She has spent her life researching it, exploring it, in the belly of the search for it. Her dog is dead. Her dog of twelve years, her dog of her childhood, gone. Fifteen years ago. Routines became routine, but underneath it she always felt that there was something.
She tried Prozac but got sort of bored and happy, then she cut all fried foods out of her diet, then she began to collect albums by Dionne Warwick, then she began to date, then she began to get married, then she tried to pretend that she was content, then she began to admit to herself that she was not happy, then she began to get a divorce, then she began to collect Norman Rockwell figurines, then she bought a hammock, which broke, and then she began to date men much younger than herself, and then she got a job as a pastry chef, and then she was fired when she accidentally activated the Ansul system, flooding the whole kitchen in billowing white foam and thus preventing food from being served in the restaurant for the rest of the night, then she began to feel depressed again, then took a tai chi class which she felt would relax her, then she got a job on the riverboat and she began to deal the cards.
The job on the riverboat gave her for a short time a feeling of precision and control. Her responses became automatic, and every moment she was dealing, she was concentrating solely on the cards and the table, and she became a transmitter of the laws of blackjack. She made good money at it. The cards she dealt were random, and she began to understand her life in this way. The cards were random, but the odds were in favor of the dealer. She began to think that the laws of probability, which in the casino became absolute, held a degree of sanity in it that she could cling to. But then she started having nightmares about flat royalty, and her legs began to feel tired from so much standing, so she quit.
The problem was that probability was not really pattern, wasn’t really in reach, wasn’t something she could hold onto. It wasn’t clearly what she wanted, what she wanted was unclear. She got a job at an office that was steady and reliable and she put things into files in alphabetical and topical order, and then she began to add up numbers and subtract numbers and multiply and divide. After a while she began to think of herself not as one self but as several selves, a rolling barrel of voices competing with one another for the attention of the computer screen that she thought of as her person. The numbers had certainty on the computer screen, because the numbers were money, and the money bought things and people used things so the numbers were there, they were certain. The numbers made sense. But then she began to measure things, her height, her weight, the distance from her cubicle to her car, her age to salary ratio, her credit limit, her vision, the distance from Jupiter to Mars, the number of strokes with which she brushed her teeth on any particular morning. Finally, she broke a nail when she was doing some filing, and the file she was putting away at the time was file number 0286, a bill for $28.60, and 286 was the exact number of strokes she had used to brush her teeth that very same morning, so she quit the office job.
She is sitting on the couch now, and she rises to feed the parakeet. It quiets the bird, and she returns to the room where she keeps the wheel that she bought when she had a small cash windfall after she burned her hand badly in a deep frier accident that was not her fault. She has only been able to make things that are very abstract, and most of what she has pulled out of the kiln has seemed ambiguous even to her, but it gives her something to do with her hands.
-Scott Rettberg
