Gap

Gap /ɡæp/ noun

A negative space, mapped on a white, non-linear, circular construction of time.

-Imaginary definition from a non-existent dictionary

Lacking a visual form, lacking an auditory form, lacking a biological organism. Lacking. Lacking. Lacking. Gap is the materialisation of Lacking. Poets say it’s the ineffable, escaping into the loophole of language. I say, 70 something nothingness, it’s just what happens when my memory stops working. Yes, I’ve been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. My two daughters took me to the hospital, after two weeks of delirium. They said my mere presence gave nightmares to their small, vaguely female-looking humanoids - my grand-daughters.

Maddy, my elder daughter, is shaped as a full circle.

For her sole purpose in life is utility maximising, translated as:

In her mind, a gap is a waste, an unutilised resource, that should be eliminated or leveraged. For everything is recyclable, expandable, transferable for the metamorphosis into advanced humanity.

Cathy, my younger daughter, is shaped as a gap. For her sole purpose is being invisible - absence from any social, environmental, genetic functions.

Her main hobby consists of prolonged exercise of daze – a timeless art of fixating afar to close oneself from receiving any information, internally or externally. It’s physical appearance is so similar to the act of rumination, that I had long mistaken her for a thinker. Yes, I once had great hope for her to become a writer or philosopher. Then, I had an unfortunate discovery over time, that her silent gazing was not meant for perceiving or thinking, but for the escape of them. For she has an aversive reaction to anything intellectual – books, films, discussions – and a comically blunt perception of people and objects.

Her journal is the daily entry of…

At some degree, I suppose, I admire her restraint to the noises. For I am inflicted with all of them. An old fool buckled beneath the soft, slow avalanche of modern decay. This is a literal fact; since the doctor told me that my spinal canal is bended and narrowed like a thin twig covered with thick pig shit. What that means is that if you see me on the street, my shuffled gait and tremoring hands will make you think I’m in a perpetual haste to go somewhere – someone with intention, determination to achieve things. In reality, I’m a mute, broken broadcast of nerve and flesh. If someone struck a match and lit me aflame, I’d sit there like a still portrait. Not as a statement. Not for dignity. I just wouldn’t remember how to flinch. The pain comes to me like background humming noise of a fan.

Conveniently, I forgot about those – memory dysfunction. And when I do remember them, at some moments of lucidity, it feels irrelevant. I’ve grown use to my body slowly dissembling itself against my will. Toe → knee → finger → face. Now, I giggle when I want to sob, because I forgot the right muscles to pull for sobbing. For that expression to happen, I was told by a human ‘lie detector’, that the three threads of facial muscles - orbicularis oculi, M. Frontalis and M. Corrugator, and Depressor Anguli Oris - need to work like a menage-a-trois. Precision required. Or you end up looking like you are having a stroke. How do those genetically potty-trained miniatures do that without thinking? How can babies be born crying like that?

I feel the chilling breeze of a singular reality.

Intangible consciousness mates with organismic expressions.

Bodies wrapped by the antennae of metaphysics, in the murky bathtub of impossibility.

Since my memory stopped functioning in a linear fashion, my past, present and future have become jumbled up, clogged, mish-mashed into hairballs. At night, I’d see them littering around the showers. And gaps become something of a new habit I need to suck into my essence. The whitespace in my recollection of daily events produce long static noises in-between my emotions, my feelings, my senses of everything. I admit I have caught myself uncontrollably laughing in my mind multiple times, when suddenly all I remembered was the annoyance for an over-bittered coffee. And the thoughts that I could have killed someone in those gaps with no burden in my conscience become normalised by the day, that all my poetic dazes of forgetfulness are turning into the eerie aftertaste of murder. But then, I’d laugh at myself to think my coward, good-for-nothing character can ever be arsed to do that. Seriously, killing someone requires a lot of physical strength, mental planning, cunningness. I’d have to care about killing to exert that level of materialised energy.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

“Dad! Come down! Cathy is bleeding again!” Maddy’s voice broke up my thought. The sound hit the door like a loose wire’s snapping sparks, then floated through the air as a twitching thread of sound. I could see it. A vibrational filament — language as dust, suspended. I blinked. No, I didn’t blink. I stared. My eyelids don't work like that anymore. I realised I was on the bed. Sweat-washed sheets, that turned yellow with coffee and cigarette stains. I hated Maddy in that moment. Pure, clean hatred. For breaking up my thoughts with auditory aggression. But I had to play the role: a dead-brain walking, with a black hole and deceased neurons in my squishy grey matter. That’s what people expect when they hear ‘Parkinson’s'.

