Things That Happen on the Way to See One Battle After Another
by Lise Hosein
There are about 50 feet from beginning to end of the escalator, Claire thinks. It’s weird how escalators work, in feet instead of stairs. You can’t really tell how many stairs there are on a three-storey escalator. Three feet in. Claire can’t tell a lot of things, these days. Her therapist diagnoses it as alexithymia, a sort of emotional blindness. It reminds Claire of congenital analgesia, that condition where babies don’t have the ability to feel pain. Seven feet. She saw on 60 Minutes once that those kids don’t live long. They touch stoves, stay out in the sun, eat staples, whatever. They don’t know that they’re hurting themselves. 12 feet. The corrugated steel stair underneath her is boring. Claire hums to herself a little, then stops - people might hear her and she’s not sure if it’s weird. 23 feet. Claire thinks about those babies and wonders if she would even know if she ever feels too much herself. 28 feet. She can hear the tired groans and whirs of the escalator as it drags her up three floors. Is three stories a lot, for an escalator? She’ll Google it later. 37 feet. Escalators are tedious, really, if you’re not walking up them, and this man in front of her seems frail. She doesn’t want to brush by him. She’s not sure whether feelings are like infection - what if she catches one from his hunched posture? 41 feet. Claire’s toes have disappeared. She’s sort of disinterested until she realizes it’s not supposed to happen this way - your calves, now your knees, are not supposed to be ingested by an escalator. The corrugated strips of the risers are bending, warping, loudly pulling her inside. Somebody’s yelling from the top. 48 feet. As Claire is dragged further into the maw of the toothy mechanism, as she loses her vision, then her hearing, she starts to feel searing pain. So she doesn’t have congenital analgesia. She’s sure of that.
Lise Hosein is a queer mixed-race writer, producer and former PhD candidate based in Toronto. She’s most interested in systems of care, ritual, misinterpretation and the ways ordinary objects unsettlingly fail to remain ordinary. Lise’s writing has appeared in Canadian Art, Magenta Magazine and CBC Arts.
