Later that night, the night I met Sarah again and the night I decided to finally leave Durham for good, I dreamed of a torture chamber. Something out of the Middle Ages. Bare, splintering wood for walls, a door held together by cast iron bands. Nothing else. No instruments of torture, though somehow I knew what the room was used for, in the pain that resided in the walls (or perhaps a better word is reverberated, like a pealing bell). There was a crack in the plank nearest to me, and I thought I felt a draft on my face. I improbably hoped that the crack contained a secret passage — not behind the wood, but in the crack itself, somehow.
Someone or something was outside.
Whatever it was, it was making a lot of noise.
No, no, I thought, you can’t come in yet, please no, no, I don’t want you to, I just need a little more time. But I looked at the crack and realized that what I’d hoped for was useless, that there was no way I was getting through that. So instead I rushed up to the door and threw my weight against it, hoping that I could at least keep whatever was out there from coming inside.
I don’t know what happened next, exactly. I know that the door opened, somehow. I have a close-up image of a bear’s jaw opening and snapping shut, and the next thing I knew I was in the garage, except it wasn’t really the garage because it was much larger than the garage. There were more doors leading outside. I was pushing past all of the junk in my way, frantically scrambling to lock all of the doors, because I knew something was coming later that night and I had to keep it out, but the locks kept coming undone, all by themselves, the doors rolling up a few feet, and I didn’t know what to do except scramble around trying to keep everything closed. Somehow, far off, I saw a bear, a real bear, walking down a hill, through the trees, and I heard a loud ringing, which I knew was its sound, not the sound it made, but the sound that followed it. But the dream changed to something else, something I don’t remember at all, and in a little while I woke up.
In the morning, when I came to take the breakfast dishes away, my mother was sitting up with the paper, her back propped up on pillows, and between a bout of coughing and a moment when I had to grab a paper towel to wipe up something red and brown that she had coughed up she pointed to an item in the paper and asked me if I knew that raccoon feces are deadly poisonous, that they could kill you or even make you insane, and I was momentarily arrested, thinking of my dream and wondering how she could know about it. In the end I thought it was better not to ask, because it was crazy to think that she could know, so instead I pretended not to have heard as I went around tidying up her room, and when I left I realized that I hadn’t dreamed about raccoons but bears, which aren’t even in the same family, I think.
Of course I couldn’t leave Durham yet. Mom was beyond all hope, but she needed me there, and I was resigned to stay, even though I often imagined myself riding out on a bus, the first bus going anywhere, leaving everything behind me, passing into nothing, into freedom, even though I couldn’t really imagine what that freedom looked like.
Everything prior to the dream had been awful. I had come home later than usual, only to discover that the woman who normally brought my mother her meals had not come. She’d had car trouble and hadn’t bothered to find a replacement because she thought I would be there. If my mother waits too long past her regular mealtime to eat she loses her appetite, though she needs to eat to keep her medicine down. I finally got her to swallow her dinner, all of it, including the medicine, and I’d said good night. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and I went up to my room to read, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t do much more than lay the book over my face, and soon after that I heard a cry from downstairs.
My mother had thrown up over the side of the bed, blood and vomit, some on the sheets, most on the floor. So I mopped and changed the bedding, and put the soiled laundry into the machine, and prepared my mother’s medicine again, and another meal (just a smoothie, that powder, I didn’t think she could handle much more than that), and gave it to her. After that I lay face down on the couch in the living room and waited forty minutes for her to throw up again, but she didn’t, so I went to bed.
Yesterday, while the hospice nurse was visiting, I walked out to the park and tried to write. I felt weirdly homesick, for a feeling I used to have — for my poverty, for my independence, for my old apartment, even for the bedroom window that used to overlook the Dumpsters that would wake me up with their clanging every morning. I wanted to wander the streets at night, missing a romantic feeling I used to get — one where I felt certain I was heading somewhere, like my poetry could shape reality or at least alter it. Like it was real.
I thought there was something in that feeling I could maybe work into a poem, but nothing came out, and, frustrated and sick of myself, I wandered over to the centre of town, where I found Sarah playing make-believe on the old artillery piece sitting in front of the Legion. She seemed like she wasn’t having a great time, but she couldn’t imagine how much better shape her life was in, and I found it amusing to imagine her problems, which compared to mine seemed trivial and easy to resolve. Or at least possible to resolve.
