the missing space
Part III of Missing Pieces: Modern-Day Fables
For parts I and II, please check out the missing color and the missing sound.
Once upon a time, there was an extra space in the world. Well, actually, a lot of them. There were doors all over the place, though they hardly seemed door-like as you and I know it. They shimmered like mirages and often disappeared when you faced them from a certain angle. They were as light as blue smoke holding up an orchid and as intangible yet real as a friend who lives thousands of miles away.
In fact, you could walk right through them if you wanted. They were there for need, not obstruction. They were openings, not impediments. They were beginnings, not closures.
You could be walking down the sidewalk and see another pedestrian slip into impossibility…and disappear. Of course, you would understand that he had entered a spare, as the extra spaces were known. No, he was not ducking out of the rain. No, he was not dodging an ex-girlfriend he spotted further along down the street. No, he was not playing hide-and-seek with his toddler. These were not what spares were for.
They were for taking a deep breath. They were for stepping into a quiet space for a moment of reflection and renewal. The world—and all its problems, its complexities, its hypocrisies, its crises—could erase you and forget you, for just a moment, before you returned to it, fresh with the space that needs to be taken and given. Anyone could enter a spare—inconspicuously out in the open as they were—close their eyes and calm themselves. You had to slide in sideways and, every time you tried, it felt like you would never be able to squeeze in, the frustration building until…pop, you were in. They were cozy and warm like the inside of a nutshell. Their sound was both wistful and windy as if a Chopin prelude were playing next to an ocean. And then, your shoulders dropped. The lining of your gut relaxed. Sometimes someone farted...such as it was when all aspects of one’s person completely relaxed. In this space, all tension was released. People used spares frequently and carefully. They were as much like a shrine as they were an elevator, something at once elevated and pedestrian. And they returned people to the world with a clarity of mind and regulation of emotions that enabled them to extend compassion, show integrity, and speak with humility.
No one really knew where they were or where they came from. But that was like wondering where grass or water or body odor, for that matter, came from. Parents would search desperately for a spare when their tantrum tolerance was breaking. Employees fed up with their micro-managing managers would turn and turn until they found their way into one. When the neighbors played loud music too late and for too long, a local would stroll out into their yard right into a spare. Kids learned early to manage frustrations by turning to a spare instead of screaming, yelling, or hitting. When a block tower toppled over or their sister sat on their wet painting of a dog, the little ones would march around the house until they collided with a spare. You could even slide into a spare while driving—if someone cut you off, drove way under the speed limit when you needed to get to your son’s soccer practice, or refused to let you merge so you could turn off the highway. There was a way you could shimmy and wiggle in the driver’s seat until you were in. Or you could drive until you just flat out rammed into one.
The shower of calming they provided did not hide the world from you, just protected you from it for a moment or two. You couldn't linger too long. Spares would automatically push you back out once it was clear you were ready to face the world again.
The spares weren’t magic. They didn’t ease physical pain, couldn’t heal emotional trauma, and would do nothing for a broken heart. Instead, they were like human charging booths, because people emerged from spares refreshed and reinvigorated. They had remembered what was important. They had calmed the constant and overwhelming input of the world—the traffic, the boss’ orders, the emails, the TV channels, the advertisements, the text messages, the news feeds—and refocused their minds. They rematerialized from spares with their batteries saturated with an electric energy, their power switches fully on, their minds engaged and attuned to the potential of their own positive power.
The rules of spares had been passed down generation to generation or perhaps were programmed into humans' DNA by now. Everybody knew them with the same familiarity they had with the "No shirt, no shoes, no service" sign posted outside a restaurant entrance. Along with your time in a spare being limited to the brief moments it took to slow your breathing and unclench your jaw, they were pack in, pack out. Everyone knew it was a space and not a locker. Everyone knew and yet…things happen.
One day a stressed single father, late from work, and knowing his ex was going to be furious at him when he arrived to pick up the kids and she was now late for her appointment, hastily rushed into a spare, his arms flailing like a mute swan flapping its wings to frighten a perceived threat. As the space of the spare knit around him, the shifting air caught a loose button on his shirt sleeve and pulled it off, the button falling in slow motion as his breathing and movements calmed, landing with the most delicate croon, like the exquisitely haunting A flat that brings the organ into the Saint Saens Organ Symphony.
