Theories of Forgetting (Fiction Collective Two) - Softcover

Olsen, Lance

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661791 ISBN 13: 9781573661799

Publisher: University of Alabama Press, 2014

Synopsis

Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age.

Theories of Forgetting is a narrative in three parts. The first is the story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets the desert. Alana falls victim to a pandemic called The Frost, whose symptoms include an increasing sensation of coldness and growing amnesia. The second involves Alana’s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip both to remember and to forget Alana’s death. The third involves marginalia added to Hugh’s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense of it by means of a one-sided “dialogue” with her brother, Lance.

Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh’s and his daughter’s tale runs “upside down” across the bottom of the page, from front to back. How a reader initially happens to pick up Theories of Forgetting determines which narrative is read first, and thereby establishing the reader’s meaning-making of the novel.

About this title

About the Author

Lance Olsen is the author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four fiction collections, and two textbooks about writing innovative fiction. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and N.E.A fellowships as well as the Berlin Prize and a Pushcart Prize. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Village Voice, BOMB, and Best American Non-Required Reading. He teaches experimental narrative theory and practise at the University of Utah.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Theories of Forgetting

By Lance Olsen

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Lance Olsen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57366-179-9

CHAPTER 1

hugh

And then the man opens his eyes to find himself standing at the kitchen island. He is studying the cereal bowl on the granite countertop before him through light textured like the static on a rabbit-eared TV set. It must be morning—four, four thirty: that's what he would guess. The cereal bowl, black, black or gray, is half full of granola and the man realizes there is something in his left hand and something in his right. An open carton of strawberry yogurt. A spoon with aerodynamic design. To the best of his knowledge, he is making breakfast.

This thought happens to him and the man hears a noise and raises his head. He thinks cat before he remembers there isn't any cat before he remembers there was no cat, but maybe now there is. A few seconds, and he settles on the idea of floorboards adapting, a breeze bothering things outside, even though it is summer and he knows there aren't many breezes at this time of day at this time of year.

He scoops the yogurt from carton into bowl and stirs the granola from the bottom up. On the counter beneath the paper towel holder is a large fruit dish, except it is a different one, chrome grid, not glossy Norway maple, maple or maybe it was fir, with different kinds of fruit in it. A pale white apple, which would appear green in daylight. One orange, which the man picks up, palms, sniffs, puts back down. Two bananas, one splotched with biomorphic stains, and he chooses the other. Opening drawers, closing drawers, opening drawers, he locates the silverware and selects a knife, a steak knife, no, just a regular blunt-end one, with which he cuts up the peeled banana over the yogurt and granola and listens to the wet sound of slices tickling into the mix.

Which is when he becomes aware of the spiky scent of ground coffee. He discovers a coffee maker beneath the cabinets near the microwave and the machine must be black because it blends in almost entirely with the countertop. He can see it and then he can't and then he can. The one they had was black, too. No, brushed aluminum. He would figure two tablespoons of ground beans in the wire mesh filter. He would figure the timer was set last night.

This thought happens to him and the man hears someone take a quick breath across the room and he raises his head: a stranger suspended in the doorway between the hall to the bedrooms and this place, the one the man finds himself occupying.

He is in the process of lifting a spoonful of granola and yogurt and banana slices to his lips, semi-thinking about how a glass of orange juice would taste good with it, possibly recalling and possibly misrecalling seeing a carton on the shelf in the refrigerator among the calamity of white light, possibly behind a yellow plastic mustard bottle, a pickle jar with two pickles in it wafting in cloudy pea-green brine, an open can of peaches in sugar water covered loosely with a sheet of Saran wrap.

A woman. The woman. She is scrutinizing the stillness the man has become. He wonders if she can really see him or if she can only sense the accumulation of his body in space. The certain density. Second sight. Should he remain motionless? Continue eating?

She is smallish and several years older than he is and maybe she wears glasses and maybe she has left them on the bedside table when she got up to investigate the noises coming from her kitchen. His kitchen. Her kitchen. It used to be his. Now it is this gray hair, this shoulder-length gray hair, and he thinks kindergarten teacher in a pink quilted robe. He thinks: I can easily take her.

He feels rather than sees her part her lips to speak and recalls he is wearing a t-shirt, a plain white t-shirt, and saggy worn jeans and a pair of new white sneakers. The t-shirt and sneakers glow in the dimness, giving away his position, and she is saying: You're doing exactly what here?

She adds something he can't make out.

What? he says.

The noise, she says.

Her voice is younger than she looks. Someone in her thirties. Forties.

I'm not the noise, he says. You're the noise.

I hear things. I come out to check. Only there's never anything.

She is holding an object in her hand. A modest pistol. What they call a what is the word subcompact, with names like Bobcat, Cobra, and the way she enunciates makes him wonder how many bridges and crowns and caps have re-organized her mouth.

The pistol is pointed at him.

I'm thinking: mice, she says. Squirrels. Animal sounds. I'm thinking maybe my house wears down around me a little every time I go to sleep. I know it does, but I'm thinking maybe I can actually hear it as it's happening.

