‘[W]HOLE’ AND ‘ASL’ — short stories

[w]hole

A thing is a hole in a thing it is not​, said Carl Andre, sometime in ‘68. Samuel saw the phrase written on a note pinned to a gallery wall at Tate Modern and it’s stayed with him, lodged itself in his head. He takes hold of it in his mind, sounding it out, tapping on its even length to hear the echo. Trying it, investigating, smoothing it down.

A thing is a hole in a thing it is not. 

Example 1 
Seen from a bench in the park, a bird is a hole in the vast blue space of a summer afternoon: an absence of blue, an absence of sky, an absence of featherlessness. In other words, the bird takes up space, displacing air (the thing it is not, which gives it shape and something to push its wings against).

 Example 2
A kitchen knife is a hole in the flushed orange flesh of raw salmon, in layers of crisp fresh lettuce, in the skin and pith and juicy teardrop cells of a lemon, and briefly – such as the year he started school, 2001 – a knife is a hole in a hand. In the kitchen of the house where he grew up watching TV news. A hand that had been navigating a bamboo cane just moments before, so deft and confident, notching it for a length of knotted string. With the kitchen knife. For a bow to go with his headdress, for him to play Cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Native Americans. Cowboys and The People of Turtle Island. Of Hah-nu-nah.​       

And here we must draw 
Our line

When, in a moment, the knife slipped and sliced his mother’s skin, he didn’t panic. It was the fleshy area at the base of her thumb, the heel of her hand, he remembers that. She took the white plastic house phone from the wall and called his grandmother. The blood was a red curtain lowering, flowing, a flowering rose (these are more likely images borrowed from films to furnish his memory). The blood seeped through white muslin. The image of him sitting diligently on the front doorstep, still in his headdress, while they waited for his grandmother is also fabricated, he reckons, from retellings of the story he’s heard over the years. Him being brave. As in both the adjective, an emotion(?) and the noun, an Indian warrior. The car was yellow and square-looking, like a drawing of a car. The journey is now a blank – or a blur rather, of tall hedges opening onto green open space, rushes through marshland – but the waiting room is clear, stark, bright with white light and starched shirts.

  What he does, also, definitely remember is his pride in being the only one there for her at the moment it happened. Not one of a million possible witnesses, watching powerless from afar, but close enough to touch her and – he imagines – smell the coppery scent of the blood.

Absolutely, concretely, the only one there.

Side note
The past can’t have holes, can it? It’s gone and so it has nothing to lose. You might think there’s a hole in the past, but that’s just the memory of a hole in a passed present. The past​ has no holes ∴ the past is a whole.

Example 3
Silence is a hole in sound, which itself is a hole in silence. Yesterday, eighteen years later or so, he rushed up on the train from London to find his mother sat at the kitchen table, staring blankly ahead, not saying anything. He recognised her silence from years ago, when he was sent to stay with his dad. It was a hole in that it was “an empty space” or an “opening” in sound, in meaning, in the flow of conversation (‘hole, n.1’). At the same time, the silence was inflating, becoming almost physically taut, and the only way to relieve the pressure was by puncturing it with a word. Which he searched for, the word, because not just any word would do. Get it wrong and the staring and silence would be the New State of Things. That’s as long as the silence itself could withstand the pressure. Alternatively, it might have burst open, tearing open new, irreparable holes. His mind tacked, untacked: word​ ​, he thought: verbum​, verb​, as in do ​​something!: word​ ​, sword​, the kitchen knife, to pierce, to cut, to shut up: word​​, ward​, to ward off, to be one’s ward, to be in a bright ward with white light and starched shirts. She was still staring and he was still, not lifting his eyes from the fine grain of the table.

A bird is a hole in the vast blue space of a summer afternoon. Later, he thought, he might look at the bird and say: That is me, alone and quiet, a dark shape in a bright void. ​He might recognise himself as the hole, though he tried everything – barring finding the right fucking​ word ​– to make himself present. To make himself there for her.

Example 4
The word READ ​ under an unreplied-to text message was a hole in the delicious white pixels​ of ignorance. Also a hole in the mind (as in, it took up space, displacing other thoughts like an errant bird).

