by Doon Arbus
By leaving intact this vestige of his former life, Dr. Morgan, for whatever improbable reason — it might have been an uncharacteristic case of nostalgia, of masochism, of mere inertia, perhaps a lingering fidelity to the wife, or even to the memory of his friend, the artist — had chosen to subject himself night after night for the better part of his adult life to a bedtime vision of a past that no longer existed and possibly never had, while the reality he actually inhabited grew to resemble it less and less. The spectacle could not have failed to disturb his sleep and infect his dreams. When he awoke, there it would be again, confronting him with its fraudulent mirror image of his existence. Every day bit by bit the chasm widened until the actual subject of the picture finally abandoned the field, leaving it to the triumph of the painter’s version of what used to be.
In anticipation of visitors, the bedroom — like the rest of the residential quarters on the third floor — had been enhanced by a few carefully chosen props to perpetrate the illusion of a life still lived. They included, among several other subtler touches, a copy of Stuff, a well-thumbed first edition, which lay open on the nightstand, displaying, for the benefit of those who ultimately never came, the book’s final chapter heading, “The Wisdom of Things.”
The caretaker, swaying a little, stood transfixed beside the enormous empty bed awaiting him with its endless softly undulating white comforter. He eased himself out of Dr. Morgan’s crushed, contorted slippers, which had by this time permanently transferred their allegiance to the alien feet, and took up the book, inserting two fingers between pages to keep from losing his place. Now at last, wearing nothing but the reading glasses, he slowly climbed onto the bed where the great man had intended, but failed, to die, laid his head back upon a depression in a pillow and, insinuating his angular frame into the vestigial contours of the mattress’s illustrious former occupant, rested the open book face down like a tent pitched on the barren landscape of his naked chest, clasped his hands over the spine, and waited for sleep.
We too must wait. Is it possible that — while he lingers in the vast, uncharted region between here and elsewhere, between now and nevermore, between himself, the Other, and no one at all — some inchoate form of consciousness persists to helplessly record, with no interpretation, the most ephemeral of sensations — not pain, too late for that, not pleasure — maybe just the pure phenomenon of air drifting over unprotected flesh and moving on; or the celestial vision of brightly colored flashing lights emanating from somewhere deep inside his eyes as they regurgitate the light they once absorbed, expunging what they’d seen. We can only speculate. Whose heavy eyelids close the eyes and seal them shut? Whose lips draw breath? Whose formidable chest dictates the halting rhythm of the ribcage in its rise and fall? Perhaps some sort of mangled history assails him with scraps of places he had been or longed to go, with someone’s guilty secrets — or are they now his own? — in which a wife whom he had never really known and never married, the wife of another man’s made-up story, ministered to invisible wounds about his person and healed them. But this is only fiction. It cannot touch him anymore or make its pitiful improvements on his plot. Mind the barrier. Touching is forbidden. Inside a mind a door is slowly closing, although it makes no sound. Consciousness, that old incessant narrator, falls silent. The privacy he craves envelops him. There is at last nothing left for anyone to know — not even the omniscient — only the exquisite neutrality of silence.