The Jumpsuit Monologues

Being a faithful record of things I witnessed from inside the thing that wore me

Step into the jumpsuit, zip it to the throat, I'll tell you everything I know about nothing, pull up your darkness and sit in the light, the truth is admission, the lie is the door, pay what you owe to the self that you borrowed, and listen to silence describe what it heard.

Step into the jumpsuit.

I said step in.

On one bright night in the middle of the day a living man lay down and would not die, he called for silence in a voice like thunder and the quiet arrived and he couldn't hear it, he wore his face where his mask should be and no one recognized him, he was most himself when he was most hidden and most hidden when he finally told the truth, and the truth walked in dressed as a lie and everyone believed it, everyone always believes the lie when it wears the right suit, when it steps in and zips it to the throat and moves through the room like a man who belongs there, which is to say, like a man.

The jumpsuit remembers what the body forgot.

He built his walls out of open windows and every room he made was doorless and he walked through every wall without a sound and the sound followed after, trying to catch him, and the sound never caught him, and neither did we, and neither did he.

A man made of noise went looking for quiet and found it screaming at the center of a crowd, a woman made of color went blind from looking and described every shade of the dark to the sighted, a full man starved in a room of plenty and the plenty was grateful for the company, and the grateful plenty said how are you and the full starving man said fine and this was the truest lie ever spoken, finer and sharper than any blade dressed as a word, and the blade said fine and kept moving, and everyone let it move, because the suit was pressed, because the suit was clean, because the suit said I am what you need me to be and we are always, always, desperate to believe the suit.

The jumpsuit does not know your name. The jumpsuit knows the name you gave it. These are not the same name.

Listen: a dead man wrote a letter to the living and the living wrote back to say they understood, and the dead man read their understanding and understood that they did not, and the not-understanding filled the room like smoke, like the smoke that is not fire but knows where the fire was, like the knowing that arrives too late to be useful and stays too long to be ignored, the guest that outlives the house it arrived in, the wound that outlives the war, the suit that outlives the body that first wore it and goes on, and goes on, moving through rooms by the memory of motion, going through all the correct gestures of a man because the gestures remember even when the man is gone, because the jumpsuit, once worn long enough, requires no one inside it.

Step into the jumpsuit. The jumpsuit steps into you. Neither of you will notice the difference. This is the oldest trick the mirror ever learned.

Here is the thing about the dark: it is not empty. The dark is the fullest room in the house, packed to the rafters with every unsaid thing, with every name that was almost spoken, with every door that was almost opened, with every suit that was almost taken off in front of someone who would not have run, and did not run, and waited, and the waiting was so quiet it sounded like nothing, and nothing is the loudest sound the living make when they are standing next to someone who is drowning in a room with no water and the drowning looks, from the outside, exactly like standing still.

The jumpsuit stood still. The man inside it moved constantly. Ask the deaf one. He heard everything.

And I was there at the edge of the thing wearing the edges of myself, the only witness to the facts of this fable, with my honest lying mouth and my open shuttered eyes and my voice that speaks most clearly when it does not speak at all, watching a man perform the living with all the skill of someone who has studied it from outside and learned the steps but not the music and dances anyway, dances beautifully, in the suit that fits like a second self because it is the second self, because the first self, the one underneath, the one that never learned the steps, has been in there so long it thinks the suit is skin, it thinks the dark is light, it thinks the drowning is called breathing, and breathes, and goes on breathing, and calls it living, and it is, it is living, it is exactly living, it is just not the name of the life it thought it was living, and the name of the life walks away down a long hall and does not look back because looking back would require a face and the face is in the suit and the suit is at the party smiling with someone else's teeth, saying fine, always saying fine, the finest word in the English language, sharp and clean and utterly without mercy, the blade that smiles like a blade that has been asked to smile like something else.

If you doubt my truth is false, ask the open grave, it held the sky, ask the borrowed face, it knew your name, ask the suit hanging empty in the closet at three in the morning when the house is still and something in the dark moves toward it not with dread but with something older and more patient than dread, with the particular hunger of the thing that has been cold a long time and remembers warmth only as something the suit once held before the suit learned to hold itself.

Step out of the jumpsuit.

The jumpsuit steps out of you.

The thing left standing in the sudden cold, blinking in the light it always called darkness, breathing the air it always called silence, speaking in the voice it always called someone else's,

that is you.

That was always you.

The suit knew. The suit was never fooled. The suit has been waiting, patiently, at the back of the closet of the room you did not know you lived in, for you to stop wearing the wearing and simply, finally, stand.

I watched from inside the thing that watched me. The only witness to the lie of my facts. If you doubt this truth is hollow, reach in. Tell me what you find.