SOS
SO S S SSO S SOS S O S S
thi est c any adth ? ihope tyo findthis nders nd ido othope tobefound idonot possible anymore iamtoofar it toolate ionlyhope thismessage you thereare nomorequestions iunderstandnowthattherearenoanswersnowonlya
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SOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOS
SOSSOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS
i have to breathe
i have to save my enrgy and writ carefuly now with pauses that’s the only way i'll be able to transmit (?) this mesage to you i hop i hope that you get it I’ll never know if you do and even if you don’t receve receive this message that I’m trying to write on these pages (in this cold and dark dark place) at least i can pretend, at least i can try to believe in it, i can try that’s all i can do Sailors on sinking ships they always try transmitting an SOS signal out into what they probly think is an endless sea, well, they may have felt the same way as I do now.
SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS
Now I’m writing slowly and deliberately. Maybe I’m being too wordy—you always yelled at me for being too wordy, how it gets in the way of my meaning and I ramble on and I have only a short time and should tell you everything you need to know so that you try to understand. Try to understand. I’ll take you through it, through everything, so you know where I am, why, and how.
Spain.
It was all so romantic, wasn’t it? The idea. We’d leave everything behind us—a whole ocean between us and all of it!—and you quit your job and I bought some books to brush up on my pronunciation, the plane tickets were in my hand, and there was a flat waiting for us. It was as if it took no time at all, as if the nine hours on the plane, the time in the taxi and the traffic were swallowed up and it was just us, standing there in the flat, breathless and blinking and wondering what events had led us here, to this old place so far away and me too afraid to think too much or I might start to regret something.
It wasn’t just distance that we traveled—it was time, too. The place smelled old somehow, this slightly sour odor hanging in the air. I thought maybe there was a hint of cigar smoke, I wasn’t sure, and standing there I suddenly felt as if the previous owner, owners, were still there somehow, absorbed into the walls and watching, waiting. As if we had walked into a space that wasn’t Madrid, that wasn’t Spain, that wasn’t Now but something altogether different. A large, infinitely large space that held nothing, but at the same time had absorbed everyone who had previously lived here, breathed here, died here.
I know now that you were right to fear this place. I noticed the way you held your breath when crossing the threshold. I noticed how you spoke quietly, as if scared of the echo. I know now that it wasn't the echo that scared you, but the void. I know now that the flat felt far too large, it felt as if it were a series of connected rooms inside nothingness. As if one could look out of its windows and see nothing, a blank space neither black nor white but colorless. As if it floated inside an infinite space that sucked color into it, where no light can escape. But there was something there. Someone, rather. Someone watching us lay down the suitcases and boxes and stand around uncomfortably, waiting for the other to speak.
After a moment, you said this. You told me all this in so many words and I listened, shaking my head. I felt it, too, but you know me. You know how I am. Everything is explainable, I said. This place just doesn’t feel like it’s ours yet. Once our pictures are up on the walls… well, you’ll see. It’ll feel like home then. It’ll be ours. And that was unfair, I know. It was unfair of me to use the word ours like that, knowing that all you wanted, all you ever wanted was some sign that we were going to be stable and settled and together for this thing you always call the foreseeable future. Not a real length of time, but a shadowy, veiled future tense that held questions I wasn’t prepared to “pop”—God, how I hate that damned word—and it was manipulative, I know. I knew coming here wasn’t your choice, and I knew that you made sacrifices, and all I did was make promises over and over and my intentions of keeping them were, well, my intentions weren’t the purest, and I never admitted it before because, believe it or not, I never intended to hurt you.
You were forever talking about auras and intuitions and omens and I always shook my head and explained everything away. And that’s what I did right then, maybe out of habit, I explained everything away even though this simultaneous feeling of being watched and lost in this strange space was there in the back of my mind, and I was tired and dehydrated from the plane and certainly didn’t want an argument that I knew would degenerate into something surrounding commitment and stability as it always did and now I’m rambling again and need to breathe and let my hand rest. I can’t write too quickly or I’ll break the lead of the pencil, and it will take too long to sharpen it on the claw end of the hammer. I can’t waste this time or this energy. I need for you to get this message and understand.
I remember you pouting. As if to prove me wrong, that your feelings weren’t caused by some vague sense of homesickness, you found some of our old photographs and began to find a suitable place to hang them. I sat on the floor and leaned on one of the larger boxes. I watched you eye each wall. I asked, Shouldn’t we wait for the large furniture before we hang anything? but you ignored me because you wanted to show me that pictures and furniture and bric- a-brac wasn’t going to make this place feel any better. You had the hammer in your hand, and you slowly, very slowly, approached the wall and placed your hand on it. I heard you take a sharp breath in. You sighed. It’s not going to bite, I said. You didn’t look back at me as you raised the nail and chose a spot at eye-level. You raised the hammer and tapped the end of the nail.
