The New Land Is Full of Emptiness
My horoscope says I won’t need external validation until September. Right now it is April. The challenge for the next several months is not to go entirely mad under the thin pressboard wainscoting of my own counsel. My brain flashes various unhelpful slogans like neon signs behind my eyes. This is a city designed for entertainment but all I can see is how unhappy everyone is. People walk by each other, practically colliding but not really noticing, not stopping or pausing whatsoever to marvel at the absolute miracle the existence of another person actually is. Perhaps I watch too many apocalyptic movies, but I can imagine each one of them gone: the trembling older man with the cane taking cautious palsied steps toward the car while his family waits impatiently, the bouncing aggressively cheeked girl with the hot pink barrettes excited about her first trip to Disneyworld repeating “its my first time” over and over again, the irritated and the mother of the hot pink barrettes complaining about how a complaint she made to someone else earlier in the day didn’t actually change her situation and she doesn’t know how to change it except to keep repeating herself. I take them all in with eyes and mouth and skin as plump and round with love as I can make them, especially for the old man, for whom ceasing to exist is something he confronts every morning when he wakes hours earlier than his family to carefully dress himself – every button in a button hole is a maddening labyrinth – spending hours he can ill afford preparing himself so the rest of them can whirl and stuff themselves into a state of being that only approximates happiness.
I’ve always been a favorite of old men. I cannot help but feel tender toward them. Once they’ve been stripped of their essential maleness by age, made impotent in their musings, I find all of their prejudices and hatreds as soft and edible as the mushy food they spoon into their wrinkled mouths. My mother used to be a caretaker for a couple of older men – the real sweethearts, she called them. She refused to care for older women – those demanding bitches are never satisfied. So these were bachelors and widowers, forced to listen to her own imbalanced, odious and incoherent opinions, while she performed her various ministrations on their behalf.
“Do you remember old Mr. Schumacher?” she used to inquire from time to time. Of course I remembered him. Any job my mother did, I also did. My recollection is that I was an extremely capable helper, but given that I was only 4 or 5, this might have been a lack of self awareness on my part. Nonetheless, despite the fact that with my mother’s capable and strong arms, Mr. Schumacher was able to get in and out of the bathtub, he did require help and supervision. While my mother did the dishes or prepared lunch, I’d run a giant sponge or washcloth over his body, while he told me stories or hummed songs he’d long since forgotten the words to. I was fascinated by his translucent nudity and all the odd shapes men’s bodies made, but my mother told me it was rude to stare or to say anything, because it might hurt Mr. Schumacher’s feelings, so I’d often close my eyes partway in a gentle and fuzzy gaze that felt not quite asleep and not quite awake. One time after his bath, while he ate soup, I ran and played in his overgrown backyard and was stung by a bee I had startled while picking flowers. I screamed several times and he slowly and tenderly ministered to my sting with a baking soda poultice after my mother plucked out the stinger with tweezers. “The bee didn’t mean to sting you,” he explained. “They have to give up their own life to do it, but this one was probably protecting his family.” “I wouldn’t have hurt the bee,” I cried. “Of course not,” he said. “But a girl like you looks big and scary to a bee. Sometimes, they just don’t know any better, that’s all.”
I liked his humming too, it was very soothing, and it was a habit I imitated when I was at home in my own bath, while my skin wrinkled in the water just like his. I often told him I wished he was my grandfather, because both of my own were drunks, one mean all the time and the other incoherent by noon, both were men to mostly avoid, not yet old enough to acquire my compassion. He said he wished for the same thing and he would gently pat my hand when he said so. One afternoon, the same pattern as any other afternoon, he grasped my hand and said “I think this is it now, girl.” I stopped washing and just let him hold my hand, though the water was going cold and his skin was turning blue. I kept my gaze soft and fuzzy. I was a very patient girl. When my mother walked in, her eyes got wide and she extricated my hand. “He’s gone,” she said to me. “How fortunate he was with someone he loved.” She made sure to repeat this to his daughter later, when they came to take his body away, and the daughter’s face changed immediately to a kind of angry horror. She made a hole in the check she wrote to my mother with the pen she wrote so hard and we had to leave right away. “She was jealous of you,” my mother said. “Her dad loved you more than he loved her. But at least she was generous with the final payment.”
