The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  The force of his velocity jolted me, his trajectory intentional. I couldn’t remember the last time he tried to fly, but as I bent down to make sure he was all right he scooted away and avoided my hand. “Come on, Clarence,” I called after him, imploring him to see things from my perspective, saying, “I get what you’re doing, but it’s more than simple application. If that’s all it was, well, hell. But it isn’t. It’s complicated. Fuck, Clarence. You’re a bird! What do you know about anything?” I almost had him cornered, was about to pick him up and start my excuse all over when Elizabeth set her key in the lock and opened the door.

  There’s a point in every piece of music when the melody completes itself and what’s left is a final refrain. Occasionally an aria will vary its rhythms just enough to reinterpret the music through a less predictable finish, and other times an arrangement ends so suddenly the audience isn’t quite sure the music’s over until the last echoing notes have faded and the room falls eerily still. Either way, the song is done. Elizabeth stood just inside the door, staring at the tiny bike and stretch of twine. Her face was wan, more tired than I could ever remember seeing her before, cast over with sobering shades of resignation, and sizing up the situation in the aftermath of what happened at the Music School, she said, “Bird tricks, Bailey?”

  “I can explain.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “About what happened,” I got up from my knees, stood a few feet away on the opposite side of the twine. I wanted to apologize and make sense of what went wrong, but unsure what I could say, I held out the bike like a sacrificial offering, my hands trembling as Liz shook her head and I tossed the toy into the chair. Clarence moved toward Elizabeth, who reached down and scooped him up, setting him on her shoulder. A car honked on the street. A set of tires squealed. I stood in the center of the floor, the space between us only a few feet yet we seemed to be communicating across a broad chasm. “Quite a show,” Liz said.

  “I’m truly sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “You played exactly as you wanted. Like always.”

  “But I didn’t. What happened was a fluke.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It was stage fright, nothing more,” I tried to think of something clever to say, was prepared to go to the piano and perform whatever she wanted to hear, but she was already cutting me off, raising her hand and saying, “Enough.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “But that’s just it, I do. I should have paid attention before when you were trying to finish your dissertation. I should have known then what you were telling me.”

  “I wasn’t trying to tell you anything.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “Liz.”

  “And you have. It’s obvious you’re not happy, Bailey.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course, I’m happy.”

  “No.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “You shouldn’t have to try so hard.”

  “Playing, I mean. It just isn’t coming as easily as I hoped.”

  “No, it isn’t,” her tone was barbed. She glanced at her false hand, then back up. “I shouldn’t have put you in a position to disappoint me,” a curious confession. “As for the rest,” she spoke as if she’d thought everything through well in advance, “it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  “What is? This? But that’s not true. I didn’t want any of it. That’s crazy.”

  “You’re making yourself crazy.”

  “But I’m trying to change.”

  “Why, if you’re so happy?”

  “Wait. You’re confusing what I’m saying,” I paced through the space where the string hung, struggling to make myself clear, only Liz cut me off and said again, “Tonight’s exactly what you wanted. All those people, Bailey. Dr. Kabermill came off looking like an ass. You forced yourself to fail without a thought of what it meant to his reputation, and why? Because you can’t trust yourself to want anything. You chose playing Roslavets because you knew, more than your dissertation, more than anything else, promising to take your music seriously was the surest way to get to me. You knew screwing up would be the perfect way to show me how miserable you are.”

  “Elizabeth, no. That’s not it at all,” I argued as best I could, challenged the accuracy of her contention by insisting, “You have it all wrong. I admit I messed up. I know I’ve been driving us both crazy these last few weeks. It’s all my fault but everything’s been such an aberration.”

  “What has? How you played? The way you’ve been acting? But there’s no such thing, Bailey. How can anything you do be aberrant? Everything’s real, don’t you get it?”

  I watched her walk to the window where the moon outside was silver white, and scared, I whispered, “This isn’t what I want.”

