Liminal Space (in prose)

 

For the occasion of the New Year I thought to share the following excerpt with you, it is from a novel I have begun penning recently as a side project, (originally written as a screenplay I completed last year entitled: Liminal Space), which I am turning now into prose. 

The main book I am working on couldn't be any similar to this work, both in tone and scope -- so sometimes I find myself enjoying this world a bit more, a bridge of liminality so to speak. It helps, I believe, in offloading some of the detritus of intense focus that I reserve for my main project at the moment which I will reveal later. 

Part One: A Gallery

    

Her

At an art gallery there stood a woman who looked rather interested in the gap between the frames on the walls than on the portraits themselves. Each gap had a single promise, an invitation perhaps to a distant memory. 

There was no distraction to be had in the void, not unlike the drawings which at best, distracted her and at worse, made her recall her disdainful taste to some choices of colors, which some odd people might dare to misplace as masterpiece. 

She stood away from the growing flock of crowds, craning their necks to see which hue contrasted better with which shadow, she might have shrugged off the thought that some of them—if not most—had no single clue what art meant. 

But there they all were, nodding to a stiff-limb bony woman who spoke inaudibly to her inner robes rather than to her audience, swaying her hand to no portrait in particular.

Still squinting at the negative space somewhere ahead of her in the hall where nobody really stood — except for one man — who now had strangely begun to come into sharp focus. 

Just as she blinked again, registering who he was or might be, he turned away. He too walked off away from her…they all did it, didn’t they? Men. At the moment they’re about to be caught, glancing, wondering, lingering long enough that women felt they were stared at…as if men were born with a different set of eyes, that somehow lingered far than necessary, almost obtrusively. 

For women, there was an undeniable satisfaction to be had, in catching those preying, innocent looks from eyes that belonged not just to a different gender, but to a different set of makeup entirely. Was that the fault of the Y genome? Just when she caught him gazing, he turned away. Of course he would.  

She was certain he must have even followed her for quite sometime. The shadow she had felt upon her, trailing her now made all sense. She always had a funny feeling of being watched. 

Living with a husband who constantly creeped at you from dark corners, his idea of fun seeing you expecting a sudden loud manifestation of his big figure, launching at you in such a speed you think you might dissolve from the impact, certainly brought its own sequences. The haunting that grew out of the always-hunted, the pursued, even under humor left a tasteless savory. 

Him

Why is she staring at me? 

He had walked a few paces trying to distract himself with the magnitude of frozen faces looking down on him. He had just now turned around and found her still looking. He had expected her to cut the staring short now, how intrusive when one party broke the bond of mutual staring, and one party breached the contract by continuing to do so. 

Maybe she’s thinking of something else and looking my way, some people do that. 

He smiled at a passing aging lady with a walking stick, she smiled back, her eyes lingered with his momentarily. She was alone just like he was, he wondered whether was it by choice or out of circumstances beyond her control? If he only was a little older, maybe she would ask if his knees were hurting too —provided that she spoke a common language, of course. 

Or, if he were a local, maybe she’d even invite him for a hot drink, his age wouldn’t matter then. By the time his Maybes run their course, the old woman had already left the gallery, her walking stick sinking deep the thick snow covering the outside streets. The opening and closing of the see-through doors sent refreshing shivers down the corridors on to the hall. 

Breathing the crispy air brought sharp memories into his mind, the languid generated heat inside had done nothing but amplify his dribbles, that and his sense of misdirection. 

He thought of his home, his wife and little son, guilty though he may be, he also did not want to go back home so quickly. Why the rush? Enjoy this business trip, he told himself, as he headed to the automatic-fridge for snacks and hoping that upon scanning the QR code and failing to collect lemon tea, a ‘local’ somebody would perhaps offer a helping hand in figuring out their cryptic language of which he was thoroughly ignorant. 

Her

She received a voice note, she saw the name on top of her phone screen and averted her eyes, almost as a reflex of guilt. How long she hadn’t spoken to him? The worn-out excuse of time difference and any possible jet lag (which she had never experienced) was no longer feasible in the slightest. She pressed on to listen as she sprinted, aimlessly as ever, occasionally catching strangers’ passing by, their glances she never understood and they, never returned. 

‘’...I don't know,’’ her husband’s voice filled her eardrums, blocking any other source of sound. He sounded as if he was just next to her in fact, she almost ridiculed herself into checking whether he was actually in the vicinity. Surely he didn’t trouble himself to come all this way, especially after what he’s done. 

’’I look at our pictures and they're full of...I can barely remember how or in which circumstances we took them, it's as if you're looking at two different people. Any ways. I read this article about the loss of warmth in the eyes of the people you know and—and I think—‘’ 

She paused the voice message, the file on her Messenger App showed seven minutes worth of audio. I’ll listen later, she made herself a mental node she knew she would gladly forget, and looked for the nearest Ladies Room.

After she came back, the open area at the gallery had welcomed even more influx of visitors. A group of high school students lead by a tall, rigid-looking woman strode off, apparently their visit to the gallery was a last minute add-to-list program. Although she herself didn’t understand a single word they said, but it was all clear for her from the way the woman slanted nervously calling up names, smacking a file on a younger teacher —her assistant— and making phone calls that went unanswered. 

She turned to the other aisle and a pair of students clashed against her, stepping on her feet. The two students helped one another up from the ground, ignoring whom they had just mistakenly also thrown into the ground. Giggling, they strode away joining their group, their headmistress apparently unable to control her own temper over the disarray this day trip had likely turned out to be.

