Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

de·pres·sion:a feverish oscillation between sorrow and remorse, simultaneously inducing grisly numbness and the too-real sensation one is hurtling into the abyss.

It was a melancholy Monday.

I was doing my daily exercises, panting on the treadmill of obliteration fantasies that kept me sane. These included selecting which of the twelve terraces would be the one I chose to leap from after lunch. To keep myself interested, I pictured exactly how I’d make that jump, and what my body would be doing during the fall. In my imaginings, it might take the form of a clean corkscrew, belly flop or spectacular swan. Inspiration struck when least expected. My head would rummage around and surprise me with a long-forgotten defenestration from Pasolini’s Salò —the piano player, having seen enough perversion and murder, steps off the balustrade with the eerie sangfroid of a maid dusting a sofa. I imagined one of my housekeepers catching (or not catching) my fall from the corner of her eye and promptly fainting. I saw myself flailing, a silent film of windmilling arms, gravity rushing me into the Lord of Pavement’s arms. These musings never failed to mischievously include a horrified gallery of sidewalk gawkers, some of whom impossibly watched my leap from its very beginning, and others whose heads whipped ’round at the explosion of metal, glass and bone-spray.

The comic relief provided by those arpeggios didn’t last very long. I’d surface to the pitiless present fast enough to get the soulsick bends, a rotten cork bobbing on dead calm domestic seas, mocked by the distant hum of vacuuming armies… I wouldn’t really surface , though, not entirely. I felt like a spelunker . Let me be more specific. Think of yourself as a spelunker — join me in my nightmare, won’t you? One who scubas through uncharted cave waters. Cave divers, they call them. You’re running low on oxygen — perilously low — you’re not sure how that happened, but there it is. A bad valve in the tank or a bad whatever. And when you realize this, you’ve been swimming for a quarter of a mile. Some of these caves are completely sealed off from each other, the only way they’re linked is by common waterway… and let’s say you already swam a quarter of a mile to get from one to the other, there’s no in-between, only an implacably hard ceiling of lava above your head. You’re running out of air and on the way back to your point of origin when your lights fail, even your back-up lights, a perfect-storm kind of thing. A perfect shitstorm. You try to get your bearings. You think you’re still heading back to that initial manhole that you lowered yourself from at the beginning of your little adrenaline-junkie adventure. You were supposed to come with a friend but they bailed because their kid got sick. You decided to go anyway. You didn’t tell them because you knew they would think that was a bonehead move and would just try to talk you out of it. So today, you’re extra careful about your prep: you’ve checked and double-checked the equipage. And everything was going so well but now you’re running out of air and there are no lights and the water’s dark as a moonless midnight. There’s no way to surface — nothing to do but go along laterally until the tube ends. You marshal your energy and say: Okay. This is shitty but I can do this. You really believe you’re swimming toward where you started but can’t be sure anymore. One of your feet feels funny and you reach back — you’ve lost a fin. Not good. You acknowledge a devilish voice that tells you you’re righteously fucked, but because you’re a pro — you’ve been doing this for 20 years, been in touchy situations before and always gotten out — whatever panic that arises is quickly tamped down by a reflexive athlete-warrior’s confidence that soon you’ll be out. Soon be savoring late afternoon sights, sounds and smells, throwing your gear into the backseat and talking with friends over wine and dinner about the already-legendary anecdotal hairiness of the day. Laughing about it… You see something faintly illuminated — a hole? phosphorescent lichen? — something in the distance that you jerk-flutter toward with your one fin. You understand it’s not your destination but right now you’re a pilot who needs to land, you need a runway, a clearing, anywhere, before the wings and wheels come off completely. You close in… it is a hole! You break surface. Remove the mouthpiece and inhale deep, germy draughts, a literal second wind — and with horror realize you’ve merely exchanged one darkness for another — darkness visible! That creepy, slamming doomsday sensation as the eyes adjust: it’s only an air pocket. By habit, you put the mouthpiece back in so you can get the hell out of there then remember the tank’s kaput. Done. You’re done. By perfect satanic design, the short-lived promise of escape — and sweet familiarity of breathing uncylindered air — jumpstarted your