Some Day During The Summer

Zoey is nearly as tall as the window. The line of her posture suggests a certain urban parallelity: wind crowding through vertical streets, places where pavements pack people absolutely solid with electrons. Her hair is drying crisply, thick with gel and mousse. Steam had pasted down the contacts she’d worn in the shower, and yet even with that blurred quality, the view from the window is not exciting.

 

Zoey looks, Zoey thinks—American landscapes are manneristic. What does she mean? She thinks—everyone stretches, impossibly, for a rubbery frontier. 

 

Italian trees line this part of Brooklyn. Dappled, air wobbling around them, the trees stretch too. Zoey walks past the bodies and fire hydrants that wall the curbs, blood warm with Intelligentsia coffee. The man who patrols Lafayette is more naked than usual. Zoey says to him that some days, after leaving the studio, she would look at people on the street and—without meaning to—understand how to sketch them unclothed. 

 

He says, so what? She says, a body really is just a body. She can see quite a lot of his body, actually. She could draw him right now, even out of practice as she is.

 

He says, so what a body is a body? Obviously a body is a body. 

 

The irreverence annoys her terribly. Don’t you get it? Their whole mind, in that body!

 

Well, people are more than bodies, he says. The self is more than the body. The mind can be the phone, even. So is the phone basically the body?

 

Zoey decides that the point is that the body is material. Sensory experience is material. All feeling, all thought—physiological. 

 

Oh my god, he says. What is this? What do you care? 

 

And she thinks, then, that what conversation, and connection, and thinking, and even sex hide from you is that the whole of a person is in their body. And then at that point, mind, body; body, body; mind, mind; what’s the difference? 

 

Zoey doesn’t carry cash, so she doesn’t give him any money. She tells him about some Russian anarchists she knows that run mutual aid out of Tompkins Square Park, and leaves. His spirit is manifestly limited. Anyway, there’s only so much truth in intimacy. 

 

By the harbor, the water in the air prickles her nose with salt. The span towards southern New Jersey passes indistinctly into the sky. The wind sinks, heavy with waves, and the clouds take on the character of wet cloth. As far as she can see, the medium-dark color of the water and the medium-light color of the sky pass into each other. Irreverent of the line between what is worldly and what is above, and wild with its own intermediate quality, that unsettled belt of space reminds her vaguely of standing in the shower after she’d turned the water off, when the air was soaked and dense with wet. The waves slitting against the rocks touch her knees quickly with white sprays of foam. The idea comes into her mind—​​this is trans-natural, this cold, this wet, this concentration of sensory experience, humanity many times over, folded tightly into an isolated chemical system. 

 

All at once the next breath fills her nose and her throat with cold; cold presses around the ears, into the ears, and it comes from all directions at the mind, up through the top plate of the mouth, and against the forehead and pressing into the temples and the face feels itself changed by the cold so that the cold sits as another layer of expression. 

 

A quick blaze of feeling. Who to tell, Zoey asks?

 

In the staircase, later, she passes her neighbor, a medical student, who is rubbing his sore, neighborly knees on the landing. Zoey wants to tell him that American landscapes are manneristic. She doesn’t, ultimately, suspecting the comment is underdeveloped.

 

Shy blue light soaks faded edges into her apartment. Zoey uses a fork handle to fish out the teabag. The curtains are made pink by interiority: pink like the inside of the body, pink in the way that her face became pink in the wind. That neighbor had told her just the other day about the brains that the students study, and the dead, donated bodies they look at, and how they just lie there for years, and then how they get too old and they get rid of them. That’s an extra afterlife, right there, where physicality becomes the plain truth of your life. She finishes her tea before it can stop burning her throat; she leaves the mug in the sink.

 

The light is soon drowned by the storm. Those clouds have come from the edge of the world, the end-part where the water and sky don’t look or feel any different. She can feel that ending ringing within herself, where the substance of her mind sinks into confused flatness, minerals and electricity pooling against her pillow. The darkness laminates her face with velvet. 

 

As she reaches to set the alarms for the morning, the tendons that run through the space between the world and the storm run, likewise, along and through her arms.