The Man on the Ceiling

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Maybe it’s the state of the world; this year, like every other year in the history of the planet, there is much to dread. But this is the first March in fifteen years that war has been on this particular horizon; the others here have been awash with peace and plenty, though of course somewhere, for someone, they were not.

  The dreadful thing has already happened, fifteen years ago next week, on a spring evening like this and not at all like this. Dread skulks and haunts, for no good reason. Fear is a fiery ghost of its former paler self, no body, only soul; until this thing happened, the forms fear knew to take were metaphorical, mythological.

  Maybe it’s the way the earth turns and tilts at this time of year, magnetic field shifting, molten core sloshing against strata that have been burned so many times before and seeping into hidden places to burn for the first time, though it has seemed for fifteen years that nothing could be hidden from this. Maybe it’s the primal instinct to come up to the thing again and again, to come close and stare it in the face, to make its acquaintance. Knowing all the time, of course, that it can never quite be gotten at, it can never fully be claimed, it will always be just outside our reach.

  She was tiny and old and a nun. “What shall we talk about, Melanie?” she invited me once we were settled.

  She must have been close to ninety when I first went to see her, and she’d been a nun since she was nineteen—she told me she’d wanted to join the convent right out of high school but her mother had insisted she wait a year, experience a little life first. I think she had herself a boyfriend during that year; she never quite said so, but there was a certain sparkle in her voice.

  She was internationally known for her social and political activism, for her work on behalf of peace and civil rights, the ordination of women, and, of all things, abortion rights. She’d been one of the handful of American women invited by Pope John XXIII to be part of Vatican II. She was much revered, and utterly accessible.

  “I want to learn how to live a contemplative life without being a hermit on a mountain top,” I told her.

  “Oh, but I’m not a contemplative. And I’ve never in my life been a hermit!” Her laugh was infectious.

  “You’ve combined a spiritual life with an engaged life,” I persisted, then took a breath before adding, “You’re wise.”

  She accepted it as I’d meant it, neither a compliment nor a criticism, rather as if I’d observed that she was old. “You’re wise, too,” she said, and having just learned from her, I inclined my head and didn’t rush to thank her or demur.

  Probably she was more comfortable with the ensuing few minutes of silence than I was, but maybe her mind was just wandering; within the year the small strokes she’d already begun to experience would cause her to stop seeing students like me. A bird chirped like a metronome outside her window. The buzz of the lawnmower next door rose and fell and rose again. Two of the other nuns who shared the house started singing “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” in the kitchen on the other side of the wall from where we sat.

  She looked up and straight at me. “Suppose we get right down to it and talk about—do you mind if I use the word ‘God’?”

  “No—uh, no, not at all,” I managed.

  She nodded briskly. “It’s as good a name as any, I guess.”

  This woman had been a Bride of Christ for seventy years. “Right,” I said, “I guess.” She was on her feet now, moving around the cozy little room. Watching her, I realized we were meeting in her bedroom. The bed was covered with a Winnie the Pooh quilt. At first I thought she was searching for something as she picked things up and put them down, but it quickly became evident that she was just looking, feeling, maybe smelling.

  “The thing about God,” she remarked cheerfully, “is that He’s a Mystery. And that’s just the way I like Him.”

  Chapter 10

  Down the Dark Stairs

  Melanie has been teaching me lately about the asymptote, which is a way of talking about that goal you cannot achieve no matter how far you extend yourself, that state you cannot reach, that idea you cannot understand, that person who will not care for you the way you want them to care.

  This is the way some of us live all of the time, and all of us live some of the time.

  Melanie likes the mystery. It pleases her to know there are things beyond human ken and will. I often find it more frustrating than uplifting, but at the same time I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.

  Understanding has always been the line I’ve worked toward, and for a while there I thought I was getting pretty close. Now I suspect I’ve been in a great orbit, coming close to at least a kind of understanding for so long, and now on the other side of the curve, leaving that particular line behind at the velocity of escape. I think I’m going to be okay with this.

  Melanie and I are very different people in many ways. Her interests in jazz, long walks, bike-riding, and spirituality contrast noticeably with my love of comics, movies, puppetry, cartoons, and trash TV. She is renewed through quiet and meditation, goes off on silent weekend retreats—voluntarily, mind you. People often assume I must enjoy that sort of thing as well, because I’m sometimes so quiet, so shy, so prone to listening without speaking, to the point that it makes others uncomfortable. That silence is necessary for me; I spend much of my life there. But it’s not something I would ever say I enjoy. It is the medicine you hate the taste of but must have. I could not last more than an hour in a silent retreat. I could not spend that much time alone. I have been in that dark and quiet place, I have spent years in that dark and quiet place, and I know that someday it will be to that dark and quiet place I will return.

