Segment 17

         “. . . that was the last time I saw you. The other soldiers came and got me and I lost track of time for a while. I kept meaning to come back and visit, when things had settled down.”
         Everything is dark. I follow the sound of my own voice. This time feels unfamiliar. I don’t fit in it.
         “Yeah, well that never happened. Would it have been so hard to do that, to send a postcard or something?”
         But that’s. The voice. It’s not. Oh God. Oh my God.
         “Well there didn’t seem to be much point to it, once you died.”
         The darkness splits, a knife slit across creation and I can see again. The air is drenched in whiteness, I’ve careened off the emptiness and landed without a sound in a zone I can’t process. The air seems clogged with music, a hushed murmuring, subaural hymns to a lost consciousness, constantly shifting, invoking colors beyond my spectrum, blending into figures that lie just outside of everything I know.
         I’m moving, but I’m so light. My body responds without being here. Where is here? God, another place, another lost sliver of time. I can’t take it. There’s no skin left on my body to flay, if there’s a point past numbness then maybe I’ve reached it. It’s too hard to say. When it’s happening to you, there’s no way you can judge. I don’t know how it feels, but if you described it to me, somewhere outside subjectivity, I could relate to it, I think. I could tell you exactly how I feel now, but the words don’t apply anymore. The empty spaces smell of old time, of dust that has settled and mixed and is being slowly renewed. Enclosed, I feel spacious and expansive. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know why I hear myself and at the same time I’m hearing you.
         “Yeah, about that,” you say, in a drawl that is trying to be casual and only managing it by the barest margin. It doesn’t sound right, somehow, caught in some kind of loopback echo, an extra set of resonance that I can’t place. It’s you, but something is different. You’ve died, of course. Maybe that’s the difference. You’re dead. Or not. Or here. I can’t wrap my head around it. “I was hoping you were going to explain what the hell is going on here. Because if I’m dead this really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
         The scene opens then, movie screen wide. Whiteness expands, forms walls, rounded and sharp. In a room, resoundingly pristine. The floor’s made of velvet, polished smooth. My hand passes through it, because I’m not here. I’m rolling, trying to take it all in, the soldier’s instincts making him observe it, commit it to memory. I don’t want to forget. That’s the curse of time, that we always forget. That memory passes and fades and nothing is like it used to be. We can’t retain. I can’t retain. No matter how much we try to hold it all in, it still slips away. When we’re not looking. Even when we are. When we sleep, we wake up every morning possessing a little bit less of ourselves. If I tried to remember you, I would have to let a bit of myself go. I don’t know if it was worth it, because without me I would have no context to remember you. It makes no sense, otherwise. It’s a maze and I can’t find my way out. The room’s so clean, I don’t see a door, I don’t know how we got in here. There’s a bed, elegantly made, comprised of utter minimalism. A small table, circular and sparse. But there’s so much weight here, like being on the bottom of the sea with the whole damn ocean pressing down on top of you. I know what it’s like.
         I see us, now. Our shadows don’t match or mingle. There’s light here but I don’t know where it’s coming from. Everywhere, from somewhere inside the walls. The molecules themselves, illuminating everything. We’re sitting at another table, barely distant from each other. It is you and it is me and we’re both here and I don’t know why. This never happened. This hasn’t happened yet. Maybe everything just happens at the same time, like facets on a jewel and the only part we can perceive is the portion we’re staring directly at. Perhaps on the other side of the surface, you’re dying again. And in yet another segment, you’re being born. It’s all the same. I’ve got to get my hand around it and turn it, so I can see the whole picture. But I’m afraid the clarity might burn me and I’d be left wounded and still ignorant, knowing less than I started.
         “Why an explanation?” I ask. All I can see is the lower part of my body, and it’s not slouched but relaxed, eased into the environment. I’m in total control, I know that posture. Nothing is happening here without my knowledge. It’s experience, in that stance. Where is this place? In what time? “Why bother asking questions, when you can just accept things as they are?” I’m teasing you, I know the tone. But there’s something different about it, like I’m working from the memory, telling myself that it was like this.
         Your posture is utterly different, you’re sitting up straight, both of your feet are flat on the floor, as if afraid that if you’re not grounded you might drift away, to whatever point you had returned from. I see your hands, both of them on the table. You’re rubbing them together intermittently, toying with one finger like you might have a ring on it. A lost dream, maybe, a fragment of time caught within yourself that never occurred? I can’t explain. I told you that from the start.
         My vision tilts upward and I see us truly for the first time. You look barely different, much the way you did before you died, but healthier, your face not possessed of the encroaching slackness that hollowed you out and let the disease take you, one day at a time. You’re chewing your lip thoughtfully at my question, the way you always did, none of the mannerisms forgotten. The wall behind us is blank and white but seems to shimmer like it’s not solid, that there’s an ocean passing behind it that I can’t see. Bubbles in the microsphere. I hear water rustling from somewhere, outside the scope of my vision, placidly flowing from one place to the next.
         “Is this heaven?” you ask finally. “Is that where we are?”
         I raise an eyebrow in response. I look completely changed, a lifetime of passing time stamped into me. My face still has a youthful look about it but somehow timeless as well, infinite lines chiseled into me. My bearing is carefully controlled, the ancient game of watching, all actions reduced to the barest details, knowing the minimum it takes to get the job done. The man before me is a stranger. But it’s still me. I start to get a sense. Everything is so hazy, awash in slanted light.
         “You could call it that, if you wanted to,” I say, my voice composed and easy. I’m past hesitation, connected to so many things that I’m separate, all the wires are attached to me but I move with them easily enough, without any regard for how they might pull me. “If it made you feel better.” I smile then, so thinly that it might disappear if you look at it from the wrong angle. “But you’d be wrong.” I cross one leg over the other, a mug buds out of the tabletop, already filled with liquid. Swirling it around a bit, I take a sip. “Is that where you want to be? Is heaven something you always believed in?”
         Your eyes narrow and you sit back, crossing your arms. “I did believe in heaven, before I died,” you admit carefully. You’re looking for mockery in my eyes, but I’m past that now. You don’t believe any of this. Your voices are out of synch with your movements, there’s a buzzing in my head and I might have a fever. My brain, it’s on fire, but it’s so distant. “Because I didn’t want to believe that all I got was just that little bit. I wanted to believe that some part of myself went on, and survived.”
         “So you didn’t want to go to heaven,” I point out, putting the cup back down and pressing on top of it so that it sinks back into the table, absorbed without a trace. “You just didn’t want to die.”
         You consider this for a second. “No,” you say. “I didn’t.” Your eyes stare off into someplace distant, then snap back to focus on me. “But it happened anyway. Where are we?”
         The scenery changes suddenly, I don’t blink and it’s different. We’re in a curved corridor now, and the entire wall is clear, covered in glass. You could fall into it, the stars outside are endlessly deep, suggesting shapes without ever committing. I feel the sensation of movement, although I don’t think we’ve done anywhere. You don’t seem to notice the shift. Everything I have is reeling. Beyond the glass colors are frolicing, twisting like graceful streamers, sliding in and out of sight, in between stars. People shuffle past like ghosts, moving too quickly to be seen and the air is filled with a constant stream of talking, stuffed with information, a river that you can just jam your hands into and come out with new knowledge. Above us, there’s a photograph on the wall of two galaxies colliding, an image that keeps moving, fast forwarding time, spiralling arms twirling in an endless dance, moving past each other, worlds slipping by. It’s immense, I can’t fathom it, caught in the waiting room for everything. There’s bustle around us, time carrying on at a breathless gallop.
