Chapter Eleven
I am running and I am not getting anywhere and this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
Worse than the grey. Worse than the formlessness, the absence of sky and ground and wall and corner and every surface I have ever used to orient myself inside a world. Worse than the cold that is not cold, the air that is not air, the place that is not a place. The worst thing is that my legs are working and the ground, or the nothing that serves as ground, is receiving each step, and the distance between where I was and where I am is zero. I am running in place. I have always been running in place. The grey will not let me pretend otherwise.
In life I could cover it. In life there were blocks to walk and corners to turn and new neighborhoods to discover at two in the morning when the apartment got too quiet and my phone was dead and even the podcasts had stopped and the four-second gap yawned open and I threw on shoes and went, went anywhere, went down the stairs and across the parking lot and along the shoulder of the road with trucks hissing past and their headlights painting me white for half a second before the dark closed again. Moving. As long as I was moving the hum stayed behind me, a half-step back, close enough to feel on the back of my neck like a breath but never quite catching up.
The hum is here now. It has been here since I woke in the grey, since the silence arrived, since the earbud cord caught and pulled and the last song stopped and the room I spent twenty-four years nailing shut opened underneath me like a trapdoor. It is not behind me anymore. There is no behind. The hum is in every direction, low and constant and mine. The sound of Frankie unaccompanied. The frequency I have never been able to sit with, not for more than four seconds, not for even that long, because what lives in the hum is the thing I am most afraid of, the thing I have never looked at, the thing that sits at the center of me like a stone at the bottom of a well, and the stone has a voice, and the voice is saying something, and I do not want to know what it says.
So I run.
Let me try to explain what it is like to need noise the way other people need water.
You wake up. Before your eyes open there is a gap, a sliver of time between the body's first awareness and the mind's full engagement, and in that gap there is nothing. No sound, no input, no voice telling you who you are. Just the raw fact of consciousness, unadorned, exposed to itself. Most people pass through that gap without noticing it. They yawn and stretch and the day begins and they were never in danger. For me the gap is a cliff edge. The quiet rushes into it like cold water through a crack in the hull, and in the quiet the hum rises, and the hum carries things I cannot hold, and if I do not fill the gap in four seconds or less with a screen, a voice, a song, a podcast, the sound of rain from an app, anything, anything at all, the hum will reach the surface and I will have to hear what it is saying and I am not sure I would survive the hearing.
I have never tested this. I have never let the four seconds become five. Miriam teased me about it once, gently. You know you're allowed to just sit there, right? And I laughed, because laughing is noise, and said sitting is for people who trust themselves, and the laugh covered the honesty and we moved on and she did not press, because pressing is not what we do in that house.
Here in the grey there is nothing to fill the gap with. I have checked. I have checked the way a drowning person checks every pocket for something that floats. There is no phone. No screen. No speaker. No bar on the corner with a jukebox. No diner on Route 9. No concert, no party, no kitchen where the espresso machine roars at six in the morning. All of it gone, every mechanism I built, stripped in the stretched second when the music stopped and the silence arrived and I met the thing I had been running from and it was already there, had always been there, had been the thing on the other side of the four-second gap all along.
The Someone.
I felt it in the dying. Not a sound. Not a light. A knowing, vast and aimed, the way a searchlight is aimed except the light was not looking for me. The light had already found me. The light had always known where I was, had been watching the running and the noise and the filled calendars and the earbuds and the two-in-the-morning walks and had been, this is the part I still cannot process, glad. Glad the way you are glad when the person you have been waiting for finally walks through the door, except I had not walked through any door, I had been running from every door, and the gladness met me anyway, and the gladness was specific, and the specificity was unbearable, because it meant the Someone was not glad about some general, blurred, unthreatening version of me. The Someone was glad about me. The hiding, skittering, terrified center of me that I keep behind the noise and the motion and the pretty face and the infectious laugh. The me I do not let anyone see.
I flinched. In the dying, in the long stretched moment when the presence pressed close and the gladness said stop, stay, let me see you, I flinched the way my whole body flinches from silence, full and total, every cell refusing, and I turned away, and the grey caught me, and I have been running ever since.
The problem with running in a place that has no distance is that you never get tired enough to stop. You keep going. Your legs, or the memory of legs, keep churning, and the grey keeps not changing, and the silence keeps not breaking, and after some unmeasured stretch of time that might be minutes or might be years you realize that the exhaustion you are waiting for, the collapse that would give you permission to lie down and be still, is not coming either. The grey will not even let you be tired. It strips away the mechanisms of quitting the same way it strips away the mechanisms of escape.
