The Infinite Space Between Walls

When I lived downtown, I felt like my head was stuck inside the bell of the world. So I found this apartment on a quiet block in the burbs. Bunch of abandoned construction projects and dead ends. Not even the birds hang out around here.

Most days I just bask in silence. Let me find peace, oh Lord, and let me know when I’ve found it. I smoke, I sleep, I sit and watch the walls. The only other living thing is my little blue guppie circling its fishbowl. Occasionally somebody calls, which I don’t like. I don’t work, which we won’t be discussing. I do own a record player but I don’t put on music because it reminds me of the world.

For a while life creeps by in this syrupy daze, and I am an echo of myself. I twirl my finger in the fish water and contemplate the wetness. At times I’ll tap the bowl. Tap-tap. Now, you’re not supposed to do this. The vibrations hurt the fish. Sure enough, my blue guppie zips around in frantic figure-eights whenever I tap, tap on the glass. But it’s hard for me to stop. If the fish was screaming, obviously I’d stop. But fish can’t scream. And I’m in pain too, and sometimes the tapping helps. Sometimes, when I’m having an… an episode, tapping on the fishbowl can make it go away. It helps more than the pills, more than so-called “friends.” What’s one little blue guppie’s pain? So I tap, tap…

That’s until the scratching starts.

The first time it happens, I’m in bed trying to sleep. The noise slides into existence from the highest edges of my hearing. It sounds like tiny hands with long nails scratching inside the walls. It comes from everywhere, even the ceiling. Scratching, scratching. Fold the pillow over my ears but I still hear: nails scraping insidiously. This must be a nightmare, but no, I do not dream, not ever. I slap myself: God, I’m awake. This is real.

Mice? An infestation?

Mustering my courage, I roll across my bed to slam my fist against the wall. Slam! Slam! Practically the whole apartment shakes. That oughta scare those suckers off.

Sure enough, the scratching dies down, and I can almost sleep…

In the morning a friend calls to “check in.” A friend from the bad times, before my prescription. A friend who is disappointed to hear that I’m smoking again.

“Mainly because I’m addicted,” I explain, “but it also helps to take the pain away.”

My friend wishes she could be the one who takes my pain away. That’s what she says, and I wish she could too, but wishes are like promises and everything else: just noise. I tell her not to visit, and when I hang up, my head is ringing.

It’s not long before I find myself tapping the fishbowl again. Tap, tap. The guppie immediately darts about in panicking patterns. But I keep tapping. I rap my knuckle smartly against the glass, louder. The poor little fish picks up the pace, a sincere sense of urgency to its chaotic movements in that tight space. Sloshing now, water outside the bowl, because I’m shaking it furiously. (What am I doing? This is always what I wonder, during an episode and otherwise.) I force myself to set the bowl down. The choppy water steadies out, grows still. There’s a little blue thing floating belly-up on the surface.

I poke it, the dead fish.

It doesn’t move. It’s just… dead.

It takes me half a pack of cigarettes before I flush it.

I lie in bed for a long time before it’s even dark, asking myself if it’s ethical, after what I’ve done, to buy another fish, to ever step foot in another pet store. But what is pain, let alone a fish’s pain? I would get two this time, two guppies, to keep each other company. I could go right now if I wanted. Yes, I could go right now, to the pet store. I could bring home two fish and a bigger bowl, perhaps something that makes a gong sound when you tap it. But I wouldn’t tap it. I wouldn’t. Or, only very rarely…

Tonight I’m actually able to fall asleep. I’m even dreaming—a nice, quiet dream—when the scratching starts.

Rodents again. I don’t waste any time slamming the wall. Slam! Slam—

My hand goes through. Surprisingly easily, as if the wall were made of cardboard. I pull my hand out and peer through the new fist-shaped hole in my room. On the other side: nothingness. Empty space without stars. Is this real? I climb easily through the strange thin wall, into endless blackness. But it is not so endless; swimming through space, I am guided by invisible boundaries. Bumping against one of these, I try to grab onto it, but the boundary is slippery and doesn’t completely want to exist. (Where am I? How am I not terrified?) Finally I do manage to hang onto one of these unseen barriers. Constantly slipping, I must keep changing my grip or else the current will tow me away. One hand grabbing, then the other. The motion becomes like—like scratching. And what am I scratching? Is this the other side of my apartment wall?

My own fist from yesterday slams into the other side of eternity with an ear-splitting crack of thunder, and suddenly I’m scurrying away, swimming again through space, riding the current of nothing, to find another place to scratch until the ringing shatters my world again—that retribution of the past-me, who still lies in bed before a friend called, before the walls reconceived themselves into the flimsy material of Time itself, and before I am over—only a passing reverberation, a self-aware ripple in the flow of that which has many names but exists beyond terminology, beyond all perception, that dream dimension outside the physical and the bounds of sense, where the lack of meaning is the purpose of existing without intention while fading from reality at the ringing pace of a cymbal smashed by a rubber mallet—