I walked in my quick, shuffled gait, to open the door.

“Yes, darling, I’ll be right down.”

I responded with a feigned warmth. But when I looked up, I realised there was no Maddy. Just her outline — white, shiny, and edged like broken porcelain. A spiky cut-out of human-shaped deletion of a literal, physical gap. As if the detailed, vivid physical features of her third-dimension body decided to give up on her. Ironic isn’t it? The utility maximiser just evaporated into negative space, along with all her matters. What is she going to optimise now?

I laughed. Silently. Internally. Sarcastically. Hard to tell.

“Darling, you are a gap. Can you see that?” I spoke with my blank, resting face.

“What? Dad, should I get the doctor? Ugh, I can’t believe this is happening at this stage. It’s too soon! The doctor said hallucination only happens at the end. You know, when you don’t know who you are anymore.” She sounded annoyed. Not worried. Her fear was practical — actuarial. I’d guess she hasn’t yet to upgrade my life insurance to critical illness cover.

Coins in a piggybank.

“Don’t worry about it, darling. Let me go down to check your sister.” I walked in my quick, shuffled gait again. This time, It produced the right sense of urgency for the context. This is what fathers do, right? Panic. Rush. Bleed empathy through movement. 

When I went down to the kitchen, I realised two things. First, Cathy became a teenager. Second, she absorbed Maddy into her physical being. By that I mean she has a morphed face and body of her and Maddy, at the time when she was a teenager. The face was both new and familiar, causing confusion in my senses that immobilised my limbs to a halt. Strange feelings - unrecognisable to the eyes but intimate to the heart. I stared at it for a while. Then, I realised that there was a wildly running blood from her left nostril, akin to a downpour flood from a just-opened sluice.

“Oh God. Oh hang on.” My voice sounded robotic.

I was panicking, but what can I do to show them? Facial muscle dysfunction. When I fumbled around to find the first-aid kit, my panic distressed me so much that I had an intense desire to cry, which came out as a maniac laughter. And that triggered my small humanoid grand-daughters to laugh with me. As if the three of us were suffering from the after-effect of a great joke.

“Here you go Cathy, oh hahahaha, here you go, I’m so sorry I can’t stop hahahaha.”

My hands shook the kit like a holy relic, and the contents exploded outward — antiseptic jazz raining onto the linoleum: gauze, cotton, Band-Aid, ghost. Cathy didn’t flinch. She rose, in her usual undisturbed, disinterested fashion. Blood slipping down her face like red silk unravelling from a mouthless puppet. She picked up a cotton ball. Dipped it in alcohol. Snubbed into her nostril. The gesture was graceful, mathematical; as if she was an outsider of herself, watching it from two seconds behind. It produced a dreamlike effect in my already disoriented visual perception.

“Ok, Dad. I’ve stopped the bleeding. I’ll go to school now.”

Cathy’s tone reflected an air of monologue. Self-oriented. Lack of social lubrication. The way that one talks to a distant memory of oneself in the steamy, foggy mirror of an after-shower scene. Maybe not even that. It was post-language. What am I  supposed to act in the memory of myself? Should I have responded in the non-consequential dialogue that has never existed in reality? Or should I just stand there, staring, watching - a stalker of my own insignificant past?

I followed her out the door. The weather was temperatureless. Not hot, not cold. A blank hum pressing against my skin in the ceasefire between my flesh and weather’s tyranny. Or the environment’s. Or the earth’s. Whatever it is that is outside of me. I’m under no distress in planning a designation. That’s freedom, isn’t it? Sometimes I wish for a shell. A proper one. Like a cockroach — yes. A shiny brown exoskeleton that tells the wind to mind its own business. With that, I could walk through fire and frost and never notice. I’d finally move without reacting. Pure agency. Divine.

And then it came to me — If I can imagine that world, then surely, it exists. Somewhere.

