White Out

by Michael W Clune

  My grade-school afternoons burned without being consumed in the blue television light flickering on my father’s basement walls. And the sudden chill at dusk reminded me of school play rehearsals. Once I had a red cape and a play sword; Elizabeth had a blue gown made of terrycloth…

  Everything came back to me. The holy question “who am I?” was hard to sustain. It was hard to pretend I was some great mystery when every puddle and every slant of light knew me.

  “I know you,” said the evening chill, “you were the pirate in the school play.”

  “I know you,” said the sunset, “your bedtime was at eight.”

  “I know you,” said the puddle. “When you were little I showed you a bit of the sky.”

  Now the sky the puddle showed me had something to show me. The reflected bit of sky showed me…me. I looked at the puddle and my heart sank, full of ten thousand days.

  Who am I? I am a being who is alive, fills up with time, and must die. In this human world, who I am has a simple answer. A first name and a last name. A body and a brain. Nothing more to me than what is in the mind of anyone who sees me passing and calls out my name.

  Pretending there’s more to me than that is dangerous. Perhaps it conceals a secret longing for the dope body, the timeless body, the white eternity. Worse, this chasing after mystery is tasteless. It looks pretentious on a being who is born and then passes away. A being so full of dead time he sinks when everything else rises. When the heavenly days come—late April, early May—he fills up with memory and pastness and sinks away.

  Catching all those human memories—in the sunsets, in the smell of cooking, in an old book I found under my bed—that was hard. And being back in human time, knowing that I would eventually die, that was hard too. But even worse was having to get a job.

  What kind of job? By that spring, everyone agreed manual labor was the answer. Manual labor. It’s not good for Michael to mope around the house. What’s he doing all day? Fiddling with that dissertation? What’s he calling it? “Freedom from You?” What does that even mean? Manual labor. What else was I qualified to do? Undergrad degree in Russian history, partly through a grad degree in English literature. Partly qualified to be a professor; fully qualified to be a manual laborer.

  Manual labor. The tenth floor of an office building under construction. It was like heaven. A wide-open bright space with nowhere to hide. And why would you want to hide? This isn’t a place for hiding. What are you doing hiding over there, Mike? Didn’t I tell you to sweep out this room an hour ago?

  I knew all about manual labor. I was something of a master, in fact. I could teach you how to pick this up and bring it over there and put it down. Now pick that up. I think actually I’d be good at it. But no one ever offered me a job teaching manual labor. The job they offered me involved doing manual labor.

  The word manual comes from the Latin word for hand. That’s misleading. Because you don’t have to be too good with your hands. I once worked with a guy who had a hook for a hand. He’d been a machine operator, then he had an accident and lost his hand. Now he was a manual laborer. Just to put it in perspective for you. Just in case you know Latin and think manual labor involves some kind of close and careful work with your hands. It does not. It’s the kind of job you can get when you lose your hands. You can push boxes with stumps.

  My father came to me with the suggestion after I’d been hanging out in his basement not getting high for three months. It was hard to argue that I shouldn’t have a job. He’d been paying for me, helping me, never complaining about all the horrendous stuff I’d put the whole family through for years, the legal fees, the “borrowed” credit cards, etc. He’d been amazing, warm, supportive, loving. He let me stay in his house, drive his car. He paid for my car insurance, gave me money for clothes, movies, cigarettes. He’d asked for nothing in return. So when he mildly suggested that I should get a job, I could hardly respond by arguing that I shouldn’t. It was maybe easier to argue that I couldn’t. But to build up my self-esteem I refrained from taking that line. At first. Eventually I did take the position that I was incapable of even manual labor—and I stood firm on it—but at first I simply suggested that maybe I could get some other kind of job.

