Zerostrata Read online

  “Yeah. She just called me miserable.”

  I stood for a moment in that half-light, letting the sounds sink into me. At first they were distinct sounds. Zasper mentioned the television and I could pick the television out. He mentioned the CD player and I could pick that out. But I found the second I stopped paying any attention to it, the moment I stopped trying to single those sounds out, they all blended together and I could see how, at times, it would be a beautiful sound. Like a crowded city street. But that was what was missing. The people. As big and loud as that noise was, it was still a very lonely sound. And there was something else I couldn’t quite pick out and didn’t hit upon as Zasper was giving me his sonic inventory.

  “Is that all the noise in here? It seems like I’m hearing something else.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. That’s my keyboard. It’s against that wall over there. I left it on and, occasionally, I throw things at it. Sometimes they land on the keys and keep them pressed down, adding another sound.”

  “I like the sound it’s playing now.”

  And I did. It made me think of childhood. Of bright Saturday mornings when I was still a happy child and totally unaware of all the sadness around me. Unaware that sadness would one day infect me.

  “I like that sound a lot.”

  “Well, if you want, you can take the keyboard. I don’t care much for it anyway.”

  “So what have you been up to lately?”

  “Oh, you know, not much. Mostly lying here. You look so uncomfortable standing up there. You should come and lie down on the floor. It’s really more comfortable than it looks and, don’t worry, Francis vacuums in here weekly so there aren’t any creepy crawlies or sticky stuff.”

  “Okay.” It wasn’t right that I was the only family member in the house who was still standing upright so I crawled down on the floor next to Zasper.

  “What have you been up to?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Is that strange?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Kind of. Maybe you don’t want to know.”

  “Mother wants me to go see a psychiatrist.”

  “Dr. Blast?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not really a psychiatrist. I don’t think he has a medical license or anything. He calls himself a ‘therapist.’”

  “Yeah? Have you been to see him?”

  “No. Mom tried to get me to go a couple of years ago. She thought I would get out of high school and go off to college and live some grand life but... like that was ever going to happen. I was wired for failure. Have been since the day I was born. I just wanted to lie on the floor and think about things.”

  “Haven’t you been thinking about things a long time? You’ve been out of school what, five years?”

  “Can you ever really think too much?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you run out of stuff to think about? Don’t you have to experience things in order to think about them? Analyze them?”

  “No. That’s reflection. Not pure thought. What I do is pure thought. Like this New Music. It’s like I have the whole human world around me but I’m something different. I have stepped out of the human realm.”

  “You’re still human.”

  “But I’m a guilty human.”

  “You feel guilty to be a human?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re the cause of everything bad in the world.”

  “Really? Humans cause earthquakes? Storms?”

  “Well, all of those are created by God and we all know humans were created in the image of God. Throwing millions of humans together is like creating an earthquake on a daily basis.”

  “But you’re an atheist.”

  “So.”

  “Sophist.”

  “Zealot.”

  We both emitted staccato bursts of breath, our idea of laughter. It felt good. We used to have conversations like that all the time but, in our youth, the conversations had a little more promise. There used to be a world of possibilities yawning out before us and we talked about which one of them we would pursue. Now it just sounded like two sad and tired old men talking about what could have been or what went wrong. Only, neither one of us was really that old.

  “Do you remember being happy when we were kids, Zazz?”

  “I’ve been deeply depressed since I turned twelve.”

  “I know. But before that. Do you remember laughing and playing and not thinking so much? Sometimes I think the more I think the fewer things I do. I remember thinking a lot over the years and I don’t remember doing very much. I think thinking paralyzed me.”

  “I only feel alive when I’m crawling around in my own brain.”

  “Do you remember Zerostrata?”

  “Of course I remember Zerostrata.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “When was the last time you were outside? This morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s been two years since I’ve been outside. It was still there the last time I was out. Something probably blew it down. Hopefully.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s so childish. It’s a fucking treehouse for Christ’s sake.”

  I thought about Zerostrata. Suddenly, I was filled with an urge to be inside it. Out in the backyard, high up in the trees. It was the first time since I could remember I had actually wanted something, that I had actually looked forward to something.

  I stood up so quickly dizziness washed over me and I swayed to the side, bracing myself on Zasper’s bed. The books and records that were stacked high went tumbling, some of them onto the floor, onto Zasper.

  He grunted as the heavy objects pelted him but he made no attempt to actually move.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  “You can’t go back to your childhood,” he stated very matter-of-factly, a Celine on his forehead, surrounded by his beautiful noise.

  But he was wrong. That wasn’t what I wanted. That wasn’t what I wanted at all. I didn’t want to be a kid again. I just wanted to be in Zerostrata. I just wanted to look out over things, from that height, with virtually nothing holding me back from the world around me.