  Elizabeth heard and turned around. There was a moment then where I might have salvaged a brief reprieve, a half second when opportunity offered me a way to make amends if I could only answer what Liz asked next. “Tell me then, what do you want?”

  How to explain? (I still can’t.) For despite the chance, I failed to say a word.

  Elizabeth reacted to my aphonia by taking hold of her right arm with her left, just below the elbow where her prosthesis fit over her stump, and removing her arm she placed it on the floor. Not finished, she pulled off her shirt, framing in full view the absence of her limb. I stared at her nakedness, at her shoulders and belly and breasts, her arms in their eternal state of non-symmetry like two sides of a Picasso painting where the difference in shapes composed a unique harmony of interdependence. Viewing her half arm alone, I felt the insult of her amputation exactly as she intended, the violence of her injury a raw spectacle, her right arm hanging partway down her side, the end rounded off with a patchwork of flesh covering truncated bone, her condition infinite and without cure. By exposing her fractured form to me, the sight of her said, “There, you see, Bailey? Look at me and still I’m able to choose. I still know what I want!”

  Here then was the difference between us.

  I picked up her prosthesis from the floor, went to the bed, and set it on the pillow. Next I knelt and handed Liz back her shirt. I ached with the need to tell her more, but the moment had passed. Clarence returned to Liz’s shoulder and together they moved to the window where Liz pried away the screen, and cupping the bird against her cheek, she whispered something in his ear. Clarence strutted to the end of her arm which Liz extended out over the street. When she whistled, he took off. I rushed to the window where I looked overhead and up into the trees. Elizabeth whistled again, and from out of nowhere Clarence instantly reappeared. I was astonished. (How was such a thing possible?) Elizabeth stared at me mournfully. “Even a bird knows to do what it wants,” she said, and with her arm still extended outside, she had Clarence perform the trick twice more.

  The first cool breeze of night blew against my neck and I trembled as I came from the window. The air in my apartment chilled as Clarence flew to my piano while Liz gathered up her things and walked into the hall. I left the screen out of the window and soon Clarence disappeared as well. After a time, I stumbled back and sat in my chair.

  CHAPTER 10

  DISTANT SHORES

  Emmitt isn’t writing now, is staring at me with a rather pitiful look. “What did you think would happen with Elizabeth?” he asks. “Did you expect she wouldn’t leave?”

  “But I didn’t think anything,” I made clear. “Obviously, I didn’t think at all.”

  “So you never planned to play the way you did?”

  “I already told you. You don’t honestly think I did it on purpose?”

  Emmitt lifts his head, his gaze clinical, and by way of answering says, “I read the book you loaned me. Not all of it. Not yet. It’s not a text to read straight through, but most of it. What do you think of the line: ‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.’ Do you agree with that?”

  I
consider the query, not surprised that out of the entire book, with all its historical and philosophical significance, Emmitt has singled out this one passage.

  “The quote is a puzzle,” Emmitt continues. “As a syllogism, it doesn’t work. How can Man ever simultaneously be the very thing he denies? Man can only be what he is and not what he isn’t, and yet, as Man is a cognitive rather than instinctive creature, he has the freedom to choose a course of conduct he might otherwise object to. If a person refuses to act as they know is best, if they compromise and sacrifice their convictions for fear or folly or worse, have they become what they are or are they still someone else?”

  Before I reply, I stare down at my hands and think of my last night with Liz, and as a consequence of what I remember, I answer as honestly as possible, and say to Emmitt, “Yes. Without a doubt.”

  That Monday, Niles took his one final exam—a graduate seminar examining the principles of Parmenides in which the class was asked to explore the issue of time and space being illusions of the senses, and “What then is real?” Professor Lucy Tius posed. He handed in the first draft of his master’s thesis for review, his paper entitled “The Subjectivity of Truth: Kierkegaard’s Unhappiest Man and Memory as Avoidance and Ruse,” and went home to pack, filling his duffle with jeans and shorts, underwear, shirts and socks, toiletries and bandages, a copy each of Camus’ The Rebel and A Happy Death tucked beside the file from Massinissa Alilouche.

