Intimations by Alexandra Kleeman Read Free Book Online Page A

replies.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Is it my kitten? I ask.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  No, no, he answers.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Is it a stop sign? asks my mother.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  It is not, he replies. Now, why in the world would I think of that?

    THAT WHICH MEETS NO RESISTANCE
    The first idea was to build a house free of weather. Mother says Father was sleepless for weeks, drawing plans for houses without doors, without windows, houses without pipes for outdoor water to enter, houses without any air inside at all.
    The first idea was to build a house free of weather. But they discovered within the removal processes a secondary origin of weather. A house with nothing to resist—no rain, no wind—finds areas of resistance within, growing frustrated with its own stasis, shuddering and crumbling around its own stable shape. He formulated a rule: The shelter that meets no resistance shall resist itself.
    It was many days ago that Father’s rule was proven accurate and, conversely, that our house proved itself to be a rule. I curled around my warmth as the morning opened itself up, peacefully, without even drops of dew or the movement of birds outdoors. A sharp whine began from within the walls and floor, making items of furniture whine too, like a bomb about to go off. The things on the walls fell off during this whining, and the things on the tables fell with the onset of a chugging, painful sound from machines somewhere within the house. Around us, two gulps softly and one spasm like an attempt to hurl something from the throat. I said that it seemed the house felt we were alien, but I was told that was unlikely. The machinery, built to withstand high winds and violent events, was simply buckling under the weight of very little: through induced outer turbulence we would regain the internal stillness that comforted our objects and our routines. The floor was on a tilt and I watched the roundthings roll away and out of the room, and the flat and square things slide more slowly toward a similar exit. In another room the refrigerator was on fire, burning up from inside, smelling at once like charred meat and plastic.
    I open the freezer door and stare at the hail. It stays still in there. It looks back at me from next to the ice cream and some frozen peas, the hailstones beginning to stick to the freezer’s artificial frost.

    THE FIRST IDEA
    From one room I looked for another room to hold me, to change the things around me and leave this sharp feeling behind me in the sharp air. A feeling might claw you open with the simple intention of freeing itself, and it would be no one’s fault. I took the black marker from the top of the table.
    One arrives at the map room, taking long steps through the shuddering hall. Charts of yesterday’s weather and today’s weather and tomorrow’s weather cover the walls and windows. This is where we make the fiction of tomorrow’s weather, which we hope to make fact, where we draw the weather on the maps, draw the future on their flat faces.
    I drew storms on the maps of yesterday and today.
    There had been no storms yesterday or today.
    The world of the future will be “storm-free, an environment designed for utter compatibility with the needs of the many, as determined through a survey reconstructing the median desires of a high-quality section of inhabitants.” It will wheeze rather than roar. Instead of the storm, there will be a pocket of mild, warm wind. Instead of the rain there will be light and additional light, filling every corner of the empty sky. Instead of hiding from it as one, we will scatter, walking aimlessly away from a central point to a peripheral.

    I drew a storm with a warm front traveling north toward this house, a low-pressure center. I marked the origin of storm activity and the counterclockwise direction of wind flow around the low-pressure center.

    LACK OF WIND
    The clouds we make with the breathing