Aphantasia: A Floor Plan by Josepha Natzke
Front Stairwell
The home’s previous owners painted the stairwell a dark mauve. You and I are close to the top step. The white beam of our bed frame looms between us, its length caught on the last corner.
Since we have been married we have moved four times, and every time we move furniture together, we argue. I find myself warning you of this each time. Don’t you remember? This doesn’t go well, does it? We approach these tasks very differently. I plan, you move. I fret, you haul. We sweat and grunt at each other. The sharp edge of the bed frame digs in at the soft pink of the wall, exposing chalky plaster beneath.
We argue angles. I think the gash on the wall is your fault. There is a clouded window watching us from above, its frame the color of a thorough bruise. Also above our heads, a framed painting that the previous owners, whose names we know from the closing documents are Maximeno and Ramona, left behind: a man and a woman, dancing together. A clock looms in the painting next to them, an indeterminate reminder about time.
Lot Characteristics and Size
We bought this house because it was one of the only places in this northwest Chicago neighborhood that we could afford, and because we knew how to do the work it needed. Together we have learned how to rewire outlets, frame walls, mend drywall. Between us is a love for fixing and patching, and because of this we have always lived in houses that are in the throes of entropy. We try our best to care for them as we put them back together.
I can easily envision the many settings of my childhood: the blackberry patch by my childhood home, the cluttered corners of my bedroom.
This home sits on a lot 25 feet wide and 125 feet long on a narrow city street lined mostly with cars and litter. It was built in 1895 and looks small in comparison to the buildings on either side. On its front is a second-floor balcony unlike any we have seen in our years living in the city: a mildewed porch lined with a white railing. It sags in the middle and likely isn’t up to code. The day we close, we drag two camp chairs onto it to bask in the sun and share a lukewarm bottle of prosecco.
Bathroom
When we move in, I arm myself with sponges and sprays. I start from the bathroom ceiling and work my way down the walls, mirrors, and tiling to the floor. I remove layers of debris from the past lives lived here. There are rings of brown grease on the ceiling. I pull hair and toenails softened by water from the shower drain. There is a bottle of soap and an industrial roll of single-ply toilet paper under the sink. I gag as I wipe down the scummy corners of the shower. Despite my body’s physical reaction, though, I don’t mind too much. The drips of soap and strands of gray hair are the natural castoffs of the body. A bathroom is where you go to remove these things. It’s disgusting, but it’s also intimate.
In the 30 years that Maximeno and Ramona owned this house, they took some decorative liberties. Not only are the walls of each room painted bright colors, but this home is a time-traveling funhouse: Many things are not what they seem. The towel rack in the bathroom is actually a curtain rod with spiny finials. Here, as in other rooms, the gaps between the window and its frame are sealed with clear tape. There are hooks in the back of the door which, when I lean forward with my rag to wipe them down, are actually just nails covered in drippy coats of paint.
Living Room
Your father has been sending us scans of his childhood photos. He sends them in alarming spurts, belying a nostalgia he never shows face-to-face. There is a photograph of you and your younger sister Cornelia on a back deck, or maybe a restaurant patio. Your curls swell in the humidity. Your arm is thrown around Cornelia’s shoulder: a happy older brother. “Where was this taken?” I ask.
You examine the photo for a moment and shrug. “No clue.”
Another: You’re older, maybe 16, sitting on the ground outside. Almost every inch of your skin is covered in red mud, which has dried in the Alabama sun. I look over at you on the couch and laugh until you blush. “What the hell were you doing?”
But you have no memory of the patio, the mud, or any part of the other photos your father sends. You have never been able to recall specific memories from your childhood. Even now, in your early 30s, you forget small things that most of us remember: friends’ last names, birthdays, bars we’ve visited before. We’ve debated whether this was caused by the trauma of your parents’ divorce when you were 10, or from something else from your childhood, which you spent being ferried back and forth between them across state lines. There’s a possibility that the memory loss stems from trauma, some assault which your mind then chose to forget.
I can easily envision the many settings of my childhood: the blackberry patch by my childhood home, the cluttered corners of my bedroom. My past is an associative landscape, a carpet rolled out before me asking to be remembered. But these kinds of scenes in your past elude you. Your eyes flicker over these photos without recognizing them, learning their details for the first time.
