Nothing (3 page)

I can remember with equal prowess standing as a preteen in the large open room of the library we always went to with my mother down the street—in particular a day of warm light in which I stood near the main room’s center and looked along a shelf at where someone had propped a hardback copy of Stephen King’s
IT
so that it stood to face the room. The way the title—large blood-red letters, all caps—seemed to brand themselves upon my eyes, and above that, the coal-gray, also all-caps letters of a man’s name against a nothing. The image of the sewer grate—an open mouth into some tunnel. On the book’s back, the huge replica of the creator staring back at my own head. That day I carried the book out to our Buick against my chest, feeling its weight sat on my lungs in presence, and something itching at me through the pages, which by peeking into with my breath held, I’d see the pages all those other fingers before me had already touched. Maybe bits of hair or food or oil in there, even, though that I don’t remember. I remember the plastic sleeve over the dark jacket, making the book’s face seem as if removed from what it had been once: a copy of a copy, under glass. Back at home I took the book to my bedroom and I locked the door behind me. I sat at the desk installed into an alcove in the wall and laid the book down at the center under the long fluorescent light. For some long period in its presence I could not bring myself even to move. I could not lift the cover. I sat before the book and looked. I went and lay down on the bed and felt the book seeing me not looking. At some point I might have gotten up and tried to read the first sentence, tricking open:
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years
—
if it ever did end
—
began, so far as I know or can tell . . .
All throughout the night the book was there. It was not changing. It could see. The whole evening went on this way. And late into that evening, when the light through windows turned to nothing leaving the neon bulb only to shine off of the horrid fat thing’s sleeve. And even with that light off I could not sleep with the book still there, unopened, worming its way into whatever future sleep sometime might try to come. To this day the book remains in me unread, the first of many objects seemingly having been designed to keep me awake, aware, forever, a shapeless presence feeding itself on itself inside my flesh.

And as more time comes and is and is, each day gives us more of us to hide, more crud to exist with in the same space we walk around in every hour, more terror welled up in the self itself. Soon and for years inside the night with walls around me I found I could not bring myself to face a mirror in the dark, seeing not the mirror or me in it, but the space where I knew the mirror there must be, its reflection hidden, something unnamed caught behind its glass. Other evenings I would find it hard to look out through a window, sensing people out there walking past the house, or watching cars churning by onward to wherever, people soft beneath the windows sitting there in the machine, people I would never come so near thereafter—each night in this way the same shape, spent repeating—the present, passed again—if there among it somewhere, in the passing, a silent common air, an indexed map—space through which the shape of who we are each instant in our aging must come and go, while in the shifting light we hope to sleep and wake a bit and sleep again. Among such shifts the sleeping keeps us cleaner, allows brief repose as the air of all around goes on alive, underneath us and surrounding, in all houses: a spreading corridor of furtive magic masked in the common, any day—an instant stretched beyond its present as when (a) approaching a room’s mirror, the lurch between the act of expectation and the seeing of the self; (b) the text of all the books surrounding, never opened, in any home or store, those sentences in terror silence; and as well, the words slipped by the mind when in really reading, the mind blanks out, and
still can see
; (c) the milliseconds surrendered between blinking, which when added up assume a portion of one’s life; the brutal intrusions of fact; (d) the frequencies of sound we cannot hear but that come against our skin and in our ears regardless; (e) the presences behind all walls and walls unseen, within inches without seeing, and contained as well on all our film; the body behind the window in the scene inside the film we’ve seen the most, and the film we fell asleep in, and the film we’ve never seen; (f) the groan of trees, the scream of meat; (g) the corridors of sleep space left unremembered, or as fragments, drowned awake; the unlisted (h) and (i) and (j), and going on and subdividing further, beyond (z)(z)(z)(z)(z)—all of this surrounding every hour, smushed and smushing, in an air-shaped kind of frameless case, the skin and cells we walk around in, hovered among days.

And still the selves go on regardless, aggregating, blanking.

And still the self itself cannot be seen.

Nothing

“You just arrive in a place,” said the painter, “and then you leave it again, and yet everything, every single object you take in, is the sum of its prehistory. The older you become, the less you think about the connections you’ve already established. Table, cow, sky, stream, stone, tree, they’ve all been studied . . . a vast ornament of space, nothing else. Humble backgrounds, vast replications—you see you were always lost. As you get older, thinking becomes a tormenting reference mechanism . . . I say ‘house,’ and I see cities with their seas of roofs. I say ‘snow,’ and I see oceans of it. A thought sets off the whole thing.”

