The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  The night before she went back to Europe, we were sitting on the steps outside her apartment when I thanked her for coming and wondered if we might see one another when she returned. She pushed her hair aside slowly, gave me the sort of look that let me know this was just the question she hoped I wouldn’t ask, then said, “I’m sorry for Niles,” and before I could ask again, she informed me of her plan to stay overseas through next semester. “I’ve taken a leave,” she said, as certain opportunities presented themselves and would occupy her through the New Year.

  I stood up and looked at the moon, so distant and pale as to appear a kind of brilliant tease. “All right,” I said and without amending my gaze, “I understand.”

  After the funeral I could do no more than sit in my chair, drink whiskey, and smoke whatever cigarettes I could find. I avoided friends who called to see how I was doing, ate pizza ordered from the corner, until all my available cash was gone and I had to go out. My mood was inconsolable. At night I sat by the window, hoping to forget what happened and eventually lose myself in the distant dark.

  The problem was, despite my most urgent want for nothing, I didn’t quite know how to disappear anymore, and looking for some immediate form of diversion, I got it in my head to write an article explaining what had happened in Algiers. I wanted to present things from Niles’ perspective and submit what he would have said had he been allowed to confess. Determined then to commit myself to the project, I cleared off my desk and sat not at my computer but with paper and pen as if composing a personal letter. I worked late into the night, hoping for clarity and anxious for people to understand. I produced a jumble of notes, roughed out my thesis, retooled and altered my approach, ran through a half dozen or so false starts while searching for a coherent voice.

  Just before sunrise I fell asleep and had sad dreams about Niles and woke with a stiffness in my back and my head down on a pad of yellow paper. I stretched, then stood and read the pages from my night’s effort. The initial result disappointed me as I found my tone overly sentimental, a mewling sort of grief and babble. How could I explain the complexity of Niles’ deed, and prove the sacrifice he made was unconditional, if my writing was so biased and over the top? Frustrated that my attempt turned out poorly, I was torn between finding the resolve to sit back down and rework what I wrote and taking every last page and throwing them in the trash. In the end I decided on neither and went to bed.

  I got up around noon, waking with a start as I opened my eyes to find Timbal’s painting of Sally staring at me from the opposite wall. (I’d unrolled the canvas and fastened it carefully to the brick.) The sun shined through the window, and as I went to close the blinds, I saw a woman dressed in faded jeans, a short-sleeved blue shirt, and red canvas tennis shoes posting an orange flyer on the kiosk across the street. Several people walked by after the woman was gone and occasionally someone stopped to read what she’d left. I got dressed with the intent of going out for something to eat, my last meal too long ago to remember, and in crossing over toward the kiosk, I stopped and looked for the flyer.

  Dozens of other flyers were tacked up as well, advertisements for tutorials and bikes for sale, bands playing at local clubs, apartments for rent, health food co-ops soliciting members, and a New Age temple offering spiritual guidance for a fee. I found the orange paper beside a notice for a starving artist’s auction and read the five words underlined in heavy black ink: IN NEED OF A VOLUNTEER.

  Typed beneath the heading was a brief essay beginning with the pronouncement: “Modern psychiatry has failed. So much talk. Psychologists, psychiatrists, analysts, clinicians, Freudian, Adlerian, Gestalt, Jung. Therapy has become an ineffective fashion, a convenient way to kill an hour in the afternoon with little to show in return. As part of research currently being conducted at the Hatilbee Institute, we believe in a different approach, a unique method that allows the patient to reconnect in short order with the sine qua non of their soul while ridding the mind of all that is harmful and foul. Clean-Slatedness,” the treatise continued, “is a new theory on psychological healing, an inventive form of treatment designed to allow the individual to cut through the clutter of past experiences by a process of selective abstinence and sensory deprivation. We at Hatilbee are confident of our findings, and in an effort to confirm our theory, are soliciting paid volunteers.” A phone number and address were printed at the bottom of the flyer, along with the name and signature of Doctor Emmitt Speckridge, Hatilbee Institute.

  I stepped closer and examined the name just to be sure, then pulled the flyer off the kiosk and took it back to my room where I sat and reread the tract from top to bottom. The writing was curious, its tone at once serious, didactic, and propagan-distic, all quite provocative and similar to the Emmitt I knew some eight years before when he was a doctoral candidate in psychology living in the apartment next door. An honor’s student with a host of unorthodox and heretical theories incorporated into the outlines of his dissertation—completed at the age of twenty-four and published under the title “Regenerative Self-Healing and Absterging the Mind”—Emmitt often used me as a sounding board for his early work. Our exchanges frequently ended in disagreement where I was accused of faineancy and myopia and worse.

  Irrepressible by nature and able to go for what seemed days without any real rest, Emmitt knocked on my door at all hours, his black hair unkempt, his heavy glasses sliding halfway down his nose, his shirttail untucked, and baggy pants bunched about his legs while his arms waved in a constancy of motion. I’d known Emmitt almost a year when he began dating Melissa Dunanne, a beautifully large-boned biology major with a concentration in deoxyribonucleic development. In love, Emmitt proved as indefatigable as ever, wooing Melissa with flowers and candy and entertaining anecdotes about Francis H. Compton Crick and Glenn Seaborg and their early experiments with berkelium and DNA.

