From the beginning I have been borne aloft by a series of supports or pillars upon which my weight, which is great and has only grown over the years, has been sustained. Early on, in my youth, I was actually quite unaware of my predicament as, being very small, these two pillars—which at the time I really took to be one because they were pressed so tightly together for my benefit—were so much larger than my little body that they appeared really as if they were a solid floor upon which I was lying; as if they were, in fact, an entire earth upon which I crawled. It was only as I began to grow that bits of my body began to hang off the ends. Even then I did not have an inkling of my true situation as I was both too preoccupied with the enjoyment of my surroundings and the bits of me that were spilling off quickly found support upon the ends of still other pillars and so in this way I spent those days in amusements, staring up at the clouds in the blue and beautiful sky above me, completely unaware as to the potential peril that I was continually in. However, it is not even correct to bring the word peril up at this point, really, so far from my mind it was in those days that I could not even have pronounced it, let alone had an inkling of its meaning. In fact quite the opposite was true and it should be stressed that for years I did not even know that I was borne so precariously upon such supports and really went about living and thinking still as if there were a solid floor beneath me, as was natural enough since with each of my movements—I lie always upon my back looking up but can squirm about, naturally, in all directions—my limbs felt nothing but support beneath them, a support which I had neither asked for nor earned and, so being, seemed all the more natural and inalienable.
Many years were spent this way, perhaps even an embarrassing number of years in a sense, though in another it was still all too few and could absolutely never have been enough. I was of little use, such as I was (and through no fault of my own, really) continually looking up at the sharply risen land on either side of me, sniffing at the breeze tinged with fir in the warmer months and wood smoke and sodden rock when it was cooler; gazing in the evenings through the lighted windows here and there, watching with interest the lives of those within as they worked away at their various movements and activities (activities which at least seemed important, if only for the sheer energy they seemed to throw into them, an energy which I was forever lacking). Being quite nearsighted, I could never fully make them out and only really presumed to understand what they were up to, filling in whatever I could not properly make out with my own imaginings, the boundaries of which I could never really delineate from the truth. I took it for granted, for example, that they and I were essentially of one people, despite obvious differences, and even to this day I think that is probably basically correct.
At any rate, as I have noted, this went on for quite a long time—year after year—to such an extent that although I should wish now, and wish with every last pound of my being (and by this point there were many, many such pounds), that I could go back to those days and never leave, still I must admit that it is embarrassing to picture the ignorance that I was caught up in and the danger that I did not perceive though it were, so to speak, right beneath my very nose. It is with embarrassment, also, that I realize only now that perhaps the lack of visits from those whom I watched in their windows was precisely because the danger I was in was so obvious to everyone that they kept their distance since to draw any nearer would have been to endanger themselves as well. Perhaps their activity, which I mistook for their daily labors, was really a running to and fro in desperation to figure out how to rescue me from what I ridiculously did not seem to have the wits or will to rescue myself from. All this is, of course, only speculation and given my extreme nearsightedness (compounded, fatefully, by my wild imagination) it could all be wrong. Their activity could actually have been just labors, as I had always assumed. Then again, it could have been something else altogether; there could really have been no living things in those windows at all, and—most horrible and horribly possible—there could really have been no windows either, but just some trick of the sun as it shone upon those sloping rocky hills dotted with pines. That far, though, I will not go in reassessing this world that I have lived in, for I am too old to have the energy for it and what little energies I do have are already bound up in other tasks.