He closed his eyes. He breathed. He breathed slower. His chest expanded. His lungs filled and refilled with deliciously oxygenating air, its umami intensity filling his body with the delicious flavor of nervous system-calming savasana. He was dead to the world, in the best meaning of the phrase. Until he wasn't and he was reborn with a serenity able to meet his ex's lashing displeasure. And then, pop, he was back in the world...but the button remained. Such a small thing really, but as they say about the little things, they are not just the things that count or make us happy, but they are the things that can hurt the most too.
It happened slowly really, but also almost overnight. First, an elderly woman who next used the spare-button spare noticed the forsaken item and left one of her rosary beads as an alms to calm. Then, a small boy, who had just been shown by his mother how you could toss a coin into a fountain and make a wish, dropped a precious penny into the corner, closed his eyes, and made a wish. Soon, others were leaving their own tokens, mementos, or keepsakes. They called them forget-me-nots and it felt like a way to honor the gift of spares, while continuing to unburden themselves of small items of meaning, or even little pieces of junk to which they then attributed meaning, using the spares as they thought they should be used, as they witnessed them being used by others and so followed unthinkingly and unwittingly.
Unburdening does not occur evenly. Though some only had extra lint in their pockets or movie ticket stubs they had forgotten to throw away, others carried their homes—their lives in fact—on their backs every day, as he did, wearing extra layers of clothing even on the hottest summer days and carrying a pack full with his toothbrush, hair brush, extra socks and underwear he could come by, one perfectly-fitted shoe for which he hoped to find a mate someday, an old worn-out parka, a blanket, and two books: The Art of War by Sun Tzu and More Beautiful Than Before.
And just as unburdening does not avail itself evenly, neither does privilege. And, though you might assume everyone knew about spares because they were so plentiful, because they were free, because, well, everyone around you seemed to, they were not something everyone had experienced, not something everyone knew about or knew were accessible to them. For you had to want a spare to find a spare and if you weren’t aware of them or didn’t think they were meant for you, you would never serendipitously collide with one.
He, or rather we should call him Ishbak, didn’t believe in spares. His father had raged often and left early, his mother had been constantly overwhelmed until the overwhelm consumed her fully, and his aunt had kicked him out of the house when he was fourteen and came home high one morning. If there were such a thing as spares, he thought, if there were something in the world which would calm and soothe people, then why had his life unfolded as it had? For years, his questions had ached at him until finally they ate at him and with the world gnawing into his muscle tissue and thinking space, he resented the false dream of a spare, just as a child too old to believe resents the lie a parent continues to tell to younger siblings about Santa Claus.
But on this day, on this overcast fall fading into the first licks of winter day, as Ishbak sat on his favorite bench rereading More Beautiful Than Before for the hundredth and seventeenth time and repeating ‘You can and you will, because you must,’ he happened to glance up as a beam of warm light escaped through a sucker hole in the thick clouds. The beam landed right on his lap, right on his palm holding open the book, and its warmth stunned him. The stun was so intense he had to look away for a moment and, as he did, he noticed a young girl—she must have been around eight or nine, that perfect age—appear seemingly out of nowhere across the street. Her face was expressionless and yet full of something…something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. So, he returned to the book. But something in her intrigued him. He peaked up at her again and now she was crossing the street, walking straight towards him, and again he saw the nothing-something in her face. What was it? Why was it so anodyne? And then it hit him. It hit him like the sky he couldn’t see behind the mask of clouds. It was the beautiful blue sky above the turbulence, the sky that hovers above the pain, the sky that opens wide to give space to your tired eyes and color to your troubled soul. And in that moment, he knew. There had to be such a thing as a spare.
With a need so wide and an ache so deep, he felt he might inhale all of the spares if he breathed too hard, Ishabk stood and began walking, hesitantly at first, then more determinedly, then downright mulishly. His agitation was near-constant and the now-belief that he might find something to ease it caused him to huff and puff nervously as he willed himself to hold onto the faith that spares existed. And then, suddenly and seamlessly, he was in.
