Prompt: The fallibility of memory. A character must be entranced by the orindary.
I guess this is the story, or the note about the story, or the memory of the story that used to be more story-like before I started remembering it wrong, which is how most things go in my head, which is a head like any other head except when it isn’t, which is often. There is a person named Alex, or maybe Alys, or maybe Alec if you say it fast and don’t mind the extra C falling off the counter like an egg. They live in an apartment that is either on the third floor or the second floor with high ceilings that pretend to be a third floor, and there is a hallway that is longer every time I remember it. The hallway has a light switch. The light switch is white unless it is beige unless it is that soft gray you get when your thumb touches it the same way for years and years and oils are a color even though no one ever admits it.
Alex is entranced by the ordinary. I should say that again because it sounds like the whole point. Alex is entranced by the ordinary. This means they stare at things that other people move past. They stare at the light switch. They stare at the dust on the baseboards. They stare at the spoon with the tiny nick at the edge where it looks like someone once tried to eat a pebble. They stare at the cloudy window that blurs a tree into a green smudge that could be a tree or a lettuce leaf or a memory of a tree from a childhood backyard that might not have been theirs. Alex would forget and remember and misremember and be fine with it, or not fine, or some flavor of maybe.
The first thing I remember about Alex is not the first thing they told me. It could have been the day with the kettle. Yes, that was it, except the kettle might have been a pot, or a saucepan pretending to whistle, or a coffee machine pretending to be a bird. The kettle was dented on one side, but the dent traded sides the more I thought about it, like a tiny lunar phase on stainless steel. Alex said they liked watching the steam. The steam, which is water forgetting how to be water and then remembering again on the ceiling. The kettle’s lid rattled. The spoon clinked. The light switch watched everything, a small quiet rectangle with two positions and a hundred greasy fingerprints layered like tree rings you could read if you were the right kind of scientist, which Alex was not, but Alex could pretend.
When Alex flips the switch, there is the click and then the soft hum of the bulb, or the loud hum, or the almost-invisible hiss of electricity that I probably invented because it makes the moment feel more important, even though nothing important is happening. That is the point. Alex loves when nothing important is happening because, they say, that is when you can see the most. I write that down and then immediately doubt whether they truly said it or if I made it up to make Alex sound like someone who says things. They probably just sighed and said, “Nice,” which is not a quote anyone would remember, and so of course I have remembered it a dozen different ways.
Let me log some details before they change again. The apartment smells like toast or laundry or a plant that is both living and failing to live. The floorboards are hardwood or laminate or hardwood with regrets, the kind that squeak like a complaint you can’t quite hear. The walls are a color that landlords call “eggshell” even though no egg looks like that unless it is tired. There is a clock that is always wrong because Alex says a wrong clock is right twice a day, except it’s digital, so it is not right twice a day, which is confusing, and perhaps the reason Alex likes it. On the windowsill there is a mug with three pens. The pens are black except when they are blue. One pen is out of ink but still has weight. Alex picks it up sometimes to feel the idea of writing instead of actually writing.
On the shelf there are five notebooks. I will list them, which will help me not forget their names, except notebooks don’t have names unless you write them inside, which Alex might have done. Notebook One: the cover is soft and green, the green of a bus seat from a city I didn’t live in. Notebook Two: hard cover, red, a red that gets on your hands like chalk that is not chalk. Notebook Three: spiral-bound, pages that curl because spirals are a desire and a punishment. Notebook Four: a gift with a fox on it, the fox looking like it knows more about taxes than you do. Notebook Five: cheap, stapled, already losing staples. It occurs to me the list might be wrong, or out of order, or that I swapped Notebook Two and Notebook Four in my mind because I like the fox better than the red. Alex writes in these notebooks sometimes, but more often, Alex holds them and imagines writing in them, which is ordinary in a way that glows for Alex like a lamp.
