Emily and Stap

by: Brian Conlon

She grew up in the center of the universe. Smack dab in the center, surrounded by artists and engineers. She was told she could create anything. She was told others had already created quite a lot. She was told the impact of all the others was evident. She was told her impact was not. Her parents gave her all that could be given a child. They paid the artists to paint her and the engineers to do math for her. She let them. They spoke to her between strokes, or cadenzas, complex conversions, or fractional derivations. They explained to her all types of things, not the least of which being: beauty, the primal simplicity of a well-constructed swing set, theories of shapes, theories of sound, interpretations of colors, the precise moment of their happiness, and their hourly rate. She heard them and nodded from time to time. It was all someone else’s dream. How many portraits could one mount on one’s wall anyway? And how many equations would you have solved in your name? Three, she finally decided. Her parents filled her head with softness; the type of knowledge engineers laugh at and artists cry for. She was given books to read and actually read some. One was called If the Lake Were You. It inspired her to watch her neighbors swim and imagine that they could swim fast. She imagined that they swam so fast that her mind could not keep up with what her eyes were seeing. They were swimming so fast that they could disappear into their towels and their patios and return to the pool only hours or days later. But she knew they were always swimming, lapping each other so quickly she could not tell who was winning or what winning would even entail. While watching the pool one morning, a mist carried her away, away from the pool, away from the engineers, artists, and parents she had known, away from the center of the universe, and towards him.

***

He grew up in a town of 7500 people. They all called him Stap. They allowed Stap to drink from their many springs and forage from their local convenience stores on the condition that he perpetually did. They wished him to act, all the time. They told him it was good for him; that thought led to death at some point, which led to an absence of thought, which, for those who think, is thought to be a great loss. He took them at their word and did. He did until the age of seventeen, then stopped and considered what it was he had done, and felt as though it was not all that much. They told him that was his first mistake, thinking. He told them it was impossible to count the number of mistakes he had made and he regretted his first seventeen years in their entirety. They bought him an armed guard. He sold it several times to a number of different passersby and left town. They fought over it until it protected just one of them from the rest. Stap continued to do, discovering that the only thing that prevented his regret was the performance of another task, a task he would regret, but only if he had time to do so. Most townspeople now thought of him as no great shakes.

***

They met in a meadow, one of the ones they used for movies, back when they used real meadows for movies. She sat in the middle, in the precise center of the meadow. He scourged about the outskirts; searching for things to eat, things to pick, things to stamp out. Her skirt ballooned around a cluster of dandelions and she contemplated the mild pleasant odor until it was time to consider the colors. Yellow and green were defined by the weeds and blades of grass, a not unrepresentative brown could be found underneath, but she would not go out of her way to find it. “Why brown is even a color at all is beyond me,” she once told an artist. There was not much to eat, but plenty to pick and stamp out, as Stap approached her in concentric circles, giving her an optimal opportunity to vacate before he reached her. She stayed, as she does, right there in the center. He came so close to her that he nearly stepped on her skirt. She imagined he would encircle her infinitely, getting closer and closer, but never touching, like something an engineer showed her once. He bent over, excused himself, picked up her skirt, and plucked a dandelion from underneath it. She remained still. He handed her the dandelion. She brushed the fine yellow pedals between her thumb and forefinger. The tactile sensation calmed her and the slow constant motion of her hand unnerved him.

***

“Your name?” he asked.

“Emily, thank you,” she said.

Stap nodded and would have doffed his cap, had he been wearing one. She looked up at him and smiled, but where most people would look away, she kept looking. She looked to find out what he was. She saw the light brown dirt which permeated his forehead. She saw the darkness in his eyes which the townspeople had once insisted marked him for great things, or at least the doing of many things. She saw his yellowed teeth whenever he opened his sometimes pink, sometimes red, dry and peeling lips. Why was she still looking? She saw his hands, strong and earth-stained, unlike any of the artists and engineers. He brought his hands to his face and hid his eyes from her.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I’m looking at you right now.”

“I know,” he said. He put his hands down, went to the ground next to her and began picking at the grass. He sorted the grass as she watched. He sporadically looked up to see if she was still watching. She was. The occasional insect distracted them both. When they noticed that the other was likewise distracted, they smiled at each other.

The area around Stap was now barren. He placed the grass on Emily’s skirt. It was organized by shade and then by length within each shade.

Stap got up and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all. Thank you,” she said, and dropped the dandelion on her skirt and picked up the piles of grass.

