ERASE Notebook: small: black; Gen:11:7

Tucked in between the top and bottom of my weekly uniform exchange, I uncovered a check, addressed to me, for twenty thousand U.S. dollars. I opened it suspect, dragging the remainder of my secret, half-sharpened, yellow No. 2 pencil between the sealed lip of the blank envelope, gingerly slicing it open.

The amounts were filled out in the correct places (the date left blank – what is time anyway?) and the comment in the memo section read “ERASE Notebook: small: black; Gen:11:7”. The words meant nothing to me.

The handwriting and signature looked familiar enough; I could only assume it belonged to Father. My fading memories made me sad.

I did not know if it was from Now or Then.

Now was what the new era was called, after The Great Divide. Everything that happened before was referred to as Then.

Now, we were given individual pods, approximately six by six by six feet. I glimpsed a never-ending row of them when I was first placed. We were told, via a sound system in the versatile hole in the cedar-smelling ceiling, that “In these four walls holds everything you will ever need to succeed in Now.” I had no idea what I needed to succeed at, now that I was here. 

I was assigned a suit and underpants in grey, an armor of cotton, I believe. I received a white towel. By the end of the week you could see my face in it. 

I sneaked my pencil in, hiding it in a place too delicate to mention.

On one side of the pod was a built-in bed with a single sheet, blanket, and pillow, all off-white, like a dove, in deep contrast to the blacks of the walls, the grey floor, and the rich browns of the ceiling. Every day, at the hour the first horns alerted, the bed was raised using a simple pulley system that allowed for space underneath. It appeared to float. 

Too tall to stand fully erect, I took the opportunity to sit beneath it and meditate. I had no way to keep track of time but I guess it was about six hours a day, in between the breakfast and lunch pumps. On good days, I would forget time altogether; on the best days, I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore. This was a blessing.

On the opposite wall was a toilet, whose back basin functioned as a sink where I kept a toothbrush and some powder to prevent cavities, washed my hands, and drank from when thirsty. The hole in the ceiling (the one providing the thrice daily food pumps, the random and rare announcements, the thin shards of light) also doubled as a shower. There was a single overhead fluorescent light that turned off and on twice a day.

There was a wall with a door that contained a slot for the weekly exchanges and across from that nothing—just the fourth wall.

Twice a day, once before the breakfast pump and once after dinner, a trickle of warmish water fell down. I had to chase the stream before it escaped through the drain in the center of the sloped concrete floor.

The walls were wrapped in material that felt familiar. I think it was leather although it had been so long since I had touched the real thing I couldn’t be sure. It was a dimpled grid of columns and rows, rectangles of various shades of blacks: an ad-hoc monochromatic quilt.

In a few sections, there were straps attached that would hold my towel that was exchanged every seven days. Some straps no longer maintained their pull, loose bits of dry-rotted elastic, a constant reminder of my own mortality.

I returned the used uniform and towel in the perfectly fitting container and squeezed it back through the slot, a throwback to something like a national postal service, dismantled towards the end of Then.  During these exchanges, out of an abundance of caution, I would hide my pencil.

Behind the toilet, I had tried to record the passing of time but no surface in my pod would hold the message. Nothing stuck.

Father once said to me, “Son, never give up.”

He was a world-renowned Artist, with a capital “A”. He made large-scale installations around the known universe using the organic materials of land, sea and sky. That was Then. 

He was working on a new one when we last saw each other. His creations were kept secret even from me, a challenge given the level of enthusiasm for the work. He kept prodigious notes, drawings, drafts, scraps, and ephemera, all stacked in piles of small black notebooks in every corner of the studio. He could identify any one of them instantly, a human card catalog.

I stared at the envelope and the check.  Even before The Great Divide, during Then, checks were foreign currency. We were transferring whatever we had between devices with the push of a button. Human contact was waning. If a check was out-of-date Then, it was an ancient artifact Now.

I had no use for money anyway. He would have known that. The real value was the check itself: the text, the memo, maybe the envelope too. Written language, while prohibited, could be worth something to someone; a blank piece of paper: white gold.

This check was drawn from an institution that no longer existed (none did, to the best of my knowledge). It was shocking to see Father’s name printed on it. Now, names were never to be seen nor spoken. We were numbers. I was 08071976.