  That winter Melissa moved in with Emmitt, and so situated, their relationship took its course. 1 was sitting in my room one night, not three months after Melissa arrived, when Emmitt knocked at my door, all pale and with his right shoulder twitching, his left hand fisted and his dark eyes red. He took long drags from his cigarette, walked to my window and back in front of my chair where he asked for a drink. I wasn’t sure how much he’d already had, though I got us whiskey just the same and poured two short glasses with ice. Emmitt sipped from his drink while staring back at the door as if expecting it to open. When it didn’t he pressed his glass against his right cheek, frowned at me and said, “She’ll be back.”

  I didn’t want to argue, but from force of habit said, “How do you know?”

  Emmitt walked in a circle, tugged at his belt, pushed his glasses up with his middle finger, rubbed at his forehead as if an irritant just beneath the surface was prickling his flesh, and answered, “Because I do.” He took something from his pocket and put it in his mouth. “You think she won’t?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  The twitch in his shoulder became a separate spasm affecting his left eye, the dryness of his lips contrasting with the sweat on his chin as he stepped around my chair, wagged a finger in my direction and asked once again, “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know, Emmitt. Maybe she’ll come back and maybe she won’t. There’s nothing you can do either way.”

  He finished his whiskey, the smoke from his cigarette floating up toward the ceiling as he shook his head. “You’re wrong, Bail-bait. From a purely physiological perspective, it’s altogether impossible to do nothing. The two words are antipodal. We live in a constant state of action and reaction, are either stilling the waters or making waves. Even someone as seemingly idle as you, is forever reacting to something. Doing is all there is!” he waved his glass, and for emphasis jumped up and down, spilling the ice.

  I found his argument both sentimental and specious, and drawn into the dispute, said as much. “Loving Melissa is one thing, Emmitt, but what can you do to insure she’ll come back?”

  “Let me tell you,”
he removed his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, offering me a detailed index of what he planned to do. “There will be changes. Modifications and adjustments,” he promised to quit drinking, to keep regular hours and control his moods, to be more composed with Melissa and handle problems before they evolved into crisis. “Change is the essence,” he chanted at me. “Everything is a matter of redress and rectification. All that is, is subject to change,” he shot a stream of smoke into the air, then distilled it entirely with a backward brush of his hand.

  I set my drink down on the floor, and against all better judgement—for what was the point in arguing still?—told Emmitt his riposte was flawed. “You’re ignoring the obvious. You can change everything about yourself, from your attitude down to your underwear and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it won’t matter at all. Love is like this,” I said and flung out my open hand, closed it and opened it, grasping futilely at the air.

  Emmitt stared at my gesture and rolling his enormous head from side to side rejoined, “Love is a kite on a string, is that it? Always tugging and ready to take off?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Your opinion evidences a dangerous pathology.”

  “But we’re not talking about me,” I refused to indulge his digression, and turning his words around suggested, “Love itself is a pathology. The only reason you think you can perform a metamorphosis is because you’re desperate. You’re also too much of a control freak to admit the truth. Wanting Melissa back, you’re determined to believe you have the power to manipulate the situation but your expectations are unreasonable. Life’s a struggle and things rarely work out in direct proportion to what we want.”

  “How would you know?” Emmitt snapped, beating his heels against the wood of my floor, the soft of his belly throwing waves beneath his untucked shirt. “Since when are you interested in making anything happen? If you’re not recoiling from shadows you’re backpedaling from ghosts. Everything you can’t repress sends you into a panic.”

  I listened to Emmitt’s analysis before walking to my piano and playing six quick bars of “Strange Fruit,” stopping in the mid-die to turn the tables once again and suggest, “If what you say is true about everyone’s ability to change for love, then it follows I can change as well in appropriate ways for any woman, including Melissa, and that she’ll be equally inclined to fall in love with me as you.”

  The moment I said this, Emmitt kicked his right leg up as if punting a ball, the red in his face deepening as he hurled himself at me ranting, “That’s right, Bailey. That’s right!” The space between us filled with heat. I stood and allowed him to push his free hand flush against my chest, then stepping away he dropped his cigarette near a pile of loose newspapers, dashed out my door and disappeared. I saw little of him after that. The rest of my spring and summer went by at a leisurely pace. I spent my afternoons reading and walking through town. I played piano at Dungee’s and tried as best I could to avoid running into Emmitt on the stairs or in the street. Two days before the start of fall semester, he moved out of his apartment. We didn’t say good-bye and I had no idea where he was going or if Melissa had agreed to take him back. Watching from my window however, I noticed as he was leaving that his hair appeared cut and brushed, his pants sagged less, and instead of a cigarette he was smoking a pipe.

  I put Emmitt’s flyer on the bed, considered the coincidence of my looking out the window at the kiosk at just the right moment, and wanting very much to forget everything that had happened in exactly the way Emmitt’s treatise promised, I sat in the chair, and after a few minutes of predictable stalling, reached for the phone. The receptionist at the Hatilbee Institute pushed a button and music played through the receiver. (I recognized the piece as John Dowland’s “Lachrimae.”) A minute later, Emmitt came on the line. “Bailey?”

