writing

The sander’s power cut off. I had an extension cord running down the hall out to the back steps where the generator was recently moved to. The neighbors complained about having the generator out front made our block look “crude” but really it was far more convenient for me considering the longevity of our house and I was working on the floors in the front room. The generator shivering shut off, out of gas, to me this indicated my day’s work was complete. Initially we thought the decision to strip down, reshape, and ultimately refabricate the house would make it unlivable, however it was coming along just fine, and we remained living inside the house during the modest renovations. Walls striped, I’d hoped to get to rewiring soon, mainly to sort and update the basement’s breaker box. We were fortunate the plumbing was still good, and neither of us really needed electricity at the house since we spend most of the daytime working, and our stove is gas powered so we could both still enjoy our coffee in the morning.

Over breakfast she would ask me if I had any dreams—I never dreamed as far as I told her, but I suspect she always asks so she can begin to tell me her dreams, which actually I usually found quite vivid and interesting. Last night she had a dream about a friend from high school, I forgot his name, but she said in the dream they were at prom together. She told me about the punch, the music, the dancing, and how there was an unusual emptiness to the event, dreams often are set in simple spaces as if they were movies with a limited budget for props and decorations. Then she said during the beginning of a slow song something fell from the ceiling. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it triggered a series of falling items, growing into a sort of indoor avalanche. “Soon the chandeliers fell crashing into other couples and finally I looked up at a giant disco ball becoming unattached, appearing to grow in size as it came closer to me and my high school friend. That’s when I woke up,” she said. I listened to all of this while pecking my fork at the eggs. We finished breakfast and I did the dishes as she got ready for work. During the days, recently I’ve been traveling into the past. At work we just started a project about the history of the West Bottoms, a former industrial part of town that has since been evacuated due to flood, then reinvaded with artists studios, antique malls, and coffee shops. Even with the rapid changes, our building still remains in the West Bottoms, and they want some sort of walking timeline constructed in the main hall. They put me in charge as creative director for the project, despite my lack of really any curatorial experience. I believe they got the idea of the timeline from the Museum of Natural History’s Big Bang exhibition. What amazed me after hearing about the Big Bang exhibition was its certainty about the creation of the universe, there was no theory involved. Its immaculate quality of structure reflects the museum’s stature, leaving me almost laughing considering the insignificance of our hallway display. The benefit of our project is its lack of accurate dates or facts but rather focusing on images themselves. The company wants me to use visual representations of the past, multiple exposures, create an overall sense of pastness. I first thought about the recent history we’re constantly creating, how would I remember this conversation and what image would I choose to represent humankind in Missouri during the twenty-first century, and more importantly what does that image say about how far we have come as a species, or rather how far we have yet to go.

