‘There Is Everything Between Them’

‘Why does everybody leave?’
‘Who’s leaving?’
‘People. They pass by me.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At the post office. We meet at 3pm, yes?’
‘Yes, in the park.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Mura calls back immediately: ‘But it’s already 3:15pm! We have to be more careful with these things. If we go outside the calendar like that, then the park, too, gets uncertain. And where do we meet?’
‘You mean we still meet today?’
Adia waits for the answer until the hand hurts, electromagnetic waves feel funny and a message on Facebook reminds her to meet with the others shortly. She quite ignores the message and still waits a bit longer.
Ewa is the first. There is also Dan and Mihaela. They all sit separately, waiting for the gate to open; they do not seem to know or to care about the arrival of the others. Adia enjoys this and takes a place, her back close to Mihaela’s back, sniffing her pointlessly (Mihaela doesn’t smell). Instead, she hears the big white blonde head fall to the side. From the heaviest of thoughts, she smiles.
The light is white and low, as if it is early morning.
Adia has cut her hair once again. It is not well cut but the act seems beneficent, it makes her look serene. Mihaela is doing this thing now – addresses and even thinks of people using their own words and Adia loves the word beneficent.
Mihaela is already standing and queuing, smiling at everybody at once, somehow. Gathering us. Dan is amazed by her energy but his face would not say much. It is his mouth that speaks first, revealing more at once. ‘Hey, how are you? You go directly or you join us in our detour?’
‘What detour?’ she asks, while Ewa’s eyes and then Ewa’s arms are about to embrace her. The long neck makes her look as if floating above the room. ‘Finally holding the good creature,’ read the eyes. And the sentence feels like floating around her, too. Normally, she would find elegant comfort in this embrace, but there is something behind Dan, close to Mihaela, capturing Mihaela’s entire attention, something that makes her cold.
‘Hi, I like your outfit. I’m Mor by the way.’ It was talking to her easily and cutting her to pieces.
‘Hi, I’m A-aaadia’, people waited for her to finish the stutter. ‘And thanx. That’s like a text on Grothendieck next to a montre en or rose, bracelet en alligator.’
‘What?’
What indeed, some things are cuter inside the head. There are laughs. Not Mor, she is half not paying attention anymore.
‘In a fashion magazine. I’m not making it up, I swear, search for the Air France Madame last month…’
Someone answers: ‘Why stop at this, fly with Air France last month.’
Mihaela abandons whatever she is doing and looks at Adia sink as if all morning she, herself, has been sinking into warm nothingness; and she knows sinking is good. ‘I’m wearing the no one socks you gave me, they fit perfectly.’ They stare at each other arriving instantly in a place where there is no need for Mihaela to add anything, but she does. Something about serving back the perspective. It does not matter what exactly.
She is luminous. But not all of her. Why?
‘Mor insists that we go and see a performance tonight. We’re thinking of maybe taking a night train and coming back a bit later. I know you really have to be there. I also really have to be there but I don’t know what to do.’ Actually she speaks a bit in Romanian – ‘Sunt așa de obosită și de tristă că m-aș ascunde sub scaune și n-aș mai pleca nicăieri.’
Adia looks at her friends’ naked arms as though she couldn’t help but think of the leaves that must fall so that the branch doesn’t break under the weight of the snow. She sees so clearly the huge amount of spaces that Mihaela undergoes, to and fro, from her splendid mind to any possibility of a bit of splendor in the visible actions.
She really likes Adia’s wrong haircut and it feels needless to say it. She is tired but, after reading a good essay all morning, the thought of linking higher space, the body of a mathematical soul, to Adia’s obsession with Henry James’s haunted spaces in the shape of style indirect libre, and telling her about it, makes it all good. Plus the private contagious discovery that, of course, William and Henry were brothers and feeding each other… Mor starts talking to her. Dan hurries them. They pass the gate. Mihaela has forgotten something on the chair but it is all under control now.
Just that the air is so thick.
‘So, nobody is going directly then?’ Adia asks the obvious mostly to herself, and someone does reply, saying they don’t need to see the show and they will go with her. ‘How are you, by the way?’ It is Ewa, reasonable and clear, as we imagine her to be.