Maximeno and Ramona painted the living room pink. Bright, pepto bismol, lacquered lip gloss, watermelon candy, texture like a drug store lipstick. A throbbing and crawling color so saturated that I’m convinced when we get up from the couch to walk to another room we must be seeing everything through a haze of green, the color on the other end of the spectrum of the red tones, like in middle school where the teacher had us all stare at a red apple for thirty seconds—I ask you, do you remember?—and when we looked at a white space on the wall afterwards, there was an apple’s silhouette, green, seared into our vision.
You have no idea what I’m talking about. You don’t remember learning this in middle school, or anywhere else. And to be fair, maybe that’s just because no one ever taught you.
Sometimes your father sends the photos in a group text with Cornelia. Others he shares only with you in an email with no subject line. Once or twice, he sends them only to me. Young versions of you, smiling wide; cheerful emissaries from your forgotten past.
Kitchen (Eat-in)
We will have to demolish most of this house to restore it, and so we should know better than to become attached to these bright walls and strange finishes. This dreamsicle palace that Maximeno and Ramona created is only our temporary home. But its delirium casts a spell over us. The kitchen is painted three shades of yellow: mustard, marigold, ochre. There is also a stenciled brick pattern behind the oven. There are also white floor-to-ceiling stripes on either side of the wall heater. There are handmade cabinets with glass fronts—but no! You tap them and it’s only a dull click with your nail. Plexiglass. This home is a facade in yelling color. Every interaction with it yields some inexplicable and precarious wonder.
The day we move in, the kitchen sink doesn’t let out any water. We wonder, panicked, if the city turned off our service. Down we go to the strip of grass between the sidewalk in front of the house and the street. We pry off the plastic cover and peer down at the shutoff valve. We try several tools to see if we can turn it one way or another. This is illegal, of course. They don’t work, because the city uses some special wrench with a proprietary number of angles to prevent exactly what we’re doing. I go back inside, stare at the sink, and unscrew the nozzle of the faucet. I remove the filter and detach the pull-down handle, and then I discover that the top of the tube is filled with tiny smooth rocks which have blocked the water flow. Once I empty them and reassemble the faucet, the water flows just fine.
On the door of the cupboard above the oven, where I decide to put baking supplies, there are countless phone numbers scrawled in pencil. There are printed pages of more phone numbers taped to the backside of the cabinet walls. Like cave paintings, they are barely legible, strokes looping over each other, some with last names, some just numbers alone. Someone stood here with a phone tucked under one ear, flicked open the cabinet door to peer inside, scanning for digits to the sound of the dial tone.
I set a bag of flour up on the top shelf. It lets out a white puff-dust out into the air. But it isn’t sitting flat. I reach underneath it and my fingers find something small and hard. It’s a single human molar, chalk-white.
Office (or Bedroom)
In our bedroom which is the color of lilacs, you set up your desk but rarely use it. While I work a remote job editing reports, you travel for weeks at a time to cities like Phoenix, Columbus, Richmond, and Denver. We rarely speak on the phone when you travel. This is an agreement we have come to following dozens of disagreements, in which I want us to speak more, and you are resentful for forgetting to call me and being blamed for it later. I’ll send texts that go unresponded and that pile up on my side of the screen, an evolving monologue. When we finally get in touch, I’m too mad to want to talk at all, which was the whole point to begin with.
You have told me you struggle to remember. The minutes of the day slip by and you forget to call.
In 2019, we were sitting on concrete behind a resale shop with leftovers in a takeout container growing cold on the ground next to us. We had been dating for a month. You told me, uncomfortably, that you didn’t often miss people. “I want to miss them,” you said, “but I can’t remember their faces.” You studied me very closely as you spoke, watching for a negative reaction. But at the time, I had none to give. In the deep well of grace that comes with new love, I knew this forgetfulness was unavoidable. It was just a part of you.
I am afraid you will find someone else in a gray corporate bar in Los Angeles. Make a drunk mistake in an Uber on the way back to your hotel.
A few months later we both travelled separately to our parents’ homes for the holidays. We exchanged flight confirmation emails. My return flight landed a day before yours. I made my way through the crowded corridors of O’Hare, wishing I didn’t have to go back to my empty apartment; wishing that magically you might be there waiting for me. Then I felt an arm slide across my shoulder and turned to see your face grinning into mine. You had rescheduled your flight to surprise me when I returned. “I missed you,” you said. Your eyes filled with tears. As much as a profession, it was, to you, a revelation.
Gradually over the course of our disagreements, we have forged a tenuous procedure in which you try to remember that I value consistency and I try to forgive you when you forget. But it’s fragile. I am trying to trust that you don’t mean to ignore my calls. Your mind, I know, is racing along other tracks in a different city, so consumed with whatever is right in front of it that it cannot think back to what and who it has left. At least, I have to believe this to be true.