I could have discerned my predicament in any number of ways—at least, I should think and hope so, so as to give my intellect at least a modicum of credit—it was really only a matter of time. As it was, though, it was not my intellect at all by which I perceived how things were but only really a matter of chance. Having grown so heavy with inactivity and gazing upwards my body had pushed the original two pillars upon which I was borne apart, and as no others had sprung up to take their place as had always happened before (why this was different now I can only make a conjecture that it had to do with my being older and larger) the slack was not picked up and my rear began to sag and feel a bit of the wind. This happened one night, late, and it filled me with a horror, which, if not the very greatest I have felt in my whole life, was certainly the most acute, being the first. Really I was in little danger at all as I can see now in retrospect—having survived many, many more situations of much greater peril since—but being completely new and unexpected it was a horror for which I had no defense. It must have looked comical from the outside, my lazy hindquarters sagging there between two supports free for all the unlooking world to see, but for me it was quite literally as if I were dying. I could feel my heart beating desperately inside my chest. What few sounds there were became metallic and pierced somehow beyond the eardrums, and then suddenly the beating of my heart stopped, a sensation that should have been very welcome except that it was replaced by nothing, only a horrible silence and my vision began to blacken from the periphery inwards. Though I could not hear my voice—unless it was the very metallic sound, which was filling my ears—I know that I grappled about for my supports, my pillars, and called out to them for help. It was the first time that I had called for help and not received it. In fact, it was the first time I had really had need for it and though, as I have mentioned, my situation was really less perilous than it appeared, the hole in which that help should have been has never been filled. My situation in life had changed and there was to be no going back from it. Most likely, this entire episode lasted only a few moments but those moments limned into my very soul my own meager outline in eternity and I could see how very small that outline was; so small and lost amidst such black otherness that it seemed it would be impossible to gather again even the energies required for such tiny activities as had previously been my lot. None of this description is adequate to explain that inexplicable feeling, but in my innumerable retellings of the story since—if only to myself—I had to search out words from the limited palette of language (made more limited still by my tenuous grasp of it) and so what was for me, in a way, the end of my world, or of a world at least, has come to be told as I have just done and I have long since ceased to attempt to explain it any better. I could relate it more accurately, though still not by much, by merely taking a potential listener off guard and shrieking into their ear, but that would hardly do much more to convey the real shock and I would then still be forced to waste words in explaining the explanation. Suffice to say that the situation has never presented itself and it would take a rather dull listener to be taken by surprise by me at this point in my life.
It had felt like death and yet I continued to live. Very soon I was back to my old self or some approximation of it, excepting that I was given to spells of great panic and anxiety, which would creep up suddenly on me and then disappear back into the chasm that I now knew lie beneath me. For years I tried to return to my old ways more fully but always those spells would come and drag me back and so I began, if gradually, to turn my gaze inwards rather than upwards. I spent a great many hours picturing the chasm. I turned all of my attention on that part of me which was unsupported. I would prick up my ears and listen intently to the sounds made by the occasional breezes and when they were warm and gentle I would reason that really the chasm must be more of a hole—maybe even a very small hole whose bottom, perhaps, my backside was almost touching. Another day the same breeze would stir, but this time cold and ominous, and I feared that really it was very deep such that if (or when) I finally fell I should be lucky not to break a number of bones. Other nights it positively howled beneath me and, scared though I was, I would listen to every nuance of that howl and focus all of my attention on its each and every lashing contact with my exposed skin and then I knew—knew for certain—that the chasm was very great indeed and that there was no chance, not even the smallest of the small, that I should survive when the time finally came; for a small chasm could create those gentle winds, yes, but not those lashing torrents. A deep chasm, on the other hand—an unfathomably deep—chasm could in all likelihood contain in it the potential for both the one and the other.
Very possibly I could have filled the rest of my days with this constant, tense observation and speculation were it not for my fundamental flightiness and lack of attention span. Though the dread stayed with me (I felt it as a sort of ball warm ball at the pit of my stomach and base of my spine) I began to turn my curiosity to these pillars to which I had never before given much thought when they had seemed a solid floor. There were three of them, I discovered. Two were large and one a bit smaller. I could feel each distinctly and could discern by degrees where it was that each of them intersected my body. I would think of only one on this day and then of another on the next. They became for me sacred and I loved them in a way in which I never could have done should I not have suffered at their tearing asunder, for one takes a floor for granted but not a support. I found that I could carry on a communication with them in ways that I had not imagined and that they were always and ever reliable. If, for instance, I had a fit of curiosity or despondent self-loathing and tried with my ungainly body to turn over to gaze downwards into that chasm—whose mere sight would probably have killed me just as quickly as a fall—they supported my awkward efforts still and with hardly a creak or tremble. I grew to have so much well-founded confidence in them that although I was capable of little real movement still I could shift my weight here and there and flail my limbs a bit and they would swing back and forth with me as I laughed, not forgetting, exactly, but able to live side by side with the dread which was, of course, always there—always somewhere. I wondered at night, when all was still, did they live with the same dread; they who by their very nature, one would presume, reached further down into that very chasm and maybe even to its very bottom and who, on top of this, had to bear the weight of such a dreamy and heavy character as I (who, it should be noted, would have felt that whole weight of dread rush back to me in full if nothing more than a bird had landed upon the part of me that was unsupported).