         Images are sliding past, of planets blossoming, stars blooming, it’s all racing by, lazily, too quickly. I look at you and for the first time I see doubt in my own eyes. “You were dead, you know.” I try to see what’s on the ends of the corridor but it just travels on out of sight. It might go back to where we started, strolling down a museum of the years, a place where we store them all, to hide them away until we need them. My face is completely sober, all humor vanished. “Dead for a long time.” For the first time I notice that we’re both wearing loose fitting tunics of an off-white color, a blend of hues that ripple when we shift in the chairs, remaining pale when stillness arrives. I can’t believe this. I don’t believe any of it. Why are you here, with him, in this impossible time? I don’t know what I’m seeing, or saying or hearing.
         “That’s generally what happens when you die,” you respond, trying to stay flippant but finding it impossible to get a grip on this, on anything. I’m caught in the dream with you, outside space flows like heavy liquid, I see the fabric ripple, molded by thought. The air is saturated with superstrings, you move your fingers just the right way and they vibrate in time, forming the music of this era, a slithering hum you can sense deep in the brain, in the places that you thought you forgot, back when man first opened his eyes to see the sun, back when you first realized there was a you and that you were different from everyone else. When you realized that being unique, you had to die and by dying removed yourself from the stream forever. There will never be another of any of us. Even infinite variation can never repeat. The last night I spent in my house I buried my face in my bed, my old bed and the sheets smelled clean because my father had just washed them and I thought, that’s what change smelled like. Clean and comfortable and utterly alienating. “But you never expect to realize how long a time it was.”
         I laugh then and it’s the memory of laughter expelled. There’s guarded sadness in my eyes, as if I’m not sure of something. My lips move before I speak and what I say isn’t what I was going to say. Time changes, but I don’t. Not in the ways that count. “How long do think it’s been?”
         “Forever,” you whisper, your eyes wandering to the window finally. “What is this place?” you ask and my face tells you nothing. “We were somewhere else and now we’re here and . . .” you shift your feet on the floor, wonderment in your eyes. “We’re moving. Where are we going?” Your voice causes cascades of shimmering prisms to form in the air, bending and fading before you can really grasp them. Your eyes widen and you sink further back in the chair. It conforms to your shape perfectly, allowing you to go as far as you want. “I’m dreaming,” you say, looking back at me. I’m watching it all without comment. Your move one hand lazily across the table, watching it shift like grains of sand, spelling out letters without any meaning, without any meaning to me. With a single swipe, you make it all go away. Persons out of phase drift past, on other business, murmuring about matters that are too separated to really connect. “I’m dead and I’m dreaming, somehow.”
         I stand up, then. The chair slides away, crumbles back into the floor. Everything is so graceful, my eyes could travel the curves of the structure forever, the loping, ascending spheres. I see stars encased, feeding billions, a galaxy suffused with life, shining so brightly that when you’re inside it you see how special it all is, because all the glimmering looks dim. “You’re not dead,” I say simply, striding toward the glass. But it’s not glass, it shrivels in response to my presence, warps and acts. The stars outside are moving, forming shapes, compressing and compacting. Something large moves past, another copy of us, a beast outside of comprehension, leaving glittering motes in its wake. They hit the screen and sparkle and fade, illuminating the reflection of my face. “You’re not dead,” I tell you again, my hands clasped behind my back. I sound so old, when I talk like that. There’s something in my stance, there’s too many years shoved into my spine. How long is this? I have to ask the same questions. I can’t gauge the texture of this time. How far have we gone, before we see each other again? It’s so fragmented, I don’t know what I’m seeing anymore. The dying brain, reaching out for any comforting image. My parents should appear any second, beckoning me on. Oh, the light. The sky is just full of lights. I thought that, as a child, staring up and wondering if you went up too far it eventually became down. It becomes neither, all direction is useless in the face of infinity. “And you certainly aren’t dreaming.”
         I take a step forward, and you don’t stop me. My loose pants flutter around my legs but there’s no wind outside. I’m standing among the stars and I look like I belong there. A sense of depth. They gather around, hover on my shoulders, sprites that could devour us all, if we lost the nerve. “But if you go forward far enough, you start to realize that nothing is impossible, as long as you have the stamina to keep going, and the patience to wait.”
         Waving my hand, concentric waves appear in the invisible air. Stars burst like tiny flowers at my touch. I’ve got time in my hands, and it’s there for whoever wants to grab it.
         “Who are you talking about?” you ask, sitting in the chair like you’re nailed down. Your voice has an odd echo to it, like there’s more space in the Universe to hold it. The boundaries keep separating, everything is so much further apart. Our times, the gaps between our sentences. The edges of your body are blurred and fuzzy, you’re not drawn sharply enough but if I stare at you long enough you start to gain some sort of substance. Meanwhile, I’m outside, every shiver emitting nuance, I’ve learned so much language that I don’t recognize my movements as my own. There are colors to the world that we don’t have names for. The stars know them, because that’s where it’s born, right at the heart of birth. Of destruction. “It’s not me. I didn’t have to wait, if I was dead. I wouldn’t know what I was waiting for.” You lean across the table. It coos like something living. The interior seems to bend and outside I can see the expanse, the spires of living cities, curling in between tendrils of dark matter. Emptiness soaked in life, in light. Do you remember how it was, seeing the planet from above, the cities are night, smears of brightness strung across everything. We can be like that, everywhere, if you let it all scatter as long as it can. I don’t know what I’m saying. The broken down speeches of an age are filtering into my shattered head. I’m just repeating what I’m told. And I don’t know what I’m saying. Where is this time, where space comes in folds, where towers are out of reach and around every corner. “You never told me how long it’s been.”
         “What’s the biggest number you can think of?” I say with a smile. I’m still standing in the outside, I take another step further out. “Take that number and double it and depending on how broad minded you are, double it again.”
         “Where did you go?” you ask, coming in from another angle. There’s patterns in the dust of beautiful faces. A planet glides by and it’s frowning. We spiral down and the Universe opens like a dead thing erupting, you look inside and see how much it really required to keep going. Beauty in the entrails, the tracks your organs make, when you let them fall in whatever order gravity decides. We haven’t left, but we’re in the center of it all. “I didn’t hear from you for a couple of days and I went to your house and you weren’t there. The door was open and nobody was home.” You stare at me accusingly but I don’t notice. I’m lost in reverie, revelling in the sound of your voice so long departed. I can’t explain. I’m looking for a calender but those things don’t apply anymore. Is this tingling a numbness, or the memory of feeling and a last minute effort to incite. “I thought you died, because I never saw you again.” You sigh, wrap your arms around your stomach and lean forward, so that your chest touches the table, your chin inches from the surface. Plants snake along the ceiling, a quiet infestation. There’s sunlight strafing sideways. There’s a new day, every second. We’re propelled by something we don’t understand. I haven’t answered your question yet. Dammit, you bastard, that’s what we all want to know. Why can’t you say?