We were allowed one language that was to be performed, never pronounced, and only when “absolutely necessary.” We received a four-page key titled “The Only Language You’ll Ever Need,” inside of which were eighty drawings of hand symbols, twenty to a page. We had exactly seven days to memorize it (“six for work, the seventh for rest”) and then the key itself was considered contraband and needed to be passed back through the slot in the door. I never used any of them as there was no one to communicate with. I practiced with myself until the language became useless. Even if not spoken, anything repeated begins to lose its meaning. 

I read the memo again, “ERASE Notebook: small: black; Gen:11:7” and gathered that this would have been Father’s way of organizing them, but I didn’t know why “ERASE” was there. He kept everything.

I didn’t know how one small black notebook could be differentiated from another. He did though. He knew everything.

He insisted that the notebook was as important as the ideas that it held. He used to say “Son, you cannot have one without the other,” and when I challenged this I was met with gentle resistance, “You think you can remember everything ever thought of, ever seen, ever created without writing it down? You’re smart, but not omnipotent.”  

“The real measure of intelligence is how willing we are to ask for help,” another mantra Father preached.

I paced the length of my pod. I did this daily. I counted ten-thousand steps, leftover aspirations from Then. Besides the three meals that were delivered in liquid form through the tube in the ceiling (which I had to catch in my mouth or else watch it go down the drain when the showers came) my daily step count and meditations were the only other things to do.

I had visions.

I had the pencil, but until this envelope, nowhere to write. I tried to write on the walls, but the surface didn’t hold the graphite. I attempted three times; the pencil was over half gone by the time I was done and I had no way to sharpen it.

Father once said, of creation, that , “Every material is viable, every material is useful. Throw nothing out.” I thought of this as I looked at the pencil with its nearly full, bulbous pink eraser attached to the yellow No. 2. A small, silver, metal casing connecting the tool to write and the tool to erase. “ERASE Notebook small black.”  He was communicating with me.

I held the eraser this time. It was staring at me. I had no notebook. Maybe it was the check, the envelope? It was small enough and functioned in a similar manner, capable of holding text and ideas. I could write on it. “ERASE Notebook small black.” Maybe I was to write something else and erase it, like they used to say Then: Write a letter, but don’t send it. Just get it out.

Father seemed to pass through me; at times, I felt like a tourist in own body.

Days or weeks or months passed. I swallowed my pumps, took my showers, my bed rose up and down. One thousand steps, two thousand steps, ten thousand steps, meditate, rinse, wash, repeat.

My weekly exchanges came. I changed my clothes, searching the new ones for any messages tucked in a towel or hidden in the folds of fabric. Nothing happened. I was dressed in grey, surrounded by black walls that increasingly felt like they were closing in on me.

I tried once more to write on the walls, but nothing came of it. While it left some indentations in certain spots, traces of silver-grey in others, I would have gone through what remained of my No. 2 in no time given the pressure I had to apply to make even the faintest mark. I had never tried to erase them.

I was making my marks low, hidden behind the bowl of the toilet. They were simple marks, lines meant to represent a day, three, maybe four. I could no longer tell, they were so faint. I took my eraser and started to gently rub. A sprinkle of pink dust fell and floated away. A whitish mark appeared across the black. It seemed to dance along the surface of the wall.

I rubbed again, more vigorously this time, trying to write with the eraser. I lost control for a moment, frantically stroking, head first in the hope of discovery when the wall itself appeared to come off:  the eraser gripping the leather-like material, pulling it away like the skinning of a hide. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

I was petrified in ecstasy. It was the sublime. I was tearing down the wall. It was tearing down itself. The strong eraser was pulling the weak surface away to reveal a notebook—one of Father’s, the covers spread open to line my pod; inside were pages upon pages of words, notes, sketches. His memo was working.

I found the seventh row, in the eleventh column and began scratching with my eraser, a chicken clawing the Earth. As the layers began to peel back I pried my pinky in between the notebook and the wall. There was so much to scour. Each page was dated and contained meticulous notes on whatever was being worked on at the time.

I was in Heaven.

He was everywhere in these pages, everywhere, but this was not what I was looking for. I went back to the eleventh row, seventh column, and used my eraser again.

As I stripped it back, slowly, so as not to tear a single page, it appeared, miraculously. This notebook, dated a few months before The Great Divide, was presciently titled “The Great Divide,” with two columns labeled “Now” and “Then” with a single, vertical line down the center. Beneath this, on either side of the line were the words “now” and “then” in every known language, or so a note told me: “‘Now’ ‘Then’ repeated, over and over in every language of the world to-be-titled ‘Babel On.’” 

My head spun with the words of the world spewing forth. 

His latest installation had come to fruition after all.

Silence.