—Thomas Bernhard,
Frost

What a House Is, How a Body Fits Inside It

The initial wanted instinct upon first hitting the pillow is to be blank—as near as possible to nothing, silent, sloping open to the night. For many, on normal evenings, the effort ends where it begins. There is no deliberation. The door opens, becomes gone. If I’d never slept near other people, on road trips in hotel rooms with friends who hit the pillow and instantly black out, I might have never realized my dysfunction, despite night never seeming right: always most awake at points of ending, then rising tired to the world—a continuum reversed. Whereas for some sleep is a question of becoming horizontal—entering
the rest afforded by a suspension of voluntary bodily functions and the natural suspension, complete or partial, of consciousness
—for others, when we hit the bed, the head begins; the brain coming on inside the worn down body as if to spite it, to remind the flesh that it contains something inexpressible, uncontainable, to itself; the persons hid inside our person coming on at our softest moment, ready, at last, to reign. The brain inside this shape might seem to seethe against the inside of the skull, warming hard against the pillow in the gel of uncontrollable impending thought: the body’s fleshy defense defused by its own system of alarm.
Hello
, it says.
How are you. I knew you’d come around. Here you’ve been pretending I and all the thoughts you’ve been avoiding weren’t here, or could fuck off. Now you’re tired. Open. Now you’re mine.

Prior even to the laying down for sleeping in want of blank mind, the house and what it holds go on and on. The walls, doors, ovens, knives, etc.; they don’t sleep, and do not wish to. They are there. In each room, each inch and object holds a hundred thousand potential questions, each of which might overlap: who why moving in what space and who before them and who before? Even in homes sequestered to their own walls, sharing nothing, there is the residue of shifting forms, the sounds that move within a house at night, those other people there, awake. There is place and there is time though both are always changing. Regardless of to what degree one may or may not attend these minute methods of every hour, they remain alive, awake around the body.

The bulk of any house is made of air. Subjects in sleep lab testing procedures have been found, out of their usual element, to exhibit the same mood and personality shift whether they had trouble sleeping there or not, despite the fact that the unsleepers did indicate higher heart rates, higher body temperatures, and accelerated nervous systems.
³
Even lab rats, when placed in cages previously occupied by other male rats, have been found to experience a longer period of sleep onset (fifty-nine minutes versus an average, regularly thirty-two) as well as hyperaroused EEG recordings.
⁴
In humans the subjective complaints are more difficult to read, even from inside the self, and yet the space of where we sleep, regardless of internal condition, clearly distinctly matters. Upon the air, beyond its elements, there travels sound and light and the unseen: cells we breathe in without knowing, cycled among the buildings, over years—dust of human, breath of human, hair of human, bacterial surge—as well as the flood of signals beeping back and forth between us, communication of the objects, silent speech—transmission, higher pitches, the presence of a presence, or the idea of the presence, or the intimation of something coming nearer, waiting.

Sound
: we give names to anything in ways we share, or the tremor of an object’s wobble, or system of the night. In their later years, my grandmother knew my grandfather still stayed around her in the evenings after he had passed, hearing his breathing, a residual of what was so long known. Children might be soothed to calm by music playing, as if the sound itself is someone there, or perhaps designed to cover up the teeming billions of all others looming in a silence: how much more terrifying a house can be when nothing’s moving, as if every instant is the instant before some awful lurch. Even there within the pillow, if one listens clearly, there is the encroaching sound of some parading ream of drums, a rhythmic echo pushed out from the body into the pillow, the intoned heartbeat replayed into the head. Every bump or blow or itch of room around the body is magnified by several times. Most nights I run a white noise machine beside my bed: a singular screen over the stutters of the surrounding of the night. The context of the sound carries its purpose: if I am its master, it might sing to me, while if it is beyond control, it owns my air. A perfect silence might seem ancient, graceful, though also, by its facelessness, in some, a menace, aimed to eat, pervaded as by a thing that shines too bright.