I try to make noise. I open my mouth and sing, or try to sing, the first song that comes, the bass line from the concert, the one that shook my molars and made the air inside my chest vibrate like a second heart. What comes out is thin, small, a voice without a room to fill, without walls to bounce off, without anything to catch the sound and send it back thickened and real. My voice drops into the grey the way my footsteps drop into the grey. Absorbed. Swallowed. Not silenced, exactly. Thinned. Made honest. Stripped of the reverb and the volume and the speaker amplification until what remains is just me, singing to myself in a formless country, and the singing does not help, because the singing is my voice, and my voice is the thing I have been drowning out, and hearing it alone and unaccompanied and bare is too close to the hum for comfort.
I stop singing.
The silence resettles. It does not rush in. It was never gone. It just waited for me to finish trying, the way you wait for a child to stop splashing before you point out the water was still there the whole time.
I try memory. I close my eyes, or the eyes I think I have, and build the coffee shop in my head: the counter with its chipped edge, the espresso machine with the temperamental steam wand, the morning regulars, the hiss and gurgle of the portafilter, the bell over the door that rang so often on Saturdays it became a kind of percussion. I build it note by note, the whole sound map of my life, and hold it against the silence like a compress against a wound.
It does not hold. The memory is vivid but it has no weight. The grey takes the images and lets them be but will not let them sing. The coffee shop sits in my mind complete and silent, like a movie with the volume at zero, and I am inside a memory that cannot protect me from the thing the memory was built to hold off.
My mother said I was afraid of my own shadow. She said it when I was five or six, when I would not sleep without the radio on and would not ride in the car without singing, and she thought it was a phase, a thing I would grow out of the way children grow out of night lights.
She was wrong about the shadow. But she was close. I am afraid of the thing the shadow points to, the shape behind me that I have never looked at, the source of the hum. The hum was my first awareness and my longest companion and I have spent every waking minute since I was old enough to find a next thing making sure I never heard it clearly.
What I know about myself: I am not deep. Miriam is deep. Julian is deep. They carry their wounds like arguments, like positions they have thought through and decided to hold. Miriam's fury has footnotes. Julian's grief has a thesis. Mine has nothing. I am not running from a theological objection or a wound the church left or a dead sister whose question I could not answer. I am running from the sound of my own interior, from the discovery that if you peel away the noise and the motion and the warm bodies and the cold drinks and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, what is left is a girl sitting alone in a quiet room, and the quiet has something to say to her, and she has never in her life been brave enough to hear it.
This is not the kind of refusal you can explain at a dinner party. It is not principled, not argued, not even fully conscious. It is a flinch. The whole mechanism of my living was a flinch, automatic and total, the way your hand jerks from a hot stove before the pain signal even reaches the brain. I flinched from silence. I flinched from stillness. I flinched from any moment that threatened to leave me alone with myself, and the flinching became a way of life, became the life itself, became the girl the world knew: bright, restless, game for anything, the one who always had a plan for Saturday night.
The girl the world knew is gone. The plan for Saturday night is gone. Saturday night is gone. The grey has no Saturday and no night and no plan and no girl with a pretty face and a laugh that fills a room. It has only this: the thing I was always running from, finally still enough to hear.
I press my hands against my ears, or the memory of ears. The gesture is absurd. There is nothing coming from outside. The silence is not an incoming sound I can block; it is the absence that remains when every outgoing sound has been spent, and my hands against my ears are just hands against ears, and the hum comes from inside the hands, and the hands know it, and I lower them.
Time passes, or something that functions like time. I cannot measure it. In life I measured time by the next event, the next obligation that gave the hours shape. Tuesday was the double shift. Wednesday was the open mic. Thursday was laundry and Julian cooking something ambitious. Every hour had a destination, and the destinations strung together into a map that looked, from the outside, like a life.
Here there are no destinations. I run, or walk, or stand, and the grey is the same grey, and the running accumulates nothing. No mileage. No approaching shore. Only the motion itself, and the motion is beginning to feel like what it is: the ouroboros, the drummer's tattoo going around and around in a circle with no beginning and no end, consuming itself to stay busy.
I think about the snake on his forearm. The way it moved when he hit the snare. I watched it for two hours and thought it was the truest picture of my life anyone had ever drawn. I have been the snake. Feeding on noise, on motion, on the next thing, burning through sensation the way a fire burns through fuel, and the fuel is me. Not a straight line from somewhere to somewhere. A circle. The mouth and the tail always in the same place.
