The Weight of Nothing by Kip Knott

Sam doesn’t like sunsets. Sunsets for Sam are a daily reminder that death is just over the horizon. Sunrises aren’t much better for Sam either because they just start the clock running again, marking time until the next sunset. Even now, as he stands outside his mother’s house smoking a cigarette while the hospice nurse tends to his dying mother, Sam is unpersuaded by the light of one of those sunsets in which people swear they see Jesus’s outstretched arms in the iridescent rays that beam between clouds. Sam just shakes his head in disgust, then turns and walks inside.

Someone might assume after hearing this that Sam is one of those people who always sees the glass 99% empty, the kind of person who doesn’t like to be around people, and the kind of person who other people don’t like to be around. The fact is, Sam is an outgoing person who loves most everyone he meets and who most everyone loves in return. His friends and neighbors would go so far as to say Sam is one of the funniest, kindest, and most dependable people they’ve ever come across. All of them would agree that Sam’s ability to tell a good story can lift the spirits of anyone who might be having a bad day. And the stories that Sam tells from his days as a misunderstood teenager are especially prized because they never fail to get a laugh.

Like the story about how Sam got the nickname “Ice Man” back in high school. Up until his senior year, Sam was called “Sloth” after the grotesquely large and dimwitted character in The Goonies. People assumed that Sam’s lack of conversational skill was the sign of a weak mind rather than the defining characteristic of a deep thinker. None of them would have ever believed that what Sam kept hidden beneath his mattress was not the newest copy of Penthouse, but rather a dog-eared copy of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy that he had stolen from the State Library on fieldtrip his sophomore year. But that all changed one summer night when Sam bet his friends that he could fit into one of those ice freezers outside the Gas-N-Go when they stopped to stock up on more beer with their newly minted fake IDs.

Fitting into one of those commercial ice freezers might not seem like a very difficult task to most average-sized people, but at 6’ 6” and nearly 300 pounds, Sam was far from an average-sized person. Sam had no problem living up to the name his mother had given him the day he was born, Samson. His mother always told him that he would grow up to be like his father, a larger-than-life man who never made it out from the underground after the Sunday Creek Mine explosion that rocked the town when Sam was barely two. Sam would only come to know his father through his mother’s memories the way a child comes to know mythological figures during bedtime stories. “Your father is holding up the weight of the world on his back. Without him, everything would come crashing down and we’d all fall into a bottomless pit,” Sam’s mother used to tell him on those nights when Sam was especially longing for a father. By the time Sam turned 14, he was already as big as father, and when he walked through the doors of Our Lady of Sorrows High School the first day of freshman year, he became the Holy Grail for the football, basketball, and wrestling coaches. But organized sports held about as much appeal to Sam as sunsets, and he never once succumbed to the daily pressures to “play ball.”

So when Sam bet his friends another case of Old Milwaukee that he could fit inside that ice freezer, they all jumped on that action and watched as he opened the small silver door, then reached in and tossed out bag after bag of ice before cramming his drunken mass into the empty container. As Sam pulled the door closed, he noticed how the setting sun held the world outside the way a drop of amber holds its own microcosm for millennia.

The way Sam tells the story these days goes something like this: “The last thing I heard before I pulled that door closed was Jack Duffy saying, ‘God bless you, Sloth. Hope to see you in the Great Hereafter.’ I don’t remember a whole lot after that. I can tell you what it was like to lay in that cold dark, though. It was like getting a sneak peek on what to expect when we die. I’m here to tell you that I could see the light. I could hear the harps. I could feel the pull from my dad on the other side. I tell you boys, the afterlife is a real and beautiful thing.” It’s always at this moment in the story that the room goes quiet as the grave and Sam hangs his head as if the weight of that memory still pushes him down. And just when the silence is the deepest, Sam snaps his head up and yells out, “Next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital wrapped in one of those foil blankets like a newborn baby surrounded by my ‘friends’ chanting ‘Ice Man, Ice Man, Ice Man!’ I’ve been the ‘Ice Man’ ever since.” And every time, the uncomfortable silence is washed away with choking laughter.

What Sam always keeps to himself, though, what he refuses to describe in exact detail to the people who populate and define his life, is the darkness that surrounded him as he slowly drifted into unconsciousness. The day that he climbed into that freezer, Sam was at that point in his teenage life when Death sang a Siren’s song tempting him to see how close he could get to it without actually embracing it. The deeper Sam sank into the darkness of the freezer, the more he thought he would see the other side growing closer in the distance, just he had always been told. He kept waiting for the inevitable pinpoint of light to appear on the horizon, or streaks of kaleidoscopic colors to rush toward him the way they did in a movie he saw once, or anything that would guide him to the Paradise that the priests and nuns guaranteed was waiting for everyone after this life. But in the end, all that Sam found was a blinding void, an absence of sensation and any sense of self. In short, all Sam found was nothing. And that’s the part of the story Sam never mentions.

Ever since that morning he woke up in the hospital, Sam has dedicated his life to being there for anyone in his hometown of Hemlock who needs help making it through the day. No one in town has ever amounted to much. Most of them, like Sam, live in the same house they grew up in. They all still buy most of their groceries, or smokes, or dip, or Old Milwaukee from Clay’s Market, even though Mr. Clay died fifteen years ago and the market has been owned by Jack Duffy ever since. So when any one of them needs a helping hand or a laugh, Sam makes sure that they know they can turn to him. After all, Sam knows that the nothingness he had discovered in that freezer could swallow anyone at any time. Sam has dozens of stories that he knows can lift the spirits of anyone who’s feeling down. And even after forty years, no one has tired of Sam’s stories. In fact, everyone has come to rely on them, and him, during the roughest times, and Sam has always graciously accepted his role in the community. Most of the folks who live in Hemlock say that Sam is as dependable as the sun rising and setting each day.

But the fact is, there are times when Sam feels burdened by the truth that he has kept from everyone ever since he saw it in the dark of that freezer he climbed into all those years ago. Sam has carried that truth with him just as he carries his own shadow, something everyone can see, but something no one ever acknowledges. If anyone ever bothered to really ask Sam what the truth is, he would have to think long and hard about what to say, even though he knows no one would believe him. Sam learned a long time ago that people would rather cling a kind of blind faith in anything, just as long as it wasn’t the truth.

Like Sam’s mother, who, even this close to death herself, would rather turn a blind eye to the truth.

“What is it you’re not tell me?” she asks as Sam sits next to her bed. The last rays of sunset flicker through the window and across the ceiling for a moment, and then fade to nothing.

Not wanting the last words he would every speak to his mother to be a lie, Sam takes her hand and leans close to her so she can hear him whisper, “Nothing, Mom. It’s. . .  It’s just nothing.”

“Nothing? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Mom. Really. It’s nothing.”

But as Sam’s mother looks into her son’s eyes for the last time, she sees the familiar streaks of blues and greens and flecks of gold that belong in part to her, in part to Sam’s father, and in part to her mother and father, and all the mothers and fathers who came before them. And as she exhales her soft final breath, she knows for certain that there is something more than nothing waiting for her on the other side.

Kip Knott

Image: Golden sunset behind dark hills from Pixabay.com