My body carries my mind. A wooden spoon, an egg. I live with four men in Otke Notive. Our apartment is a thin hallway with seven doors on it. Five of the doors are the way into bedrooms, and the sixth door is how you get into a bathroom. The hallway begins from the seventh door, which takes you into a stairwell down onto the streets of Otke Notive, and it ends at a large room which has a kitchen and a couch in it. This is where I occasionally have seen the other men who live with me.
On a day when my hands were in the fridge, I looked at the sink and saw my tall roommate. Water billowed from the faucet and banged into dishes. Behind me, another roommate recycled a jar, looked up, and he gasped.
“That’s hand soap.”
My tall roommate breathed a laugh into the sink and the water continued, falling on metal. In the fridge I looked at rubber-banded stalks. They were blooming in a misty water glass. I’d cocked my ear to listen better, and I’d widened my eyes with the same intention.
The other roommate bent to our garbage can, forced the trash deeper in its bag and then stood. He said, “There’s one there for dishes. You are using one for hands.”
Then a bright insight was told into the sink. And it was true: soap is soap and it doesn’t know hand from dish; anyways, it’s all moot; we’re not cleaning anything, ever, just adding layers of chemical film to our bodies and silverware; actually, peer review just came back on a study that observed the effects on a fork after ten-years’ washing—it was larger.
These words came, by way of my tall roommate’s mouth, from his mind to my ears. And they were welcome to me, because I spent hours in that foamy sink, and I often wondered what I was doing.
The tall roommate hauled his cooling meal from the counter to his room, and my other roommate put every dish right back in the sink.
Then I stood at his door in the hallway, and I knocked. This man was a stranger to me. He had been here since I moved in, but after seven months, we only nodded. On the way to the shower, or coming back from it, if I saw him, we would nod. I did this with the other men in my apartment, and there was a bony roommate who even clapped me on the back. Still, I would never knock on my bony roommate’s door, though he clapped me on my back.
The tall roommate’s door opened and I came into the room. He took white headphones from his ears. “What is that,” I asked. He was bound in an elastic system connecting a back brace to ankle weights, via something like a corset. He explained it to me, and it made a lot of sense.
His room looked like mine: it had a swollen ceiling and his window faced a building. I wondered if he ate on top of his comforter like I did. I told him I support your actions at the sink. I watched his hand swoop in the air, both wing and claw, then land and finger through a desk full of papers. Back in my room, my desk was full of papers too. When I said what my name was, he said what his was, and then he spoke in the direction of my head from the best angle:
“Speaking of names, what do you think this place is called?”
I looked at him and I clarified his question.
He nodded.
I answered, which made him shake his head. “Otke Notive,” Dominick said.
The Whitwell system. Place names are arbitrary, and they bear no relation to the place itself, so it makes sense to follow Whitwell’s system, which in the nineteenth century calculated new names for places by assigning letters to coordinates, so that when you say Otke Notive, you refer to the exact latitude and longitude of New York City. He said all this to me and showed me his notes. The air felt sturdy.
In less than three days, Dominick became vivid. He looked the way a Roman sculpture looks when it is correctly displayed—the false white surface coated in reds, blues, and greens, with pupils painted onto the eyeballs. His hands pinched at ideas when he spoke. I started drinking out of beakers.
We were measuring each other’s skulls when Dominick explained to me that the year we live in is actually wrong. Due to one monk’s clerical mistake in the 1300s, we had been marking the wrong year ever since.
“That means it is technically 2030.”
“We’ve been off by a couple of years.”
“Precision is important,” he said, and I finished his sentence.
So we had been off by a couple of years. When could this new information really set in? I took some air particles in through my nostrils. The next morning, it would surely feel different to wake up in my bed.
But late that night, we dragged our beds to the curb and sold them to men from online, for a lot of reasons. It was actually best to sleep in a chair, because this stacked your organs properly, and also it made the most sense to sleep in short intervals, and besides, sleeping is just what polite society calls passing out. Also there were other good reasons to not have a bed, such as creating space in your room for other things that made more sense. Sometimes people list a number of reasons for doing something, and it may seem like there’s really just one reason. But in our case, we did it for a lot of reasons, equally. I awoke in the year 2030, in my chair.
If you know where to look, the streets of Otke Notive are evidence of a society. Between two sidewalks, there is always a road. There is public space and private space, and the line between them is subtle, and tasteful. The economy’s kinks are ironed out. Money debits through the air. The populace is taught language by posters and signs all around them, and at waist level, there are fences to protect everyone from saplings, bushes, and grass. People smoke cigarettes from off of the ground, and customize the filling when they order food at a restaurant. In gleaming black uniforms, cops return stolen bikes to their rentable docks, or else they ride in vans on the sidewalk.
With Dominick, I also began to notice that the world is filled with gel. At all times, we are walking through gel. Have you seen up close the way an insect steps into a drop of water, how the water bends?
On the street, into the phone, I told my Mom about Dominick. “Is that an ambulance?” she said. I told her she should call it Otfu Veitoup where she lives. “And there goes a firetruck. Where are you?” Then I asked her how she is doing. “Now, someone,” she observed, “is playing music out of their car.”