  I monitored my students’ exams on Tuesday, asking them as part of 100 multiple-choice questions to distinguish between the significance of Clyfford Still and the comparatively lesser works of Sam Francis, to identify Jean Fautrier’s Hostage, to trace connective links from Bauhaus and surrealism to post-painterly and abstract expressionism, and whether North America (1966) was produced by Jack Tworkov, Morris Louis, or Barnett Newman. At four o’clock I invited my class to Dungee’s, where I provided the first pitchers of beer and played a soulful rendition of Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower,” Victor Young’s “Street of Dreams,” and Albert Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away.” Time passed and people danced.

  Elizabeth flew to Europe the following afternoon. I graded my students’ exams and left the next night with Niles. We were scheduled to land in London at ten, depart Heathrow into Bechar and head for Algiers later that evening, where Niles arranged for us to travel by train across the High Plateaux and western edge of the Saharan Atlas, up through Oran and northeast for a distance of some five hundred miles, “To get a feel for where we are,” he said.

  Our flight into London arrived on time, but our plane to Bechar departed an hour late, and reaching North Africa we went immediately by bus to catch our train. Niles struggled beneath the weight of his duffle and the video camera he brought as we raced from the terminal into the hot street. Our bus was almost full, nearly every inch of space occupied, including the overhead rack and the aisle where more than a dozen people paid to stand with their possessions stored between their feet. We jockeyed for position while stumbling against one another like stones tossed together in a sack, tipped and bounced until we arrived thirty minutes later at the train station which was but an outpost made up of three sand-colored walls and several short wooden benches.

  A thin man in a long cotton shirt and dark trousers, flecks of white and grey whiskers on his dark cheeks and a dense mustache swooping down from his upper lip like a scythe stood behind a counter where it was possible to buy pieces of flat bread, a roasted meat called mishwi, and rice. Niles ordered our food—he also asked the man to wrap two meat sandwiches for the train—and we ate our meal standing inside. Afterward, we stretched our legs along the gravel path to the left of the station. Another busload of people arrived and took up space on the platform, groups of families and men traveling alone, their belongings packed in many different sorts of luggage, from ancient leather bags to quilts tied up and knotted with twine. A small boy lay sleeping on one such bundle when the train pulled in—an hour late—the noise startling him and immediately he began to cry. Two men on the near side of the platform looked over and laughed while three women came at once and comforted the child.

  Niles bought tickets for a private compartment but the idea of being left in peace was impossible to enforce as the door had no lock and people routinely invaded our space: travelers wishing to escape the public cars, others hoping to sell trinkets of jewelry, sunglasses, and wine, an old man with a metal box chained around his waist offering to exchange our American currency at a rate of 9DA to the dollar though we were already required to exchange 125 American dollars for 1,000DA as we arrived in Bechar. After an hour or so, another man in a green shirt, black slacks, and brown shoes came in and dropped beside me on the seat. His breathing was raspy and there was the odor of fever about him. He begged our forgiveness, but asked if he might just sit a moment. “I don’t travel well,” he said in Arabic which Niles translated for my benefit.

  Our compartment was small, no more than five feet square, and the addition of a third body drove what little fresh air there was back out through the door. The train itself was old and rattled along the iron tracks, causing the man to bump his elbow against my side and press against me hip to hip on the seat. “Possibly, it’s all in my head,” the man referred to his trouble with travel and coughed into a white piece of cloth. “I don’t know. I am otherwise a very active person. I have a beautiful wife and many friends. I own a small business selling and repairing furniture and musical instruments. If not for things beyond my control I would move to the city and be done with these trips, but for now I have no choice.”