The grey makes this very clear. Without the fuel, the circle stops. Without the noise and the motion, the snake's jaw hangs open and the tail slips free and what is left is just a creature on the ground, still, looking at itself for the first time.
I am not ready to look at myself.
The nearness is here. It has been here the whole time. I have been trying not to mention it, the way you try not to mention the thing in the room that everyone can feel and no one wants to name, but the trying costs more than the naming would, and the grey does not let you spend indefinitely on things that cost.
It is at the edge of me. Not behind. Not ahead. At the edge, the way warmth is at the edge of a fire even when you have turned your back to it. I feel it on the periphery of whatever sense I am using now, a pressure that is not pressure, a heat that is not heat, a thereness so specific and so steady that it does not feel like an environment. It feels like a person. Someone standing just past the boundary of my attention, patient, in no hurry, watching without watching, present without crowding.
I run from it. This is what I do. This is what I have always done: I feel the approach of something that might see me, that might require me to be still and available and present for inspection, and I bolt. I bolt the way I bolted from the four-second gap every morning of my life. Automatically. Completely. Without the intervening step of deciding.
The nearness does not chase.
This is the detail that undoes every calculus I have. The nearness does not chase. It does not follow. It does not speed up when I speed up or reach for me when I swerve. It simply is, everywhere I turn, the way a temperature is everywhere in a room. I run north and it is at my edge. I run south and it is at my edge. I stop, I start, I change direction, I change again, and the nearness has not moved, because the nearness does not need to move. It is not following me. It is not stalking me. It was here before I started running and it will be here after I stop, and the running is not the thing that keeps me from it. The running is just the thing I do while I am refusing to acknowledge that the distance I am trying to create is a distance this place does not contain.
In life I could outrun anything. Or I could outrun the feeling of anything, which was the same thing. The bar, the concert, the bed of someone whose last name I might not have caught, the two-in-the-morning walk. Every exit was a distance I could put between me and the hum. Here there are no exits. The grey has taken every door I ever used and replaced it with more grey, and the running is accomplishing nothing except to prove what the grey has been telling me since I arrived: you cannot run from something that is not behind you.
It is not behind me. It is beside me. It is in the silence itself, a quality of the silence, the way warmth is a quality of sunlight. The silence I have been fleeing is not empty. It never was. It is full of this, this steady, patient, unhurried presence that does not require my attention and does not withdraw when I refuse it and does not do the single thing that would let me dismiss it: it does not chase. A chaser I could handle. A chaser I could categorize. The nearness is simply present, the way gravity is present, and my running from it is as useful as running from the weight of my own body.
I think about Miriam. Miriam, who is out here somewhere in the grey, burning with a fury that has a name and a face and a history. I envy her the fury. I envy Julian his folded arms, his argument, his principled refusal. They have words for what they are refusing. They have reasons they could articulate, positions they could defend at length, whole edifices of thought and feeling they have constructed around their no. My no has no argument. My no is a flinch, a child's hand over her eyes, the instinct to flee from a room before the light comes on.
I wonder if they can hear the silence the way I hear it. For Miriam the grey is God's anteroom. For Julian it is a proposition without a thesis. For me it is the thing itself, the room I nailed shut, the place where the hum lives. Each of us woke into the same formless country and found in it the shape of our own particular terror. The grey gives you your own fear back.
Mine is silence. The specific, total silence that comes when the last noise dies and you are left with yourself, the self you have never met, the self that lives behind the noise like a tenant in a room you have been keeping sealed for years, sliding meals under the door but never opening it, never looking, because what if the person in the room is someone who is worth nothing without the performance, what if the person in the room, stripped of every ornament, is just empty, just the hum, just the low constant drone of a life that has no center because the center was hollowed out a long time ago by a fear so old she cannot remember when it started.
That is what I am running from. Not God. Not the nearness. Not even the grey. I am running from the person in the room, the me behind the me, the one the silence would show me if I ever held still long enough to see.
But here is the thing about running in a place with no distance. It is not just that you do not get anywhere. It is that the running itself begins to thin.
At first the motion was vigorous, panicked, the full-body fling of a woman who feels the walls closing and throws herself at the gap. I ran the way I fled the four-second gap: instantly, totally, without thinking. The running was its own noise, a substitute for the noise I could not find, the rhythm of my footsteps and the pounding of my pulse (if I still have a pulse) filling enough of the silence to keep the hum one shade quieter than unbearable.