No, he decides, a pack of cigarettes.

It's been months, she says. How many months has it been?

No, a pistol.

When did you buy? he says.

Buy? The house. When did you buy the house?

the heart is allways the least to go away

You're asking me the questions? I'm asking you the questions.

They are both quiet, he recalling his dentist once explaining to him that teeth are perpetually adrift in your gums, migrating and modifying continuously, no matter who you are, what you try to do about it.

Three months, she says. Three and a half.

No, a cellphone.

Three and a half, he says. Five, six. It's April, right?

He steps over to the sink, spoons the contents of the black or gray bowl down the drain, flips on the water, the garbage disposal; flips off the garbage disposal, the water.

You just come in? she says to his back. You just do this?

I don't take anything.

Food. You take food. And then ... what? You eat? Clean the plates? Put them away? What sort of burglary is this?

The man dries the bowl and spoon with the luminous dishtowel on the stove front, replaces the bowl in the cabinet, the spoon in the drawer.

I eat off the plates you've eaten off? she asks. Adds: The doors are locked. The windows.

The one that looks onto the deck? he says, facing her again, leaning back against the granite countertop. The lock only feels like it locks.

You know this?

The catch.

He is moving effortlessly. Her kitchen. His. He squints and she grows younger. Squints and she grows older. He experienced the same effect when he hovered over her sleeping body in her bed. Her face kept changing. He couldn't get over it. Her face kept becoming other people's faces as he watched. He remembers being mildly impressed by the resonance, the tenacity, of her snore. It wasn't loud, just persistent. She had a white scar over her left eyebrow suggesting a grain of rice or a flatworm. He can't make it out now, which is when he becomes aware that the light surrounding him is resolving toward what is the word legibility. The light surrounding him is resolving toward legibility. Colors rising out of the room's complex aspects.

No, her robe isn't pink. It is a difficult shade of blue. Blue or gray, but not pink or quilted.

Terrycloth.

The word for what it is is terrycloth.

He wants to say the woman is wearing matching slippers and all at once she isn't suspended anymore. She is planted on the floor just like he is, planted in this room, this neighborhood, speaking to him like he is speaking to her.

I've already called the police, she is saying.

Just so you know.

Do you like the house? he asks.

Before I came out. From the bedroom.

Its character. What do you think of its character?

They'll be here any minute. Like on one of those reality cop shows. And it's June.

June? he says.

I'm a florist. I make flowers look flowery. I bother exactly no one. What have I got you could possibly want?

The word bungalow.

Her face, he sees: she is wearing a surgical mask.

No: that was someone else.

I love its attention to detail, he says. You don't get that anymore, do you. The twenties. The thirties. But not these days. Crown moldings. Wall niches. The what do you call them corbels. Not in this price range.

He sees the woman's cellphone is on. A fuzzy, radiant phosphorescence meaning the line is open, meaning somewhere out there a 911 operator is listening in on their conversation, recording, evaluating, which is when he understands he no longer has anything to add.

He does have something to add and then he doesn't and in a quick relaxed series of gestures he pivots, cuts across the kitchen, unlocks the sliding glass door, glances back at the woman who is now raising the phone to her ear and parting her lips to speak.

See you soon, he mouths, models her a smile, steps through.

A moment later, maybe a week, he is watching his backpack slide down the conveyor belt behind the check-in counter and disappear through dangling black flaps into a dimension he can't quite bring to mind. He watches where it used to be until the airline agent with milky oversized midwestern glasses hands him his boarding pass and tells him the gate number, which he forgets before he has stepped away from the counter.

His daypack waiting in a gray tub on an aluminum table.

White sneakers. Cellphone. Brown belt.

The man holds up his ticket in front of him like a mug shot. The tall, slender, black, modernist TSA screener on the other side of the metal detector waves him through, focusing, not on him, but on the LED panel above his head.

But let me back up and start again, dear bro. Anja's waiting for me after work one evening with a message the manager stuffed under our door: Sie haben ein Paket. I run down to pick it up only to find this, postmarked Amman, half a year after the fact, addressed in a hand I don't recognize (see enclosed), no name of sender, addressee, just the address itself. It's not his voice, and, even if it were, why the weird use of 3rd person? Written sometime before he left the States? Journal in the form of some invisible future-perfect thought experiment? It doesn't make any sense -- or as he would say: it does &it doesn't. Help me out here, okay? What are you seeing?

He wanders the airport for hours. Coke and slice of pizza at Sbarro. Latte and slice of banana walnut bread at Starbucks. He thumbs through travel guides at the bookstore, rides past photographs of implausible orange rock formations on the moving walkway.

There were his children and then that was something else.

Enormous planes settle onto the runway like clumsy pelicans a lake. His forehead nearly touching the window wall. Behind, an agitation of mothers, fathers, grandparents, uncles, aunts involved in the pastime of trying to distract children on the verge of tears, boredom, pules, chases, ruin. Businessmen talking to spirits on ear-bud headphones. Passengers scattered among seats, knitting, reading, dozing, studying maps, playing video games, typing on computers, iPads, Blackberrys, listening to music, examining palms, staring at the CNN Airport Network on the screen suspended from the ceiling. Although they can't hear what's being said any more than he can, they keep watching, keep anticipating the next story, which will, they believe, he believes, always be more interesting than the one they're actually watching.