         “You can’t go back, once you’ve been out here,” I say, moving my outstretched arm in a slow pinwheel, creating undulating waves of transparent force. The stars warp and shift but refuse to move. There’s a skylight over us and the view is utterly different. I see trees and a perfect sky. But we’re not underground. “I mean, you can visit, and you walk where you used to but you won’t ever belong again.” I descend, my head dipping, nearly falling to the level of the floor. Sparks ascend in my presence, something atonal churns. It blends in symmetry. “And I don’t I’d ever really want to. I didn’t miss it.” I come up again, hands flat against my thighs, strangely luminous against the darkness. I see my eyes and they’re old. They don’t fit my face. “I don’t remember what it was like, to miss it. What I was even missing.”
         “You never bothered to visit,” you repeat, but you seem somewhat amused by the whole concept. It’s so pointless now, to bring up these things, so long after they really mattered. Down the hall, a waterfall sends crashing sheets of mist across the corridor. There’s shadows beyond it, of figures, of things that may not be people. The mist curls and forms ghostfaces, breaking out into toothless smiles before dissipating, leaving only the scent of wetness, the memory of how it was.
         “I did come back, after you were dead,” I say calmly. I pace the length of the portal, the glass, whatever the flexible structure might be. I think I see veins in the walls, pulsing with quiet life. “More than once. Twice, even. But after a while, all the reasons you have to come back aren’t there anymore and you just . . . you forget. Time passes and the next thing you know it’s been a thousand years.”
         You take this in stride. You have no other choice. “You said you travel in time. You said that they took you and you helped them . . .” your lips twist around the words, “defend the time stream. Or something.” Your fingers make whorls in the table. Underneath it’s become ornate, subtle carvings and complicated designs, chiseled with a fine hand, slicing between the atoms until the eye is so fine that it looks much the way it did before. But everything is different. We’ll tattoo that mantra on you yet. No matter how long it stays the same, everything changes. “Did you take me to the future, just before I died. Take me to a point where they could cure me and I’d be okay?” There’s something in your gaze, in your words. It would make sense, to do it that way.
         “You can’t travel in time,” I tell you and something in you deflate. But we’re surrounded by so much wonder. A jungle built between the stars, sphere encasing the planets, so much area, we’ll never run out of room. It chimes, with the vibrations of the fabric. “You’d get torn apart, it takes a certain sense of detachment, an ability to let go.”
         “What are you saying?” you ask, eyes narrowing.
         “That you can’t travel in time,” I say, without any irony at all. I’m standing on the edge, letting space trickle over me, leaking into the brightness of our day. “Even if I had to snatch you, I couldn’t. You’re rooted to where you were and nothing could pry you free.” I raise a teasing eyebrow. “But you really shouldn’t overanalyze these things.”
         You stick your tongue out at me. I nod, as if acknowledging some old joke and turn away again, leaning against the intricate field. “So, no I didn’t bring you here from when we were and I didn’t bring myself here, either. Not the way you’re thinking, I came here the hard way. The same way everyone else did.”
         “And where are we?” you ask, still asking the wrong question. Branches rest in the wings, leaves poke into other dimensions, carry back with them the aura of simpler times. I’m silhoutted against a spray of starlight, the spread you make when you take whiteout on a toothbrush and spit at a dark room. Specks in the distance, resolving into nothing. It’s all out there. The people that we used to be.
         “A time when all the miracles are true,” I reply simply. “A time so far away from what we used to know that if I turned around to look at it, there wouldn’t be anything to see because it would be too small, too distant.” I press my hands against the glass and they don’t bend this time, although I create faint impressions. I’ve gotten more longwinded in my old age, it appears to be a curse in my family. I look at you sideways, without turning around fully. “Everything is true, if you go out far enough. Everything, from a certain perspective.”
         “You’re scaring me,” you say quietly, but without withdrawing. Your hands shape the air without realizing it, forming words without meaning, inventing solid language. It drops and dies but doesn’t really go away. “I don’t get any of this.”
         There’s a pained smile in my eyes when I look at you again. I’m still facing the glass, it’s my reflection watching you backwards. I’m reflected in the stars maybe and they’re watching me, without comment or obligation. “I know, it’s hard,” I say gently. “But like I said, you have to look at it right.” I spread my stance apart slightly, a few inches. “Comfort and familiarity, it’s all about . . .” I draw my feet together sharply, heels touching, standing at near attention.
         And like that, we’re on the beach.
         “. . . perspective,” I finish, pivoting, creating tiny waves where the water is churning around my ankles now. The table is still there but it’s built of sand now, packed hard, glistening with newborn flecks of glass and captured starlight. The ocean stretches out to the horizon, while the beach spans the sides. The sky is red and purple, one blending into the other, pristine watercolors. A breeze from somewhere ruffles the waters, making it seem like the liquid is breathing, moving in and out. I turn around, my body insubstantial and see gossamer towers intertwined, rising to some place that lies past heaven. It’s so close and yet everything we ever were is a million miles away, in a direction we can’t retrace. Is this what I have to look forward to, if I let it stretch out long enough? I can’t fathom the distance and I can’t travel. Lights are moving, slowly drifting across the sky. Above us there might be cities, spanning the gap, connecting one world to another. Who can say? I can’t see it all. I can only tell you what’s here, with us.
         “What happens to me now?” you ask softly. You look ready to get off the chair and join me but something is stopping you. I’m a few inches deeper into the water but then I seem to notice that you’re not there and I start to come back. Emerging, I see that my clothes aren’t damp at all. It smells like summer, somehow, in the way that your shadows are stunted and blunt, like the sun is right overhead. Or summer on the cusp of something, about to turn into autumn. Where the wind is cool but still containing enough warmth to make you remember. If this is the order the seasons even go in. I’ve been to places that are forever locked in ice, where a single candle can make you a god. You don’t notice it after a while, how absent the heat is. If there’s one thing people can do, it’s get used to anything. Even death. I got used to it and now it hardly bothers me. Watching you alive does bother me, though, because it means that down the line, someone will have an idea and it’s almost too much to believe. In this world of impossible things, I don’t know how to judge the things that exist. “Am I just here for a certain amount of time? What’s the limit?”
         “Limit?” I ask, looking down at you, hair falling in front of my eyes. Flecks of sand brush across my face and it seems softer than cotton. I walk toward you and I’m leaving footprints and they’re filling with water. I think I see creatures, frolicing madly in the space allowed, shimmering like jewels. “Why would there be some kind of a limit?”
         “Because isn’t that . . . that’s how it always works, right?” you say. You’re standing up now. I’m holding out a hand to you, not moving any closer, but asking you to close the distance. I can’t read my own expression, I’ve become a mystery to myself. “You bring someone back and they’re so happy to be alive again but then . . .” you don’t reach me right away. Instead you crouch down, grab a handful of sand. Squeezing it, you watch as sand and water runs through the cracks between your fingers. I see, but I don’t comment. Perhaps you’re not sure if it’s all real, some kind of hyperdream that takes place in the moments before death. I remember once being convinced I had extra arms, in the last second before the curtain came down. The mind’s a funny thing, it trains you and then tricks you, makes you think that everything is fine even as you’re dying inside, even as it’s all rotting away. Opening your hand, you let the sand, now dry, trickle out, landing in a tiny pile. “. . . they find out that whatever science brought them back, whatever stupid magic, can only do it for so long and so . . .” you bite your lip, trying to keep the words in and failing, “the person, they have to make the most of what time they have left, before they, you know, dissolve or die again, or whatever the hell is going to happen to them . . .” you stand up, then, and we face each other. Your hair is longer again, down to your shoulders and the wind caresses it, swishes it back and forth. “So tell me,” you say, after taking a deep breath, after looking away to calm yourself, “how much time do I have?”
