“I don’t know. I guess,” I said, “I didn’t know where to begin.”
Emmitt and I spoke by phone twice a week and I met with him at Hatilbee at the end of each month. For August, I was instructed to give up reading quarterlies and magazines, and in September to stop listening to recorded forms of music, a difficult assignment so early in the game. I spent several weeks in the silence of my room reworking the essay I still hoped to write about Niles. I resumed playing at Dungee’s, taught my classes at the university, ate bowls of tuna, lettuce, and carrots, and before going to bed each night made entries in my journal. (Emmitt provided a notebook, asked me to keep a daily accounting. “Nothing overdone,” he said. “For now just concentrate on general observations.”) I took a workmanlike approach to the experiment, eager to erase all that affected me adversely, inspired to forever lay old bones to rest.
October and November: motorized forms of transportation, television and movies. I had to walk everywhere, rearrange my schedule and plan my appointments with enough interval between to make it from one place to the next. Despite the inconvenience, I never thought of quitting, the exercise—if nothing else—gave me something to do, and without telling Emmitt, I took on further modifications, gave up tuna and chicken and supplemented myself with soybean and tofu. I stopped using electricity after nine at night and learned to read by candle, limited shaving to once a week, and slept without a pillow for my head.
Looking to test my progress, I took out photographs of Niles and Liz, curious to see my reaction, hoping my emotions would prove less brutal though the result was always the same, disappointing and severe. Frustrated, I put the pictures back in the closet until the next time, for as long as I could.
In December I gave up all fruit and black ink pens, novels written after 1970, music composed by musicians whose last names began with the letters О through Z. My effort was absolute, indefatigable and intense, and still I forgot nothing.
A week before Christmas I received a phone call from an attorney who informed me that Niles’ will had cleared probate. I hadn’t thought of this before, not once in all the weeks since I was home, such a thing simply never occurred to me and I was shocked to learn that from the trust Niles created for bequeathing sums to charity, he’d arranged to leave me $ 10,000 a year for life. “A matter of formality now. Just a few papers you need to sign.” I went downtown the next day and tried to convince Niles’ attorney that I didn’t want the money, that I didn’t deserve it and wasn’t entitled to it, and that he should put the money back into the trust, but he wouldn’t let me, said, “The money is yours now. What you do with it once it’s in your hands is something else.” I signed the papers as he asked and left it at that.
For January I gave up the blanket on my bed and dialed my thermostat down to sixty-three degrees. Liz returned to Renton just after the new year. (Eric Stiles informed me as we happened to pass on the street and I questioned him at length.) Elizabeth’s sudden proximity challenged my current ambition, and despite all the months of effort I put into laying the groundwork for Emmitt’s treatment, I wanted to go and see her and confess how much she was missed. Ultimately, as a form of compromise, having gone round and round for nearly a week, I waited one day until the mid-afternoon when I assumed Liz would not be in her apartment, and setting the phone atop my piano I dialed her number, allowed the machine to click on, and played Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude Op. 32, No. 5 in G.”
Following this, I sat in silence for quite some time, wondering what I had done. Around 5:00 p.m. I took out the journal Emmitt asked me to keep and wrote on the page dated January 11, “Forget, forget forget,” filling every line back and front, stopping only as the telephone rang and I let the machine answer it. I heard Beethoven’s “33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli,” the left hand alone but clearly recognizable. I listened to the entire piece without picking up the phone, and later that night tried to imagine why Liz chose such a difficult score, not one of her own and a composition which—despite how well she played with her left hand—was nonetheless fractured and only half achieved. I puzzled over this until the next afternoon, then returned her call by performing the right hand to Beethoven’s “Variations,” the missing half reciprocated in kind.