It is here, like this, and not on the plane, not at 38,000 feet, that he initially experiences time-blear. He is in this place but he is anywhere and it could be two in the afternoon and it could be four in the morning.

Another day, another week.

In the restroom he removes his cellphone from his pocket, turns it on, holds it under the faucet for sixty seconds, ninety, bunches it up in paper toweling, drops it in the trashcan below the hole in the countertop.

Jack, he thinks, exiting. I look like a Jack.

He doesn't return to his gate. He continues walking—past the row of fast-food restaurants, the security checkpoint, down the escalator into baggage claim, out of the terminal.

A yellow taxi at the pickup stand, its windows rolled down, its trunk already ajar: this is what he rides to the motel and trailer park just beyond the noisy 215 overpass.

At the front desk the man asks the toad-bellied clerk in shapeless beige shorts and Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt for the same room he has been living in for however long he has been living in it.

Loose-faced, the clerk processes him as if he had never seen him before.

Door locked, bolted, do-not-disturb tag on the outside handle, he pulls the plastic-backed curtains and sets down his daypack on the chair in the corner and waits beside the laminate desk, then takes a shower because nothing else comes to mind. Afterward, he sits on the edge of the bed in his damp underwear and damp socks, feet flat on the carpet, hands flat on the bedspread, breathing machine-cooled air smelling of mildew and maybe it is someone else's body odor or sadness.

Teflon sheen leaks from around the blinds in her room. There isn't Teflon sheen and his eyes adjust then there is and he crosses to her bed gingerly. Hovering over her, he appreciates how people appear older when they are unconscious. On their backs, mouths open a little, chins tilted up, they aren't the same people as when ordering a burger at McDonald's, removing a book from a shelf down at the store. The woman beneath him seems dead except for her snore and it doesn't help that her eyes aren't fully shut, a fact that startles him when he first realizes it, causes him to suspect maybe she is really awake, staring up at him, stalling to determine what he will do next so she can work out what she will do next. Only the more his own eyes acclimate, the more he can see it is just that her upper lids don't quite make contact with her lower ones. He can see the whites, thin slices of unnerving.

The flight is happening around him, the plane rushing down the runway, his body pressing back into foam.

Sometimes several hours before dawn he ends up strolling along the sidewalk in front of the bungalow. Reaching the end of the block, he turns and strolls the other way.

Streetlamps shifting light frequencies and white brick dirtying into pewter, gray trim into blackish blue.

A breath, and he veers, cuts across the front yard, alongside the house, past the whirring air-conditioning unit in the bedroom window, up the pile of cinderblocks, over the slatted wooden fence.

The street behind him is one-hundred-percent empty, the neighborhood one-hundred-percent aphasic.

Even the dogs have given in until morning.

He steps onto the deck and lifts the window with the broken catch and is blind-manning through the living room, the hallway, arms extended in front of him in case she has re-orchestrated the furniture again. He doesn't like the uncertainty. He doesn't like it yet somehow he does. It makes him feel like he can inhale sleep and the lack of color in this house.

These days the bedroom is all off. He barely recognizes it, which is everything has been redistributed, jumboed and stuffed and fluffed in there like some nightmare rococo painting. The top of her dresser and side tables crowded with knickknacks, candles, antique perfume bottles, decorated eggs, miniature ceramic elves issuing from miniature ceramic huts.

Who wants to pass the night under such alarming conditions?

It gives him the impression he is snorkeling and someone reaches over and pinches off the top of his rubber tube.

It feels all right standing there, simply standing, except it feels even better wandering through the rest of the place, visiting the tiny office that used to be a girl's room two doors down with the heavy desk and the laptop with amebic rainbow screensaver. The tiny bathroom, which it feels even better stepping into and out of the clawfoot tub, running his fingertips along the spines of the books in the library upstairs that used to be somebody's office. He bends forward, arches his neck delicately, touches his tongue to a faux leather binding, resumes his usual posture.

Performing ahistorical activities generates a sphere of silence around him, of what is the word salvation, no, cessation, a sphere of cessation around him, yes, sometimes in his socks, his sneakers neatly aligned inside the sliding doors, the buttery sensation of the floorboards beneath him, how he can slide across the living room in a slo-mo skate, elbows pumping, or sometimes lean back against the kitchen countertop, cool black granite against hot dry palms, staring into accruing luminescence, head blank as snow blindness, spooning up granola and yogurt and banana coins.

Hers: his.

A spangling tug in his lower abdomen and tarmac dropping away below him.

The hazy khaki desert. Rapidly contracting roads. White-fringed salt marshes. Fuselage creaking and swaying.

He closes his eyes and opens them and sees brutal blue lake, sunstorm, complicated city, the flagrant shock of mountains.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Theories of Forgetting by Lance Olsen. Copyright © 2014 Lance Olsen. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573661791
• ISBN 13: 9781573661799
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384