With his eyes still closed, he sat down slowly settling into a cross-legged pose. He was dizzied by how much space existed in his mind. It was like walking through a polluted, traffic-clogged, pedestrian-frenzied city and then having it all razed before your eyes so that, in all directions, the space flattened and receded neatly, his bewildering world folded up neatly as a white linen napkin and placed in front of him with its clean pressed corners and smooth flat layers. His thoughts drifted gently one atop another like molting feathers layering themselves into a cushiony white mental nest.
This particular spare was not so neat and clean as Ishbak’s new mind. The forget-me-nots had accumulated and begun to form a confusing floor of their own over the hovering fuzzy non-floor of the spare. Others had entered this spare only to exit quickly, their nervous energies not palliated, their minds still whirling a buzz. But for Ishbak, even amidst the detritus, there was enough clear air for his thoughts to calm. When you live for so long in a stifling mental pell-mell, as he had, with thoughts and stimuli coming like arrows through your head from every direction, just a little bit of clear space was a powerful therapeutic. Ishbak felt his mind returning to a state he remembered from long ago. It almost felt like a different lifetime, a different Ishbak; it was so foreign. And then, pop, he was back out.
The air had cooled a few degrees and those who brushed by him on the sidewalk rewrapped their scarves more snuggly around their necks or pulled the strings of their hoods tighter around their heads. There was a buzzy, static energy in the breeze. If he could have taken the pulse of the world, he might have felt concerned. But Ishbak’s lips were contoured in a slight smile, the millions of tiny air sacs of his lungs moist, softened, inflated with oxygen transferring out into his bloodstream, pulsing through his body to fingertips he couldn’t recall feeling and ears that now received a calming message from the swish-whoo of wind against leaves making a music indistinguishable from a soft rain. When had he last heard the leaves tickling against each other like comfortable old friends sharing a moment of playfulness? The rustling felt violently new and shockingly soothing. The soft chilling breeze made him release a soft warming rain of tears.
Meanwhile, others were becoming frenzied in their search for empty spares. Each one that was entered seemed to be distractingly desecrated by forget-me-nots. At first, this was just an annoyance. A woman who achingly longed for her home across oceans pivoted into a spare and was rather agog at the crunch of stuff beneath her feet. However, when she looked down and saw a small beaded elephant trinket in the corner, it reminded her of the silly tidbits sold to tourists at markets back home and a giggle escaped from her belly, releasing some of her tension.
But for others the filling became more serious. A man who had been able to manage his panic attacks with spares stumbled in and then stumbled back out into the world, full of the same anxieties he had entered with, and losing his ability to cope. A mother, overworked and overextended, dove into a spare as her heart rate rose at the stress of her children fighting and then gleefully throwing paint at the basement walls. Inside, she felt pelted by tiny balls of something, paint maybe, and she crawled back out into her basement only to lie on the floor where she began to omit great balloon-like sobs like nauseating hiccups. Her children watched, owl-eyed, in fear. A man, hounded by his manager no matter how innovative his ideas or well-written his reports and knavishly upstaged by his duplicitous co-worker, took a long lunch break in order to calm himself in a spare. Exiting quickly after finding no relief amid the clutter, he stomped back into the building and stormed into his manager’s office where the scene became a tumultuous blur of thrown papers, echoing screams, red hot anger, and finally ended with his immediate termination.
The man erupted back out onto the street, his anger spinning around him and outward like an emotionally dysregulated tornado. Passersby ducked under the spin of fury or huddled against each other in the corner of a store doorway or hurried into dank empty alleyways to escape. Their fear was not theoretical—the building agitation of the world was moving in on them like a storm and nobody knew where to turn.
Ishbak, meanwhile, was visiting the spare across from his park bench daily, if not hourly. As the pile beneath his feet grew, he balanced a mirror on it, found a discarded razor, and shaved his unruly beard for the first time in a decade. He began leaving his backpack inside and, after trying this a few times and always finding it there upon his return, he started to make the spare his own. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a space to call his own. And the more he claimed the space, the more space there seemed to be. He laid down blankets and a pillow into a neat bed. He organized the tokens and trinkets into a sort of entryway. He planted a small garden. The air was soft with his whispers and the more he inhaled himself, the more himself he became. And the more the spare became his alone.