Dining Room
The dining room is at the center of the house. One arched entryway opens from the living room, another from the kitchen. This room is dark red, translucent; a beating heart.
In two years we will have saved enough money to begin our renovation. We’ll replace the fraying electrical wiring and pull down these walls to rebuild them because they are uninsulated against the Chicago cold. Once we have dragged the plaster away from the dining room, we will find a huddled shape tucked at the foot of the original framing. We will brush the dust and dirt aside and carefully, like surgeons, draw out the thick spine and connected skull of a cat. There will be no other bones left. The spine is curved tight on itself.
I have a dream that you are living with caved-in teeth. I am lying with my head in your lap on a grassy hill, looking up at your face framed against the sky. You are planning something with someone else I can’t see. The top row of your teeth are bashed in, not bloody but healed over from an old wound. They fold in towards the roof of your mouth so that your top lip hangs, formless.
You look down and catch me staring. “What?” you say, impatient in a way you are not in the waking world.
“What happened to your teeth?”
You bring your hand to your face; press your fingers against the limp top lip. You feel its shape. “I don’t know. Why do you care? It’s nothing.” You pick back up on the plans with the unseen friend. The caved-in teeth are a holdover from the past, inconsequential; something you had already forgotten until I drew your attention to them again.
When you first begin to leave frequently for work, I develop a fear that during those weeks apart you will cheat on me. Not an intentional, emotional affair, but a slip up; an accident. I am afraid you will find someone else in a gray corporate bar in Los Angeles. Make a drunk mistake in an Uber on the way back to your hotel. Become intimate with one of the coworkers with whom you spend long days. Are these normal fears in a marriage, I wonder, or is this fear grounded in something real? Am I right to fear that I cease to be a partner when I am not right there in front of you?
Millwork
The windows themselves are falling apart, even though when we first looked at the house they appeared relatively new. This is something we discover only when the weather turns cold and the plastic shrinks and can no longer expand to fill and fit the frame. That Scotch tape we pulled up from each window literally held them in place.
We return to the house late one evening to find the living room window fallen completely out of its frame, lying face-down on the couch. The living room is chilly; the carpet strewn with leaves.
Ramona Room
For my office I claim the small front bedroom that faces north. Two of its walls are a dark red, one cyan, one yellow. Ramona’s name is glued onto the door with wooden craft letters: Ramona Room. I wonder if she intentionally painted the room in primary colors. There’s a smear of glitter glue on the hardwood floor. Perhaps she had a daughter or a grandchild who shared her name.
It takes me a few months to notice that mounted on the outside of the door is an old hasp where a padlock was once threaded. Why did Ramona lock this door, I wonder, and why? She had gone to great lengths to declare this room as hers and hers alone. It seems she had drawn some boundary of privacy between herself and her family. Was it to prevent curious children from getting into something they shouldn’t? But if it was children she wanted to keep out, why did she label it with her first name, and not grandmother, aunt, mother, or Mrs? Was it Maximeno himself who she wanted to keep out of this room with its color-wheel walls?
Cloud Room (Attic)
We have lived here for a few months when I take down the framed painting in the stairwell of the couple and the clock. I have decided to start painting with oils again, and I need a smooth glass surface to mix colors. I carry the heavy piece up to the attic. I plan to pry open the back of the frame to remove and use only the glass plate, but when I turn it over it has been professionally glued and papered together. Impatient to begin, I squeeze the colors onto the glass, smearing burnt sienna, ultramarine, and titanium white. They obscure the figures’ faces and blur the roman numerals once used to tell time.
It’s the house that makes me want to paint again, a practice that petered out during the beginning of the pandemic. These dizzying walls remind me how easy and joyful it is to lay colors onto white canvas and paper. I paint in a small room in the attic with a broken window and no heat source. Its walls are cerulean blue. Over each ceiling tile, Maximeno and Ramona carefully laid a peel n’ stick wallpaper with a cloud pattern, so that walking into this space through its teal-colored door is like stepping into a portal where there is no roof, only paper sky. In the mornings before starting my day job, I climb up to the room alone and paint bright green landscapes and peachy arms and legs. In January, the inside pane of the broken window grows a thick beard of frost and rattles when icy wind sweeps through. My brush runs off the sides of the canvas and paper and leaves gashes of peach, white, red in the blue walls. Like Ramona, I have my own space in this house, leaving marks of my own on its surfaces.
