NaCN
Today Phil didn’t crawl outside and over to the university and take a growling elevator three floors up to the chemistry department. He didn’t meet a high school friend up there in the chalky concrete hall and he did not hold his breath and smile and nod through five interminable minutes of the most tedious small talk and he did not behave well and catch up on what was new in the old friend’s life. He didn’t invent things about his own life to sound busy—he did not say he was still animating and doing design on the side, he did not use finger-quotes to frame “on the side,” eventually Phil didn’t get down to business and ask if the old friend had found what Phil had not inquired about via email two days ago. The friend didn’t accept the catching-up to be over like the kind self-assured angel Phil always knew him to be, and he didn’t hand Phil a paper bag and ask what he wanted to use it for again, a flash of vague suspicion crossing his face, concern, Phil didn’t smile to reassure and chuckle and tell the angel he needed to dissolve some gold. For animation. Phil wasn’t lying. His hand was not palsied as he reached for what he could practically already feel inside him in the bag, the friend didn’t laugh and take pleasure in this long lost gold-dissolving artist friend and let it make his day, didn’t say it was “nice to see” Phil and then ask no further questions and tell him to be careful and Phil said no form of thank you and didn’t say goodbye.
No because instead what he did was come home and have a steaming coffee on the front stoop with E and it wasn’t freezing because it was almost summer again today not November and leaves were in bloom and the whole gang was there Phil and E and Small Phil on the bottom step and the real her the indescribable her the inevitable her and the vanished her and God was there too actually and they all just sat on the steps having a fucking great time and talking about how great of a time they were all having, and Phil talked to E and didn’t even bring up the disappointment of the day at the beach in the summer when they walked all the way to that private beach in the funny little suburb in the forest to skinny-dip because they were together for once and they wanted to and that was reason enough and about how when they got there she didn’t actually want to get in. And about how he had tried with every shred of self-control he had to just be patient with her and not get angry and panic and not try yet again to understand but it was impossible and the day became the day of the impossible and about the disappointment of everything, not just the skinny-dipping, but his entire tormented being and the shame inside everything whether it was for or against him and how he could destroy anything and she left him stranded on the beach, she had no patience, had already spent her patience on him a thousand times before and he couldn’t make it back from the beach or into the woods and sat on the beach crying holding himself in a trembling ball like always—today Phil and E sat on the stoop and didn’t make a list of everything they hadn’t done together that they said they would and this list went on and on and it had no end and every day now is another addition and Phil just let her be did not argue or check her email or grasp at anything and he was doing a good job.
Then he walked her home like he does every day and he saw her for the last time again with tree and streetlight and her glowing hair against the dark spaces between leaves and the twilight and the beginning of the end and I love you and no answer. In the massive silence she disappeared again.
He thought maybe he finally should too
On the way home he thought about all the things he himself separate from her because she doesn’t DEFINE him wanted to do but never did
He remembers everything he once naively thought he was and when there were things he could be and he starts making his own concise list and tomorrow at dawn he brings it with him and will cross EVERYTHING off ONE BY ONE SHEDDING EVERYTHING AND LET EVERY WORD WASH AWAY TO BLANK WHITE TO PURE NOTHING BECAUSE NOT LIVING IT WOULD BE TO LIVE THE MOST CONSTANT LIE AND TOMORROW IT ALL FINALLY BEGINS
WE ASK
THE MAN IS sitting on the rock. He wears white. Though it’s late fall the morning is warm. He moves his dark hair out of his eyes. He stares.
We are here and watching. We are listening. See us standing over him and leaning close. Across the water more of us stand. In every direction more are watching.
He folds his right leg over his left. He opens his book. His pen writes quickly, then he studies the words. He strikes them out.
We are still here and have always been here. And this is what we’ve seen and will see, though we still look. He will stand, the book will be left behind—was it his intention?—he will disappear. Though we knew before he began to write, before he came to us, before. Though we always knew, we did not know.
Even as we lean and creak above him we do not know. We hear him, we see him but it is not enough. We will not feel him. We will listen and watch, and we will not stop. But we do not touch him. He tells us nothing and does not hear us.
In his last moment, just before the breathing swells we wait. He stares and is still. For now he is frozen inside this last breath, as are we, and we wait. Before he stands, before the book falls we are here:
There is no wind. The calm water makes no sound. And he stares and is still.
He is the size of a human. He is the shape of every one we have seen. He weighs as much as a human and moves as one does. This we know.
So we stand staring in this quiet breath and we wait, even though the next sounds have already echoed loud, as they will again, and now as they do.
NOTHING
FATE NOTHING
NOTHING ESCAPE END
WORLDS WHERE I COULD HAVE
RIVER
–This has nothing to do with her (She knows this) This was before her
–This was forever
–(I’m SORRY) I’m sorry I didn’t get around to it before I met you.
–I CANT SEE MYSELF one day crawling out and being OK and I’ve known that forever.