Early in February, the month I gave up going to galleries and drinking morning coffee, I hit a rough patch in the essay I was writing on Niles. The piece—tentatively entitled “Notes from the Meridian”—had gone well for a time then grew more labored, and looking about as always for a further form of diversion, I decided to review my dissertation. Removing the notes of my most recent draft from its red crate, I read through the material. I didn’t expect much, but fell into a surprising groove rewriting what I had, completing my research while rounding off rough edges, and finalizing the whole of my manuscript by the end of the month. I provided a copy to each member of my committee, assuring them, “The article on Timbal’s coming,” which only added to their shock. I gave no thought to my accomplishment, nor did I concern myself with what would happen now that I’d completed the task and Mel and Josh and Dr. Freidrich each had from me all they could expect.
In March, abstaining from alcohol and wearing only clothes dyed white or blue, I was leaving Dungee’s following a night of playing when Marthe asked to speak with me. We went outside, bundled in jackets against the cold, and finding a spot along the wall that broke the breeze, smoked together beneath an absent moon. Marthe stood beside me, silently at first and then wondering, “Do you think he went because of me?”
I expected these sort of questions right after Niles’ death and couldn’t say what caused Marthe to ask me now. She seemed to have given the matter a good deal of thought however, and rather than respond on reflex and insist Niles had planned his trip well in advance, I took a different approach, and said, “He spoke of you often while we were gone.”
“Then why did he go?” she looked at me as if the answer was mine to give.
“He had to,” I replied then as honestly as possible, saying nothing about Oz and Jeana and all the rest, and moving my wrist in order to encourage the smoke from my cigarette to swirl in the air like a faint white rope, glanced at Marthe inside her coat with her hood pulled up against the cold, and added, “Whatever confusion you caused him was a good thing. If your relationship caught him off guard, it was also the one reason he wanted to come home. You were with him in the end.”
Whether or not she believed me, if there was more she wished to ask and answers she hoped I’d provide, she didn’t say, and here I wrapped an arm around her shoulder, drawing us closer together against the chill as we stood silently then, thinking of Niles and Niles and Niles again.
I sat at my piano and worked on a piece of music that had played for much of the week inside my head. I composed quietly from 1 a.m. straight on through until morning when the arrangement was finished, jotting everything down on sheets of composition paper Elizabeth left behind, and setting the pages in front of me, performed my new score with the phone dialed and Liz’s machine clicking on.
I ran into Harry Fenton early in April. (Warm showers and eating before sunset were added to my list of abstentions.) Apparently all of Harry’s persistence paid off, his investigating the connection between Ed Garmore and Mayor Clabund resulting in a coup as he tracked the money trail from the Union Center development through a network of dummy corporations and bank accounts in the Canary Islands. “Crooked dealings, just as I said,” Harry slapped my shoulder and did a little jig. I congratulated his success, was told a grand jury was to convene, that Ed Garmore was already looking to plea out and Mayor Clabund was being pressured from within to resign. Three separate publishers had approached Harry with talk of writing a book, dangling advances large enough to make him laugh.
I walked from campus, thinking more about Harry’s achievement and how pleased I was for him. The effect of his perseverance had caused a small corner of the world to undergo change, and as such, I imagined Ed Garmore and Mayor Clabund squirming
under the application of Harry’s assiduous hand; this quite the opposite of my own lack of industry and how I caused both Liz and Niles to bend, and worse, under the weight of nothing.
At home later that night on my machine was the left hand of Chopin’s “Sonata No. 2, Concerto No. 1” in a minor key.
Classes ended the following month. I finished my essay on Niles and printed out a copy, which I mailed to Harry with a note for him to do with the material what he thought best. Two days later I graded my students’ final exams and made my way across town to the Hatilbee Institute, covering the three miles at a brisk pace. Emmitt’s assistant, Dianne, was waiting for me in the lobby and I followed her down the hall to the examination room where I slipped off my clothes and was given a white cotton sweat suit to wear. The medical doctor came in and had me step on the scale. He was concerned about my loss of weight, and after asking me to cough with his hand on my back, his fingers on my chest and between my legs, wondered how I was feeling. I complained of no physical maladies and assured him that I was fine.