  Aside from his current affliction, the man did not seem to be suffering from any real illness. He had the sinewy musculature of a runner, the appearance of someone whose energy rarely betrayed him. His dark eyes were quick and alert even through his fever, while his voice, if a bit raspy, did not sound altogether weak. “Twice a month I’m forced to travel,” the man continued. “Four days out of every thirty I spend this way. As to why it bothers me so, I can’t say. I’ve been to many doctors who insist there’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve taken pills to alleviate motion sickness and similar traumas, but even when I’m drugged near the point of passing out, nothing helps.”

  Niles asked the man a series of questions in Arabic, wondering about his business, about his family, and the history of his aversion to travel. He translated for me, restated the man’s confusion about his condition. “Anah mish ahrif layh (I do not know why).” After several minutes of listening to the man’s complaint, I still did not understand and asked Niles to translate, “I don’t get it. If traveling is so hard for you and no one can find a cure, why not move closer to Algiers? Or hire someone to go for you? Why put yourself through such torture?”

  “But I told you,” the man repeated. “Certain things are beyond my control. I have no choice,” and getting up from his seat, he thanked us again for allowing him to sit inside our compartment, bowed twice, and turning away from me then, he reached inside the small valise he had with him and produced a jeweled dagger, the stones were actually glass but shined beautifully nonetheless in the light through the window. “A gift,” he held the knife out to Niles, “for your kindness.” Niles tried to refuse but the man insisted, and turning on his heels, made his exit.

  The train ascended a steep hill and the motion of our car shook in protest to the climb. Niles put the dagger inside the bag with his video camera and shrugged his shoulders as if there was nothing more to be said about the man. I considered drawing attention to the coincidence of the man’s condition and Niles’ own peculiar affliction, but not quite sure what to make of it, I decided to let the subject drop.

  Niles reached into his duffel for a tube of ointment and fresh gauze, stood and lifted his shirt in order to apply a new dressing to the wound on his stomach. He discarded the old bandage inside a small paper bag that he then buried back in his duffel. As he finished with the salve, he sat down and searched for his dog-eared copy of A Happy Death. Althou
gh it was well after midnight—and later still in Renton—he seemed not yet ready for sleep, and finding a favorite part in the novel where Camus’ protagonist first goes for a dip in the sea, he read aloud how Mersault “lost himself in order to find himself again, swimming in that warm moonlight in order to silence what remained of the past, to bring to birth the deep song of his happiness.”

  I untied my boots and stuck them under my seat, listening to Niles while shifting closer to the window. I stared outside at the endless expanse of purple black sky dotted by pearl bright stars, and pressing my nose against the glass, felt the motion of the train while experiencing the reality of moving farther and farther from home. I thought again of Liz and tried to make sense of what happened, considered the quickness of my mistake and speed of my own departure, how I went from a state of absolute dormancy to hurtling along in a blind kinetic whirl.

  “We travel with such velocity these days that the most we can do is to remember a few places names. The freight of metaphysical speculation will have to catch up with us by slow train, if it catches up with us at all.” The quote appeared in a story I read on the plane, a cautionary tale in The Collected Stories of John Cheever, and staring outside again, I thought how true this was in terms of Liz and Niles and all the rest, the speculation I felt over what I was doing in relation to each, the velocity of my trip such that even my most intimate impressions were slow to reach me.

  I dozed then and woke with the sun just starting to rise outside the window. Niles was asleep with his legs spread out and his head tipped back against the top of his seat as I got up quietly, slipped on my shoes, and went off in search of a bathroom. After this, I stood outside on the small platform connecting our car to the one in front and smoked a Turkish cigarette from the pack bought the night before. The sun stirred from behind a dense range of mountains, the morning air dry and warm, filled with the smell of esparto grass and the unexpected scent of salt and ash. In the High Plateaux, several pastures of blue green alfa waved lazily in coordinated rows, though for the most part sand was dominant, blowing across the tracks and scratching against the underside of the train.