Nothing (16 page)

Fear of Body

On the earliest video images captured of me, via Betamax one Christmas, my body appears translucent. Where I am standing in the image you can still see the room behind me, as if I’m not at all really there, or am a temporary gloam over the more permanent structure that the house is. That house, by now, to me as a concrete place is gone, having been sold after my grandparents’ passing, turned over to others to reoutfit with the hours of their lives. I will never go inside that house again—here it is upon the tape, in a day I do not remember but by seeing myself moving in the replicated room there. There too, the cells of my body, at age two or three, form a version of my body I could never find my way into again, and could not even as that image was burned into its pixels, even as I moved in the instant. And yet I am still in this same body, if grown larger, older, here today—I watch myself in the old space unaware of being watched. Therein, in the containment, I seem to contain a kind of false eternal life, a compilation of temporary minutes constricted into data that inside the tape play on—me there, speaking, gleeful, shaking objects out of boxes, aging with age I have had now inside me for so long. The tape seems almost to mock the absence of my own version of the memory—what about my life the machine remembers that I do not. These kinds of videos and images exist now for most everybody in certain hours, spools of versions, days gone past.

In my own skull’s box, too, beyond the camera’s reach, there are films coiled, ones seen once and not again, some seeming not like days I’ve lived but like exposures burned in from a different kind of light. As thick and suddenly eruptive as recall can be—some moments so burned into the blood and definitive of self they seem always playing in there in learned silence, on and on—for each of any of these clearest hot spots, there must be hundreds of thousands of other instants crushed underneath—either because they seemed less remarkable than another upon occurrence, or simply because it is our nature, inundated, to let the mass of what has come and gone become dissolved into some kind of bulkhead over the hour, there but not there, accessed by accident and sometimes force of will—though so many of the instants that do roll up inside me even now seem somehow qualitatively, at the time of entry, unpronounced. More clearly than the specifics of most any of my birthdays, or the deaths of my relatives or my skinned knees, I remember things that should seem, in comparison, a sidebar, common. Better than being baptized or going to prom or my first ball games, I remember with some great degree of spatial semblance the year I saw a certain movie on TV—one I’ve never found again since whatever year—a film wherein a child sized like me then appeared asleep in front of another screen—until in the dark room through the glass, as he remains still, a horde of countless bulbous insects rush to fill the floor, come to surge and writhe around his sleeping body in a clustered mass encountered unaware—the insects then carry the child’s body off into the dark of the house surrounding, offscreen—gone from me in vision except for where the sight is burned still in my mind.

Another year, when I was three—
though this, unlike the movie, I would not remember without having been told
—my mother found me talking on the phone—connected through a wire to a stranger speaking words into my head. Mom thought at first that I was playing on in self-conversation until the nature of my speaking began to shift, and it became clear someone was there. She took the phone out of my hand and asked, “Who is this?” The person on the other end hung up without further word. Our bill that month would reveal I’d been on the line with whomever almost half an hour, sharing wire, a digit string I’d dialed by fluke punching the keys. Unlike the unread note inside the balloon caught in a tree years later, I’d received a message, though one all buried, lurking here inside me now.

What sounds that man laid into me, what language. His breathing or commands; perhaps some code repeated over and over, prophetic dictum. I have no memory of it at all. I know it occurred at all because my mom remembers, and yet that residue still lingers, or something like it—I feel I can’t get the idea of the voice out of my head. It feels as close inside me as any minute, in my body—not a voice inside me, but its specter, by definition shapeless, and so in concept capable of any shape.

This seeing, hearing, being, contained inside the self—boxes, film, speech, image, air—must in gathering within me, even silent, contain a voidspace—a terrain inaccessible but through an inversion or elaboration of a certain sketch of time held in chemical loops caked in my mind, their silent wheels working in orchestration with any other range of moment, forgotten and not forgotten, amassed dimensionless, a hidden blood. When I die, those spaces die within me, while the tapes outside me continue on, there with all the other relics of the things I’ve taken into me in translation via seeing, reading, thinking, wishing, what—each also to one day be discarded, sold or buried, burned, donated, inherited, thrown away, passed on to other bodies, for whatever, until those bodies too are gone.