Adia smiles at her. Consideration is sweet. She even stutters ‘Quuu-ite ok now. Thank you.’ Ewa has to leave her at her seat, opposite to Mor and Mihaela and also to herself and Dan; opposite to everybody, except for the father with a small child in his arms who takes the seat next to Adia.
Adia kept on talking about abstract mothering so the new proximity is fitting. Ewa herself struggles with the need to not-so-abstractly mother Adia; and take her away (which she will), and protect her from harm. She could and she could not understand everybody’s fascination with Mor. She is not the devoted type anyways. Or, she masters well the art of distributing attention and is in the affair of mothering her own self, even more than Adia’s.
‘Oh, you are not staying with us, that’s a pity,’ Mor turns to her graciously. There is also this frightful warmness on her face.
‘I checked-in earlier. But really, it’s fine,’ says Adia, and she means it. Mor smiles showing big crooked teeth and gums. ‘You’re right. Everybody seems quite content with their places.’ But her clothes emanate frost. When Mor talks, information seems to unravel retrospectively behind her face. Adia is this close to asking how she does it. So much for the universality of social preprogramming in humans, Adia always has to train herself hard to read the signs of how much one is supposed to face an interlocutor, or when it is and when it is not the time to pour herself out but dose etc. She never gets it right.
But she fits nicely the aquatic shining of the day.
Adia ignores the cute calm baby staring at her (who is going to do any reading at all like this?) and looks for Ewa’s clear face. Someone finds Dan Dennett amusing. Mihaela thinks this is depressing and the thought that one does not hold the authority of one’s own stream of consciousness – scary. Adia enjoys mis-interpreting what she hears. ‘Would you be the author of my sense of self? And I become this space where we can meet, or?’ Then a constant rhythm. Someone is reading from an interview with Donald Hoffman on mathematically ‘formalizing consciousness into conscious agents.’ She gives up entertaining (pleasantly, through the eyelashes) the image of Ewa keeping silent, or of Mor looking at Mihaela and letting her do the talking. This is something she wants to know.
‘Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view,’ Mihaela reads loud for her to hear. ‘I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.’
‘I wonder what entity I am breeding with you’.
Dan thinks out loud about Hoffman’s split-brain operation giving clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses that function as one if the corpus callosum is not sliced. ‘The way this guy explains makes me think of a psychologist in the 70s, who speculated that until late in the second or even around the first millennium B.C. men had two distinct streams of consciousness, the bicameral mind he called it – and one was streaming from the Gods.’
Adia knows that any possible evolution into a unified meta-consciousness (or an involutional fitness according to the interface theory?) cannot not be connected with the appearance of philosophy and even of Christianity; and struggles to see the link between the seductive thought that relations could create new consciousnesses in another dimension and praying as a constant exercise of letting go of the ego and perspective – an abstract exercise, while any human relation would be a literal practice of enlarging the space around one’s own subjectivity.
And a child, what is a child if not a way to literally get out of the self, the possibility for the new perspective that is not me or you or us. This thought does not even belong to Adia.
Mihaela looks at Adia (and maybe at the baby, too) as if speaking her mind to her, answering her, and also as if speaking with stutter in an attempt for unwanted, exaggerated fine tuning with her friend. Then she frowns because the thought of passing the wretched gift of stuttering to an infant comes to Mihaela’s mind, and it is a chilly thought, close to the one of offering humanity her new sinister obsession over breathing. But she is not the one with panic attacks, Adia is. She knows these are not her thoughts. And they are not her friend’s either.
‘I wonder what entity I am breeding with you.’
Adia would caress the real child now but it seems totally taken with Mihaela. Adia would caress Mihaela, but the abstract thing growing between them is not always kind.
Someone is insisting that theories operating with a clear distinction between mind and consciousness should be preferred to this self-indulgent approach, but nobody laughs at the pun.
Adia looks at the parallel raw of chairs and sees Mor and Mihaela as sliced bodies in need of physical inter-perspectival connection. This new way of understanding mating makes her burst into laughter until her eyes find the wise baby in front of her, in the arms of a woman, but also to her left, held by a man.
Mor and Mihaela have the same allure. But Mor has the same air and even bones with Mura and with a former boyfriend of Adia’s, who knows she should not just devote herself to a person because of this.