  Our differences are the most interesting part of our relationship to me, as are the differences between me and my children, and their differences from each other. Yet I can’t say I’m immune to the anxiety many people feel when they realize how different they are from those they love: if we’re so different, what holds us together? How close can we get, or how far, before simple physics spins us off in our own separate ways, the life we once had together forever out of our grasp?

  What do we do with our time, how do we spend our time, to stave off the eventual darkness?

  Do we meditate, do we write, do we make love, do we spend all day listening to music or watching cartoons?

  How close can we get to making it all meaningful before it all seems meaningless again?

  There are necessary angels down here, thousands of them. Sometimes the sound of their wings is no louder than eye blinks, but sometimes it’s as thunderous as the crashing of planes.

  There is a child down here who will not tell me his name. There is a palsied light in the huge eyes of creatures who shake without moving. There are people whose nerves have grown out of their scalps like hair, multicolored nerves like telephone wire twisting into abstract bouquets.

  I don’t know that I can tell their stories truly. The threads of their narratives are just out of my grasp. Their stories are the story of the darkness itself, and how could I ever hope to get my arms around that?

  But I’m going to try, because this is what we do.

  Through my life I’ve tried to capture more and more of the invisible world. I struggle to tell the truth as I understand it. I look for the moment that tells. Melanie and I write this biography of our imaginations. We create a testament of what we felt, what we saw and what we imagined that we saw, what we heard when the sound was turned off, how it was to be here this relatively short time on ground that could barely hold us down.

  It may not be the best thing, it may not have been the best way, but you do the best you can. You do what it is you do. And this is what we do.

  So much happens in a life. More than we can remember. More than we can hold. Sometimes we repeat ourselves in order to retrieve the moments we have lost.

  The images we do recall fade like old film. We reimagine the colors and put them back into the reel, and when we view them again they’re close to the orig
inal, but not quite the same.

  One day Anthony and I walked together around the outside of the house. I let my arm dangle and spread my fingers until my hand practically covered his chest. He grabbed my arm and held on tight: little boy swinging on a vine. I could feel his heart in my hand as we raced through the jungle of the afternoon. Recalling, I could bend and smell his hair, that little boy smell of soap and perspiration, I could kiss his cheek and breathe in the coolness. I am that close.

  Sometimes I think I should be through this, I should be over this, but I know that’s not what I really want. I want him alive in my imagination.

  Right after Anthony died, I wanted to believe in an afterlife where I would see him at least one more time, where I would see him. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t quite imagine that and I felt as if I’d let him down.

  My baby. You hold their small hearts, their lungs in your hands and it is unimaginable: both their lives and their deaths are unimaginable. How they came to be out of nothing and how this miracle has been put into your undeserving hands to nourish or to fail. Sometimes it brings the absolute best out of people and sometimes the absolute worst. I’ve seen people snap under the pressure, we’ve all seen them, dissolving in the presence of a miracle.

  There is my boy running in the woods wearing a yellow windbreaker and rich brown corduroy pants. There, and no, over there. He is there, and there, until I can’t see him any longer, no matter how hard I try I can’t reach him.

  Looking at the ground, I see people filling every mound and curvature of the earth. As far as the eye can see and far beyond, I see them turning in their sleep.

  Looking out into the woods, I see a shape frozen inside every tree, weeping or praying or simply waiting for the next movement of the dance, angels and demons and sometimes it doesn’t matter which. Miracles, waiting for just the right moment to raise their ancient bowed heads and meet my gaze.

  I come so close sometimes. I come so close.

  For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky.

  Some nights I rise from the bed and climb into the dark envelope that will take me, if I’m lucky, safely down the stairs.

  Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead.

  Down here in the dark, everything we tried to forget has become familiar again. Pale glimpses of children pad lazily around, thumbs wedged into their mouths, looking for their names. In the highly-charged dark, they wave like translucent grasses underwater.

  My friend here is someone whose nerves have grown several inches outside her head. I’m curious as to how she feels, if she keeps in touch with another world, if she hears the same sounds I hear coming from my children’s bedrooms, if she knows which way the wind is going to blow. If she really knows. Anything.

  But down here in the dark, questions hardly matter. Down here in the dark, you can sit all night with someone and never speak.

  Down here in the dark, you can wonder how you ever kept going on with it, how you got up every day to go wherever it was you were required to go. You can’t even remember what you did all those hours so just how important was it to do those things you did?

  The figure whose nerves now halo and massage her head floats up out of the chair beside me. Patches and threads of skin tear away where they’ve grown into the seat. They float around in the air as if they were nothing. She stretches out her legs and kicks in slow motion, moving across the room as if huge and unstoppable. Until I stop her by speaking her name.

  This is the way it happens, even though I do not hear myself speak her name, even though I have no idea what I just said.

  For down here in the dark, names are more important than ever, even though we do not know the names, or hear ourselves speaking.

