Dear Charles,

There are many dangers involved in spending your life in a pale green room, not least of which is the open window looking at the scenery of a neighbor's brick wall. Or is that your own brick wall built over the pane of glass? Well, what is important is a serious detachment from thinking one or the other to be true, thus giving you the freedom to select neither one nor the other for personal reasons. The thoughts that stream throughout: you can't imagine where you are because you are the new man, the original, unblemished copy, the early riser who has not slept, and when you ponder Blanche the Gymnast you can only fathom cartwheels, as though your memory of her is as the woman who is an action and the cartwheel the real object of your attraction and scrutiny. But however in the world did you find yourself in that green room; however in the world, and however will you escape? You ask yourself or you ask that person your self used to be but only now represents. It is not cold in the green room. It is green. Understanding this you might understand everything. Let me say before we get started: the cerebral mixture of melancholic hysteria, rigid dissent and overabundant love has locked you in your peculiar situation. And Blanche is responsible, no matter what you think otherwise. There was a time, my friend, when everything clicked with an audible harmony between you two. Unrelated question: Does time destroy people or do people destroy time? Think carefully. Because this is the sole question, the solution to your green room. The green room. There can be but one action you can take in a green room and that is speechlessness on an epical narrative level. The stories you tell to keep yourself at peace. You'll say: Oh those. Speechlessness, my friend, is what you own. Right after you disappeared into your little green solitude, Blanche and I went strolling in a small park nearby to explain to one another what had become of you. To lie rather. We both knew exactly what had become of you, but neither of us realized the other did as well. She said, putting her hands into the falling water of the spouting marble lion:

He is afraid.

Afraid! I said. Afraid of what?

He is just afraid.

Of anything, I said.

Of anything, but as long as it's his own invention.

I believe, I said (taking your side of the argument), that he is courageous for vanishing. (I did not say, good friend: into the green room!)

If he is brave to betray everything in the most cowardly way then he is brave yes.

Blanche took her hands out of the fountain and dried them on my felt cap for reasons that will become obvious in several years. She is full of these esoteric quirks, but you already know that. We passed sluggishly around the circumference of the park and came at last to the electrified fence that towered above our heads. If you strain your eyes painfully you will see, at the very top, a haphazard assortment of dress shoes, pant fabric, briefcase handles, and a various assortment of any number of things you may forget taking along anywhere. I wondered why anyone would risk the certified death this climb entailed, since it stretched across the ground about nine feet, and the spaces surrounding it were completely open. Was it the same reason the fence had been constructed in the first place? It brought to mind the old adage you'll have heard a thousand times: How does one escape an unlocked room when he knows that the other side contains more or less of the same?

So Blanche grew tired and we rested awhile on a bench. Nearby an athlete was stretching in preparation for her long ascent up the fence. A crowd had gathered on the other side to watch the fall. They were kept from entering the park itself by the electric fence.

Let's move, Blanche said.

We moved to the shade of an insignificant tree and sat on the lumpy grass. She began at once:

One evening I told him that he could tell me anything: his most treasured secret or mundane hope or repetitious catchphrase.

Oh yes, I said.

He confided that he loved me, Blanche remarked to the side, But that my presence made him feel indifferent to both me and love, and for that matter, towards life itself.

He said all that to you?

And of course to be treated indifferently is much worse than being hated.

Being hated.

Hate is an absence of love, as we know. Whereas indifference is the truest absence available.

I agree.

Indifference is an absence of absence, and what's more.

But I cannot say more because the remainder is unimportant. Afterwards however, Blanche did elaborate a nightmare she's been having every other Tuesday successively for four months since you left. In her words, as precisely as I can remember:

I remember this (she begins): I am standing at the corner of Rimbaud and Hell, and I have been reincarnated into I don't know what, perhaps you. To the left a car dealership and every vehicle is filled with people pretending they are driving somewhere. I want so badly to tell them they are stationary (sic), but this, it seems to me, would force the dream to a conclusion. I know all the while that it is a dream, and that I am someone (or something) else. And the families in their unmoving cars without so much as an idling motor: where do they pretend to be going? I could be a slug or a torn piece of yellowish paper or the poem emblazoned on the left-hand margin. Perhaps I am the margin. A young gas station attendant very close by motions the rooted cars over to his beautiful garage installed for the occasion, as though fuel could cure their crisis. I take one step back. I am in your green room. There is a sink and a tub and various bathing utensils and hygiene products displayed on every ledge. And the brick window. The only thing missing (for I've been here before) is you and what I feel is unsafe, yet somehow comforted by such solitude. Oh Chuck, if only you knew the dangers involved in spending your life in a pale green room. And the window.

We spoke more, but nothing conclusively about you. We still speak occasionally, mostly about you and your green room. I sincerely wish I could be with you, but there are battles to commence and allies to succor. And also, you have not yet invited me. I beg you answer this latest letter, for the other twelve that I sent were somehow or other lost in the system en-route to me. You are wondering how I am able to imagine your situation so well. It isn't difficult.

Your Erstwhile Friend,
Chuck


P.S. I hope the cartload of multi-colored wallpaper has arrived.


Copyright  2007 Michael Peck

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