Alex’s favorite object is the light switch. I know I said that. I say it again anyway. They would stand in the hall and look at the light switch like it was a painting in a museum. “It does two things,” Alex says. “On. Off.” Then they peer closer, as though a third thing has been hiding there all along, a middle position called Maybe or Another Time or Later. Once, Alex claims the switch used to be a dimmer, with a slider that made the light go up and down like a tide chart for the ceiling. Another time, Alex says the switch once shocked them. Another time, Alex says they have never touched it at all because it feels sacred, and maybe the light is controlled by a different switch, around the corner, that we have both forgotten about. This is obviously untrue because I have watched Alex touch the switch, but in memory the truth is a moth, soft and suicidal and full of powder.
There is a day when Alex notices the dust. The dust is in a sunbeam. Dust in a sunbeam is the most ordinary of sacrednesses, and I can hear someone reasonable in the future complaining that you cannot say “most ordinary of sacrednesses,” but here, in the real morning, it makes sense. The dust floats like a parade of very small, very undecided planets. Alex holds their breath to stop wind from their nose blowing the universe away. I do not hold my breath. I say, “It’s dust.” Alex says, “It’s dust.” We are both right, and we are both remembering different dust, some of it from years ago, the kind that only lives in living rooms you no longer live in and sunlight that no longer belongs to you.
I think I met Alex in a grocery store. Alternatively, I met Alex at a bus stop. There was a shopping cart, a red one, or a bus shelter with a poster of a red shoe. Alex was staring at the cart, or the poster, or the bus schedule. “The lines,” Alex said (maybe), “are so straight.” They traced the grid on the schedule with one finger. They examined the printing dots on the shoe advertisement like astronomers tracking a constellation that sells footwear. “Most people don’t notice dots,” Alex said (possibly, although who can be sure). “I notice dots all the time,” I said (lying). We got coffee or tea. The cup had a lid with an X-shaped mouth that spilled even if you didn’t move it. Alex looked at the steam again and told me about a spoon that made a perfect ring in the bottom of a mug, the ring that is just regular physics but looks like a portal if you are the kind of person who likes portals.
The fallibility of memory is not a theme here; it is the only furniture we have. I move it around and stub my toes on it and say new curse words. For example, I remember a plant in the corner: a spider plant, overflowing, motherly, full of hanging children. Then I remember a cactus. Then I remember an empty pot because Alex is allergic to responsibility. Then I remember a bouquet, dead, still standing, too well-behaved to collapse, the way grief behaves when you force it to. Alex names the plants: Jerry, Susan, and Number Three. I might have made those names up to make a sentence feel finished, which is another kind of dust.
Alex keeps time with the kettle, and the switches, and the mail slot clacking. The mail includes coupons for things Alex doesn’t buy: exotic grapes, artisanal soap, rugs that say WELCOME and also KEEP OUT depending on which way you read from. Alex likes a particular coupon because the perforated edge is satisfying. They tear it slowly, admiring how the little holes make a line of surrender. The coupon is for ten percent off something that costs more than Alex has. Alex keeps it anyway, puts it in the second notebook to flatten it and forget it there.
We look at the spoon again. The spoon is a moon when it faces up and a little black hole when it faces down. “Look,” Alex says (I think), “my face is stretched.” I say, “It always is.” They smile or they don’t. The nick is on the edge. “Did a rock get in my soup?” Alex says. “Did my teeth do that?” I do not know. The spoon remembers more than either of us. It remembers mouths, and lemons, and coffee stains that never fully come off, and the impatient tapping during a phone call. The spoon is ordinary enough to be magic, which is exactly Alex’s thing. If this sounds clever, it was not clever when it happened; it was just a person looking at a utensil for longer than is normal.
I would like to mention the hallway again, because the hallway is a character, because I forget people but remember rectangles. Sometimes I think the hallway in Alex’s apartment leads to my childhood bedroom, which is impossible unless a door learned to fold space. On the left there is a thermostat that we can’t agree existed. I can see the little plastic wheel; Alex says it was a blue digital rectangle. A blue rectangle in a beige hallway is a noticeable fact, and yet I cannot hold it steady in my head. The thermostat sets themselves to 68 or to 72 or to OFF because Alex likes to wear a sweater. The sweater is either orange or gray. The sweater pills in one corner where a bag strap rubs. “It reminds me of a sheep,” Alex says, and I do not know if they mean the sweater, or the rubbing, or the warmth.
