In the Room
I want to tell him everything but there isn't enough time. That's not it exactly. There isn't enough space either. I can only provide a map of this disaster and the scale will always be distorted, will not correspond point to point. You can't feel what I feel. I tell him this. And I tell him this: How hard this is to tell. And I muse for a moment about such a map, a map on the scale of 1:1, a map that when unfolded would map everything exactly. The map would settle on those chairs, the desk, on us exactly, a new skin, would correspond exactly molecule to molecule. You would feel what I feel. I have run out of words. I look around for another handy metaphor, another physical tool to pry open all the abstractions. Any port in the storm. It is the place, I suggest, that has made me so sad. This particular combination of physical detail. Maybe it's in the water, the air. It is always so cold and so dark. We both look at the window, and Doctor X draws open the blinds dramatically. The lumens in the room increase infinitesimally. We regard the familiar gray sky, the light my wife jokes about each morning. The famous light, she says, painters come here from the whole world over to capture.
A Final Amplification
I edited a magazine once called Poet&Critic, and, as part of a promotion campaign, I ran a contest for a poster design to feature the words POET and CRITIC. I received fifty entries, and all but one characterized POET in a display font that was flowery and fluid, italic at the very least, but always cast to look improvisational, spontaneous, creative. The CRITIC, on the other hand, was figured as severe, in serifed types or bold block letters, regimented and defined. Only one designer reversed this take-the POET permanent and the CRITIC scribbled in by hand. And that was right. That was it exactly. All the stories I have read, all the books and magazines and typescripts-these were printed, set in type. It is my scrawl of analysis, my random thoughts, the critic in the margin and between the lines, the editor that ferrets around by hand amending commentary. It is so difficult to see the obvious. I watch Doctor X scribble on a pad of yellow legal paper as I talk. I tell him about a story I read once. The story was about Superman, the comic book hero, but it was a pop treatment. The author's trick was to take the conventions of the form and the character to logical conclusions. When Superman, in this story, uses his X-ray vision, I tell Doctor X, all he sees is lead. The X-ray keeps going, see, through everything until it can't go through anything more, until it runs into some lead. And in this story, I say, Superman's speech balloons and his bubbles of thoughts are invulnerable like the rest of him. He says something or he thinks something and the words appear for a second above his head and then they drift down, coating him in verbiage, a kind of sticky paste, layer after layer, impervious to detergent or thinner. Our hero encased in a cocoon of words, the light filtered by the thatch of entwined letters.
In the Waiting Room
"You can go," Doctor X says. I am in his office and I take his "you can go" both ways. That is, I can go now and leave this room which is, I realize at this instant, a kind of waiting room now, outside, as it is, of the next room I must enter. Or I can go, leave this place, this S, altogether. There was a moment in the Mustard Meeting, in the room in the philosophy department, a moment when I knew I would go. With the silent mediator opening square after square of chocolate, enthralled by the stories being constructed by W, K, and H. In the middle of this, I was struck by the thought that all was lost, that I was lost. I was an M. I was merely a character now in this room, in this place, written out in the meantime, in the corroborating narratives of W, K, and H, reiterated in the meetings they had together in the run-up to this meeting with me. An M. An M who had been written up and written off. I wasn't in that room anymore. So I could go. And I went.
The Copy Room
I am in the copy room, copying my vita, an academic resume. The copy room is windowless, air forced in through vents near the ceiling. The wall of shelves is stacked with reams of white paper, letter and business. The lights hum and the copier stutters through its cycle. All around are the fossil remains of extinct business machines, heaps of the obsolete technologies of duplication-thermograph, ditto, mimeo-their cords coiled. The machines are clad in those exhausted colors-putty, gunmetal, drab. With each swipe it makes, the green light of the copy machine leaks a little from beneath the lid. For the pur poses of furthering my employment opportunities elsewhere, I have reduced my life to a page of copy. I am making fifty copies of the copy. The vita's form is boilerplate. There are bullet heads for EDUCATION, AWARDS, PUBLICATIONS, TEACHING, SERVICE, in bold all caps. H comes into the copy room, queuing up behind me. We exchange pleasantries. "Be done in a jif." We have all been pleasant this fall after we have CLEARED THE AIR in the August meeting, the one I call the Mustard Meeting. That's how W, K, and H characterize what happened then and there: THE AIR WAS CLEARED. WE CLEARED THE AIR. On my vita, there is the bullet labeled EXPERIENCE, and I have advertised there the position I still hold, Director of Creative Writing. The meeting in August, the one I call the Mustard Meeting, was held because W, K, and H had LOST CONFIDENCE in me as Director. Now a few weeks later I am still Director. "Be the Director," I was told at the end of the Mustard Meeting. You know, Doctor X says to me in his office, this hasn't been about you as Director. This hasn't been about CLEARING THE AIR. This hasn't been about LOSS OF CONFIDENCE. The copy machine performs its little rumba of reproduction, counting down to naught.
The Cloud Room
Before we go out to the car to go for good, we walk through the empty house in S, my wife and I and our two boys. We say goodbye to all the empty rooms, starting in the basement where Sam had set some handprints on a jacking pad we'd poured when we moved in. I carry the little one, Nick, the two year old, and borrow the chant from one of his bedtime story books. I have learned, in telling my stories to Doctor X, in listening to myself tell my stories to Doctor X, the power of litany to both cudgel and comfort. At this moment, I am all for the possibility of comfort, the soothing murmur of the lullaby, of language laying to rest. Say good-bye, I say. Good-bye kitchen. Good-bye dining room, good-bye. Good-bye living room. Good-bye stairs. Goodbye your room and good-bye Sam's room. Good-bye our room. Good-bye bathroom. Good-bye Mom's office painted school bus yellow. We climb into the finished attic where some sorry soul poked a few skylights through the roof to get what sun there was, my office, where I wrote, three stories up inside a blue house. The cloud room, Sam called it when he first saw it. Dad is in the cloud room. Say, good-bye cloud room, good-bye.
Going Up
I
I am a gawker. A bumpkin, a hayseed from the Midwest, I stand on the wide sidewalks of cities to look up at the tall buildings. The pedestrians stream grudgingly by, parting into channels on either side of my shoal-like stillness. The walls launch from the same concrete on which I am standing. They vault into the air. This looking creates pleasant illusions. My vision, as it swipes along the lithic or glass facades, recreates the sped-up record of the tower's construction, brick on brick furiously morphing into a solid sheet, raining upward. It is that cinematic technique of vertigo, that pulled focus of the camera lens, the simultaneous clarity of the very close and the brilliant detail of distance itself stretching, stretching even further away. I am looking straight up! All that is square to the solid deck beneath my feet, all these truly true vertical lines, diminishing as they go (and they do go), vector toward that very center of the endless sky. All lines point to the vanishing point. I am looking straight up! I can see the point of vanishing. This perfect lesson of perspective. This gawking is, perhaps, a function of my midwestern-ness, an expression of my eyes' evolution on a flat plain. The horizon is all periphery, one endless sentence. The horizon is not this concentrated speck of attention up there, not this black pinprick of convergence, not this dot at the end of seeing seeing, not this infinite period.