Two weeks before I lost my home, I found a coat hanging in the attic. It was a large coat of pilled gray wool, worn out from years of use.

The coat was not mine. The coat did not belong to the man who lived with me. I held it and thought, How? If this had been a film it would have seemed that I, the character who’d found the coat, would be the one for whom it would all go badly. But it did not. I am fine. I am telling you this story.

Alone in the attic with the coat, I did not know what was coming my way; I did not know that the days I had left in that home were numbered, that circumstances were moving toward me that would soon obliterate my quiet life, and in that ignorance I became entirely preoccupied with determining exactly how this coat had entered my home.

And while it is true that a person is always ignorant of the particular future moving toward her person, there will certainly be moments when this truth is truer than others, and such was the case as I spent several days calling all the friends who’d visited my home in the prior weeks and months to discern whether the coat was theirs; the precarity of my present was becoming truer and truer, darker and darker, yet entirely out of view. And though this story ends peacefully, I haven’t degraded that peace by entrapping it here. The moviegoer is best dropped some distance from a story’s true end, and told to walk the last mile alone.

None of my former house guests would claim the coat. No one was missing it; no one wanted it. I found this very difficult to believe. How else could the coat have arrived if it hadn’t been carried in by a living human being, a person who had entered my home through the front door, ascended the stairs, entered the guest room in the attic, and left this coat hanging on a rail in the closet? Unsatisfied, I called all my former guests a second time and still they said, No.

Pascal, my neighbor, most adamantly denied that his mother had been the one to leave the coat. A handsome Frenchwoman, Pascal’s mother had stayed with us while she awaited the birth of her first grandchild. She didn’t speak any English and mostly sat in the backyard, smoking and reading a series of pocket-sized books (or perhaps the same book, repeatedly). I could have sworn I’d seen her wearing the coat, or something like it, but Pascal told me his mother wasn’t missing a coat, and when I called back to check again he assured me that it was absolutely not hers, as she was never so careless with her possessions to leave them in places they did not belong. I had to agree. Of all our house guests, she had left the least behind when she left. She was the one most gone.

I hung the coat on its wooden hanger from a chain in the corner of the kitchen’s ceiling. I assumed the house’s previous owner had hung a potted fern or pothos from that chain, but the man I was living with held a moral objection to keeping plants indoors. I kept cactuses in my office out of his view, but they all kept shriveling away, as if sickened by some unseen smoke coming off that man’s inexplicable convictions. He said nothing about the coat at first, not even when he caught me staring at it, concentrating, trying to come up with a story for how it could have arrived in my life.

One afternoon when I turned away from the coat and back to the man I had been living with for years, I noticed he was sweating and breathing heavily, as he often was when he kneaded all that sourdough. Indeed, he was kneading yet another lump of sourdough. He kneaded and baked loaf after loaf of sourdough, much more than we could ever eat, yet he also complained about how much time and labor all this baking demanded of him and how ungrateful I seemed to be. I did not like sourdough, but he did not like that I did not like it and insisted that I did like it, that I did indeed desire sourdough bread, toasted and sandwiched and dunked in soup, and his insistence succeeded in creating a desire in me for sourdough, which I would eat absently for weeks until I grew tired of it, at which point he would remind me that though I had been taught by modern society to fear bread, bread was in fact the only real fact of life and to deny myself bread would be to embrace death itself. The repeated kneading had created chronic pain in his elbows and shoulders, but knowing how angry it would make him if I suggested he take a break from the baking, I never attempted to make such a suggestion.

–

The coat’s sudden, cinematic arrival made me feel like someone was filming my life right over my shoulder, a feeling that reminded me of a film director I’d been involved with a long time ago, a man who didn’t read books anymore but still had enough shame to pretend he might soon resume his literacy.

I liked his shame. I liked the way his shame looked in the morning and in the middle of the night. He read the news but was ill-informed. He did not speak the same language as his mother. He couldn’t cook, never made his bed, and was clearly unable to stop spending pointless evenings with women like me, woman after woman, women who differed from one another in only the most superficial ways, though none of us were ever around for long enough to have a chance to seem distinct from one another.