  Dad saw through this for what it was—a way to buy time. The fact is that I had tried to get a non-manual-labor job before, and the result of that experiment made it unlikely that I could repeat it. After I graduated college, and before I learned that Johns Hopkins was going to pay for me to go to grad school for six years, I had called a temp agency and gotten an office-type job. I was supposed to work there for at least a year, and to give a month’s notice before I left. I was going to be taking over for the secretary of a small firm. This lady knew all the little ins and outs of the place, the kind of valuable, essential knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere. It was in her head. She’d train me, put all that stuff into my head, then she’d retire. It was stuff like what to do with invoices and where certain forms were kept. But I can’t really be more precise because two days into my training I got the letter from Hopkins and stopped listening. I was going to become a professor. I decided I’d go to Europe on vacation with Eva in a month to celebrate never having to get a real job again.

  So there was no need to pay attention to the training, I just needed to earn a few weeks’ worth of money and then I’d be out. After two weeks of training me, the old lady left. There was an office party. The boss even took a picture of her symbolically handing over her keys to me. It was sad and fun. She’d been there twenty years. I got into the spirit of it, told her I’d miss her. I signed her card, “I can never replace you.”

  The day after the party I came in and moved some papers around. I got seen walking purposefully around the office and talking seriously into the phone. All day long people passed by and dropped forms on my desk. I stuffed them in the drawers when no one was looking. I had no idea what to do with them. After four days the drawers of my desk were full. There wasn’t room for one more form. I started throwing them right in the trash can as soon as I got them. There were about sixty unreturned voice mails on my machine. People were starting to look at me a little funny. It was time.

  Late that night I called in and left a message saying I had diarrhea and wouldn’t be able to come to work anymore. The next day I got a nice but puzzled voice mail from the boss of the firm. The day after that, nothing. The day after that I got a very angry message from the temp agency lady saying I’d never work for her company again. She said she was going to send a letter to her friends at the other temp agencies in town.

  An evil deed never goes unpunished. So it was that five years later I found myself holding a broom on the tenth floor of a Chicago high-rise and longing for a cushy office job. The sounds and smells of construction rose around me. I pushed the broom a little ahead of me, then my arm got tired and I let it fall.

  “Here, Mike, let me show you,” the supervisor said. “Like this.”

  He took hold of the broom and began vigorously sweeping with short, quick strokes, raising a thick cloud of concrete dust. I watched with ill-concealed distaste. My way of sweeping came from an older, gentler place. It was environmentally friendly. Closer to the earth. My sweeping let things be as they are: the dust, the light, the air.

  “See? You don’t even hold the broom right,” he said. “Hold it like this. Now. I want this room swept clean when I get back.”

  I took hold of the broom in a weak and hopeless way. I smeared it along the ground until he was out of sight. Then I lit a cigarette and walked over to the window. There was a section of drywall propped up against a girder on the far side of the room. I contemplated it. Then I went and hid behind it.

  The minutes passed. Actually, the seconds passed. If you are immortal and you want to get a feeling for human time, pick up a broom and head for a construction site. Manual labor is like a laboratory for isolating the properties of human time. Its weight, for instance. Each instant falls like a concrete slab on t
he one before it. Its slowness. Like a mountain falling down. Like a very old dog walking. Its weight. Like breathing with a fifty-pound dumbbell on your chest. Its slowness. Like reading a book in an unknown language.

  And it never stops. And everything it takes is gone forever. I was back in it. I was outside the timeless dope body. Getting outside that body was thrilling. But the thrill wears off. It’s not like you can keep doing it. It doesn’t take much getting outside before you find yourself in a place you can’t get outside of. You’re just outside.

  I crawled out from behind the drywall and checked my watch. Three minutes had passed. Two-and-a-half hours till lunch. I picked up the broom and began smearing it along the concrete. I checked my watch. It was going to take a while to feel comfortable with this outside time. To learn the tricks. It would take some time to find time’s weak spots. The holes and the tunnels. The skipped moments and the repeated moments.

  And what if there weren’t any? I tensed; the broom froze in my hand. Then I relaxed. Of course there were. If my adventures had taught me anything, it was that time isn’t solid. It’s full of holes.