It surprised even myself how seriously I began with the project. Starting off, I headed to the prehistoric nature our city was assumed to have. Mammoths and saber-toothed tigers walked the very trails we’ve made into streets, streets we’ve reconstructed from previous versions of streets and so on. The high-rise of the downtown area was actually caused by the Ice Age, making a gully between the Missouri and Kaw River creating the West Bottoms as a perfect cul-de-sac from where the two rivers meet. In order for my research process to begin, I usually have to wake up after falling asleep, occasionally in the same bed but much more frequently in a bed floating, making its way down a slow paced creek or in an anti-gravity state. In this instance, I was floating above the city, watching a time-lapse of it creating itself in front of a universal sky. Soon the rivers started to form, they grew out of small streams often times connecting multiple streams increasing the water flow. I didn’t see the sun rising and setting but rather one continuous day; the sun rose and all of the last forty-two billion years of history was happening over the course of a single cycle. Birds remained in the sky flying slowly watching the changes happen with me, I was rushing through the whole thing. My main goal for the night was to see the settlers overtake the landscape. I woke up. I tried to assume the time and place of her dreams by her unrelated body position. I wasn’t sure what I had truly learned from the creation I’ve seen thus far, perhaps the hallway should start off as some sort of abstract painting, a mural of colors colliding to create new colors of innovative steps. This idea woke me up even more, so I got out of bed quietly to jot down the idea at the shared desk across the room. There was around two and a half hours before she had to get up to get ready for work, so I got up from the chair by the desk and laid back in bed taking shifts of opening and closing my eyelids falling further into some state of meditation. Finally the sun appeared through the east-facing window, one of the few perks that persuaded us into purchasing the property. A cool breeze brushed through the trees outside entering our room with considerably less power as it came into contact with my revealed barefoot at the edge of the bed. Overtime, we’ve acquired two separate tastes for our coffee: I prefer the dark bitterness of espresso while she likes hers with soy milk and honey. I used to make both of our coffees each morning but soon fell out of the habit once the project began. On Tuesday’s I was expected to show up at the 10am meeting, however today I texted my boss saying I couldn’t make it due to a forgotten dentist appointment. After coffee, which was surprisingly delicious, I walked to the gas station two blocks away to refill the gas can for the generator. On my way there, a discarded firework (or was it placed intentionally?) ignited approximately two feet away from me; as the explosion happened I looked up searching for its source and immediately made eye-contact with a construction worker’s head sticking out of a manhole. The head must have turned to look for source as well, the only instance where it seems sound travels faster than light: an explosion, but upon prolonged eye-contact he realized I had the same amount of suspension as him, so he slowly sank back down into the sewer system and I continued to the gas station, vaguely being aware of how much worse the miniature explosion could have gone if I had a gas can full of ethanol-less gasoline. My debit card wasn’t reading at the pump, so I went inside to pay also buying a Snickers. The summer heat made me eat the candy bar quickly as I began walking home leaving my mouth dry and sweet.

Falling through the overly sanded floor into the basement below was a constant fear I had as I was exposing our floor’s original tones. It was a beautiful white oak appearing as if it was still alive, a tree that could have been chopped down yesterday. Once I finished sanding I would vacuum and stain the floors with a coat of semigloss polyurethane. I started to wonder if we would appreciate this labor, that is, if we would outlast the house, and why do we spend more time on home improvements than actually sitting in the living rooms we’ve worked so hard to stabilize. The ripping hum of the sander was the only sound to be heard. I was using the sander to reveal what I thought was the past look of the floor, how it originally appeared when installed. But really the originality of a tree is untraceable like the origin of everything else. The project didn’t matter. Nobody cares about the history of the West Bottoms, the show will be something to do on a Sunday maybe, and perhaps there could be a paragraph about my hallway in the local newspaper then inevitably discarded original images attempting to represent the unrepresentable past. Maybe a bowl full of dirt from the West Bottoms could be presented in the hall, on a show card nearby explaining how this dirt has been recycled, reborn into more dirt and really everything is for the most part recycled, things being made from the Earth are returning to another place on Earth. Sanding made me think I was thinking profound thoughts, but really sanding was just an excuse to occupy my arms, making it impossible to jot down additional nonsense to add to my already nonsensical project details.

When I woke up, it took me a full minute to begin where I left off. I relocated to the shared desk again, this time jotting down: cattle farms, early nineteenth century stockyard living. In my dream I saw the uprising of several buildings, one being the Livestock Exchange Building. This would serve as the perfect facility for demonstrating the past as the building has indeed gone through many lives, many pasts, inside it held stories on stories and more importantly artifacts that I could use to make a small museum-like display, showing the history of a building within the building itself. On May 3rd, 1903 Mary Lou Wilson gave birth to twins who, little did she know, would run the West Bottom stockyards for the first part of the twentieth century: millions of cattle and wealth poured into the West Bottoms from all regions including the north, as if it were a mutual unspoken agreement cattle could abolish past disagreements (Missouri Compromise) and truly as a nation we could all agree on how a redistribution of wealth was a good thing. A dollar bill signed by John B. Wilson will be featured on display, the first dollar in the flood of millions exchanged within the West Bottoms Livestock Exchange Building. After really waking up, I began to realize how absurd my research had become, a series of completely illegitimate studies. I had mistakenly created a fictional retelling of an ever-changing real community. Next Tuesday I could go to the meeting and present my notes, saying they were just quick scribbles but at least proving my worth to the company. I could perhaps keep doing this, going or skipping the meetings, accumulating more and more notes, scribbles, scribbling until the house is remodeled; we haven’t confirmed a project deadline for the show thank god, more time to consider time. I thought about these things during this Tuesday’s meeting after presenting my notes.