Front Porch
We are sitting in the teak folding chairs we found for the front porch. A blue sky is visible above our street’s tight row of homes, a clean breeze carrying the clouds.
We have some concerns. Getting stuck between the house and the earth is one of them.
We have just returned from a friend’s wedding up in the woods of Wisconsin. Now, lightly hungover, we compare our stories: the drunkest bridesmaid, the talkative aunts and their mysterious sources of wealth, delirious memories of woodfired pizza.
“I wish we’d had pizza at our wedding,” I sigh. At our wedding near my hometown in Oregon, my father had demanded we serve a “real sit-down meal,” convinced that it would be a social misstep to invite family from out of town just to feed them greasy slices of pizza. It was such an unusual line to toe for my thrifty, gentle father. I’d discussed this with you when it happened and had probably brought it up many times since, borrowing against the unspoken agreement that as your partner, I was allowed to unload the same unresolved gripe more than once over the years. But this time you look back at me, blank.
“What?” I ask.
“He really didn’t let us do pizza?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’ve told you this.”
You shake your head. “I didn’t know that. What did we eat at our wedding?”
“You don’t remember?” I can’t keep my frustration out of my voice. “But surely you remember our wedding.”
You make an exasperated sound and shift your weight in the chair. “I remember that it happened, of course. I remember that it was wonderful.”
“But you don’t remember the details?”
“I don’t remember what exactly happened. Like what we did,” you look away out at the street, “or what we ate. I don’t have any images of it in my head.”
We sit in a dead silence. I am shocked, angry, but I can’t find anything to argue against. Should I raise my fist to the sky? Shake you by the shoulders until you cough up the details of our wedding dinner?
“You know I’m like this,” you say, in a tone that’s pleading. “We’ve already been through it.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier,” I say. But because I know you are hurt, I add, “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” you reply. “Me too.”
Backyard
We discover the term “aphantasia.” I don’t remember which of us finds it first: a video online of a man who feels guilt because he doesn’t miss his mother after her recent death. The man in the video loved his mother—she was like a best friend to him—but now that she is gone, he doesn’t feel grief in the same way that the rest of his family does. This perceived lack of memory or emotion is linked with an inability to conjure mental imagery: to visually remember, for instance, faces or images.
You tell me this matches your experience. You can’t remember what your childhood home looked like, or picture your parents’ faces in your mind. You feel, in any present moment, fully focused on what is right in front of you: work, the person you’re with. The past is a set of knowledge without a visual identity, a cache of facts you know to be your own but that feel foreign and faceless.
You take a trip alone to your childhood hometown to spend a few days with Dustin, one of your closest friends from high school. You sit in his backyard around a bonfire and smoke weed. Dustin’s dogs pace behind you in the dark. You tell him that you don’t have a good memory of your childhood. You ask him if he can tell you what he remembers.
Dustin describes to you the afternoons you spent together as teenagers, stealing road signs, finding turtles in backyard ponds. You spend the evening listening, high and giggling, and pester him with questions. Where were we when that happened? Who was there? What did they do when they found out it was us? The memories live on vividly in Dustin’s head in a way they don’t in yours. You remember the big events, like the stitches Dustin needed when a rock split his foot open, like who your prom date was but not what she wore; not what the event space looked like or what songs everyone screamed the lyrics to on the dance floor. But Dustin does. Dustin’s memories roll out into the night, his baritone voice an endless tapestry. Later, you tell me you hung on to every word.
Foundation/Crawlspace I
Six months into living in this house and we still cannot locate the water shutoff. Now we need to turn the water off because the house has no laundry machine, we’ve been waiting for the day where we no longer need to haul clothing to the laundromat, and there’s enough money in our bank account to hire a plumber to install hookups and run a drain. We suspect that the shutoff valve—the one we can legally operate ourselves—is down in the crawlspace that runs the length of the house. At places, this crawlspace is two feet high; in others, the earth rises up in ridges and there are only about 12 inches between the dirt and the floor joists. The trap door is a square black vortex in the floor of the hall closet.
We have some concerns. Getting stuck between the house and the earth is one of them. Critters are perhaps not threatening, but a meeting with them is undesirable. The air and the potential that we might stir up some old mold or fungus spores as we push our way through the dirt is worrying. So is cutting our skin on rusted metal in the dark. We drive to the hardware store and pile in our cart whatever we can to barricade our bodies from unknown dangers: unisex Tyvek body suits, thick plastic gloves, plastic goggles, duct tape to seal the gaps between the gloves and the suit, respirators, and headlamps.
