How You Look at Things

Looking intently out of the train window as the train gathered speed, keeping her gaze focused outward, not fixed on anything but the far horizon, the images began to blur. Aria sighed contentedly as the world in front of her swirled into the swirl of color and shadow that she knew it was. Being in motion was one way to see things as they were—twisted, churning, blending together.

It probably wasn't the best image to have at that moment. Going to a new place, a new job was supposed to elicit emotions of excitement and enthusiasm, to be thinking of new beginnings and the future that lay ahead, for her to take.

And yet, the view out her window confirmed her suspicions about the universe. You could see things so many ways and it wasn't clear that any particular view was more correct than any other.

Now, watching the new and old whirl together in a sometimes stomach-wrenching way, she knew that have any expectations was foolish, and an ill-founded to move to a new thing. Moving itself would jumble her visions for a time. The new job would be thrilling at first, but eventually, it would all settle.

No, she thought. Things didn’t settle. They became emulsified, blended into everything else. It was just that no one saw it that way. They thought new things were different, but they were only things that her mind hadn’t related to the rest, seen as part of the blend of things.

She’d meet new people and have new experiences, but soon enough that newness would fade. It had to. Newness made things stand out, seem different. But they weren’t. It would take a little time to see clearly, but after a time, she’d see her new job as she had her old one, with good and bad qualities, up and down moments.

These thoughts tempered any enthusiasm, muted the joy, without killing it.

The thing she did actually look forward to (and hearing the words look forward to echoing in her brain amused her for their inadvertent accuracy) was new vistas. They’d last for a while. She would have new windows to peer through. New ways to see the world, just as now, if she chose to, she knew full well that she could stop staring (fixedly) at the horizon and let her eyes collect momentary glimpses of passing objects, rendering them clear.

Doing that would also make their ordinariness crystal clear. She found too much clarity in her view of the world. It made the dullness of life far too vivid. The perpetual motion of the people, places, objects swirling by her now, emulsified (the word pleased her, stuck her as apt and a word to rely on) by the way she chose to view it, through the window that hurtled along the tracks, fascinated her. It lacked shape, giving her permission to give it whatever shape she chose.

Being in control, running the universe, even in this small way, struck her as delicious, even though her eyes began to ache from the strain of not focusing on objects.

And there was a curious thought. How could not be doing something (focusing, in this case) strain your eyes? It seemed as odd as straining a muscle by not working out.

Nonetheless, her eye muscles insisted on growing tired and she had to sit back in her seat and relax her intense control over seeing. The dull world, no longer restrained, jump into view.

“Lovely country, isn’t it?” the woman across from her asked.

“I suppose,” she said. Although she’d been wrapped up in the countryside blurring by, she had no idea what she’d been looking at in the sense most people meant it.

“It all depends,” the woman said. She was tall enough that even seated, she looked down on Aria.

“Depends?”

“It all depends on how you look at things, of course.”

“I don’t understand.

She pointed out the window. “You can see straight rows of yellow corn stalks or see how the entire cornfield turns into a tremendously potent swirl of silky haze,” the woman said.

The comment, one she might have made, startled her. She struggled to form the question she wanted to ask, but the train slowed. They approached a station and the woman stood, smoothing her floral skirt.

“My stop,” she said. “Just remember how much things depend on how you look at them. But never blend things through broken glass. Refractions can be tricky. They are unreliable and make the game unsafe. You can be trapped in them.”

Sitting in her seat, feeling rather stunned, Aria watched the woman leave. Having read Aria’s mind, adding bits and pieces of her own to the jumble of thoughts, she stepped off the train. An uncomfortable emptiness rushed in to fill the space where the woman had been.

For the rest of the ride to the city where she had rented a room, where she would start her new job, she tried to make sense of the woman’s words, but like the emulsified scenery, they defied her logical brain. With the scenery, that was the point, of course, but the enigmatic words, words that touched on her innermost, most secret thing—her vision of the world—should conform to something.

Shouldn’t they?

She managed some fitful sleep before arriving at her station and making her way to the small hotel where she’d arranged a room. Eventually, she’d find an apartment, maybe a coworker would be looking for a roommate, something. For now, the dullness of a cheap hotel was her life.

The room was on the third floor. But it had a window. Dropping her bag on the bed she went to look out. The view was of an alley. The afternoon light cast a yellowish tint on the world below. “My scenic view,” she laughed, noting two half-filled dumpsters, back doors of buildings with bars, giving the long wall the illusion of a fortress.

The window itself, filthy with the grime of who knew how long, had an interesting configuration. The large center consisted of a single, hinged pane that would open outward, a tiny bit, to admit air. On either side of this pane, three small glass panes were arranged vertically, also set in a pitted metal frame.

She counted them carefully. Three and three and one made seven panes. A propitious number. Each had aged differently. One of the small ones had obviously been replaced at some point; another had a crack running diagonally across it that caught the yellow afternoon light and turned it into a rainbow.

The cracked pane, the way it danced with the light, made the window perfect. The strange colors it projected on the ugly beige walls, made her otherwise dull room perfect.