Mother comes to take the child from the father near her and replaces it with a twin. Mor smiles crookedly looking at Adia, also not trusting the new baby to be a new baby. Mor’s skin is so thin, still one cannot hear anything that goes on inside.
Dan is so absent all the time. Sometimes Adia considers that he may lack the capacity to physically perceive her. And she really wonders why. None of us wants to let go of spacetime and objects. But he does sometimes. So why can he still not see her. She also doesn’t really understand why this prolonged fragmented position for the body ticking with disaster.
Organized human flesh, even loved flesh, undergoing a Belloto effect, waiting to hit the ground nicely. The entire reality goes through derealization, first the faces and the details, then understanding turns into something else and then extinct. What did she do to switch the frequencies such that she cannot go back? The calm baby breathing is checking on her. It has been intensely sighing and now it seems to choke alarmingly. Does it smell her fear? Did it listen to the dread growing in her breath? This kind of company is everything. She holds on to the book she was reading right before it started. There was a good Coetzee sentence there. A child loved too much becomes the object of such intimacy that it dare not be allowed to live. A sentence that she can understand.
Ewa wonders about Adia’s hair and clothes soaked in cold. It is almost nice against her body heat that she cannot sneak out of. But she only turns to talk to Mihaela until they both frown. Then searches the sight of that orderly opened curtain, like a young girl’s combed hair, held by the shoulder for the sake of suspension, and stays there as if she is the one needing comfort.
Adia has managed something of her favorite Victorian images; the whole flying, low light and all arrangements compose variants of beheaded mother with child or child held (delayed) by spatial or temporal coverture. Mihaela tries to catch her eyes and tell her friend about the cruel esthetic visions. But the friend does not respond; she seems far beyond the realm of the symbolic (although trapped in it) and is in need of another kind of enormity fix. Mihaela goes back to the reading aloud.
Dan asks her not to repeat or insist, ‘why does she like to insist.’ Then he feels badly and smiles at her as if he gets it and as if he himself could stay with a situation too much, making it live longer, which he never will. He, also, wonders what Adia is saying. Mor is half watching, half ignoring her. When she travelled alone, Adia would sing to herself. ‘She’s singing, not talking,’ Ewa clarifies and the murmuring sight gives her pleasure.
The plane lands, they split in three. Ewa has to make a detour of her own. She wonders if she could make it to join them at all; she got a message or something. Dan admits it is an effort not to go directly, but does not act on it. Adia goes towards the bus station. There is no more baby present but it feels like there is. She holds on to the book she was reading right before it started. There was a good Coetzee sentence there. A child loved too much becomes the object of such intimacy that it dare not be allowed to live. A sentence that she can understand.
Jumping from one perspective to another can be tiring, staying too much in one is death and now everyone is gone. Also, for anything else to appear, one’s self must withdraw and make room.
She moved into a house so thick in walls that she often misses the wireless signal. And she doesn’t quite understand or care about being available. But now Adia is calling, and she picks up, and Mura’s greeting vowels work like they do every time, lifting a burden, forcefully, to the side. And then she wants to tell a dream that she would like to have recorded (so she could replay it later). Once every two sentences Adia says ‘but we must meet’, and it is not like with Mihaela – the more she says it, the further she goes away – no, now it’s good; as if they are already part of the texture of this necessity.
She was younger, with her mother, looking at the sky, a sky that changed colors like water does, and then at a red line that did not behave like a red line in the sky; and then they knew it was grave, apocalyptic grave, but it did not matter.
Mura knows well that most of the things she says click inside her younger friend’s mind so strongly that she remembers them as memories of a life she misses the most.
‘(Alone,) covered in skin, dressed up in hair.’

Published within the collective book BLACK HYPERBOX, edited by Alina Popa, Florin Flueras, published by PUNCH.
Contributions by Florin Flueras, Alina Popa, Ioana Gheorghiu, Ștefan Tiron, Gabriel Catren, Irina Gheorghe, Garett Strickland, Sina Seifee, Bogdan Drăgănescu, Eleni Ikoniadou, Cristina Bogdan, Cosima Opartan, Nicola Masciandaro, Ben Woodard, Blake Victor, Adriana Gheorghe, Gregory Chatonsky, Dorothée Legrand & Georges Heidmann, Matt Hare, Larisa Crunţeanu, Dylan Trigg, Ion Dumitrescu.