Nights with the director were usually well-written. Dialogue moved at a certain clip. There was enough forward propulsion to keep me there. He had his bits, his little beats, in those date scenes that would have endeared us to an audience if one had been watching. One night he suggested we each guess the other’s single biggest weakness in romantic relationships, write our theories on bar napkins, then exchange the napkins. I wrote of him, ‘Fear of Commitment,’ and he denied it. ‘Restless,’ he wrote of me, which I confirmed.

That winter I sometimes crossed paths with the other women, the women like me, that I knew the director had dated before or after or during my tenure. We beheld each other with grim respect, like actors up for the same role passing each other in the waiting room. Seeing them relieved me of the burden of being singular; I relished the romance of their loathing.

Those years felt entirely unreal, as if every moment was occurring in a film under his direction. Even the mornings I woke up alone at my own place, I could have sworn he was commanding the drift of sunlight across the bed, whispering instructions to the many crew members and assistants who carried out his every whim. He cued everything, it seemed, saturating every hour with his symbolism, transforming my life into an allegory for something more important than my life. What a relief when he stopped calling and I was allowed off set, allowed to return to the meaninglessness of things.

A steady decade passed, frameless, a sheer existence, a privacy that lasted right up to the moment I held that coat, and became burdened with the need to explain it, and with that burden came a frame, but no one can live in a frame. All you can do in a frame is wait for its edges to finally break and release its contents. Then the narrative ends. Then you’re free. In the meantime, you’re not exactly living.

–

For a week, the coat hung in the kitchen, and hung over me even when I was not in the kitchen. I wondered whether the man I was living with was ever going to say anything about it, or whether he was going to keep on baking loaf after loaf, but he said nothing of the coat and seemed to double his production of sourdough.

I began to ask myself questions such as, Am I living in an independently-financed and over-produced tragicomedy directed by a young and promising visionary who no longer reads books? The answer was always yes, sadly, yes, until the day I impulsively yanked the coat down and put it on. It was much too large for me so I rolled up the sleeves to reveal a dirty lining, silk the color of sweat-stained cotton.

The man I was living with told me he liked my new coat, though he didn’t believe in fashion, so this was just his way of saying he liked the person I appeared to be while wearing the coat. This was unsurprising since I knew he preferred me to look a little ugly, a little more like him. Recently I’d come home with a vintage silk slip that I’d bought for the way it felt in my hands at the thrift store, softened by such frequent use that it must have become meaningless to its last owner. When I put the slip on in front of him and looked briefly beautiful, the man became angry and took it off my body and fucked me.

Where on earth would you go looking like that, he asked, and I didn’t know.

Nowhere, I said.

I had no plans to be seen in that slip by anyone but myself, but the coat suggested I might have places to go, business to attend to.

Then came the day that he yelled my name from his den, yelling that he needed to tell me something. I yelled back that I was coming, and he said, quickly, come quickly, so I ran.

He informed me he had just taken a large dose of poison. This upset me.

He said the poison would take effect within the next five minutes, after which he would be gone forever so if there was anything I wanted to say to him I should say it immediately. This upset me further, upset me so much I smiled.

Had he been so miserable as this? Had he always been so miserable?

I can see you are upset, he said. You see, he knew me quite well.

My first thought was that he might have taken the poison because of the cacti I’d been keeping in my office. He was so sensitive, much more so than other people, and so very in touch with so very many important sensations. He could see things that were not there, or rather he could see things that absolutely were there though the rest of us were simply too blunt and blind to notice. He could know things about people he’d never met, people I’d only mentioned in passing, people he told me to avoid. He could see my thoughts, he said, and over time I began to think so too. Still, as he sat there dying I did not confess to keeping the cacti in my office, as I assumed he had already intuited that I’d brought plant life into our home in order to test his convictions and perceptions. Or, if he hadn’t known of the cacti, but would have preferred for me to think that he had known about the cacti all along, I knew I could have easily been convinced of that, too. And so, there was simply no point in confessing.