–I always had to keep looking for a reason to keep looking. You KNOW this.
–And what kind of place is a place where you can’t help imagining better
–the beach is a good place The perfect place
–the freezing water will take me so immediately and I’ll be part of it and absorbed into nothing
I DID ALL I COULD TO MAKE NO ONE MISS ME
–I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel
–I only wanted to give or know that something of me was worth giving. I wanted to be received. I wanted to not matter and for that to not matter. I wanted someone to know and not run away. I wanted some part of me to be worth sticking around for. I wanted to stick around. I wanted
COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE
CLUES:
–Someone named Phil.
I started jogging down Francis’s mucky driveway. My thoughts were moving around in a circle and putting themselves together like bricks in an igloo building itself inside my head. Some of them were things about Simon, and other ones were things about Phil. I still couldn’t really tell what was going on inside my brain, but I knew something was.
I jogged as fast as I could without slipping and falling on all the leaves on his driveway. All the dead leaves from last fall that had landed on the ground and got covered in snow during the winter were exposed again. They squished under my wet boots, and my boots and the driveway were slowly composting them. It was weird to shine my flashlight on the old leaves and think about how they were still there, even in the spring, even after all the snow. I thought those leaves would have been history, since they were already getting replaced by new ones anyway. So there was something strange to me about the ghost leaves from last fall, basically, and if I owned money I would have used it to bet that Francis would have agreed with me.
I squish-squashed down until I reached the road, and the half-pavement half-gravel felt way less exciting on the feet. What I did though, was I s
tepped out of my boots and took off my socks and carried them. I don’t know why. My heels got stabbed by sharp rocks every once in a while, but I didn’t care. My brain was all screwed up sort of, because it was after three in the morning, and also I had never heard less noise. The parked cars in the driveways weren’t making noise, the dark houses weren’t making noise, the telephone poles weren’t making noise. I thought that if someone was having a special late-night phone call on my street right then, maybe if it was kind of a sexy one, I would have been able to hear it come out of the wires. It was the quietest morning I had ever found.
Everything was asleep except me. The part of the street just before my house where the oaks make a ceiling sounded like it was snoring. That was the only sound: the trees all standing side by side, reaching as high as they could without having to stand on tiptoes, holding hands so they’d sleep safe without falling over, and the breezes making them snore and snore. They even smelled like what quiet smells like to me, like cinnamon, raisins, and something else. I was a little scared, to tell you the truth, but I kept my flashlight on the whole time and I walked all slow and silent in my bare feet.
(Meanwhile my real dad was the mayor of a quiet city where everyone had to wear silence boots all the time. He had made the law because the city was just getting so noisy, with everyone walking in so many directions at once and running into each other, and whenever anyone said anything no one could tell who was talking, if they could even hear them, and they definitely couldn’t understand when anyone was telling the truth. So everyone learned how to not hear anything.
When my real dad got his brilliant idea and made the law about the boots, not everyone followed it at first, but some people did. They went downtown to city hall to pick up the two clumps of moss that my real dad’s government gave them for free, and they tied them onto the bottoms of their boots. When they walked, they barely made a sound. The people who were still being loud felt stupid after a while so they got silence boots too and then everything was silent, and every day the people walked just as much as they always did, and got as much stuff done, except it was so quiet that it wasn’t so annoying to do it anymore. Soon they realized that they were actually walking seven times farther and actually getting seven times as many things done as before. So the city became the best city in the world because it did everything a city had to do, except way better than other cities, plus with less noise.
It got voted the nicest city to live in, and everyone wanted to move there, so lots of people did. The moss on the silence boots would wear out every couple of weeks, but it was OK because they could always compost the worn-out moss and keep growing more on the moss farms, and decades later the council voted yes when my real dad proposed to pave the streets with moss instead of pavement, and replace the floors in buildings with moss. The glass skyscrapers, the parking lots, the fire station, the old theatre and the chandelier, the houses, the grocery stores, the pizzerias, the zoo: everything would be moss. It was an exciting and record-breaking day when the world’s best city got mossed over, and all the streets and buildings shined when the sun hit them, like they were actually paved with emeralds. But when the news reporters whispered questions to my dad to ask him how he felt about it all, he didn’t say anything. They showed him that night on the news, being quiet and smiling, and everyone realized that instead of talking my real dad was listening.
Eventually the entire planet decided to live in my real dad’s mossy city, and the city got really big and expanded to all the continents but it didn’t get any louder, it somehow got even more quiet the more people moved in, and the farther the moss creeped. And every day was so silent that people actually believed they could hear a microscopic noise which was the soft crackling of all the burning stars billions of light years away. Some people thought that was impossible, and the soft noise was just the quiet rubbing of all the boots on the moss. Other people thought that both were probably true. And everyone listened to each other instead of ever talking, and they understood each other perfectly even though nothing was said. They knew where everyone was going and didn’t get in each other’s way so much—and even when they did they just smiled about it—and they knew how everyone was feeling, which was usually quiet and happy—and even when they were sad it didn’t last forever—and they heard the answers to all their questions rushing gently at them one at a time, like the noise of each star.)
