A break in the wall.
If we ignore the ontological difference, the immense nothingness between the thing in its being and the being of the thing, we will miss the possibility of our own establishment as human beings in the existence in which we are immersed.

—Ricardo Escarduça on 1984, an exhibition by Teresa Milheiro

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We are at a modernist art exhibit called 1984 in Lisbon, examining a set of pronged metal spectacles designed to pluck out someone’s eyes. 

“Did they do that to him?” Alicia asks. The question smells of cigarettes—burnt cloves and upturned earth. “Did they blind him in the book?” 

I’m not sure Orwell’s novel has anything to do with this. The author’s name appears briefly in the English translation of my pamphlet, crammed into a paragraph that reads like Portuguese even after my fifth attempt at deciphering it.

“I think it’s a metaphor,” I suggest. “Post-structuralist dialogue, and all that.”

“Ah.”

I haven’t read 1984, despite what Alicia believes. Probably because I told her, at the hostel breakfast in Porto three days ago, that it was one of my favorite books. 

Alicia asked me to accompany her after we discovered that we were staying at the same hostel. Advertisements for the exhibit were plastered throughout the city—on signal cabinets and lampposts, with tear-away info stubs dangling from their bottom edges—but they revealed almost nothing beyond the title, address, and the artist’s name. The entire experience cost us six euros combined, which covered entry to both the main collection and a smaller exhibit, Animal Farm, in the annexed apartment upstairs. We were also given a complimentary drink ticket, if, as the attendant explained, we managed to find the rooftop bar.

“Has Kristian texted you?” Alicia asks. Her posh Yorkshire accent carries through a wide, scar-shaped aperture in the wall where I’ve wandered to the other side.

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked.”

“You should,” she says. “He’s really into you.”

 I’m preoccupied with a necklace made of human teeth. The swoop of the chain seems to grin at me. “What makes you think that?”

“Obvious. Aussie boys wear their hearts on their sleeves.”

Her voice drifts to the nearest archway, where she stands with her arms crossed alongside a series of antique surgical spoons, as if the artist had placed her there deliberately. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” she begins, tilting her head. “What was your first impression of me?”

It would’ve been less revealing if she’d told me to take off my clothes and pose before the exhibit. I try to come up with an answer, but instead I find myself back in Porto three days earlier, where some hostel mates introduced us on a mound overlooking the Dom Luís Bridge. 

***

“Fag?” Alicia asked. I blinked before I realized she was offering a cigarette. I pinched one by the butt as if the feeling came naturally to me. 

“Thanks,” I said.

“Where are you from?”

“New York, but not the city. What about you?”

“Manchester,” she said. “Exactly where you’d think.”

Alicia was dressed as if she’d walked out of a 2000s Teen People catalogue, and because I was a shameless Greek Mythology nerd, the image reminded me of Aphrodite emerging from the foam.

“Here,” she said. Her thumb struck the wheel of a lighter. It made a satisfying click, then her hands were spewing fire.

I leaned into the crook of her fist and inhaled. There was the warming sensation about my lips, followed by the sharp, almost licorice taste that surged to the back of my throat. It made me gag.

“Been a while?” Alicia teased. 

I wiped the spittle from my mouth. “Maybe.”

The tourists around us multiplied as the sun began to settle. Most of us weren’t even on blankets. We rested on whatever we had instead: napkins and tote bags, sweatshirts and flattened boxes of beer. Some people planted themselves directly on the dirt, and when they kneeled to sip from one of the communal bottles of Portuguese wine, grass stains blossomed on the seats of their pants like ripe mold.

On the phone with my father later that evening, I would try to explain that it wasn’t about the sunset—not really. It was about basking in its presence, and how, by simply showing up, we each became small, ember-like vessels for the sun. He didn’t get it, so I told him to imagine: hundreds of strangers crowded onto the crest of a hill, speaking in different dialects—different languages, even—or else swaying to the clamor of five or six active musicians, competing for sound space and spare change. It was the Tower of Babel, if God had permitted its citizens to open carry cocktails. 

But when the sun slipped away—as it always did—the entire congregation, musicians included, fell silent. At that exact second, as if it had been waiting for our excitement to simmer, the sun burst open like a water balloon, smearing onto the great white masts of ships, and spilled orange across the Douro valley. Of course, I had witnessed something like this before. Thousands of times, upon thousands of horizons, with thousands of hackneyed metaphors. I could say nothing about the sunset that had not already been said. The main difference now was the applause. 

It took me a minute to recognize it. I had forgotten that the world could sustain all that sensation at once. But even before I heard it, I saw the hands moving in my peripheral vision, beating together like cymbals, accompanied by whatever primal sound came out of the clappers’ mouths. 

Beside me, Alicia hollered. The noise contradicted the distinctly cool attitude I’d begun to associate with her in the last half hour. The skin around her mouth stretched into sharp, unfamiliar lines, and it occurred to me that none of us were ourselves. Not Alicia, who had dropped her cigarette to fill her lungs with fresh breath, and not me, who was bellowing alongside her, trying to thank the sun in the only way I knew how. 

***

“Bloody hell,” Alicia laughs. “It was that bad?” 

I look up to find her standing right in front of me. I’d been too absorbed in the memory to notice her drifting in my direction, though the necklace of oxidized teeth remains exactly where I’d left it, tucked into an alcove where a bathroom sink used to be.

“Not at all,” I say. “I was just remembering.”

Her eyebrows jump higher on her forehead. “I guess there was a lot to remember.”

By now, the exhibit has emptied—not that it was all that busy to begin with. I can feel the door attendant squinting at us over the lip of her magazine, willing us to leave. Alicia, on the other hand, seems content to remain here indefinitely. 

“Well?” 

She doesn’t know how difficult it is—to extract her from my memory, as if the procedure could be performed with an X-ACTO knife. When I try to articulate how she looked on that hill, I find myself not wanting to subtract but assemble, offering my perception of her as it appeared to me, pieced together by sunlight and cigarette ash, like a kindergarten collage. 

Teresa Milheiro would know what I mean. The same way I know what she means, as I move through her physical interpretation of 1984, filled with all manner of violent, disembodied relics. I don’t need to read the book to grasp how she feels about it. 

I step around Alicia, stirring a faint nebula of dust from the stone floor. Her eyes follow, and I wonder if she’s getting impatient. After all, I’m only a stranger, and she had asked a simple question. But I want her to feel the stillness before I speak. The blank matter between her body and mine that I hope will answer for me. Because I can’t tell her that we, like the entire art show around us, are objects enacted upon one another, asserting power simply by occupying space. And there is so much power in this space, standing here with her when I could be anywhere else. It is only by the exact presence of all these things that we can impress upon each other, and everything would be different if even one tooth were missing from the chain. 

But I don’t have the language for all of that. Sometimes existence is the most honest expression we can offer. Trying to explain my experience just creates a clusterfuck of formless words too meaningful for form—like how the pamphlet in my hand crumples beneath my fingers. A break in the wall.

So instead, I tell her: “I thought you were the prettiest girl I had ever seen.”

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Katie McHugh is a multi-genre writer from Long Island, NY. Her work has appeared in BULL, Riddle Fence, The Linden Review, and Folly Journal, among others.