One day there is thunder. Or there is a truck. Or there is someone dropping a bowling ball upstairs, or downstairs, because sound directions lie. Alex is not startled because they are busy trying to understand the light that comes through the slats of the blinds and makes a ladder on the floor. “If I stand here,” they say, “I am in jail. If I move here, I am free.” They move back and forth between bright and shadow and are as serious as a scientist without equipment. I think about telling them that window ladders aren’t prison bars, but then I think, maybe the ordinary is built out of pretend prisons and pretend freedoms and that is the joke that the sun and the blinds have always told.
If you’re still reading this, which seems unlikely, you might want something to happen. This is the thing that happens: Alex keeps noticing. Alex notices until noticing is the event. They are entranced by the ordinary, the orindary, the off-brand version you buy at the store because you like the box. The box, by the way, has a cardboard smell and a scratch on one side that is in the shape of a fish. The fish shape is accidental, which is how most art is made. The box held something days ago: a lamp that is now in the living room, unless it is in the bedroom, unless we never bought it because Alex prefers the switch in the hall that controls the light you cannot see from where you stand.
Memory breaks in the middle of sentences. I start to tell you about the milk—how Alex watches the pour and the way the white ribbon folds into coffee like a soft ghost learning to swim—and then I remember it was tea. Then I remember it was nothing, just hot water because the milk was gone. Then I remember it was not morning at all; it was evening, and the light from the street was jelly-colored and slow. Alex doesn’t care what time it was because they have their own clock made of small noises and small motions: flip switch, click kettle, tear coupon, tap spoon. If the clock had hands, they would be two cat tails you could not persuade to point the same way.
Another list, because lists feel like a way to stop the slide: things Alex is entranced by, in rough order and with gentle errors. 1) The light switch (all caps, underlined in my head). 2) The threaded top of a soda bottle, especially the little plastic ring that stays behind when you twist—the ring is a broken promise that becomes a bracelet for the smallest finger in the world. 3) The seam on a plastic bag, which is like a river in a map that leads nowhere. 4) The way the fridge hum comes and goes like a neighbor playing a single note on a distant harmonica and forgetting the rest of the song. 5) The tiny bubble in a pane of glass that looks like a final punctuation mark for a sentence no one wrote. 6) The error in a newspaper headline where the “t” missed some ink and looks skinny, like the alphabet is dieting. 7) The ordinary words that become incorrect if you read them too many times (bread, bread, bread, what a ridiculous sound). 8) The sense that the hallway must be longer than it is because you hear your steps for longer than your body moved. 9) The way keys have teeth and therefore must also have mouths. 10) The mystery of whether the notebook with the fox was ever actually opened to page seven. I want to say yes. I want to be sure. I am not sure.
Once, we try to test memory. We make a game. Alex puts five objects on the table: the spoon, the coupon, the dead pen, a rubber band that is more oval than circle, and a paperclip shaped like a heart (or a regular paperclip I am romanticizing). Then they take one away while I look at the hallway because the hallway insists. I turn back. Something is missing. “Which one?” Alex says. I say, “The paperclip,” and they say, “No, that’s still there.” I say, “The rubber band?” and they say, “No, also there.” We go on like this until every object has been guessed and none of them are wrong and none of them are right and Alex’s eyes are bright because the point is working. The missing object is memory itself, the sixth thing that wasn’t on the table until we made a space for it.
When we go outside, which we do, rarely, because the apartment is an entire planet if you look closely, Alex counts the lines in the crosswalk. They say, “There are always seven,” as if announcing a law of science. There are six. Another day there are eight. Another day, same intersection, we find fresh paint: ten, blinding. Alex is pleased, not worried. “It means the world updates,” they say, like an app. The bus that stops here is the number 12 or the number 7. The driver nods; Alex nods back with the gravity of a handshake. A dog sniffs something that is either a leaf or a lost potato chip. Alex looks at the dog like it is a professor and may offer a lecture any minute now about the sociology of puddles.