Other spares became too heavy, too weighed down with people’s discards. Under the weight, they began to disappear. Not only could people no longer find as many spares, but their need was greater. The churn, as everyone started calling it, was enough to make anyone need a moment of respite. The air felt too heavy to breathe. Everything was pulling in a dark gravity downward. It was even hard to lift your face, so people began to trudge around the earth, their eyes downcast watching as the forget-me-nots disgorged back out into the world, a mucky sludge inscribing your footprints as you stared back at their marks longing for the reflection of your face in another’s glistening eyes.
Space itself was losing its grip as the balance between light and heavy was lost. Creativity and decision-making abilities declined. Doctors began to lean too heavily on A.I. for diagnoses. Tech disrupters were so tired that their usual bio-hacking, visionary, industry-wide revolutions began to look like mere cranky contrarianism. Advertising campaigns lost their innovative luster and came out sounding like monotone announcements to “please buy more uselessly expensive coffee” and “don’t you also want a car that drives fast around curves because they are really nice.” New movies were all remakes or sequels and restaurant menus came to resemble one another such that it didn’t matter that your partner couldn’t decide where to take you on your anniversary. The churn was so busy, it secreted a pervasive dullness over all else. Mothers and fathers could not decide what to make for dinner, so many children came home nightly to cheerios and milk or a one-pot stew whose ingredients never seemed to waver. “What to do with free time” and “How to get more oxygen in your breath” topped Google searches. People’s movement and then their thoughts existed in a fog that shadowed their attempted awe walks and scorched their hopeful future self-actualization plans.
Ishbak’s inadvertent meditation during his first experience in a spare slowly became an intentional practice. He would come out and smile. Soon his smile became an anomaly. As the world descended, others—when they could garner the strength to look up—noticed it. He was like an updraft of air in a stifling heat wave. Zadie was one of the first to take note. She had left school early that afternoon because nothing was being taught and no one noticed her slipping out and, as she wandered around, she happened to pass by Ishbak just as he was exiting his spare. Her lungs filled as they had not been able to in weeks; it was like a pocket of extra air opened up within the hot churn. Zadie turned around and around quickly searching for more. That was when she saw Ishbak strolling calmly down the sidewalk away from her. He seemed light, his footfalls barely grazing the pavement. With an interest and a need, she followed.
Ishbak wasn’t going somewhere. He didn’t have a destination or a goal. But it was exactly this easy wandering, this loose un-direction that attracted Zadie. In his ease, there was space—space that could no longer be found in spares.
It didn’t take long for others to catch on. There was a need and he filled it—in some ways, it was as simple as that. He was the closest thing people had to the space of deep breath they once had. Soon there emerged a small cluster of people hovering around the spot his spare inhabited. They waited. They had nothing to do but wait, the waiting itself a panacea for the churn. When he materialized, they parted, making space for him to do whatever he might do. Mostly he walked; mostly they followed. He looked like a leader and it looked like a cult, but he wasn’t and it was not. He was a green space in their urban heat island, re-naturalizing their wild minds, and shading the group under a shared inhale-exhale and a lowered pulse that began to beat as one.
But that was only some. Others weren’t so smitten. Others were angry. The anger was like a heat upon an already lit world, scorching what was good and hopeful. One day, Ishbak returned from a long walk to find his bench spray painted with black words that read: Softness to traitors will destroy us all. The irony of the quoted was not lost on Ishbak. Zadie watched from a distance. She returned two hours later with a rag, a bottle of nail polish remover, and a mask. She knelt before the bench and began the work of dissolution.
Egan too watched from a distance. He admired Zadie’s dedication. He admired Ishbak’s innocence. He also admired the churn. It was disarming, really. Its whirls and swirls, its twists and grists. Really, people, he thought. Can you not see its beauty? Does it not turn the placid air around you into something energized, something exciting? Do your eyes not suck in the stimulation it so generously shares? Are you not fascinated too by the fundamental questions of the universe and the answers it may offer? It too knelt before you, if you knew how to tame it.