In the bathroom, for months, urine dots had fallen off the bottom of Dominick’s privates. The other roommate finally said, “I am moving out.” He spent half a gift card to clean his room, buying each surface its own fluid. The room felt smaller with its new coating. Even so, I decided I would move in there, because it shared a wall with Dominick’s room. I stood against my new wall, and Dominick traced my shape with a box cutter. This would be a passage between our rooms, once we had the proper tools. Until then, my jagged outline stared.
Then we began the Ipba Veinul system. I did feel different on that first morning of it. I lifted both arms in the hallway, and I could not reach either wall.
We had begun the day before at noon. I knocked on my wall twice and I heard Dominick’s pants swish as he came into my room. His outfit was already on so he helped me clip the goggle chain into my waist-container, and then we sat in the armchairs. I got back up to close the door because Dominick forgot to do that. While we waited, I noticed the way he hung one leg over the other. At the ankle, it was loose and smart, but his thighs concealed his groin with compact force. He also had new shoes, which I guess he bought with Christmas money. Then an alarm went off on our phones, and we began. We took a slow breath for five seconds, held it for eight, and exhaled for five. We did this again. We kept doing it. Dominick got up, breathing, and gave me a thumbs up. This was the first phase of the system. Then he left my room, still breathing in the intervals. I heard him breathe back into his room.
I went down the hallway and through that seventh door, so that I could go to work. Outside, I noticed the air gel was easier to move through. I watched a security camera protect boxes on a stoop, and I saw a developer develop a building. At the curb, I was struck by a bicycle. I clattered onto the street, and I stood quickly to finish counting to eight before my exhale. I fixed my outfit and continued towards work. I was mocked quietly there. Then, in a soothing tone, my manager asked me to unplug my knee tubes.
On the way home I looked at a streetlamp. Its light came out in a line towards the ground, and it followed conventional story structure: beginning, middle, and end. I left a voicemail for my Mom. It was hard to speak while I tracked my breath, and even harder because Dominick and I had written a new language, so I just said I love you and I hope you had a good day, because I was not yet fluent.
It was the limpid worldview. I lived clearly and every day made sense. A year passed in this way. I used to have some story to tell about each day, something would concern or confuse me, but what would I tell about this year? I just did what I always do and everything was fine. I was a part of the world, and I did not have any questions. I now felt that no one should ever take a while to answer anything. There was no question what life is, where it all comes from, how things work, or what motivates human behavior: it’s real, it comes from space, science is how it works, and reproduction is why we are motivated.
Cause and effect was a visible, dotted line. I understood that a depressive state was just a chemical imbalance. And what I mean is that I could see a bulge in the skull, a chemical swell, which lopsided the gaze. When I sat for meals I could not only feel, but participate in the sorting and filing of nutrients. What a relief to swallow fuel. And language was de-confused. We rooted out its lies and its wastes of time. Dominick looked so rational. He rinsed my life of confusion.
Until one day I sat below a tree, in the shade. The heat drove me there. I was off-course, and susceptible.
Below the tree, I looked at the shade. It was shaped like the branches above me. But I wasn’t certain this was caused by the sun. I thought: this shade might bloom from the grass itself. And that was all it took.
Which brings me to my point that I now see the world as an unintelligible place. Dominick speaks plainly when in fact the world is cryptic. I walked home that day, and as I went, I noticed the street was strange and made of clay. On top of the road were parked cars and buildings, and these were all one continuous surface, cut from a single piece of stone. Have you seen the in-ground churches at Lalibela?
Dominick knelt beside me that night with paper. I was on my back as he read my meters and wrote down numbers. He babbled his language all around my head. I kept quiet. When he left the room, I looked at the wall and the outline we had cut. I sucked in five seconds of air, held it for eight, and let the wind loose through my lips for two days.
Beneath fluorescent light, I pushed a page covered with markings into the trash carefully. I think it is an article, I think Dominick wrote it and he slipped it under my door. I buried it with the garbage that is there. But I worry that in the richness of food scraps and ground coffee, I have planted something, because my apartment is grisly. It teems with roommates. It laid a new one in my old room. The hallway’s like a throat, and only some frequencies make it through a closed door, like a soda can being opened, or a paper towel cupping private parts. The walls shudder. I think a developer is developing the building with us inside.
Now I see: the sky is filled with every solid thing, and its gut hangs over the city. Lakes form at storm drains. The coast eats Rockaway. Tonight, I watched the sink clot with foamy water. I would not touch it. The dishes were molten and buoyant.
I have started again to call the world by its strange names. I am able to talk to my Mom. I still wear my outfit, but the pouches dried, and they smell, because I don’t refill them with solution.
Inside of the world, on the street underneath my apartment, I talked into my phone. My Mom said, “Your grandmother got really sick. They did the IV wrong. A nurse missed the vein, so her hand filled with dialysate. We only noticed because it looked like her hand was sweating. I watched it, I could see the drips prick up through her skin, like a sewing needle.”
“Where are you?” she asked. “It is really loud.”