gravitated toward her
celestial engravings and mirrored the procession of her movements
with scrupulous mathematical precision, until they broke loose from
the faintly shimmering wall, piece by piece, and finally trickled
down to the square, replicating the prior markings by rotating and
bending in the exact same patterns. Hoping to produce the desired
constellation, the neutralizing alignment of unattached fulfillment,
but only if someone chanced to reciprocate her nods at the exact same
moment. On most occasions she only succeeded in awakening the
attention of loners, drunkards or misfits, and an ancient vagabond
routinely gave her majestic bows before disappearing into the crowd.
Once, she felt as if the universe had shifted its center to mirror
precisely where she bent her body: after a graceful exchange of nods,
an unusually pleasing person drifted hesitatingly toward her, and
said, “I apologize for my lack of creativity, but have we met
before?”
“We have not.”
“Are you sure, may I ask your name?”
“Fuck off please, I’m quite engaged in something.”
“I see.”
She resumed her nodding, as if nothing had happened, as if the entire doleful trajectory had not exhausted itself, and finally reemerged in another orbit.
“We have not.”
“Are you sure, may I ask your name?”
“Fuck off please, I’m quite engaged in something.”
“I see.”
She resumed her nodding, as if nothing had happened, as if the entire doleful trajectory had not exhausted itself, and finally reemerged in another orbit.
