A Box of No-Feelings
by Gretchen Astro Turner
It’s Christmas eve. Snow has lampshaded neighbors’ trees. Trees are Candyland cotton-tufted lollipops strung with colored lights. Squirty pricks of saltwater taffy tones throw star-shaped lances of glow into the night, from beneath their snow-translucent blanket. Little halos of hushed hue encircle each Jolly-Rancher of light. The effect is pure postcard.
Leif found himself entranced by the charm of this graphic. He lived in a type of toy train town, like the ones donning living room bureaus at holiday time. Only Leif’s neighborhood was life-size. Well, in his mind, it remained a diorama, with people of movable plastic and everything just a little too saccharine, like the sugarcubes that play snow in a child’s Inuit school project.
But in the confections and affectations, Leif always found little nibbles of pure delight. That’s all there were. Never full meals, nor even adequate snacks of relief, only a nibble here and a stolen moment there of sheer enjoyment. Where the traffic of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that blared constantly in his overwrought mind would cease and a wide open field of just-snowed-upon quiet would send up its warming, enveloping arms for a fleeting embrace of Leif’s lonesome, disaffected mind. His mind was a dogsled and if one husky was tiring, a dozen more would pick up the pace and the race race race of thoughts would mush on.
Leif was growing weary of the endless sprint and only snatches of comfort. He was sick of having to work so hard to constantly find joy like matchsticks. Sure, there’d be rushes and blazes of light…and then the stick would burn down and the smile was over. Why couldn’t that fire catch on anything? Why was it destined to always burn out in its predictable crawl down the stalk ‘til fingers clutching to the moment are nearly singed with desire to hold on to the high just a little bit longer? Why couldn’t *happy* be more like the sun and just fireball with permanent might? Why did the train of good feelings always have a stop over and wind up with a shitty seat to complete the ride? – next stop, loneliness.
Why was “why” such an exasperating word?
It’s not that Leif even wanted answers. He just didn’t want the constant questions, whose answers begot more quandaries, quagmires and quickly dissipating comforts of resolution. Why couldn’t his mind hush to mirror-like stillness, so it could reflect the perfect vastness of a divinely appointed sky? Why couldn’t he regard the pursuit of asking why, not as futility but as a divining rod destined to point to the presence of silent elemental knowingness, deep under the human crust of consciousness. And why couldn’t he plug his current of wondering into this telluric socket, trusting, like a sage sunflower, it would conduct its quest back to the unequivocal light of the sun, where life is given without question. He was starting to grow weary of the perpetual “why”-shaped branch of his witch hazel psyche, always prancing forward at something tellingly beneath the seeable, but never knowing exactly what.
Today Leif wanted exhilaration of feeling alive, of striking water, or alchemical ore, or that mystical umbilicus mundi, so he could control capricious energies of life around him and subvert their transience once and for all. He was sick of joys being little untrained puppies that would only scatter and bark anarchically when you commanded them to “stay!” So, with his backpack around two shoulders, Sorel Caribou boots, and an inscrutable gleam in the orb of his right eye, he trudged through the shag coconut carpeting of his snowed-in toy town on December 24th. He was determined to leave glass-half-emptiness behind in favor of something that would let his heart overflow in the frothing springs of vitality. He was ready for something extreme. He was courting something off the beaten, ground-down path. His desire lines felt more like rug stains, his desire tree bore hollow fruit in the flaying cold of this hark-hear-the-bells night, tolling desolation in the void of a ramshackle, Yule-bereft bell tower.
Leif knew where there was a bridge nearby. The highest one in the outlying vicinity. He didn’t mind walking miles to get to it. It took the seemingly endless march of a lifetime to get to what he was planning but some hours in the Jackfrostbitten evening were a little price to pay for the release he was ready for. He never had the courage ‘til now.
His life felt like an unraveled kitestring caught in a telephone pole wire strung between oaks battered by maelstrom after thunderstorm after tempest. In his string, knotted with brambles, trapped, decayed leaves, and even dead creatures of some miniscule sort, from years of accumulated bacterial debris that attracted scavengers feeding off his life that felt slowly leaving, there seemed, to him, a legacy of loss. Jobs fired from, or derelict of his own volition. Romances rusted in the oxidation of forsaken tears. And death. Death. Death of meeting the lethal headlights, that looked like python eyes, in the oncoming car wreck that suffocated his best friend. That’s how his only childhood soul mate was ripped from him when he was 13, after being nearly conjoined twins, inseparable from nursery school. The driver hit a patch of black ice on the main drag in town, and Emma never even knew what hit her. Or his mother who died of breast cancer when he was 8, whose remission only lasted two years. And his older brother who fatally overdosed in the bathroom they always used to eat Sunday brunch in (it was their weird little ritual!). Leif was a still-growing yet handsome (girls certainly seemed to think so) 18-year-old when it happened, but no matter how tall Leif got, he always looked up to Corgan like he was God incarnate. An impossibly significant part of Leif went to join Corgan forever in that horrible, maroon, varnished box.
From where he stood now, looking out into the mirage-y distance, that was never further than the tip of his nose (for there was no such thing as later, he was always trapped in now – Zen philosophers delineated this phenomenon well), he saw only glass walls ever tempting him with treats behind the fancy display 5th Avenue windows, but with little endurance of pleasure after actually encountering the mannequins in various artsy poses of meaning or weighty-yet-frivolous fun. Where was the mouth of the river that ran blood through their *real* veins? Leif wanted to put his mouth right up to it, to drink life’s elixir straight from the carton. And he wanted a bottomless pot of love, of joy, of peace. Not one that burned to crematorium-flavored char after too long over the fire.
