Nothing 4

Ben sat on the floor. He was still, his legs folded in front of him, his back leaning against the front of the couch. It was a cool night. Cool air streamed in from the open window, smelling piney like some plant outside. He watched the plant on the shelf across from him. It was a little bigger already, full and happy from more regular waterings. Its leaves stood out straight, plump and very green, a kind of green that seemed to contain thoughts or intention. Ben had never seen anything look so alive. Tinges of red at the tip of the leaves where they twisted upwards and towards the window, tinges of red along the stem as it split apart, joined together, sunk into the brown dirt. Part of the plant was down there, too, where you couldn’t see it and didn’t think about it, but it was just as much part of the plant as the part you could see.

Ben wondered if plants were more alive than people. That’s why we eat them, right? To get their life out of them. He wondered what part of himself was made of plant, which cells were made of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, how had that greenness reshaped itself to become part of him. And what part of him was onions. And beans—they were plants, too. Even the pasta was plants, wheat, grasses feeding on the sun and dirt. He was all made of plants. He basically was a plant. Even the air blowing through the window, scenting the room like sap was made of plants. And those plants were going into his nose and into his lungs and becoming part of him.

Then Ben understood that there wasn’t a real separation between him and the plant. That separation was an illusion. But there was a continuity—plant, air, dirt, sun, human—all in a constant process of exchange, the way the cells in his body passed nutrients and fluids to each other, redistributed them from the part that had more to the part that had less. That was the same with him and the plant, who were sharing the same air, redistributing the oxygen and carbon dioxide in a manner that would keep both of them, him and the plant, alive.

He wondered which of them would die first—him or the plant. But he also thought: it doesn’t matter. If he and the plant were part of one thing that contained not only themselves but billions of other plants and animals and people and cells and molecules, then it didn’t matter whether he died or the plant died, any more than it mattered when one of his cells died. It was just like people said: you live on in the lives of others. That had always just been a thing people said, but now, sitting on his living room floor on a cool summer evening, it made sense.

Nothing 3
Nothing 5 

Nothing 3

It had been a month, and Ben hadn’t really talked to anybody. His mom a few times on the phone from New Hampshire—she was concerned. And the people working at the Saturday morning farmers market where he was buying all his broccoli and Brussels sprouts, and the cashier at the corner grocery where he bought the beans and pasta. But no one else, unless he met somebody on his walk, had a chat about the weather or the landscaping or how bad the traffic congestion had gotten. 

He used to talk to people every day. Mostly about stuff like deadlines and bug reports and code freezes, but also about how life was going, how were their wives, their kids, was he dating anybody? He didn’t exactly miss it, but it seemed like something you should keep up with a little. Sometimes his voice didn’t work when he tried to use it.

He called Seth and made plans for dinner on Saturday. Seth was his oldest friend—they’d met in middle school—and he lived ten miles away, but they usually only saw each other every few months. They were both so busy. Seth was a high school math teacher, plus he had a three-year-old daughter.

Usually Ben drove to Seth’s place—a house on a quiet street—but he wasn’t in a rush now, so he walked to the train. It was about a mile walk on each end, but he was used to walking. The yards on the way to Seth’s house had roses blooming, or dusty green cactuses, or little penned-off gardens with kale and lettuce growing.

Seth’s wife cooked while Seth and Ben played with the daughter. She had a little table with trains on it. She was moving a little wooden train over the track, knocking over little wooden trees and people that got in its way.

“What have you been up to?” Seth asked. “Now that you’re not working.”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

“Like really literally nothing?”

“I clean and cook and walk.”

 “So like literally nothing.” Ben raised his eyebrows, impressed. He looked over at his daughter, looked back at Ben. “Sounds nice.”

Ben nodded. He didn’t tell Seth about the part of the day where he just sat.

All through dinner, Seth’s wife talked  about different women she wanted to set Ben up with.

“You should get married,” she said, spooning a second round of food onto his plate. It was lamb stew over couscous. She was a really good cook and it was hard to stop eating. Even the three-year-old was shoving fistfuls of lamb into her mouth, getting sauce all over her face. “You’ve got lots of time to meet somebody now.”

