Strange Attractors

Lives Changed by Chance

Edie Meidav, Emmalie Dropkin, Edie Meidav, Emmalie Dropkin

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781625344243
• eBook ISBN: 9781613766736
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Has a stunning surprise or lucky encounter ever propelled you in an unanticipated direction? Are you doing what you always thought you would be doing with your life or has some unseen magnetism changed your course? And has that redirection come to seem inevitable? Edie Meidav and Emmalie Dropkin asked leading contemporary writers to consider these questions, which they characterize through the metaphor of "the strange attractor," a scientific theory describing an inevitable occurrence that arises out of chaos. Meidav's introduction and the thirty-five pieces collected here offer imaginative, arresting, and memorable replies to this query, including guidance from a yellow fish, a typewriter repairman, a cat, a moose, a bicycle, and a stranger on a train. Absorbing and provocative, this is nonfiction to be read in batches and bursts and returned to again and again.

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Rumination in Three Parts

Noy Holland

Years ago I lived in Tanzania on the shore of the Indian Ocean and, afternoons, when the heat was too much, I pulled on my fins and walked backward into the broken waves. I had fins because I liked to swim out, almost past where I could see the shore.

I was twenty-five, twenty-something. I felt not so much invincible as curious, drawn to peril, easily lost. I never had a premonition of drowning but a dread that I would be eaten. Still I swam because I loved the feeling and the strange peace of being beyond the break and beyond where anyone could see me swimming to India, swimming to Zanzibar; I often wondered how far I could go. Once I swam up close to a fishing boat, very small; there were often boats and, in them, two or three men, beautifully dark against the glare of the sun, standing in the boat and hauling in a net, or flinging a net as if sowing seed out into the swaying water. Net of words; I thought of Virginia Woolf. As if they were netting a story. I thought I would become their story, the mzungu by accident caught in the net, helplessly knotted, my hair in my mouth. They would haul me out and into the air, drowned, among all the flopping, gasping life that would drown from being dragged out of the water.

Of course this never happened. What did happen, one day out swimming, was that I felt myself suddenly and irretrievably lost; I could see the shore but I could not see the curve of beach where I lived with my boy from America, my American boy. My amour, my temporary lover. I could not see the small hotel we lived in, the rumpled bed, the grace of the net that hung around the bed to keep the malaria mosquitoes away; he’d had malaria, he would have it for years, but I couldn’t see him, and I didn’t love him, I only loved that he was a gypsy like me, and a dreamer. For the moment, I dreamed myself lost, and soon exhausted, in the great wide sea between Africa and India, the trade wind, the current the merchants sailed along, bringing silk and spices and tea.

Twice now I have typed “a little sigh in the Indian ocean.” I meant to type not “sigh” but “fish.” Little yellow fish of relief. Sighing, of course, is a sign. So, too, was the fish, a beacon. Big as my little finger. It was a grayish dullish yellow fish that brightened when it caught the sun. In an aquarium, I’d learned that a band of nerves runs laterally down the sides of a fish and, by these, the fish senses movement; by these, the flashing thousands are able to move as one. Swallows, too, murmurations, flocks, in the glare of the sun, the velvety blue, a swooping exultation. But this image comes from elsewhere; here there seemed to be nothing between Africa and India except me and a dull yellow fish small enough to swallow whole. I turned for shore and the fish turned with me, beneath me, below my breasts, my belly. I couldn’t see it quite; I had to stop to see it. It had chosen me, somehow.

I hope to go on believing in the weird miracle of being chosen. By the little yellow emissary. A thrush in the trees. A leaf falling. I have a sense sometimes of being spoken to. By living humans, yes, but there is more to it, more to us, than this.

Because a leaf twisted down at Rowan Oak, and I lay on my back and watched it, because my husband who was not my husband yet lay on his back beside me, and we watched the same leaf, we married. Because of that. And because of this, two people—a boy, a girl—came to be. Who so easily might not have been.

