Dents: The Warehouse Photos Pt. III (Documentation)

Dents: The Warehouse Photos Pt. III (Documentation)

The Shape of Noise to Come

A Personal Ghost Story

Marie is ordering coffee at a café she has never been to before. This café has choices, which means she would not have ordinarily come here, but she had woken up, this morning, with a sense of disorientation and in her attempt to reorient herself, had ended up on the terrace of this café. The golden footprints that circle the café have as much to do with it as anything.

(She looks at the coffee menu and decides on the Sumatra coffee.)

The footprints started appearing in the city three years ago and at the time, she thought it was the brain child of a local artist—that someone was stealing out in the middle of the night, painting perfect replicas of the soles of people's shoes. Marie imagines the artist having trunk fulls of shoes with soles dyed golden from the project. But three years have passed and now she understands that those footprints belong to someone she will never meet, but whose goings and comings result in these perplexing messages. Marie has never seen the owner of the golden footprints, but she has seen the trails change, sometimes over the period of weeks, days, even hours. They have never met, yet they live in the same city, one invisible to the other. Do I leave hints of existence in her world, Marie muses, because she has decided from the shoe prints that the owner is a 'she.'

And now Marie is ordering coffee, seated outside, and she sees the footprints winding through the chairs and tables. She can sense these ones are not fresh, not alive, they have been here for awhile. She has seen them here before and she no longer notices them circling around her. When she notices them on the sidewalk, they mean something to her. This step is her own arching foot, is the smooth heel, is the pattern on the bottom of the shoe. It is Marie walking home with the groceries, tapping her toe as she's waiting for the bus, Marie tripping on the uneven bricks of the sidewalk.

Or maybe she wonders again where these footsteps are coming from. She doesn't let herself follow them. She doesn't want to get dependent. But she asks about them. She lives in a town haunted by a ghost with golden footsteps and she is forced to know everywhere the ghost goes.

(But we are still seated on the terrace of a café and Marie sees someone she knows sitting at a nearby table. She waves.)

What would happen, she thinks, if the owner of the footsteps stayed in her town forever. She would have to move, she decides. She would have to.

The Differences of Celi and Cecilia

I am sitting around a dinner table with my husband and kids, discussing the interesting things we have seen today—Maria saw a gas station that used the wrong form of “your,” as in, “Your going to be amazed!!” We chuckle. This feels familiar, but in the wrong kind of way. Upon closer inspection, I know what I have been trying to figure out the whole day now: these are not my real husband and kids. I have been sitting here nearly every night, having dinner with them, for the last 3 years. His name is Rob, he is 43 years old, five years younger than I am and we “have” two children together. One boy, one girl: Tom and Maria. Rob, 43, Tom, 17, Maria, 13. Cecilia and Rob, Tom and Maria. It sounds weird to me because I am used to saying Cecilia and Jack, Katie and Sarah.

Now that I have made the realization that this is not my family, I must go through with Step 2. I must convince myself that this is a dream, because it is. But in dream world, just because the same thing has happened to you the exact same way 1036 times before does not mean it will happen the same way for the 1037^th time. In fact, in dream world, it seems downright improbable.

I study my hands. They move when I want them to. I have a distinct awareness of my body in time and space. The shadows fall over Maria's face the way they should given the light source affixed above the table.

My “husband” leans towards me, what's wrong? The dinner table has fallen silent. I think they know what's coming. If this is a dream, if they are something I have conjured up, they should know what's coming.

Tom looks angry, an adolescent boy whose mother has commitment issues.

Mom, Maria whimpers, don't do this. Just let us have one night. Just one.

Look what you're doing to the children, Celi, says Rob. The children. They'll think you don't love them. That's right, I almost forgot. Rob calls me Celi.

But it's too late. My hand is already reaching for the knife next to my meatloaf. They know. That means this is a dream, right? How else could they know what I was going to do before even I did?

(And here the same thing happens every time.)

I grab the knife. Rob is sitting to my right side, Tom to my left, Maria across from me. They don't try to stop me. Do they know it is useless? This dream world is their real world so it makes sense to them that this would happen for a 1037^th time. Me—well, I am still a bit bewildered by the complacent look on Maria's face as I slash at her dad's throat. The spray of blood hits my eyes and my open mouth. The taste is the same in every dream.

