Creature

“To be among Amina Cain’s creatures is to stand in the presence of what is mysterious, expansive, and alive. Whether these distinctly female characters are falling in and out of uncanny intimacies, speaking from the hidden realms of the unconscious, seeking self-knowledge, or becoming visible in all their candor and strangeness, they move through a universe shaped by the gravitational pull of elusive yet resilient forces—the yin-dark energies of instinct and feeling that animate creative life. It’s here that the intuitive reach of fiction meets the reader’s own quest for understanding, through the subtle beauty of living the truth of one’s experiences in the most attentive and unadorned way possible.”
PAMELA LU

“Amina Cain is a beautiful writer. Like the girl in the rear view mirror in your backseat, quiet, looking out the window half smiling, then not, then glancing at you, curious to her. That is how her thoughts and words make me feel, like clouds hanging with jets, and knowing love is pure.”
THURSTON MOORE

When I first moved here, I lived in a friend’s room in a loft. I had never lived in a loft before, and it was strange to do so in such a quiet place. Downtown was unlike any downtown I had ever been in: its emptiness surprised me, but it was empty only of certain kinds of people. They were around, but they lived on the sidewalk and in tents. And stores and businesses existed, but not the kind tourists want to shop at. The month—August—was hot, the way I like weather to be, and in the evenings when it cooled down I rode my bike through the neighborhoods next to mine, and sometimes to a cornfield that someone had planted nearby. I would get off my bike and look at the plants, at the cobs of corn hidden in their pale green husks. I liked that the field was there, with the city’s buildings so close to it. I liked that I was there.

Across the street from where I lived was a school of architecture, and the huge, dusty lot in front of the long building comforted me like the cornfield did. The building had once been a train station, and the friend whose room I was subletting had gone to this school. Even with all this comfort, though, I felt like a weird person. Sometimes in the loft I could barely hold my head up as I talked to people. I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I was happy, and settled in my new life, but I was also limp, and maybe still shell shocked by the anxiety I had regularly felt before moving. The people who lived in the loft had been there for a while, and I was an outsider who had come to stay in the empty room.

In the living room area, several aloe plants sat on a table in front of large windows overlooking the school, and a motorcycle was parked in the corner. There were also several desks scattered around. Once in a while I sat at one of the desks to write, but mostly I worked in my bed.

One night a guy who lived in a tent several blocks away from the loft said to me, “You don’t look like a confident person.” Was my lack of confidence apparent to people on the street? I didn’t feel limp when I was alone, when I was walking around the city. I felt good then.

Summer extended itself into September and its sun was harsh and healing; evenings were extremely pleasurable. It’s said you can’t run away from your problems, and I knew that was true—I still had some problems, but others had completely disappeared. Some part of life was closed to me, but another part was open. I had nothing to do really, except go to yoga classes and the grocery store. Those things usually took a whole afternoon or evening, so in doing them I felt I had been out around the city, had accomplished something. And I liked doing them. The yoga studio was small and clean; and in the bathroom, instead of disposable paper towels, neatly folded washcloths were set out on a shelf. I had already lived an adult life in my old city; why was I now living a life so different from the one before?

In the loft the walls didn’t reach the ceiling, so I was never alone. One of my housemates also studied architecture at the school across the street, the way my friend had, but did most of her work from home. Her room was right next to mine and I could hear her move around, even in her bed. Our other housemate left in the mornings and returned at night. When he was at home, he worked on drawings at one of the desks while wearing headphones. He also ate there, and watched things on his computer.

Sometimes I talked on the phone, knowing my housemates could hear what I said. I talked about a project I was helping to organize in my old city, and I talked about how life was going for me in the new one. I wanted to advertise to my housemates that I had lived in a place where I had had a job, and also still had responsibilities, even if I had none where I was now living.

During that time, I saw a movie about a woman who lived out of her car with her dog because she didn’t have any money, and then lost the dog while traveling through Oregon. When she lost her dog, I couldn’t stop crying. I’ve always felt a lot for animals, but I also related to the woman who lived out of her car. I thought I might be like her.

One day I drove to the middle of nowhere with my friend whose room I was living in. He was home on a visit from Dubai. Once we had been very close, but those days were gone. Still, we attempted to spend time together.

The sun was unimaginably harsh; I drove while my friend slept in the car. When he woke up we stopped and got out to climb some rock formations that looked like they were crumbling, even though they were stuck to each other. Together the rocks formed a microclimate for plants that grew in the shade they made, and for animals who could also survive there, because of the shade. Short trees had sprouted up, and delicate plants. Little squirrel-mouse animals scurried around, though they weren’t quite squirrels, or mice. We sat under the shade of one of the trees to watch them. We didn’t let our arms or our legs touch.