  “Hello, Emmitt.”

  “Out of the blue, Mr. Finne. It’s been what, six years?”

  “Longer.”

  “How are you?”

  I answered his question by describing my situation, made general references to Elizabeth and Niles and everything else that led up to my finding the flyer and placing the call. My voice cracked as I told him in more specific terms how desperate I was to try anything, and in an effort to cheer me, he insisted I shouldn’t worry, as confident as ever. “Bailey, Bailey. I am the cure.”

  I invited him to dinner, asked if he was free that evening, and he accepted without hesitation. We met at seven-thirty, at Tyne’s on West Jefferson. I was surprised by how well Emmitt looked. Gone were the frumpy pants and baggy shirts, replaced by neatly creased slacks and jacket. His hair was cut short, his stomach flat, and instead of thick black glasses he wore wire-rims that complimented his large head. He was waiting for me in the lobby, not the bar, and greeted me with great enthusiasm. I complimented him on his appearance, while he was polite enough to say nothing of mine.

  Over dinner, I learned that just after moving out of my building Emmitt got back together with Melissa. “We’ve been married for two years. We’re living on Belmore. Melissa’s in medical school.” I congratulated him on his happiness. Emmitt smiled, and after a moment in which I told him more about myself, jumping from one bit of news to the next, from Niles’ death—though nothing about Oz—to Liz’s leaving, my failed dissertation, and references to Timbal, Roslavets, and Clarence the bird, he nodded slowly and agreed, “I’m glad you found the flyer.”

  He described to me then the state of his work, how he still subscribed to Eysenck’s view that modern psychology missed the boat both in application and approach. “The idea that examining our past will lead us to a clearer understanding of ourselves, and in turn a more constructive life, is egocentric,” Emmitt said. “Self-knowledge is unreliable at best and at times a danger. The emphasis should not be on remembering but forgetting and returning to a point where no wounds exist,” he tapped the flat of the table with the prongs of his fork. “At Hatilbee, we remove all that’s come to infect the individual through a process of teaching the patient how to strip away the negative while ridding the system of unnecessary memory and habit. It’s what you called me for, to wipe away the accumulated clutter and all the old undergrowth which does damage to the here and now.”

  As for the specifics of Emmitt’s treatment, I was told, “The process of Clean-Slatedness starts off easy enough. The individual is required to give up something familiar each month and maintain that abstinence for a period of several months. It’s important early on for the subject to become acclimated to the process, to let the mind know a journey has begun. Once a patient is ready for the final phase, they’re placed in complete isolation. No lights, no sound, no human contact for a period of one month. Locked in with a bed and table, a toilet and shower, they remain in the dark while we feed and guard over them. They have only to give themselves up to their surroundings, to allow everything to flow back through them and be released. It’s all quite natural and doesn’t require years of wasted energy and expense.”

  I sat quietly as Emmitt spoke, nodding my head in agreement with each of his contentions, ignoring the gaping holes in his theory, and choosing to believe I was in good hands, repeated my desire to volunteer for his experiment. We set a time to meet the following afternoon and I arrived at the Institute just after three o’clock, was brought into a small room with yellow walls and one square window, where two men and a woman came separately to speak with me for more than an hour. Afterward, I was weighed and measured, my urine sampled and blood pressure checked, my ears, eyes, and throat examined, and my rectum poked. Since Emmitt was not a medical doctor, all of this was done by another man, a very tall and distinguished-looking physician who referred to me impassively as Subject Finne.

  I completed the examination and was escorted down to Emmitt’s office where we discussed what I might give up to begin my cycle. I suggested red meat, was overly eager and said perhaps additional things could be added in a few days, but my zealousness was frowned upon and Emmitt made clear
I was to follow his instructions and grant him absolute control over the experiment. “If not, all treatment will end.” I promised to cooperate and shook his hand.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE WEIGHT OF NOTHING

  The first month passed without incident. I bought cans of tuna, ate more salad and fruits than ever before. Later that summer I met with my committee, bringing along Timbal’s canvas slipped inside the same protective tube I used to travel from Algiers. I explained as much as they needed to know, admitted my original story about Timbal was bullshit and how everything that happened during my trip came about by chance. Dr. Freidrich examined the painting, and over Josh’s thunderous protest, came away convinced of its authenticity. “All right, Finne,” he returned to his seat behind the desk, “despite my better judgement, I’m going to take you at your word.”

  I was given an extension on my dissertation, told I could keep my teaching position for the year as long as I produced the paper I promised on Timbal. I agreed to do what I could, explained that I was in the middle of another writing, and in a gesture otherwise unplanned, left Timbal’s canvas behind. “Whatever documentation needs to be prepared, I’m sure someone here can take care of it,” I said, and agreed then to donate the painting to the university.

  Melaine walked me outside. We’d spoken only once briefly since my return—she’d heard about Niles and contacted me with condolence—and looking at me curiously asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “About?”

  “All of it.”