With Nothing to Bring Us Together

           During recess, I scan the schoolyard until I find Mellamine all the way on the other side, turning a jumprope for Cerulea, staring straight ahead like she’s looking past everything in front of her and drilling deep into the school with x-ray vision. Then I know with total certainty that I’m going to trade the only real secret I have for Mellamine’s—her secret identity as a poetry prodigy, if the rumors are right.           

           When I see Mellamine crossing the cafeteria alone with her lunch tray, this could be my chance. So even though Elana is in the middle of telling us about the new trick her dog can do, I pick up my tray and head to the dish room. 
           Inside, there’s only us, just as I hoped, just me standing beside her as she scrapes gravy from her plate into the compost bin.
           Still, I whisper when I say, “If you tell me about your poetry, I’ll show you something special in my room.”
           Her head swivels in my direction like she’s part owl.
           “Who told you about the poetry?” she hisses, her eyes peering right into mine. 
           “It doesn’t matter,” I answer. “I already kind of know, so you might as well tell me about it and see what I have to show you.”
           “OK. Meet me behind the garden shed in ten minutes,” she says, then goes back to scraping her plate. 
           When I get to the shed, she’s already sitting on the ground with her back pressed against the shingles of the rear wall. 
           I sit down next to her, and she says, “It’s pretty simple, really. I just hear poems a lot of the time. And the only way to stop it for a while is to write the poems down.”
           “This happens every day, during school?” I ask. 
           “Yeah. You know how truckers have that radio for calling or listening to other truckers?”
           “Oh, like the ones police have in patrol cars?”
           “Right. My brain is like that radio. Always on, picking up poems. And when one comes on, the poem repeats, like a song that’s stuck in my head. Unless I write it down. After I do that, it’s radio silence for anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours before the next one comes.”
           “Wow.”
           “So what’s in your room?”
           “Come over and you’ll see.”
           “Today?”
           “Sure, today’s fine.”

           Mellamine waits for me by the classroom door as I finish putting things into my backpack. As soon as I’m done, I skip putting on my jacket and hurry over to her.
           For a few blocks, we walk in silence, until I ask, “Are you hearing a poem right now?”
           “No, not right now,” she says.
           “Then we can talk.”
           “Yeah, we can talk.”
           “When did you start hearing poetry?”
           “About 2 years ago.”
           “Did something happen that, um, switched on the radio?”
           “I don’t know. But it started after a family vacation to Arcadia. It could have been something about that trip.”
           “Like what?”
           “Like hearing and seeing another language pretty much all the time. It was strange recognizing the letters in the street signs and billboards and magazines but not knowing any of the words they spelled. Like everything was in code or language had gotten rearranged according to new rules.”
           The way she says rearranged makes me want to go to a place where things have been switched around into a different order.

           Once we’re in my room, I point to the door next to the dresser. The polished oak gleams the way it always does this time of day when the weather is clear. 
           “Behind there,” I tell Mellamine.
           She puts her hand on the brass knob, then looks at me. I nod.
           The moment she opens the door, her eyes go wide, and I’m sure she’s never seen darkness like this. See, I want to say, aren’t you glad we traded secrets?
           “What is it?” she asks, her voice hushed and uncertain—completely different from all the times I’ve heard it at school.
           “It isn’t anything.”
           “It’s nothing?”
           “Nothing and nowhere and never ending.”
           She reaches a hand in, like I often do, pushing steadily forward until her arm is stretched straight out.
           “Whoa, it really is,” she says.
           When she finally takes her hand out, she asks, “Has it always been part of the house?”
           “No, it was my birthday present last year.”

           After I’ve turned off all the lights for bedtime, I open the door. As always, the nothingness makes the knobs and edges of the dresser more visible, like its darkness makes my room glow faintly, this total absence making the presence of things more noticeable. Looking into it, I think about something Mellamine said when we stood here in the afternoon sunlight.            
           “There’s no safety net or anything?”
           Such a thing had never crossed my mind. Even when Mom said, “You aren’t afraid she’ll fall in?”
           Because right away Granma answered, “No. You certainly didn’t.”
           “But I was older,” Mom said.
           “Well, she’s old enough to be careful.”

           On the way home from school, I’m surprised when I see Mellamine a block ahead of me, standing at the corner of Spruce and Elm, writing on a notecard.           
           “Hey,” I call out while crossing the street.
           She looks up from the notecard and answers, “Oh, hey.”
           “Isn’t your house in the opposite direction?” I ask.
           “Yeah, it is. But I wanted to ask you something.”
           “OK. Ask away.”
           “Can I throw some poems into the nothingness?” 
           She holds up the notecard she was writing on.
           “I guess. But why?”
           “I need to get rid of them. Somewhere no one will find them.”
           I want to ask why, but I just did, and asking again might sound annoying. 
           So I just say, “OK.”
           A huge smile brightens her face. 
           “Thanks!” she says.
           The rest of the way home, she walks next to me without saying anything. I don’t say anything either so that the afterglow of her smile can float between us.