I grew older in this way and, without any way of explaining how or precisely why, was joined and lifted up by many more of these pillars. Some seemed to come out of nowhere, others to spring somehow from those that already existed. Some would become very familiar and then, suddenly, drop away without explanation and I would be vexed and inconsolable for a period of time. I ceased to think any more about the chasm, at least directly, and spent my days cultivating an art of arranging these various supports underneath me, shifting them about from one configuration to the next to see which was most comfortable. Sometimes I would arrange them in the way that was most natural for me, but mostly—because of either a gentleness or guilt ingrained in my character—I really would arrange them in the way that I imagined would be the least strenuous for them, for their burden was assuredly much greater than my own. Sometimes I would even cry quite bitterly in picturing the burden that they had taken upon themselves and it seemed that I could tell that it was wearing on them and cutting them short at my expense, but these tears I shed only at night and very silently, which almost compounded my guilt for I did not know if I shed those tears in secret so as not to bother them or not to jeopardize myself.
It was on one of these nights when I realized a fundamental difference between some of the pillars and the others. Some, it was true, were what I had thought them to be (that is, supports of some sort) purely external to myself. I reflected upon them—and there were at this point many for it was no longer only my backside that dangled but many other parts as well, such had I grown as I aged—and could feel at the various points the tiny intersections of our lives. The surface area of our point of contact was, in all honesty, quite negligible. Really they, in their large numbers, were hardly (at least individually) supporting me at all. I was hardly a worthwhile burden to for the large number that fell into this category, but, for all that, a burden all the same and one for which I somehow felt I no longer had time in my advancing age. I felt spread a bit thin, as it were, and wept bitterly for the hours that we had squandered upon one another when each of us, it is certain, had more meaningful intersections (for lack of a better word) to pursue. I began slowly to nudge and kick them away and in no time was rid of the lot of them and they rid of me. They did not crash downwards to ruin, nothing of the sort, for which I was, of course, also glad. It would probably be more true to say that I heard in the wake of their departures something that was quite like a soft wind but probably in truth a collective sigh of relief.
After these exertions I lay still for a long while gazing upwards, although I no longer saw any windows above and certainly no one in those windows, for my eyes had aged badly and were no longer only near-sighted but given also to excessive watering and a burning sensation. I lay there in the night gazing upwards and dreamily, as in the old days, and took stock of my new situation. It was true that I had probably made both my own situation and that of the remaining supports much more perilous. I was no less heavy and large than I had been when I was supported by vastly more of these pillars. Large portions of my body hung freely now and the contortions that it caused shot pains from time to time down my side. There were now only about ten pillars, but I could feel us growing closer as we pressed on one another and I became very certain that these were not pillars at all, but pikes. They jutted up into me and I down into them, there was no clear distinction between us and in a real sense we were one. I could feel each point at which they pierced me. Even though the part of them that was inside of me was small, very small, compared to the whole of either of us, still it was enough that we could stand for some time like this against even the harshest winds that the chasm could spew from its bowels. And we did stand for a long time, and the chasm did hit us from below with increasingly terrible torments (though admittedly they may have been no worse than any we had seen before, but only registered as such since we were much older now—I heavier and larger and they more brittle and frail).