“I regret this. This whole thing, I’m sorry. I never should have bothered you,” he said.

“No bother,” she said. “It helps you, it helps me.”

No it didn’t, he thought.

***

She tugged at his boot just to see if it was coarse. It was.

“Stay for a while,” she said, “Just stay.”

“But there’s so much to do and regret. There’s those woods over there. I could chop down every tree in those woods. Every one, and then there’d still be more and what would come of it in the end? What would come of it?”

“I don’t know. Less beauty, less oxygen, less time. Why would you do that? Why would you cut down one tree? Why would you strip the bark off of one stick? Why would you lick the dew off of one leaf?” she asked, and then licked one of the longer blades of grass.

He fidgeted. “The things we do prevent us from thinking about the things we’ve done.”

She dropped the blade she had licked back into the meadow, beyond her skirt, and it blew away with the next light breeze.

“And once they’re done, they are more things to think about,” she said.

“Yes. I worry about that,” he said. He untied and retied his boots. She watched him.

“So don’t,” she said.

“Worry about it? I don’t while I’m doing, another reason to do,” he said.

“No, don’t do new things,” she said, “sit, dream, observe, imagine, be.”

“Why?”

“It helps. I’m helping you,” she said.

She then imagined that the grass that she had licked and had blown away would transplant itself and in several months grow delicate feminine human arms from the DNA she had infused it with. These arms would be available to sexlessly console men who had recently been stripped of their war medals, athletic trophies, or women, and woodland creatures, who had recently been stripped of their dinner, habitat, or sense of sight. The arms would caress, the arms would reassure, the arms would only do good; that is, until someone chopped them off.

***

In the time it took Emily to imagine that, Stap had wiped the sweat from his forehead and transferred some of it to his pants.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat down next to her, just outside the circumference of her skirt, and immediately regretted it. I should be doing something, he thought, but could not get up.

“What’s your volume?” she asked him, looking into the distance, still imagining the arms. The engineers had told her that volume was very important.

“Not loud. Do you really think you’re helping?”

“No, total volume. How long would arms have to be to console you?”

“This is helping?”

“Yes.”

Stap was compelled to get up. Emily remained still. Stap placed his hands on his hips and looked down at Emily who was looking up at him, but only imagining the arms of the plant and how they could encompass him, tame him, or, maybe, his impatience, his incredulity, would wither the arms into oblivion. No, it was the arms that would win. They would sap him of his regrets and his incomplete theories; they would leave him a blank and optimistic being, understanding that he could do or not do, and he could regret and not regret, and there would still be consolation. There would be something, maybe someone, that could make it better without him doing at all.

“They could be short. I don’t think it makes a difference. It wouldn’t last is the problem and then you’d regret withdrawing or ever allowing them near you in the first place, unless you moved on to doing something else.”

“You know this doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“I, well, you must act and you must stop acting.”

“No. There is no . . . you don’t have to act.”

“I do. What does it mean not to do anything? We are doing something now. Not a lot, but,” he said.

She imagined his mouth filling with spiders; spiders with venom that would numb, but would do no real harm. Every time he spoke the spiders would bite his tongue and he would become more relaxed, each time, more and more relaxed, until he could not speak, and would just sit with the spiders coming out of his mouth leisurely a couple at a time, until they left him entirely and he sat motionless, content not to have any more spiders in his mouth.

He saw a rabbit hopping along the outskirts of the meadow. It hopped and hopped and twitched and hopped. In short the rabbit was acting, it was acting and Stap doubted that it would regret any of its actions even if it hopped directly into the mouth of a coyote. As the coyote began to crush out the last lifeblood of that rabbit, it would not be thinking, I should not have hopped right into this coyote’s mouth. It would be thinking, I’d like to hop again, I must get loose so I can continue to hop.

He chased the rabbit. He took three quick steps before it hopped away.

***

The brush moved as it hopped into the denser part of the meadow. Stap ran towards the rabbit even after he lost sight of it. He ran until Emily was as far away as the rabbit had been when he first saw it. She said nothing. She noticed how his hips did not align precisely correctly. Not ideal conservation of motion, her engineers would say. A jilted non-athletic gate, her artists would say: a form unworthy of depiction. She admired his imperfection and thought it might mean something at some point.

He regretted the run. He ran back towards her and slipped on a patch of dirt he had cleared earlier. He fell backwards, further staining his right hand. She was thirty feet away, sitting, observing.

“Are you hurt?” she asked just loud enough so he could hear her over the buzzing of the bees and the droning of the industrial mixing plant just the other side of the woods. It mixed everything.