           With Mellamine back in my room, it’s like time has looped back to yesterday. But now, Mellamine moves with certainty as she places her backpack on the floor then opens it and takes out a stack of notecards. Going along with the flow of her actions, I open the door, and she flings the notecards into the black rectangle in front of us. They fly apart before vanishing completely into the dark. Then it feels like something should happen, like this is some sort of magic trick and flower petals or confetti will fly out at us. But of course, nothing happens.           
           How many days of poetry was that stack?
           “I feel better already,” she says.
           That reminds me of something Granma often says: Living in the world means letting go.
           “Mom says I should keep them in this box she gave me,” Mellamine tells me. “Sometimes I do, but there’s way too much.”
           Maybe the poems are about sad things. 

           Soon, Mellamine is coming over regularly after school to get rid of poems. Usually on Monday and Thursday. After she’s tossed her latest stack of notecards into the darkness, we do our homework together. She always has questions about things she missed during class because she was distracted by a new poem. I don’t see how she ever does homework on her own. Maybe she gets help from her parents.                     
           I also have questions. Mainly, I want to know about the poems, but I make sure to ask her about other things too, like what her favorite foods and movies are.
           When I finally ask her how the poems sound, she says, “Like someone talking aloud to herself.”
           “Is it always the same voice?”
           “Most of the time.”

           I want to ask her if I can read some of the poems before she casts them into the nothingness, but that might seem nosy, which I guess it is. Still, I really want to know what the poems are about. If only there was some way to catch them before they go far off into the nothingness.           
           Then, in the middle of social studies class, it hits me. Safety net. Of course.
           As soon as I get home, I rummage around in the basement and find an old mosquito net that just might do the trick. I hurry upstairs with it balled up in my hands then pin its corners to the doorframe with thumbtacks. I throw an old magazine into the darkness then carefully unpin the net and bring it back into the sunlight that fills my room. In the limp mesh is the magazine. 
           The next time she comes over, I’m nervous, afraid that she’ll see the masking tape covering the thumbtacks. But she just cracks the door open, sticks her hand in and banishes the latest pack of notecards with a flick of her wrist. 

           Once she’s gone home, I use the stepladder to unpin the upper corners of the mosquito net. I hold on to them as I descend to the floor, then use them to pull the rest of the net back through the doorway. I grin the moment I see the notecards come out of the darkness, the handwriting on them messy, nothing like the neatly formed letters Mellamine uses to fill in worksheets and outline reading assignments.           
           I gather up the notecards, wanting to read the poems on them right away. But I put the stack of them on my desk for later, for when I’m ready to have my thoughts rearranged by poetry. 

           I start reading the poems after dinner, taking my time with each notecard. The words are mostly simple ones, but together they have the wise tone of a teacher or grandparent, telling me about things that await me in the future or in a different world. Being patient with a small child as an act of trust. A sculpture that will come to life when the right person comes along. Relying on amnesia as a cure for embarrassment because the true antidote of acceptance doesn’t come easy.            
           In the middle of the seventh poem, I notice certain words stand out—harmony, time, mystery, azure, affinity. I go back to the poems I’ve read and find the same thing—words that seem to have come off their notecards but stay suspended above them. How did I miss that? Are the poems just like that or…
           I get the magazine I used to test the mosquito net and open it to a random page—an article about a kind of bird that can quiet the space around it with a special song. Some words here and there stand out but not as much as the ones in the poems. Is it because the poems were in the nothingness longer?
           I take the magazine over to the door and, like Mellamine did, crack it open enough to reach in. I hold the magazine inside and wait. After a little while, I feel a soreness in my palm. Probably from today’s math sprint, from gripping my pencil tight while writing furiously to finish as many problems as I could in 5 minutes. 
           When I open the magazine, there are words clearly hovering above the page. I want to tell Mellamine about this, but I have to figure out how.

           I can’t stop thinking about holding the magazine in the nothingness while I’m getting ready for bed. Did holding the magazine make my palm more sore, or did the nothingness make the soreness more noticeable like it did with those words? And if putting my arm inside it made me notice the soreness in my palm, would putting my head inside make me notice certain ideas or memories?           
           I’ve only done that once but not for very long. It felt like being aware of being soundly asleep—of being in the world but completely separated from it. And I’ve never had any desire to feel that again.
           But now I have to know what effect the nothingness could have on my mind. And I have to do this with Mellamine, to know if whatever happens to me is or isn’t just me. 
           For a while after bedtime, I lie awake in bed imagining different ways I could tell Mellamine about what I want to do. My mind orders and reorders words, finally settling on an arrangement that feels like a dream blended with a memory, like something impossible that’s already happened.
           “Let’s try an experiment,” I’ll say before telling her that I’m curious how we each experience the nothingness. I won’t mention the magazine. Instead I’ll explain how we’ll experience it, how we’ll take turns leaning our heads into the darkness.
           “Put your hands on the doorframe to make sure you don’t fall in. I’ll grab on to your ankles just in case. Take a deep breath to hold because there won’t be any air on the other side.”
           Then I’ll ask, “You want to go first?” And no matter who’s first, we’ll have a new secret to keep just between the two of us.