But something wasn’t right. You knew it, and I did, too.
It was the sound of the hammer against the nail going into the wall. The wall gave too easily. It sounded hollow. We both knew that it wasn't right and that the floor plan of the apartment ended right there at that wall. The wall should have been solid. You began to whisper, as if you didn’t want to be overheard, that you remembered someone telling you a story about a place in Madrid, a story about some people finding a walled-up room in an old flat. Long ago the secret room became a library where incriminating books were sealed in to protect the owner against the authorities, and for years the books remained hidden there. I knew the stories. Spanish families scared of the Fascist regime finding their copies of questionable literature, pieces of “degenerate” art, even religious artifacts, would construct these hidden rooms and wall them up, preferring to seal the objects away instead of throwing them out or burning them. They would rather seal them up and forget them than destroy such meaningful objects. They valued these things that they hid, but at the same time they feared them, increasingly seeing them as dangerous, threatening. A death sentence.
You stepped back from the wall and handed me the hammer. You told me that you were afraid of the ghosts that lurked behind the walls. That you feared the void you felt there, mumbling something about the mote of the eye. You shook your head and said that there are just some things that you aren’t supposed to see, like when you think you see an object move out of the corner of your eye. Or the void that may exist just behind your back, but you’ll never see it because it disappears just when you turn toward it. It’s the shiver you get up your spine for no reason. It’s that darkness that always lurks behind you, but it’s never fully in view. But always there.
I laughed and rolled my eyes, but I still listened.
You made me promise not to break through it. You made me promise to wait, just for you. Just for your own peace of mind.
And then I promised.
I promised you again.
You said you needed fresh air, that you were hungry. You offered to pick up food for the two of us, and I knew it was because the feeling was too strong, too heavy. The door closed quietly behind you, and I stared at that wall, gripping the hammer, thinking. A void, you said. I could feel it behind the wall, waiting. But there was something else, too. Someone. That feeling of being watched, somehow. I had to know what was behind that wall. I grabbed my tool belt and fit it around my waist, listening to your footsteps echo in the stairwell and disappear entirely. I took one last look at the apartment, the boxes and suitcases ready for unpacking, and raised the hammer above my head. With all my weight, I struck the wall.
It tore through as if it were paper, and cold air rushed up from inside. I was transfixed; I couldn’t stop myself from striking the wall again and again until I had created a hole big enough to fit through. I used the flashlight from my tool belt to see inside, but the dust was clearing and all I could see was blackness.
I want you to know that I thought of you when I entered that place. I thought of you and how you would fear for yourself and me. I admit that I pushed away that sense of dread—the dread that might not have been my own, but an intense dread emanating from that dark place—by laughing off your fear of the unknown. I actually laughed audibly, a small chuckle, and it echoed as if from the bottom of a cavern, and the hair rose on the back of my neck. I should have backed out then. I should have listened to you. But I was determined, so determined to find something real and concrete in that wall just to prove you wrong. To prove that ghosts didn’t exist. To prove that you were being silly and childish. To prove that I was rational and capable and correct and right. The air from the hole was cold, and I took a sharp breath in before I stepped inside.
The flashlight revealed that I had broken into a small square room. I run my hand along each wall in turn, starting at my right, feeling the coldness of each smooth surface. I wonder why someone would wall up a room as small and insignificant as this, and as I run my hand along the wall that I (thought that I) had come from, I find it not to be a wall at all but something else. I suddenly feel nauseated, as if I were just kicked in the stomach. This was the fourth wall I felt, and it should have been the wall leading back to the living room of the flat. But instead of a hole, there stands a wall with a bookshelf filled with books, tons of them, all leather-bound and worn with age.
I turn to my right, and the flashlight reveals another wall of books. The next wall, another wall of books. I spin around, the flashlight illuminating only books, and I begin to panic. I’m trapped. Is this claustrophobia? I think, because I’ve never felt this way before, my chest is tight and I can’t catch my breath. Looming shelves surround me. My entrance/exit point has disappeared, it’s definitely gone. I reach out to my sides into the darkness, positive that the flashlight is deceiving me somehow, and that the circle of light that it illuminates allows the darkness around it to change the shape and content of the room. If I can only see in one direction, could everything be changing around me? Is that somehow possible?
I yell your name, and there is no echo. My voice is sucked away from me as soon as it escapes my lips, dampened by the books, or maybe by the darkness itself.