She helped herself up, her arm felt sore for a moment or two, she massaged it and put as much as space as she could between her and the high schoolers.

This was a rather strange afternoon, having traveled quite extensively for her career, her eyes met quite a confederal amount of unlikely habits, cultures, even animals. Now, she noticed a woman dressed in what looked like 15th century medieval clothing. 

Alone, she roamed the gallery inspecting each and every portrait as if she was evaluating her own child’s homework. She had also smelled fermented rose, in the bathroom a vague scent of French Baguette, and now a rather special odor of burned sage, all of which had no business doing in a gallery. She stood again, intending to count the inches of white space with her strong measuring qualities, she believed, and see if they were evenly distributed. She expected less from a world who put more emphasis on where colorful objects should be placed, disregarding what surrounded the very object.

And there he was again, the very same man she had spotted earlier, whose eyes pierced at her in the most oddest of ways, as if he was the only one able to perceive her out-of-wordlessness. Now come to think of it, he was as foreigner as she was, both cuddled amidst the most alien plane of existence they could ever be. He hovered on and about a dirty fridge that looked faulty from the way it stood on one functioning leg, its inner lights flickering like a ghost saying hello from a horror movie.

 

The man had fuzzy black hair, beardless, his skin spotless, perfect. His long gray overcoat gave him the necessary touch of mystery she longed to dispel. She wondered how she looked like to him, or if he bothered to see past her readily uninviting demeanor.

Him

He had been waiting for help for a solid five minutes, nobody seemed to care or notice this strange man struggling to get a drink from this bloody useless machine, which deceivingly emitted light and a peculiar, sinister childlike voice likely urging people to purchase. 

Ping! A voice message. His phone’s signal was working after all, he had given up texting his leader, his wife and the office’s clerk whom he promised a fat pack of cigarettes in exchange for candid information about local spots for a bit of needed relaxation. 

He had been promising himself a treat after the strenuous work. He almost dreaded checking the sender. Hoping against hope, anything, he thought, anything but his leader. For he always texted when he wished a random, on the spot zoom call going over bullet points they had discussed last month. That awful Ping sound could come from a general automatic message sent by any service he’s subscribed to, or, it could be from his dear wife too, which suggested another loss of freedom.  

‘’…Hey there, I am checking in, when's your flight back? You must be still jet lagged. Give me a call when you can…’’ his wife’s voice trailed away, she sounded nothing like the wife he knew. He’d rather hear the usual, chirpy high-pitched tone which indicated happiness and elation at all times. Whenever his wife attempted to adopt a brooding, almost contemplative mode, he knew it was one of her ways to appeal. To appear to him, hopefully, in a different light, which he never took the time to notice or appreciate. There was a second audio after the first one. 

‘’I ...I miss you. I...anyways, I'll see you when I see you, or when you call. My girlfriends are around, they were like, asking, if you'll be back tonight, I lied, I said yes, because I don't want to be left alone. I feel so alone…’’

He wasn’t only listening to his wife’s message, their two-year old son was apparently crying, Lulu, his pink rabbit toy must have sprang to life and disappear somewhere in the house, as toys usually would do. 

He was all too familiar with that kind of distressing cry, a cry that signaled intense separation anxiety that doubled more than when mommy and daddy weren’t by his side, and what an oddly convenient time for his wife to choose, out of all other times in the day, to send her darling husband a voice note —not a text— reminding him that he had a family, in his business trip abroad. Beside the thundering, alarming wails of the child, he could also filter a fleeting, almost ethereal sadness in her voice. He called it sadness, but it wasn’t sadness, not at all actually. It was a nameless feeling they had both shared, somehow. 

He had no idea where it came from. Their life looked incredibly stable. His own sister and brother-in-law suggested they changed their last name to Perfect. That how perfect they looked to the outsiders. 

He, however, had experienced glimpses of that fleeting so called sadness here and then, even back when they were still dating and no prospect of marriage was put forth. He found it beautiful sometimes, but he never really dared speak of it. As the years went by, that nameless feeling, almost like white space in the pages, between the lines, the binder or the area around closed doors, grew to an entirely different creature. He liked it that way, bigger and present. Because he never really wanted it to disappear. 

He felt it cowardice for some couple to seek that nameless feeling out of the relationship. It must stay, stay and linger. That white space should be given its right to survive, to feed off of the two patrons of the relationship, any relationship. That foreboding sense of inability to relate to each other would no longer act as the bond that kept things afloat, if that fleeting, secret sadness was to be laid open or discussed. It was almost sacred. 

At times his wife attempted to dissect it whenever they were alone, but he had managed to escape the scrutiny. Soon he had to learn ways he could distract his wife. Sometimes with sex, sometimes with outdoor fun, and now that they shared a son, the constant need for distraction was—

‘’You need help?’’ Her voice threw him out. It was the woman he had spotted far at the corner, the same one who fell after two overweight teens marched on her, without apologizing. The same woman who refused to break eye contact, even after he had long marched away.

‘’Do you speak English?’’ She repeated. Yes I do, he thought, but what came out was just a nod.

‘’Let me try,’’ she took out her phone and scanned the unclean front of the fridge, the QR code, dirt-addled and folding on its own, almost falling. She straightened it, but also to no avail. He watched her determined to open the fridge, he knew by the periphery of her eye she should feel his eyes on her, but he couldn’t care less. 

Her head, almost as if in for celebrating the near coming Christmas, her impossibly dark hair waved enough spaces for the white strands to appear, gently beneath and about, as though glittering snow on a wild dark night. 

from Liminal Space, by Imad Afdam