The Repeat Room

My sister used to say, let us inhabit the moment of our love, not just now, but for our whole miserable, pitiable lives. And I would listen, as I always listened. Standing, listening, watching. She would tell me things. She’d tell me anything, anything real, anything unreal. She made the world we lived in with her hurried, rapid phrases, so many I can hardly remember them all. Pleas, elaborations, imperatives. Nothing was too much. My father and mother who raised us in that loveless house on a black hill with nothing surrounding it and nothing within, they told us we must be our own resort. You must be your own resort, he said to me, and you the same, to her. My mother said, there isn’t anyone who will help you or want to. You must carry your own help like food in a bag. My father hated the way the world had become. He was a romantic. Like all romantics, he loved the past, some past in some way particular to him, and went there to live in his head. From it he drew an awful thing; from it he made the house in which we lived and its rules, rules that marked and drove my life. The first rule, he said, as he said it so often, still each time it was with the emphasis of speaking to one who has never heard, a useful thing for one like me, who indeed never hears, who is, as my father would often say, smiling somewhere else, the first rule, he said, the first rule is, there is no one where you are. You think there is someone there, standing in your skin, but there isn’t. Accept it. If you would like for there to be someone where you are, albeit briefly, you must choose who to be and be that person. He had been trained in the theater, had been an actor and a director. My mother had been a director too, and a better one than him, or so she sometimes said. In their dismay at the useless degenerations and contortions of hypermodernity they had, the two of them, gone, so she would often say, my mother, to the black hill, to the house on the black hill, there to make a fate. We lived like an unanswered burning, the evidence of something ending, but there was no one to see. Like the old riddle where nobody meets no one and everybody can see nothing will happen whatever anyone might say, yes, like that. My father, I tell you, was a romantic, and he rejected the technologies of the day. He rejected the schooling that we were obligated by law to have. Neither my sister nor I ever set foot in a school. If we left the house it was only to go short distances, no more than twenty or thirty feet out onto the property. The house was not a house properly for the obvious reason: it was a set, a stage. We were not children for this couple, our parents, because they were not properly our parents. They were directors, and my sister and I, we were actors, although they, the directors, would act alongside us. The first task, the task of our extreme youth, was to learn what they called sullenness and motility. The hundreds of lectures beat it into us. I recall it in a series of flashed blurred images. The place I would sit on the floor listening, so familiar to me, and as familiar to me the corner of the yard visible through the window, the seat of impossible yearning. Sullenness, sullenness, sullenness. On and on my parents would go. Sullenness is the body waiting, being nothing. It has no emotive quality other than the lack of being. A body is present, but contains nothing. Learn to contain nothing. Motility is the body as origin. The body gives rise, first to the promptings of a heart, and then to the actions of that heart or life. You stir, my mother would say, to something. You never simply stir. But what is it that calls you? We would be made to sit, these small children would be made to sit, for hours on cold paving stones not moving. Alternately we would be made to link the chains of why and say them. I run across the room because the curtain trembles and seeing it I tremble and want to be with it. This I would shout as I ran to the curtain. You are always wrong, my mother told me, when you think you know why you do things. But you should try to know anyway and you should cry it out in a kind of wealth. My sister would sometimes run beside me, and we would imitate each other. She would say, I am sitting on the floor because I am like a hat. And I would say, I am sitting on the floor because my sister is like a hat and I want to be one too. Then my mother, You are not like hats. Hats do not sit but they are put. Have you been put? And we would run off, shouting something else, something else we were doing, and we would shout it running, and again be contradicted. But what is it you mean? What do you mean by it? When we were older, when I was eight and my sister ten, we were given the scripts they had spent that first decade preparing. These were dossiers, lists, descriptions of characters. Here on this black hill, my father would begin. Here, yes, here, yes, here on this black hill . . . We were so used to these speeches we could concoct them ourselves. Here on this black hill is the last day of the life you have been living, so said my father as he and my mother brought in box after box. Each box had folders and folders. The folders held the selves and versions, all the ones that we might be, were we told to be. It was like this: my father, my mother would say, you, you are Joan F, and you, you are Medellin K. Then we would be the pair of them, those two, and we would know the history they had, how they behaved. Perhaps there was no point to it. Perhaps like anything, it had no real content, only seemed in its winding and unraveling to give a glimpse of meaning. I could only do what I was told and try, and I did, I tried with everything I had, just as my sister did. For years we woke every day desperate to succeed as we had not the day before.

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From The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball. Used with permission of the publisher, Catapult. Copyright © 2024 by Jesse Ball.