Janie's Mind (Janie 3)

It happens with water, usually. Or sex. Janie’s mind torques and she’s left suspended between the thing at hand and a far more real-seeming life in her brain. When water’s to blame, it’s voices she hears: screams from downstairs or up, pleas for help. Final cries. She shuts off the tap water or shower and strains to hear confirmation, or if she’s let herself slip, simply shouts out, “Are you okay?” as her hair drips all over the floor and her family dully responds from their perches in front of the television, “What? Yes? What?”

During sex, it’s more complicated, because she leaves - and it's sometimes hard to get back into the room in time. She travels into living rooms with old ladies for tea where the cups and the saucers make chipping sounds and the women cluck their dry tongues against their wrinkled lips - or storm troopers pass behind a rain splattered window or hands reach up from the dirt and turn into flowers that reach out petal fingers and grab nervous looking postal workers and taxi cabs run lights. Recently, she’s wondered whether her inability to think about sex during sex is partly to blame for her incapacity to think about anything else the rest of the time. 

Flash mobs are all the rage - She’s been poked and prodded to look at improv everywhere In Grand Central - strangers - 207 of them - freeze in place creating subtle panic and discomfort and delight all at once. One has dropped his papers and left them scattered on the floor for effect - for the sense of interrupted immediacy and granular reality.  They are very still - at least on youtube. They are very thorough.

But what if they had all pulled out rabbits, Janie wonders? What if they’d had tiny joy sticks activated at precisely the same moment in their panties? And what if that caused them to stir in 104 ecstatic dances? Would more joy breed more joyful responses? If not, why not? Why not ecstasy in the witnessing of ecstasy? She knows - she does. And yet, she wonders. This particular form of joy is the last unseemly bit of privacy we’ve kept. We drink in public, and find humor in watching drunks - (so long as they are well dressed) - We watch a skinny person eat a glazed donut with more angst than we reserve for watching money change hands. But we do not watch the act ... without a screen.

Janie does not mention her fantasy about the improv to the friendly co-worker who’s pulled it up on YouTube at the office. Nor does  she vent her frustration with her brain. But she feels it. Tonight, she thinks, I will think about the man with the papers on scattered on the floor of Grand Central Station... and I'll be back from Grand Central before it's over. That’s close.