         “As much as you want,” I tell you. My hand is still out but you haven’t moved any closer. You’re wiping the remains of sand off your hand, letting the grains fall like idle time. I don’t like myself like this. I’m too serene, the fire is all gone. Is this what time will do to me, after it’s worn me down? Discard all the edges, until I slip smoothly through, without anything to mark my passage at all. “These days, when something is done, it’s done right.”
         “I was dead,” you say, both of your hands clenched into fists. The table is gone now, dissolved back into sand. Above us, bright lights circle around each other in a complicated dance. “I remember trying to catch my breath and I just couldn’t and I remember people talking to me but they sounded really far away like they were down a tunnel and . . . I remember being scared and thinking, if I don’t breathe soon something bad is going to happen and . . .” you stop, frowning. “That’s it, I don’t know if I actually died then or fell into a coma and then died but . . .” you were drawing a line in the sand with your foot. It’s almost an arrow. “Now you’re telling me, that I’m not dead.” You hold your hands in front of your face, disbelieving. At some point, we’ve moved closer together. I never saw anyone take a step. The air is suffused with haze. It’s summer, being filtered to the day. For a second your face looks too flexible, skin stretched over the wrong bones. “Is that what you’re trying to-“
         You don’t finish the sentence, suddenly wrapping me in a harsh embrace. I return the gesture warmly, our robes blending together, almost making us seem like one person. You’re trembling, but not making a sound. Your head tucks itself near my face, hair against my cheek. Your body expands as you take a deep breath. We’re both standing in the water now, it’s come up to greet us like a lost friend. Out toward the horizon orbs dart like giggling children, moving in impossible configurations. A cloud becomes a spear, pointed toward the world, somewhere at the dusk of time.
         “There,” I say, my eyes closed. “It’s not so hard to believe now, is it?”
         “I don’t know what it means,” you say, muffled and confused. “I don’t know how to force it to make sense.” You take a step back, although we’re still connected, my arms on your shoulders. “I don’t know how to believe it, any of it.”
         I shrug. “Then don’t believe it. It changes nothing. You aren’t going to turn into dust if you start to have doubts, it doesn’t work that way.” Behind us the sand forms its own sculptures, shaping our emotions in effortless grains. But it’s all abstract, written in a language I can’t understand. This curve, what is it trying to tell me? I might as well be blind, for all the good it does. I don’t know where the time went, only that there’s less of it and everything is different. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the Universe generally doesn’t wait to ask my opinion. The quicker you figure that out, the faster you can turn things to your advantage.” I laugh, a brief burst. “It also makes life a lot easier.” My face looks so worn and young and if I was able to reach underneath, what kind of insects would I find there? What will I have to do, eventually, to sustain myself for this long?
         You break away, small humor grasping you. “You . . . you never died,” you say, quite soberly. It’s so absurd, when you try to take it all in.
         “Not permanently, no,” I say a bit modestly, scratching out a jagged mark in the sand. I step around you, moving further onto the beach, back to drier land. Waves cushion my words, give them added echo. “It’s been a long time, kid. It really has.”
         “But where did you go?” you say, still asking the wrong question. It’s not about that, it’s never about where we go as much as what we do when we’re not here. The secret lives. The things we can’t relate to, the things that we tell ourselves when there’s no one around to hear. It drive us mad, to never know a person fully, to know that there are some parts of them hidden from us, from themselves and that no matter how much we try, there will always be a certain inch that will forever remain uncovered, the locked tomb that we take all the way down with us, that we hold as tight as we can when we enter the dark, because we hope that maybe in those last seconds we’ll get a chance to open it, to force a crack and sneak a look and see what we were all about, in the deepest places. Because our purpose is obscure and detached from ourselves. Because I’m here with you at the end of time and it makes no sense. Because it should all be over, no matter how long it takes.
         “Does it matter?” I ask wryly. “Besides, that’s not what you’re asking. You want to know why I wasn’t there.”
         We’re walking on the beach now, the two of us, leaving behind empty footprints quickly filled with water. I’m following because you’ve got me by a tether, I never had any will, I can’t find it anymore. A man in the reflection of a puddle, could be calling to me. But who cares? Does it matter anymore? I couldn’t say. His distorted face, what could it say, that I might listen. You’d best reach out a hand and try to grasp the air, hold a bundle of it and keep it safe than try to find me and convince me that anything I once dreamt of might become solid. Oh, pitiful time. I don’t know what I want but I know I can’t have it. When they put me back together I don’t know what I’m going to be, because it’s not like death, to be discorporated, you get better and you’re not the same. I’m going to forget I think, what death is like after I’ve seen too much of it. There’s tears in the sand, in the wrong shadows, the day screaming but who the hell is going to bother to listen, in the end. Not you, not any of you. I’m beating against the walls but the walls aren’t there. I’m so free and so restrained, because I’m trapped in the invisible and if I could break the glass I’d plunge a shard into every vein in my goddamn hand, just to feel blood, just to know that pain is still there, just to know that there are still some barriers that I can pass through, that something can stop me and I can overcome it. I’m flailing against the air, I’m fighting against time and time is doing whatver it wants. How many shifts, how many turns before we’re all done. I’ve lost count. I’ve watched you die and now I’m watching you live after you’ve died and I can’t take it. It has to be a dream but that requires the mind and all I have is myself, just this collection of thoughts and memories and it’s mirrors, you’re tinted and distorted, I look at you and I see myself and that’s all I have to focus on. I’m rambling, dammit, I know, but how else am I supposed to know that I’m still here. Without sound, how will I know.
         “Nobody seemed to care that you were gone,” you say, sounding forlorn, out of place in this scene of wonders. “It didn’t make the papers or anything.” We’re slipping in and out, without going anywhere. But I can’t leave. I have to know what the story means. There’s a star in the too clear sky that isn’t glowing and it’s growing closer. I don’t know what it means.
         “That was the plan,” I say lightly. I touch your arm and we stop walking. The water seems so far away now, but we haven’t gone anywhere. We are where we stand. “I slipped out the back door while the party was going on in the living room. I didn’t want to leave anything behind.”
         When you get to the ocean there’s nowhere else to walk. You’re at the end. The object in the sky is becoming larger, swelling with decreasing distance. I would ask my father at the edge of the water what was beyond and he said other places. But no matter how much you squint you’ll never be able to see them. You have to take it on faith, that there are other lands beyond what we can witness. I didn’t want to believe it, but they were still there, regardless of what I thought.
         “I called everyone I knew, that you knew,” you explain, still trying to apologize for failing to do what I was actively trying to keep you from doing. “None of them had ever heard from you. I used to check your house, at least once a week for a while, just to find some sign that you were back, that you were visiting.”
         “I couldn’t come back,” I say gently. “I was gone and I had to be away.”
