Free Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe

Hartman’s weeping. She sat at the desk in this room and looked at one particular page of a certain book and wept for most of the day. I didn’t want to go into the room where she was weeping, so I sat on the wooden floor in the hallway just outside the open door. There I tried to re-create my dead brother, Paul, inside myself in the form of a Philosophical Conundrum. The conundrum was not supposed to replicate exactly the situation of the weeping; it was meant as an idealized conundrum
about weeping
. Let us say, the conundrum began—for all conundrums must begin with this supplication—let us say that youare in a room. And let us say that there is a room adjacent to the room you are in and that someone is weeping in this second room. There is no door to the room in which the person is weeping, and there is no door to the room you are in. Nor are there windows to these rooms. Each of you, then, is sealed in a room with no way in or out. The walls of this conundrum, then, are the walls of the two rooms, which are the walls of the world, for the purposes of the conundrum. It is your task to stop the person in the adjacent room from weeping. Why is it your task? It is your task because it is your task. And it is your task because you cannot sleep with the ceaseless weeping. The weeping distracts you from everything in your life that is not the weeping. You have already tried calling to the person. First you called softly and tenderly. You said, “Oh, my child, I am right here beside you, and though you cannot see me or touch me, I will always be here beside you.” But that only made the weeping more abject, more disconsolate. You have also tried calling loudly and angrily: “Will you shut up already! I am your neighbor, and your sorrow is not my sorrow!” That, too, intensified the weeping. At this point in the conundrum, reader, I noticed a difference between this conundrum and the ones Paul used to instruct me in. In Paul’s, there was generally a choice to be made among two or more distinct courses of action, and it was implied that only one of these courses of action was correct. Whereas the conundrum I had invented to instruct myself presented a situation unresponsive to anything I might do to attempt to change it. Either it was a conundrum without a solution or the solution consisted of a mental adjustment to a situation I was powerless to affect. I believe this was the point in my life at which I abandoned conundrums altogether.
    In this way, the memory of Paul’s life loosened its grip on my mind.
    For a few days, I sat outside the door to the room of the weeping woman playing the game of jacks that I had brought with me from the suburbs in a red cloth bag.
    Then I went into the room.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “Hi.”
    Skip Hartman sat in her chair. She was not actively crying now. She was in that red-eyed resting place between crying and more crying. She was looking down at a picture in a book about northern Renaissance painting. I pulled a book down from one of the shelves and opened it and touched the pages and tried without success to figure out what the book was about. I put it back and pulled down another book and touched its insides and put it back. I did this to maybe two thirds of the books in that room. Then I left the room and went out of the house. Skip Hartman did not follow me this time. I imagined she was still in that chair looking down at that page of that book. I went into Central Park and wandered down to Bethesda Fountain and watched two squirrels alternately frolicking and standing still. I came back to the house and made a sandwich and ate it and went to sleep. When I woke up I went to the book room again. She was looking down at the book, crying.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “Hi.”
    I wanted to do something nice for her but I didn’t know how, so instead I pulled down the books again, all of them, and I did not replace each book before pulling down the next. In themiddle of the floor, I made a