If not for the helpful yellow fish, I might have panicked and drowned. The fish seemed to guide me ashore. To wish me life.

How this might sound to a sensible person doesn’t trouble me.

I don’t believe in an orderly universe but I believe that when that leaf fell, it fell for me—fell because I wanted it to fall, because something in me was seeking, and in seeking I could see an answer that had long been there. I knew the leaf was my dead mother coming to me, saying as she often did, simply, Live.

And so we married. I have been married twenty years, and my husband, a sensible man, easy to like, down to earth (down to earth: isn’t this a strange thing to say?), my husband felt my mother speaking, too. The leaf came down in its twisting erratic way and fell near us where we lay at Rowan Oak in the chill of the evening coming and my husband who was not my husband yet, who had never once met my mother, knew without my saying a word that she spoke to him also, he felt her saying also, Go on and love her. Live.

This is a rumination in three parts, bound to the centering self. In the first part, a fish swims beneath me; in the second, a leaf falls beside me; in the third part, a dappled horse appears among the stars in my head, looking down. Each act was at once negligible and lastingly momentous; each was its own weird blessing.

The dappled horse appeared in Egypt, months after I’d left Tanzania and left the American boy I had traveled with who was drawn to peril as I was, drawn to peril like me. I traveled alone by then and preferred it. I piloted by whim, or what I thought was whim, who could not see the footprints before me, could not see how often my impulses did not originate with me. Cairo—heaps of saffron in the markets, chickens losing their heads on the chopping block, flowers, heat, a terrible brightness. And the pyramids, of course. I found a stable. I don’t remember the saddle but in my mind the saddle was tasseled, colorful, cloth. The horse was dappled, with the pretty, dished face of an Arabian, a horse bred to live in the heat of the desert, a favorite of Genghis Khan.

We lit out across the Nubian desert. At a lope, at a gallop, the guide ahead of me—an apparition in white, a girlhood dream—King of the Wind was the book—in full flower. Elated, I have seldom felt so—what? Insubstantial. So entirely unknown, unfindable. At a gallop, my horse stumbled and went to its knees and from its knees surged forward and over me, still in the saddle, thrown to the sand. And day was night, instantly, and the brain I use to see with saw the night sky pricked with stars.

Months later, in Tuscaloosa, I was telling my father this story. He looked amused, maybe incredulous.

“You don’t believe me,” I said.

“No, no.”

“You think I made it up. I can’t have seen stars.”

I was ready with the scientific explanation: the occipital lobe, etc.

“No. Only that your mother, we had traveled to Cairo, just as you did, to see the pyramids, the Nile basin, the ruins. This would have been ’56, ’57.”

(A date is like a door to a story for my father; until it is opened, he cannot go on.)

“September of 1957,” he went on. “That very thing happened to your mother. A horse fell on your mother in the desert and, like you, your mother lay there, and slowly stood up and rode away.”

I lay there. My horse heaved up and stood looking down at my face. I felt the breath of the horse on my face, tender, the skin, a little raw from the sand. I did not think of my mother. I watched the stars going out; I could hear them. Bees, I might have called them, a flock of gnats. Flock, swarm, murmuration, school. And closer still, above me: that marvelous, dappled creature.

Conspirators

R. O. Kwon

There are those who like to look for girls in the subways. Once I knew someone, a Barcelonian, who was good at it. Prodigiously good. Oh, that Spanish swagger. She liked very much the challenge, she said. It is so like being on the stage, she said.

I am not so brave a girl. Blanche might say it is not bravery that is required but rather openness, a glasnost of the soul. A blossoming. Blanche and her poeticisms! I am never open, but there was a time, three years ago, when I did get lucky. I was in the subway and speeding toward a Halloween party. I am everlastingly bad at parties. Without fail, I become once more the child I used to be: mute, judgmental, desperate to hide behind the skirts of the one I love. Still, I wanted to drink, and not alone.

