I began to wander and found myself in a wing of photographs. A hundred or more black-and-white pictures surrounded me. No landscapes or bowls of fruit. Every image was human. These were the kinds of photos I’d wanted to take before my parents had shut down my experiments. I stared at the high contrast, deep shade, and blazing light. In one a naked woman lay across a grassy hill, half in and half out of the sun; in the next shadows ran like streams across the speckled skin on the back of a wrinkled hand.
And these weren’t just pictures about the beauty of the human body; the spirits looking out of those faces shocked me. An old woman waiting on her porch steps, her eyes heavy with pain. A boy balancing on the bow of a broken rowboat in the sand, flexing his skinny arms and staring down the camera with defiance. They were so fearless about who they were.
I found out how things worked through trial and error. Sometimes I decided to go somewhere, like when I was back in front of the Waterhouse painting in the blink of an eye because I thought of being there, and other times I found myself in a different place without warning or knowing why.
That’s how I landed beside a podium that held an enormous dictionary. I knew the place even though I’d been there only once—the huge main branch library downtown. I came to a story time there with my first grade class.
I moved through the aisles between millions of volumes and realized I could read anything I wanted now, uncensored. It wasn’t until I tried to open the cover of a novel on the new arrivals table that I discovered I was wrong. I had to read the back covers of books propped up on book stands and half articles visible on the pages of magazines left open on the couches in the lobby—it was impossible to grasp anything or even turn a page. Eventually I was brave enough to lean over an old man who sat in a study carrel and a woman at the long table in the computer wing and read silently along with them. They weren’t reading what I would have chosen myself, but still I liked the quiet and the colors of floor-to-ceiling books.
I visited the dance studio where I’d spent hours taking ballet. I hadn’t had lessons in months and I missed it. I loved how the mirrors created a world that went on forever; perfectly matched wooden bars and floors stretched into infinity, with company after company of girls calmly breathing, bending, stretching in unison.
I could see every detail as clearly as if I were lifting onto pointe myself. But I wasn’t really there. I proved this to myself by rushing toward the mirrors on the far wall, coming smack up against them without ever appearing in the reflection. I suppose I could have continued on through the mirror, but the idea frightened me.
Once I ended up at the Reed Theater. I stood in the center aisle, a dozen rows from the front, watching West Side Story. My parents refused to rent the movie for me; said it was inappropriate. But I had watched it on TV one day when I was home from school with a cold and my mom was at a church committee meeting. I was twelve, and I cried so hard I caught the hiccups.
Now I floated up onto the stage and turned back to see what the audience looked like as Maria and Tony sang a duet. The light from the stage turned everyone into angels—a thousand gold faces in the dark.
I went to a forest many times. There was no sign of humankind, though there were tiny bugs, camouflaged birds, and chittering squirrels. I darted between tree trunks and leapt over bushes. I jumped streams and climbed to the tops of trees to look down on the forest canopy. I threw myself into the thick of the woods to swing onto a branch and perch there like an elf. Since I weighed nothing I didn’t even bend the slenderest twig.
To my surprise, I once found myself back in my old house, in my old bedroom, at my vanity, where the mirrored closet doors behind showed me a view of the empty chair where I sat.
I froze, terrified, not because I wasn’t reflected, but because something was moving by the bed. The gentle robot of my body pulled