Do Everything in the Dark by Gary Indiana

Author:Gary Indiana [Indiana, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

49

Denise squeezed her eyes shut. When she closed them no light penetrated her lids, no phosphenes radiated in her inner sight. An ink-solid blackness draped her visual field. Mentally she pictured her city apartment windows. They stared out on an expanse of waste space separating five tenement buildings, an unintended courtyard full of unplanned vegetation. It enclosed four sickly elms, a rampant growth of crape myrtle, and one white birch, its striated bark peeling off in black and white strips. She could see the windows of her neighbors and restage their habitual oddities, gleaned from years of idle spying. If she looked up she saw a ragged wedge of sky.

It wasn't much; sometimes it was everything. A rubble-strewn dustiness and a stagnant odor hung in the street outside, which was gentrifying at a snail's pace compared with the blocks west, north, and south. Recalcitrant minority people with rent-stabilized places had made the block their final barricade in fending off expulsion by the better-off. For many of them the landlords’ offered buyouts would climb to some irresistible figure. Denise would miss her loser neighbors. She liked sitting on her stoop gabbing with eighteen-year-old Puerto Rican girls who already had two babies. She liked the desuetude and the company; she hated being old among such young people.

She juxtaposed daily life in that space (comforting as any well-worn rut, dulling as novocaine in its unvarying Deniseness; the apartment, however clean and spartan-empty she kept it, defeated bright schemes of self-improvement and energized productivity she conjured when she was away from it, exactly as though it were stuffed with all the detritus she'd ditched at the end of her twenty-year common-law marriage; Denise's calculations never glossed over the torpor that place tossed over wishes and ambitions like a thick, fuzzy blanket) with the wide, cool, dusky rooms of the chocolate-shingled, California-craftsman-style jewel box—a rare example in the Southwest—on the outskirts of Santa Fe.

Here she could wander for miles into the desert pondering a single undistracted thought like an expertly balanced tray of champagne glasses, loosely packed sand crunching underfoot, mesquite and lizards and mineral-indifferent cacti the only decor, an occasional rattler slithering away at her steps’ vibrations, under a limitless sky, a blue color that stung the eyes like pure white during the day, retracting after dark to reveal an awesome planetarium. Denise had never seen so many stars and satellites and cosmic spirals, planets and constellations the locals pointed out in a proprietary way, and the fact that everything out there was as dead as the chunks of quartz the local New Age emporium sold as “healing crystals” made her living existence feel like an unrepeatable miracle.

The flat, uninflected desert spread out in every direction. The dry heat, the weightlessness of empty space, relieved time of any meaning. Denise's history, any history, never impinged or accumulated. But she would never be here without Caroline, she reflected, could never adapt or take pleasure in this exceptional solitude as she could back home. Without Caroline's

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