Egan allowed the churn to lift the corners of his mouth into what resembled a smile. There were so few left; he knew it would be of interest. With a power in his visage and an idea in his belly, he removed the toothpick that had been clasped between his clenched teeth and flicked it into the churn. It spun for a moment or two before shooting downward like a stray bullet, heading right towards Zadie's exposed Achilles tendon.
She knew it before she felt it. She knew the moments were lining up as the planets did once every few hundred years. She knew that physics and math didn't hold the answers to life's questions and that smiles came from the eyes not the mouth. And she knew that Achilles didn't actually die from the pierce of his heel tendon rather from the arrow’s poison, but she knew that she would. She was too far from the middle to make it in time.
Ishbak had been in a sort of haze, a lovely serene delirious ice-cream-after-swimming-in-the-ocean-on-a-hot-summer-day-with-salt-and-sugar-both-on-the-lips kind of haze. But a haze was different from a high. And he was not unaware of the world or its churn or the line of people clipping at his heels when he walked down the sidewalk and across the fields or along the river. It was just that the flutter in his heart was so joyful, the feeling so pure, and the calm that now encircled him so exquisite, he could no longer place his concerns anywhere in particular. But, as he walked away from his spray painted bench, blind to Zadie’s flattening upon the ground, he felt something slip…or shift. Or slip-shift. And his out-of-balance came to mirror the dislocation of the world’s weight. And, from a safe but too-close-for-comfort distance, Egan watched as always.
The next day, when Ishbak set out for his walk, he passed by a different line of people. They had queued up carefully echoing each other’s rigid self-conscious pose in a long train that carelessly crossed the busiest street in town. The line cut right through the middle of the road stopping the rows of cars that, of late, drove aimlessly around the city’s ring roads for most of the day. At the head of the line stood Egan under a garishly lit sign that read: Excuse Generator. The sign was nailed up above the door frame of a recently vacant store which had once sold smart watches and the latest in high-tech phones. Across the door hung a red and orange curtain whose zigzags zipped diagonally down and across as if hoping to tear the fabric with their decorative assault.
Ishbak chuckled at the scene straight out of a comic book’s rendition of a magician at a circus sideshow. But no one else was laughing. The line was lengthening and people were happy to wait. For, the whispers that dribbled like drool down a sluggish chin from person to waiting person foretold that here was one of the few remaining spares. It was only when they arrived at the front of the line that they ascertained its exceptionality.
“Hello,” Egan greeted the next person to reach the curtain. “Tell me, what troubles you?” To each, he inquired of their struggles and their frustrations. To each, he explained how the churn had destroyed many of the spares and befuddled the leftovers. What remained, he mouthed softly-chewed words that oozed down towards the listener’s sore feet, was this spare. But, he perked up, its shuffled atoms had reorganized into something special. Whatever your trouble was, it could generate an excuse which would convince even the most hardheaded bullshit-detector among us.
People happily sucked up his words as their excuses. They hadn't been able to think straight in weeks and the pretexts that Egan printed on the empty pages in their brains seemed both plausible and propitious.
"I can't go to work this week. I'm so burnt out..." explained one woman. Egan entered the Excuse Generator and returned a moment later to produce an excuse for her. He performed this complimentary service for the first few and then, with the energy of blind faith instilled, allowed them to enter on their own. With his nefarious seed planted in their minds and their wanting creating an expanse of space in their minds, they, unknowingly and unwittingly, generated their own excuses of the finest quality.
Each day with his line lengthening and word spreading across the land, Egan appeared in front of the Excuse Generator, pulling back the curtain to allow one customer in at a time. And shortly, that is what they became—customers. For it was only a few days before the Excuse Generator, which had started out as a gift, came at a steep entrance price. And the externalized blame blasted out into the world in exponential barks, snarls, grumbles, and roars fed the churn until it was difficult to go outside most days. Just as quickly as they had appeared, his customer base shrank and withered. Egan was furious and also scared. Into the churn emitted his fury and fear and, like all the others, into his mind came the whirring, burning, swollen, contused, surging, churning waves of unrest. He sat down, dizzy, next to a bench on what should have been the cool grass. As his head spun, he tried to collect his thoughts. He tried to locate himself again amidst the churn. Dizzy, so spinning, the whirl whorling, he spread his hands wider across the grass to steady himself and his left hand grazed flesh.
