Back then, we called it a chip-chip. Better names have come along in time, but it made enough sense in its senselessness.

“It’s about your book,” she said.

I nodded, maybe there was an, “Eh-heh.”

“Yeah,” she said, kind of throwing her body forward like it was new to her. The stains on her teeth played the full length of the field in the light, the way her clothes fit, too, the sores, even. All of them played, but none so much to make her ugly…more like imposing, plus there was the whole gracelessness. “I was wondering about the part where Wills puts the hat in the box, the part with the shovel and the corncobs in the barn…I don’t know.”

I said something like, “It’s OK,” some lie or another.

Some insignificant darkness, too true to be mundane—just weird enough to make it seem important: chip-chip, that is. We had a name for it because once you started seeing it you’d see it all the time, till you stopped, that is, seeing it, that is.

“I don’t know,” she said.” “I mean.”

“Right,” I said, gathering my things, avoiding eye contact.

How could she be so clunky? I wanted to drop something, something heavy. Maybe if I broke one of our feet it would be over.

“Wills, I mean. It doesn’t seem to fit his…you know…[vacant smile].”

“Oh.”

I’m sure she kept talking. She must have. I must have said something, too. Maybe not, though. It’s possible she kept talking all the way from the lobby to the bed with no sign from me beyond a failure to make her leave. Whatever the case, she kept talking, and I eventually heard her, again. I was inside her, I think, kind of looking around in her eyes for something familiar enough to care about by proxy, when she said, “Why the hat? Why the box?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you stand in a spot that’s not the spot beside it?”

She laughed. I wished she’d take it back despite knowing better.

By the window of the suite, the one looking out over the park, she stood in her underwear and pretended comfort. “I was thinking,” she said, and I tuned out. When she bent to inspect the minibar, her eyes hung in place, the lights of some distant pair of dirigible docking poles occupying the same space with similar predictable brightness.

“Let’s head over there,” I said.

“Where?”

I pointed at the lights, favoring the one to my left.

“Why?” she said, already dressing for the trip.

“Leave your clothes,” I said. “Let’s go there and fuck or something.”

“OK.”

Back then, whenever that was…back when, maybe…we called it a chip-chip. Jung had a better name for it, but things stick how they do. Meaningless and valid—scary, I guess. There was no “there,” no tower with its eye-blink light. There were tons of them, but the significance was lost with the change in perspective. The urge to fuck had fled, anyhow, replaced itself with disappointment in the book and in answering stupid questions too meaningful to dismiss. “Stop,” I said, and the driver did. “Let’s walk for a minute,” I said, and we did, she and I. It was cold in our robes, but we managed alright.

“Your questions are the most pointless things I’ve ever known,” I said.

She nodded an agreement. “You just have to look for things, sometimes,” she said, “things that sometimes, I don’t know, aren’t, you know, there.”

“Yeah,” I said. Then, after a time of walking, I added, “It’s because I did that once. I don’t remember why. I just remember doing it—the hat, box.”

She was disappointed and right for it. “Can we go back?” she said.

I told her no, that she could do what she wanted but that I’d peaked years earlier, that I was done, pretty much.

She took the car. I walked. The night persisted, ambivalent toward her absence and my presence.

Timestamp: 01.11.08 at 01:22 PM. Filed under: Fiction.