by Tommy Butler
Jollis falls silent, the truth suddenly clear—the travelers don’t know how to fill the empty space. They’ve no more idea than Jollis himself. Merriam was wrong. And by the look on her face, she knows it.
“It’s not a hole,” she says, but her words are a ragged whisper, and her light is nearly extinguished. She slumps so low that Jollis fears she will sink into the earth forever.
“That’s right,” Jollis says to Wilfred, raising his voice to make sure Merriam can hear him. “It’s not a hole at all. It’s an empty space.”
Merriam stirs. She looks at Jollis gratefully.
“Isn’t that the same thing?” asks Wilfred.
“Not even close!” roars Jollis. Merriam manages a weak smile. “And it’s not in your heart,” Jollis continues. “It’s nestled in beside your heart—quite artfully, I might add. Your heart is perfect. Nothing wrong with it whatsoever. And your spleen, by the way, is spectacular.”
“But it feels—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” says Jollis. He takes hold of Merriam, dismayed by how insubstantial she has become, how faded by her labors. He pulls her close and draws her away. The earth grows distant, until its edges appear and it is once again a shining orb in the starry darkness. From here, Wilfred is no more than a speck on the thin surface of the world, yet Jollis has not lost sight of him.
“We’re really very sorry,” Jollis cries. “Just do your best.”
Elliot
(1993)
It is a damp, drizzly November in New York City. A dense mist doesn’t so much fall as hover, thickening the cold air and deepening the evening gloom. On the lower east side of Manhattan, an old building crouches at the edge of the East River. Its windows are shadowy blanks, save for one illuminated square near the door. I stand between them—the building and the river—facing the light but heeding the dark tide at my back. I am twenty-two years old. I am thinking about that doctor.
He tricked me, of course. With honeyed tongue, he led me seductively down one path—where my world was important, worthy of belief—before pulling the rug out to reveal another, where there was a bright line of truth, and I was on the wrong side of it. Fine. Maybe that’s what my mother paid him for. The betrayal stung, but what unnerved me was how easily I had been taken in. The doctor’s questions had been so pointed, so personal, like he was inside my head. I mean, who asks if you feel like you’re vanishing? Is that a standard psychiatric inquiry? Or did he know something I didn’t? One might almost suspect that he really could see into my mind, and that he saw something he recognized, which would naturally lead one to wonder whether his diagnosis was correct.
Except that, when you are a ten-year-old boy with an imagination so fertile you believe a monster saved your mother from drowning in the Atlantic Ocean, and when that same mother brings you to a professional psychologist who declares that you want to take your own life, the first thing you do with that information—if you are a Chance—is bury it. Deep. Under an ocean of denial. Then you leave it there, letting the years roll over it, until it is all but lost.
In the process, other things get submerged. I stopped walking in the woods. The ring of stones was forgotten. I gave up the idea of ever asking my mother for the book about Neverene, ultimately surmising that it no longer existed, and wondering at times if it ever had. Even Esther moved away. Somehow this surprised me. She had seemed at home there, in her uncle’s old house. I thought she genuinely enjoyed those summer nights on the back patio, watching the fireflies—even, maybe, talking to me. Not wanting to forget her along with everything else, I took paper and pencil and made a crude attempt at drawing her face, but her features had already faded into abstraction. Maybe I had imagined Esther, too.
When the weighty parts of your life are jettisoned, you either soar or drift, depending on your metaphor. I drifted. Middle school passed vaguely by. High school began in much the same way, though neither period was technically devoid of incident. Life has a way of occupying the days, if you let it. There were classes and homework. There were sports—after my ill-fated baseball career, I focused on tennis, eventually making varsity. There were blundering sexual encounters, halting half romances, and other milestones of adolescence. But mostly there were the Shipmates.
The four of us—Roberta, Josh, Christopher, and I—were assigned to be a study group by our English teacher in our sophomore year. And though our first mandated journey together was an aquatic one—wading through nineteenth-century prose in pursuit of a white giant under the Atlantic—that is not why I thought of us as shipmates. Rather, as we spent more and more time together, as the I slowly disappeared into the we, it occurred to me that maybe my new companions had also been caught in the drift, and that the four of us had come together to form something greater than each—a ship that could more ably navigate the eddies and crosscurrents of life.
Which is not to say that we were all hewn from the same wood. Roberta was a member of the cross-country team, Christopher a budding artist, and Josh an avid computer programmer at a time when few of us even knew what that meant, while I myself was most likely to be found with my nose buried in a book. Yet the gravity of these pursuits fell away when we were together. From our earliest study sessions, a collective banter regularly bubbled up between us. Together we were jovial, irreverent, silly. Buoyant, even.