Maybe Leif just felt too much. He was always accused of being oversensitive when he was little, of caring too much about the little Robin with a snapped wing, whose rapid, desperate wing-flapping fluttered the crispy leaves beside it as it lay there to die next to the playground slide. Leif could never just turn off his feelings and accept death of something so innocent, of something so fragile and little and pure, the way others chalked it up to life being lifelike. “Oh well, you live and you die – as He gives so does He take away,” they would say in a platitudinous chorus of inurement to that over which they had no control. Leif could not bear to watch living beings suffer under the whimsical mercenary of time. Or what they attributed to an omniscient, omnipotent God. He needed to free himself from the inevitability of time’s battering ram, which played spin the bottle as a career and randomly chose victims to whom it would administer its kiss of death.
No, he would not have it. Leif wanted to choose his life and he wanted to choose his death. How fair was it for that Robin to chirrup gurglingly in agony when the little birdie never intentionally brought agony to anything else, only living according to its nature? Why do things with open, white hearts that live only to bring pleasure to the world — like birds obeying invisible time signatures in the clouds and lush arrangements of notes in the Braille of trees’ G-clefs, who deliver song to all of Mother Nature’s creatures — have to endure sudden, irrational pain? Why, again, did the question “why” have to come with no comforting explanations? For some, a riddle and rhymeless universe was acceptable. For, people kept on living carefreely and enduring time’s feckless blows. Indifferent to the tragic unfairness of it all. For Leif, he felt loss of things loved too acutely. And he craved to not have to feel it anymore.
One Christmas, when he was 9, he asked Santa for a Box of No-Feelings. So he wouldn’t have to cry when he walked home each day seeing once-alive furry lives splattered along that busy main road, with so many lights and intersections, hemming the woods for such a long stretch. And he wouldn’t have to get a gob of sob in his throat with sadness as he rode the subway in the city, across from the bench with the old man lying down, leather, creased face almost the color of iodine, with a hint of a calm smile, clenching something inside that paper lunch bag, as he slept.
Even on Leif’s 21st Christmas, he still longed for a Box of No-Feelings. He would still, regularly, weep silently in his room, flashbacking to those kids who were now a branding iron in his head from that trip his dad took him on to India. His dad was always travelling, as a top software engineer for international clients, and when Lief was 21, he asked if he could join his father on his business trip to Mumbai. Leif saw an endless stream of burnt sienna-skinned kids who were shoeless, or, if they did have shoes, had visible frayed holes with big toes and chicory-colored socks poking up through them, below the tatters of rags hardly earning the dignity of clothing. Worse than shoeless, many were limbless, as the leprosy, combined with poverty, had gouged them out of body parts, as well as home. Even though the children sang, with clear, jubilant eyes, in colorful, high-pitched voices, and danced, and banged on home-made drums, and shook bangles convivially, Leif was never the same after that trip.
On that 9th Christmas when he sat on Santa’s lap in Macy’s that year and wide-eyefully requested a Box of No-Feelings, Santa said he might prefer a toy train or a football. He said that Santa’s elves made children toys and games and made wishes come true, and without any feelings, Leif wouldn’t be able to be happy like all little boys are meant to be. So Leif got a mitt (which, admittedly, he loved since sports were a type of salvation and he always felt Home on any court or field) and a genuine Major League, signed baseball that year, signed by some famous short-stop he had never heard of. But magically, the Box of No-Feelings was under the tree, too, though none of his family could see it. Leif knew he got it, because when he opened all his other gifts, he didn’t feel happy.
So today Leif had donned his well-stuffed backpack, and waterproof boots, and was determined to find his happy. He was determined to leave all the loss and sadness and disappointment behind for a swig from the bottle of something true and that might make him feel something other than cheated and at the mercy of the unknown all the time. He was going to take life — and that ineffable, slinking-around-the-corner, ready-to-spring-at-any-time, wildcard of death — into his own hands. He was going to defy life’s rules for once.
After four hours of trudging through the snow, past lines of houses festively decorated with all the accoutrements of holiday cheer and multi-colored, stringed, Jolly Rancher luminescence, he arrived at the bridge connecting his town to the one across the river, that faraway hamlet called Styxville — a rather weird and ominous title he always thought, though he couldn’t put a finger on why.
Leif sucked a huge breath into his lungs, that made his belly protrude like a bullfrog’s cheeks, as he looked over the frozen rail of the bridge up into the real-life planetarium doming him, then he did the thing he always got a naughty giggle out of each time he was standing at a deliriously way-up height, at an acrophobic’s nightmare of a high precipice. He ejected a little meteor of spit down into the plumbline depth of shallows and unknowns below. He was too high up and it was too inkwell black this time of night to watch the fulfilling little “plop” of splash as the bubbly baseball of saliva connected with the mirror still sheath of water below. But Leif giggled to know it would hit the water, because some laws of life and science and gravity are inevitable.
And with this in mind, Leif climbed up onto the steel cross beam of the ridge that demarcated the bridge from the open expanse of dizzyingly high, Van Gogh starry night sky surrounding it. From there, he ascended a little ringed ladder that people who worked on the bridge must use when they need to get to the tippy top of one of the towers, over which the vast cables travel. Leif finally felt alive and eternal as he was about to defy one of life’s laws. His heart was still as a mirror and reflecting the perfect pointillism of light pricks above him. He felt as though something finally did make sense and he was ready to join with a divinely appointed sky. He looked death in the face, with the street sign next to him reading one mile to Styxville.
And he leapt.
… with an unimaginably large smile that did not fade for those 10 some-odd seconds he remained aloft while his parachute pack opened and he fluttered cleanly onto the dock way below. Onto the safe, human-engineered plank of a surface next to which pleasure cruiser boats all bobbed and glittered in stringlights and revelry of people inside singing Christmas carols, like Robins, who, for at least a little while, forgot one of their wings were snapped.