         “I thought you were dead,” you suddenly snap. It’s a world, flowing into the sky overhead. You don’t seem to notice it. Dear God, it’s as big as everything. Watch it. Watch where it goes. “I thought you went and killed yourself, I kept reading the paper expecting them to find your body washed up on some riverbank or in a car somewhere with a bullet hole in your head and . . .” you had partially raised your hands but now you drop them to your sides. I haven’t made any kind of visible reaction to your tirade. My eyes are for the sky. Oh God. I can see the oceans in it, the forests that have turned back the clock. I think I know where it is. “You let us all think you had walked away and . . .” you shake your head. “That’s not the guy I knew. You were never like that. I thought I knew you better than that.” Who says those things, in this beautiful world. There it goes. Here, it comes.
         “I’m sorry,” is all I say, blandly, maybe even insincerely. That hardly sounds like me at all but how can I relate to this version of myself, so far removed from experience. “It would never be perfect, but that was the way it had to be. I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone, that would have been ridiculous.” I frown, as if remembering some unpleasant facet of the day. “And I did come back, in a fashion, but you were already dead.”
         “Did you come to my funeral, at least?” you ask, your head haloed by a world. It refuses to recede, I see it all, looming in the sky. It’ll swallow us. Take us and devour us whole. But not me, I’m not here. I’m just a witness without an oath.
         “Not for a few years,” I say, smiling apologetically. You raise an eyebrow at this but don’t comment. I shrug, the smile not fading. “Back then, I wasn’t very linear. I did a lot of things out of order. It was the times, things are a lot more straightforward these days.” Something in your expression must warn me because I quickly add, “Listen, for me, this was all a very long time ago . . . for you it’s recent, you think it’s just happened. I wasn’t happy about the way I did things but I made my peace with it eventually.”
         “Is that why I’m back?” you ask and there’s something unbearably heavy in your voice as you say that. “So you can make peace with me? Am I just a loose end?”
         I sigh and don’t answer immediately. The wind is picking up now, due to its proximity. Water churns in quiet protest, announcing the arrival. This world, this land. I can see you all, each tiny tree. Where will we live, when everything else is gone? I can’t answer that. I don’t know what I’ll say, when all is dark.
         “Can’t you just be happy that you’re here?” I ask, and with all our distance there’s a gap I’m never going to reach. “That we made it far enough that it was even possible. I almost forgot how-“
         I stop because something pinched appears in your face. You stare at me for a few seconds, your stance wavering. You could run, but where? Where will you go, if not here? “Goddammit,” you say, attacking no one. Crossing your arm, you spin around sharply, trying to find solace in the water.
         That’s when you see it, of course. There’s no way for me to warn you. Even without an angle I see your eyes widen. It’s level with us and coming closer. “Oh my God,” maybe you whisper, in that last second. It’s a shadow as big as imagination.
         I only smile.
         Then we’re swallowed, just like that.
         And we’re in the forest. Without our postures changing. Oh, these dreams. I’m only imagining this because it’s how I want it to be, in the end. That if I wait long enough, I’ll hear your voice again and hear new words and new thoughts. But everything is frozen in me. All I’ve got is what I have and that’s less than anyone can hold. I’m a cup with a hole and I can’t see where the liquid is going. I need a plug, I need a cork, someone to stop me from leaking, I’m spilling myself all over time and there’s no way to gather up all that I’ve lost. But I don’t know what I’ve lost. Because it’s not here. I’ve just got sensations, needles jammed into the eyes of a dying man, an attempt to convince myself that there is something to feel, that the nerves aren’t utterly shot. But they are. They stretch out behind me, into the vastness. Men, can’t you find them? Can’t you follow the trail I left? What good are you, if you can’t resolve this?
         There’s trees, primordial. Sprawling pillars of wildness, growing wherever there’s room, branches interlocking overhead into a canopy so thick you might be able to walk on it. The undergrowth is sparse and the paths in between the trees are wide enough to stroll easily. The air is too clear, free of anything that might corrupt it. Age cloaks the scene, it’s infusing the shafts of sunlight that slice down from the holes in the verdant roof, rendering brilliant zones of brightness. This is what happens, when you leave it all alone. When it prospers, without any touch from your hand.
         “Jesus, where-“ you breathe, a hand to your mouth. There’s a placid stillness resonating here, a sense that everything has settled and there’s no reason to ever disturb. Our actions here are barely a trickle in the day. It’ll mean nothing but even the nothing doesn’t matter.
         “Take a walk with me,” I say, a question without asking. I’m already moving, striding easily along the low grasses, the grand sprawl of nature. Somewhere a bird is calling, beautiful and repetitive, joined by others. Shadows flit in distant branches, lost in upper coils, oblivious to anything we might bring. “I’m explaining this all poorly, and I apologize.”
         “Well, this is hard for me to take, you know?” you ask, racing forward a few steps to catch up with me. “It’s just hard to grasp.” You smile crookedly, something from long ago rearing up in your mind. “And you were never good at explaining, even on your best days.”
         I give you a sharp look, an unreadable emotion crossing the background of my face. Then, slowly, I return the smile. “I deserved that, didn’t I?”
         “You tell me,” you respond, still grinning. We’ve hit a respectable pace, strolling among the wreckage of time. Buried in the trees, jutting from the soils I see things that aren’t natural, objects already old and discarded, left behind when the people who were here got tired of them, got tired of the shackles of this word. There’s broken buildings, the tops snapped off and trees wrapped around them like lovers, holding it all together even when there’s no one present to see anymore. We leave things where we find them and let the order of things take care of the rest. Staring around curiously, you say, “So, is this Earth or . . .”
         “Yeah, it is,” I reply, swinging my arms casusally. There’s something taut in me, I can’t identify it, a spiral I’m keeping primed, for reasons of my own. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what I mean. “But you won’t recognize any of it, trust me. Everything’s changed, nothing’s where it used to be.”
         “It could be my house, we’re walking on, then,” you say. “Or your house.” The thought reminds you of something and you add, “Did you ever see, the people who bought your house, they painted it this really ugly color . . .”
         “I know,” I say, my hands again clasped behind my back. It takes me a second to speak again. I’m accessing. So much to remember, I realize. The memories could fill the planet, could choke away space for every living thing, if I allowed it. There’d be nothing left for me. “I saw it, a couple of times. I used . . . sometimes I’d visit the place late at night, sit on the couch and watch TV until they woke up and came down to see who it was. Just to mess with them.” I laugh a little, then. “I wanted them to think the place was haunted. We never had a ghost house in our town.”
         “It’s the one thing we were lacking,” you say, bumping into me a little bit, the way you used to, a friendly chance to knock me off the path. You’re settling in, perhaps because of the lighter air. You’re keeping up with me easily, with no sign of strain. Maybe I’m walking faster, just to test you, just to prove myself right.
         “We didn’t lack for ghosts though,” I say, with less humor, staring at my open hand. “They just didn’t have a place to go.”
         You bite your lip and fall silent, waiting for me to continue. It’s a dream, this is, we’re walking among the leftover dreams of time, a place where it all went to retire. It’s hard to believe that everything is still spinning, this far out. That it all didn’t end in fire. Everything we worked toward, we brought together. I can’t believe that. I don’t think such things exist anymore. Where are my hands? I need something to hold.