Dianne stood to my left with a clipboard, and after the doctor was gone, asked me several additional questions. These interviews were standard each month, as she wanted to know about my sleep, the pattern of my eating, and any appreciable changes in my moods. As sex was one of the things I gave up in the last ten months, first because of Liz and then, as I raised the stakes, eschewing masturbation as a further show of restraint, I tended to placate my abstinence by looking at women wistfully, and noticing Dianne’s rounded shape and liberal fleshiness, found her the sort of admirably plump figure Giovanni Segan-tini, Raphael, and Rubens loved to paint nude. I imagined myself a painter then and kept the image in front of me until Dianne finished her questions and led me down the hall.
Emmitt and I spoke for approximately forty minutes. He was more animated than usual and kept coming out of his chair to squeeze my arm and poke me with the middle finger of his right hand. He examined the clipboard Dianne left: for him, asked his own questions and wrote down my answers with a blue ink pen. “Is there anything you haven’t told me? Any particular incident that stands out that you failed to record in your journal?”
I wasn’t sure if he suspected me of failing to adhere to the specifics of his schedule, and rather than confess that I had added certain abstentions of my own to his experiment, I shook my head and said, “Nothing, really.”
“What about the things you’ve been doing?”
“What things?”
“You tell me.”
I mentioned for the first time finishing my dissertation and how I’d been writing a bit of music. Emmitt came around and stood in front of me again. “Your dissertation?”
“Yes.”
“And music?”
“Some.”
“And these are things you didn’t consider important enough to tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
He went back behind his desk and wrote furiously. When he finished, I was taken to a room on the west end of the building. The space was approximately fifteen by twenty feet, with a shower and toilet installed in the rear, a single bed with a sheet and green summer quilt, a table to the right where I could eat though, oddly enough, no chair. A plastic pitcher of water was placed on the table with several Styrofoam cups. Food was to be delivered through a lead-lined chute in the bottom of the door, designed so a tray could be slipped in without admitting the slightest hint of light. (The walls were, of course, without windows and the ceiling ten feet from the floor.) The only audible sound inside was the gentle whirl of air being pumped in through vents at a controlled temperature of sixty-eight degrees.
Emmitt spoke with me in the hallway just before I entered the box. Assurances were made that I was not being filmed or recorded with infrared cameras, though for my own safety special devices were installed so those outside could monitor me at discreet intervals. “No more than one or two minutes an hour. Otherwise you’re on your own.” (I later learned Emmitt lied and a camera was, in fact, rolling the entire time I was in the box.) “We want you to feel completely at ease,” he led me to the doorway where I was asked to notice a switch just inside I was to press in case of emergency. “The switch is connected to a yellow light that will flash to us,” Emmitt said. “If at any time you feel in distress, you need only flick the switch and those of us in attendance will respond immediately.”
“How convenient.”
“It’s necessary for some. Of course, we’re confident you’ll go the entire month without any problem at all.” He encouraged me to relax, insisting I try and let go. “What you cling to will remain,” and here he threw open his fingers, like a sailor releasing the length of a rope. I nodded and stared inside the box. A change of clothes, clean sweats, underwear, T-shirt, and socks, were stored for me beneath the bed. Emmitt folded his arms across his chest. “The key is doing as little as possible,” he reminded me once again. “Everything should come and go through you naturally. Allow your thoughts to flow, don’t force them or avoid them but let them take hold.”
I said I understood, and stepping inside, waved once as the door closed. The last bit of light I saw surrounded Dianne’s face as she looked in at me, mouthing the words, “So long, Bailey. So long.”
The first thing I did was slip off my sweats and crawl into bed. The mattress was stiff but not uncomfortable, the summer quilt soft and cool. My intention was to sleep, if only for a short while, in order to remove all sense of time and disorient myself so that when I woke I’d have no lingering connection with the outside world. I didn’t expect to drift off as easily as I did and found when I woke the absolute dark had devoured me completely.