When I finally nudged open the door and stepped inside, I was extraordinarily glad to be back in my house. I put my boots down silently and I tiptoed through the kitchen and put the silly knife back and then carried my socks with me back to my room. If I was in a movie or a musical or something, I would have knocked over a lantern or a box of nails, obviously, on my way through the living room. And Simon would have woken up and gotten mad at me and put me in a boarding school for running away like that in the middle of the night. But I’m not moronic, and I made it into my bed safely, without a sound.
I switched my lamp on and took out Phil again. Right then, I was mostly interested in one part specifically. I opened to Page 43. I closed my eyes and read it with them closed for a while at first, because I had it practically memorized. Then I got braver, and opened my eyes and slowly read Page 43. I read it again, and then one more time. I already said my brain was all screwy and I meant it. I thought about that page, and how it was the last one, and what it meant, and whether I was even right about what it meant. I went back and forth between believing it and not believing it and as usual I ended up on believing it, which made my stomach crunch up. To be honest I was going a little crazy. And then, I started wishing about things.
I yawned and lay back on my bed making wishes. Maybe Brenda Beckham could have listened to me when I said not to call her stupid son. Or maybe Mr. Peterson could have made sense. Maybe that white cat was with me, cleaning my feet. I wished that maybe Victoria would be Finch’s girlfriend for real, and maybe they’d actually french, but that I wouldn’t have to know about it. Maybe I could pretend to be a better friend. Maybe I could be stronger, and old and wise, and magical, and I could make all these things the way they were supposed to be. Maybe everyone would get exactly what they wanted. Maybe I could have been less of a jerk to Simon lately. I’m telling you, my brain was malfunctioning.
As I was lying there with my eyes closed, my heart was shaking. No, it wasn’t shaking, it was heavy. It weighed a thousand tons and it was choking me. Every time I made a wish I did it because I thought that maybe it would lighten up but instead it got heavier and choked me a bit more.
I wished that maybe I’d never gone into the woods and found Phil in the first place. Maybe I just wasn’t there. But that wish was completely impossible. I was there.
Then I opened my eyes and grabbed a pen I had inside my pyjama shirt pocket. I knew what to do. It made just as much sense as how much sense it didn’t make at all.
I flipped Page 43 over and stared at Page 44.
I told myself it was OK to do it. I took my pen and wrote some words at the top, but they were so stupid, and I crossed them out. What the hell was I doing? It wasn’t going to make any difference. Still, it felt like what to do. But it was impossible. I didn’t know what to write. I chewed on my pen, and I didn’t start crying, and inside my head I said:
“Hello God, I hope you’ll make me finish this.”
Then I realized why it wasn’t working. I wasn’t in the right place.
It was almost four o’clock, and it was still dark and scary outside, but it made sense to go. I took Phil and my pen and my flashlight to the front hall, and got ready to go outside one more time. I almost put my jacket on upside-down, that’s how tired I was. I put on my boots but didn’t bother bringing my backpack. I crept out the door again into the darkness.
My treehouse was exactly like it always used to be, except it was dark. Dark, but not scary. I shone my flashlight beam into every corner and then climbed the slimy lad
der up to the top floor. The floorboards and the wall were a little damp where I always used to sit but I sat there anyway.
I used to do the most important things in the treehouse there, on the top floor. Maps and lists and plans and things. Some of my very best drawings were drawn right there. But there was never anything at all like the thing I was doing that morning in the dark. Nothing that important. I shone the flashlight at the blank Page 44 in the notebook and thought hard. So hard. I saw the words I wrote in my room and they looked so horrible. They were like black rotten spots on a banana. I felt like I was at a funeral and I was laughing at the person who died and everyone there was embarrassed to know me. But I convinced myself that I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t just trying to mess up the book. Every time I thought about adding something I thought about it too much until it became a bad idea, and I felt sick, and like I was doing something wrong. Like I was doing the avoiding kind of circumnavigating instead of the brave kind that draws a scribble around the entire world. Like maybe Phil would have been disappointed in me. It was like I was pretending, and I didn’t want to pretend. What did I want?
I waited for the right idea, but ideas weren’t coming. Usually I always had ideas in the treehouse. Sometimes I had so many of them that I couldn’t even do them all. I never even thought about not having them. I waited. My page was still blank. There was no one around to give me anything to start from, it was only trees, but trees can’t talk. I took off my boots and counted my toes for a while. I made a shadow puppet on the wall with my flashlight and my hand. I tried a lot of things to take my mind off of not having something to write. I was sitting there forever, trying everything. I even knocked on wood for good luck, on the soggy floor, but my page was still nothing.
A Matter of Life and Death or Something Page 20