I try to control my breathing. I wonder if the room might be losing air. I suddenly think I caused this hallucination because I had punctured a gas line when I broke through the wall. I wonder if I’m somehow dreaming, maybe on the plane yet, maybe in the cab. I wonder in terror if I have simultaneously gone deaf and blind. Did I hit my head? Am I having some sort of death dream? Am I… dead?
I slowly squat down, and then lower myself to the ground to sit and wait. I try to lock out the darkness by squeezing my eyes shut, my own inner safe, familiar darkness.
Then I listen.
There’s no sound. Yet, it’s not the absence of sound— it’s as if sound is eaten up, deadened. Like sound is killed by something here, in this place.
I wait for your footsteps and your voice, but the flat feels far away, not on the other side of a wall, but… gone. Unreachable, somehow.
I don’t know how long I sat waiting. I only know that after an eternity of this waiting game I know that I need to do something, anything. I need to break through one of the walls and return to the flat. I became more and more confident that if I started moving, breaking through the wall would return me to the living room of the flat, and I would break through and you would be there, your face a bit frightened but with that loving, yet stern look you always have after I apologize. After I admit you were right. After I make another promise, a promise I know in the back of my head that I won’t keep. And I’ll eventually apologize again. But this time, I’d mean it.
I’d try to mean it.
I feel around the walls, forsaking the flashlight and relying on my sense of touch which I judge to be much more trustworthy in case I really am hallucinating. I had lost all sense of direction in my panic and had no idea in which direction the flat lay. In front of me I feel a bookcase, and the leather volumes feel grimy under my fingertips. I crawl to my left and find yet another bookshelf. Another bookshelf lies behind me and another to my right, and then I reach out to touch the bookshelf in front of me again only to find that there isn’t one, but a blank, cold wall. I almost laugh, but it catches in my throat. I keep my hand on that wall as I turn on the flashlight—I have a feeling that it might change again if I remove my fingertips—and in the dull circle of light I see the blank wall lit before me. I put the flashlight in my mouth and reach for the hammer, keeping my eyes on the wall to keep it from changing, and using the claw end, I chip away at it. Chunks of plaster fall, and I use more force, and in a very short time I break through. I allow the dust to clear, and my hands tingle with numbness when I see the gaping black hole before me.
I force myself through that hole, and the flashlight reveals a small square room, identical to the one I had just passed through, although all of the walls are bare. I immediately cross the room and break through the far wall, and then find myself in another room exactly like the last. I then break through the far wall of this room and continue on and on and on. This goes on for hours, or maybe less, or more—I can’t be sure. I break through one wall and immediately proceed to the next. I’m exhausted. I’m suddenly hungry, hungrier than I ever remember being before, and I try my best to ignore it. My throat feels tight and dry, and I gasp and strain but continue to break through wall after wall. I turn off the flashlight and begin to break through each wall blindly. I lose count of the walls after the first hundred. It may have been only hours, and it could have been as long as an entire day before I’m so exhausted I can no longer raise the pickaxe. I stumble to my knees, and with my last ounce of strength I curl up on the floor of the last blank room and I can only guess that I was able to fall asleep in the cold darkness.
I need to rest for a moment and collect my thoughts.
I awake suddenly, and panic because I think I have gone blind and deaf as I slept. When I regain my senses (?) and remember where I am (?) I reach out toward the wall and feel the grimy spines of the books. There was no point in breaking through any more walls, I realized. I click on the flashlight for the first time in hours (days?), and I at first blink at the light, and then I see the looming bookshelf in front of me.
I suddenly have a thought, one that strikes me as so simple, I almost laugh. These books must hold the key to this place. Why else would they exist here? I look over the spines, running my fingers over the grimy leather, and my hand rests on one, indistinguishable from the others. I pull it off of the shelf and sit with it, cross-legged, and lay it in my lap. The leather is cracked and warped, and there is no visible title. I run my fingers over the cover. I wonder vaguely if these were the treasures that the previous owner of the flat found necessary to hide. I wondered if they hid themselves.
The cover opens with a slight crack, and I pause when I find the first page blank. I stare at it dumbly, wondering what this means. I turn to the next page. Blank. The next is blank as well. The next, blank. Blank. Blank. Blank. I tear through the pages, all blank. I flip the yellowed pages to find nothing, not one letter, symbol, or scribble. I pull a second book from off the shelf, a random volume right in front of me, and find it to be as blank as the first. The third book, the fourth, the tenth, the twentieth—no words, pictures, or numbers. All pages are blank, and my eyes begin to burn as I frantically pull down more and more books, unable to stop myself. I want to know what this means, if it’s a sign, if it’s an omen or some kind of message. I page through each book desperately, doubting that they are blank because they had always been blank, and becoming increasingly convinced that they only became blank because I had expected them to be blank. The suspicion that I’m creating this hell with my own mind weighs on my every move, and I can only keep pushing myself to open more and more books, scanning each page for some stray mark. I might have continued this way for hours, ripping through book after book. I felt cycles of gnawing hunger, and finally after an immeasurable amount of time I collapse from weakness.