Example 5 (i)
A worried phone call from his grandmother was a hole too complex to understand, its size measured in Kbps or Mbps.

Example 6
A train ticket for that same evening was a hole in the space in his pocket; he was also a hole in the space of the train; the pixels spelling RESERVED were a hole in the little strip of screen above his seat. During the two hour journey, the bird wouldn’t stop chattering and pushing things about with its frantic wings.

Example 7
A hug was two holes, one each. 
A tear is a hole.

Example 8
Nostalgia requires absence, which is to say a hole in experience. After a tense train journey and an evening of near-silence bleeding into night, he can, for the moment, for the morning, do nothing more. Wandering, he finds himself in the cafe in the park – the cafe he used to visit with his dad – where they no longer serve something particular. In this cafe there used to be a man with very crooked teeth – he might have been the chef – who would bend down over the table and say: “If you wobble your milk teeth like that, your new ones’ll end up like mine.” Then he would throw his head back and laugh, giving a good view of them, like old tombstones. Samuel’s dad always knew what to say back to the man, always moving things forward, making a joke, ordering a lime milkshake. Which is, Samuel realises, the something they no longer serve. The menu still reads essentially the same – 

Tea
Coffee
Beans On Toast Fruit Cake
etc. 

– but beyond the etc. ​  ​is a space where the milkshake once was. This space is discomforting in a way he finds difficult to articulate, though he’s sure he wouldn’t order lime milkshake now, given the option. It’s not about the milkshake though, is it? It’s about the hole in the past that, let’s be honest, is unlikely to be filled in. No, he wouldn’t even drink the lime milkshake, but yes, he would be much more comfortable eating his beans on toast and drinking his coffee – black, strong, medicinal – if it was still around. Because what he needs right now is the reminder of his milkteeth days.

Milk ​suggesting pearly whiteness or their soft nubbliness, for nursing? (When we talk about a child’s missing teeth we always have a better sense of a thing as a hole in the thing it is not, referring to the hole as the thing, space as object, etc.) The memory of his dad, the sense of his ever-onwardness, makes him feel weak, always suckling on the past.

“Do you want coffee?” ​​were the words he finally found, the night before. The words that punctured the silence. When he goes to her again, after the park, there are no more tears, but there are words. He takes her black coffee again, a remedy, applied like a balm. She presses her hand around the hot cup and even the silences are more comfortable, if only for the excuse of their lips being otherwise engaged.

“It’s strange,” she says. “I didn’t remember…” 

The past has no holes ∴ the past is a whole. The conscious past, however, is reliant on memory, which is absolutely full of holes, riddled with them, which was how she could ask his grandmother, “Was he here, last night?” even though they hugged and cried and spoke – finally spoke – to each other. And even though, for Samuel, the memory is so sharp he tries hard not to touch it.

“I’ve been dreaming a lot,” she says. “It’s hard to tell what’s real.”

Example 9
A dream is a hole in the obliterating blackness of sleep. As is waking.

“In the night I can’t sleep and yet it’s all I want to do in the day, is sleep. Nothing else. Sometimes I wake up and go back to sleep, sometimes without realising. The dreams bleed into real life and I’m beginning to wonder if I can tell the difference.” She’s been spending days at a time in bed, facing the wall and not responding when they go up to her. The skin beneath her eyes is creased and greyish like worn linen, or as if someone’s tried to rub it out.

This might be to do with her refusing food and drink, filling herself up with hollow space. 

“Yes,” she replies, when he asks if she’s eaten. “I had toast and a glass of water when I got up.”

Example 10
A mother is a hole in her son. As in, she is invisible for a large part of his life, or else she is such a constant presence that she blends in with the furniture of his imagination, or else he is blinded by his overwhelming dependence upon her, all meaning that when he finds her right there in front of him, something physical, with needs, it shocks him somehow. It shocks him how much he cares about toast and a glass of water. ​          ​He can’t say why. And it makes him realise how much and how little he’s been allowed to know. Because the fact is, he will never see the tears that came weeks after a one night stand, or hear the stuttered confession to his grandmother (whose past is even more elusive). Even the physical touch he shared with her – a tiny hand wrapped around her slim forefinger – is gone, no matter how he adored her, because he, now, is not what he was then, before memory began. He is himself in the present, but also, in her eyes: “an area where something is missing” (or ‘hole, n.2’).