So, I was on my way uptown. The subway car was rollickingly loud, overloaded with goblins and whores; flappers and rockers; schoolgirls, heroes, and ghouls. The revelers were drunk and exuberant. They wore short, preposterous skirts.

I was by myself and, defiantly, in a simple white dress. I never wore a costume for Halloween. A leprechaun twirled around a pole. Superman, disappointingly, staggered. I noticed a girl sitting catty-corner from me, reading, alone. Long fingers hid the title from me. She sat very straight in a trench coat of a dark, peculiar green. Her legs were bare. Her close-cropped hair alchemized fluorescent light to gold. She laughed to herself, then underlined something in her book.

Most of the drunkards disembarked at Christopher Street. The girl stayed, still laughing. I kept looking. I love looking. Beauty baffles me. That posture of hers. She appeared uncompromising and apart, like statuary. What was she reading?

We swung through tunnels, and I let my stop go by. More revelers got off. A disproportionate number of elderly couples got on. They were quietly well dressed: suits of gray, dun furs, pearls. They looked unaccustomed to the subway. They leaned into one other and peered at scraps of paper. “I think the next stop is for us, dear.” “My goodness, already?” “It is fast, isn’t it?” “Oh, here we are.” “Take my arm.” They got off at the stop for the Lincoln Center. Opera-goers, I thought. Of course. Aboveground, the streets of Manhattan would be overrun.

By and by the car emptied. When the girl stood up, I wasn’t ready for it. Sitting with her for so long, I’d thought maybe, like me, she had nowhere special to go, and together we might carom around underground, fellow vagabonds, all night long. But, no, she was up and at the doors. I would have liked to be standing, too, able, as the doors opened, to step aside and intimate with a murmur: After you. But I was too late. So I did the next best thing. I followed her.

I kept pace from a distance. Despite the hordes on the platform, she was easy to see: a pair of bare strong legs, a flash of green. I wondered if I had ever, to anyone, looked so memorable. As she passed a group of singers busking at the black gates of the subway—She bid me take life easy, they sang—she dropped a bill into their open guitar case. Was it the song? Was she just that big-hearted? Was she, like me, new to the city, still feeling for those who asked for money? We came to the base of a steep staircase. There was an escalator, but she ignored it and ran up the stairs, lightly. She flew by all the plodding, earthbound walkers. I hurried to keep up.

A lamplit street. Merrymakers everywhere. She strode on, her trench coat flapping. I cut through the celebrating crowds. For a moment, I lost her. Drunkards, imposters, trying to be for one night something other than themselves. All—in—our—way. But then, that flash of outlaw green. I ran, feeling giddy and optimistic, like an adventurer.

She turned left onto a narrow, quieter street of stalwart brownstones and ailanthus trees. She stopped and about-faced, and I stood still. We looked at each other across the length of half a block. I wondered what she saw. A wooer at the ready? A slight girl in a white dress and cowboy boots? A small face cupped by blunt black hair? I heard the song of sirens far away.

“Do you,” she called, “do you like the way I walk?”

Oh, I did. In the leisure of the days and years to come I would study the rhythm of her walk, deliberate over the language of her legs. We would be naked and in love and would do as we pleased. We would travel the breadth of the whole, the biddable world, and we would open ourselves to it: open like a door, like open sesame. We were open with Tibetan dissidents and Bajau sea nomads; open to nightclubs in Sinchon; open in Yanji, and open in Barcelona. Blanche was a travel writer and photographer. I quit my office job and picked up odd gigs teaching English so I could stay by her side.

At first, it was fun. Blanche and I, we duetted in karaoke bars. We petted ratty orphan tigers, and laughed at men who tried to pick us up. She seemed to think it perfectly natural, no big deal, that I would leave my life to be with her, so I pretended I thought so, too. On filthy trains she dozed, and I watched her, amazed: her legs curled under like a mermaid’s tail, cheap rhodium bracelets staining her skin greenish gold. As we roved, I jotted letters to old friends. The letters became postcards, postcards became occasional emails, and finally I forgot to send any word at all.