We buy bread. We forget to buy bread. We eat bread. It is stale and then it is perfect and then it is mold and we are surprised every time like children who didn’t think time applies to baked goods. The toaster has a dial with numbers that pretend to correspond to minutes but really correspond to moods. Alex keeps it on 2, or on 5, or on the little picture of a slice that means “You will regret this.” They watch the coils glow. They watch the slice descend with that lever that feels like a promise. The toast returns. The toast is ordinary and therefore worth a ceremony. Butter. Knife. Nicked spoon watching with envy. Crumbs fall and become a topography on the plate: a mountain range of wheat. Alex says the plate looks like a map of a place where the mountains are edible. I say we live there now.
There is, somewhere in all of this, the possibility of sadness. Not because the ordinary is small, but because in honoring it, you admit how much of life is not a parade, and how memory folds even the parade into something that might have been a practice run. Alex does not like the word nostalgia because it tastes like half a sugar cube. They prefer “remembery,” which is not a word they made up but a nice mistake they adopted. I say “remembery” with them sometimes because it makes the broken parts of the past feel like a toy you can fix with gentle pressure. We talk about childhoods that might be merged or swapped. I tell them about a lake with a dock. They tell me about a ditch with a frog. The lake becomes the ditch. The frog is in my lake. The dock is in their ditch. The frog is ordinary and extraordinary and has no patience for our metaphors, which is correct.
On a Wednesday that could have been a Monday, we lose power. The light switch keeps its shape; the lamps are paused; the kettle is a mirror without function. Alex is delighted. The switch finally has a third position: on, off, and nothing. They flip it even though it does nothing. They flip it like it is a rosary bead for atheists. Click, click, click, and the room does not change, which is a change. “Now it’s an idea,” Alex says, and if they didn’t, I am helping them say it now. We light a candle. The candle is ordinary: wax, wick, fire. The way the flame flickers when you sigh is a cheap magic trick; we applaud anyway. The hallway in candlelight is longer than ever. We can almost see the childhood bedroom at the end, or the bus stop, or the grocery cart corral where carts are chained like horses.
After the power returns, we forget about that candle until the wax hardens in a slope and, weeks later, looks like a glacier melting in reverse. “We should toss it,” I say. “We should keep it,” Alex says. We do both: we keep it until we toss it. On the day we toss it, Alex photographs it with a phone that has a camera that remembers moments more faithfully than me until the phone breaks or the cloud forgets. In the photo, the wax is whiter than it was in real life, and the kitchen looks bigger. We agree to remember it the size it seems in the picture because that is easier.
If there is a plot, it is a small one: Alex lives like this and does not stop. They go to the window and count droplets on rainy days like an accountant of water. They sweep crumbs with slow devotion. They line up three coins on the counter and arrange them by invisibly different dates. They misplace the pen purposely to experience the finding. They turn to me and ask, not always out loud, “Do you see it too?” Sometimes I do. Sometimes I pretend I do because I love Alex, or the version of Alex I built like a paper house out of bad recollections and ordinary glue. Sometimes I forget who asked the question in the first place and I look around for Alex to answer me.
The ending is hard to pin down because endings are dramatic and drama is a costume this story refuses. So: the switch sits in the hallway. It has two positions. It is either up for on and down for off, or the other way, depending on which country your childhood happened in. Alex stands there, not frozen, just very still, like the statue of someone trying to remember a minor fact (where the keys are, what their third-grade teacher’s name was, why a spoon is called a spoon and not a small boat). Then they smile at the switch the way you smile at a friend you’ve known so long their flaws are furniture. They touch the plate around it and feel the gentle warmth of the wall, the ordinary warmth that means nothing and everything. The light either comes on or it doesn’t. The memory either keeps it or it doesn’t. Alex is entranced. I am trying to be. The hallway is long, but not that long. The dust floats like planets and crumbs make mountain ranges and the kettle forgets to be water and remembers. I leave this here so later, when the story shrinks to a sentence, we will at least have the inventory: a switch, a hallway, a spoon, a coupon, a pen, a rubber band, a paperclip that is a heart or not, a digital clock that is wrong, a sweater that pills, and a person whose grand romance is with the orindary.