Patient X: Where do I start, and if I were to start, would the events sustain their fall from the grace of secrecy?
Doctor: Yes, they are only specks of what constitutes the early environments you were nurtured in. What remains of you are landmines of places, living beings, things and events. When you speak now, like an owl that can see the night walking towards it, swinging its lantern, green expanses turn into straws of grass. Wind in your hair metamorphoses into a crude memory of that sweaty warmth emanating from an unwelcome body.
X: Can you help me recollect, doctor? Because the longer I turn into myself, the longer I gaze at where I have hidden things. I try ascending the creaking stairs to the attic, and the planks are broken, chipped away even, at the edges, almost as if to remind me that my body weight will perpetually be on the balance. As I reach the landing pad of the stairs, the tiniest of spaces that my feet can occupy, the red oxide floor, the chill tracing the shape of my toes and soles, I see the room emerging from the corner. We knew even before we could actually know that rooms did not remain affixed to walls. They emerged as we birthed them into existence for a purpose. To hold our books, our clothes, and ghosts that come calling from its benthic nooks asking for lilies. If we remember, we remember, isn’t that right, doctor? The prologue has to be birthed into existence – where do I walk into? I have come calling asking for water in return for the lilies I promised you.
There was a male Savannah baboon on the ledge. As it saw me tearing into existence the door beneath, it did what it normally does to females digging for vents to escape. A bite on the neck, the kind that leaves a mark.
D: What has happened has happened. What are the next steps?
X: The next steps begin by pulling at my toes and twisting them 180˚ on the axis of my heels. I am a Djinn and every step I take is going to be backward.
D: This cannot be right. What have you to show to prove that it worked?
X: I am in the headlights. A spectre of a deer gazing at the moment it came unstuck.
D: Don’t incite imagery.
X thinks to herself: I detach him from doctor, to survive the session.
X: As the baboon climbs up the ledge, soot comes calling. It shapes itself into a man with a quizzical look and comes unstuck. Soot beads itself into black beetle eyes and rough black hair. It turns white, silky white, and kneads a set of teeth. This ensemble walks itself into the room that has now started solidifying into existence. This is where the story has to start. I walk through the door, its frames taking shape, spitting shrapnel onto my face. As I pause, a yellow evening cascades into the doorway in a descending gradient. It touches the floor where my feet are firmly planted as white light. If I follow this white light to the place where the yellow evening begins, I shall see where the beetle eyes, black hair, and silky white teeth lived.
D shuffles in his chair.
D: Do you have proof?
X: No, what good can it do if I bring it to you? Some material evidence for the time I planned to fictionalize a doorway. Nothing concrete can come out of it.
D: This amorphous landscape is what you need help with. All this fiction begins with various kinds of lights. Lights cascading onto a doorway. Strobe lights from a UFO. Light flowing through the cracks of a door you promised yourself not to knock.
X: Light that gets trapped inside the sheen of a dog’s coat. And yes, all that light that departs from the beetle eyes.
D: Let’s not ask for proof then. Let’s ask for what remains of what happened. The living proof of that which existed.
Atmospheric voice: It was the doctor’s first appointment for the day, and they were separated in time by 9.5 hours. They only had an hour. Of course, I made sure I dilated all that I could of time, and showed nothing on paper. Delusions of grandeur are best when privately experienced.
X: As I walk in through the portal, I am transported into a café bound by two ancient Banyan trees, haustoria starting to puncture the outer bark. Soon it will reach the core, and devour it alive. Light will travel out of the trees. I know now because I was there. But at this moment, I am back where I usually sit, thumbing the curved edges of a teacup, blowing on the tea, and taking deep sips. The apparition of eyes, hair, and teeth walks in, with everything in between slowly taking shape. This recollection requires a bit of objectification, and I hope you will allow that. This is the first time we have met. The little finger on my left-hand twitches involuntarily – here and now. Not then. I have to point this out, doctor, because I have been reporting things as they are. If a female’s left-hand twitches…
D: Yes, it is seen as a premonition of a misfortune.
X: Now this is where I have to catch myself, doctor. This predestination business. You see, the left hand never twitched then, in the café. It was an actively developing situation, as the war analysts say, and it would be sensible to see what leads to what now. The apparition – now an outline of a man in soot – has seated itself at the table in front of me.
Wish I had known what first times really drape themselves in – the familiar vice of things past. The shape of the apparition sends a lightning bolt across my chest. It is the fitting in of anything that can fit in that makes the framework durable. I remember two friends telling me about the time they woke up with an ache, one with an empty glass in a deserted club and another in a deserted room, fine print of her stuttering teeth on her tongue. I can’t tell where, but the face falls into place, and measures right, next to the frame. Was I a child then, doctor? But my pounding gut says, stay calm, and feel the familiarity. The smell of a salty face, a toothed smile, a carryover from a younger adulthood. I suspect whether this is a character I slept with when I was a kid, or an uncle who opened the door the only time I was left alone to strip down, or another one who walked in on a bleeding Friday. Or another one who promised to not walk in. Or another one that grazed the stoic thigh, or the bent back, the typing hands and the crouching shoulders. I remember nothing.
D: But you remember when the subject locks into the template.
X: Yes, like the dusky guy with a square face, a full-toothed smile, black beetle eyes, rough black hair and lily-white teeth I saw at the bakery. You see doctor, I cannot name the apparition. It could be anyone. Yet it turned and smiled – voluntarily, deliberately.
Are you writing this down? The black dog, it was there. The mute dog thinner than shadow.
D: Victimhood. That’s what we call it.
X: Define an object. Something elemental and incapable of volition, voluntary movement and teleological retrospection. I was the object then, at 0, 0, 0 in Cartesian space. Pulled into the orbit of a Machiavellian object-wielder. Or pulling in a Machiavellian object-wielder.
D: Practice the art of polishing mirrors, to see from either side of the glass.
X: Right. But doctor, this September, I’m planning to forget the apparition.
D: Hmm.
X: I cannot afford to make all these maps. Chart a helicopter, ascend, and zoom out, christen myself a cartographer. All these real waterways, prickly Savannahs and winding alleys.
D: All imagined of course.
X: I had two friends, one of whom remains. We used to have tea. Of course, only one of us drank tea. The other drank coffee and one drank sweetened milk. We joked about therapy, called our breakfast conversations, therapy sessions. Two of us hated dogs and one of us didn’t. Two of us showed their cards on the apparition and one of us folded. One of us folded like a moth. Victimhood compels me to add: one of us folded like a moth and called the haustoria its home and folded into it. It sounded like a door creaking open, and spluttering onto the hallway.
Did I make sense, doctor? You charge by the hour.
About the Author
Kalyani Bindu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Brain and Mind, NIMHANS, India. She works at the intersection of genetics, neuroscience, and systems biology. Two Moviegoers was her first poetry collection. Her poems and essays have appeared in Fauxmoir, 45th Parallel, Indian Express, New Asian Writing, Guftugu, and elsewhere. She served as a poetry editor at Variant Literature Journal. As a columnist for White Crow Art Daily, she penned articles exploring various socio-cultural themes.