Otherwise, where is my imagination coming from? How can I conjure the world outside of Plato’s cave, if I haven’t seen it? Maybe it’s a forgotten world. Maybe we are the wrong version of history. Maybe there’s a gaping toothless socket in the collective brain. Something advanced came before us, and we all agreed to forget it. Very politely. Very permanently. Of course, the number one quality of a gap is its invisibility in one’s consciousness. That’s how It stays alive. For all you feel is its effect - the drag of the disjoint between reality against imagination. Dissonance and fraction. 1 gap 2 gap 3. F gap o gap r gap r gap e gap s gap t. Gaps in numbers, gaps in words, gaps between my fingers and my daughters’ names. Without the gap, nothing makes sense. Everything overlays – blurs - fuses. Becoming one slippery organism of meaninglessness. My two daughter’s faces morphing into someone else; pile the load up and jerk cognition into paralyses – unrecognisable . With the gap, I see the cause and effect of reality. Imagination as a precursor. Gap as proof. A forgotten memory of something existed. Something that will be again.

Onistic aggression.

“Dad, why are you stalking me?”

Cathy’s sweet, juvenile voice shattered through my skull like a glass pebble. It’s Cathy’s past voice. I’d forgotten its frequency and pitch. How much it had become the rhythm of my thoughts. And I lost it in my memory’s gap, metamorphosed into the siren voice of my dazed dreams. I wonder if that’s how love defies forgetfulness - mask itself in the gauze of anonymity. 

“No,” I said, “I’m not your dad. I’m not real. You’re not real either. You’re a pixel fragment of my memory. This already happened. This is recycled material.”

“Except I am real. And so are you. The only difference is you’re a few decades ahead of me.”

“How do you know you’re real?”

“Because I’ve never asked the question. Only the sick bothered with their health. Healthy people just exist.”

“And how do you know I’m real?”

“Because I remember you. And if I’m real — then the things I remember must be, too.”

“Memory can be falsified. Implanted. Synthetic. You could be remembering me through a chip someone else put into your membrane.”

“Implanted memory, what do you mean?”

Of course. It’s useless to tell my daughter a concept that has yet been conceived. Foreign digits in the collective consciousness; impossible to be downloaded across generational firewalls to her brain of un-realised, un-developed future potential.

Her answer was an ignorance-shaped righteousness.

“I’ll walk you to school. The weather is off.” my hand reached out, limbs carried forward with an evenly paced gait. I’ve already felt abnormality in this gait in the short time of my Parkinson’s diagnosis. Evolved genetic adaptation.

Suddenly – shift.

I’m at the present day of Maddy’s room. Time has adjusted myself into the linear façade of reality once again. For some reason, her room smelled stale with perfume from a different decade. Why am I alone in my daughter’s room? 

“Maddy! Maddy!” my voice came out like a torn zipper. Weak. Looping.

Quick footsteps spiralling up to the stairs.

Then, click - twist. Doorknob turned like a broken neck.

“Dad, everything ok?!” Maddy showed up with her fat, white outline. Why am I still seeing her gap?

“Maddy, I….I s-s-s-s-au C-C-C-C-A-A-A.”

“Dad! You’ve wet yourself again. Let me get you some new clothes. Are you OK? Do you want me to get a car to the doctor?”

She’s calm, corporate; a professional urine processor.

“N-N-N no… I-I-I…” I gestured an ‘Ok’ sign with my hand.

I wonder why I can’t speak anymore. Inside, I’m fine. My thoughts are existential. Complex. Clean. I am entirely coherent. But my body insists on acting like a dying species. Is this rebellion? Or protection? Is my thought too dangerously close to something? Could I have cracked the case of gap? Am I under arrest by cosmic police? Will the green man take me to the 10th civilisation of Thiaoouba prophecy? Is this what ‘insight’ feel like? Incomprehension. Misunderstanding. Confusion. Disorientation. Mockery.

“Ok Dad. Let me know if you need anything.”

Maddy disappeared into the distance. Her white outline stretched and expended to occupy the space with absence. Fat with nothing; she became emptier, de-materialised by a thread of being. I crawled to the corner. Sit, like a dog. A licking dog who enjoys wetting the dusty, pen-marked walls with their saliva. In fact, the wallpaper tasted nostalgic and sweet, like an old battery dipped in sugar. I felt aroused. A mixture of sexual and meaning. Primal. Pre-language. My ageing, wrinkled, shrank, impotent genital felt a phantom hard-on.

Neon words flashed in the back of my visual field:

‘Licking as a post-human masturbation.’

