Carmen Maria Machado

The radio was tuned to a classical station, which was playing a grand, jaunty song that moved along irregularly, dipping and swelling as I drove through the curves. It was like the beginning of an old film, a vehicle weaving along roads to reach its destination behind white-lettered credits. As the credits ended, the car would pull up to an old farmhouse, where I would get out, untying a white scarf from my hair and calling the name of my old friend. She’d emerge with a wave, and the laughter and rapport we’d share carrying my suitcases into the house would in no way foreshadow the gruesome plot whose wheels were already turning.

I believed that my wife loved me as I was, but I had also become certain that she’d love a more relaxed version of me even better.

A curious term, resident. It seemed at first glance incidental, like a stone, but then if you turned it over, it teemed with life. A resident lived somewhere. You were a resident of a town or a house. Here, you were a resident of this space, yes—not really, of course; you were a visitor, but whereas visitor suggests leaving at the end of the night and driving out in the darkness, resident means that you set up your electric kettle, and will be staying for a while—but also that you are a resident of your own thoughts. You had to find them, be aware of them, but once you located your thoughts you never had to drive away.

It was then I remembered that I had once been sick at camp. How had I forgotten? This was the unspoken pleasure of the residency: the sudden permission of memory to come upon you. I remembered one of the leaders taking my temperature and clucking her tongue at the number. I remembered a sense of despair. Here on the beach, the despair felt clear, as if I’d been seeking its signal for decades and had just now come in range of a cell tower.

Resident had seemed such a rich and appropriate term, an umbrella I would have been content to carry all of my days. But now the word colonist settled down next to me, with teeth. What were we colonizing? Each other’s space? The wilderness? Our own minds? This last thought was a troubling one, even though it was not very different from my conception of being allowed to be a resident in your own mind. Resident suggests a door hatch in the front of your brain, propped open to allow for introspection, and when you enter, you are faced with objects that you’d previously forgotten about. “I remember this!” you might say, holding up a small wooden frog, or a floppy rag doll with no face, or a picture book whose sensory impressions flood back to you as you turn the pages—a toadstool with a wedge missing from its cap; a flurry of luminous autumn leaves; a summer breeze dancing with milkweed. In contrast, colonist sounds monstrous, as if you have kicked down the door hatch of your mind and inside you find a strange family eating supper.

I’d heard sounds like this before, when I was a child and our cat had eaten an entire loaf of bread. It was a sound of gluttony regretted, of wallowing in one’s own excess.

I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, of Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning.

I believe that what talent I have comes not from some sort of muse or creative spirit but from my ability to manipulate proportions, and time—but it has put a strain on my relationships. How I married my wife is still a mystery to me.

—and there was nothing in my eyes. Or even worse—there was nothingness. Not the absence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing. I felt as if I was seeing a premonition of my own death, or a terrible memory I’d long forgotten.

I did not know what to say to her. That she knew perfectly well that she had betrayed my trust, that our beautiful afternoon was ruined? That I had been exposed in a way I had not intended, and that she should feel guilty about this exposure even though it was clear she did not? I could not look at her.