The Naught Times

By Jane Marion

When a heart is empty it seeds itself on a blank page, with the hope growth might arise out of each loss. The Naught Times is a collection of short, melancholy prose and fiction about love, loss, friendship and nostalgia. From cover to cover the writing spans the last decade of the author's life. It is a book about the difficulty of saying goodbye, and letting go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257414710

Book preview

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The Ear of My Heart

The gift of your whispered, I’m sorry was unwrapped by the languid movement through my cochlea, drummed deeper by invisibly precise inverted flam taps. In the deepest part of the inner ear, lies a heart in the shape of shell. It makes your supplications sound like ocean waves, and slip into my mouth through tiny estuaries. Then, your whispers taste like salt water taffy and remind me of our days in the ancestral Tla’o’qui’aht Nation, in Tofino.

You told me the inlet was named by the Spanish explorer after the man who had taught him cartography. I found a shell on the beach, and thought of the heart in my ear named after a snail. Snails never get credit as explorers; all else usually arrives first. But I think they must examine more of the world underneath their body; each grain of sand felt more precisely than others leaping through and over it, missing so much traded in haste. I like that my inner ear is a snail, feeling your compunction like each grain of that blond beach.

In the moment of your last contrition all I could think of were dolphins. Had I been in the water when you left, I am sure they would have rescued me; taking me somewhere safe after I had been set out to sea; marooned by your inability to stay still. Love needs slow moving cochlea, not the speed of a gazelle. You ran. And here in this urban space, where there is too much concrete for a snail to survive, and dolphins are denigrated in theme parks, all I was left with was silence.

For many months I was sure I’d gone completely deaf.

In the course of relationships, metaphors emerge, meaningless to every ear outside the couplet; like we are the only two people in the entire universe who understand that an emu is not just an emu. There is no other person you could touch, taste, or whisper to, that would think of your mother’s gentle intelligence when contemplating the utterance of the emu, or your father’s curiosity at the mention of a bat. When you deliver these words in public, and other people proclaim to understand, our metaphors are kidnapped. They belong to us and no one else.

For a long time, after your departure, I wanted to redact large parts of the vernacular and refuse to allow certain habits of speech to go on unbroken.

Thankfully, many of these words are not used with regularity; for what a shame it would be had a distinct memory connect to the word is, or that. I’d have wanted to remain deaf, forever.

Little things, like a word here and there, become difficult for a long time before forgiveness sets in. But slowly, I’ve forgiven the way you tore off my endearments as if you’d been shackled but found a way out. I’ve forgiven the way you casually disregarded the bestowment of my affection upon you as if I’d been laying stones upon your chest. There was a time I despised the thought of even one of your easy breaths occurring at the same time mine were stymied and laborious.

Forgiveness, when it came, was like jumping into the ocean and not needing a dolphin, able suddenly to hear what the whales were singing about, and feeling the inner tiny tapping of each reverberation in the deep heart of both ears; a symphony of exodus and arrival.

I took my daughter swimming in the ocean yesterday, and at the shore she found a shell that looked like a heart. I hope she hears the world, as close to her, as a snails belly on every swell of world, every pebble with each pause, and know the prodigious triumph of a journey along the path of nuanced flaws.

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The Pawn Shop

The door jingled as it shut behind her, causing her a moment of panic as it closed. She wondered why she’d come. Perhaps it was a bad idea. Perhaps she didn’t want to go through with this after all, but her thoughts of fleeing were interrupted by the deep voice behind the desk. It met her ear as cruelly complacent and sounded hollow; a voice that recognized her tentativeness, and sensed her susceptibility.

She laughed at herself, wondering why on earth she would expect something like compassion within this context. This was a place that existed entirely upon the vulnerability of necessity. It was a place to sell what you didn’t want to give away, but what you needed to trade for something else, in order to get by – for just a little while longer. The sad strings of guitars exchanged for just another hit sang to the engagement rings traded to pay for heat; empty cups traded for water rested precariously next to radios offered for electricity.

He asked her what she had come to offer up to him. In a pause, she clumsily sifted around for a few memories that would make her want to go through with the letting go. She sifted through quiet whispers within the wee hours, and stacks of carefully handwritten letters. Suddenly, she remembered Loving. No. Not those. They were making her again want to turn around and leave with the wounds and density of interconnectedness. She kept looking for the memories reminding her of the Danger; the ones that had brought her here in the first place. Several were to be found in the scar of reminiscence.

She was an emotional vagrant, exchanging one set of emotions for ones slightly more sustainable. She was preparing to barter a part of her soul away. She put her Expressivity on the table, with all of its rich history, for him to judge its worth.

She wanted to know how much Silence she could get for it in return.

He held it in his hands and examined it quizzically. There was profound weight to it, and it was an unusual trade; the majority of these transactions were reversed. He’d encountered many cocooned individuals who had finally decided they wanted the experience of emotional articulation.

To be sure, her Expressivity had value, but the inequity of the trade was deeply puzzling.

A woman sitting in the corner behind him, busy doing calculations of some sort, kept looking over curiously. Her old and weathered face reflected how she was feeling; an acute nonverbal representation of both disgust and tragic understanding. It evoked a sudden sense of shame.

Ever the same, she was curious to know how it would be to navigate life with a reduced desire to communicate Feeling. She was still quite convinced it must keep loss at bay.

In a quandary of desire and fear, she vacillated between wanting to take a quixotic leap into signification and suffer the radical insecurity of the consequence upon impact, and the need to keep quiet and stay safe. The question was whether or not these words, those Feeling words, actually serve to accentuate the Real, or prove instead to be a hurricane howling through the Illusion of an ethos only imagined.

She steadied herself, remembering why she’d come. She loved him. And she was determined to keep him by muting her heart. Perhaps it was just a need to change - to develop a kind of fortitude she had never before felt determined to put into action.

Perhaps, it was the final piece of the fortress against despair…or perhaps it was because she lived in a time