Fiction – Hannah Liberman

May 21, 2025

On my shelf sits a book by William H. Gass my brother read when he’d just turned twenty years old, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. This I know only because in pen he’s written his name, the year 2016, the name of the person who sent it to him, and Los Angeles below the final words of the introduction: words and syllables and sounds may shelter us in a time when “everything is gray.” Gass draws a distinction between depths of blue and depths of gray. From the shelf I often take the book and run my fingers along creased parchment. Pages are gray as the word now. Monosyllabic. End with no substance. Opening of the mouth. 

I found the book lying open beside his bed when I cleaned out his apartment with my parents, packing things that smelled of him into boxes. In his drawer, a card he had bought for me. “Congratulations graduate!” tilting along in blue letters on the front. Lilting, I could hear it. Inside, it was blank. I’m not sure when he’d bought it, but he’d not yet written anything. It was the day I graduated college that he died from a fentanyl overdose. He was nineteen, two-and-a-half years beneath me. 

Fingers damp, he must’ve been drinking water as he turned the pages of the first three chapters of On Being Blue, the paper puckered along the edges by once wet skin, pages withered without hue or scent, meaning it couldn’t have been tea or coffee or liquor or beer he drank as he sat with the pages. Gass would call that color, the color of emptiness, blue. Color of sorrow, longing, sex, fear, loss. Desire, a lack. Equating emptiness itself to a color. But I see no color there at all. Only a colorless glass, untouched on the table, too hollow and unmoved to hold or reflect any light along the shadow of the wood. Not solely colorless, but two-dimensional. Flattened now, my brother’s fingers slipping through glass like those of an apparition. 

What was he holding as he read? What was he holding as he read? 

Did he lay the book across his lap or his desk, or hold it in the air above his eyes while he sprawled on his bony back? Same back that would bruise from his crashing on skis, same back on which I layered sunscreen, same back later scratched and scratched from the opioids and the withdrawal and the relapse and the opioids and the withdrawal. Did he place it beside his bed with a slip inside and rest his glasses on top of the flattened cover? Or propped along his chest did it lie, splayed open? 

It is somehow inconceivable to believe that he once held that object, my fingers resting where his once did. If I let my eyes linger on the words long enough, might I see the print of his thumb? And if I were to bring it to my nose, I know I would not smell him, but only stale past empty as palm. And so I don’t. I know the smell of absence. Instead, I close my eyes and imagine his fingers beneath mine, his fingers mine. Los Angeles sloping in letters leaning one against another. Hear heavy salt wind breaking against a window’s screen, a pack of coyotes confusing an ambulance for another pack, howls pouring out the throats and hitting metal. 

Growl of stomach blue. Color of his eyes in memory blue. Blue will swallow black like a bell swallows silence “to echo a grief that is hardly human,” Gass writes. The person who sent him the book had been living in New York at the time, someone he used to love though I’d guess neither of them knew it because my brother was quiet with things like that, in himself and through others, with others. And why am I angry it was that person who would eventually find his body? Alone in a room lying beside each other, I wonder if that person drew the silhouettes of his eyebrows, bridge of nose, cheekbones, teeth, gums, inner ears, bellybutton, nostrils? Hollows others often prefer to ignore, the ugly human. 

Did that person smile when watching my brother’s eyes open in the morning, stuck with sleep? And how did the two of them turn through the night? And did my brother dream beside them? And did that person tear my brother against him, not to test his body’s propensity to break but to show him that it was possible two beings might slam into one another with all the force of desire, emptiness, while remaining whole, unfractured? Did together they learn that another being cannot fill that emptiness, but watch it, watch it—push at it and prod and stretch and blur and hold? On the page, I am allowed to wonder. Not if my brother knew love like this, but how it manifested and if it brought him some joy and, if not joy, then some yearning for life through some contentment with it. If he were here, this I would tell him. The two, yearning and contentment, I’ve learned are not in opposition, no, but can only coexist. However little contentment, there cannot be any hope without it. When that person looked at my brother, did the fear of death magnify, dilating like a pupil when happening upon an object of fear or attraction? Fear of death, fear of death. It is a fear only felt when life possesses color, which seems of such little consequence here. Ash: A Philosophical Inquiry, Gass might have called the book. 

Bent pages and smeared pen gorge the slim book, On Being Blue. Underlined on the first page, a withheld or imprisoned breath . . . the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in . . . the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains . . . the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven . . . consequently the color of everything that’s empty.

On the next page, the blue of these books is pale by now. 

I know my brother must’ve loved the person who sent him the book because of the attention paid each page. Because my brother sent me a copy, too, attached to a note: it makes me think of you. But I disagree with Gass when he writes of all the bluish hues of death. . . Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief . . . each is an absence in us. We have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the lip that meets our lip is always one half of our own. . . Being without Being is blue. 

Romanticize red to blue. Sorrow, pain, despair, loneliness. No. Death is colorless. Black is too heavy, blue too silly phonetically, gray too forgiving. Ash. Though Joan Didion named her book Blue Nights, she might have been closer when she wrote, blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness. . . . Fade as the blue nights fade. His death often fades color, steals color like darkness steals shadows from clouds and sun. Robs space and time. Light above me will slide across the ceiling, not the light cast from the bulb but the locus, bulb itself. Reality buckles. 

He’s underlined, It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word. 

One might argue that if word is how we grasp the world, this distinction is rendered moot. Another might say they would trade all words to describe flesh, blood, and bone in exchange for holding a body once more. Only word literally correct now: Ash. Another might hold their breath. Another might call the refrain: Where are You? Where are You? Only words left after flesh disappears. 

Ash. After cremation, ashes weigh between 4-6 pounds. Weight of a brick, a pair of boots, a fetus, a few books. And it’s in Bluets that Maggie Nelson writes, writing does do something to one’s memory . . . it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. 

Somewhere I read about those born blind who later in life gain their vision. The words they’ve used to structure the world behind their eyes remain unfixed to the objects the sighted have organized through nomenclature. Through blind eyes, book or love might hold the same physicality. Glass or hatred. No distinction between words assigned to physical objects and words assigned to sentiments. Blue. And thus once vision is gained, they must learn to restructure a world of objects. Language shifts. 

To write, His eyes were blue, is to flatten. The sky rarely approximates the color of his eyes, but sometimes I find them there at the fade of unclouded day. Along the edge of a white stone dampened in sand. Stuck in the face of a stranger on the street. Several days ago by the ocean, a balloon crawled along the shore as if maimed. I could hear the nothing of its voice. Wherever I have gone the Blues are all the same. The sound it made was that of snow on wind, still car against tree, wind on snow. Broken empty mirror. Shade without shadow. Moaning mother. Unplugged chord. Mind in mine. Smoke leveled by rain. A hat hanging behind an unopened door. Untouched pages. The reason forgiveness realized too late is worse than forgiveness never realized at all. Unfillable lack. Ash. Being without Being. Wave swallowed by tide. No blues. 
        No blues. 
        No blues at all.

~

My brother never read this book. He probably wasn’t familiar with Gass, he never lived in Los Angeles. He didn’t care much for reading. But that card, “Congratulations graduate!” sits on my desk, empty. If fiction has any value for the writer, its value is that it might distill some truth otherwise veiled in reality’s play of events. I hold onto that.