Partial Transcription

Let us not regard our marriages as given - it would be best not to assume that your wife is there alongside you in bed because there is a mass present in the bed. Of course, you think - what else would occupy that space? And surely she sleeps in until after you leave for work, and when she gets home, she is so exhausted as to already be in bed. You swear you see her sleepy smile through the darkness of the covers, peering out over the edge. How terrible then would it be to discover that age old trick of a pillow under the sheets mimicking her body, and poorly drawn make-up to portray her smile? How much more terrible when she knows you paid so little attention, that a mere pillow would suffice as a replacement for her image? Did you really think a pillow matched the curves of a woman? Yet still, for weeks, you’ve been duped. And by now? God knows where she is; probably just as invisible - but not neglected - and, rightfully, amidst this absurdity, is one real thought. You do wonder: can you remember what her smile really looked like?

You should know a little secret about novels as well: there is a reason every time someone is left by their spouse, it always follows with a long but not explicitly fascinating episode of nothing. Nothing happens but rumination and confusion. Is it catharsis? No, that would follow with something more tragic - suicide, murder, mental breakdowns, something entertaining. Rather, in great literature, for magnanimous anti-heroes and their narrators - nothing. Nothing but thought, reflection, perhaps a reconsideration of the origins of such a relationship. “Where had things gone wrong?” And wouldn’t you know, on second thought, so many intrusions, once overlooked, come creeping out of the woodwork - things once considered the population of the fringe, just as one might think coffee sales in 1787 had nothing to do with the French Revolution - until one learns how coffee houses were where the radical philosophes organized… and how it took close to 130 years for there to be serious publications entertaining the idea that women, a generous half of the nation, perhaps had a significant role in the war… and it then occurs to you that the fault might not have been with this all being naturally a secret, naturally obscured and hard to find, and woe to you  - but that you made it so, for acknowledging such troubles would require entertaining seriously the possibility of your marriage being a failure, which then might mean your marriage would not survive such revelations. And since you would never entertain that possibility, thinking it would beget what it asks, the denied prophecy fulfills itself; the reality is never revealed, until it was so overwhelming that it could no longer oblige your delusion and ruptures your blindness. It struck you, seemingly out of the blue - but really? - from under your nose. 

(Think, again: do you remember what a genuine smile from her looks like? Would you be able to distinguish it from any other? - and another thought: perhaps you were right to think her body was that of a different person your first night together, petrified, porcelain, alien? But the feeling never returned every time after, not even the shadow! - well, except - you know.)

A man is late for class, and is sprinting down the streets, through corridors and across intersections; as he dashes through the people, he notices another man coincidentally running ahead of him, but he is much slower. The man passes the stranger, but, becoming somewhat tired, does not accelerate far beyond him, and instead maintains a steady distance in front. What must the passersby think? Surely, for those meagerly interested, it is simply “two delinquents chasing each other. One must have offended the other.” But the more attentive people have noticed that one man had in fact ran ahead of the other but had been rapidly surpassed with no interaction. The appearance is the same, but one takes the details and thereby the situation more seriously. But for the people who look up at the clatter of stamping foot down the road, or after the fact, with them burning trails into the horizon, they have the one and only appearance. The only way they would know to suspect anything out of the ordinary for these unusual events would be to question others, or to follow along to see them eventually split off in different directions, totally uninvolved. Of course, though, they won’t put in the work; they have things to do. And so the sun revolves everyday around the earth, and your son is good, and your husband is faithful. And your life is honest.

A man in Manchuria, 1938, is on a reconnaissance mission within the Mongolian-Soviet controlled territory. His team is captured, and all but him are slaughtered. He, for whatever reason, is instead thrown into a dry well, urinated on, and left to die of exposure. But he does not, as his comrade, who happened to be urinating serendipitously at the nearby river, went into hiding when he heard the clatter of horse hooves. This soldier then followed the man’s captors to the well on foot, but as a result somewhat losing them, hence the long duration between being thrown in the well and him being rescued. In the meantime, the man in the well, suffering somewhat from hypothermia and the distress of broken bones, resided in an almost entirely unpunctuated darkness. The only light that appeared to him was the small window-esque image of the sky through the well-mouth (From the perspective of the esophagus, how many stars can be chewed?), and the intermittent and brief but scathing burst of light from the sun passing directly overhead. Nothing of this experience was spoken about again until a good four decades later, when the man, now a veteran, was executing the will of his recently-deceased rescuer. He came across a strange man who had a natural comfortability that seemed to coax secrets out of a person with his perfect ears. This is what made him strange. After an unimaginable duration of time, the man spoke about the experience. He described the horror of the capture, the cruelty of the captors, the severe cold of the desert, the fall, the urine, but most of all - the utter darkness and pure light. The utter darkness seemed to cleanse him of all relation, to a pure baseline of fleshy there-ness. All that remained in the darkness were the wet sounds of his coiled organs undulating, and the dim but perpetual pulse of blood in his veins. All he had were his thoughts, and for once, they came to him with honesty and openness, a willingness for discussion. His past become a presence before him, ready for even oblivion. But when the light came, this preparedness of thought became overwhelmed. What was the light of an average day revealed its latent and obscured power through the inundation into his senses. He spoke of, in the light, touching his soul, approaching an incomprehensible experience. And then it ended as the sun passed, and so the story ended, meaningfully. Afterwards, he was rescued, returned to Japan, and lived in silence until this moment, when he recounted the story, and then proceeded to return home, having fulfilled his duty to his friend. Presumably, he prepared for death, for having something somewhat fulfilling again since that fateful incident. But this is not relevant to my story - perhaps none of it is whatsoever, except the point about the well. We can say, simply: a man experienced solitude at the bottom of a well, no more.