My actions are frantic, but Maria and Tom are calm. Maria is crying silent tears. Mom, she whispers as I hack at her breast. I always start with Rob, he is the easiest. For all intents and purposes, Tom and Maria are my children. The dream me recognizes that they are my children. It is the real me that is trying to break through that.

Maria's eyes are glazed over and there is a gurgling sound coming from her throat.

Fine, says Tom, fine. He offers up his wrists. My mind always finds a way to make everything harder than it needs to be. Just do it, Mom. Just go ahead and do it.

I am sobbing, porcelain plates are shattered on the floor, my meatloaf is a little pile of mush in the carpet under me. I'm perched on the table with mashed potatoes in my hair. It is too late to ask myself if this is crazy.

I don't answer Tom. That would be accepting him as real. I want to give him consolation, but he is not who he says he is. I stab him, too.

I survey the room. It looks similar to the way it does every night. There is blood and mashed potatoes on the walls. They are all slumped in their chairs, leaning against the table. Rob's face is in his soup; his hand gives a twitch. Will this be the last time? Or am I perpetually destined to kill my family dream after dream? I wake up in the mornings and see Katie and Sarah, my daughters, and think... am I sure this is the real world? Have I been getting it wrong this whole time?

Speak into the microphone.

Like this?

We can't hear you. All I can hear is your breathing. Pull the microphone away a bit.

Exhale. Now?

Your breathing. It's like falling asleep to the ocean.

I'm just out of breath. I'm sorry, can I have a minute?

I spend days at work and evenings and weekends with Jack, Katie and Sarah. Then I fall asleep and do the whole thing over again with Rob, Tom and Maria. These lucid dreams just won't go away and in them, it usually takes me until dinner before I realize that I am dreaming. The shadows cast from a candle that don't fall quite right, or something Maria says sparks a memory and I realize my body is lying in a bed next to Jack with my two daughters in the next room, although my mind is here. I go through with trying to rid myself of this family. I do not have place in my life to take care of two different households, two different pasts, presents and futures. I have tried sleeping pills, therapy, hypnosis, and finally, murder. The last option is the only thing that has worked even marginally.

Then, I wake from the dream, not feeling rested at all, and it starts all over again.

I open my eyes. “Rob?” I ask, trying to get my bearings.

Jack nuzzles my shoulder and says, “Mm'mm. Jack.” His eyes are still closed. A sheen of sweat covers my forehead.

“Jack,” I say. He nods in his sleep.

“Jack,” I say, having grasped reality again.

Speak directly into it. Say what you really want to say right now.

No.

Why not?

Someone will hear me.

No one can hear you over your breathing.

Ok.

Ok what?

Ok. What I want to say is...

…

It's that... wait... where am I again?

I remember the remembering I do in my lucid dreams. I remember that while I’m dreaming, I have memories of Maria when she was 3 and learning how to ride a fire-engine red tricycle. I remember the red pimples on the faces of the boys down the road that were friends with Tom when he was just hitting his teenage years. I remember the tooth he got knocked out by a baseball at 13, the blood, red against his white teeth. I remember how Rob and I met, 1967, a rally, awkward, angry, and red-faced. During the day, I carry these memories around like someone might carry around the pages of a book she has just finished reading, familiar and intimate, yet still recognizably distinct from one’s own experiences. But as I fall asleep, I can feel these memories becoming my own, settling under my skin, behind my eyeballs, until they are the only truth that is fed from my brain through my ocular nerve and to the projection screen of my eyelids. Silent movies constantly flickering across my gaze: Maria running, Maria stumbling, Maria going to the ground, Tom by her side, Tom, baseball, high school, high school friends, Maria getting up, Rob, laughing, Rob, yelling, Rob and that French cuisine cooking class, Rob and...longing?

The second time Maria begs me, don't do this, let us just have one night, in a dream, I pause. I am in my familiar crouch in the middle of the dinner table, my toes spread apart in the Jello. I'm tired. What if she's right? Why not let it go this one evening? I've trained myself to do the same thing every time for so long that I don't know if I can stop myself.