Ben used to want to meet somebody, to have kids, to live in a house. But now he couldn’t think of why he would need that. If he wanted kids, family, food—he could just come over here. He smiled, nodded, chewed on a bite of lamb and wondered how he’d never noticed that cumin seeds were delicious.

Nothing 2
Nothing 4

Nothing 2

For the first two weeks, Ben did the same things every day.

1. clean 
2. cook
3. read
4. walk
5. sit

The cleaning was nice, like a present to himself. His apartment was old and crappy and he’d always been too busy to keep it really clean. The old linoleum in the kitchen had a perpetual sticky film over it and the bottom of the white bathtub was gray. He spent all morning scrubbing one thing until it was shiny, vacuuming out the narrow spaces between cabinets, scrubbing old cooking splatters off the kitchen walls. He put on music, or he didn’t, just listened to the sounds of scrubbing and running water. It was like he was bringing out the essence of each thing in the apartment, clearing away the deadness on top of it, making it alive. The air started to smell good like he was living outdoors.  

Then he would make his same food in the newly-clean kitchen. Beans, noodles, broccoli. He decided to start cooking the beans from scratch; he could do that, since he was home cleaning all morning. Canned beans were cheap, but bags of beans were much, much cheaper.  He’d soak them overnight, cook them in his biggest pot with garlic and salt and chili if he felt adventurous, eat a bowl of them while they were still hot and soft. Some day he would learn to make the pasta from scratch, too—just flour and water and maybe egg, should be easy. He usually steamed the broccoli, but now he started roasting it, too, which made the edges crispy and the insides creamy. Sometimes he made Brussels sprouts instead—those were really good roasted—or carrots, or even onions.

Then he’d open a book, sit with his bowl of noodles and beans and crispy vegetables, read for an hour or so. His old thing was eating lunch in front of the computer at work. There were about twenty books on his shelf that he’d bought and meant to read but never gotten around to it. He started with novels, read one each week, during lunch and dinner and a little bit in the morning when he woke up. Sometimes he wanted to keep reading, to pick up the book again after his walk, to spend all evening immersed in the story. But he knew that would be too much. He didn’t want to spend his whole life in someone else’s story; he needed the majority of his time to be in his own life.

After lunch, he’d go for a walk. He’d start out towards the donation box two blocks away, drop a bag of stuff he didn’t need. Then he could go any way he wanted. He’d started out with the cemetery—it seemed like the obvious place to walk. He’d go along the stone paths, through the headstones, read about lost beloved mothers and babies. After a few days of that, he started going to places he’d only ever seen from his car.  Winding pedestrian overpasses, mysterious urban playgrounds, paths through the brush on the side of the freeway where he’d sometimes seen people walking or riding their bikes. It was interesting to be alongside cars, to walk where one was meant to drive, to be slow in the face of so much speed.

When the sun set, he would come back to the apartment, tired, wanting to lie down. He would, for a few minutes, on the living room floor (he liked the floor better than the couch), staring at his ceiling, noticing the patterns in the swirled white paint. Then he’d sit up, his back against the front of the couch.  He would just sit. Sometimes he’d close his eyes, but mostly he’d keep them open. He’d look at his one plant on the shelf across the room. He didn’t know what it was called. It had a bud on it that was growing bigger and bigger. It would probably open into a flower soon. Sometimes he wanted to get up, clean something, read more of his book. Have some more beans from the pot. But no, he had to sit and look. Because this was the most important time of the day. The cleaning was important, and the cooking, and the reading and the walking. But this time sitting was the time when he would learn the most. This was the time he would learn to do nothing. 

Nothing 1
Nothing 3

Nothing 1

If you started out as an engineer making seventy thousand dollars, and if your salary had more than doubled since then, and if you put eighty percent of your salary into low-risk bonds every single month, living in a rent-controlled apartment and buying your clothes at Ross and eating broccoli, beans and noodles every night, it only took nine years to save a million dollars.

The plan had always been: when Ben saved a million dollars, he would quit his job.

So you’re gonna travel? asked basically everyone.

He shook his head. Travel could eat up a million dollars in a few years, easy. Anyway he wasn’t interested in going anywhere.

You’re gonna write a book?

No, definitely not. That was the opposite of what he wanted to do. If he was going to write a book, he might as well just stay at work.

So, what, exactly…?

They never seemed to want to finish the question, maybe because they already had a guess at the answer, and something about it made them uncomfortable.