Kicking off her shows, she lay on the bed, on her back to watch the colors move over the filthy ceiling. It had been shiny spackle once and now probably more textured cigarette smoke. But the light sparkled.

Much later, when the sunlight vanished and the room returned to its dullness, she went to a diner for a meal. The city offered her sparkle and light. Flickering neon signs, soft sodium street lights, the harshly bright primaries of traffic control lights at intersections interwove into intricate patterns.

This too would soon not be new, novel, or interesting. Flashing of color, artificially constructed, could be complex, but her brain would sort it out, untangle its threads far too soon.

She ate alone, sitting at a white Formica table with a clever pattern that made it look fly spotted. The food was all right and she let the still new sights and sounds around her embrace her.

On returning to her room, closing the door, its dullness hit her hard. Without the afternoon light, it was a dismal, squalid place.

Ups and downs and all arounds.

She went to the window and peered out. A single streetlight at the end of the alley and a few lights over doorways cast long, monochrome shadows that distorted the scene. Moving to one side of the window she could see down some distance into it as if the alley were a canyon. From the other side, she could see the opening onto the street and people moving, car headlights and taillights flashing.

Moving back to the other side again, she caught a glimpse of something moving. This time the object was the blur and she stood still. As her eyes adjusted to the heavy contrasts created by dim, unfocused lights, she saw golden, glowing eyes.

It was a cat. An alley cat, of course. It had jumped from some ledge (the blur she’d seen) onto the metal top of a dumpster to curl up and stare back at her.

Aria struggled to focus on it, make out detail. For a cat, it seemed oddly formed.

Then she realized she was staring through the crack in the pane. It divided the cat, fractured it, distorted it wonderfully. Closing one eye and moving her head, she could shift the pieces of the cat, move it around within the alley.

The cat, in self-defense, perhaps, tilted its head and yawned.

Aria’s raised a finger to the glass and touched it with her red fingernail. She had no reason to touch it, but no reason not to, and when she did, it wiggled. Well, half of it did. The glass was loose in the frame, freed by whatever had cracked it.

Now, when she tapped (ever so lightly) on it, her nail making a clicking sound, the image danced, and parts of the cat moved in different directions—and then back again, of course, as they do when you alter your perspective.

“I see a cat,” she said, tapping the glass. “I see it wiggling in ways cats do not move.”

But seeing was believing.

She stooped and looked through another pane, a discolored but unbroken pane, and sighed with the dullness of this cat. It couldn't, after all, possibly be the same cat.

She confirmed that notion by looking once again through the broken pane. Yes, this was an entirely different cat, possibly a different species of cat. It bent in the middle and twisted grotesquely yet looked entirely comfortable with its contortions.

She tapped the glass again, eager to see another cat or another incarnation of this one.

The top half of the pane wiggled more now. It seemed to be getting looser but the cat benefited from it immensely. This cat was nothing like any cat anyone had ever seen. Even motion, fast, high-speed motion couldn’t emulsify something this new, this different.

Of course, Aria knew it was all the same cat—sort of. But things were often how you saw them. You saw something as good or bad, frightening or exciting, and that’s what it was. Seeing her new cat this way, well, that’s how it was.

A noise in the hall made her turn, face the room. The dullness she was made her stomach ache. When correctly viewed, she was on an adventure, but it didn’t look adventurous now.

But her cat, her marvelous cat…

She turned back and her heart pounded. The cat was gone. Looking through the broken pane and wiggling it, she could see the cat's universe, but not the beast, her twisted beautiful cat.

She opened the window as far as it would go and stuck her nose through, pressing against the frame, trying to see the cat. If she could just spot it in the normal world, she might be able to locate it in the beautiful, refracted world.

Her eyes burned from the effort to see into the alley, to catch sight of her cat. Her breathing was harsh as she pressed her face and hands hard against the window. She strained against it, trying to move it another fraction of an inch, shift the window enough to see a bit further up and down her marvelous alley.

The yowl of a cat rose from another dumpster with an open lid. Aria’s pulse raced with excitement and her hands slammed against the window as she focused there and heard it scrambled in the garbage for a moment before bursting clear.

She cheered and the window flexed, its ancient metal frame bending. The broken pane fell out, the top piece falling into the alley, to crash on the pavement. The lower piece fell inward and shattered on the floor of her room.

Aria stood frozen, with her gaze locked on her cat, as the other window panes gave way, and the window came completely apart. Her view of the cat became kaleidoscopic; she put a hand to her face and found her forehead was bleeding. Shards of glass seemed to be everywhere. Her hands wanted to come up and protect her face, but her eyes demanded to see.

Fearful beauty, she said as her alley began to emulsify, as things did. Happily, the cat remained aloof from the process. It stared at her, its body moving in many impossible directions, yet remaining a cat body.

It all depends on how you look at things.

Needing to touch the cat, to reassure herself that she shared its reality, Aria leaned forward. But she misjudged the distance, forgot the laws of physics controlling the space between herself and the cat. And she had totally ignored differences in altitude and temperament.

With her face studded with shards of glass that made the world an incredibly beautiful place no matter how she looked at it, Aria tumbled out of the place the window had once been and joined her cat, the real cat, in the alley.