Let’s imagine a scene. This scene could easily be re-imagined as a poem, a painting, a photograph, it could be puzzle piece in a larger framework, such as an epic, a novel, or a long film.
The weather is unsettled. At random intervals the wind grabs at the trees and lets them go, leaving heavy tree branches to hang and the flowers in the window beds waiting for the sun to appear through the clouds and blind them.
There is a significant and abstract relationship in this scene: inside and outside: one from two abstractions. This relationship could easily develop into a theme. This theme could describe sanity, madness, loneliness, an impulse to violence, for if inside and outside are manifest (as in the relationship between civil behavior and wildness, the natural world and the world of cities), then some border, some intervening or partitioning force has to be drawn.
We need devices. Two people in this instance or four. A woman is on the inside, physically placed in an apartment, a house, a castle, a hut. Why is she “inside?” This might be obvious. She comes home from work and closes the door. She’s weary from shopping, travel, court, performing surgery; she’s been visiting an elderly woman who’s life weighs like fragile eggs in her small white hands. When the woman opens her hands, the young woman closes hers around them, and says, “Walk with me” or “Tell me what you did yesterday” or “Why won’t you sit?”
Once home, she closes the door. It’s been a long day and the weather is unsettled and yet more days are coming, days she cannot count. She takes a shower, dries, wraps herself in a comfortable robe and makes hot chocolate. But even though the day is unsettled, it’s hot, humid maybe, so she changes her mind about the chocolate and pours a cold glass of white wine, and when she sits on the couch with the wine and the robe, she remembers a time when she heard the door bell ring of the house where she grew up. The memory is abrupt and its clarity is like an image in a mirror. She remembers her mother saying, “Could you see who that is?” as her mother was on that side of the house furthest from the front door yet near enough to call out instructions and still be heard.
The doorbell was insistent. This is what she remembers. The finger depressed the button to a strange beat, short rings one after the other. The finger pressed the button, let go, depressed again, then let off. This action increased in rapidity. Some jeopardy on the outside was approaching, some terrible monster, and so whomever rang the door bell did so with insistent repetition, saying, You will open, you will let me in; it’s important. This is what the woman remembers. As she approached (6 years old, 8 years old?) the door, she felt that insistence. The loudness of the buzzer, the numerous times the button had been depressed and was still being depressed–this made her aware of the thickness of the door, the ominousness of the silhouette in the sidelight made by the person who wanted this door opened and opened quickly. She remembered putting her hand to the door nob and turning, turning slowly. She opened the door to a man whose identity is still a mystery. This is what she remembers. She remembers her mother approaching quickly, drying her hands with a dishtowel, saying, “Oh, it’s you. I forgot you were coming.”
The wine is good and crisp. The weather outside is unsettled. The evening sun struggles grayly at the windows. It strikes her as odd that she’d never inquired about the man who’d come to call that day, had never asked about the transaction that had followed, must’ve followed after her mother told her to go to the kitchen. She remembers solid shapes, height and great width, a face that has no name and that neither smiled nor said hello, and as far as she can remember this memory is fresh, new to her, a new element of plot, but real. The memory has come, a memory that has neither aftermath nor preposition. It is merely a ringing, unutterable fear, and an opening.
She turns to the front door and assays the evening pressed at the illuminated sidelight. She feels a brief impulse to go there and look outside. Then she notices the blinking red light on her message machine.
