Knowns and Unknowns

Addressing the loss of a friend (Harriet), the irredeemability of Harriet’s disappearance, and the likelihood of that friend’s suffering, this short plays with speaking and not speaking, looking and evading gaze, the known and the unknown.  Emphasizing the act of not telling, one panel floats the phantasmic words, “But I can’t,” capitalized, distinct but blurred at the edges.  Except for an inviting, yellow light in one window of some square-block style “halls of residence,” the scene seems more about the absent or the dead than the living, the residential building’s vacant windows like hollow eyes or mouths that are open and say nothing.  Immediately prior to this panel, the narrator looks evasively away from readers and is situated in the lower, right-hand corner, shrinking away from acquaintances in earlier panels and towards the ghostly “But I can’t” of this next, aforementioned panel.  People gradually fall away; they are plentifully present in earlier panels, their spoken words taking up space.  For the most part, “But I can’t” takes the place of both people and dialogue said aloud.  At this point, silent words take over and tell the story of Harriet, who believes in extraterrestrial abduction and disappears as a teenager.  Colors become increasingly sparse as memories engage with the unknown, as memories become more and more a form of coping and reconstructing a series of “knowns” and “unknowns,” including the unresolvable disappearance of a friend and the two friends’ at-odds conceptual frameworks/belief systems/what have you.

Harriet’s eyes are generally indistinct, shielded by glasses.  Accentuating the gap between known and unknown and emphasizing the narrator’s own unknowns about Harriet, the narrator’s outlines the limits to seeing what the friend “sees” as a teenager.  Harriet’s glasses mediate the seemingly knowable aspects of Harriet, just as the narrator’s text grapples with the known and unknown of who Harriet becomes and what Harriet knows about (1) what may be Harriet’s alien abduction, (2) what is Harriet’s disappearance, and (3) Harriet’s use of the belief in extraterrestrial abduction as a coping mechanism (from childhood to teenage life).  Harriet’s gaze is indirect, shifty, and calls attention to the tensions that lead the narrator to disconnect from a friend.  Not meeting Harriet’s gaze straight-on and not knowing enough about Harriet’s increasing obsession with extraterrestrial life to give readers the illusion that they can look into Harriet’s eyes and see much, either, that gaze seems a visual way of telling readers, “I don’t know what my friend saw, so how can you?”

Dark shadowing in later panels provide a sense of heaviness to the narrator’s sloping shoulders, showing a silent weight of grief and anxiety over the unknown, especially as the narrator consistently looks away from readers with downcast eyes.  These shadows increasingly outline and surround the narrator and Harriet, complimenting the ever-present line-drawn bags under characters’ eyes, invoking the sleeplessness that can come from fearing the gaps in knowledge around the loss of a friend, as well as the gaps in memory/perception: What is in the shadows (unknown)?  Less and less is known, as the narrator later breaks down in a list of what “I know.”  Meanwhile, Harriet and the narrator’s sweaters retain their color as distinctly recalled outward markers of memory (“I wore a red sweater that day”).  Both characters’ hair and clothing stand out in more color, as if they are better remembered than other details.

As in the transition panel (“residence halls”) from the casual abduction conversation to the recounting of Harriet’s story, people become secondary to scenery in the panels depicting the brief police search for the narrator’s friend.  Grass, fences, and pathways/roadways are not exactly sharp, but hauntingly brush-stroked into sinisterly pastoral scenes where the landscape is more in-focus than the cop cars that drive in shadow but can’t bring illumination into those shadows.  They can’t find the friend, and they can’t shed light on the details of the disappearance.  The setting is known; the disappearance is unknown, shadowy.  The friend wears shadows in the last panel but isn’t subsumed within them; the memory of the friend is inseparable from the memories that are unanswered, partially reconstructed, subject to the omnipresence of the disappearance (conscious of the “end” that can never end in the sense of redeeming something or providing irony unmitigated by trauma/violence/loss re: friend believes in alien abduction and disappears).

Situated in the lower left-hand corner with face tipped up to down a drink, the narrator’s eyes avoid gazing in any direction, detached.  In another panel, the narrator’s body stands in visually for what readers, other classmates, and the narrator cannot see: Harriet’s body. Sprawled out face-down, the narrator’s body is vaguely drawn, representational of a body more than detailed to depict the narrator’s body in particular.  The narrator’s body has life, as the words shouted by the narrator’s parents from out of the panel suggest, but the position of the narrator invokes death for a moment, confronting readers with the unknown: Is the narrator dead?  This conveys the attempt to consider, think through, grieve, and accept the unknowable aspects of the death, something that the narrator may be experiencing as a result of the loss of Harriet.  The visual immediacy of this pseudo-death may extend empathy for the narrator to empathy for Harriet, detracting from the impulse to reduce Harriet to a joke about the extraterrestrial unknown, making Harriet’s disappearance a bit more real, a little less abstract or ironic, more a reality than a plot device.