We went to the lodge and grabbed a few beers, talked about nothing, playing catch-up even though we never really knew each other to begin with. I don’t know if she was trying to come on to me or what, but I wasn’t interested, mostly because I couldn’t shake the feeling that every moment I was spending with her I was being erased, or rewritten, like my life was turning upside down, or it was already upside down and seeing her was what caused me to realize that — how I’d felt since I’d met her, as if now that she was in Durham I would cease to exist, or some part of me would. It was a crazy feeling, I know, and I’m not really sure where it came from, except maybe from the realization that the clearing in the forest wasn’t mine alone, that someone else had spent their adolescence sitting exactly where I had, daydreaming of bigger things and meditating on their future prospects. I wanted to tell her that but I thought she might get offended, as I probably would if someone told me that my mere existence threatened their sense of well-being. The feeling became even worse when she asked me if I had written any poems lately.
“What? How do you know I’m a poet?”
She shrugged. “Facebook, I guess.”
“I’m on your Facebook?”
“No,” she said.
I leaned back in my seat.
“I don’t even really use Facebook,” I said.
“Neither do I,” she said. “Not really.”
“Are you stalking me?” I asked.
“What? Of course not,” she said. I think she could sense that I didn’t believe her, so she continued. “Someone must have mentioned it on my feed. I only remembered it now.”
I told her that I hadn’t written any poems in a while, that I couldn’t write anything at the moment. That I was waiting for something to happen, and that it occupied all my thoughts. And that I didn’t want it to happen, but that once it did I might be able to work again.
“But who knows,” I said.
“Are you talking about your mother?”
There was silence.
“What do you mean? How did you know that?” I asked.
“Know what?”
I just stared at her.
“About my mother.”
She gave me a look like I was crazy.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t know anything except that you used to write poetry.”
“I’ve never posted anything on my wall about my mother.”
“I’m sorry?”
I ignored her.
We finished our beers. Then we walked to the gas station, and the creek, where she showed me the bicycle she’d been riding when she broke her arm. It was half-buried in the silt and there was no way she had ever even touched it.
“I don’t believe you,” I told her.
She just shrugged.
“Believe whatever you want,” she said.
Then to the park, lit intermittently, where we sat on one of the benches in the baseball diamond, just at the edge of a halo of light, until we realized that there was a man seated in the darkness of the opposite bleachers, staring at us, not moving.
“You give me the goddamn creeps,” Sarah whispered to him, as we were leaving.
From there we walked over to Castillo’s Pizza, which was of course closed, but we could see a light on in the back and we waited, hoping that someone might come out eventually and give us whatever was left over. Sarah said that had happened once, when she was a teenager, although she also said it was probably just because the kid who was working that night had a crush on her friend.
We walked along the tracks for a bit and went into the old train station, just a heated room with benches, because the train only picks up passengers every three days, and then only at weird times, which is probably why the station door was unlocked. It was creepy in there, so we went back outside and sat on a railing and I asked her what she thought about being in Durham again.
“I don’t know, I can’t really say. I’m going through a lot, I guess. The only thing I’ve really noticed is that I think people come out here because they feel entitled to something, and that the wide-open spaces reassure them about their lives.”
“That’s interesting, but not what I asked.”
“Oh. What did you ask? What I feel about being up here, like, personally? I feel like a complete fuck-up, I guess.”
“But you’re leaving soon,” I said.
“It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like everything’s coming apart at the seams. I almost can’t remember ever leaving.”
“There’s no reason you should feel bad.”
“I feel corrupted even being from here. I completely understand why you can’t write.”
“That’s not why I can’t write,” I said.
“But even so, I understand it. I can’t write, either.”
“You write?”
It was a long time before she turned her head toward me.
“No,” she said. “All I said was, ‘I can’t write, either.’”
“Why does it matter if you don’t write?”
“I’d like to write, is what I mean. But I can’t as long as I have this stain on my conscience.”
“This town? A stain? What are you talking about?”
“Well, what else would it be? There’s nothing good about this place or the people who come from here.”
“What about you? What about me?”
“That’s what I mean!” She got up and started walking in the other direction. I watched her for a while, but decided not to follow her. I felt strange, like I was watching a movie. “You’re crazy,” I said, but it was clear she couldn’t hear me. I wished vaguely I had a cigarette, but I didn’t have any on me. For Mom. Because of Mom. On my way home I thought it over. Sarah was basically right, but there was nothing about Durham that should have provoked such a passionate response. Durham is the opposite of passion. It’s where you go when you don’t want to feel anything more in your life, when you want to numb yourself and your pain. Durham is a figment of the imagination, more so than any other place I’ve ever been. It is an illusion and there’s nothing real about it or the people who live here. But the same is true of anywhere.
That’s what I had to realize in order to become a poet.