It was a stupid thing to do - get rid of one’s self, but mostly because if a person does erase something so fundamental, they can never be sure how to get it back. Such was the situation Mia found herself in on a gray and indecisive October day. While the day couldn’t seem to push the moment to its crisis - should it become autumn? Should it become winter? Mia had. She had gone forth in a procedure that had failed to leave behind any shard of what might reverse it. In effect, she seemed to be irrevocably gone.
What was left is harder to explain, but fortunately, the world has left us with people like Ray. Ray could only be designated as a philosopher, a person with a hexagonal gyre for a mind that turned out labyrinths of ellipses, cobwebs and rhombuses. Thus, we have our two characters: Ray who could distinguish shapes for what they truly were and Mia who lost them or kept loosening them.
Ray entered upon the scene with what could only be deemed a most obvious but appropriate question.
“What happened?”
Mia, who was understandably upset by an implausible ordeal, was piqued by it.
“It’s gone. My self. I got rid of it. And now I don’t know what do to.”
Ray, perhaps, asked the next more obviously appropriate question: “Are you sure?”
“Yes!” The vehemence shot through the otherwise empty room that Ray had found Mia in. “Don’t you think I wouldn’t know if a sliver, slice, section, smidgeon, speck or spark was missing?”
When she had said this, Mia sat down and wrapped her arms about her tightly, as if to reassure herself of her tangibility. Her face looked vulnerable and uncertain in the wake of a choice that had raised devastating if uncertain results and Ray was not untouched by it. He immediately sat down next to her and took her hand.
“Your consonance tells me you can’t all be missing. The self is essential to you. And you are here.”
Mia gave Ray a queer look with a question mark almost in her eyes. “I wondered that too. But I feel so empty. Tepid.”
Ray put his other hand on Mia’s and patted them warmly.
“How did you do it?”
“I just thought it. Cast it out. It seemed so useless anyway.”
“Maybe you didn’t thrown it all out. What did it look like?”
Mia gestured vaguely around her apartment. It was a small, one room concoction with a kitchenette. The walls were white and the windows were coy and unrevealing in their transparency behind swathes of white curtains. Her bed was in a corner with a litter of books and Tupperware filled with snack foods of nuts, dried fruit and caramels. The floor was covered with a cheerful square rug of spring green with a red square border. Over her bed was a picture of a Monet. His wife, Ray thought as he stood up and approached the bed to search through the tomes. As he picked his way through Nabokov, Donne, Hamlet and the alphabet, the lady’s blurred face seemed to look down upon his with the promises of a witness. But Ray wasn’t interested in testimonies yet, he was looking for the only conclusive book Mia owned - her dictionary.
If an outsider like the reader wondered why Ray found this whole chain of events unsurprising, the reason was due to his and Mia’s history together. In the timeline of life, they had both met at a certain point - “A”. This point was followed by others, but how they lined up in chronology became more difficult to discern as the meeting and entanglements became more frequent. Suffice it to say, that whether they had started out with the intention to become friends or not, now when Mia lost her self, she called Ray and Ray always answered.
Ray was getting lost in words that had been highlighted and written in the margins - encephalitis, triskadekaphobia, rhubarb, splotch. He seemed to be wandering away on a tangent from his original purpose and his finely shaped mind tried to pull him back as a compass would with its needle. He found what he had first planned to look for:
Self noun,
1 : the union of elements (as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person
2 : material that is part of an individual organism <ability of the immune system to distinguish self from nonself>,
Ray closed the book but kept his finger in place between the pages of the definition so as not to loose his place. He was now reassured as to the whole status of the affair. The reason was that Ray did not find the lack of a key ingredient in a solution to be a problem. For instance, if he were making a cake and didn’t have enough flour, he might substitute another mix that one might buy at a store such as for pancakes. Or, if he didn’t have milk, he would exchange its place with plain yogurt. Ray opened up the dictionary and read the definition out loud to himself.
“It’s doubtful the self could ever be completely gone then. Perhaps just an element. Or part of the material.”
“Come again?” Mia said. Ray jumped up startled, the book fell from his hands as his eyes found Mia again. He had entirely forgotten that Mia was there. The situation really was serious.
Mia’s face understood the jump. “It really is bad. Why did I do it? Do you really think it went somewhere?”
The girl looked hopelessly under the rug and it was when she stood that Ray noticed she drifted aimlessly in her search. It was then that Ray remembered what Mia would do if she were making a cake and missing an ingredient - she would concoct an entirely new recipe, heedless of the result, but enthralled by the process. He walked over to her and gasped her searching hand again.
“Why did you do it? The truth.” Mia stopped shifting.
“It was my fortune,” she said. She couldn’t look him in the eyes and Ray wisely said nothing. “A woman read my tarot cards and she told me. My ideal world was horrible.”
The way the memory still played painfully across Mia’s face again reassured Ray that she was not all gone, only mostly.
“The cards were filled with masks. All the same. Bland. Their eyes were so empty. They had no substance behind their skin. And that was my ideal world. I could never want that Ray.”
“So you didn’t want your self then. If it wanted that then you didn’t want it. And you got rid of it,” Ray said. Mia said nothing. He remembered the definition about the self and the nonself and how the self was able to distinguish between the nonself and remove it.
“Where did you get your fortune told?”
“You think we should go there?”
“We should start at the beginning.” Mia went over to her bed, knelt down and pulled her bag out from under it. Inside she placed her dictionary, her Nabokov and a Tupperware full of cranberries which were her favorite. Again, not all gone, Ray thought and with that, they left.
—By Sarah Dzida (written between 2004-2006)
Author’s Note: A few weeks ago after I published Martin & Celia, a friend asked me about it.
“This seems like something they’ve done before,” he said. And I agreed, but while I’ve always been intrigued by the scene, I’ve never known what Martin and Celia were doing there. We get right up to the point of where they open their mouths. Then ….. I don’t know. Why are they meeting? What’s their past? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Writing and stories are like that; sometimes a scene, character or idea grabs you. But then, you don’t know what to do with it. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this in her Big Magic, and I have learned that I just need to trust my process. If it’s important enough, then I’ll eventually figure it out. Much like with the above story!
I first started this when I lived in Japan; I was a young twentysomething in a different culture, language and life. I felt very apart from myself, and the story of someone losing their actual self resonated with me. I was reading lots of Vladimir Nabokov and Haruki Murakami—specifically Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—so surrealism was very much in my mind. However, I just did not know what happened after Ray and Mia met and left together. I kept writing up to 20,000 words and not getting any farther. Eventually, I decided that while I liked the idea, I just didn’t know what to do with it. For the next decade or so, I would sometimes see or hear something that would make me say: “Should I ever return to this story, then I will do X.” Almost to the exact 10-year mark, I had a dream and all my questions were answered. It was as if my mind had been processing all the information over time. The algorithm was finally done! I had all my answers! What were they you asked? Well, you’ll just have to stay tuned.