There came a day when one, the oldest—older, it turns out, than even the original two—broke away after a period of decline and went crashing down below and for the first time I felt the true price of having streamlined my supports, though I never regretted it all the same because the tremendous loss that I felt at that one was greater, and in some way more full of joy (though a joy that was harder to bear even than sorrow) that I would not have had it any other way. I hung now at quite an awkward angle and was in some acute pain. The wound resulting from the point at which we had been connected, which had been deeper even than I had imagined, did not ever really heal but kept bleeding—I could feel it despite not being able to position myself to see it—far into the future and I kept it bleeding, so to speak, with a great effort, determined never to let it disappear. One could say that the wound became a memorial; a tangible manifestation of a memory; a point of reference. What was harder to imagine and to bear was the realization, brought to the fore by this loss, that there would be others in the future. Indeed, though time in its way dumbly sought and arrived at a new normalcy, still they were more punctuated by creaks below; more marked by the slipping of parts of me here and there. My hearing became worse for picking up regular sounds and communications, but I could hear all sorts of other things that I hadn’t been able to pick up before. Sounds mirthful or malicious, careless or bored—all potentially of equal danger to us now—could be discerned with difficulty from below. For the first time it seemed that these sounds may have originated with living things; lives going on beneath us, though lost to us in the dark. I even came to realize with fascination and a shudder that there were things living within us, which were accomplishing their own activities that in at least some cases must be contrary to what was best for us.
In time a few others, and those that were most a part of me, dropped off. I did not hear it in my age but felt it like a shudder all throughout my body and became cold nearly all over. I regained the fear, as it were, that I had been able to lose sight of in the course of all the years and experiments between my first little fall and the present. I began to shake or, more accurately, quiver. However, it was not the quivering of one shivering with cold and chill but the quivering of one wracked by indecision. I could neither decide to move or to keep still, for fear of my own safety and of the very few pikes remaining to me. Probably this very quivering was itself unsafe for them, but they did not complain of it and neither could I have stopped it if they had. This quivering—which had really always been the very motor of my existence, if to a lesser extent—had the unintended result that a sound, a sort of song, came up into the air from my whole being. It was brittle and fragile as the sound of crickets as they rub their wings together and was, on the whole, made in something of the same way. Having ceased years ago to have any real activity, I put the whole of my energies now into refining this sound into what, at least to me, approximated a sort of art form and I sent up into the heavens what I imagined was a sort of hymn. I pictured that there were, again, windows above and were, again, figures in those windows and that the pikes that stuck to me still could hear it and—if I imagined hard enough—that it could be heard even at the very bottom of the chasm (if there was one); wherever those that had dropped off had ended or, if their fall hadn’t ended yet, that it would at least catch up with them and keep them company on their way down. I put everything that I had become into this, all the remainders of my energies, until I was quite spent and then it dropped off to a little hum and died out.
And now here I am. I really am getting on in years, now. It is true, maybe, that I am still not so very old, for I haven’t another example of one like myself to lend a comparison to, but now that my voice is still, my ears shut, and my eyes darkened and held fast with dried fluids, I can feel time begin to stir somewhat more restlessly and I know or at least can sense that behind that restlessness, which is still fairly imperceptible, there is something more urgent and pressing that is not yet accomplished but will be in time. I wrestle feebly with how to feel about it, but arrive no more at joy or fear; I cannot seem to find the proper footing for it, so to speak, for how to stand in relation to that event which is not of oneself, nor in any proper sense external, but pulls through you all the same and at every point. It pulls through and you feel only that something which to some registers as fear, to others joy, to still others that frenzy of quivering indecision, of one’s very private self trying to brace against that which has no point at which one could mount a fight or even grapple in resistance. At times, and I could not have felt this way before I came to this late point in life, I picture how nice it would be if instead of all of these pillars and pikes there had just been one pike beneath me—right at my center. Being one, it would bear the whole of my weight, and, being centered, would pierce me perfectly and more deeply than any that I had known. With my entirety pressing down on it and its entirety pressing upwards through me I would feel it push apart my brittle ribs, feel my organs bunching against one another as I sunk down and it grew wider, feel my heart beating high up in my throat so that it sent a throb of pain each time through my very molars. I would descend as it filled me more and more; descend but never fall, until any distinction between myself and that one pike was no longer possible.
But this has not been the case. Rather, I shall probably be spending my remaining years—and they may well be many—looking for the stance that I will assume at that final moment. A stance that will surely be of no actual help, but need only make me feel for that one, tiny, infinitesimal moment that I have done as much as I could have done to protect or at least lend dignity to myself and these few others. Already a few hairs have fallen from me just trying to think of it.
© 2009 Adam Ross