There was a moment after my presentation where nobody said anything, a moment of silence for my career, when finally the silence was broken as I was doing the math dividing my annual income with the remaining remodeling expenses to discover I only had to continue working nine and a half more weeks to break even. Breaking even wouldn’t really be enough though and I knew that, but for the following weeks as I continued the project I kept up with these dates and soon it would be the day where I would have officially broke even. The floors and rewiring in the house are done, I was now able to use the internet at home to fact-check all of my hallucinations finding them to be mostly true, or at the very least true enough for as much as I cared about the exhibition. I would continue far past my due date, making more money and progress until I had a final draft of the show, it would be titled, “The West Bottoms: a Moving Landscape.” The company tried fighting me on some of the stretched facts but I was persistent that we were making a show to be enjoyable and not necessarily stating anywhere that it was factually flawless. I was considering suggesting we have a sign saying something like, “a dramatized reproduction of true events” but after saying it aloud in my head I realized it sounded too ridiculous to mention. The night before the show opening, a full nine months after the project was assigned to me, we both slept great, commenting on how the rise of the sun simultaneously woke us up as we set at the table to eat breakfast.

She began describing what she said was her last dream to me. The term “last dream” immediately drew me in, insinuating this to be her “final dream” that is to say, either during the course of the day today or tomorrow (if she doesn’t dream tonight) she will be deceased, putting her long cycle of recurring/reinventing dreams to rest or otherwise onto me as their only living proof of existence. “I was an astronaut,” she explained, it began in outer space. The dream then ‘cut’ to seeing herself at a grocery store–she was grocery shopping in an astronaut suit, holding the helmet between her forearm and hip as she slowly walked the aisles. She then described the checkout process with cringing detail: noting the long lines, how she couldn’t fit all of her groceries onto the conveyor belt at once, the elderly lady in front of her was paying with a check, etc. As she left the store, she said a pedestrian thanked her, she didn’t know why exactly but assumed it was because of her space suit. “After the brief interaction, I began to hear a muffled child scream, the kind of muffle indicating the child was inside of something, the screaming was faint. As I got closer to my car the screaming increased, I moved with a slowness while pushing the cart, the astronaut boots carefully coming into contact with the asphalt each step I took, and then, the screaming stopped. As I picked up my pace back into regular motion, and as the glare from my car window dissolved, a child strapped into a car seat appeared, seemingly asleep. I freaked out” she said believably, first trying to pull open the car door then searching for her keys. “Did you recognize the child?” I asked but she said no, and that caused even more anxiety, feeling a guilt that someone else’s child was potentially dead inside of her car. The worst part, she continued, the worst part was I wasn’t waking up. I kept struggling and struggling to get the child out of the car, my keys weren’t anywhere to be found, the suit didn’t have pockets. I remember in the dream feeling, actually feeling hopeless. I screamed and cried in terror. It was as if I was stuck inside of a horror movie, only I didn’t know what the plot was or anything. Neither of us had taken a bite of our food in minutes. “I felt like killing myself and I did. I walking to the interstate and stepped in front of a speeding car in my space suit. But worse, at the end of it all I would reappear back in outer space, then I would be back at the supermarket again, just like that. What happened in the past of my dream was impossibly recurring, killing myself again and again for what seemed like hours. Only to then come back to life outer space, floating. There were no days or passages of time (a universal sky?) rather a stream of continuity. Then in space I turned and finally saw Earth, and once I tried to locate the sun. There were lights coming from impossible places, I kept turning, the moon, turning around back and forth to the supermarket and then back again.”

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