In other words, we laughed a lot. We poked fun at everything, especially each other, which is probably why we never talked about anything of real significance. To raise a deeply held fear or confidence—say, that one had once harbored a belief in monsters, and perhaps still did a little—would have been to offer oneself in sacrifice at the altar of our collective sarcasm. No, we stuck to lighter affairs. Roberta teased the rest of us for acting like boys, and we did our best to tease her back, though she had superior ammunition, and we were more interested in convincing her to reveal the secrets of her gender, no matter how many times she insisted there weren’t any. With slightly more sincerity, we vetted each other’s love interests, though in truth there weren’t many of these, and they tended to be short-lived. We preferred spending time with just us, and mocked whatever romantic comedy was currently in the theaters, even if we went to see it anyway, and even if we privately hoped something similar would one day happen to each of us. But not yet. Later. When we were older.
The days when we would be older—our futures—were also not something we talked about. I never shared my dream of becoming an advisor to entrepreneurs. As far as I could tell, Roberta aspired to be a professional runner, which seemed like a risky career choice, and Christopher wanted to be a sculptor, which was perhaps even more preposterous. Josh had no plans, and didn’t want any. He decided he’d rather not grow up at all, or at least not any more than he already had, and the rest of us wondered if maybe he had the right idea—so much so that when it finally came time to apply for colleges, we resisted.
“Why would I want to go to college?” Josh would ask. And—because there was no adult in the room to answer him, no one to declare that a higher education was not only the gateway to a more prosperous life but a rewarding experience in and of itself, not to mention a privilege that some of our parents, mine included, never had—the rest of us asked ourselves the same thing.
“Yes, why?” we said. “Why shouldn’t we stay here?”
Spoken aloud, the proposal aroused our indignation. “Are we not happy?” we asked. “Are we not home? We will get jobs. We will rent apartments. We will be locals and put down roots and be together forever. Yes, why shouldn’t we stay?”
There was a pause. Someone mentioned money. Someone else, the expectations of family members. Neither was a categorical reply, nor an absolute reason why things had to be the way they were. Nevertheless, we did not stay. As applications were completed and offers of admittance accepted, I realized I had been wrong. We had not created something greater than ourselves. There wasn’t much binding us together at all—we were less a ship than four corks bobbing down the same stream, if ne
ar to one another for a time. We would each face the ocean of the world alone.
The laughter faded. Bags were packed. One by one we succumbed to the momentum of our separate currents. Goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye.
And the we once again became I.
The mist grows heavier, bearing down as if trying to sink Manhattan into the sea. A single drop falls, then another. The rain begins to fall in earnest, beating a solemn rhythm on the concrete. The suit my mother bought me is drenched. I can almost feel it shrinking, and it was too small to begin with—she hasn’t fully accepted the fact that I finally sprouted to six feet tall and am no longer small for my age. If that’s even a thing, once you’re in your twenties.
In the growing downpour, the building’s lone lighted window seems to contract, and I fear it may wink out entirely, before it comes to life with movement from within. Bodies circulate, chairs are arranged into a circle. Strange faces greet each other with restrained benevolence. Most are dour, but not all. One of them even laughs—not a polite titter but an honest, full-throated guffaw—which I find curious, given that this is a support group for potential suicides.
Though there was no laughter when the Shipmates disbanded, there wasn’t any ranting, either—nor any struggle, really. We vowed to stay in touch, but didn’t. During our freshman year, a few early letters and phone calls rippled weakly across the distance between us, then dissipated entirely. Christopher spent the following summer in California, where his parents had moved. Roberta stayed on campus in Colorado. Back at home, I saw Josh once or twice, but it wasn’t the same. The two of us alone weren’t able to achieve the same banter, and couldn’t seem to find much else to cling to.
I lapsed back into the drift. In college I stuck to the customary script—drank a little too much, stayed up a little too late. I became a half-hearted member of the junior varsity tennis team. After flirting with literature, I decided to major in economics, primarily because my father thought I should, but also because I hoped it might someday help me start my advisory firm.
For this reason, too, I strived to keep my grades up, passing untold nights hunched over the desk in my dorm room, or in an empty classroom, perched in the most uncomfortable seat I could find so that I’d be less likely to drowse. More often than not, however, I could be found burrowed in the stacks—those deep corners of the library where row after row of books ascended to the ceiling—because that was where Amy liked to study.
Amy and I had been in two classes together—or one and a half, before I abandoned literature by dropping a course on Romantic-era poetry. Both had been in large halls with space enough, and students enough, that Amy and I never bumped into each other. I had been content to admire her from a distance, or at least what I could discern of her—an easy laugh, an electric smile, the kind of beauty that, well, that could inspire you to write poetry. If you were a Romantic.
Until I later noticed her studying in the stacks, my lingering image of Amy was of her staring at me intently as I recited my first (and last) poem. But then I had felt like everyone was staring at me, which I guess they probably were, given that it was my turn at the podium. I was nervous, having been blindsided by the assignment from the beginning—the course description had promised we would be reading poetry, not writing it, but our professor insisted that we would never understand the verses of others until we composed one of our own.
I wrote a sonnet. About avalanches. I don’t know why, except that I had never seen one, and was fascinated by the thought of all that snow—one moment resting on a mountain, pristine and still, and the next moment plunging downward at two hundred miles an hour with the mass of the Empire State Building. I imagined how awesome it would be to stand in its path and witness the snowpack hurtling toward you. At least until it killed you. Which it would. People generally don’t like that sort of thing. One way they prevent big, devastating avalanches is to intentionally set off little ones, by dropping explosives in just the right spots.
