Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

TO PLAY WITH IN THE TRICOLOUR CUSHIONS! I JUST ADORE PLAYING WITH COLOUR AND LIGHT, TOM, AS YOU KNOW, AND CUSHIONS ARE THE MOST FUN FOR ACCENTING ANY ROOM IN THE HOUSE!”

Unforgivable. There were monsters in this story. Not story. Right there behind the mirror, in the wings, in the mirror, coming out of the mirror. Look. Don’t look. It doesn’t matter. Nobody cares what you do. You are nothing. You might want to fix that. Wisdom is caught by touching wise people, isn’t that Plato? Or did he say it was fucking wise people? Fuck Plato. Something is caught that way—you know it the moment you’re swimming in it, full of it, shit up to your eyes, in your mouth, in your nose. We are made of this shit, this stuff. We have to keep eating it to stay alive. Why? Fuck eating. Fuck breathing. Fuck this stupid, badly drawn face.

Fortunately at this point a ten-ton anvil falls out of the sky and hits you and it all goes black. This isn’t a tragedy, you see, it’s a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Voices over smooth things along into the next scene, the big reveal.

“WELL THE LIGHT THROUGH THIS FRENCH DOOR IS JUST INCREDIBLE! I HAVE TO SAY, I PERSONALLY LOVE WHAT YOU’VE DONE HERE, ROBIN! IT’S BARELY RECOGNIZABLE! BUT NOW IT’S TIME FOR THE MOMENT OF TRUTH. LET’S SEE WHAT NICK AND FRANCIS THINK OF THEIR NEW DREAM HOME!”

—

Outside, a dark and empty moon washed over Paris. I had no idea the Seine had burst its banks until the early hours, when our hotel was suddenly pealing with the clamour of alarms. We had been sleeping in the path of the rising waters. I came to myself in my underwear, in a tub of cold water tinged with blood.

I jumped out, terrified and freezing, and wrapped my body in a hotel towel. Why are they always fucking white? I stained it.

I couldn’t see any open wounds, but by now I could hear the bustling outside my door over the static from my TV. Palpably nervous but defiant staff were hurrying up and down the corridor, as though something monstrous were chasing them, but they still wanted it known that they resented the imposition. A Parisian boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen was knocking hard on each door, repeating his message over the protests of angry English philosophers.

“Mesdames, messieurs, il faut sortir. Immédiatement, s’il vous plaît. C’est une urgence. Vous devez sortir. Go outside now please. Oui, monsieur, maintenant s’il vous plaît. Outside now. Merci, madame.”

Faced with a door that didn’t answer, he simply swiped in with his master key. As he seemed to appreciate by instinct, sometimes words only make a bad situation worse. One way or another, he sent whatever he found inside each room out shivering into the grey and terrible morning.

—

Onwards. Order and method. Trajectory and momentum. No worst, there is none. That’s Manley Hopkins. Here! creep, / Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind…That’s manly, Hopkins. Whether or not the worst is a real thing, we have plenty of language for it. Pis aller is one way of saying “last resort” or “worst-case scenario.” Come to think of it, Piss Alley was the worst place in Cambridge. Could be a coincidence, but I doubt it.

Maybe there’s no worst because things keep getting worse forever. Or it could be that they are always equally bad. The future will resemble the past; more generally, the unobserved will resemble the observed. This right here is the most basic principle of scientific reasoning. It’s so basic it’s not even science: it’s what science needs, if it’s to get started. David Hume said it was just a habit of thought, an assumption, the uniformity of nature. What reason is there for believing in it? That it’s been true in the past? Come on. Yet if this principle falls away everything collapses. Things that stay the same, persisting through change, are the steel rods that keep the edifice erect. Keep the universe from disintegrating. Constants. Gravity. The atomic weight of hydrogen. Cambridge. Fun fact: Cambridge change is a philosopher’s name for what happens to you when you stay the same while something else changes.

This is basic in a different way: what’s valuable is about what we value, not the other way around. I am never going to be Humberton’s equal, he knew that. What he had seen in the bar that night was one of the good girls. We are young, white, cis, straight (or single will do), well-spoken. Very clever, very quick on our feet. We have a strong but quiet record of publications in mid-ranked journals. We dress conservatively, feminine but not sexy. We “stay out of politics.” We’re skilled at admin and willing to do painfully large amounts of it. We are incredibly useful, because you can hire one of us to prove that you are not gender-biased. Good girls walk an infinitesimally fine line. Two-dimensional. We all know that, even if we don’t know we know it, but what isn’t obvious until you get there is that the line doesn’t go very far. It’s made of flat floating stones that are falling away, bit by bit, day by day, in slow motion, imperceptibly drawing on towards the day when they will deposit you into the sea of lava beneath with the excoriating logic of time, gravity, and something else altogether.

—

Back in Seattle the fall term started. I went for an ill-advised afternoon beer at the UW Club with Dean Crawley. I asked for the meeting, and suggested we go there because the view out the window is supposed to be impressive, and that means you always have an excuse not to look at the person you’re with. I don’t care for the place, nor for the beer.

The vibe, says one of the Club’s reviews on Yelp, is elite. That’s all you need to know, really: someone on Yelp says that.

I don’t know what I