Paper Conspiracies. Susan Daitch

      Train-Eating Sun Blinded by Eclipse

      How many stories could begin, “What are you doing here, you’re supposed to be dead?”

      The door opens, light shines into the dark hall, and the curve of a cheekbone appears vaguely familiar. Other guests, innocent family members in the back of the room don’t notice the new arrival. You think it can’t be possible that he or she might only be visible to you. No, it can’t be. You shut the door, looking up at the transom, then down at the gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold to be sure no shadow has slid into the room.

      The encounter might take place on the street, in a train station, a busy intersection, a back alley, you’re supposed to be dead! What are you doing here? What do you want from me? Leave me alone, please. You’re in trouble. Calling the police is useless because a history of guilt and complicity on your part isn’t entirely buried and forgotten. Could the likeness be only a coincidental double, not the real person, not the actual birth-certificate-waving human, not the citizen who might have made your life a living hell? That’s how I felt at work when restoring old movies. Shadowy figures assembled into frames began to look familiar, to hum and vibrate with amorous longings, embarrassment, coyness, the desire for evening old scores, or simmering with rage, they fade into an indistinct background.

      A silhouette skating like a banshee over pebbled glass, a profile reflected in the rearview mirror of a parked car, I twisted around quickly, not believing it possible. Is that you? Wait a minute, let me be certain. I grew up the only daughter of two people who didn’t know where they wanted to or even could go, so they ended up in a small city halfway between New York and Montreal. Both of them, but my mother in particular, were not destined to feel at home anywhere. The idea of home stood on shaky ground: a house, an address on a steeply inclined plot of land on which sprouted a one-story house called a ranch but there were no palominos or branding machines on this idea of ranch. It was just a one-story house so you didn’t have to go up or down stairs. There were no grandparents, no uncles, aunts, or cousins. One distant cousin landed in Argentina in 1940, but his children were disappeared in that country’s dirty war of the 1970s, and he ended his life jumping from a balcony shortly thereafter. His letters, written in a hybrid of Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish were kept in a drawer along with tax forms, photographs, fliers for discounts at car washes. I was unable to read them completely, and no one was willing to translate his macaronics for me. In one letter I could make out Nokh a kish funa gonif, dezehl iber dayne tzende (If you kiss a thief, count your teeth) and figured someone was carrying on with someone they shouldn’t have, but the specifics of who was tangoing on the wrong street, I couldn’t make out. I’m not sure each page really revealed much anyway. The letters were murmured over when they arrived; a few years later my mother wept over them. Alone, sneaking the pages out of a drawer at night, I figured out some of the Spanish parts that referred to quotidian details of an increasingly frightened life, as if by burying the anticipation of death squads under details about a trip to the doctor’s, the fear might be buried, too. Houses broken into in the middle of the night, children going into hiding in country houses, in the jungle, in museum basements. My mother, a woman who fought chaos with chaos, snatched them from my hands, saying she’d heard all this before, and I didn’t need to hear it at all. When I turned fifteen, around the time the letters from Argentina stopped, she spent a lot of time wandering around a newly built windowless shopping mall looking for light switches (prices slashed), wrapping paper (after holidays), out-of-stock paint colors, and other semiuseless objects because you never knew when there would be shortages or how these things could become useful if flight or hiding became necessary. Both my parents were talented at putting mechanical detritus to good use: radio innards were used to fix the telephone, a turntable mutated into a gizmo used to stir prints in my father’s darkroom, a speaker made of plywood the size of a refrigerator box blasted music all over the house. As a child I was convinced they could turn a desert junkyard into a phalanx of robots. The one-story house became a vault for packages of jeweler’s screwdrivers (what if you have to fix a watch?), picture hooks (could pick a lock), rolls of tape of all kinds, and tins of sardines and vacuum-sealed bags of raisins with expiration dates from before the camera was invented. While my mother was preoccupied with this kind of shopping my father spent more and more time tinkering with electrical machinery and a homemade computer as big as a bathtub, with disks the size of dinner plates. Chaos reigned. No one would answer my questions. I only knew I was named for someone whose name began with the letter F, someone who was born in a town whose name was made up of consonants and couldn’t be found on any map.

      My mother couldn’t use an oven and cooked quickly over a stove, burning pots and pans, throwing them out whenever possible. Food that was canned or frozen presented a language that, for all its simplicity, held hidden dangers, the breaching of food taboos. What was she seeing in the turquoise packaging of a frozen macaroni-and-cheese dinner? The bits of bacon rendered it inedible, and the whole thing had to be taken outside and put in the garbage. The staring into space got worse after my accident, which wasn’t really an accident at all, but a letter bomb directed at all of us. I was the one who opened it.

      “Where will we go? Rio?” My father grew angry at my mother’s hysteria, useless and irrational, as far as he was concerned. “Shall we join your cousin whose children were dropped out of a helicopter over the Atlantic Ocean?”

      “You’re always the last one to get it. You stay behind until the wolf is at the door, until his tail wallops the glass, and then it’s too late.” My mother dumped the contents of her bag on the floor, looking for her keys so she could make an exit. “Frances, were you going through my things again?” I’d just gotten out of the hospital and I wasn’t going anywhere. Half my face was bandaged over, my hair hung limply out