My mind is sluggish, and even though I feel I have to do something, I’m completely unable to think of what I could do that could possibly help me. I start breathing heavily and sigh. The sound is stolen from my lips even before it reaches my ears. I yell, Who are you? and What do you want? until my throat is raw because I feel I have to. I pound my fists on the floor until they’re numb. I scream. Every sound is swallowed up by the darkness.
So I give up. I lie on my back, breathing. I try to sleep again, to ignore the pangs of hunger, but I only succeeded in short spurts.
When I awake the final time my mind feels clearer. I can only guess that I was now beyond hunger and thirst. I can only think of you, and this is how I begin to focus my mind on sending you a message. I never was one to meditate, and as soon as I try to clear my mind and send a thought telepathically, words and emotions and a million thoughts gnaw away at my consciousness, and I know that it would never work. I need to concentrate on one thought at a time.
That is when I remember the pencil in my tool belt. Instead of being used to mark off measurements, it will become something to help me focus, like a sort of telepathic focusing agent. I will write my message to you, focusing my mind on yours. I pull down several volumes and, with the flashlight between my teeth, I begin to write until I find that I can focus by writing in synchronization with my breathing.
Now I find that I am writing with the flow of my breath, and even now I can feel my heartbeat in harmony with the movement of my hand on the page. I need to conserve energy, and even now I feel weak. I don’t know if I can rest and then continue. I’m afraid that I will have to stop again soon, and the flashlight beam is becoming weaker and weaker and I will be in darkness and my words and message will simply disappear.
Suddenly… wait.
I… think… I think that I understand.
Maybe it’s because I’m exhausted, hallucinating, I don’t know… but I think I understand it now. It just came to me all of a sudden, just as I’m sitting here writing, I think I know where I am and you were right all along. I believe in it now, and I know, I know, it’s much, much too late, but you were right. You need to know that you really were right, not how I admit you were right at the end of arguments just so they’ll end, no, that’s not it at all. You were right when you said there was something there, something in the mote in your eye, something just out of sight that you can almost see. You know where I am, even though you have never really seen it. I know that you cannot really see me, because I am just beyond your sight, just behind your back, and when you turn to look I will not be there but just out of sight again.
Do you see? No… that’s the wrong word. Do you understand?
That’s where they go. When they disappear, I mean. The people that once lived in the flat. That must be what happens… whether they just die or disappear, it doesn’t really matter. They eventually get trapped, they stumble into a place they can’t escape from, a dark place, and they somehow stay there and are absorbed somehow and are there, waiting, watching, just out of sight but there. I’m here, in that darkness, trying to reach just to catch the corner of your eye, and please, please, don’t turn to try to see me, but leave me be at the periphery because that is the only place where the darkness and I can exist—just out of reach. But if. But if I reach just beyond the periphery, just a fraction above the surface. Maybe.
I am intent on you receiving my message from here. Even if nothing tactile can exist here, my thoughts do exist (and I, bodily exist, but for not much longer). The thoughts I am transmitting (?) are coming from within the void inside my own body. I want you to feel my message in the void inside yourself. I want you to stop where you are at this moment and breath in time with me and feel your own heartbeat and see my words. I want to reach out of this place, I want to reach beyond the wall and the flat and reach into the world, reach into all of it. I want every sign, every book, every magazine and journal and newspaper and advertisement to carry my message to you. I want to rearrange the broadcasts of the world to touch you. I want every word every man, woman, and child in the world speaks to be my own voice speaking directly to you. I want your whole being to feel my own.
The light is f ding faster and I can no longer feel the pencil. I do not ev n know if I am leaving a vis ble mark on the page The flashlight beam has now faded to only a dull glow I only know that my intent is strong but my breath is failing it is so cold as the light fades I fade and I fear th t i do not have much more time and n w the light is gone and i feel so desperately al ne but wait something is there i’m scared there’s someone there there’s more there’s many many people there lost here they want me I’m scared and they reach they reach no I don’t want to go they reach and i am trying to think of you and your warmth and i have broken through the wall and you are standing there with a stern but s d face but you are re li ved a d i am apol gi ing and t ou h a
i have br k n thr gh the l st w ll
i a apol izi g i m orry
y u ha e t t s d but stern f ce y u a l w
ast ou ilo eyo lo veyo il you i ov i
l e y u i
S O S SO O S
S O
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Otium