You go down first alone, briefly, to get the lay of the land. You return with something held loosely in your hand. Your headlamp casts a glow down on it. “Look.”
It is a goose skull. Yellow, with its long flat beak bone still attached. We cradle it in our gloved palms. How it ended up in that sealed crawlspace—how any of these strange bones came to rest in this house—is an unknown story to us; a question of the past we will never be able to answer. Its beak wobbles a little when I turn it over to examine it, held loosely by cartilage or tendons that dried up long ago.
On our wedding night, we danced so late that our hired bartender was required by law to stop serving alcohol; so late that our younger friends’ parents stood around with long, tired faces waiting to pry their children away from the music. Brian, my friend from high school, took vape hits behind the bar tent and made multiple attempts to hijack the wedding playlist with his experimental rave tracks. College friends snuck off in pairs to smoke and make out in the protective shadows of the fir trees and returned with lipstick stains and muddy shoes. The bartender threw me a wink as she set out a corkscrew on the bartop next to the wine before heading to her car.
You and I danced together for the last piece of time, our heads fitted against each other’s shoulders. Finally our friends approached us and asked, Should we break down? And we said yes, but when we pulled apart, they insisted No, please. We’ll clean. Please dance as long as you can, on this special day. They carefully folded up dirty tablecloths, blew out the candles, pulled down the string lights. We held each other as the dance floor grew slowly darker. Don’t worry about it, they told us. We love you.
Like ants sandwiched between glass, we army crawl underneath the kitchen towards the living room, ducking our heads to pass beneath the joists.
In the wake of realizations about your memory, I feel I’ve been appointed with the precious task of keeping our history accurate for both of us. In fact, I feel that this responsibility as the sole keeper of memories is a burden far heavier than those worries about cheating I had when you travelled for work. I have worried that you will grow closer or more intimate to someone else. Instead, it appears that this shared history of marriage, the features of which I recall daily, is a less stable structure than I perceived it to be, and one that asks for my assistance. I must hold up on one end while the wind whistles clean through the other. I’m unsure what to make of a life of memories that I thought were shared but are now, in a way, largely my own. I’m suddenly uncertain of my capacity to remember anything accurately; seized by an urge to write it all down on paper, or to go under hypnosis to pull out anything else from that day that still lingers in my subconscious. It seemed, until now, like an unspoken agreement that we would have each other’s stories to shape our own.
Predicted Investments
I have always found your physical movements instinctual and frenetic, like the swerve of a paintbrush. You grasp at what is right there; what is tangible. While I can easily sink into my memory, you are equipped specifically for the current moment. When we’re at the grocery store, you’re everywhere at once, running your hands along the edges of watermelon bins, swiping dust off of cans, stealing grapes from their zippered bags. You will head off with a list of items from the shopping list—maybe four—and you’ll come back with one, so taken in by your environment that you forgot the rest. You exist at the crest of rippling time, perched right there at the present moment. It seems your body and mind, whether formed by genetics, childhood environment, or something else, have made the choice without you to prioritize whatever is immediate. To focus on the colors of produce or the details on a label. They decided that it is worth casting off the past like stripping off layers of old paint in order to move more easily in present time.
Foundation/Crawlspace 2
We put on all of our gear and lower ourselves through the trapdoor. The soil is loose and foamlike: an undisturbed mix of dirt, insect waste, and fallen cobwebs that is spongy beneath our knees and elbows.
Like ants sandwiched between glass, we army crawl underneath the kitchen towards the living room, ducking our heads to pass beneath the joists. The respirator filters click with each breath. You veer off to the west wall and I stay to look at the east. I squint through the weak headlamp beam at the two metal pipes running along its edge, shuffling down their length to find the elusive valve, but one is a black gas line and the other has no valve that I can see. I turn around slowly, scooting like a seal in the sand, my feet hitting old bricks loose in the dirt, and wriggle back to wait for you close to the trap door entrance. When I shout back into the darkness to call for you, I hear nothing in return. I squint into the void, which is full of the dust motes kicked up by my shuffling limbs. I call again. Your voice comes back to me but whatever you say in return is muffled and faint. For a few moments I worry: What if you hurt yourself, or became trapped somehow between the floor joists and the earth, pinned beneath the house?
But then you are there, as if out of nowhere, a force of Tyvek movement out of the black. From your eyes I know you’re smiling. You are here. You are always right here. You possess a knack, at some precise second in time, to appear right by my side. Your plastic gloved hand reaches out for mine.