“Nothing,” he said.  I’m not going to do anything.”

And he really wasn’t. All he wanted to do was sit in his apartment, stare at the walls, walk around the block. He used to love to walk around the block.  He hadn’t done it in years.

You’re gonna get bored, they said. And/or, You’ll be back in a few months. A wink.

He couldn’t know, of course. They might be right. But he didn’t think so. What he thought was that once he left this job, he’d never have a job again.  

Nothing 2>

The Blues

Sarah was forlorn. And when one was forlorn, it was always comforting to copy the behaviors of great forlorn people throughout history. So she wandered the midnight streets drinking whiskey from a bottle. Sat at a bus stop watching packs of frat boys going by, girls in party outfits, happy couples holding hands.

She stumbled through the all-night supermarket, hoping someone would kick her out, but no one looked at her. She bought a protein bar and more whiskey. She searched the eyes of the cashier—can’t you see I’m buying a protein bar and whiskey?—but he just stared at his screen, even when he took her driver’s license and then handed it right back to her.

She walked by twenty bars, but they were all showing baseball or blasting techno music. That was not the right vibe at all. She wanted to sit in a dark corner, drink shots of whiskey followed with beer chasers, watch seedy characters make shady deals, watch slick operators try and fail to take home slatternly ladies.

She walked all the way to 98^th, which was way farther than she had ever walked. She didn’t know what happened when you got past 99^th. Did the streets turn to 100^th? Or just stop? Anyway, she didn’t find out, because at the corner of 98^th, there was a bar called Desdemona’s. She knew (from English class) that Desdemona meant ill-fated, so she went in.

She sat at a dark corner of the bar, ordered a whiskey and a beer, watched middle-aged people slow dance in the middle of the bar. Maybe it was the alcohol, but she was pretty sure she saw Billie Holliday dancing out there. With—right?—William Faulkner, silver-haired and dark-mustached. And Vincent Van Gogh with Frida Kahlo. Anne Sexton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Tennessee Williams, Edith Piaf. Radclyffe Hall (Sarah recognized her from Women’s Studies class, the suit, the tie, the cropped hair and spit curl).

She stood up to get a better look, and then they saw her. Get out! they yelled. Get out! You have no business in here!

They lurched towards her, not agile or athletic but furious, shaking with drunken despair.  She ran for the door, pushed past Sylvia Plath who was leaning against the wall with her arm over her face, made it out into the chilly night air.

Oscar Wilde was sitting outside on the sidewalk wearing a purple velvet jacket. He was sharing a cigarette with a kid in all black with tattoos on his face.

“Have a seat,” Oscar Wilde said. He pulled out a little flute, began to play. The guy in black had a ukulele. They played a song, kind of a ditty, cute but in a minor key.  She could only partially hear it over the music blasting from inside the bar.

“Here, take these.” Oscar Wilde handed her a small set of bongos.

“I don’t know how to play,” she said.

“That’s okay, we don’t either,” said Oscar Wilde.  “Just empty your mind and find the rhythm.”  

She tapped her foot, slapped her hands against the skins of the drums.  Soon she was part of the music, a quaint, sad song that drifted down the alley and into the dark blue night.  

Art Week (For Anita Felicelli)

I

Agent (skirt and sweater): I’m not sure how to market this. It’s a bit esoteric.

Artist (striped socks and bird hat): Yes, esoteric! It’s coming through!

II

Agent (floral blouse and floral shoes): I don’t think people will relate to this protagonist.

Artist (clogs and knee pads): Could you look in my ear? I think a bug got stuck in there.

III

Agent (blazer and jeans): You need to build a readership.

Artist (buttons and polka dots): Tweetles. He’s my rat. Want to pet him?

IV

Agent (black stilettos and cashmere): I need you to sell yourself.

Artist (corduroy dress): Can you tell I made this with just a stapler?

V

Agent (khakis and fleece): How do you plan to make a living?

Artist (one shoe): I’m not sure where the other one went, it’s around here somewhere.

VI

Agent (Lululemon and Uggs): This is not really commercial.

Artist (Foil): Do you ever just listen to Zappa until you forget to eat?

VII

Agent (leggings and rain boots): The ending is too abstract. 
Artist (diagonal): But frogs.