  Chapter Four

  Zerostrata

  Outside, the rain had tapered off to a mist. I hadn’t thought about Zerostrata in so long I had no idea what to expect. I was sure it wouldn’t be there anymore. After all, it had to be quite an eyesore at this point. The city had probably made them take it down. But another part of me knew it would be there. Of course it would be there. It had to be there. Things and places like Zerostrata didn’t just go away.

  Standing in the backyard, the mist swirling around me, I looked up at the sky, up toward the top of the huge oak tree and I saw it, raised to heights in defiance of all child safety. Zerostrata, looking just like it always had.

  No. That wasn’t true. It was more beautiful than I remembered. When I was a child, I had never thought of it as beautiful… just neat. But now it was imbued with my whole childhood and, looking at it, all of that magic, all of that happiness came swirling back to me.

  I approached the tree, the ground mushy beneath my feet, smelling the grass and the fertilizer and the rain and thinking maybe there was a slim possibility everything could be all right with the world. Or at least with my place in the world.

  My father had hired a carpenter friend of his to construct Zerostrata when I was nine years old. As a structure it wasn’t really anything spectacular but as a treehouse it was fabulous, almost supernatural. The most striking thing about it was its height. It was nearly at the top of the oak tree, hovering well over every house in the neighborhood. As a child, being up in Zerostrata was like sitting in a cloud, looking down at everything else. And it was a good-size treehouse. It was the size of an average bedroom and the ceiling was at least eight feet high. To get to Zerostrata, the carpenter had constructed a crude ele
vator. By crude, I mean it only had the barest essentials. There weren’t any walls. Just a wooden platform to stand on and a corrugated metal roof. Toward the front of the platform was a little pad on a pedestal that had the only two buttons it needed—up and down. The limbs and branches in the path of the elevator had been cut away and I was glad to see they had not grown back.

  Hopefully, the elevator still worked.

  I stood on the platform and pressed the little ‘up’ button. The button was a yellow smiley face, now faded with age. The ‘down’ button was a frowning face. That was my father’s idea.

  The platform wobbled but, after a few shaky seconds, I began to rise to the top of the tree.

  I named it while Zerostrata was still under construction. I would go outside with my notebook and pen and look up at the carpenter working away. While glancing up into the tree and the sunlight, I wrote down all kinds of names in the notebook. Most of them were made-up names because I didn’t want the treehouse to have a name like anything else in the world. When I finally came to ‘Zerostrata,’ I looked at the name written there in my childish scrawl on the blue-lined notebook paper and decided I liked the sound of it. I liked the way it looked. I thought it was mysterious. I could make up any sort of meaning for it I wanted to, depending on my mood for the day. Giving something a meaningless name meant it was up to the namer to bestow this meaning upon it. That would be the challenge for my fevered child brain. Only now did I think I truly understood the meaning. What it had come to mean was all the afternoons Zasper and I and whatever friends we could find spent in that place. Just the word now sparked that imagery, that freedom we felt while we were up there.

  And I was there now.

  The elevator stopped when it reached the top and I made the delicate step from the platform to the inside of the treehouse.

  It smelled exactly like I remembered. It looked similar too. A little smaller because things always looked smaller as an adult. And a little shabbier because it hadn’t had anyone to love it and look out for it all these years. The walls were a faded yellow and the ceiling was a sky blue, as close to the color of the sky as an imaginative but resourcefully limited child could get. Large glassless windows were opened on the three sides that didn’t house the door.

  This felt more like home than the house ever could or ever would. This had been mine. And Zasper’s. And it had never really been anyone else’s. Maybe it was the last thing I had ever really considered mine. There are really two kinds of adults. Those who acquire possessions and those who have their possessions stripped away. Thinking of Zerostrata as mine was a good feeling, I thought, because it was such an incredibly childish and selfish one.

  Zerostrata was virtually empty. An oval rug, something I had smuggled out of the house, covered the middle of it. The rug was now nearly black with mildew. There were a few board games over in the corner to my left, the boxes bloated and warped with age and moisture. These things felt like imperfections. I grabbed the rug and threw it out one of the windows, watching it tumble down the branches of the tree until it hit the ground. Then I grabbed the board games and did the same with them, watching as the boxes broke apart and the pieces inside scattered everywhere.

  The door faced west. That was why there weren’t any windows on that side. It kept the bulk of the harsh sun out. I went over to the eastern window and looked out.

  In our neighborhood, the houses were well-spaced apart and there was a patch of trees in the middle of the large block. Trails ran, spokelike, through the trees. Every neighbor could reach every other neighbor’s house by walking through the woods, a concept no one had utilized in my lifetime. The individual trails met in a central hub, meant to be a gathering place. In the hub was a fake pond with a fountain in it. There were benches situated around the fountain and a small playground for children. Very few people ever went there. Looking down at it now just made me sad. Here was a place designed for neighbors to meet and enjoy the company of one another and it was completely empty. Or maybe the purpose of its design was what made it feel so empty. Certainly just a pond with no one around it wouldn’t have seemed empty.