adrenaline, heightened your faculties. The full understanding of your predicament comes with nauseating certainty: sealed off. Your head just above water, elbows resting on the hole’s rocky rim to more or less comfortably keep it there — the rest of you wading in the grave. Now the other fin drops off too… finito. Somewhere into the void. That fin is lucky , you think. That fin is already dead, was never alive, and now, at least, is free. A moment of panic before instinct forces you to arch back your neck to create more space between you and the low ceiling of the pocket. Instinct requires the organism to seek more space or the illusion of more space. Heart hammering as your brain fritzes in the effort to solve an insoluble problem, instinct/habit makes you grab that useless mouthpiece again. You even keep it in your mouth a moment, as if to give yourself “distance” to help gather your wits. Sadly, there is no instinct that cleaves to the extinction of the entity it protects, no natural cyanidal impulse that shuts down systems in the face of certain annihilation, to allow one an easy (easier) death — no. (None of it is easy.) Only that relentless, dumb, primal imperative to save the organism at all costs, brain ordering neck to lean back on the fatal pillow of a slurried shelf, a brief truce before you drown. Nature has thoughtfully— so thoughtful —provided a small comfort cushion for your head on the available silt, an ergonomic bolster that instinct kindly arranges for you to make use of on your deathbed… nature and instinct, working together! The irony! Because at its terminus, the organism supercharges the integrity of its mandate: to survive at all cost (including death), to keep eyes and nose above the water until the end . Just doing its job… as when, with lightning speed, the animal — you — assayed the pocket’s height to be 14 inches and change, a sidebar left brain measurement made in the instant after you first exuberantly, accidentally smacked the top of the cryptspace with your skull. Unforgiving, non-negotiable instinct then bid you retreat and regroup. Come: lay your head on this silty pillow to sort things out. Come stay awhile. One never knows how one will behave at the end but this ending is so hopeless, so monumentally lonesome and grotesque that it comes as a shock that you’re still capable of logical thinking. Soon, you reason, hypoxia (and the attendant) hallucinations will put an end to my suffering. Not only is this true but its wise reiteration has the effect of soothing the panicked organism. (It was instinct that orchestrated that thought in the first place — instinct needs the organism to be calm because panic is the harbinger of erasure.) Resting on your sad pillow, waiting for your buddy-system pal hypoxia, you remember seeing a documentary about a man who survived falling overboard in a storm-tossed sea. He said there was a point when every cell in his body told him to let go… you draw succor from his words, and await such a directive. In your vertical, phone booth — like coffin, you berate yourself for having foolishly dived alone but self-recrimination is soon replaced by thoughts of your husband, your baby, a trip you once took to Poland and other random things, then wonder how long it will take to find your body or if it ever would be found and for some reason the idea of never being found makes you yelp like a dog accidentally stepped on by a party guest, nothing more pitiful than a human yelp, this one has a gasp thrown in and the yelp-gasp robs most of the remaining air, hastening your end— no! You get a fourth, an eighth, an eleventh wind! Instinct won’t let go — won’t let you go — yanking you to full awareness again. It slaps your cheeks and wants you alert, still wanting to save your life! Like the old joke about the patient dying but the operation being a success. Again , instinct arches your neck and bids you rest your head on the pillow. Instinct rallies, like a drowsy fly on a corpse. Instinct stage-whispers: Hey! aren’t you wondering where the light is coming from? From the beginning, a pathetic amount of light lit up the pocket, “lit” too strong a word, still, enough to draw you toward it from the waterway, to your phone booth grave, because the nearly invisible alteration in color — from below, it was a dime-sized deep grayness amid the black — was enough to catch your reptilian eye. It’s the end of the play; in the middle of your big death scene, instinct keeps interrupting from the wings, telling you — politely asking —to please make an effort or at least consider making an effort to dig or even think your way toward wherever that light is emanating. But your brain understands the feeble radiance is seeping from microscopic fissures in the rock. The brain overrules instinct’s clownish, crude, surreal fantasies of ascent and escape, and won’t let you take the bait. Your brain at last provides what it rarely seemed to, in life: dignity.