by Charles Yu
You know what I mean. In the same room.
What's the difference? Anyway, we are in the same room now. A room the size of this galaxy. Why not a room the size of everything? Four walls around the cosmos.
The boss is still going at it. He's scrubbed, he's smooth, he's nude. He's singing.
"I've Got the World on a String."
"Fly Me to the Moon." Florence is circling.
But I can't see you, I say.
You can't see me.
Right. I think of being together as being able to see you.
Is it all a question of optics, then? Of biomechanics? Of the properties of eyes? What if you could see an infinite distance? What if you could see as far as you wanted, an unbroken Euclidean line of sight, in any direction? What if you could see me right now, halfway across the galactic cluster, sitting at my desk, so long as nothing got in the way? Would that make us close?
Tina. Come on now.
No, answer me. What's close? What would be enough for you?
There are gaps. When we talk. Long gaps between everything we say to each other.
Delays are a fact. Gaps are a fact.
So it's time then. That's what this boils down to. You don't want to spend the time.
Everything has to have a cost associated with it. Everything has to cost something and time is the price mechanism for the universe. Time is not so difficult to understand. Time is not such a mystery.
Then what?
Tina says: It's distance. Distance equals rate times time. Distance is the mystery. You're there and I'm here.
***
Four years go by. A package arrives from Aunt Betty. Vitamins and a calendar and a new toothbrush. A pair of socks. A note. "No need to visit. I'm fine. Hope you can use these." This year. This year will be the year I visit her.
And then it's almost Christmas, and, once again, it's the night of nights. A sun goes down, and then the other. The moons go down. Everything goes down. The sky comes up. It's Christmas Eve. It's been one million something thousand something years since the birth of baby Jesus. I've lost track. Everyone's lost track. I bet even my aunt Betty has lost track.
A message comes through from the boss. It's a time-delay Christmas carol for me. Away in a manger, he sang, he sings, the little Lord sleeps. It's the last Christmas Eve for another seventeen thousand years. From now until then, all Christmases will be scorching and dry and red orange with the light of two suns. After this, more than a hundred centuries of blistering Christmas Days, fiery and interminable. But for now, it's night and it feels like time has stopped.
Tina is out there somewhere, whatever that means, and I am right here, whatever that means, and my boss is nowhere but a song he sang some years ago, a song he recorded for me about the baby Savior, a song he is singing while dancing naked for me, his penis and testicles flapping like a pink, gummy marsupial, a song just now arriving, color and melody at the speed of light. Florence is swimming toward me in her silent arc, sweeping through the mute, dark, frigid, motionless water, looking at me with those eyes, and I wonder if I leave if she will be okay. I wonder if I were ever to leave if she would even notice. I wonder if she knows I am here, knows what I am, if she knows anything at all. What is she doing here, out in space, on a planet by herself, in an isolated pool of water, no food, no mates, no connection to anything at all? How long has she been here? What would she have done if I had never found her? What is she? What is a shark? Do I know anything about sharks? Do I know anything about anything? I don't. My boss sang and sings and will be singing for who knows how long. My boss sang and the song is still coming, my aunt prayed and I hope she's still praying.
Tina is moving away at the speed of light, and if only I could see across the room, if only I could see across the universe, I could watch her. Florence is circling. Another card from Aunt Betty. I have a stack of them in the corner of the control room. Four feet high. That's it. No more screwing around. I resolve to go see my aunt Betty. I open the card. It says: "Didn't want to trouble you. I know you have your own life. Wished I could have seen you, but I know you're busy. I'm going to the Yttang-67 Loop. I have an old grammar school friend there. I hope she remembers me. Take care. Your aunt Betty." I ignored her one day too long. I was going to go. I really was, but I ignored her and she gave up on me and she moved away. Four minutes go by. Four minutes, four minutes, four moments. Four milliseconds go by. It's official. Florence is another year older. I sing to her. Happy birthday, dear Florence. She swims in her circle. A nearby world explodes. Happy birthday to Florence and to the baby Jesus. I have a goose and a ham and beets and sparkling apple juice and a beer and then a couple more. Somewhere, sometime ago, or now, or in the future, Aunt Betty is praying for me. She prays, she prayed, she will pray. Me and my boss, we sing a little harmony, thousands of years apart. We sing, Florence circles. I cut the cake. I eat it. It's good. I get ready for bed. I brush my teeth. I hit the sack. Another world explodes. Something happens. Somewhere. Four years go by.
Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation
Man, 46, at some point in his life, looks around and says, How did I get here? A quiet boy grown up into an even quieter man.
An October afternoon, a Sunday, a narrow one-story house.
A living room, a couch, some chairs. An accumulation of nouns and furniture.
An ordinary moment in an ordinary life.
He notices the woman sitting next to him, looking somewhat concerned.
"This is the story of our lives, isn't it," he asks. Not really a question.
