The sensation was not disagreeable at first. There was a great peace in knowing nothing, a tremendous weight lifted. I spent the next few days growing accustomed to the curious calm, doing push-ups and pacing from wall to wall inside the dark. I sat on the end of my bed and relished the wonder of Clean-Slatedness and the luxury of being free of old ghosts, and still it wasn’t long before I began feeling uncomfortable with having such an absence of Self. Despite all I hoped to gain, my entire identity had vanished. “Who am I?” I wondered, and received as my answer no reply.
Moored to nothing, I grew disoriented. What once seemed a great achievement made me nervous and unsure. Hours went by when all I could do was ask again and again “Who?” while faltering over and over in my response. Frightened, I walked across the floor, miscalculated my steps and crashed into the wall. I cursed and limped back to the bed where I pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around my legs and fell over onto my side. I began to fear without memory there was nothing to keep me from vanishing altogether in the dark, and even when I was eventually released from the box, how was I to know what missteps to avoid if I had no sense of what brought me here? The question exposed a serious flaw in Emmitt’s treatment, and trembling, I grabbed for the iron frame of my bed as if to anchor me there. “Who, goddamn it?” I continued to repeat, “Who? Who? Who?” like a ridiculously horrified bird.
I crawled onto my bed and closed my eyes, and while I didn’t sleep, I seemed to dream and heard a voice then telling me a story about a man walking along a footpath in a flatland filled with yellow and green grass. The man was quite old. His hair was white and worn long, his beard dangling away from his chin, his whiskers a hoary silver. He appeared healthy, his stride steady. His gait was purposeful and rhythmic. There were other sounds I heard, birds singing, the breeze through the grass and the branches overhead, the man’s boots as he moved from path to road and back again, a soft yet constant chant inside my head of “Wait…Watch … Listen…”
He coveted several miles. The terrain remained flat and only occasionally did a building come into view. At these times, when a house or small farm or fishing shack appeared, the man would approach the site and immediately be greeted by children and adults alike, all pleased to see him and calling his name. A circle would form around the man who stood in the center and told his story to all that drew near. Four times that day the man stopped at a different place and recounted his tale. His words on each occasion were identical. (I was initially puzzled by the purpose of his routine, but again persuaded by the voice to “Wait . Watch … Listen …”) He described his life as a boy, his impressions of the world as they first came to him, how his father had been killed in an accident while mining for gold, and the way circumstance later forced his mother to marry a man she didn’t love. He spoke of his days as a student, and of his time in the service and of the war in which his brother was lost. He told of falling in love and starting a family and buying a small farm where one of his children—named Horacio for his brother—had stumbled on a machete carelessly left laying at the base of his field. When the child almost died, the man went crazy with guilt and rushed into the field and cut every last stalk of wheat down until his hands bled and his back hurt so severely he couldn’t move his legs for some time. That winter, as his injured child healed and returned to his normal life and kissed and loved his father no less than before, the man was overwhelmed, and more than once dropped to his knees and wept.
During the telling of his tale, the man produced dozens of photographs from a green knapsack. These pictures were passed around throughout the course of his talk and left with the children when he was gone.
Within the man’s story, every sort of incident was discussed. He spoke of choices made and not made, of temptations resisted and taken, of good times and bad. He described the birth of his first grandchild and pulled from his knapsack the sweater his wife knitted years ago that he still wore. Moments of delight and infinite sorrow were conveyed with an equal sense of wonder. At the end of the day, after covering many miles, the man arrived back at a small cottage on his farm. The house had a stone chimney and thatch roof, wooden walls inside painted blue, two small windows, a bed and chair with a table, an old-fashioned stove, and a shelf holding many books. Beside the fireplace was a small stack of wood. Photographs identical to those the man carried with him on his walk occupied the mantle, hung also on the walls next to the bed, the windows and door. The man removed his green sack, and lifting three dry logs from the pile of wood, put them in the fireplace. When the fire was strong enough, he sat down in his chair with a book. Each time the light became too dim for him to read, he got up and added more wood to the flame. Afterward, he ate a small meal and stretched out on his bed where he slept until dawn.
In the morning, he went to his garden in back of the cottage where instead of carrots and lettuce, tomatoes and corn, additional copies of the photographs he carried with him yesterday grew in neat rows. The trees, too, were filled with snapshots of the man’s children, his wife and parents, and friends. I watched him gather up as many of the photographs as he could carry from the garden and trees and fill his knapsack, before setting out along a different path, passing through forest and wild fields, changing shoulders when the sack on one side became too heavy and he needed a rest.
Here the story ended and the voice disappeared.
I sat up and looked about the dark, waiting and watching for what would come next. A few seconds later I heard a new sound, a soft refrain of notes to a song my mother used to sing, and then my mother’s voice from so many years before. “Love me, love me, say you do.” I remained motionless on the bed, sitting with my eyes fixed on the ebony pitch in front of me, listening to the music and my mother’s voice, the sweet melody drawing closer and closer, until I was entirely embraced and gave way exactly as Emmitt told me. Soon after this other memories returned, filling me completely. Relieved, I dropped to the floor and did a vigorous set of push-ups, then went to the shower where I stripped off my clothes and waited for the water to warm. I stayed beneath the stream and let the water flow through my whiskers, massaging my arms and back, then climbed out and toweled myself dry.
