crisis

 from ana patova crosses a bridge by renee gladman

"as a country
this was our crisis: getting other people
to see what we were seeing. and it
wasn't as if there was this multitude of
idylls we simply couldn't share but, rather,
for the most part, there was only one
idyll and for everyone else a void. the
people on the train took my hallucination
as a sign of their own suffering. you were
better if you could hold a picture in your
head, a scene or many scenes. but, i
wasn't trying to be better. i was trying
to breathe and not hear what people
were saying about this day in their life
of the crisis. people suffered. they woke
in a morning, before the sun rose. you
didn't want to know. it was to be their secret, but
all day they leaked their words, and i
leaked my words. in the silence following
my vision i couldn't help but say
'mostlip' as people gathered around me.
then said 'gap,' then said 'triumph.'
your words, your words, someone
admonished me. 'goodnight,' i
completed the list. people cared for me
in long minutes of awkwardness in which
i swooned and held my eyes closed in
shame."

"you began to take on other
people's sentiments, because of the weight
and translucence of the scroll, because
the threads of the paper did not take well
to ink, because ink was all there was.
'jandovirr is changing,' i wrote into
the scroll one day. 'it has changed.' but,
when i noticed these words appearing
all over the scroll, sometimes saying
jandovirr, sometimes mohaly or cit
sahaly or names from other parts of the
city but all the same vague observation-
changing - when i saw this i began to write
in greater detail: 'the manhole cover had
been replaced; kiva's was packed with
people, they seemed like foreigners. a
couple stood on the corner waiting for a
light that was inoperable, they waited,'
and wrote out tracks of details of my
seeing, until i started to see these
particulars repeating along the scroll.
you worried that the crisis was following
you and, because of how closely it
mirrored your thinking, that you were
the crisis."

"'to think of architecture is to do what,
ana patova?' she asked me when the
reports came out that our population had
been decimated by three years of
bewilderment and a feeling that one had
been ghosted, the total number of
inhabitants now only an eighth of what
it had been. 'why have we remained?'
you wondered when you sat emptily.
the crisis made you watch it and so did
architecture, which you did until it
devastated you, then beyond that point
(you still looking at it).my thinking of
architecture resulted from my thinking
of the line, how the line made narrative
regardless of whatever else it was making,
and narrative presented enclosures for
your questions about living, and living,
for the most part, required space, which
turned out to be a definite field of study.
but, in order to enjoy architecture i
realized i needed people, so i didn't
know what to do when they began to flee.
i wrote a book in which i explained all of
this; it was one hundred and eighty-three
pages and said 'crisis,' 'crisis' in every
chapter and used drawings to illustrate
the 'empty feeling,' which i believed to
be the cause for everyone's leaving. not
everyone could move about a city as if she
were traversing a remote highland, as if
she were the last pedestrian in the world.
not everyone could say 'farewell' all the
time with her exhausted body, clambering
over some pole."

"it was the city,
but was unreachable, was violent, without
victims and without perpetrators, and
violent, though there were no crimes."

"what i slept in was created by
my mind; it was a question of void space,
my sleeping. it began as empty, black
space then was transformed by light, by
ribboning, by the secreted presence of
another. another person touched my
sleep and shapes formed. i knew who
she was; i called her name. she could
not come in body. so there was this
sleeping geometric holding feeling, and
there was outside architecture."

"we had been walking for hours,
looking for a happening, a boundary
event that would put an end to the crisis,
not an extraordinary occurrence - some
magical intervention - but a small act out
of a cabinet of everyday acts that we'd
witnessed numerous times and never
noticed and never saw the way through.
we thought it would be a speech act, so
began to look for instances where we
might chance upon bodies in unconscious
speech: we looked through people's
windows. but windows looked into houses
whose structures were no longer reliable.
it had become impossible to say that you
were contained, to say 'hello, the house,'
as you once had. the object world, we
noted, was drawn on by shadows."

"meanwhile, the eye witnesses the story
of what we were when we happened,
when the last person left and the first
person returned as if the same moment,
as if the inhale began in the exhale, that
first person leaving, who belonged to all
of us, and what we became in his
leaving: our reaching for our cups. we
were holding space and making space
through stillness, looking for structures
to reflect what we were seeing, which
was nothing. i wrote about buildings,
and for the first part of the crisis this
kept me occupied. i was holed up in my
home. i slept on the books i wrote, which
i'd glued between boards and given
unassuming titles like slow and tired, but
these books were my life's work; i knew
once i'd finished them i would never
write again; rather i would not need to
write or live or sleep, it felt like. when i
changed my mind about this, when i
changed my mind - but, it was me and it
was l. and it was z. and b., and we were
all high on coffee, and sometimes pills,
waiting for some storm to come, some
document from abroad."

"the notion of thinness, i thought, as
the two of them sat on either side of an
important threshold that neither seemed
capable of seeing for the six hundredth
time in their history, was this sitting here
between them and who i was supposed
to be now in this new emergency, when
ana patova and luswage amini couldn't
cross this bridge, again. it wasn't so much
a line between us as a bend in time, a fold
where one had to walk through fire, or
believe this to be the case. luswage
amini believed she could not get across
to ana patova as long as ana patova
remained in ravicka. 'luswage amini
is in france' became the material of
that thinness. i put my arms through
them, both of them at the same time: i
put my left, i put my right. i waved my
arm about inside myself and tried to look
down and peer at it, to see it through the
thin window of my body. my arm was in
her chest when amini stood up and leaned
over and grabbed ana patova's ear and
whispered something, that i should have
heard since my arm was in ana as well as
in luswage, and in me. i didn't hear what
she said so ana patova didn't hear, or i
couldn't feel through the book i was
writing that she'd heard."

"spaces moaned. they were of an order
that had nothing to do with what we
felt when we were in them; they had
become impossible to write about,
impossible to enter, impossible to leave.
you wanted to say 'space, space' to
create an index of where you went and
what happened to you, you wanted to
say 'cafe,' you wanted to say 'alleyway,'
you wanted to say 'bedroom.' 'train,'
was a place you needed, 'museum,'
'cemetery.' you gave names so that
you could return to the walls between
experience; you stamped time onto
things so that you could recognize the
walls. spaces moaned; they did not
want your walls. the names i gave
most often did not fit. i walked 'outside'
into a 'closet' that was supposed to be
a 'yard,' because the light of 'day'
had come up and 'people' were waiting
for me and 'books' wanted to pass
through themselves and other books,
and 'language' needed to be made.
i woke and stretched my body and
felt pain in my hands. 'today' was
a broken index. but, still, you felt the
presence of 'world' there inside the
room (and outside the room). it couldn't
be avoided and asked to be opened and
was open all the time. but what you did
with where your body went, how you
wrapped words around it, calling it
something that might be useful to others,
who also did not know space, which was
everyone, was of an order inconsequential
to the space you inhabited."