I brought my legs around and put my feet on the floor. After a minute I stood and paced in gradual strides from one side of the room to the other, sliding back and forth along the same path until the route began to feel familiar. I measured the distance from my bed to the side wall, from my bed to the shower, the table and door, then found my way back to the bed again and sat down. I listened to the air through the vents, heard my own soft breathing, concentrated on the instructions Emmitt gave me just before locking me away, and looking to cooperate, I repeated my objective: “To achieve a point of nothingness and return to a natural state of being.” The prospect appealed to me, the ability to at last lay things to rest and start over, and extending my hands into the dark, I invited the next phase to reach me.
What memories returned first were surprisingly pleasant as I was visited by my mother and Aunt Germaine. I recalled the pleasure of my music and art, playing piano at Dungee’s, and touring galleries and museums. I sat on my bed, got up and paced to the table and back, to the wall and the door. My movement inside the box improved and I developed a reliable efficiency for getting around. I slept on no set schedule and seemed to nap in two or three hour increments. Food arrived through the lead chute, tuna and vegetables, a wheat-based hot cereal. Sometimes there were crackers, at other times cake. I made a habit of eating beside the door and left the tray in front of the chute so it could be retrieved by one of my caretakers.
Time passed and while I was still waiting for the process of erasing to begin, I was surprised that only the most pleasant memories continued to return. In the absolute dark, I could stare with eyes open and watch as life-sized images performed for me on a shimmering black stage. There was Elizabeth in happier days. And Niles. My every recollection proved comforting and welcome and for this reason I was confused. I did my best to remain patient, anticipating the moment everything would change and my more brutal past would emerge and rush from me, and yet none of this happened, not for the longest time.
I ate a meal of soft warm cereal, wondering more and more if Emmitt’s idea of locking me away was actually madness and all for show. I had, after all, made progress in the last year, what with my dissertation and music, and why was I here then if the process of Clean-Slatedness wasn’t going to help me forget the worst of my past? After the first few days my isolatio
n struck me as nothing but flash added to a treatment that otherwise required month after month of self-sacrifice and abstention and where was the attraction, the selling point and mass appeal in that? If this was a ruse, I thought, then all of Emmitt’s instructions were false, and unwilling to wait any longer, I chose to dismiss his warning and conjured a particular unpleasantness on my own.
Sitting there in the dark I traced back to the root of where everything began and saw my mother laid out bluish grey in the snow. The memory caused me to shudder as I looked about to see if the process of erasing might at last begin.
And then it did.
For the next several hours all the bile came coursing through me as I remembered my father, drunk and dancing with an ax around his piano, cursing and crying in the flames. I saw Tyler beaten down at the Haptree Theater, recalled Niles’ fever and how I failed him as he lay in Aziz’s bed. I pictured Elizabeth equally pale as I purposely botched Roslavet’s “Etude,” causing her to leave me. I remembered my mother’s funeral, and all that otherwise went down with her into the grave. Inside my cell, I suffered through these memories like an addict sweating away his poison, my infected layers scraped away as painfully as peeling muscle from bone. I fought to endure the torment, afraid the torture would never end, and just as I was about to rush for the switch and signal for those outside to end the experiment, my panic abated, my breathing slowed, and the racing of my heart returned to normal.
And then it was over. And everything was gone.
I remained quite still and stared into the darkness, then went and sat on the side of the bed and waited to see what would happen next.
Nothing.
No further memories returned. What’s more, aside from incidental information, it seemed I had no memory at all. I could recall my name and what I was doing in the box, though not specifically what led me to volunteer for Emmitt’s experiment. I remembered where I lived and how I played piano, that I was unmarried and taught at the university, but when I tried to concentrate on more, a particular day from my childhood, a moment with friends and work, no such images appeared, all memory abandoned me and my mind was blank.
The Weight of Nothing Page 22