The poison was busily shutting down shop in his body. He sat there on his favorite chair-like object, something low to the ground he’d brought back from travels to a distant country, and he looked up at me with the profound relaxation of someone who had arrived in the place he’d long longed for. He lit a cigar, one he’d been saving for a special occasion. I watched him expire. I can’t remember what I said, or if I said anything at all, as I am so comically forgetful.

Just before he died, however, he told me one last thing about myself. He said it was a shame that I had not yet learned to be a precise person, that I should work hard to try to learn to be more precise, that I should be more patient and more precise, more precise (he was repeating himself) that I should try to find a way to say what I really meant without wasting so much time and energy. I shouldn’t waste other people’s time. I shouldn’t waste their time with my imprecision.

I watched the cigar fall from his hand. His eyes were still open. The curtains caught fire and he sat there staring at me as the flames grew overhead, staring at me like a perfect picture of apathy, motionless as the flames ascended his pant leg. This was not how I thought that Tuesday was going to turn out.

The house was growing smoky so the only reasonable thing to do was to take a walk, to commit to a direction without hesitation or regret. I wasn’t entirely sure where to go, but now I also lacked a place to return to, and in that homelessness I felt most at home in the coat. When I stood still with my arms hanging, my hands fit perfectly into its big pockets.

The coat was technically too big for me, but what did that mean, really? I knew I was larger than I appeared to be, like an object in a rear-view mirror.

–

Weeks passed, and I acquired, through no easy means, living situations. One of my best qualities at this time was how transportable I was, how I could fold up into the scantest little places, subsisting on hardly anything. Guest rooms, guest rooms, I cruised from guest room to guest room, making apple tarts in thanks, sleeping beside older brothers if that’s what it took, stripping the bed, dusting the coffee tables, rinsing my toothpaste out of the sink.

Without that man around to object, I began to wear the silk slip beneath that hideous coat, and I found that the suggestive beauty of the slip was canceled out by the mealy dilapidation of the Ghost Coat, the proper name I gave it that fall.

I was living in one of those guest rooms when the phone call came from the coroner. The autopsy revealed that he had been asleep when he died, that he had not suffered, that he never even knew he was inside a house on fire. The autopsy revealed he had a genetic predisposition to heroism, to omniscience, to clairvoyance. It was not his negligence that had burned down the house, the autopsy revealed, but rather it was a deliberate choice he’d subliminally made for my sake, a selfless choice of freeing me from his sway. The autopsy revealed that he did not love me upon his death, but extracts from his charcoaled marrow demonstrated that he had once loved me and, above all, he had for years enjoyed how I had allowed him the endless lease of my body. He had been thankful for that, thankful that I made absolutely no noise when he fucked me, thankful that I did as he said, lived as he said, ate what he gave me. There is so much joy in pet ownership. There is so much joy in the supplication of an animal.

No. What’s come over me? The autopsy said none of this. I should remember the vow I took, the vow the film director had taught me a decade earlier. Know that there are Great Men in this world whose thoughts you simply cannot understand. Great Men who rightly know the precise contours of the interiority possessed by any woman within his spitting distance.

Our house had been so cozy before it burned down, and his mouth muscles were so powerful that he could spit at me from almost any distance, a kind of certainty I may never live with again.

–

On Thanksgiving Day that fall, I wore the slip and the Ghost Coat to the lavish brownstone of a friend of a friend where a mother, a father and three daughters were hosting a holiday dinner for people without families, or people who’d been banished by their families, or people who’d banished themselves from their families. Seated among a group of strange men, I summoned a little sanity and asked each of them polite questions about their origins and occupations.

The men were all from France and they were all film directors, and some of them were wearing coats quite like mine, and some of them leaned toward me to study my freckled collarbone visible between the wool lapels as I sat there holding a naked secret at the center of me – how unwell I was.

Do you know Pascal? I asked, inferring from the sound of my voice that I was already a bit drunk. His mother is from – Something, France. I forget where –

They looked at me like it was a game, and maybe it was, my little game, yet I had no next step for it, no rules, no plot twist, so I changed the subject quickly to the only other French thing I could recall. Had any of them seen that recent film about the professional motor show dancer with a metal plate in her head who kills a man who is bothering her, has sex with a car, becomes pregnant, fails to self-administer an abortion, kills some additional people, burns down her family’s house with her parents locked inside, then goes into hiding by disguising herself as a missing boy, then climbs atop a fire engine in order to seduce an audience of homoerotically-charged firefighters?