Yes. That’s it. Lick lick. Ooh, I’m getting there. Lick lick lick. Oh heaven, lord, I’m coming. My numb organs looked at my orgasmic brainwaves spat on my dysfunctional facial muscles and limbs. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. My own satisfaction of defying physiology turned into a metaphysical laugh. Then, it irritated me that my physiology blocked that emotion from the outside world; somewhat as the last pathetic attempt of a goalkeeper to win against my mind. Everything in me is keeping scores. Suddenly, a puddle of sticky, viscous, semen-like gel substance materialised in the centre of the room. I crawled to there in all fours; licked it with my tongue like a war hero who’s enjoying the sweet pomegranate of victory.

There, an exhaustion took over me. Heavy eyelid oozed me into a daze. And my body was carried by a brittle paper boat gliding on air currents. The air particles grew dense and viscousitied, dragging me downward by gravity following the trajectory of the stairs. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Maddy there. Her fat, white outline turned into a mirror of memory. In her, I saw myself in my youth, next to my ex-deceased wife. I didn’t feel emotionally moved. Her ten years disappearance from my life - divorce, then death – produced the right amount of de-humanisation for me to drop my affections. But I did feel an insatiable curiosity to see what happened there.

I stepped toward Maddy, right hand reaching into her gap.

“Dad, what are you doing?! Why are you poking at my tits?”

Ah. Right. That’s what it was when I poked. I had forgotten where female anatomy tends to locate itself. Impotence. Old age. Loss of male predatory instinct. Post-human masturbation. So on and so forth. Plus, how is one expected to place nipples on a fat, white negative space? Still, I remembered the social ritual.

“Sorry, darling,” too late I realize “darling” is the wrong flavour in this context, “anyway. Is it ok if I get inside of you?”

“Excuse me?!” Maddy was clearly upset. She shrieked, and with it: fire. Literal flame. Her outline began to burn. Edges crisped, sizzling the memory-mirror – inside that, the scene of my younger self, beside my ex-deceased wife, flickering through flame.

This worried me.

“Maddy, darling, Maddy. Calm down. Sorry I misspoke... You know, I’m an old fool with Parkinson’s. I didn’t know what I was speaking, " I paused. "Anyway, I saw somewhere, maybe on the hospital wall, there is a better insurance offer that could leave you with more money in case I die sooner.”

“Really? Oh dad. Don’t be so cruel. You know I love you. I wouldn’t mind getting less money,” her flame disappeared into a softer, less spiky outline. The idea of capital comforted her. Shiftily, she continued, “anyway, where have you seen that?”

“Yeah, you know, I think it is with Doctor Hemus, I’m not quite sure, maybe you should get Cathy to see him soon. Just wander about in the hospital halls. You never know what you can find there…” I mumbled as I approached to her central torso.

Then, aim - shoot. With full strength, I jumped into her, to that old memory scene.

It was our first house. Shabby existence. Torn wallpaper. Second-hand sofa. A time when I had thought I could be a writer - delusional bravado and intellectual over-confidence. My ex-deceased wife, Val, sat next to me - pregnant. This time, I was invisible in that scene, watching my younger self. I was talking. God, I wouldn’t shut up. I fed her non-nutritious dreams and ambitions to get her to work two jobs while growing that thing inside her. I believed myself. Worse: I made her believe in me. And now? I believe nothing of my own nonsense. But I remember it better. And memory – more than truth – is the cruellest form of faith.

I couldn’t quite hear what I was saying with her there. Only some words flew to me in disorganised fashion. ‘Bird’. ‘Tea’. ‘Shower gel’. Then at the word ‘key’, she stood and slid into the bedroom. I followed her there. She sat down at the desk, opened her notebook - autopsically dissecting the bills.

Gas bill. Bus fare. Milk. Prenatal vitamins. Rent rent rent rent rent.

She counted conscientiously for each item, and checked her box of vouchers. Scratch. Scribble. Subtract. Then, made a plan for tomorrow before closing her notebook; dazing into the window like a paused simulation. There, my two daughters materialised into my mind.

Maddy and Cathy: two sides of her mode of being.

Maddy is the addition (utility maximiser). Cathy is the subtraction (paused simulation).

Was it me? Was I the dividing variable? Did I split the atom of their mother into binary outcomes? What if I’d paid attention? What if I’d shut up more? Loved better? Said less? Be more realistic? Took on more responsibility? I suppose one cannot keep blaming oneself for being ‘young and naïve’. And guilt is a leaky tap that will eventually make you immune to the sound of its drip. In any case, my body is wrapping itself up. I can feel the tape tightening on my coffin.

