Solitary

It isn’t the room. The room seems fine, as rooms go, with its little window high up on the wall, the tiny sink, the steel commode, the sturdy table and chair, the shiny grey walls, the skinny mattress on its sagging springs. It might be as good a place as any for someone like myself, happy in his thoughts, benign in my own company, as it says in a book of poems I once read. I’m at liberty here, in most ways, wandering in my thought, nested like an oyster in its pearly shell. No, it’s the way the light seems to taunt me through that window, from under the door, a grey light mostly, without warmth. And the way the heavy grey walls, instead of damping, seem to amplify the anger that erupts in the galleries out there, the hoots and howls that explode in the oceanic, lamplit night I imagine behind the door. It is, I guess, the impossibility of anything like solitude, here in this waking space, which makes me think Solitary’s the last name you’d use for this situation. Everywhere here, the dreadful irony of that word. It’s not so much an exile, this circumstance, not so much the fact of my expulsion, this exclusion from the world, but the peculiar way the world seems to hold me at its absolute center, where I cannot manage to step back, to stand apart, where I’m subject to the smallest things, exposed to the narrowest light, to the pendant bulb in its cage, where I seem to be endlessly reoriented by the familiar, somehow altered and strangely destabilized by my unchanging circumstance. In the fragile stillness of my narrow bed, I can’t escape the rasp of labored breathing. In every dream, the feathery, insinuating breath of isolation on my cheek, the licentious whisper of my absolute detachment, the undying echo of an unremembered judgment assigning me to this specific, unremarkable room at the unstable center of an indifferent circumstance, exposed to something more intimate than the violence out there, something somehow older than this separation: the rasping murmurs of a solitude without privacy, a solitude that never manages to find me simply by myself in this empty space, an isolation that doesn’t leave me alone.

* * *

God Walks into a Bar

Actually, it was I who walked in. He was already there. How long had he been seated there, I wondered, in the darkness of a far corner, at the little table, nursing a little Cognac, wreathed in the heavy pipe-smoke of his Cavendish? I was late to the assignation, as always. He seemed unperturbed. At that time of day, it was the just the two of us, if you don’t count the occasional squeak of a bar towel against the glasses that the proprietor stood polishing, endlessly, holding each one up to the grey light from the little windows up front. He’d been happy to interrupt His schedule for my sake, or so He said, to indulge me in this little interview. It was awkward, to say the least, this conversation between someone without belief and Someone who doesn’t exist. He readily acknowledged this latter point, I’m happy to report, the issue of His nonexistence. It relieved the tension I’d expected and dreaded. His cheerful concession to nonexistence broke the ice, and as I recall he seemed to focus on his status, above all, as a name. If memory serves, He was saying how the word, the name, isn’t exactly a thing, but something that points, that “stands” for something other, something on the way to something else, somewhere else. Nonetheless, after putting a few brief questions to Him that I’d prepared in advance, the pipesmoke started to get to me. The cloud that enshrouded us seemed to be getting thicker. I began to feel lightheaded and faintly nauseous, so I had to cut the conversation short, make my apologies, and hurry back out into the Autumn afternoon, grateful for the open air and the nearly empty street. All in all, I’d say, the talk went well. As well as might be expected. I’d come away with what I needed, I thought. He said He’d be happy to meet up again any time. That if I ever needed to get back in touch, He was in the book. I don’t know. Maybe. The thing is, I’ve gotten so used to speaking with folks who, like me, seem to enjoy some form of existence. And when I got back to the office, I was dismayed to find I couldn’t make heads or tails of the notes I’d taken there, dutifully, painstakingly, in the dim light of that bar. All I had managed to come away with, it seems to me now, was the sound His voice made. Something indistinct. Something other than information. An inhuman sound that returned me to the world. Something between a growl and a whisper.