“No, no, I’m fine,” he said, getting up and brushing the back of his jeans.

“Have you done enough now? Can you sit here and stay awhile?” she asked as he walked towards her.

“I can, yes, now I can,” he said, crouching down once more.

“Good, now listen, will you listen? I think you don’t understand how to imagine. I think you don’t know what it means to stop and think. Not that you won’t do it, but that you don’t even know what it means to do it. I want you to know.”

“Well, no. I know what it is to sit and not do anything, that your mind wanders and you . . . I know what that is,” he said.

“No, that’s not it. That’s exactly what I mean. Imagining a better place is more useful than making a worse place,” she said.

“It’s the same, the very same. While you are imagining a better place, there is someone making a worse place and no amount of imagining can stop it.”

“Some amount can.”

“No,” he said, “What you don’t understand is the value of doing is the not thinking, the not imagining; a break from the never-ending disturbance which lies between your ears.”

“My ears?” she smiled back at him.

He was silent for a moment. “Not your ears,” he said.

“What’s so great about my ears?”

“They’re not mine. What’s between them is an unknown and has never bothered me,” he said, and immediately regretted it. I should have said something sweet, he thought. This is where he was supposed to say something sweet.

“Yours are not so bad,” she said.

See that was something sweet, that was the type of thing you were supposed to say, and you didn’t, and now you can’t, he thought.

“The mush in-between, whether yours or mine, is all we have. It is the only thing that is ours. It cannot be overcome by doing. It is all that is capable of transforming what is into what ought to be,” she said, parroting something a clarinet soloist once told her about the joy of improvising a cadenza.

“No. I can take these woods, in theory with time and tools, I can take these woods and transform them into a log cabin.”

“Is that what ought to be? A log cabin?”

“Perhaps. And I can’t make a log cabin with my mind. Only through action do log cabins appear.”

“And the man who built the first log cabin, where did that log cabin first appear?”

“After he built it, on the spot where he built it.”

“It appeared in his mind, as an idea, as a thing that had never existed, even with all the action, time, and wood that had come before.”

“You imagine a log cabin, and I’ll build one, and we’ll see which appears first.”

“Mine will, it already has.”

***

She imagined a dark purple cabin, plunked down right in the center of the woods. Smack dab in the center. It had stained glass windows depicting the life and death of the grandfather of the woman who built it. He had always told her, “You, Lindy, you are a handy one.” These words inspired her. They inspired her to chop down the trees, to stain the wood, to design and etch the glass windows, to meticulously cut the floorboards so that they would not only fit together seamlessly, but would create a pattern of shapes and images recognizable as intentional only to her, but would be remarked upon by all visitors as “interesting.” Her grandfather had inspired all this, and so it was his life depicted in the stained glass; his long hours at the mixing plant, his short-haired poodle who would lick his face when he finally returned home, his failed interview with another, more prestigious, mixing plant, which would have forced his family to leave the only town they had ever known. Lindy had depicted all this and more in the stained glass of the dark purple wood cabin in the center of the woods.

Emily’s eyes gleamed and looked directly through Stap into the center of the forest where the stained glass windows dimly reflected and distorted her eyes back to her.

“Your eyes, they’re pretty,” said Stap.

“Thank you,” she said, snapped back to reality.

He had said it, the sweet thing that he’d been regretting not saying. But was the timing right? And how simple and stupid it was, even if sweet. And what now that it had been said? Was he just to remain seated? Change the subject? What was to be done next? She said nothing. She was satisfied, not with him, but just with being, he thought. How can she just be? He could not sit still, could not sit idly by as his thoughts started to consume him. A thought came over him that she was just making fun of him this whole time, just to get him to say something sweet. She had thought to herself, this man, this weird, thoughtless man, I can get him to say something sweet to me. And now she had secretly won. And in her triumph, he had ceased doing. He had let the thoughts take over. The regrets had seeped in and filled his mush to the brim. She would torment him with her docility and force him to become inert, not like her romantic notion of just being, but as a statue of a live person. He regretted this thought. He regretted thinking. He needed to do. He started to get up.

She tapped her fingers on his boot.

He did not get up.

 

 

 

About the Author

Brian Conlon is a fiction writer from Rochester, New York. He studied creative writing at the University of Rochester and at Harvard Law School. His fiction has appeared and disappeared in various still-going and defunct literary magazines, including Prime Number, Blue Lake Review, and Magpie Zine. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, two kids, and Samoyed.