“Hi.” After weeks of mentally circling Amy’s favorite desk, I had finally stopped to speak to her.
“Hi yourself,” she said, looking up at me, smiling. “You dropped poetry.”
“You noticed,” I said, surprised.
She leaned back and brushed her hair from her forehead, her eyes staying on me. It was as if my lingering image of her had come to life. “You hit us with that love poem and then disappeared,” she said. “It was very dramatic.”
“Love poem?” I assumed she had misremembered. “It was about avalanches.”
She arched an eyebrow and looked at me keenly. “If you say so.”
I realized she hadn’t misremembered a thing, and that there was more to her than a showstopping smile. There was kindness, and wit, and subtlety. That smile, too, though. I suddenly felt unnaturally light, almost weightless.
“Anyway,” I said, “it was awful.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said. “It was raw—like you opened your chest and offered up your heart.”
“That doesn’t sound good at all.”
“No, it was attractive,” said Amy. “It made me wonder what it would be like to date you.”
“Oh.” I checked myself, wanting to make sure I’d heard her correctly. “In that case, I’d like to revise my position on the quality of my poem.”
The fall was swift. Amy and I became inseparable, consumed with each other—or with whatever it was that filled the narrow fragment of space we suffered between us. She wrote me songs and read me poetry. I made her mixtapes and prepared candlelight dinners using the hot plate in my dorm room. We spent countless hours in bed. When she went home for winter break, I sent her a letter every day. The night she came back, I stood in the snow and threw pebbles at her window—heedless of the punishingly cold winter air—until she appeared at the glass, her smile floating there for just an instant before the pane fogged over with her breath. In the stillness afterward, while I waited for her to come down and open the door, I stared up at the radiant stars and felt that I was one of them. And if it occurred to me that I had become a character in one of those romantic comedies I used to make fun of in high school, I didn’t care.
I even brought Amy home to meet my parents. I’m not sure why, exactly. Maybe I just thought it had to happen sooner or later. Or maybe I wanted to share with them the feelings Amy and I had for each other, even if the visit amounted to nothing more than shallow pleasantries. Maybe love makes you more generous. I didn’t even mind that Dean showed up, though I hadn’t expected him. He was living in New York, having moved there after college to work as a sales executive for an accounting firm. He and Amy had little in common, but they got along well enough. It wasn’t until Dean and I were left alone for a moment that he reverted to form.
“She’s hot,” he said to me. “You bang her yet?”
I punched him in the stomach so hard that he crumpled to the floor. To his credit, he didn’t make a fuss, just silently caught his breath and picked himself up before Amy and my parents rejoined us. We haven’t mentioned it since, though my reaction clearly surprised us both—neither of us had ever hit the other. I guess love makes you more protective, too.
More everything, really. Stronger, braver, free of imprisonment by the self if not imprisonment by the other—because you are now for her and she is for you—invincible, unburdened, attuned to a world that keeps expanding not just because you now see it through two sets of eyes but because you appreciate details to which you had been blind—the divine intricacy of the hand as she plays the guitar, the steadfast miracle of the heart, which beats on even after she falls asleep beside you—until the universe is no longer an absurd heap of colored spots flecked across a canvas but a Pointillist masterpiece revealing a whole and graspable truth, made meaningful—made possible at all—by the fact that someone else is standing with you, experiencing it exactly as you are, feeling all the things you feel.
Until she’s not.
“It’s been magical, Elliot.” We stood
outside Amy’s dorm while she waited for a taxi to the airport. It was the week after graduation. College was over. Apparently, so were we.
“Then why end it?” We’d already been through this, of course, but I asked again anyway.
“It just feels like it’s time for . . . real life.”
“This is real life,” I said, but I didn’t sound convinced, not even to myself.
Amy plucked at my sleeve. “Oh, Elliot,” she said. “This hasn’t been real life at all. That’s why it was so wonderful. It’s like a dream we shared. Our little college fantasy.”
A searing pain tore through my chest. I didn’t know which was worse—Amy labeling our love a fantasy, or the little voice in my head telling me she was right, that life is not made up of love songs and poetry and candlelight, that romance doesn’t make you invincible, that human beings weren’t meant to be stars.
The taxi arrived. Amy hugged me goodbye, kissed me, and hugged me again. Then she was gone. And while I can’t prove that the universe was altered in any other way, it seemed to me that it disintegrated back into an incoherent swarm of colored spots, and that the gaps between the spots were wider than before.
There is not a breath of wind. The rain pummels New York with an intensity bordering on violence, stabbing at my skin until it feels like my thin gray suit has been flayed from my body and I now stand naked—too exposed, certainly, to go inside and join a circle of strange faces. The people in the window begin to take their seats in the circle, but the dark river at my back feels more familiar, safer. I shift my weight to ease the pressure on my right leg. Years later, and it still sometimes aches where it was fractured. It’s the rain, I tell myself, though my leg doesn’t always ache in the rain, and I know it’s more about my own inner weather.
