Dina and Dan Write Through Affectation, Quicker

           This was in the summer, when I woke up in my apartment, and I had no idea. It had been this thing happening to me. But then it was over. But even over is an unsatisfactory term. It was complete. Or it felt complete. Except I hadn't had time to notice this. No one did. We were all busy. Even I was helping, in an office far uptown. I sat beside an editor at a large desk pushed up against two large windows that looked over a park. The editor was a smallish crippled man. He hardly talked. They said he was steeped in mysticism. I asked them what was wrong. Why mysticism, how can anyone these days become, be actively, steeped in mysticism. They laughed. It was obvious. Didn't I know? He'd been struck by lightening. Can't I work with someone who hasn't been struck by lightening, I said.

            We sat widely spaced at a large table, each of us working in a distinctively private silence. And then one day I asked him if he liked what I was doing. I had a stack of neat pages set before me and with both hands I slid the pages over to his side, right under his nose actually, because his head was already bowed. He seemed to expect this as he then began to read without a moment's hesitation. When he finished, he was shaking and pale. All he said was, I don't follow it, and he said it grimly. Then he opened the window in front of us and threw the pages right out. They floated before me, and it was the most unreal thing. It had been done so silently, the pages fell so silently, I was mystified, and he kind of smirked after he threw them out too like he knew that was the word I was going to come up with. I was pretty much in tears when I got up and left.

             It was still very hot out. The sky was as blue as it had been that morning. I looked up and around. I found this all as if it were without theme. People wore next to nothing, their hips and breasts prodding out, as if demanding. I walked and looked, as one would considering an object of great scale. I shied away from neither eye contact, nor the phrase "masses of inertia" and felt myself among them, in league. Perhaps concert. I watched and recorded in a notebook the world around me. I hadn't paid it attention for so long, but there it had been--. The sidewalk shimmered, the sky tumbled around in my head. I felt very heavy. It seemed possible to me. I wrote what I thought about. Ralph was very greedy. Mr Fellows was going to borrow money because he was broke. The family heirlooms were seized by Cousin Mathlida. Mrs Kelly's pride was very childish. I loved reading it back to myself. Planes flew overhead. They had been putting pesticides in the cutlets. Here the world was! Tom Maitland is a dark-skinned and nice-looking man. And I was suddenly reduced to nerves. I shut myself up in my apartment. It was here and in everything except me. I had let it loose.

            At first I paid no attention to its roaring outside my window, but it became increasingly difficult. It all got louder, moving in its many directions, and the sky changed from blue to empty. There were a few faint signs of bad things to come in the beginning. Then there were many. I had been unaware of their accumulating until a sound thundered away at a distance, and then veered momentarily, as if juking, before ceasing altogether. Lightening cracked white and perfect like a second of absolute time before emptying out everything completely. I registered the mystical shocking, surprising, gales of a new wind, though in a more primal way, as if the weather had gotten inside me. This switch was a part of something else. I could not quite tell what was happening apart from the bigger thing that was going on outside because then it seemed like everything was happening inside my apartment.

            I knew that birds crashed into my windows, that the panes of glass shook from the impact of their pellet shaped bodies, but I was not ready for it to literally happen. For a moment I thought stupendously of birds of light. Jack put the problem to Joan. The ball rolled into the gutter. The collisions emerged from trees, as if shot. I started groaning. Mrs Madison spent a restless night in a motel. I was not in pain, only something very much like pain. I made the conscious effort to go to the bathroom. After a few minutes the neighbors started banging on my door, asking if I needed help. I put my lips to the floor and blew a bubble without sound. The banging only frightened me further. It roared outside and inside. Then the door was opened and the neighbors were talking to me in excited and monstrous voices, a language full of sand, of all-inclusive plans, of oceans and towers. How to describe my fear of these people and their all-inclusive plans! How those sounds they made came from not just their mouths but everywhere! I groaned. There it was in my mouth, and I could do nothing.

They shook me, splashed water on me, at one point they yelled and slapped. None of it worked. In frustration they fought with one another. They didn't know what to do. What was happening? Could they do anything? She accused him of not caring. He accused her of always sticking her nose in other people's business. What business was it hers anyway? Whatever, he said finally, and called for help.

The paramedics responded accordingly, lugging up the five flights of stairs to my room a duffel bag and such, but their getting here proved a great disappointment to everyone, including the paramedics themselves, who were displeased to do anything. They made sour faces and shrugged and took turns kicking the duffel bag. There really wasn’t much they could do. Just let it be, they said. People go horribly awry, they said. Besides, they said, looking over their shoulders, it was a mild case.

I felt relieved. Steve and Betty exchanged glances. They were both developing the same thought. How do they know this for sure? Who are these paramedics and why are they so certain? All they’ve taken is one lousy look. They didn’t even check for a pulse. What if this were a corpse and not just an unconscious person? What if what they had heard was a death rattle? In all their lives, they had never heard such certainty. When we left Gibraltar, the potted ferns were retired again.

It was not long after that the paramedics left, dragging behind them that useless bag of theirs. Steven and Betty followed them into the hallway, said goodbye, and there remained, rather amazed with everything, crouched near my door, listening to the soft quiet coming from my apartment. It reverberated in the corridor. It was an almost pleasant, soothing noise for them.

“What was in that bag,” asked Betty. “I mean they didn’t hardly do anything,” she said, trailing off.

“They didn’t have the right tools maybe,” Steve said.

“But that’s what was needed," said Betty, affirmatively.

They had always needed tools. She turned and looked back at my door. She was carrying a purse with makeups and something about the door or what was going on must have compelled her to begin searching through her purse. She fished for something. Her hands moved through the bag. She believed she’d find it. She knew it was in there. She knew she would find it. Then she forgot and snapped the purse shut and looked up at Steve and smiled. She wore a bright yellow dress with faces printed all over it, faces of Hollywood Actresses who had won Oscars.