Example 11
A son is a hole in his mother. Parting fluid, he takes up literal space inside her. She is full and hungry with him. He leaves scars.

Over the next week there will be more black coffee; more, then fewer words as they run out of things to say and fall back into the familiar. The search for work and how’s Mimi’s new job as a seamstress – “so-so,” he’ll say and she’ll smile: “very funny” – and what’s he been reading. He’s been reading nonfiction since he finished his final exams, becoming more engaged, easing reluctantly out of the past and back into the present. When he speaks about this he’ll feel guilty, remembering tense conversations at the kitchen table the year before he left, about nuclear disarmament, the environment, the economy, when he cared passionately about them. He’ll feel guilty because now, of all times, she’s not up to speaking about it; then frustrated, because she’s never been up to it anyway, speaking about it, walking away from anything too difficult to think about; then guilty again because how can he be frustrated at her, now?

He knows that when he leaves again, this weekend, when he takes the train back to London because he can’t stay forever, the silence could return. He feels that old pride in being the only one there for her, but he recognises something else at the heart of it. Vanity?

Selfishness? He pictures Narcissus, leaning ever in.

Example 12
Water is a hole in itself, displaces itself; also, it is a hole – this is scientifically verified, with models showing erosion patterns in not only soil and sand, but also, impossibly, in rock and ice too hard to break by other means – water is a hole in the land. Perhaps it’s something amniotic that makes him feel so at home around it, Samuel thinks, among the vast space of it. 

Such as the estuary, a flat brown plain resisting the pull of the sea, lapping against the boards of the small pier where fishing boats launch when, after the evening and the night and the park and their talks, he feels the need to be alone for a while. Sunlight falls in straight, solid columns, parting the clouds, lining the small waves and gulls’ wings with silver. Amniotic,​ from amnion​, from the Greek for “little lamb”. Amnion​ ​ cognate with yean​      ​, as in “to bring forth (e.g. a lamb)” meaning the hole or the absence is always present, even in the language of the unbroken. As, also, in: w[hole]​  ​.

Or the Thames from London Bridge on a circuitous route home from Euston where he’ll come in on the 7PM train, back from home – home ​home: the pull of the tide forming eddies and the river’s whorls ​     ​from a poem that would drag you down into the solid brown mass of it, a hole in a hole in a whole city bursting with absence. Empty offices. Light on glass obliterating interiors. Children gone away from home.

Somewhere beyond the rusty barge full with containers, Tower Bridge modelesque (painted blue with a square of flat white sky), and the evening City translucent, is Mimi, and himself in the sound of her name. She could have come with him, offered to come with him, but didn’t. He asked her not to, which meant:

“I’m capable of existing without you.”  and

“I want it to be me alone who is there for her.”  and

“I don’t want to worry you about this, which is my ​ ​thing to deal with.”

 Example 5 (ii)
His grandmother’s calls will punctuate the days; puncture the long silences while Mimi is at work (both from punctum​          ​, “point”, like points on a graph, diminishing with his mother’s progress). He’ll talk to her from the legless chair he and Mimi rescued, his feet bare in the lush rug they cut to size (the room, it seems, has been drinking). How is she doing?​           ​ will be the question he asks, over and over. How is she doing? ​ ​Doing what? Anything? He’ll ask how she’s doing when what she wasn’t​   ​ doing was the real problem: the not talking, not eating, not sleeping. The negative space around the little she did do. He suddenly wishes he’d spoken to her more, properly spoken to her, instead of sipping away the minutes they had. Because already that period of absolute earnestness, the kind that comes hand-in-hand with urgency, a kind of dark yearning, has passed. What’s left unsaid – now and to come, in the phone calls – presses in on him, a solid mass, an infinity of discarded syllables. It’s too vast and too complex to hold in his head.

Of course we need negative space though, to define the thing, don’t we, he thinks; what it’s not gives it shape, something to push its wings against. You just need to look for the silver lining.