"Yeah," she says.
"And you're my wife in this story."
The woman nods and smiles the saddest smile he has ever seen, a smile so sad that he realizes, for the first time, that all smiles are sad, and in the way she turns down the corners of her eyes when she smiles he can see that he has put her through a lot and that he will continue to put her through a lot, and she knows this, and she will never leave him.
"Yeah," she says.
"You love me very much," the man says.
"I do. Very much."
The way she says "very much" sounds like the truth. It's the truth like he has never heard the truth before. She doesn't mean it with sentiment or virtue, doesn't want credit in the big book of good deeds or bonus points toward Heaven. She doesn't regret it or begrudge him a single minute of her life. Her love for him is not something that can be changed—it's physics, not emotion: It's the atomic weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world. "It's not enough for me, though," he goes on, getting the hang of it. "It's not enough, is it?"
"No," she says, "no, it's not," and he is going to ask her why, but he looks at her and he knows that she understands him better than he will ever understand himself, and for some reason, he understands that it works better that way, and he knows that even if she tried to explain it to him, he wouldn't understand.
"Is this how it always is?" he asks. But he has a strong feeling it is. Beginnings are easy, endings even easier. The hard part is the middle, and for Man of Quiet Desperation, it goes from middle to middle, it always goes from middle to middle to middle.
The City
Man, 46, is in the city. At some point in his life, looks around, thinks to himself, All I do is look around and think to myself.
The Movies
Man, 46, is at the movies.
At some point in his life, he looks around, says to himself:
"At what point in my life did I start saying things like at some point in my life?"
That's the problem right there, he thinks. He's always starting out with at this point in my life, at some point in my life, my life up to this point.
The West
Man of Quiet Desperation has come out west. Way out west, farther west than he ever thought he would be. The mythical west. The sky is pitched over him like an infinite tent, and it's been froz
en into a blue so cold it has turned three shades darker than black.
Just on the other side of the dry riverbed is the Land of the Imperfect Past Tense, of ghosts and romance. On the other side the story moves and flows and overlaps onto itself, a ribbon, a wave, a swirling cumulus of loss, while on this side he can only watch, watch and look, trapped in the static present, the desperate moment of right now, and right now, and right now.
The City
Man of Quiet Desperation is in the tired city. On the bus full of defeated strangers.
This is not the bus that takes you to new places. This is the bus that takes you home. The older woman who wears a tattered hat takes this bus. Up close, she smells like day-old urine. There is a permanent smile on her face, but after looking at it for a while, Man of Quiet Desperation sees that the woman isn't smiling at all. She has all of the ingredients, the technical requirements of a smile, the muscular contractions. But something is missing. Her smile frightens everyone on the bus but she does not stop smiling. He thinks he can make her stop, if he could only make her look at him, he would smile at her and she would see him and stop, but she won't look at him. She just keeps smiling. She smiles and smiles and smiles.
The Motel Room
Man of Quiet Desperation has a room at the roadside motel. This is the room where people go to say things they have never said. This is the room where prayers are spoken, in earnest, by the sink, in front of the leaky faucet, knees on the grime-covered floor tiles, faces flush with alcoholic heat pressed against the cold porcelain. This is the room with an ashtray, a television suspended from the ceiling, a drape that hides the sun and stores the lingering odors of what happened the night before.
He calls the front desk. The stringy-haired girl-woman picks up, talks low and close to the phone, as if preparing to tell a secret, as if everything might be a secret.
"I'm in The Motel Room," he says.
"Of course," she says.
"How do you know?"
"You're the Man of Quiet Desperation."
"What do you think I should do?" he asks her.
The stringy-haired girl breathes into the phone. "Stop running," she says. But he can't stop.
The West
Man of Quiet Desperation is back in the west. In the middle of the night, a noise wakes him. He thinks he hears someone for a moment, but then the footfalls are softer and softer and then all he can hear is the fire and his sleeping horse. The fire is alive, a small creature with ambition and a plan. His horse exhales soft, warm, wet breaths into the still night air. Everything is a secret. Everything.
The Movies
Man of Quiet Desperation is inside the theater. It is very dark, darker than usual. It smells like rancid butter and smoke—someone has actually lit a cigar.
Onscreen, thin, well-dressed rich people mutter ambiguously hurtful things to each other.
He: [something about the limits of language]
She: That's always been true.
He: [something about the nature of distance]
She: What do you want from me?
He: [something about the unknowability of the human heart/brain/soul]
She: (sobs)
He: (sobs)
She: [something about his family, his nose]
The Motel Room
Man of Quiet Desperation is in the motel room. The sink is dripping. Someone calls on the phone and says, You don't have to be alone tonight. Through the drapes, Man, 46, can see the moon. The front desk calls and says nothing, just listens to him lying there, breathing like a sleeping child.
In the middle of the night, the television wakes him up. It's a commercial for a magic pill. A pill that makes you feel better.