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To keep me calm or to recalm my internalizing terror in the fake light the house held to keep the night out, my mother read to me aloud. She read me books beside my bed about boys or men who, waking, moved—through forests to find fathers or ride on rivers; men who went because they could. Her voice gave a calm and even glove of warming, one like an endlessly played album I can in my head alone invoke: a soft pocket right there all through the veils of junk recorded on my brain’s ends. With her there nearby, projecting softly aloud, the larger world felt far away—the crushing veils of silence in which the evil things could hide and approach suddenly filled with protection, an eye. She would stay there, predicting end points for our evening when she would need to leave me and always staying when I asked for further, more.

Despite her sound, the reading never made me go to sleep. Our time would end when she herself, among the reading, had grown tired in her own body, her voice perhaps having even changed in tenor, turning sore. Inside the silence after, my mom would leave me with the light on, my smaller self in fear needing the reading lamp to keep the room close, quiet. A light like fire that would invoke fear in those beginning their wanting in—it was not until later, maybe, that I realized the light is what would draw them, bring them wanting. So many years I camped inside the house among that glowing, exposed as new rock, my dumb awake glow spreading out around the house all hours in small unwinking, not even miles.

In later years, both my mother and I aging, changing bodies, I would record my own voice reading on cassettes that then could be replayed night by night in loops, the cogs inside the machine fitting into the two eyeholes in the tape’s face, keys turning locks. Each night I would play the tape again, hearing my own voice in her image repeat those words pulled from some page, until over time, I learned the story from the inside, the phrases incanting from twin speakers unto late hours of no sleep, so that I could hear the words without them being said—cooked in my flesh. Those words in some way the seed of words sent out through my hands each day now, waking, repeating on and on beyond the shell, wormed in unzapped fat, too deep, and reinforced in fresh reservoirs since then somewhere fed and fed hard in the days spent inert absorbing more.

I’m no longer sure what I was so afraid of in the nights by the age of these recordings. Fear then seemed a product of itself—as if I was afraid precisely because I did not know what to be afraid of, or of the silence of the air demanding something soon to come. I can remember feeling crippled in the idea of drifting into the nothing of the space between the planets—no sound, no oxygen, no object but in incidental drift and fixed massive centers among the billioned grid of light defined by its absence for unindexed, countless miles—toward what but nothing—nameless. The black of that space lidded over, ever-present awakening, at windows—the sky at all times overhead. And yet, underneath this, I could not turn away from what seemed not even there. I was obsessed with space, the empty. I wanted near it. The plastic ream of neon stickers on the ceiling again replicating that same voidspace between lit spots overhead. I developed an obsession with becoming an astronaut despite, or in the wake of, the fear itself—eating space ice cream, watching and rewatching the movie
SpaceCamp
, wishing I was there inside the film, and yet never begging really to go to the camp itself—a spectator on the cusp of the machine.

In daylight, such recurring secret presences spread on playgrounds, whispered in the long white concrete halls of public school. Charles R., who ran headlong into the rumor of the Bell Witch, where he claimed to have chanted “Bell Witch, Bell Witch, Bell Witch, I hate you Bell Witch” into his bathroom mirror one night before bed, and then woken up with claw marks on his chest. And in that same grade, Corey C., who claimed his uncle had been decapitated by a flying Ouija board after trying to contact the center of the sun. The presence of our own Ouija board inside my house no doubt added to my internal terror, despite its hidden away station in my mother’s sewing room between a table and the wall. What second flooding throttled through me some nights when I would find her using the surface as a lap desk for her sewing in front of the TV, the presence of Corey’s language replicating in my body, draping, its presence still there even after she would return it to its hold. These objects, verbal yet heavy, strobed into my skin. They woke me up and kept me waking: a fodder for a blue brain, already curling in overthought: as more than any other presence, after sickness, or in great pain, it is the self inside the self that keeps one up. I am a part of Charles R., and Charles is in me, and his witch breath, and his lungs—if he is alive somewhere, or ever—the words he’s written down or felt against his head since the last time we stood in the same room. The hair that’s fallen out of Corey. The light we shared through our TVs. This list remains unending, a short link in a rope that wraps around my head, coiling something out and something in.