What is relevant is this strange man, the one with good ears. He had good ears because his wife had recently left him, abruptly, with no explanation and no sign except for her very absence. The strange man has good ears because he was eager for any explanation, advice, or wisdom, in any form and from wherever it could be. He found it in the happenstance encounter with this veteran who was most likely on his way to die, and therefore obliterate this story from the human record forever, if not for the strange man with good ears. But now it exists as a signpost for another man towards self-reflection. But no more than that.

Subsequently, not long after the veteran had left, the strange man gathered a ladder and a flashlight and gained the assistance of an accomplice - not much of a friend, but a sympathetic ally, I shall say. At an abandoned house nearby there was a dry well, where the strange man entered using the ladder. He then had the accomplice take the ladder away and, after a day, cover the well. The reason this strange man was in the well was for the most part non-existent. Perhaps to my chagrin, this was not a matter of curiosity for the complexities of conscious life, or of testing the validity and replicability of another person’s experiences. None whatsoever. Instead, the strange man simply wanted to access his thoughts without disturbance, so he could think properly about the cause or causes for his marriage’s unfortunate implosion. And, sure enough, it provoked in him peculiar and powerful feelings and insights, though he couldn’t say it was exactly as the veteran had described. When on the first day the light eventually pierced and cleaved the darkness into a momentary oblivion, he did not experience a divine bliss, nor the preparedness for death. In fact, death had not crossed his mind once, though it was certainly true that if his friend did not return to retrieve him from the well, it would surely mean his halfway absurd demise. But this was no time to think about that - he wanted to understand his past properly. Which occurred. Here, in the earth, this darkness could be conceived as the farthest place from God, maybe even a place to prove his abandonment. The darkness was such that there was no acceptance of up, or down, or left from right. The sun had been unchained from this chamber of being, and more than evident to him was the experience of the Earth’s undecided and unending plunge into the vast breadth of space. His soul, in contradistinction, had its own motion, like a ship dashing from an island which, destroyed in immense volcanics, was collapsing into the ocean, burning until the purple waters devoured it, and from which only smoke placidly rose from the ocean surface, marking languidly where a titan once stood. In this moment, there was no anchor to existence; there simply were thoughts, and blood. And for this vital seed of his thoughts, the darkness was the perfect womb; in a way, the nothingness was incredibly unstable and could not maintain itself for long, which was an oddity in itself. Nevertheless, eventually, from the bowels of the darkness, as though buried and unearthed, came memories - memories that glowed and suspended in the abyss, as though citadels floating amidst the stars and nebula were happened upon, obscured for billions of years by distance, void, and rogue radiation - lost out in the most open openness. These memories were once pleasant ones, though the pleasure for the strange man was now at a distance, a memory of a memory, aged by distance and disrepair; the glow of their white marble walls was something of a dream, casted over a lackluster, cracked material, as though the stone itself was reminiscing about its former glory; for now it was perceived in an interrogative light, with an eye towards sharp suspicion. It should be no surprise that indeed, all sorts of facts, once irrelevant, once chalked up to being “intricacies of the troubled personality” and “oddities” and “outliers,” perhaps meant more than what they seemed at the time; and he wondered, if he had given time to them, would they have unveiled certain truths? But, it further occurred to him what exactly would have had to been done to coax out the way paths in these appearances. For even he, alone the caretaker for these experiences, had to crawl into a pitch-black pit in the earth to summon his memories in a properly stabilized concentration. Truly, was there anything he could do? That is what he wondered, between intervals of hunger powerful enough to simulate stab wounds in his abdomen, and the gargled noises of his entrails, and the electric buzz of his nervous system - but, too, what were intervals, as the days became mere dichotomies between bright and dark, a mere slideshow across a ceiling mouth? Nothing was not at threat to dissolving, to the sensation of riotously being flung to the abyss of the stars, to the voracious disorientation of anxiety, not even duration of time - except the occasional thought, and perhaps color, as it remained infinite both outside and within him. About that - before the friend closed the well, he saw that the stars remained in the daylight. He thought about the new color to hope this gave him, benevolently, though he could not say how. Nevertheless, that, and the rest of this entire story is not relevant. Perhaps none of this is, other than the basics, which is to simply say: a man entered a well; half a century later, he told another man about it, and then left. That man then proceeded to enter a well. Who came out, however, was a different man.