He fumbled around amidst the gray smother that sat on the earth until he clasped another's hand in his. At first, it was mildly reassuring. Quickly though, he felt the unnatural coldness of the hand, its floppy fingers like a fistful of soggy pancakes betwixt his callous grip. He turned and could just make out the face. It was her—the one who was always first in line behind that walking fool, the one who inhaled so much of his calm she could almost produce her own independent of him.
Ishbak was clearly to blame, Egan knew. His conviction thorned out from his indignant heat until he was all claws and the world his soft-tissued oyster innards to shred mouth from stomach, gills from anus, muscles from intestines from heart. And so he did. He bellowed at Ishbak's spare until it shook and its nutshell walls began to crack from the inside outward. Ishbak's backpack tumbled to the ground at Egan's feet and Egan tore it open, throwing parka and underwear asunder, shattering a small glass amulet beneath his black boots, ripping More Beautiful Than Before and The Art of War page from page, the liberated words tumbling glassy-eyed searching franticly for new mates: angels pain requires no battle go to war and seek mercy and compassion defeated warriors the enemy succumb succumb listen patiently to your tears.
Egan stomped the tender green of each plant in Ishbak's garden. He kicked at the spare's smooth walls until they were dented and bruised. He flipped his bed space upside down and hurled forget-me-nots into the churn and raged ceaselessly for hours upon days upon nights upon morns until he himself forgot what he was doing.
The churn ate his anger-inebriated tantrum like a feast presented by its most loyal servant. It spun and surged, its ear-splitting noise like the inside of a freight train engine. Its fury was scorching, no longer merely agitated, but escalated by the world's escalation of rabid frenzy. It was the enemy. Succumb succumb listen patiently to your tears.
It became too dangerous to go outside. The winds were too fierce, the howling too deafening, the churn too potent. People sheltered-in-place, entering subterranean bunkers if they had them, moving their children and pets and lives into basements, or living under tables if they had no basements. Those without homes were welcomed inside as word of Zadie’s passing spread and all feared the undisclosed cause.
Locked in their homes, with the world shut down, people slept more. They caught up on their reading. They baked homemade sourdough bread and listened to records and listened to each other. They held hands for no reason other than to soothe and be soothed and they wrapped their arms around each other for no other reason than to feel another’s heart thumping against your chest.
They looked out of their windows watching the strength of what they had created destroy all they had known. Powerlines toppled, cars were overturned, trees were uprooted, and all manner of things flew by past their eyes: fence posts and cattle irons, coffee shop signs and traffic cones, handwritten letters and monogrammed pocket squares, children’s drawings of rainbows and plastic magnet letters. Watching was calming. Watching was distancing. And then they saw him.
Ishbak did not come inside. Somehow, he wandered through the churn, just as he had wandered before—his feet barely grazing the earth, his body relaxed, his lips contoured in a gentle smile. Watching Ishbak was not calming, but it was not agitating either. He wanted to be there, and everyone knew that. And somehow, he could be there amidst the fiercest human storm and still move with graceful ease. He was a reminder of solace and a wistful layer on top of humanity’s new sense of respite.
It didn’t take long for the churn to spin itself out. With no more fuel for the fire, mere days passed before the world outside had settled and calmed. People too had settled and calmed and in their shelter from the storm, in their forced cohabitation, they had learned a new way of calming themselves. In another’s touch, a new softening was loosened. The spares were gone, though, and the earth’s axis tipped always slightly off-balance. The air cooled but the breezes whispered a different melancholic song that the birds soon learned and so repeated and passed on and spread across flyways, along migration paths pulled by magnetic fields, sun, and stars. Once in a while, though, if you were wandering down a sidewalk and then across a field, the light might flicker and, just out of the corner of your eye, it might reflect in a holographic effect suggesting the presence of a nothing-something which brought a sweet mildness to your inhale. Or maybe that was just the bent of the light, and the strangeness of a world whose destabilizing forces seem to pull us unsteadily down.
Your fellow seeker,
Katie
A fable that is like "the spare" itself. I feel lighter.