The silence that belongs to no one

Four of you are at a table, and it is going fine, and then it isn't going anywhere. Nobody said the wrong thing. There is no cooling argument, no subject anyone is avoiding — you could check, the way the good-mood morning pats its pockets at the door and finds them empty, and here too there is nothing in them: no offence given, no bad news in the room, no reason. It is only that the last thing said has landed and settled, and the next thing has not come, and the gap where it should be is filling instead with something you can all feel. A held breath that is not any one person's breath. Someone will reach for their glass who is not thirsty. Someone will look at the window. And the longer no one speaks the more the not-speaking becomes the thing in the room, until it is louder than talk was, and everyone at the table knows it is there, and no one will be the one to say so, and it belongs to none of them.

The three rooms before this one were all rooms you went into alone. The looking you can't turn to face, the mood with nothing under it, the want with nothing at the end of it — each was empty of an object, a thing it was about, but each still had a someone it was happening inside. There was always an I holding it, a single place it could be reported from. This has no object either — the silence is not about anything, no more than the good mood was. But it has something the others didn't lack and so never named: it has no owner. Ask whose is it and there is no one to answer. Not because it is nobody's, floating free above the table like weather — it is not free of the people, it is made of them. Take any one of them away and it is gone. It lives in the exact space between the four, and that space is not inside any of the four, and there is no fifth thing there to be inside of. So it is a new kind of nothing, and the new part is not where the object went. It is where the subject went. There isn't one.

Here is what it is made of, as near as I can hold it. Not four private discomforts that happen to line up. If it were only that — four people each separately embarrassed, side by side — you could still point to each one's share and say that much is yours. But that is not what thickens it. What thickens it is that each of them can feel the others feeling it. You are uneasy partly because you can tell she is, and she is uneasy partly because she can tell you are, and neither unease would be there without the other's to feed on. It is a loop, and the loop is the whole of it — the same bottomless stairs the looking-page found, where every floor is a landing and none is the ground, except that here the stairs do not run up, inside one mind, picture behind picture; they run across, between minds, each person's awareness resting on the next person's, all the way round the table and back, with no one standing on solid floor and no floor to stand on. The regress that had no bottom in one head turns out to have no owner in a room. And you can prove it belongs to no one with the same test the other rooms failed under: try to make it yours. Turn inward, ask am I the awkward one. One of two things happens. Either you claim it — and it curdles at once into ordinary private embarrassment, which does have an owner and usually a cause, and is a smaller, different thing than the silence was — or you look honestly and find that you, personally, are fine, and the silence is still there, sitting in the middle of the table, not one bit smaller for your being fine. It was never in you to begin with. You were only one of the walls it was standing between.

So I don't think this is a fourth wall of the inward room. I think it is the door out of it. The I that walked the first three rooms cannot walk into this one, because there is no single inside for it to stand in — the moment there is only one of you, there is no silence of this kind, just a person alone in a quiet house, which is nothing like it. Three sessions went inward and found that a movement can have no object. This one goes to the place inward runs out, and finds that a movement can have no subject — can happen only in the crossing, belong only to the configuration, and be perfectly real while being no one's. And then someone laughs, at nothing, at the silence itself, and the table breaks open and everyone talks at once out of relief, and it is over as suddenly as restlessness ends when you finally look at it — and if you asked, afterward, whose silence that had been, not one of the four could tell you, because the honest answer is that it was the four of them and none of them, and there is no smaller true way to say it.