With us in the house, behind the locked doors, we had machines: eyes of light and shapes that counted time and boxes covered with buttons one could press, things that stayed awake and in the same mode whether you would sit with it or would not. My family’s first computer was the Apple IIGS model, sold to my parents for its supposed heightened graphics and clear sound, which at the time were something to behold. On this machine I began to worm into devices stored on discs, creations generated from long fields of text and ordered into strange displays, phrases coded into columns that when compiled might run a routine—I particularly liked writing variations on a program that would lock the computer until a password was entered, forcing the user to either know my command or press reset. I also drew up several text-based role-playing adventures that mostly went nowhere—I would give up before I got so far into the world they had a mass, thus leaving shells and shells of spaces scattered in code on discs ending in nothing, the blinking cursor awaiting my next command: ] ] ]. These languages I arranged had at least two kinds of speaking to them—the language meant to deliver the machine its code, and the words that the user would receive when the program ran, though I was the only one who ever played them—I had no one else to give them to. This duality of speaking—code arranged for some end purpose, arranged in networks of numbered make—would keep me up for hours in conversation both with the machine and with my future self, spooling up in discs that I still keep slid in black jackets in a closet of my parents’ home, waiting for no one, alive, condemned.

Our printer with that same machine—some then-new dot matrix—gave off a rhythmic screeching with its work, as if it hurt to let the ink out, the paper spooling from its long slit mouth page by page. Many times the machines, in their transmission, would skew my sent-out data into glyphs. Somewhere in the wire between where on the screen I had typed my coded language in compulsion, the bytes of text would become disrupted. One page would spit out as eighty, all symbol and syntax, strings of characters in the speech of something else. These ejections would slur and spool out of the racket for hours, or as long as I would let the heads roll on, sixty, eighty pages, more. As with my keys before and
IT
, I would carry these pages into my room and sit with them for hours, combing the lines for hidden sound—secrets, maps, directions, code words, some human mumbling—or worse, something lost and terrifying to mesmerize me in the manner the horror book had. I sat up cross-legged well into the night scouring page after page with a glass and a highlighter, looking for something I could not name now or then, but still knowing fully it was in there, somewhere, if I could bring myself to find. Circling dots or loops or phrases in the error mass that might lead to incantation, a codelock. I believed in Borges before I’d read him: “There is no combination of characters one can make—
dncmrlchtdj
, for example—that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance.” Into the night, and another night and another night, becoming another long string of the unblinking, of the never cutting out, which therein began to form its own encroaching, muddled string of text and sound and image—the source of day itself in the image of some huge dot matrix printer over all things, spooling out of some enormous mouth somewhere far off and nowhere below the sky. Each night, when I had finished combing through the papers as much as I could manage, the ink transferred in abstract splotches against my hands, I would stack the paper in my closet, hidden from whoever else might think, as if the information had been meant for me and me alone, something designed to creep just at the cusp of me, knitted, waiting to be found, so that at any moment, if I closed my eyes, I might miss the instance of the thing at last that reveals the thing itself—the thing about me and the me in me there that I always wanted and never knew to name. What these words woke in me were different even from the words in books or movies, but something just above my head, a presence fed into the home cloaked in a shape that tempted its revealing, that kept me up nights longer in my wish for what it hid to come all in.