Passing Nights

 

 

YOU WOKE UP THAT NIGHT AND STARED INTO the darkness, your body tense with expectation as the wall by your bed dissolved and became a way into a deep, windy blackness. You were not afraid, but you remembered a fear still to come as a human figure faded into view, bright with an electric glow that seemed to come from within. Pale, clothed in sickly green seaweed, the battered male torso drifted toward you, bleeding into the black, oily water, eyes gazing at you from a haggard, familiar face, foggy breath billowing out of its mouth. You cried out then, and the figure twisted around, showing cuts, abrasions, and bruises in a sickly, brine-shrunk patchwork of red, white, and gray. You reached out to the wall, to see if the scene was real. “Don’t!” the man shouted with great effort, went under, came up splashing and grabbed at his left arm. “Where are you?” you asked, sitting up, eyes wide open, nostrils filling with ocean smells. “Don’t,” the man whispered as you reached into the wall, felt the cold water, and pulled your hand back. The man moved away, as if suddenly caught in a powerful current. His eyes were closed, as if he had found peace. You blinked as the view broke up into a grainy collection of yellow dots and light exploded into the room, destroying the vision.

“Charles, are you okay?”

“Just a bad dream, Mom,” you answered, lying back and staring at the clean yellow of the recently painted wall as the overhead light went out.

“Go back to sleep, darling,” your mother said lovingly, gently closing the door.

Your eyes adjusted to the dark and you looked at the wall. There was nothing there, but you knew that the wall was waiting for you. It would be waiting for you every night.

This is the end, you tell yourself as you drift in the water. The ship had been a part of your own body, torn open by the torpedo’s explosion, hurling you into the water, where you bleed into the black liquid, returning your inner sea to the salty commonwealth.

But death refuses you. Your pulse beats, and you feel that your right hand is locked around the bleeding in your left arm, unable to let go.

The sea rocks you as you drift. You open your eyes, expecting to see stars, but there is only a cloudless darkness, without even a bright patch where the moon should be. I’m dying, you tell yourself. Might as well admit it. Eyesight’s blackening. It’s one of the signs. You can’t feel your toes. It surprises you, as much as you can be surprised, how little you care. The body prepares itself. Messengers go out to all the distant provinces of muscle and bone, whispering gently for them to slow down and accept death—the distinguished thing, as some literary fool once called it. There is no life after death. You’ll see. And you laugh, but it’s like trying to break marble with a rubber hammer, and you wheeze and nearly weep from the pain of the convulsive effort.

Suddenly, white light floods into your eyes. Recovering, you see the boy that you were, staring at you from the room that you loved, and you remember what he feels but doesn’t understand yet. You recall having seen what he sees, what he once saw for three nights, as you gaze into that bedroom where the future is still a fabulous country, waiting to be entered. All times are woven together, so why shouldn’t they cast something of themselves forward and backward now and then?

As you look into the boy’s sleepy eyes, you realize that these moments have been waiting for both of you all your lives, that two pieces of time are being drawn toward each other by the gravity of remembrance, and there is nothing you can do about the coming collision.

The sea becomes very still suddenly, and you watch the boy reach into the water as if into a mirror, and draw his hand back, surprised that it is not wet. He repeats the action and is startled as some ghostly water spills onto his bed, and you realize with dismay piled on hopelessness that it was your yearning for the shelter of the past that would now destroy it. You needed to be back in that room on a twelve-year-old’s Friday night, looking forward to Saturday morning, when you would go biking and later stop at the park to watch girls playing under the big oak tree, not quite sure why they were so pleasant to look at, feeling the play of impulses within yourself. You needed that past as you had never needed your present or future, but you had to get on the treadmill of killing to realize how little you had to give to anything or anyone.

Think! your fogged brain commands. Your need will destroy the past unless you act. Will the boy’s death end your pain? Will you still be here if the past is changed?

But what can you do? What can a dying man do for anyone?

You try to pull down the bridge between the boy in the bedroom and the man in the water by denying your need for the past’s islands of happiness, but the two moments draw even closer toward dissolution. The boy crawls back on the bed, astonished by the water that is now threatening to burst across time, and suddenly you know what you must do.

You listen to the unfeeling whisper of the sea, and slowly your right hand loosens its grip on your bleeding left arm. You watch the hand move away as if it belongs to someone else, and see your bleeding resume its gentle flow into the black water.

The boy and the bedroom slip away, and you close your eyes, relieved that the link seems to be weakening. Your past and present are safe, but you have severed your future. There’s no helping that. You have to be alive for the bridge to stand.

And for a few moments it continues to stand, and you are that boy staring at the wall in fear and wonder, opening and closing your eyes, fleeing back and forth between the bedroom and the cold darkness of futurity, where the sea drinks your blood and the blackness crowds the light from your eyes.