  Ten minutes later I dropped the broom and walked off the job.

  CHAPTER 16

  Endless

  When I drove home after walking off the job site I was shaking. I can’t take this, I told myself. I can’t do anything. Even manual labor. The speedometer needle shook. The houses on the side of the road sucked into themselves, sucked into themselves, sucked into themselves. Recovery, I thought. You can’t get back what you never had. I drove with both hands. Seventy miles an hour. The people didn’t care.

  When I parked and got out the world was still rippling with the insubstance of high speed. I wasn’t thinking about getting high. But it was thinking of me. The world was painted on one side of a plastic sheet, and an enormous dope high was standing on the other side. It snapped its fingers against the plastic and the world rippled.

  I parked the car, went in and walked quickly down the basement stairs, not stumbling, breathing through my mouth. Into my bedroom. Picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Yeah, Dad, I couldn’t really take it. Felt very anxious…Yes…No…No…Yes I’m fine.”

  He was worried. The house was empty. It was the middle of the day. I looked at the dayghost. A single bright eyeball, rolled all the way back in the wall’s skull. What a thing to have in my bedroom, I thought. Where I sleep, I thought.

  In my basement room, with the lights off, a corner of my desk glowed under the dayghost’s white eye. I sweated. I saw everything clearly. When you’re a person, everything reminds you of something else. When I panic, as I panicked realizing no I can’t no I’m unable even to do the simplest job I’m not made for this world, unmade for this kind of world—when I panic the memory webs burn off the things. Every veil, every mood, every memory flashes and smokes off them. This desk is this desk. The wall looks like the wall. The dayghost is white; the carpet is pink.

  My panicked eyes darted around the room. The things made me panic more. I panicked at the inhuman way things look when I’m panicked. They look different. The things look as they must look to themselves. When they’re alone. The desk looks the way the wall sees it. The things outside of memory. They’re scared. The wall is solid shock. The desk frozen in minus ten thousand degrees of panic. The chair panicked, freaking, bent over twisted and hiding in the shape of a chair. This world is not safe.

  I tried pulling myself together but when I closed my eyes or when I opened them now—in addition to my desk the dayghost the chair the carpet me and no memory—there was one other thing in the room. A thing that wasn’t there.

  “Pull yourself together. This is just a panic attack; you’ve had them before,” I told myself.

  But dope was in the room for sure now. When I pulled myself together I pulled myself together around the ghost of a white vial of dope.

  “Pull yourself together!”

  It was like trying to breathe with a hole in your lungs.

  “Relax!”

  I was pacing. The room was too small to pace in. I didn’t have any Valium. The room was too small to breathe in. It was sucked in and breathless. I grabbed the pillow off my bed and placed it on the ground. Then I sat cross-legged on it. Hands clasped at my navel, palms down, thumbs barely touching. Like the picture of the Buddha on my book about meditating.

  I sat cross-legged on the cushion. I threw my panicked gaze on the carpet three feet in front of me. My look was as sharp as a piece of broken glass. Every knot in the carpet stood out, looking the way carpet-knots look to themselves. Alien, amnesiac knots of carpet. Unrelaxing vision.

  I counted my breaths. Tried to breathe through my nose. Counted the exhalations. I knew from the meditation book exhalations are longer than inhalations when one is properly relaxed. I was improperly panicked. Relapse, I thought. One, I counted. Two, I counted. Relapse, relapse. Three, I counted. Relapse, relapse, relapse. Four, I counted. Money, I thought. Seven, I counted. Homelessness. Friendlessness.

  Seven, I counted again. Eight. These breaths are coming too fast, I thought. I tried to breathe through my nose. Try to breathe through your nose when you’re panting. Your head gets kind of sucked in on itself and you wheeze. Breathe. The white thing appeared on the carpet. A white vial towering over the carpet. Like a negative of the black monolith from 2001. Blink. Pink carpet. It is negative, I thought. Count your breaths, idiot, I thought. One, I counted. Two, I counted.