"This is for you," the television man says, mouthful of teeth and headful of hair. "It will help you stop running."
The West
Man of Quiet Desperation is back out west. The allegorical west, where everything means something else. The horse is the man's weary heart. The sky is the duration of his life. The cold is the truth. The black storm cloud is the impossibility of consistency. The water frozen solid inside the flesh of the cloud is self-consciousness. The border is a map of desire. In the west, almost everything means something, but the Man of Quiet Desperation is a quiet, desperate man. Some things are just themselves.
The Mostly Empty World
Man of Quiet Desperation is in the stark, barren landscape. A tree with no leaves shoots up from the otherwise featureless foreground. There is a low-hanging sun but no shadows. All of the objects around him he can count on his ten fingers. No one has bothered to fill in the details of this world. It is empty now, but before long the real world will leak in and he will have to move on.
The Motel Room
Man of Quiet Desperation starts to realize something. The City
He does not realize something so much as he starts to almost realize something. It is a familiar feeling. He is always doing this. This is his job.
The Movies
He is always getting into these situations where he is about to realize something and it isn't a nice feeling or a painful but good feeling, like tension inside accumulating and then suddenly being released from a hole on the top of his head.
The Motel Room
It isn't a moment when his field and depth of vision suddenly expand or a goose-pimple-inducing thought of simplicity and certitude or a rule about the world or a breaking of a rule about the world suddenly occurs to him. It is a sick feeling. It makes him nauseated. It makes him want to vomit everything he has inside him and then continue to vomit, until only blood and bile and then even the tissues of his organs start to come up. The liquid in his stomach sloshes around and splashes up against the inside of him. That's how he knows he is on the verge of realizing something.
The Bookstore
What is he starting to realize? And where does it come from? From up above? Down below? Certainly not from inside, because what, if anything, ever happens like that? Maybe for other people. Maybe for geniuses. But he isn't a genius. Anyone who would buy a book entitled Organize Your Days, who would read a book called Get a Life, anyone who needs this kind of advice is not a genius. These are not books for geniuses. These are not books written by geniuses. These are books for people who have trouble with things you aren't even supposed to have trouble with. These are books for ordinary people, for the mass of men.
The Dinner Party
The thought occurred to Man of Quiet Desperation, a thought of unknown origin, from somewhere above or outside, as if it were being narrated to him, planted inside his consciousness. Man of Quiet Desperation, with a sickening feeling in his gut, started to realize where he was.
The West
And it occurs to him that things don't just occur to people, like in stories. People always know everything there is to know about themselves, never any less. Everything is a secret that everyone knows. A secret that no one knows they know. To smile is the greatest mystery possible, to smile is to tell a secret, is to tell a lie from your head and a truth from your heart together, in one word—the conjugation of the terrifying present, the perfect past, the conditional future all in a single wordless word in the eternal, tenseless grammar.
You Can Never Go Home Again Because There Never Was a Home to Begin With
Man, 46, at some point in his life, tries to go back to the house, back to where it all started, back to where it always starts. To see his wife. Maybe get to know her, maybe settle down.
When he walks through the door, he sees her, still sitting on the couch where he left her, ten minutes, ten days, ten thousand lifetimes ago.
"You waited," he says.
"You came back," she says.
"I can't stay long."
"I know."
"I have to get back to work," he says. She is crying. "Can you ever take a break?" she asks. "Maybe we could go somewhere for a long weekend, somewhere less stark. Sci-fi? How about a Messy Realism?" Anywhere, she says, I'll go anywhere with you.
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But Man of Quiet Desperation is already at the door, putting on his coat, tying an old scarf twice around his neck.
The Bookstore
Man, 46, is going from story to story to story, from middle to middle, hoping for a break, some white space, an empty page, looking around, saying to himself, At this point in my life, at this point in my life, on the verge of a secret, of telling himself the secret he already knows: At this point in his life is every point in his life.
Man of Quiet Desperation keeps moving.
The Party
He is at the party—
The West
—and then in the mythical west—
The City
—and on the bus—
The Movies
—in the theater—
The Motel Room
—in the loneliest room—
The Constant World
—never stopping—the bar, the crowded restaurant, the church, the web of romantic intrigue, the awkward situation. He knows someone has to do it, but why does it have to be him? He is the Man of Quiet Desperation and this is what he does and he is okay just to keep doing it, for what they pay him, it's a living, it's an okay life, but sometimes he wonders if there might be something better somewhere, but he will not stop, is afraid to stop, wants so bad to just stop running from place to place to place, never any beginnings, never any endings, but sometimes he wonders what if he could only find a space to breathe, some breathing room, what might happen if he could rest for a moment in a place in between, an unnamed moment, a second to catch up, to just think things through, if he should just stop moving, if he should just keep moving, if he could just, if he would just, if he could only
