Living half a century is no great accomplishment; I’ve done it and more. Living through tomorrow may be something much bigger. Tomorrow a group of people, every one of them younger than I, will take a great saw and rip through my sternum, and insert steel claws, and crank my rib cage open, and spread me like a lobster.
 
I don’t believe in priests, so I’ll make my confession directly to God, who hides in the pure white expanse of this blank page.
 
If I live, I will live a new way.  I am ready to say this not merely because of the grim surprise with which I realize daily that I am precisely what I thought I’d never be, a middle-aged man, a man growing old whose body is failing, who may die soon. And not merely because deathbed repentance is attractive and convenient, even to someone like me who has always rejected such pathetic whimpers of fear, but because today I received a message of redemption. In the face of a little girl, I saw forgiveness.
 
The story is easy to remember, but not to tell. It’s about love and emptiness.
 
The year I turned forty, I begged… or, rather, demanded, rudely, that a Voice speak to me, that He stop hiding in spiteful silence behind that grand impenetrable drapery of blackness above my head.
 
I was standing at the side of a hospital bed where my wife lay dying of ovarian cancer. The steel rail was cold in my fists. The machinery hummed, whooshed, beeped. Now and then her brow folded up like a fist, but her eyes stayed closed. She was shriveled, unrecognizable. All I could think of was the hypnotic glitter of the Milky Way and how desperately, bitterly, I wanted to understand Eternal Space. I behaved like a thoughtless imbecile. I shouted up at Him, at God, at the ceiling.
 
An angry nurse blew in like a gale gusting through white curtains, hissing, threatening to have me removed, forcibly if necessary. Later, in one final rush of pain, my wife died. I never received my revelation.
 
For over fifteen years since, I’ve slept on my side of the bed, with an empty space beside me. I believe that’s what was meant to be. My reward. God is just.
 
The trouble is, people disappear all the time. They just vanish—poof, gone. This is not startling news; everybody knows it. And if you want the return of the disappeared, then that’s in the Miracle department. I used to believe it was utterly impossible, back in the years before I met Rico, that sweet, crazy old crooner. But these days, I’m thinking that maybe the gone can come back. In their own way, unobtrusively, they return. If you’re watching.
 
In my life, there were Billy Brock, and my mother, and of course Alice, who left those gaping vacancies. But it started with my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who lived with us, who rode me on his back like a horse so that my clearest memory of him is the thick shiny tangle of the back of his head, wet ropes the color of coffee beans, and the sweet scent, like a fruity wine, of Wildroot hair tonic.
 
Then, before I was eight, he was gone. He came home alone one day, home too early from his job with my father, wearing a fat white bandage around his right hand. His face is dim in my memory, but I know his skin was pale, a white forehead spiked by a dark lock hanging down. He was thin, young, couldn’t have been more than twenty‑five, I realize now. That day, he came in tense, pacing, silent. He scared me. I escaped to the back yard and while I sat under our willow, reading, their voices, his and hers, my mother’s, shouted in distant echoes from inside the solid bricks of our house, and I tried not to listen, and I remember not a word. As I tried to focus on the page, a page full of diagrams of rockets, I heard the front door slam. That was my Uncle Davy leaving. I never saw him again.
 
Somehow I knew even then that that was the beginning of the end of our family.
 
My name is Jonson Burgess. Not the old standard John, but Jonson, after Ben. My mother, in love with her own sense of irony, wanted to make a statement about negative capability, perhaps her own, perhaps my father’s, perhaps mine, and so I was named for Britain’s most admired playwright of the seventeenth century, who towered and gloated over, who praised and patronized, his failing friend Shakespeare, but who today is lost in the Master’s shadow, all but forgotten, merely a minor player. And in his dim beginnings, before all his avid self-promotion, Ben Jonson was a bricklayer, like my father. Maybe she knew my father would rise above sweaty labor to his own higher plane of banality, too. She would chuckle low in her throat; she thought such contrivances were funny, like a jazzman tossing a riff from “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into his solo, a sort of inside joke, her personal comic subversion in a humorless, dark universe.
 
