You definitely don’t feel perfect. Your muscles ache, your hands are covered in blisters and sores from the hours spent clumsily drilling holes and hammering nails. Your sinuses are congested and your throat hurts and has since you woke up this morning, a sign that your immune system is still compromised. You don’t want her to know this.
Anne says, “I’m just so tired.”
“Maybe we should stop. Take a break.”
She doesn’t respond to your suggestion. The last home video plays.
It’s the one in which you and your phone camera are following Anne around the empty interior of the chocolate-brown house you purchased together. You occasionally flip the camera so that your face fills the screen. The you in this video is younger than the you of now, of course, but by how many years you do not know. You think, That face is my face. Even though you’ve already watched this particular video dozens of times, you can’t help but feel disappointed by the reappearance of yourself, and at the same time, you fall a little bit more in love with who you were, and you ache to again be in that moment of lost time.
On the guided tour of your house, when you are briefly on camera, you make silly, exaggerated, I’m-so-impressed faces. Anne is the guide and refers to herself as the “brown-house archivist.” Within each new room she recites a made-up history, a comic, romantic, or tragic event from a forgotten age. In response you say agreeable or commiserative things like “That’s fascinating” and “They really shouldn’t have been doing that in the bathtub” and “We would be wise to wash the floors again” and “They mostly lived happily ever after.”
Your voice doesn’t sound like your voice. That is to say, your voice in the video, the one relaying through the speakers, is not the voice you hear when you speak. You are aware that everyone experiences some form of auditory dissociation upon hearing their own voice, the feeling of Do I really sound like that? You understand the tone and pitch of the voice you hear when you speak are determined by the mix of air conduction and sounds traveling directly to your cochlea via the tissues in your own head. But should your recorded voice sound so different as to be unrecognizable? Shouldn’t there be an underlying cadence or rhythm, one that identifies you as the speaker?
The video tour ends in an upstairs bedroom, the room that you vividly remember. The walls are painted bright yellow. Anne walks across the room and opens one of the windows. She says, “I normally don’t like yellow. But this color, I love.” You say you hate it. She rolls her eyes at the camera (you), sticks out her tongue, and says, “This is my office anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you think of it.” She lies on the floor, spreads her arms, and says, “Mine, all mine!” You walk into the room and you hover the camera over Anne’s face. She looks directly into the camera and she smirks like she knows something you don’t. (It’s this Anne with this look that you imagine when she speaks to you in the now.) You remind her that she hasn’t given this room’s history yet. The smirk goes away, her mouth opens, and her eyes tilt away from the camera momentarily. She says, “This room used to be a sad room, painted a sad color.” You say, “Puce?” She says, “It was a sad nursery for a sad woman who had a very sad baby. Then someone thoughtfully painted the room this yellow so I wouldn’t have a sad office.” Neither of you say anything for a beat or two as Anne stares up into the camera. You ask, “How do you know if a baby is sad?” She says, “Because she’s crying, duh.” You both laugh, and you zoom in on Anne’s face until she mock screams and knocks the phone out of your hand.
Anne replays the brown-house tour video. She recites what she says on the video as it plays. The third time you watch the video, you join Anne in reciting your dialogue.
030
You are severely congested. Breathing too deeply results in a sharp stitch of pain in the middle of your chest. You cannot hide this from Anne. You report the worsening symptoms.
Anne does not seem surprised or, given the purported pandemic, concerned. You are not confident in surmising and attributing motive to what she says or how she says it.
You do not run or jog on the treadmill. You walk, but only for five minutes, as it makes you dizzy. When you stop, you tell Anne your head is full of sand. You want her to be impressed by the metaphor. She only asks you to explain what you mean.
You have a slight fever. Anne does not explain how many degrees above 98.6 constitutes a slight fever. You are hot and you are cold. You sweat and you shiver, and your muscles ache like they did when you first woke in this room.
Today’s video is an instructional one: how to build a fence.
031
“I’m going to come into your room, now, ______. My appearance might be shocking to you. I will appear—well, I’m more than a few years older than you remember me.”
You clutch your image of Anne, the one informed by the videos and the sound of her voice and what she has said and has been saying. You shuffle slowly away from your bed, stand in the middle of your room, and cough into your arm. You stare at the door. You’ve spent untold hours fantasizing about it opening. Your imaginary face-to-face meetings and escape plans have become more dramatic, more complex, and increasingly bizarre. Last night, before you fell asleep, you imagined the opening door revealed blankness, nothingness, and though finding an eternally empty void outside the door is not a likely outcome, you might have stumbled upon a metaphorical truth.
“Are you feeling up to my visit?” She laughs.
You say, “Yes,” but you feel worse than you did yesterday. There is more sand in your head and it leaks into your body, making your muscles heavy and weak.
Instead of overwhelming joy or fear at the prospect of that door finally opening, you worry at the physical image of Anne in your head, trying to anticipate and replace it with the correct one to be revealed.
There’s a pneumatic hiss and the door slides open, disappearing into the wall to your left. She says, “Here I am.” Anne steps from the dimly lit hallway and walks into your room; her pace is brisk and confident. Her gray hair is long, hanging down past her shoulders. The gray is startling. Wrinkles cluster at the edges of her mouth and eyes. Her features are no longer made of the sharp angles and tight skin you memorized. She wears the same clothes from the brown-house tour video: jeans and a thin black hooded sweatshirt. You cover your mouth and start to cry.
“Hello, ______.” She waves. Her smile is the same one from the videos, from your memories.
“Hi, Anne.” You wave back, then you don’t know what to do with your hands. She is shorter than you imagined, yet at the same time her presence fills the room. “You look… good.”
“Wow, that’s some pause you’ve got there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. I’m only kidding.”
Your laughter turns into a coughing fit, one that rekindles a painful fire in your throat.
“That cough doesn’t sound good.”
“Am I—am I the same age as you?” You are again acutely aware you have yet to see a full and clear reflection of your own face. However, you have seen enough in glimpses of the darkened viewing screen to know your hair is not gray. The skin of your body is not wrinkled.
“Not anymore. It’s a little complicated. Come on, let’s go.” She reaches out a hand, palm up.
“Where?”
“We have some work to do at the house.”
“I’m sick so you probably should stay away—”
Anne takes your hand.
The curved hallways are white and wide and empty. The ceiling panels are similar to the ones in your room, but the lighting has been dimmed and does not glow as brightly. Initially there are no windows, only smooth walls and outlines of pneumatic doors adjacent to small, square security screens. The tiled floors are slick with dust and marked with footprints that appear to vary in size and shape.