I exited the house through the door. Back in my own room again.

I found myself on my bed; next to me was my two daughters, and a black gap that I intuitively recognised as Death.

There, I had the sudden outpour of guilt for Val.

“Val! Val! Forgive me Val! I love you! I love you so much!”

I shouted with full power of my lung. That organ is going to be put out of use very soon, so why not give it a last hurrah. At least, my lung will have a victorious death. A part of me deserves that. A thank-you note for sticking with this good-for-nothing. Then, I realised my tears were coming out, my face was making a sad expression. My eyes allowed me to perceive Maddy and Cathy as full-bodied people. It seems my body has been restored and optimised. Like a group of soldiers in their final battle, going for an illustrious death in the standard of physics. At least, my death has some meanings to someone - something.

“Dad - Dad. Shhh... Its ok, Dad. God, I can’t believe this is happening...This is not fair! Its too soon! Too soon!” Maddy jumped in, her tears streamed down her face. She looked emotional, less utility-maximising. Was she ever that in the first place?

“Dad, don’t go! I’m not ready! Dad, please!” Cathy followed. Her face was real, red-cheeked, breathing. Her dazed expression has gone to the point that I wondered if she, too, was never that in the first place.

Could my memory has distorted them out of my own confused state? Maybe Cathy was never dazed. Maybe I made her dazed. Maybe I projected silence onto her because mine was too loud.

“Val! Val! Val! Cathy! Maddy! I’m—hot! Window! Open!”

My verbs stammered out of me. I wanted poetry! I wanted philosophy! Meanings in my final words. Something an old man is supposed to say in their deathbed. Socrates. Plato. Caligula. They would have said something, wise or crazy, that justified death. And all I did was this? For once, please, God, at least make my death has meaning.

“Angry. I’m so angry at myself. Why? Just why?”

“For what, Dad?” the two daughters said in unison.

“I wanted to say something. Something that matters. Something right. I don’t know what it is. Tell me what to say. Please. Just tell me. “

“Just say you love us! Say you’ve lived a good life! That we were good daughters! That you’re proud!” Maddy shouted.

“I love you. I’ve lived a good life. You’ve been good daughters. I’m proud.”

I repeated it like programming. Spellwork. Surrender.

 “Thank you, Dad. We love you. Please, rest now.”

So, I did. I closed my eyes. Drifted out of the zone of consciousness. Decompressed into the dark, where I was born. In the mud. In the womb. In the holy feminine waters. Let me return to your primal hands; to be a tree, a leaf, an inorganic star dust, planet. Even chair, table, socks. As remote from humanity as possible.

I woke up in my bed.

Morning. Sunlight. Heartbeat. Functional lungs. Breathings. Baby cries. Sagging balls. Sweat. Sweat. Sweat.

I opened my morning journal to write:

Translated as…translated as… translated as…What is it?! Gone. I lost track of my thoughts. Looking out from the window at Maddy’s room, I saw a new sculptural installation outside my house. Contemporary. Richard-Serra-esque.

I counted its components from left to right, “Loop. Gap. Loop. Gap. Loop.”

Ah – thoughts come back.

The difference is one. One what?

God. One God. Monotheism. Singular reality.

God is the difference between the non-linearity of time and the negative space.

Gap is its form.

Loop is its quality.

Case solved.

I felt a smile creeping onto my face. I closed my notebook, resting my gaze on the gap between the first and the second loop of the sculpture. A perfect balance, I thought. So I turned around, re-arranging Maddy and Cathy’s bodies, and Val’s ashes, to echo the installation.

The bodies lay lifeless on the ground. Finally, peace and quiet! Blood from Cathy’s nose and Maddy’s chest became stale, dried into clots. Making the room smelled like a staled perfume. Ah that’s where that smell coming from. Sunlight shot through the window, making Val’s death-heavy ashes ever so light and ethereal. Now they seem to be complete. The binary outcome of Val is connected by her ashes at last. Gone, was the gap and the full circle. Instead, a holy trinity – re-uniting as a whole with a perfect equilibrium. It’s God’s work, I smiled at my own creation. Who said you can’t make up for the fault of your youth? Who said I have failed them? My mistakes have been corrected, for I’m the messenger of God. And so, seventy years since birth, with a foot into the grave, my meaning has come to me at last – and this is my salvation.