At night the air turned from hot to warm and then it got chilly.

“We don’t know each other,” I said.

“Yes, we do.”

“We’re more like brother and sister now.”

When we went down in elevation on the ride home it got warm again. There was no water around, but I felt it, like we were descending into a large, shallow sea.

At home, I crawled into bed and read a story I had read many times before, that I had taught in some of my classes. There was something in that story I wanted to sink into: the rich darkness of a barn, the putting the hand out into that darkness to see what it touched. I was no longer close to one friend, but I was becoming close to another. I thought about this second friend while pulling the covers over me. I lay all the way down, covering my head and face. You are a writer, I thought. “Dante!” someone yelled somewhere outside the building. Four flights up in the middle of a desolate downtown, that is where you are. I closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep. Instead I saw the darkness, and then rock formations running into that darkness.

What I didn’t understand was how my friend and I could have become distant when we were probably more interesting people than we had been when we were close; though I was weaker than I had been when we were close, and he was stronger. This probably had something to do with it. When I thought of the second friend I felt comforted. The first time I felt this was when I had stopped by to visit him and he was asleep. I knocked on his screen door and he woke up to let me in. He wore a
churidar
and a pink shirt that was starting to tear on one of the shoulders. He got back into bed and I sat in his desk chair next to him and we talked about a book he was reading.

I continued to wander around the city, absorbing something from it. I had very little money, but I’ve always identified with not having much, so it didn’t bother me, except when I couldn’t afford to make credit card payments. One evening I rode my bike through a neighborhood where cheap clothes were sold. I bought myself a dress for $9.99. It was pretty—turquoise with small black polka dots all over it, and sleeves that rose stiffly from my shoulders. I wore it to a museum, where in one of the galleries I saw four ornate wooden chairs facing a whipping post. Lights shone on the chairs and on the post where the wood had splintered and turned old. On a gleaming table sat a pair of slave shackles surrounded by intricately carved silver vases. An artist had found these things in a historical society in Maryland and exhibited them there together. Now they were here. I touched my dress, its cheap material.

“What do you want from this city?” my friend had asked me in the car on our way home.

“Nothing. Just to live in it.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true.” With no traffic on the freeway my friend drove fast, much more so than I would have. “What do you want from Dubai?”

“I want what everyone wants.”

I looked at him and saw that he had a scratch on his face. “Which is what?” I asked.

He never answered.

When I left the museum it was starting to rain, and a guy called me over to his tent. It was a simple triangle, like the one my parents and I had taken camping when I was young.

“What?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I’d like to invite you in.”

“Why?”

“You seem like a nice woman.”

“I am.”

“Your arm bends in a weird way,” he said.

I held my arms up in the rain. “I know, it always has. Both of them.”

“Are you going to come in?”

“No.”

“Your loss.” He unzipped the tent door and bent down to crawl inside. I could see part of a blue sleeping bag and a few magazines stacked on top of it. A lantern hung from the middle of the ceiling and the guy turned it on. “Have a good night,” he said.

“You too.”

Back at the loft I stood looking out of the window, at the school, its long shape extending into the darkness, at my arms, my shoulders in my dress. I made it look like my arm was as long as the school.

Later, when I had lived here for a while, my second friend and I visited an orchid estate. It was finally cold outside, but the greenhouse was warm. Water droplets collected on the plastic covering and window panes. I walked around looking at the orchids, at their ways of being in air. Some of them seemed like they were holding it, like they were spoons or bowls; some faced the air, slender prongs pointing up, slender fangs pointing down; some pushed through or away, small, strong flaps with light yellow ridges or dark red spots. I looked at the plants for a long time. Then I sat down in a chair and wrote in my notebook. I noticed it become evening. When I finally saw my friend again, he was carrying two orchids.

In the car, we situated the plants in the back seat so they wouldn’t fall over, and rolled the windows down so they would get some circulation.

“Can we drive by the university?” I asked. “I’d like to see what the campus looks like.”

“Sure.”

We drove through the campus where the lights from the buildings shone out onto the grass. The buildings were new with hardly anything to distinguish them from each other, except that some of them had more floors than the others, and in front of the library was a sculpture that looked like a coat hanger. A few students were sitting on it. I tried to imagine myself teaching there.

“That’s enough,” I said. “I just wanted to have an idea so I could picture it in my head.”

It felt like something weird was going to happen, but nothing happened. I turned around and looked into the backseat. The orchids were upright; everything was the same. I thought back to the period of time when it had taken me half an hour to eat a piece of toast.