STEPHEN BERG
When he told me about the breakup of his marriage, about his wife fucking other men now, (that’s what he believed), that he wanted to die because she wouldn’t take him back,
Then, a year later, about being caught in the parking lot minutes after he squeezed the metal and wood office chair into the trunk of his Honda Prelude,
About not understanding why he stole it, why, even after he knew security guards were watching, he continued to fit the chair into his trunk,
When the chair became the main theme of his suicidal shame, his helplessness, his endless daily calls, I felt some clue to the secret of his cure had been revealed, though I had no idea what it was.
He needed to be forgiven, redeemed, but for what, after all? Surely not for something as common as divorce, surely not for stealing a cheap chair from the addiction clinic he ran.
I try to see him in the parking lot, lugging the worthless object to his car, setting it down, unlocking the trunk, wrestling it in until he saw he couldn’t close it, jumping into the car, and a guard appears and asks what he’s doing.
“All I wanted, really, was to sit down, to rest…” I hear him say, and it’s crazy, it makes no sense—chairs are everywhere. Why steal a rickety old chair from your employer?
Poor friend, what could have soothed your infinite need? Last night, in a dream, bearded, disheveled, drained, exactly as you were, you sat so close your breath and hair smelled real, you were hoping for a word, and I yelled, “Go away! You’re dead.”
The guard’s hand thrust through the car window, grabbing your shoulder, the transfixed menacing glare of glass and painted metal through the windshield at that instant, wild with detail…
But you can’t describe the event, its textures and traits, shapes, gestures, light. You can only sketch auras of mood. Jeff, I’d ask you, and you’d be silent. You thought your confusion meant you had no right to speak. You believed words betrayed you, even in your poems where you grieve for an unnamed woman, for your soul infected with the silent wish to die, with the necessary theft of the chair. You equated silence with truth. I’d sit with you, day after day, helpless in your silence.
Two years after your wife demands you leave, hours after you slave all weekend to start a Japanese garden behind your new house, your heart stops, then the monthlong coma before the tubes are pulled and you dissolve.
Sit in it, feel it under you, relax; stand next to it, place your hand on its backrest; kneel, rest your head on its seat. Cool green steel legs, rivets, laminated wood.
The chair is an afterimage, a thing smoldering in the air.
Your final silence hums on the air.
December. Gray sun. Bamboo seedlings, grass, sky. Squatting to a rock that weighs much more than you do, your face crammed against it, you stretch your arms and hands around it; for the hundredth time, try to lift it, lean, kneel, clutch it tighter, squash your cheek and chest against it, grunt, jam your fingers under it, half-stand, push, hold your breath. Your life is like the darkness inside the rock, inside your brain.
The chair is a blindness that will kill you.