When I was six, my uncle’s secret name for me was “Muscles,” since he said, with a name like Jonson, some might think that my father’s name was Jon, but no, it was Sam, and Samson would hardly do now, would it? But I could be like Samson someday, he said, with a wild wicked girlfriend, and biceps, and hair, and a fatal flaw. I didn’t know what he meant by all that, but I did know about Samson, since my father read me Bible stories every other night at bedtime. My father and mother had an arrangement, a sort of alternating current that powered all my perceptions then. Then and, I suppose, now. On my mother’s nights, she read to me stories of her choice, and I suffered through them, often yawning or dreaming but sometimes enthralled, adrift, sunken in a syrup of words, in her soft deep voice, Dostoevsky and Kafka, and now and then Dickens, for a bright note.
 
Odd how just now I felt a sudden longing, a deep twinge like the flex of a muscle, somewhere near my heart, a longing for her to be here at the side of my bed, reading to me, reading anything, I don’t care, caressing soft syllables with that voice like whiskey on velvet, filling with its deep folds this sterile hard room where, now, without her, every sound, even a rustle, a whisper, clangs and echoes like a bloody bullet dropped in a surgeon’s pan.
 
And the rustles, the whispers I hear, are my heart wheezing to force my blood through an ever narrowing space, a gate where some freak twist of DNA raised a lump that year by year has gathered coats of calcium, layered like geologic sediments recording the history of my heart, my life. A congenital aortic stenosis, thank you Mother, thank you Father, thank you God.
 
Now I know, so I can say, my sin is this: I have lived a life obsessed by emptiness. On a quest for absolute vacancy.
 
Consider this cup, made of plain white styrofoam, from which I’ve been taking meager sips of water as I stare out the window, over the parking lot, past the trees to the highway, stare and sit, sit for hours as I do every day, trapped in this hospital bed. The cup is empty now. Once full of water, now empty. Now ready, you might even say willing, to be filled again.
 
What is the truth of a cup? What is the shape of an enclosed space when the enclosure is taken away? What remains here after my fingers clip and fumble in a flurry of fervent deconstruction? After I break away white chips like dry little ice floes, snapping them off one by one to end in a papery jumble on the table, mere flakes, capable of nothing, what is left? There’s no answer in the tiny hill of polystyrene stones, an airy white ruin. No, but beyond it there, still wavering like heat in the peachy afternoon light, I see the emptiness of the cup. I see its shape, its essence. Its essence is absence. Its center lacks a center. A cup without a yawning open cavity like a wound is no cup at all. A receptacle must be receptive. The truth of a cup is vacancy.
 
Like the antique blue bottle we found in a trash can, Billy Brock and I, loitering in the fall sunshine on the way home from school.
 
“Break it,” I said to Billy.
 
“No way man, it’s cool, I’m gonna put it in my window.”
 
He held the bottle up to the sun to see its cobalt flash, its sapphire shimmer. I grabbed it from his hand and smashed it on the street.
 
Try it. Break a beautiful blue glass bottle, shatter it on the sidewalk, watch the azure diamonds explode in a spray, then search like I do, search in delight for the space that was in the bottle. You’ll never find it, oh no, and that’s the secret, that’s why it’s so beautiful, so perfect, its filtered light transcendent as moonbeams, sublime as starlight, far beyond your grasp, beyond the capture of the carnal and mundane, the mud of flesh and stone. But it’s there, that shape of air, it’s eternally the same, the delicate phantom of some impeccable interior, untraceable without its bounds, the Abyss in embryo, the laughing quicksilver spirit of Hermes, god of enclosed spaces like gardens and tombs and bottles full of indigo light like the womb of a saint.
 
Billy was angry. He shoved me and I sat heavily on the asphalt. “You dumb shit, why’d you do that?” He walked away, shaking his head. I looked for the bottle, the flawless empty shape of the bottle, there, where some infinitesimal thickness of summer air wavered and was gone. I sat still and watched a flicker of sun glint off a knifelike shard of blue. I felt happy.
 
 
© Brent Robison 2009