The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender

Author:Aimee Bender [Bender, Aimee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

24

The tent has now bleached from the weeks and weeks in the sun. I’ve placed an old pillow in the back, another to sit on. There’s a little trash can I empty daily in case I bring in a snack. The hand fan cost seven dollars.

My days now revolve largely around the two tasks: make a living for myself by finding and mailing the objects, and remember that time. Remember it more. Re-remember. Find another detail. Look again. There’s no formal routine, so once I’ve awoken in the darkness and settled into my spot, I usually begin by recalling what I was thinking about the day before, trying to walk myself back into it, to mentally draw it as closely and with as much detail as I can, to include myself in it, to experience more fully. It’s okay, I have told myself, to go back over the same material. It’s okay to remember new times, new days. To speak it aloud formally, like a speech. To ask myself questions, like an interview. Still, it is difficult work. My mind wanders constantly. Scraps of old action TV episodes rear up out of nowhere. I make menus for lunch, or recite facts from high school government class. Song lyric intrusions. Waves of sleepiness. When I am able to focus, since I was so cut off from what was happening as a child, sometimes it is more than anything like walking myself through a blankness, and all I can do is try to measure the quality of the blankness, if it’s a fizzy blank, or a misty blank, or a fog blank, or a morgue.

But even with all that, for a lot of the time, there’s actually plenty to sort through. What Vicky, in her disbelief, may not understand is that even though I was barely aware of what was going on at that time, even though I was drifting through the events like some sort of person-ghost, it’s not like the whole self just turns off and floats into air; we always do some sort of compensation, and for me, my entire sensory set of equipment was on high alert even as the rest of me, the processing part, closed down. I felt no feeling, and at any time of day would burst into tears severed from sadness, a physical racked sobbing like my body had to wrench it out even if my mind could not, and I’d sit like a stone during tearjerker movies, and my mother’s wavery, tentative phone calls, but I can still tell you in extensive detail about the tight brown-and-beige weave of the cushion on the sofa in the principal’s office waiting room as I sat looking at the secretary’s rose-stoned ring on her hand with its raised central vein right before she, the principal, called me into her egg-salad-scented office with the peppery sound of jackhammers working outside to tell me behind those thick black plastic framed glasses that my uncle was flying in to take me away.

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