The Girl Zone: Eight. A Double Negative

Mimou got lost for the first time in her life in her adopted home town, home already for many years, when she was done with her Friday shopping and trying to leave downtown on foot, her preferred means of transportation. It happened while she wasn’t paying attention, the way accidents and car crashes and muggings do.

It was sort of amazing, if one stopped to think about it. How one can know a place, a person, an idea, by heart, and when approaching them from a different point of view, or angle, everything about them becomes incomprehensible and strange.

She was talking to Sally, on her expensive Sony Hi-Fi kit. It was lime, and she had always loved how the headphones made her look like from a science fiction movie, all wired up, with knobs in her ears worthy of Rob Bottin himself. It was an important phone call, and she had shopping bags in both hands, so she was preoccupied and uncharacteristically absent-minded. She crossed the park by the church, and started for the other side of the street, but the enormous trolleybus construction that was slowly claiming hold of the entire center of town was on in the middle of the intersection, with red and yellow barriers blocking the street, going over fifty meters on both sides. All the while talking to Sally, Mimou doubled back, almost all the way back, crossing the park diagonally, aiming for the one free crosswalk she spied all the way on the other side.

She crossed the street, and started walking her usual brisk pace towards what she figured matter-of-factly was her home. Sally was saying important things, and she needed to wipe her nose, so she had to balance her groceries and do the hokey pokey to get her hankie from the pocket. While at it, she fastened the straps in the front of her backpack. The jars and cans were pressing against her kidneys in an unpleasant way, but she wouldn’t start reconfiguring the contents of the rucksack right now. She would bite the bullet, and nurse her aching back and shoulders with a nice glass of red wine at home.

“It changes your whole life. If no one else has told you that, I’m telling you now. Your whole life, Mimou. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love my kid more than anything, but I can’t lie; it’s sometimes so hard. And everything you know about your life to be true will be no longer.”

“I know. But thank you for being honest. I think you are the only one who has been. I can’t think of everything changing in my life. Of course, one never does until the change occurs. I don’t know. Shit, Sally.”

“And you’re really not going to buy a test? In a weird way I’m kind a proud of that, I could never do that. Not know for sure as soon as possible.”

“No, I can’t. I don’t want to know for sure until I have some clearer inkling as to how I’m feeling about this.”

“Very Sex and the City of you. Except that Carrie wouldn’t tell Big until she herself knew how she felt about it, but you know, same dif.”

They finished the call, and for a second, Mimou kept on walking. It was a few moments later when she started to truly take in her surroundings, and glanced back. The park was gone. The church was nowhere to be seen. Just apartment buildings, and cars, and no construction barriers. She had no idea where she was.

The street was wide, a four-lane, and she was nearing a large intersection. It was overcast and windy, not that she would have had any idea about the compass points had the sun been out. Her bags were heavy, she was perspiring underneath the backpack. She paused the music on her headset. The whole scenery felt absurd. How could she be lost? She was just in the park and the church was right there.

She turned around. All the apartment buildings around her were high, at least six stories high, and she could not make any landmarks in the horizon. Where was Näsinneula? The most intruding and obvious landmark of the whole town, a beacon for the temporarily lost, a lighthouse in the sky for those on the verge of falling down the rabbit hole of their own making, it was an observation tower worthy of the Seattle Space Needle, or the Eiffel Tower, if you really wanted to make the connection, although it was nowhere near as high, sitting by the shore of one of the large lakes that shouldered the town on both sides. But one should have been able to see it, easily, from almost anywhere in the city.

Mimou couldn’t find it. She didn’t see it anywhere.

Keeping the headset on mute, she walked to the intersection. A group of young students were standing on the street, talking and waiting for the light to change. Three people, one young man and two women. Mimou stood next to them, feverishly trying to figure out where she was while listening in on the group, thinking she might get some idea where she was from them.

They were first-year students in the Art and Media School, discussing the curriculum and professors and all the things freshmen discuss at the beginning of their studies, where to find everything, the student cards, whatnot. But – there was something strange going on in the conversation. The man was in the middle of a rant.

“I couldn’t believe him. I mean, the professor stood there, telling us that if anyone was thinking of skipping any of the first four lectures, they might as well just drop the course now, because they would never catch up. I was like, what the fuck, thanks, asshole.”

