The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

A person can doubt only if he has learnt certain things; as he can miscalculate only if he has learnt to calculate. In that case it is indeed involuntary.

Imagine that a child was quite specially clever, so clever that he could at once be taught the doubtfulness of the existence of all things. So he learns from the beginning: “That is probably a chair.” And now how does he learn the question: “Is it also really a chair?” —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Zettel

Maybe we move in and we don’t hear the intonation for a few days. Maybe we hear it as soon as we unlock the door.

Maybe an idea insists itself more easily than an action.

Maybe we should stay inside and tell each other stories that are further from the truth. Maybe we should share something genuine for once. Stories from the deep, honest pits of us. But what if those buried, fetid stories are the ones that have bubbled to the surface? What if they’re right there, balanced on the edge of our teeth, ready to trip into the world without even our permission?

THE REAL ESTATE AGENT, with his waxy hair and perma-smile, keeps stopping to listen, waving his hand, saying, “That’s just the house settling.”

But we do hear a noise, and now that we’re listening, it is unsettling how much it sounds like moaning, but not the bellow of someone in pain, more like an incantation, some sort of ritual snarl.

A wave can overwhelm and a wave can take away.

he is excited about the secret passages, this being one of the places where we are seamed together, just one instance where we twist in the same spot, mirroring each other and meshing at once.

He said gamblers play until they lose because they want to feel something, not necessarily a win.

We stray from room to room, evaluating our purchase again with our new homeowners’ eyes. All of it belongs to us now.

I want to revel in the milestone of homeownership and that requires settling ourselves in.

The language was odd, something like the right house has found you, and it talked about all the storage, needing updates, nature nearer by than you could dream.”

“But I do think there could be multiple soul mates for a person, you know? People are beautiful and complex enough that I believe I could find multiple people in the world to love.”

“Isn’t it more romantic that I could be with anyone I want, but it’s James I pick? Isn’t that beautiful?” “That’s not a soul mate, though,” she replies. “Sure it is; I can’t imagine life without James, but I can imagine life with someone else.”

You wanted quiet. This is what you wanted.

I feel like I’ve turned a full circle inside myself, like I am due to unwind, like I am a spring coiled tight, waiting.

I sense a secret in the misses of the conversation. Something hides beneath her skin. Like a mouse running under a fitted sheet. She keeps shifting in her chair and itching.

I tell her about the children in the trees. I tell her how they call to each other. They hunt for a murderer.

I tell stories about finding more secret places in the house and about how floorboards shift and we find the blank treasure that is more storage and about how the humidity swells the windows in their frames and how the glass makes the forest waiting behind the house seem wet and close and I say we think our neighbor might be spying on us and they laugh about what they think is my paranoia.

Julie, at heart, is a people pleaser, a straight-A student. She’s had a series of jobs she hates but can’t help being the best at. If someone gives her advice she deems sound, she’ll act on it immediately.

She’s quiet for a moment. I know our minds pause to shape themselves around that same possibility, of admitting a mistake and moving on, but she spins out of that current.

pee. In the mirror, a darker version of myself follows directly behind me.

Shadows caw outside the window. I know what a shadow is.

Answers can be right there in your ears, unheard.

The man’s pronunciation is stiff, each word forced out individually like a finger poked into my chest. A low grumble lines each syllable.

“Why must it always be a choice?” “Well, you can always avoid choosing and just let it go.” “Let it go? Never heard of it!”

Julie reads the waves like identifying cloud shapes.

Julie says there’s a chance we might never get restless here because everything feels so strange. I agree: “I still feel like a guest in our home.”

We run out of things to tell each other. We share second- and even third-tier stories we’d never bother other people with. Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.

“The edge of the inlet there. There’s a cave in the rock, up above the water, I think.” She turns. “And those kids you were talking about. I hear them now. All the time. I want to know where they live. I never see them with parents, do you?”

We swear we can hear the echoes of the children’s voices. Their bodies, though, are nowhere in sight.

WE NEVER THINK through why a room ends in one place but the next room doesn’t begin there,

What inhabits this empty column? I knock, as if that might provide an answer, but hear no echo.

We plant new bushes—boxwood, James’s choice—around the perimeter of the property and talk about how there is an earth beneath the earth into which we wedge our spades. At the beach suddenly we are looking for seas beyond the sea.

I try to picture my body passing through his house from back to front, like a ghost, but I can’t remember any details and so it mustn’t have been real, but a daydream on foot.

No one comes to the door. I try the handle. In movies, everyone is always surprised the door is unlocked. I think I’m out of luck.

Maybe it’s the sense of being watched. The eyes in the painting track my trespass.

I dream these bodies as answers and then wake and stir at how close this nightmare felt to reality.

Did I tell him about this already? If not, I worry he’ll think I’ve been keeping secrets. And then, because I don’t want to keep secrets, I keep more secrets.

If you put your eye to one side of a water glass, you have so many angles to navigate trying to see something on the other side. Four edges of curved glass. Water’s opinions: a lens. Most times, your gaze bounces right back to you.

I think of the bodies in my dream and keep the deterioration to myself.

“Customer service isn’t really my thing. That’s why I went into computers,”

“You’re thinking rationally, but not reasonably, man. We need to account for any possible outcome, and the result has to make sense. Sometimes people bomb these things for the fun of seeing how poorly they can do.” I think of every bet I lost. And I think of the bets that followed.

Finally, I feel the regret at having been honest release through me like a faucet opening.

He opens his mouth to continue. I see the words reroute themselves.

When he pulls his hand away, the ribs slowly rise again, like memory foam, and I tell myself the answer is breath.

I think about how smoking is a way of trying to satisfy each moment. It disregards the future.

photo is reflections of light. Everything invisible comes together to show you something.

I tell myself people can have two problems with no common cause.