The Friendship Files #2

(1,200 words, about 6 minutes)

For a time when we were kids, my sister went around with a pair of imaginary friends. Myrna and Fritsa (my spelling) were forever being accidentally sat upon by our older brother and myself. I’d have been eight, say, Wendy four, and despite my elder-sister status, the scolding that took place between us tended toward her chastising me, for not noticing Myrna or Fritsa at some crucial moment; for saying or doing something that hurt one or the other’s feelings.

At some point, these “friends” began acting out their own gruesome deaths: one would jump from the window of a moving car, the other from a second floor bedroom into the branches of our crab apple tree. These, er, mishaps may have coincided with the period Wendy started kindergarten, a place where possibilities for non-imaginary friends existed aplenty.

I remember Myrna and Fritsa as full-fledged presences in my childhood. They obviously had no form, not even the ephemeral quality of ghosts, yet their existence in my sister’s mind—their surprise “appearances” and hurt feelings—wrought actual consequences in our daily lives.

I thought of M & F while reading Aislinn Hunter’s absorbing, moving 2014 novel The World Before Us. (Note that Hunter also has a new novel out, The Certainties.) In The World, Hunter presents us with a protagonist described by some critics as being “haunted” by spirits.

Jane is a historian and archivist thrown into crisis by the closure of the museum where she works, and the corresponding rising-up of her own troubled past, during which a child she was caring for disappeared, never to be found. Throughout the novel, even when she’s with others, Jane is a character very much alone, clawing her way out of a profound isolation wrought by that early tragedy.

What Hunter does for her, however—and for us, Jane’s sympathetic readers following along with hearts-in-throats—is provide her with this host of unseen companions, a flock of long-deceased former inmates of the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, who flutter about her, even narrating much of the story as they hover.

Other readers and critics have tried on a delightful range of terminology to pin down these companions. What exactly are they? Penelope Lively, writing in the New York Times, calls them “voices”; to Trilby Kent of the National Post they’re “sleepwalkers”; NPR’s Jean Zimmerman goes for a “gaggle of querulous ghosts”; while Karen Brady of the Buffalo News opts for “invisibles,” the term I like best, for it hints at the sense of selfhood for which they each continue to reach.

I think of the invisibles in The World Before Us as Jane’s imaginary friends. She has conjured them by her intense attention to the archival remnants of their lives, and her genuine interest in the forgotten events—the real joys and sorrows—that those bits of evidence represent.

Artifacts, for Jane, as perhaps for anyone in her line, are not inert. She reconstructs richly imagined scenes—complete with motive, conflict, desire, regret—around such objects as a scarab bracelet and its long-ago owner, whose family archives are under Jane’s care. “This is one of the marvels of existence, Jane thinks, as she takes the bracelet off its support and lays it gently over her own wrist: that so much can be recreated; that all the bits and snippets—the receipts for roses, inventories tucked into books, even sherry glasses or cigar boxes or the worn clasp on a velvet band—are enough to conjure whole lives.”

Jane is no recluse: there are those in her life with whom she shares a deep affinity and affection. But her internal crisis propels her rashly away from them as if by necessity—a reckoning with practical limits. She can’t admit those she loves into a reality over which she’s lost hold.

Instead, unbeknownst to her conscious self, she has gathered—as my sister did in a much more blatant fashion at the age of four—the very companions she needs as she pieces together her own ragged, patchy archive: these gentle, attentive watchers who understand that their quest mirrors hers: “Jane tries to line up her story the way we try to line up ours.”

What the “invisibles” want from Jane—who, amid her crisis, is desperately delving into archives that, coincidentally, pertain to their lives too—is evidence: of all that they can’t remember, but wish to reclaim, about who they were and what concerned them, collectively and separately, while they walked the earth.

They wait and watch as Jane carries out her routines—eating toast for breakfast, listening to the BBC. At the pub she frequents, they read the menu over her shoulder. Gradually, they become attuned to her nature, her moods and tender points. When Jane’s boss announces the museum’s pending closure, the invisibles tell us, “We turned to Jane to see what that might mean.’” What it might mean for them, that is, but also for her, for they know the two are profoundly linked.

Despite their constant attention, the invisibles aim to respect Jane’s privacy: “When Blake kneels in front of Jane and Jane puts her hands in his hair, one of us goes for a walk with the children, one of us wanders into the woods…” But their keen awareness of her aliveness, set against their own confusion and longing, undoes such gestures: “For the last hour Jane has been aware of nothing but what it feels like when a finger trails down your spine, when a chest reverberates against yours with laughter, when a twitch turns into a tremor inside of you. She has had what we want: to be wholly in one place with no thought outside of it.”

They come to know Jane well enough to, at a crucial point, consider breaching the divide between them to influence her actions—both for their good, and for hers. As they seek their belonging in the afterlife, their vigil over Jane becomes a kind of refuge: “We watch Jane study each face the way she first studied the hummingbirds: one after the other, equal weight and consideration given to each person.”

I love that Hunter has given her wounded protagonist these gauzy, wondering, uncertain, needy, yet patient companions. She needs silence, solitude, and time; unlike her living friends, who would more likely (like most of us) feel pressed to interfere or to “convince” her of something, the invisibles are able to offer these. Is she aware of their attentiveness? Not exactly. But we readers know—even if Jane doesn’t quite—that she’s not alone.

Meanwhile, their unimposing presence, their observations of her thinkings and her doings, which they consider with great urgency among themselves, offer a strange but revelatory glimpse into the stuff of human connection, the crucial business of companionship. I closed this book with a bolstered spirit, in a kind of hopeful mental mist, considering how solitude and the limits of friendship might not be quite what we suppose—and also how our occasional imaginary wanderings may intersect after all with the plane we’re walking here on earth, their “invisibles” perhaps brushing against our intimacies (and frictions) with those beside us now, our more tangible companions.