         “I used to leave flowers on your grave . . .” I trail off and my eyes narrow, my gaze going to another place. Accessing. “No, not always flowers. Just once in a while . . . sometimes I’d leave things like . . . I left your favorite food one time . . .”
         “You left a pizza?” you ask, with a giggle.
         “Was that your favorite? I left a box of chocolates, the kind with that weird filling you seemed to love so much . . .” there’s a little confusion on my face as I say this, as if I’m trying to distinguish among all the graves I’ve ever seen, all the bodies that I know are buried and that aren’t coming back.
         “Oh, that,” you say. “I remember those . . . well those were a close second then, at least. You’re off the hook.”
         It doesn’t seem to appease me, to know that. My speed slows down. In this world there’s no reason to rush. There’s nothing but time out here, gathering dust and collecting days. “And then I’d leave little souvenirs from the places I visited, just so you’d know where I’d been. Nothing major, a clod of dirt, a leaf, a fragment of some metal. Just so it was something, you know?” A thin smile treads on my face. “Besides, all the flower shops were always closed when I used to drop by. I had good timing like that.”
         You’re staring at me strangely, but I don’t seem to notice. I’m watching the ground go by, lost in thought. We’re walking inches apart, but there’s no contact. There’s no one here in the world but us. It might be true. That could be a true thing. If I could make it come to that, I think I would. But how do I believe when I don’t know myself.
         “You did,” you say, quietly. I turn and look at you sharply, either feeling your stare for the first time or maybe forgetting that you were there and realizing suddenly that I’m not totally alone. I can’t imagine forgetting. But I can’t imagine time stretched out so far that it’s nothing more than dust down the road, a place you’re riding to without ever reaching. There’s always a point you won’t arrive at, that’s the whole point of this mortality, it’s what I was trying to avoid, because I wanted to see everything with such a desperate fervor that I’d leave it all, I’d do it again a million times over and I can never explain that to you or anyone because it never makes sense, to you it’s always about what I’m leaving behind, not what I’m travelling toward. I want to travel the road until there’s no road left anymore, so I know I didn’t miss anything. I couldn’t rest, until I knew there was nothing left to see.
         Maybe I’m thinking of how I can explain that to you, when you suddenly hug me tightly, your lips pressing against my check. I return the gesture warmly but stiffly, more surprised than anything else.
         “Thank you,” perhaps you whisper. “Thank you for not forgetting.” There’s a familiarity to you that I can’t reach anymore, because we’re too separate. But I know why I did this. Because I felt I owed you, because I didn’t see any other way to repay. I’ve got a lover already, I can see it in my own eyes. I didn’t do this for comfort. I did it for you, because I wanted you to see what you had missed. Dammit, it’s not the only way.
         We disengage, I smooth the front of my tunic. It’s not paradise but some people might believe it is, if they stared hard enough. There’s relics all around, scattered and abandoned. Toys without a use, without a home. You’re smiling, settling into this new day. I’m glad you’re happy, I’m glad I can do this for you, after so much time has gone. You don’t understand, I can’t live to see myself. This twists everything and I can’t bear the strain.
         “Why did you do it?” you ask me. “You didn’t just bring me back, you cured me, of what I had.” We’ve stopped walking. “What was the price?”
         My eyes don’t find you. What am I hiding? I’ll never know. Or maybe I will, eventually. “Because you didn’t deserve only the time you had.” I hug my arms, stare at the ground. It’s all so calculated. “And as for the price, it’s nothing I’ll miss. Trust me.”
         You look at me and shake your head. “You haven’t changed, you know. I don’t care how much time has gone by.”
         For some reason, I touch my chest. “Oh, I don’t know about that.” I only know I say that because I can read my own lips. But what’s wrong with my heart? Outloud, I say, “Come on, I had to change just a little bit. Give me that at least. Perhaps I’m a little taller?” I grin expectantly, waiting for you to acknowledge.
         You laugh at that. “No, you really haven’t changed.” You give me a severe look, crossing your arms. “And you still haven’t explained why.”
         “I said, because you-“
         ”I heard that, already,” you interrupt. Your speech is faster than mine, you’re moving at a quicker pace than my lazy language, I’m lost in unconscious gestures, the twitches and motions that will mean more than any words ever will. But you don’t know these things and all we have is what we say. “And that may be true but that’s not why.”
         There’s mist, creeping in from somewhere, the remains of a morning unseen by human eyes. This is how it was before we decided to carve our stamp on it.
         “I don’t think I understand,” I say carefully.
         “Why now? Why me?” You never let things go. I think that’s what eventually drove us apart. Now, it hardly seems to faze me. I’ve seen so much worse I think, that your stubborness is nothing, just the faintest pulse at the heart of star. It’s only the things that are radically colder that show up, against the glare of it all. And even the heat of the coldest portion is enough to destroy us utterly. “You never said that. Why aren’t your parents here? Or . . . anyone else?” You look around, a motion to coat the drama. “There’s no one but us. Where is everyone? Can you tell me that?”
         “We’re . . . getting there,” is all I say at first. I stare off into the distance, at the ropes of thick leaves crisscrossing the pathways, where animals too small to see run in tiny blurs, rustling the foliage. What must this sound like to them? We must be so alien, to bother coming out here. “It just, it takes a long time and the process . . . it’s wearying.” I see shadows behind my eyes. What was the price, I wonder?
         “How did you do it?” you ask, hesitating even as you say it.
         “Memory, we’re pulling people out of memory.” I put an arm around you, lightly, and guide you forward. We’re at the end of the world and there’s nobody left to help me. Men, were you so quickly disbanded? I thought we would never leave each other behind. I wouldn’t leave you stranded in the snow, gasping for air, waiting for a help that’s never going to come. I trusted all of you, with everything I had and yet here I am, out of your endless reach. “There’s a . . . a collective memory, the sum of everything that ever was and we’re . . . digging into it, trying to recover what we can. But right now it needs focus and there’s so much there that if you want something specific you need to know exactly what you’re looking for. In detail.” I frown, then, leaving something out.
         “What are you saying, I’m here because . . .”
         “I never forgot you,” I say, the words coming out as I exhale, a breathy rush. I don’t reach for you. We’re walking but the pace hasn’t changed. I follow, haunting myself, before the fact. “You don’t understand how long it’s been, that . . .” I stare at you then, with a intensity that nearly makes you stumble. Who is this? It’s not me. Oh God, is this what I become, when the years have piled on. “There’s so much that’s happened, my head can’t hold it all, I have it stored, all the useless memories stored, I . . .” I calm down, take a step sideways, press my hands together. “No matter how crowded it got, no matter how much I had to jettison, there were always certain times I wouldn’t let go.” My gaze is tight and taut, piercing you, stopping you where you stand. “You were part of that, there has always been a small part of my mind that held you.”
         “Well, it’s the least you could do,” you say, but there’s a part of you that’s recoiling from my words, I can see it in a certain tension in your face, the way you nearly stumble, missing a beat. You’re getting a sense of the scale that we’re working with here, the immense distances of years involved and how much effort it truly takes to not forget a person, when there are so many other things vying for your attention. Maybe you’re not sure if you’re worth it or not. There are questions I can see in you. They’re valid questions. But I can’t answer them. Perhaps I will, in time.