  Down here in the dark, a fish floats by with holes where its eyes should be. You can see all the way through into the darkness on the other side. Then the fish turns its body toward you and you know it is seeing you through those dark holes.

  “Where are you?” Melanie whispers from the top of the stairs.

  “We’re all down here, in the dark,” I reply. And she goes back to bed. There is nothing she can do about this. Everything that happens here is necessary. Everything we’re telling you here is true.

  I have to admit that sometimes I suffer from a certain inattentiveness. For brief moments I seem to forget where I am and who I am and what was the last thing my children said to me. I forget to take care of my body and I forget there is traffic, there is always traffic to contend with. Sometimes I just don’t know. Sometimes I’m just down here in the dark.

  Melanie or the kids will ask me, “Where are you?” and I will say “sorry” or “right here” because I don’t want to tell them I’m down here in the dark. I don’t know how to explain that, as much as I love them, some things and some places must remain mine alone. And I don’t want to remind them that there are similar dark places waiting for them.

  Down beyond the bottom of the stairs is my rabbit’s warren of an office, half buried in the ground and wrapped in the dry smell of books. Here is where I ride the dark down every night, when I can’t sleep, when I wonder about what’s waiting for me, when I long for the surprise of words felt through my fingers and displaying on the shimmering white screen.

  Down here in the dark, I forget where I am and I forget when I am and sometimes I ride through all night typing and typing and forcing the words to lie down. If Melanie wakes up before I go to bed, she comes down worried I might have died in my office through the course of this long night.

  I never know what to say to her. I’m sorry I made her worry. But I had words to lay down—they had become far too heavy to bear. That’s why I came down here in the dark, into the home of the thing with the long nerves for hair and the boy who cannot remember his name.

  This is why all the walls here are yellow, why sometimes these fish turn upside down and drown in the weight of their remorse. Sometimes there’s not much to do, down here in the dark, but wait.

  I want to tell Melanie, I want to tell the kids don’t worry, there’s nothing to worry about here, everything will be okay. But I can’t say this because I of all people know better. Even out-of-shape, absent-minded fellows like myself—good fellows, good-natured as you would want—do die, do pitch forward onto their keyboards. They do reach and overbalance and fall and fall, not hitting the floor until they are cold. The shadow fishes all scatter and wait. The dark ones with nerves for hair sit and watch, all their bits floating as if submerged in that fluid we all live in.

  This one, this dark lover of mine kisses me and tickles my brain. She gazes at me as if to say so what are you going to do what are you going to do?

  I can’t promise anything. Down here in the dark, I don’t know what else to say. Melanie, I don’t know what else to say.

  And Melanie, who knows me better than anyone, who knows me better sometimes than I know myself, tells me, “You don’t have to say anything. So much is beyond words, though so much can in fact be said. Words are among the most beautiful of the masks of God, but they are not God, my love.

  “If you don’t know what else to say, write about not knowing what else to say. We can just float, wise as fish, in the wordless space of not knowing and not saying, with holes for letting the darkness flow through.

  “Wise as fish. Wise as a yellow cat, a coiled snake. Spacious as wilderness twilight; wise and spacious as the house we open for anything to happen in, whatever will happen.

  “We don’t have to say anything, sweetheart. We don’t have to understand. Things don’t have to mean anything. Th
e horizontal line doesn’t ever have to intersect with the vertical. We can just float.

  “Float in the certainty that things fall out of the sky. Float in the presence of the man on the ceiling. Float in the incomprehensible presence of our child’s death, which means everything and doesn’t have to mean anything other than itself.”

  There’s always too much to say. There’s always too much. Once you’ve allowed yourself to travel in the dark, you understand how much we do not say, because to do so might be in poor taste or impolite or foolish, or in order to deny what slithers and creeps right under our noses, or in order to give it space.

  An elderly friend once told me the worst thing about growing old was the rudeness of it all. The body doesn’t breathe or digest properly, water is retained and water is expelled, you stink like a leaky furnace and you drip urine and your breath smells bad. You can’t drink enough water to keep things lubricated and still you’re going to the bathroom all the time, just begging for yet another incident to feel shame over. You swell with the riches of edema, and gravity has so changed its attitude it threatens with every step to wrestle you into immobility.

  These are among the subjects polite people don’t discuss. Down here in the dark, let me tell you it stinks. Down here in the dark, it stinks of cruel impulse and foul inattention and everything you eat bears that faint aroma of despair. I’d ask my friend how he felt today. For a very long time he’d reply “tolerable” and “tolerable” until there came that day he replied “intolerable,” and I can’t remember too much of his final days but that “intolerable” has always stuck. The dark down here is full of knowledge of the intolerable.

  I should be better than this I should be used to this but some things, some losses, are intolerable.