After days in the flat he’ll decide to leave the chair and the rug and go out, to Greenwich, to stand on 0° and look out over the city. As he climbs the stairs to the DLR platform, he’ll feel the frigid air in the back of his throat, like an unformed H​ ​. Steps still slick with last night’s rain, two no-colour crows picking them clean. Carry on, crows. (He allows himself a smile.) Under the digital clock displaying the next train, a class of schoolchildren waiting. Their voices shrill and smiling-sounding. He won’t be able to tell one from the other, and their single voice will bubble up skywards, emptying air from air.

ASL

Now connected, it says.

The room is cool and dim, never completely dark. The electric glow of a streetlight through the half-open window suggests the familiar shape of the settee, the coffee table, a stack of books. Will fills in the titles by memory: Four Novellas​          ​, The Unfortunates, Diving into the​    Wreck.​ A faint breeze teases the thin grey curtain. One ear is plugged with an earphone; the other is filled with a kind of low static.

@blooddiamond says they’re 35, female, based somewhere in Texas. It doesn’t matter where. Or how old: she could be anywhere from 18 upwards, presumably no less. And she ​ ​could be he​. Will imagines a man in his late 40s sitting behind the keyboard, sweating lightly in the heat of a Texas afternoon. Heavy-lidded eyes intent on the screen, wrapped up in @blooddiamond: s(he).

Here, they exist as language, nothing more.

Today, Will is: @sophj/22/f/NW England.

And pseudonymous, they come untied. Loosed from their physical bodies, their flesh, they are freed from consequence, from physical cause and effect. Their words are light with lack of meaning.

In the other room the bed creaks, and Will cocks his head. His eyes take a moment to adjust to the dark over the top of his laptop screen and, in that moment, the space seems to go on indefinitely, infinitely deep. He pictures his pupils expanding. The bed creaks again; she’s just turning over, restless. At 10PM, he nestled in behind her, before he found he couldn’t sleep. She didn’t feel him get up, or hear him cross the bedroom, easing the door shut behind him.

@blooddiamond asks @sophj how her day is going so far. 

She tells them it’s been fine, uneventful. That it’s almost 11PM in the UK, actually. And you? 

It’s near 6PM, @blooddiamond replies.

Will closes his eyes, leans back in his chair. @sophj meant how is @blooddiamond’s day. Will’s having trouble separating @blooddiamond from the image of the man, a composite of all the lonely men and Texans and perverts he’s seen, in films and TV shows and newspaper articles. He’s relieved when he hears another message come through, asking @sophj to describe herself. @sophj addresses @blooddiamond by name in her reply: well,​      blooddiamond...

@sophj is small, slim, with long blonde hair. An elfish look about her face, high cheekbones and a snub nose. Does anyone actually believe this stuff? Blind faith, maybe. But there’s a part of Will that believes @sophj could be real as well, the @sophj that is fresh out of the shower and wrapped in a blue and white towel. Whose dog, a greyhound, is lying at her feet.

Who chats to strangers online when she can’t sleep.

Will doesn’t know where the real Sophie is. Their lives diverged a long time ago; all traces of her disappeared.

@blooddiamond asks the dog’s name. Sylvia, like Sylvia Plath.

Why does he have to mine real life for details this way, why can’t he just fictionalise completely? Will doesn’t know. Perhaps to make it seem more real to himself. Perhaps for lack of imagination. Either way, it feels impossible that she’s not @sophj right now, the girl talking to @blooddiamond. And there’s no harm in it anyway, because nothing’s happened​         ​. Nothing will happen. Words are words are words are

A new message from @blooddiamond appears in place of the last. Displaced, the conversation rises like water. A flood. @blooddiamond has sent a series of links ending .jpeg, pictures of three Instagram models that look vaguely alike. @blooddiamond asks @sophj if she likes her (@blooddiamond’s) pictures. Will pauses for a moment, but in truth he knows it’s over. He closes his eyes again, leans back. From the start it was over. They log on and their words fill dead space, barely quantifiable. Blankly, he scrolls to the top of the page and leaves the room.