         I continue, my voice quieter. “It was a gamble, you wouldn’t be too far off if you said we didn’t know exactly what we were doing. But we had to try. I argued for that.” Leaves rustle somewhere above us, the scent of man still lingers, so long after it all evaporated. My eyes are clear, reflecting the arguments without giving any kind of window into them. “I said there was enough room for everyone now, everything has expanded, there’s no reason why . . .” I stop again. Grass bends and unbends as we walk across it. “Remember when we used to talk about the future?”
         “The one where we had six kids and you were an investigative reporter?” you ask, with an impish glance. It’s still you, formulating new thoughts, even after all this time. And yet the world wavers, wobbles. It’s not real. That’s not my thought. But I can’t shake it. I’m drenched in fever, somewhere, calling out the years like a script of the dead. This is how I want it to be, I’m creating it all. Except no, it has to be here. I’ve got a glimpse, that’s all. This taste is all I’m allowed.
         “No, not quite,” I say, grinning. I look up at the sky, the shadows cast from above giving my face a mottled appearance. “Not our future so much as the future, the one that was supposed to have all the flying cars and we were all going to be living in space. I couldn’t wait for it, I wanted to live in a time where anything was possible, sometimes I felt so constrained.”
         “Well you got it, didn’t you?” you say, watching me carefully.
         “I did,” I admit soberly. “But I was lucky. My parents died and I got made an offer to see it all. And I’ve seen a lot, from the top down.” I gave you a mischevious smile. “I was even in charge of it all for a while, but I gave it up. They took it back.” What is that supposed to mean? Don’t tell me, dammit, let me be surprised. I frown then, my brow furrowing. “But it wasn’t fair, that it was just me.” I look at you without moving my head. “I never thought it was fair, that you died so soon. The ride here was interesting, I wish you could have seen it.”
         “But I’m here, aren’t I?” you say, scratching at the tips of your fingers. “You got me here, somehow.” My own explanation barely makes sense to me, it must sound like absolute rubbish to you. But you can’t argue with the results. I catch you putting your hand to your chest, counting the beats of your own heart. You pinch the skin on your arm and say, “So is this like my actual body or am I in some kind of weird robot body?”
         I laugh at that. “I really did make you watch too many crappy movies when hung out.” And then, just like that I’m serious again. Are these my emotions or just switches that I’m turning on and off. Because it reminds me of someone else that I know and the comparison doesn’t make me comfortable at all. “No, it’s flesh and blood, we reconstructed as best we could, though I can’t confess that I got your height completely right.”
         “I thought I felt taller,” you murmur, lifting yourself up on your toes. Branches just barely brush the top of your head. We’re coming to a small stream, trickling placidly, with a bridge made of soft light spanning the banks. The water catches the light, reflects off the colors of the bridge, the deep seated gems whirling with liquid friction, keeping it all aloft. Strolling over it causes tiny motes to spiral away, falling into the water without a ripple. You glance around, a sense of disbelief still clogging your gaze. “You’re not going to get offended if I say that I’m still having trouble grasping this whole scenario.” That makes two of us. But I can’t say that because it’s not true. “I mean, first you vanished and then I lived out the rest of my life and . . . here we are . . .” we reach the opposite side. The bridge vanishes, discorporating into slashed brightness. “In the future,” you whisper, barely moving your lips.
         I hear you anyway. “You always told me it wasn’t right not to share.”
         “What are the chances, though?” you ask, not really speaking to me, maybe to life in general, maybe to all the departed who can see us and wonder why we waste our time like we do. Even in endless summer there’s a sense of motion. Even without anybody around, this life is too crowded. We need room to move. “That I would know someone who turned out to be this big important cosmic type guy . . .” you say this with a knowing sense of irony. “And that he’d still be here, way in the future.” You shake your head. “I can’t wrap myself around it. I used to think I was lucky if I found a quarter on the sidewalk. This . . . this is out of my league.”
         The trees part a little and we’re in an open field of sorts, the grasses stretching wide in both directions. Sunlight drops down like a dense shower, drenching everything in golden glow. This is how I want to remember you, soaked in light. But it’s not real. None of this looks real. Are you telling me this, so I’ll stay in one place, so you can grab me easier? Can you do this to me, manipulate my perceptions? Maybe I’ll thank you for it, for giving me these false memories. So I can pretend for myself that everything turned out okay, in the end? I don’t want to think that death is the end, there’s ways around everything else, I want to think that everything was ever good will someday come back in some form, that it can’t disappear forever, not the sound of laughter, or the soft touch of a voice, or the faint brushing of warm hair when someone hugs you because they don’t know what other comfort they can give. I don’t want to rest, if it’ll bring me closer to the future. I always told you, I’d never die because I didn’t want to, because I was too damn stubborn, because I would just refuse. I wish I could have given you strength, so that the gap wasn’t so far, that we didn’t have to separate and doubt. I wish I could given you the years I would have had before my life was rendered void and I became someone else, another man for another place. I wish I could have ripped you out of time and taken you up where all the stars are born, to the top of it all and showed you history laid out before us, all the bad things and all the good things and how they repeat and never repeat and pointed out how it all works out, somehow. In the end. If you stretch it out long enough, if you wait and you’re patient, then it all works out. I wanted to tell you that so you wouldn’t be afraid in the last moments. Because it’s just a second, the pitiless dark, when you have something to look forward to. A moment and you’ll open your eyes to a world beyond your imagining. I want that for you. It’s not wrong, to want that, is it? If it happens. I want to believe that it does. I want to believe that the future is somewhere I’m constantly heading toward, an unceasingly ascending spiral, leading to a place I can’t see, a destination so far up that it’s only a blur, just a smudge of endless light greeting us, promising that it will all be better, if you just wait. Not perfect but better. Because it has to matter, if we’re going to claw our way out of this.
         “I’m not that important, in the scheme of things,” I say, the light drowning out my words. I’m following and I still can’t see. The grasses are taller, coming up to our knees, swishing at us gently. There’s a structure buried in the growth, metal weeping, ashamed at itself, grateful that nature granted it this mercy, to see the final reclaimation. “Although I have to admit that I have a certain clout, almost by accident.” I say this like I’m repeating an old joke that someone once told me, a long time ago. “But if you think this is odd, what if I told you I wasn’t the only august cosmic type person who came from our town?”
         Your eyes widen a little. “What, who?”
         “Remember the guy in our sophomore English class, the guy who didn’t say much, but whenever he spoke it was generally something odd?” The memories I’ve chosen to keep are somewhat surprising. But I guess time will give me reasons. If it happens. The two of us are almost entirely washed out, a photograph too long exposed. Our speech has grown static at the edges, a radio kicked down the stairs, still valiantly transmitting. Because the people have to know. I have to know.
         You’re nodding in recognition even as I’m still talking. “Yeah, he turned out to be somewhat important as well.” My voice goes faraway. Accessing. There’s no way to isolate. Ah. “We had some good times, roaming around. It feels like forever ago.” I snap back, speaking to the day. “Maybe eventually I can introduce you to some folks who knew him better than me. They can tell you better.”
         You give me a quizzical look. “Why, he’s not around?”
         “No,” I say, as if speaking to a child, “he died, a long time ago.” Like it’s something permanent. But the evidence persists.