  The misting had stopped and the sun was once again trying to peek out from behind the clouds. I wanted the sun to burn the clouds away but it didn’t really matter because it always felt sunny inside of Zerostrata. Sunny, without being hot. I never remembered being uncomfortably warm in Zerostrata. There was always a good strong breeze blowing through the windows, swirling around the inside and cleansing it of any staleness.

  I went back into the middle and sat down. I must have fallen asleep or went into a hypnotic state or something.

  When I woke up it was nearly dark. Rain hammered down. I stood up and went to the eastern window, looking out over the park.

  That was when I saw her.

  Chapter Five

  The Thickness of Rain

  I looked down at the neighborhood, cloaked in rain, the scant fog causing all the lights to blur into a soft yellow. I saw movement coming from the house directly across the woods. Given my altitude and the distance, I couldn’t make things out perfectly but because of the wide trails connecting our houses I had a good vantage point.

  It was a girl who emerged from the house.

  I was pretty sure she was naked. She was pale like the moon. She rapidly ran from her back porch and turned to her left. There she began running along the trail that encircled the entire park. Then I lost her behind the trees. But I waited eagerly for her to come around the second turn so I could have a better look at her.

  I was completely enthralled. At first, there wasn’t anything perverse about my standing there and eagerly watching for a glimpse of her although, later perhaps, it would become something bordering on perversity. What kept me there that first night was the total oddness of the situation. I had never seen anything like this and now was the ideal time. Immediately after coming home, all of those questions and forgetfulness attacking my brain, after reuniting with Zerostrata and deciding I wanted things to change, here was this girl who was doing exactly what I had wanted to do all my life. She had simply stripped down and charged through the rain completely naked. I wanted to join her right then and there but the inappropriateness of it would have been too great. I would have felt like I was invading something.

  And there she was again, running along the western side of the trail, the side closest to our house, through the rain and under the mostly obliterated moon, never breaking stride, never letting up. Another part of me feared for her. I hoped she didn’t fall down or get sick or attacked or anything.

  As she ran along a part of me ran with her. She continued north along the path and again disappeared behind the trees. I felt a loss when she disappeared. Eagerly, I watched and waited for her to complete her run. Would she complete her run? Would she stop when she got back to her house or would she just keep running? Perhaps this was something she did every night. Perhaps she was conditioned to run around this trail many more times than just the once. And was she naked? I wasn’t so certain after seeing her run by. I hadn’t even really been paying attention. Maybe I had just wanted her to be naked. Did anyone else know about this ritual, if it was a ritual at all? Or was this the first and only time she had done it?

  And there she was again, on the far side of the path, dashing along and back up onto her porch where an older woman waited for her with a large white towel she draped around the girl.

  This was a mystery and I didn’t have a clue as to what the answers were. But, at that moment, I was filled with the singular desire to meet this girl. She was a part of me that I had lost. Some part of myself I had begun to think of as irretrievable but now flaunted itself in front of me.

  Not now, not tonight, I knew. I would think about it first and it was nice to have something like this to think about. Something I wanted to think about, something that filled me with a sort of free happiness I longed for.

  Adrenaline racing through my veins, I opened the door, climbed on the p
latform, and descended Zerostrata.

  Chapter Six

  Dinner

  Back in the house, every room except the dining room was darkened. The dining room was very brightly lighted by the sparkling chandelier suspended above the table. Mother was seated at the head of the table, dressed in a sparkling black ball gown, Tricky firmly ensconced atop her head. A strange man sat to her left. He wore a very nice suit, had a large brown mustache and a head full of dark curly hair that could have easily been a wig. Francis hovered around the table even though she didn’t really have much to do. She was dressed in the traditional yellow jumpsuit my mother had made her wear to serve dinner in since before I could remember.

  I was very excited about the girl I had just seen. My plan was to run down to the basement and ask Zasper if he had ever seen or heard about this girl. I suppose I could have asked Mother, she was probably more likely to have seen the girl than Zasper but, for some reason, I didn’t feel comfortable talking to her about it. Before I could skulk away to the basement, Mother barked out at me.

  “Hansel! The table is set for three!”

  I would have refused. I refused this call to dinner all during my teenage years but, since it was my first day back in nearly ten years, I felt as though I owed it to her. Besides, I was now curious about the man sitting at the table.

  I sat down opposite the man. That left half the table empty and barren. I don’t know how long it had been since Zasper ate dinner at the dining room table. In middle school, he demanded to sit on the table and then, eventually, he demanded to lie on the table. And then he stopped coming to dinner altogether. He seemed to exist on an endless supply of stored snack food.