Rob is watching me quietly over his meatloaf and I know that he is just reflecting my own thoughtful expression. I climb down from the table and put the knife next to my plate. During the time it takes me to set the knife down, it turns into a spoon—yes, this is a dream. We laugh at the idea that I would ever consider murdering them, especially with a spoon. By the time we are done laughing, I have forgotten that it was ever a knife and that I ever intended to hurt them. I even forget it is a dream. Maria chatters incessantly about going to volleyball camp. I listen.

Waking up in the morning, exhausted, I remember the previous night's events.

“Jack,” I whisper. I hear a grunt and then, “Mm'mm. Rob.” I open my eyes in horror.

Excuse me, ma’am, listen to me now. Please.

Ok.

We need your name for the record. Please.

Celi Hamilton.

Celi. There was a woman at this residence named Cecelia Bennett. Do you know anyone who went by that name?

Bennett...Bennett...I’m not sure. I don’t quite recognize that name.

I’m replaying the scenario over and over in my mind. The woman who physically wakes up in the real world, but is still mentally stuck in her dream life. She walks out into the kitchen and sees intruders sitting around the breakfast table. She has trained herself to spot these intruders. She has trained herself to terminate these intruders.

Only, she is awake and she doesn’t know it.

She lunges for the knife and her daughter, Sarah, unknowingly says the same line that Maria does in her dreams, she says, “Mom, don’t do this!”

And that is all she needs to start slashing.

Trans-Atlantic

Lily was at the garden gate, studying the misty shapes of the Prague hills. It was noon and the rest of her family was in the cottage, eating soup together to the sounds of her grandfather snoring on the sofa bed, the shadows of the muted black and white TV playing across his face. Her grandmother made all the racket she possibly could as she went about cleaning up the kitchen, putting pans and pots away, rustling the silverware, banging the windows, all in a dedicated attempt to wake the grandfather up, but everyone else, her mother, her sister, her father, were all completely focused on the approaching storm. The constant hum of their whispering accompanied the noise of the kitchen: would it be big, would the tomatoes drown, would it wash away the bugs? The air in the cottage was thick and hot from the wood stove. How could he possibly fall asleep so close to that thing, they wondered.

The trees behind their cottage shuddered in the summer wind and swept the ground with their branches while the clouds crept in from the south. Lily stood at the gate at the bottom of the hill and watched them. The sky was a golden violet color and in all her summers at the Prague cottage, she had never seen anything like it.

“Lily! Come in! It's going to rain and your soup is getting cold!” her grandmother yelled from the cottage window.

“I'm not hungry yet.”

“What?” she called.

“I'm not hungry yet!” yelled Lily.

“You're always forcing her to eat, let her be!” called her mother from somewhere inside the cottage.

Her grandmother shut the window a little more loudly than necessary, grumbling about the evils of reheating meals and this new generation, her spoiled American grandchildren.

Over the years, the meadow past their gate had been overtaken with weeds. When Lily was younger, she remembered someone coming out every month to cut the grass with a scythe and then the the children would play in it. Now that the weeds grew prickly and tall, they mostly stayed out to avoid the snakes and ticks.

It reminded her that each year could be her last year here, that things were changing. Her grandparents could pass away any day now and all her yearly pilgrimages here, her summers of growing up in this place, summers of memorizing those hills, of smelling these particular carrots, would have no ability to change that the cottage would go to her cousins and that they would become the keepers of her memories. And if she came to visit them and to see the cottage, she would have to ask for those simple things that in this moment were still hers to take: opening the window to let the breeze in, putting the water on for tea, sitting on the couch. Her mother reminded her daily of her grandparents' precarious existence, their fragile grasp on life. (Years later, Lily would realize that her mother had used this as a scare tactic to keep Lily from misbehaving during their visits. She couldn't even remember when exactly her mother started warning her about the impending doom, but she knew it had to be at a fairly young age because she couldn't remember a time in her life when the possibility of her grandparents disappearing suddenly and permanently (at the snap of a finger, the toll of a bell) hadn't hung over her with a shadow-like quality, following her even across the Atlantic to North Carolina where she spent months August through November and January through May. During these musings, Lily would recall scenes of her grandfather chopping wood outside and her grandmother carrying the bathwater out, both strong as oxen, and would wonder why she had ever let her mother create these alternate images of her grandparents as sickly and fleeting.)