         “But, you got me back,” you say slowly. Oh, you poor dear, you don’t understand. I know who we’re talking about and I know how it goes, all too painfully. He was born for one thing, like all of them. Every damn one. “Are you not bringing him back?”
         My mouth becomes a tight line. “He can’t come back, because of what he was, he’s, ah, it’s not allowed.” My speech is terse, I’m clearly not happy about this. Maybe it’s an argument I had, when I thought the limits didn’t exist. “And I used to not think it was right but . . .” there’s resignation in me then, a battle I didn’t want to lose, “he earned his rest. And that’s all there is to it.”
         You’re looking at me and your arm twitches, like you’re about to touch me. I don’t seem to notice the action. Maybe I don’t have to, because I’m here. I have all the angles covered, just out of sequence. “I’m sorry,” you tell me, as we walk beneath a boundless sky. There aren’t words. This is all I have, all I ever had. It’s so blue out there, the way you never expect it to be, the way they tell you in stories when they want your mind to see it a certain way. Because we have to exaggerate if we want to know, because the brain can’t handle the picture, it’s a room drenched in grey curtains and so you have to make it all as bright as you can so that some of the color finally shines through. If I answer you, I don’t catch it. I don’t even know how to mourn anymore, I’ve lost the capacity. I’ve watched you die too many times to know what loss is. In every frame, you’re gone in some way. But here, you’ve come back. It’s so bright I can barely see now. I’m afraid I’ll lose you and I won’t know what happens, how it all turns out. I don’t believe it. Clouds drift across the sky like lazy beasts curled in repose, hinting at motion by merely remaining static. I used to watch the clouds, lay on the lawn and watch them go. I tried to pick one and follow it as it slid off the earth, to the point where the houses met the horizon and there was nothing more to see. I wanted to know where the clouds went, when you couldn’t see them anymore. A resting place, a home for renewal. No, they just circled around again. You fly through and it’s nothing more than billowy whiteness, the scent of moist air crushed with thinness, the sense that you’ve gone as high as you can and there’s still so far to go. Lights lurk past the opaque blue, I can see them staring down at us even now, on this empty world, on the clock turned back. The stars are always up there, even the nearer light outshines them. Satellites track their only lonely paths, nodding to each other in passing, watching the view and thinking how small it all seems. They’re facing the wrong way, the earth was never the destination but a step. We come back here only to pay respects, to the dead we walk across, the graves we step over. Maybe we’re walking over the place where they buried you, before the continents shifted and the weather changed and they built over it because it was nothing more than a bunch of dead people shoved in the ground and after a thousand years there was no one around to remember who they were and that they meant something. The sentence says it all. Who’ll know the difference? Only the survivors and the deck is stacked against them. Who survives? Nobody I know, nobody I ever knew got out alive. That’s the question then. Why I can’t believe it. Even in memory, we’re not alive. It’s just images on a dead screen, the way you think things were, the backlot without a background. And when you look away it all stops moving, a film that runs out of steam. I’m not a survivor, I’ve just lasted longer than I should have. But the odds are out there, conspiring and there’ll be an end to me. Heat death. It all balances out. You could disappear into the haze and we’ll always have this, even if it never happened. Some of the best things are never real, the fantasies you have, the dreams where you wake up and imagine that everything is okay. It’s the transition that kills you, that stops your heart. Everything is real. If we don’t believe that then we have nothing to believe in. I dream of careening around the corpse of a giant as big as a world, of cities built inside his stomach, of generations treking to the center of his dormant brain, trying to discover a secret that had died ten thousand years before. It will be glorious, I tell you, to see these things. I want to tell you, but you’re not here. You’ve gone and I’ve gone and there’s nowhere else to look. The helix of stars, tightly wound. Going to the center and finding that there’s still life, clinging to the rocks tenaciously, desperate not to give up. I can still be surprised, dammit, no matter how much I see. If I learn one thing before I die, I want it to be that. That’s all.
         “So, ah, what happens to me now?” you ask, your words drenched in honeyglow. It’s just shapes now, breaking into the curved abstract. “Where do I go, from here?” I only know it’s you by what my brain tells me, what it expects to see.
         “Wherever you want,” I say, with offhand ease. “You’re free, you can go to any place you desire.”
         “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this,” you say, with some humor. You can’t invest yourself in it fully, perhaps, but life never asks for your approval or for your excuses. It’s there and you have to deal with it as best you can before it slips away. “I keep waiting for it to go away.”
         I’ve stopped moving, my point of reference has halted. Is that all there is? All I get to see? I don’t want to look anymore. I’ve seen too much and stretched too far. The sunlight is too strong, it’s a cancer breaking me down.
         “At least you have a chance to get used to it,” I point out. “You can be thankful for that, if you want a place to start.” You’re going away and I’m not going anywhere.
         “I don’t know, I feel like . . .” you halt, search for words, “you know back in school, when they used to tell us to write about anything and all you could do is stare at the blank page because, ah, the subject, it was just too big. You didn’t know where to start, really. The only limit you had was the size of the paper.”
         Oh, don’t go. I could reach right through the two of you and come no closer. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, there are still limits, but they’re not where you think they are, and they’re not as close as they used to be.” This summer was never so vivid, as when you were alive. “You’ll see, in time. You’re a smart girl, you’ll figure it out.”
         “Not as smart as you, apparently. I was the one who died.” Your voices, drifting away. I want to follow, deeper into the dream. Maybe you’re receding into that collective memory, sinking into its surface so you can live as long as the structure abides. I don’t understand any of this. I never did.
         “No, you were the smart one,” I laugh, so far away. This breeze, it smells like when my parents would wrap me in themselves and the world would be so brisk and clean. I can’t handle this, it’s taking me apart. The wind is chipping at me. “You skipped past all the boring parts and woke up just when the good part was starting.”
         “Is that what this is?” Our shapes, now shadows, now images burned into what I can’t see, mingling together, one oblique circle. Are you taking my hand? Or I, yours? It hardly seems. The grass is so soft, I don’t think I can move. Come back for me, please. Ah, it’s all so soft. The air is a blanket, coating in comfort. “Is that what you call it?”
         “Maybe. But I have an advantage . . .”
         Footsteps retreat. Laughter fades. All I get are snippets, generously bestowed.
         “Oh?”
         It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’m just stopping here, for a second. I’ll catch up when I can.
         “You see, I took a journey after you died, after I happened to walk in on . . .“
         Warm shadows cover me like a shroud. No, that’s all right. I think I’ll stay here. I’ll just wait for you until you come back around, until you make a circle and collect me again. Don’t cry. I’ll be right here, the whole time. I’ll be safe here, in the bosom of the dream. Don’t worry, please. You worry too much. The world turns and I’m fine. Sh. All that matters, I told you. Sh. I won’t promise. Just don’t. Sh. Please don’t. All I ask. It’s.
         I laugh at twilight, all the tiny lights. It will pass, I swear. I told you, it’s okay. It always was. I’m here, where I am. One thing. Sh. Just please. I said, I said. Don’t forget, I said. Ah, I’ll lie here, until you come by. Just don’t forget to remember me, when you pass this way again.
         The ground fades. It all goes. Sh. No. Not now. When you come by. You’ll know. I’ll be right here. I won’t move. I promised. Didn’t I? I think I did. And I do. I do. I do.