Spaces

It was not, I tell you, until quite suddenly last night when I woke up that I noticed the spaces. The spaces is what I have called them. But how could I describe them? They are not really there. When my mind tries to find their beginnings it seizes a row of disjointed images as it always has about anything consequential. I cannot alight on one.

I suppose it began one day when I was reading a report Su Pin had sent me. My mind was wandering a little, as it always does, but I had my coffee and all was fine. John Wayne on the cup spoke with his sad sympathetic face about all a man has to do. I was a man, and I was certainly all right. Only when I looked at the small black letters of Su Pin's report I found that my eyes slipped from them as a greased spoon from a metal rack. I simply could not take meaning from them. No, that was not quite it—that makes it sound as though I could not read. My faculties were not diminished. As I said, I was quite normal. But the white of the spaces held me, snapping my eyes to them with the same significance as a pale naked body, irresistible. I sat this way for an hour or more with no one noticing that I was acting so oddly, my coffee cooling. 

Another instance that I remember was an obsession with girl's hair. The first was a rather frail brunette. Her hair was in a whorl above her head, pinned down in a graceful and unintentional sort of round. The movement of this hair was so entrancing to me that I quietly took a small picture of her with my phone from across the cafe where I sat, and when I went back to work I told C.J. I was going on a coffee break and spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom sitting innocently on the toilet and looking at it. This entrancement continued with another girl I spied on a dating service who had a picture in which she sprawled on a bed. Her face was obscured and her hair lay in a majestic fall holding the light like a glass vase in a painting. At this fall of light I stared for many hours. I knew that if anyone were to find her picture on my computer they would think that I had used this picture as pornography, which was embarassing to me. I wondered if I was developing a fetish, if I would soon request that whores lie obscured on a bed and let me look at their hair, blonde, brown, black and red, so much more interesting to me than their body. Such a thing, although unnatural, was still as natural as a man wanting to look at a woman. But the fixation with the hair passed, and I was left, again, with the untethered pauses disconnected from an image.

I am an engineer. I have always been an engineer, by trade and by inclination. I built tree houses when I was a boy in the woods behind my house and spent many hours creating with my mouth the kinds of noises that an airborne war would make were I to be in the middle of it, a defender in a lone and fallowed outpost, and many hours laying in the tops of the scaffolding that I had wedged into the arms of the trees and staring up at their branches waving on the grey sky. I think the spaces have been with me always.

But it was not until this morning, early this morning which most people would call the middle of the night, that they appeared to be inside of me. And now I don't know what I can any longer do. And now I don't know how I can speak, or be, or look out of these eyes.