Now the clouds were coming down the sides of the hills, their shadows creeping over the pastures and the trees and the train station. The mist seemed to be getting thicker and she heard a distant roaring sound, the sound of a muted waterfall. The window creaked open behind her again and her grandmother poked her head out.

Now Lily was fixated on the mist. It was rapidly advancing.

And maybe it was that she had gotten used to the slower pace of life—it was the 21^st century, and yet here, on the outskirts of Prague: still no phone lines, no running water, just an old black and white TV and the scenery—but it was almost directly on top of her before the instant of recognition hit. (For the mist was not a mist, but waves and waves of rain sweeping across the golden violet sky towards her.)

As though disembodied, Lily watched herself run up the hill towards the cottage, acutely aware of the rain catching her halfway and the suspense caught in her muscles exploding as the first drop touched her arm.

She let it catch her halfway. It slid down her nose and under her glasses and down the back of her neck. Dripping, she turned to watch. Everything was golden in the light of the rain and with the warmth and the roar and the trees bending behind her in the wind, she could feel her grandmother and grandfather watching from the cottage.

Voyeurism at it's best

Voyeurism

Today, everything feels pleasantly erotic

Like a 24-hour porno --

That instead of Hitachi Wands and purple strap-ons

Features actual bushes that, rather than pruned

Were allowed to grow heavy with fruit

And giggle as its stickiness drips down a lover’s chin

Crab grass bats its lashes at a gardenia

Who no longer fantasizes about being fucked by a tulip

But moans as she’s rammed by a flower of her own genus

Coming up occasionally only to recharge in the sunlight

And wondering how she’s lived for so long

Without ever making another perennial scream

Dandelion, Azaelia, and Crocus throw the blankets from their beds

Grind against each other with hardened stems and vibrating leaves

Petals curling as they cum and shake with pleasure

Then dropping to the ground, too exhausted to do anything but decompose

Or maybe enjoy a few puffs of CO2 or a sip of chlorophyll and coke

And before they know it,

After days and weeks of constant flirting, fucking, and sucking

They’ve covered the world in a layer of slippery yellow.

Splashed their DNA on sidewalks, bicycle seats and tables

Like a poorly aimed cum-shot that spewed haphazardly all over a window

Instead of arching majestically into a mouth

Frost

“So this morning, my little sister Rae called me out to the front yard to show me a tiny dead frog in a dull blue bucket. Frozen, dead... eyes iced over with murky rain water. The way it was positioned –body and hind legs buried in the ice, head and front legs poking out –well, I almost thought it was alive. Maybe its heart was still thumping under the ice cold skin. Maybe the frog was trying to wedge his body out of the frozen pool, right then, right there. But, he was dead of course. Poor little guy... probably died long before the rain, body decaying in that little blue bucket before god hung his head in pity and gave the thing a half-assed icy grave.

“I know how you feel, I thought, shivering, watching Rae poke the frog’s ice-encased body with a stick. Its eyes are still open, Rae said. Good, I told her. Let him watch the sky roll along, I thought. Watch the colors change from blue to pink to orange to black, and back again.

“So anyway, later that day I was walking downtown, stopped by Panera and got myself a caramel latte. I was standing at the crosswalk –you know, the one on Cherry and 9^th –when I felt something tighten in my torso. Stopped me right there on the street corner. A couple ran past in white Nikes and matching blue sweat bands. A woman in a flowery hippie shirt, ripped jeans, and neon green rain boots waddled past to cross (I wish I was kidding). But me, I couldn’t move my feet. I looked down, and swear to god, my shoes were icy blocks on the sidewalk.

“I stood there, disbelieving, looking around for help. I tried to call to the hippie woman about a hundred feet ahead of me, but the word got lodged in my throat. I tried again. Help. Even the word was frozen.
“I felt the frost snaking its way up my coiled intestines. The skin on my hands became cobwebbed with cracked ice. My caramel latte was solid. If I could move my hands to touch my face, I’d feel the cheeks hardening, the skin freezing.

“My mouth became a tiny “o” in surprise. My eyes were still open. People passed, glanced for a second at the frozen girl on the street corner as they chatted on their cell phones, before shrugging and crossing the street. One man got off the phone long enough to snap a picture. Help. I watched the streetlights change from green to yellow to red. Green. Yellow, red.”