The French directors looked at me as if I were truly stupid, as if I were a child sitting on the shoulders of another child, wearing their father’s oldest and shittiest blazer, which was, in a way, exactly what I could not help but be – a pile of small children, a pile of something within the body of a woman who had grown so tired. Tired of all the men who would only believe me if I believed what they believed, and of the haunted feeling all this disbelief left me with. I had tried over and over to understand their ways of seeing things, though it kept escaping me, a mere woman.

But I have always wanted to get along with everyone, to be a nice guest, so I smiled the smile of a cooperative woman, a woman just trying to make conversation since it was Thanksgiving. I, too, wanted to be thankful for something or barring that I wanted someone to be thankful for me.

The French directors began to sigh and complain in French to each other and as I listened to them I found myself faintly hoping that one of the directors might speak forcefully enough that I would be splattered with the tiniest fleck of his saliva. The director to my left translated the complaints of the other French directors: Yes, indeed, they all knew this film and they all felt they had been personally injured by its existence and further hurt by its success.

That woman, one of them said, what is wrong with that woman? For a moment I thought they meant me, what was wrong with me, and for a moment I thought they might actually tell me, once and for all, what was wrong with me. But it was the female French director of that film who stirred their complaint.

The French directors explained that the film had been grotesque and filled with gratuitous violence, that its tone had changed too often, its genre had changed too quickly, and the heroine had looked so unhappy the whole way through. They never understood what the metaphors were metamorphing, and though it was obviously an allegory, its allegorical objects were all garbled, and above all the film simply wanted too much, wanted to be much more than a single film should be, that it never asked for permission, that it kept breaking down locked doors, breaking promises, stabbing out eyes.

The French directors reminded each other of how they had all taken vows of purity and obedience in their calling as auteurs, but the woman who had made this film clearly had taken none of them, and this simply would not do. Being French, the French directors did not believe in God, but being a certain kind of man they couldn’t help but be God-fearing, prone to simply insert whatever was most convenient into the crucible of the idea of God.

As if by magic, or as in a poorly-conceived film, Pascal showed up right then and caught everyone’s attention by shouting my name and asking: What happened to you?

I wondered if he could see it now, how the Ghost Coat must have been his mother’s coat, even if it wasn’t his mother’s coat. It was simply the only logical option. But I couldn’t manage to tell him this, to tell him the truth about his own mother.

But I didn’t or couldn’t say anything to Pascal, busy as I was with managing this wild, new sensation, this raw and righteous anger provoked by an aesthetic disagreement with a large group of men. It had never occurred to me that anyone could have seen this film as anything other than a work of True and Troubling Art and the more they disparaged it, the more violent I felt.

It must make you all feel quite inadequate, I told the directors, to see a Cadillac doing what that Cadillac did to her. The sound of forks dropping on plates. You don’t know anything, none of you know anything about being the object beneath the subject, about being the container, about being a soft thing impaled by metal. Pascal looked confused. And you won’t, I continued, you won’t know anything about it, ever, because you’re so certain you already do! You’re everything that is wrong with the world! You are the enemy of progress and nuance and pleasure!

All at once I felt truly empty. The happy family that was hosting this lovely Thanksgiving dinner stared at me from their end of the dining table and their daughters smiled in conspiracy as I raised a fork and lowered it quickly into the shoulder of the French director to my left, which helped me regain my strength. He hardly said a word, just whimpered as he bled pints and pints of his mother’s blood, but I’d had quite enough of everything. I vowed to no longer mistake obedience for love.

I crossed my silverware on my dirty plate, the universal signal of being done, then I saw myself out of that lovely home. I closed the door gently behind me and I walked a long mile alone in the dark, growing sober as I thought through every extant variable of this one soft life I carry. I was no longer trying to make sense of the past. I began to consider the direction in which my human term would now move, and once I had walked that one full mile I shed the coat directly onto the pavement and kept walking.

Image © Parastoo Maleki