Totem

Louise would never forget the morning she had woken up to find her home in a state of dramatic stillness and of perfect architectural proportions. Everything was as it should be, and yet this was the most troubling thing of all. I will explain shortly why this was a disturbing morning for Louise, who had never in her 10 years living on the 5th floor of her studio apartment on La rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, woken up to such a balanced interior ratio. She did not open her eyes to a ceiling that was only a finger’s length from the tip of her nose, or conversely, an intimidating 2.6 meters away which as you’ve probably guessed is almost the exact hauteur sous plafond. All of her limbs were rationally contained well within the perimeters of her mattress, cradled and centered so that none of her body parts were involuntarily spilling onto the floor, nor was her minuscule form swimming in an endless sea of sheets. Everything else that had legs was intact—coffee table, dresser, lamp, stool, and arm chair all stood motionless, feet firmly planted on the slightly slanted wooden floor. Even the tiny package wrapped in brown paper that she had mistakenly received in the mail weeks ago was propped in the center of the coffee table, adamantly unopened. The little brown paper box was rather standard, maybe even a little boring, but Louise found it extremely suspicious that the appellation of the intended receiver was Lucifer Iblis. She considered this an omen and refused to open, discard or even destroy the box. Though the sealed and unmoved package was a harbinger of strangeness, it had with time become a consistent oddity that had conformed comfortably to the living space, and was therefore no longer an oddity at all. In fact, I am digressing from the actual peculiarity of that morning, which was that everything was exactly as it had never been before: upright, in place, and well ordered. Many things startled Louise that morning but none more so than the Japanese Noh mask of Magojiro that hung stably on the wall across from her little kitchenette. She noticed the woman’s beguiling smile from an angle she had never seen before since Louise was used to greeting the mask either by pulling it from underneath her bulky appendages, or seeing it from the bottom up, which fascinated her every time it so happened to be that kind of morning. What I mean by that kind of morning, and by all of this you see, is that Louise’s apartment had a strange way of scaling up and down overnight, causing her to wake up filling far too much space or barely any at all. This wasn’t an Alice in Wonderland situation though, because Louise hadn’t eaten either side of a mushroom, nor did she change sizes, it was the little studio on La rue de Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth that would shrink and grow, while Louise was merely an experiencer of the fluctuations.

She had grown accustomed to the studio’s oscillating tendencies and even enjoyed the element of surprise, not knowing under which interior circumstance she would wake up to every morning. The altering proportions of her home became part of her life’s comfort and certainties; it brought her an unusual sense of stability in an ever-changing world. On days where she woke up to an enlarged apartment, she would take the opportunity to clean the most difficult to reach corners with a cotton bud that felt like an enormous spin scrubber. She always kept paintbrushes and oil colors next to her bed, because on other days, everything shrunk and her voluminous body would occupy space in every cubic meter. Louise would use this time to paint animals, plants, and insects on the ceiling, some appearing as combinations like a bird with a human body or a fox with butterfly wings.

After 10 years of living in a wavering space, Louise was disturbed to wake up to a common sized studio, where everything was in its place and of the right size. She felt a dizzying stir in her belly that morning, much like the sensation one gets when looking down from great heights, and she couldn’t shake the uneasiness it caused her. The scaling stopped permanently after that morning, leaving Louise feeling like an integral part of her being was lost forever. Her life’s structure had become so intrinsically linked to the magic of the space she lived in. She felt a strong kinship to her mystical apartment, as its unpredictable nature kept her connected to her own spirit.

Nothing ever shrunk or grew again in the studio on the 5th floor of La rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, where the ceiling filled with guardian animals, plants and insects watched over the quiet furniture.