  This is terrible, I thought. Three, I counted. Every breath was like swallowing a huge pill with no water. A horse pill. One after the other after the other. Pills full of black space. Four. Five. Six. A big bottle, get them all down. Seven, I counted. I had to open my mouth wide to get it around the next one. Seven, I counted again. I tried to breathe through my nose.

  Just before the thoughts stopped I felt unbearably constricted. Bursting full of the horse-pill breaths. A quarter hour of sitting on an uncomfortable cushion swallowing breaths and counting them with half-open eyes. I lost perspective.

  Part of my face moved under my vision where the breaths came and went. I couldn’t tell how big my face was. It might have been three inches wide. Or thirty feet. I might have been a man or a woman. I was breathing from everywhere like a sponge. I couldn’t see enough to see. No space to see my seeing from. Just the tiny square of carpet before me. All I could hear was my breathing. My mind at six thousand revs per second. Spinning in my body like a wheel in sand. Three, I counted. Four, I counted. Five. Six.

  Then it stopped and the numbers went forward alone. Seven. Eight. Nine.

  There was space inside the numbers. Pills with outer space inside and a little outer-space coating and I swallowed them easily. One. Two. Three. Four. There was space in the way the carpet looked. The way the carpet looked to the carpet. My gaze fell on the carpet. Inside my looking two knots of carpet looked at each other. There was plenty of space in the way they looked. Outer space. Endless space.

  There was space in my thoughts too, which were now also floating in space.

  What about my job? I thought.

  Space between me and the thought, and space between me and the thinker of the thought. Space between me and the thinker of the thinker. Who am I?

  Cash once told me I like meditating because it’s like getting high. I got angry when he said it. Meditating is nothing like getting high, I told him. It takes effort, for one thing. When you’re panicking, for example. It’s often boring, for another. You have to force yourself to do it, most of the time. And it doesn’t get you high.

  But I was wrong and he was right. Meditating is like getting high. But not for the reason Cash thought. Not because meditation and heroin give me the same feeling in my head. But because they show me the same thing in the world. The thing I like to see. The hole. Dope and meditation are totally different, but they show me the same thing because it’s there to be seen. Because the world really is the way I want it. This world really is the way I desperately lo
ng for it to be.

  Time is as insubstantial as smoke.

  Cash is as insubstantial as smoke. I spent a lot of time with him in those days. Dave called two weeks ago and told me Cash’s back drinking Robitussin. I won’t talk to him since he kind of threatened to shoot me in California, but like anyone I’m curious about what he’s discovering. I think it likely that no one in America has drunk as much Robitussin as he has. I know America is a big place.

  “He calls it metaphilosophy,” Dave said, speaking of Cash’s robo-thinking. He then read me some of Cash’s latest emails.

  “Perspective is based on the number one. Logic is based on two, and communication and relationships within and between beings are based on three. This is also the solution to Clarke’s solution in Rendezvous with Rama…”

  “…I also believe that everything was destined to work precisely the way it has by the prime mover. Using Wikipedia I can easily tie together all historical events, many of them religious, in order to show the progression…”

  “…Additionally, the unraveling all started with Zoroaster…”

  “The degree of madness is impressive,” Dave commented.

  I asked him to keep forwarding them to me, and I’d reflect on the new one each morning at breakfast. A tone of sublime compassion inflected the final emails. The subject line of the very last one read “Who will laugh.” Here is the full text:

  “Who will laugh at kindness, love, and good sense?”

  I won’t. Ten years ago, in the months after I got out of rehab, I was a disciple of Cash’s kindness, love, and good sense. Every day I went to an NA meeting and then drove over to Cash’s apartment. We talked for hours. He’d quit drinking a couple years earlier and was glad to show me around his sober lifestyle.