And therefore,
Light
: in each phase of those nightly nighted hours, there looms the premonition that the sun will not come back—that, in its burning, it will burn up at last, those last hours therein unknown for how the light still travels across such time—and thereafter leave the breadths and widths of our sunk cities therein forever under, wadded, stunned. Light of billboards, headlamps, streetlights and signs and human-held lights briefly unblinking, create false tunnels of the space that seemed so plain and clean in day, the light of passing, turned on rooms and bars and businesses, scanning some small part of the immense face of a dark mountain. Forget the moon and drowning stars, so worn out against glowing that they often appear not at all, or show up dead. At night, the earth does something different, as if underwater, a mottled mirror of the environment of day, as through the same spheres and bowls and bells of buildings, windows, streets, arches, and cars appear, same in their sinking to the no-light as in any shining, in the night they appear other, covered over, thick. In dark, the new folds to any room, the innards of a previously translucent body become suddenly opaque. We learn to spend most rotating states of light in day and evening as one negotiates the features of a skin, a home. And yet, always more doors. Always odd sounds. Another hole within a hole within a hole, in and around any home, a disease communicable through any body without symptom. Light is that by which we might know or not know what is just beside us. Go or do not go toward. The cloak and the revealer.

In the house I grew up in I was always looking for an extra door: a split or seam or button in the building that had been hid there, waiting to be invoked. Awake late, in the silence, I spent hours rubbing along walls, reaching armlong down an air vent or under cushions, after all. In absence of finding any new surface, I would summon up my own—affixing keys from machines or bits of wires onto the household, waiting for where they might sink in, or digging in the yard for something just there beneath the surface. I dreamt many nights of excavating the whole yard, surrounding where we slept with mud drifts down to nothing, to the center of the earth. A map I drew one year of my mother’s parents’ house featured a long corridor on the far side of the concrete wall, which I fantasized of finding some way into, never to return.

Other young nights, caught up again in faceless terror, I’d crawl along the floor into my parents’ bedroom to curl hunched in the space below their bed. Each evening I would wait a long enough period after they’d stopped watching TV and retired that they might fully be asleep. I was supposed to be by now old enough to keep to my own bed; as soon as enough time had passed—time I waited through feeling the whole house around me, as if about to shake, I would crawl and wriggle careful along the lip of hallway from my room to their room, each slow inch by inch pushed forward in as close toward zero sound as I could manage—my mother had always been a light sleeper and would often sit up while I was en route, demand me back into my own (not always, sometimes, she let me, she understood), these catching moments requiring me to move even slower the next time I tried, even more silent. It might take twenty minutes moving the eight feet from their door to the stretch along the low foot of their bed—they had a poster bed by this point, king-sized, about two feet off the ground—god it seemed so much taller then than when I go to stand before it now. In the fold of night I would not go underneath the bed but tuck myself just far enough up near its butt-end that I could not be seen from where my parents lay face up above me, closed eyed heads aimed toward a skylight cut in the ceiling, glowing through the room.

Once in position there on the carpet, still in silence, I would begin to position my flesh into some comfortable contortion, bringing my head and arms and body together in minute positioning, still being careful not to move too fast, erupt in sound. This period was often, perhaps surprisingly, the one in which I would most often be apprehended, some shift near the bed itself bringing my mother into sudden awareness of her nearer air. I had to be extremely attentive to each inch of my arms’ or thighs’ dragged moving, rubbed on the carpet, friction sound. I had to adjust myself, even just to gather the semblance of a sleep position, pull by pull and pick by pick, slowly dragging the extremities and angles of my body into fetal, nighttimey. In that way it might take twice as long as it had taken to crawl from my door to the floor there to get myself tucked into a half-position I could therein begin to try to eke my way off into sleep, absolved at last of the coiled fervor the house enforced around me awake alone at night except in the presence of my makers. Sometimes I’d manage to drag along a blanket or pillow with me, but often these accoutrements made it more difficult to pass by without being heard, so I would abandon them for simply arriving in that blank-of-terror space. There—slow, careful, as if not underwater but held close against some massive still—there, however many minutes, hours, later—I at last, within and for myself, could sleep—if at the same time teaching my blood to enjoy the elongation, to rest only after some extended vapid thrall. Those were the nights I remember feeling safest, nearest, most open to the sound. Those, of all the nights I’ve slept, despite the odd shape, were likely hours that, if I chose out of all those I’ve glued through, would be the ones I would put on pause, and replicate in texture and sound forever, every evening, stretched right as the greatest kind of warming light.