Sometimes people are just gone and it doesn’t require an apocalypse. Sometimes the only things they leave behind are complications and unresolved knots and questions that don’t have any answers in this plane of existence. Sometimes we long for death because it is ultimately the only exit from our own painful ambiguity. But mostly we don’t hasten that along, because we haven’t scratched everything off our to do lists, and because the world is crammed full of distractions.
I have a short list of things I wanted to do today myself, and the overheard complaints of the complaining woman seemed never-endingly and mind-numbingly repetitive, so I left my hotel and made my way to them knowing they would more than fill my time. I returned after dark, having spent too much money at the designer outlet mall, and too much time feeding adolescent alligators who were crowded into a tiny pool. I made friends with their young keeper who let me come inside their enclosure and get far too close to them, due to my general charm and calmness of spirit. I knew I was taking a risk but it felt like a manageable and worthwhile thing to do. I tell myself that predators with large teeth know how much I love them and so they are unlikely to attack me. This is only sometimes true.
I exited the hotel later that night trembling because I always find it frightening to know what the fortune teller might say to me, and because the pressure of impressing them but not saying too much is always such a balancing act. OPEN flashed the sign, also promising me a variety of mechanisms for telling my future. All hotels with such a panoply of humanity in its rooms should have a fortune teller in the parking lot.
PSYCHIC
TAROT
HANDWRITING ANALYSIS
CRYSTAL READING
But the little fortune teller shack was completely empty. Come in the flashing sign said. Come in. Come in.
PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE.
I did come in, slowly pushing the door open, expecting an alarm to go off. Nothing happened. I sat in one of the empty chairs in silence. The room was entirely purple in a lurid glowing kind of way, leaving a faint lavender cast on the white furniture and presumably on my anxious face.
I write like I think — fast, associative, slightly impatient with the physical act of getting it down before it escapes. The letters lean forward urgently. I bear down hard on certain words — the ones that matter announce themselves with pressure – and with dreadful earnestness, I destroy pen nibs and pencil points, sometimes tearing holes in the paper or the space time continuum. Without lines on a page, I drift upward, which graphologists associate with optimism and idealism, the writing is literally trying to rise off the page. The words I use sometimes make me sneeze. I had brought my notebook but the only thing I succeeded in writing while inside was a large ink blot from holding the pen against the paper for too long.
Everyone or everything has a story. Just a tiny little pause to see the intermittent tuft patterns on the floor carpet, the squares of the small counter tile, installed for the purpose of displaying stereotypical spiritual objects to magnify the reading and presumably to maximize your own financial investment. Now that everything isn’t made by human hands, things mean less than they used to. But how sad for the things. Designed by a robot, not invested with any human meaning, then trod upon until it’s threadbare then thrown away. Only really experiencing the pattern of my soles and the weight of my body. It’s not enough. All the things lacking in purpose have an inherent sadness that can’t be overcome no matter how much I think about them or how much intent I direct fiercely at them in my sudden fervor over their existence.
A small sign on the table listed a phone number to call “anytime day or night” if the psychic shack happened to be unoccupied. I could not bring my still shaking hands to dial. And the shack was not unoccupied. I was there. The noises outside were also there, muted by glass and thin lower walls.
Eventually, I bowed in namaste, thanked the empty chairs and the room and the stereotypical spiritual objects and rose, leaving my money on the table. I hadn’t asked any questions but now there were none left. I met my future in a place where my past didn’t think to look. I can see into my own heart, but the print is too fine to be read with the naked eye in the pale purple glow of 11 pm in Orlando.