Instead of floating through black space, I felt anchored there by a new sense of gravity, the feeling reminding me of my mother’s hand resting softly on my shoulder as I played piano for her when I was a child. In the darkness I performed a rousing rendition of “Brown Penny” with my fingers dancing through the air. As I played, more and more memories returned and I reviewed everything with an eager resolve. Once or twice I wept when working my way inside a particular sadness, though the sorrow I felt was different then and didn’t grieve me in the same way as it once did. I dressed and sat near the door, recalling the time I went to a Miró exhibit and stood in front of the weightless white and black figures floating across a hue of diaphanous blue in Komposition (1925). I remembered examining the shapes and lines of the canvas, taking in the structure of the work and the relationship between each form, and thought how Miró’s genius lay in his ability to display an ethereal sense of order and balance in his childlike abstractions and provide a vision of what could be accomplished through the existing limitations of dimension, color, and scheme. I sat with my head against the wall, my arms relaxed, and my eyes open and staring as I thought everything through, remembered my life in terms of art and not art, saw the way memory recorded my days like a painter working a canvas, with every stroke permanent, each occurrence connecting together, one to the next. Even the false strokes, especially those, the artist had to deal with if he was to keep them from ruining the entire piece.
I finished out the month with no further incidents to speak of, ate heartily, did my push-ups, and slept with little disturbance from my dreams. I was anxious though not for escape, impatient but not to flee. When the time finally came and I heard the clicking of the latch and a small ray of light filtered into the room, I moved toward the door and was handed a pair of dark glasses to p
rotect me from the glow. Emmitt said my name, said, “Bailey?”, and I looked about before answering, stared out until all that was there awaiting me came into focus and I was able to say, “I’m here.”
In the weeks that followed, I was kept busy with a number of projects. Harry did as I asked and presented my essay on Niles to the press who, in turn, made every effort to verify my claims before publishing the piece to a great deal of fanfare. (I told the truth about everything I knew, though for Aziz’s sake, didn’t mention him by name.) Three days after the end of my interment, two government agents came by my apartment and interviewed me about Niles and Osmah. I was questioned twice more, found to know nothing beyond what I already explained, and left with a warning to keep my nose clean.
I resumed teaching in the fall, wrote the article I promised on Timbal, whose career, thanks in part to the new painting hanging at the Modern Museum in Renton, underwent a renewed appreciation. Although my trip to Algiers was well documented, I managed to keep Timbal’s location a secret and informed those who took up the hunt that I ran into him on my way to North Africa, in Spain, England and Italy, and coming back through New York.
Aunt Germaine retired to Florida where she kept a garden and met a widower by the name of Charlton Filbinger who took her to dinner and taught her how to dance. I mailed her a letter and planned to visit later in the year. In October I phoned my father, and finding the number disconnected, drove the next day to our old house where the new owners said he had moved back to Zenith earlier that spring. I got his address and dropped him a line as well.
I tried to track down my brother Tyler, something I hadn’t done for years and years and felt bad about, yet every attempt I made produced nothing but another dead end, and as with everyone I spoke with, I had no idea what happened to him or where he wound up.
Emmitt and I met regularly for much of the fall as he monitored the effect of my treatment. The paper he wrote on our experiment was received skeptically by the scientific community, though he took the reviews from other psychiatrists and psychotherapists in stride. I offered to write a paper of my own and provide my personal account of how the Hatilbee Method actually worked, a suggestion Emmitt seemed to appreciate and promised to ask for my assistance in time.
I continued to play at Dungee’s, producing pop and jazz for the crowds, though every now and then I took on a more strenuous assignment and recorded Roslavets, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin for a small label in east New York. The measure of my achievement, if such was the right word, came as Emmitt taught me in the release, and while I forgot nothing, I drew differently from each experience and the weight of that which still had to be endured.
One night, out walking, I stopped at a bookstore and bought a colorful poster of a beautiful stretch of desert set below a bright evening sky. I purchased a flashlight and tacks, and attaching the poster to the kiosk across the street from my apartment, went upstairs and stood by my window, shining the light down. The view was magnificent. The sky glowed with stars a billion years old, while as far as I could see all was clement and calm. The telephone rang as I was staring out, and through my machine I heard an original piece of music. I listened for a minute, then went at last and answered the call.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Working on my second novel, I fully expected those who were so supportive the first time around to lose interest in indulging me this time, and show a measure of indifference if not antipathy. To my surprise however, the opposite proved true. Not only were those closest to me all the more supportive, they seemed to endure my moods and methods for crafting The Weight of Nothing with a greater understanding and willingness to accept what goes into writing a novel. To the usual suspects then: To my father Stan, for his boundless faith and sage eye, ever faultless, I simply can’t thank you enough. (This book is for you, Dad. I love you. You will be sorely missed.) Mother Ilene, whose love is unconditional and a sweet constancy. Brother Bob, nonfiction writer supreme, my daily e-mail companion and bridge to my sanity. (Go Stones!) For my agent Henry Williams at McIntosh and Otis, a truly kind and generous soul, indefatigable champion of my work and gifted poet. To the gang at Brook Street Press, James Pannell and Debra Hudak, both of whom saw me through every stage with friendship and generous understanding, thank you. And last but, of course, never least, my family. To my daughter Anna, you are forever my cover girl, heir to my accursed artist’s eye; my son Zach, hero for being the calm in all of my storms (except first thing in the morning); and my wife Mary, love of my life, inspiration in every part of my being. How you bear me still is the one mystery I can’t ever solve, but I thank you.
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