I don’t know when I started worrying all the time. The thing was, Blanche needed me to keep her safe. In these teeming, starving cities where anyone might have killed her for her boots alone, she lived free of fear. Though six years older, she was the naïve one. The risks she took—they made me sick. She was all for hitchhiking, for example. She was careless with her things, flinging them anywhere. Worst of all, she habitually held her camera up to her face while crossing streets. “Blanche, Jesus,” I would say, yanking her back as a car screamed past, and she’d shrug me off and laugh. Then, she would shoot another picture. She looked at everything. She looked at everyone. I looked after her. For three years, I couldn’t sleep from the strain.

Then we were in Rajasthan, walking down a dusty sidewalk. For all of five seconds, I paused at a food stand to buy us water. She crossed the street, and a rickshaw hit her. It split her open. The doctor said she needed a transfusion, and the new blood poisoned her. All night she shook as though she’d break, her body too small to hold the outsized soul. I squeezed myself around her, holding my girl in place while her fists flung out crazily, the knuckles globes of bone. In six languages she cursed, teeth chattering.

After she recovered, she was weaker. One morning she woke me up, her eyes bright. “What if we went back to New York,” she said, sitting on top of me. “I know how much you’ve been wanting to go back.”

“For how long?”

“For good,” she said with a half smile, and I thought, At last.

A year later I was sitting in our living room with no company but the flat tick of the clock, waiting for Blanche to come home. I watched the minute hand fall down the clock face, and swing up and around, and fall down the clock face, and swing up and around, and it was twelve, then one, then two, then three o’clock.

Blanche was on a fifth date with her first, and so far only, other girlfriend. An open relationship; that’s what we had. We’re-so-young, the-world’s-so-vast, monogamy’s-so-outdated-and-counterfeit. That was why, or so she said. “You should go out, too,” she’d told me before she left, slipping on a pair of peep-toe slingbacks—my peep-toe slingbacks. She strode to the refrigerator, pulled out a silver can of Red Bull, and snapped it open: a quick, efficient swig of caffeine, in case the night went long. “Meet someone new,” she called over her shoulder. “Get frisky.”

“But I don’t want to,” I said. Then I added, to sound less miserable, “Maybe next time.”

The joke so old it’s like a creation story: what do lesbians bring on their second date? A U-Haul. That wasn’t us, or at least not Blanche, and the pilgrim soul I loved first and foremost in her was a source of discord now. No one changes, I’ve learned that much, I think.

“At least don’t wear my shoes tonight,” I said, regretting the words even as they rushed out, but what could I do? Those slingbacks would be her conspirators.

She tilted her head and looked at me fondly. The open refrigerator lit her bright, short, heroic hair. “My introvert,” she said. “My delicate lotus flower.”

“Blanche,” I said, “we’ve seen lotus flowers. Remember Beijing, the Summer Palace? They’re tough. And big. A lotus flower can be described in many ways, but it is not delicate.”

“My paradoxical lotus flower,” she said and tipped back another swig.

“Stop fucking patronizing me.”

She looked hurt. She looked hurt, her eyes wide with surprise. And, despite myself, I was sorry. She was killing me, fine, but here’s what else I knew: that when we slept, she cupped a hand around my head as if to protect me from bad dreams. Blanche in her tool belt, brandishing a power drill—oh. Once, she hitched a ride on a cargo ship to Panama, just because she wanted to. I went to her and touched her arm. Its fine gold hairs. She wouldn’t look at me. “I didn’t mean that,” I said quietly.

“I know,” she said. She freed her feet from the slingbacks. Then she did a strange thing: she knelt in front of me, lifted my left foot, and gently slid it into the shoe. Again with the right foot. “All yours,” she said. Finally, she lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Cusp
• Guides
• Partners
• Creative Spark
• Polarizing Forces
• Epiphany
• Survival
• Contributors
• Permissions