Now the motion is slower. Not because I am tired. The grey will not let me be tired. But because the running, like the singing, like the memory of the coffee shop, is losing its capacity to fill. Each step takes the same effort but produces less. The rhythm of my footsteps sounds less like motion and more like repetition, the same beat over and over, a metronome counting time to nothing. The substitution is failing. The noise of the running is not noise enough. The hum is climbing through it the way dawn climbs through the blinds of a room you have been hiding in, gradual, inexorable, indifferent to the curtains.
I slow to a walk. The walk is no different from the run. The grey is no different from the grey. And the nearness, the patient, unhurried presence at my edge, is no different from what it has been since I arrived, since before I arrived, since the dying, since the stretched moment when the gladness met me and I turned and ran.
The gladness. I keep arriving at the gladness. The grey returns me to it the way the grey returns Miriam to the tenderness she does not trust and Julian to the question he cannot answer. Someone was glad to see me. Not the pretty face, not the girl who fills the calendar. Someone was glad to see the hidden, running, terrified thing at my center, and the gladness was so specific, so fitted to the exact shape of me that it could not have been a general warmth. It was personal. It was for me. As if the hiding were the only problem. As if the person behind the hiding were exactly the person the Someone had been waiting to see.
I cannot hold this. The gladness is worse than judgment would be. Judgment I know how to flee. Judgment is a verdict, and I have a thousand tools for drowning out a verdict. But gladness says you are exactly what I came here to find, and there is no noise that covers that, because the gladness is aimed at the place beneath the noise, and the place beneath the noise is the place I will not go.
Time, or the thing that passes for time, has stretched past any measure I can hold. I do not know if I have been here for hours or for ages. The grey does not mark it. There is no clock, no schedule, no Tuesday double shift or Wednesday open mic to give the hours a shape. There is only the unbroken fact of being here, the silence, the hum, the nearness at the edge, and the motion that is slowing because the motion has nowhere to go and the going is all it ever had.
I am walking now. Not running. The walk is slow and has no destination, and I am beginning to understand, in the place below understanding, in the place where the body knows before the mind does, that the exits are closing.
Not because someone is closing them. The exits are closing because I am running out of ways to pretend they were ever open. The bar was not an exit. The concert was not an exit. They were all the same circle, the same snake consuming itself, the same mouth meeting the same tail in a loop that never arrived anywhere because arriving would have meant stopping and stopping would have meant hearing and hearing is the thing, the one thing, I have never been willing to do.
The hum is louder now. Or I am quieter. The two amount to the same thing. With each step that does not carry me away from anything, the hum rises, the way a sound rises when the noise around it drops. It has been here all along, my own unaccompanied frequency, the tone my life gives off when there is nothing between me and it. It is not a frightening sound, which frightens me more than if it were. It is low and steady and plain and mine, and it has been saying the same thing since I first heard it at five or six years old in the four-second gap between waking and the radio: here you are. Here you are. Here is the part of you that you keep locked in the room. Here is the thing you cannot look at.
And underneath the hum, or inside it, or so close to it that separating the two would require a stillness I do not yet possess: the nearness. Still there. Still patient. Still, impossibly, glad.
I am walking slower. The silence is closing in. Not like a trap. Not like a predator. Like a room settling around a person who has finally stopped running through it, the walls not shrinking but becoming visible for the first time, the space not contracting but defining itself, the way a room defines itself when you stand still in it long enough to notice the corners.
I have not stopped yet. I am still moving, still putting one foot in front of the other, still maintaining the last thin fiction of flight. But the fiction is thinning. Each step carries less of the old panic and more of something I cannot name, something that feels like the first seconds of waking, the crack between sleep and sound, except the sound on the other side of the crack is not the radio and not the podcast and not the espresso machine. It is the hum. And the hum is not empty. And the nearness is in it.
The exits are closing. The noise is spent. The snake has run out of tail to swallow, and the mouth hangs open, and the silence is pouring in, and I am not dead yet. I am not dead yet. Whatever I was afraid of finding in the quiet room, whatever tenant I have spent my life refusing to meet, has not killed me yet, and the yet is beginning, just barely, just at the farthest reach of my terror, to feel less like a threat and more like an open question.
I am still running. But the running is slower, and the silence is closer, and the gladness is there, at the edge, waiting without urgency, as if it has all the time this grey contains, as if my stopping were as certain as my starting, as if the only distance left to cross were the distance between my fear and my own still center, and the distance, in this place that has no distance, is almost nothing at all.