“I know!” one of the women chimed in. “I had my first class in Film Analysis, and they made us watch some weird old movie that I couldn’t even later find on Netflix, and right after watching it, the teacher expected us to start analyzing it, like, right away. I was like what? You know, when I go to the movies and afterwards leave the theater, I can’t say what was going on at the beginning of the film because it happened, like, such a long time ago. No way.”

“But the other one we had to watch, Groundhog Day, you can find on Netflix”, the third person said.

Mimou stole a quick look of the three people, unbelieving what she heard. These lazy imbeciles were of the select few that had been accepted this year to study at the prestigious school? She felt like grabbing them by the collar and shaking them, screaming how could they be yapping about how lame it was that you couldn’t skip classes right away at a school hundreds and hundreds of kids had applied to and failed to get in? And those three bozos got accepted over the others? What were the hundreds and hundreds of people not accepted this year like? Had everybody gone completely insane here?

The light changed and the kids were on their way. Mimou, pissed now as well as lost, kept on walking straight ahead. A very tall man passed her, walking as if on stilts, limping a little.

“Well how-dee-doo!” he exclaimed to Mimou as he went past her. She looked at the man intently, thought she recognized him from somewhere, the crew cut, the red windbreaker, the tortoise shell glasses. She kept looking as the man limped forward, and he glanced back at her after passing her. Mimou quickly turned her head. In the corner, on her far left, there were a few people standing idly on the street, dressed as a banana, a tomato, and what appeared to be a zucchini. They were just talking. The banana was smoking a cigarette.

Not so much scared as amazed, Mimou stood still. Where was the church? Where was the park? Where was the enormous trolleybus construction that necklaced through the entire downtown? What the hell was going on around here?

She took a hesitant right and started slowly walking. Ahead of her, there was an elderly couple, walking very slowly, deep in a heated argument. The woman was hissing insults to the man, who was fuming from the ears, and looked deliberately away from the woman.

“I mean, my whole life down the drain with you! I will do as I please now and you will have no say into this, and if you have a problem with that, you bloody well know where the door is! I’m so sick of your bellyaching and grumbling about everything, always! Nothing ever makes you happy or joyful, nothing! No. I’m leaving, and if you are not here when I get back, good riddance, you worthless old fool!”

“Oh, I will not do you the service of leaving, old hag. You have ruined my life with your nagging and insanity, and there is no way in hell-“

This is when Mimou passed the couple, and with her side vision felt she was recognizing the couple as well. The man’s bald head, the shape of his nose, only she remembered that head with hair – and the woman, even behind the large glasses and the distorted face and long hair in a huge bun, wasn’t it, didn’t the woman sort of look like –

Well, Mimou?

And if she was honest, hadn’t she sort of recognized them already from behind? The woman’s narrow, soft neck, the man’s posture and ears and hands?

She started walking more quickly, suddenly not wanting to hear another syllable of the awful, public fight the couple was having. What made the scene even more horrid and perverse, was that people that age, in their sixties or seventies, usually fought their wars behind closed doors. Mimou certainly remembered witnessing no such incident ever before in her life. Then again this was the first time she had lost her way in a city she claimed to know like the back of her hand, too.

Suddenly, she needed to go to the bathroom. She felt a surge of relief wash over her. The feeling was so enormous she felt almost ashamed for being so happy. She stopped, trying to sense with accuracy what was going on inside her. Yes. She needed a bathroom, as soon as possible.

She looked around her. In a flash, it all came together. There was the Irish bar, there was the expensive hairdresser, the grocery store she had frequented when she used to live in the neighborhood. She could not believe she had walked all the way back downtown, nor the fact that she was in fact in her old neighborhood and just moments ago had not been able to tell where she was.

She started almost running towards the library, now knowing exactly where she was and where she would find the nearest bathroom, thinking she was wearing only very thin tech running leggings, and hopefully she would get there before anything – revealing – happened.

While nearing her destination, she looked back to where she came from, but the old couple was no longer anywhere to be seen. The library building was approaching, now up the steps, now she was inside, and as she was hurrying to the toilets, she felt her face twist into a terrible grimace, and she felt tears starting to gush from her eyes. By the time she got into a booth she was crying so hard she had trouble stifling the shaking and the sounds.

After tending to her business, Mimou sat inside the booth for almost half an hour, crying, first out loud, then silently. She cried harder than she had in her whole adulthood, hands shaking, her whole body convulsing, her eyes stinging, and her nose running.

When she finally felt she was done, she blew her nose, got up, went outside, and decided to, after all, take the bus home.