Chapter 5

Chapter 5

12/06/1999

Letter #22

I had another one of those dreams last night. This time with somebody new--a scrawny, crazy old man with wild, white hair who wore a blue velvet suit. He chased me around my bedroom with his rickety wooden cane until I crashed into a bookcase, knocking a dusty old tome onto the floor. It lay open, its brittle, yellowing pages vibrating as if agitated.

The man, grimacing pure contempt at me, slammed his cane onto a line in the middle of the page. It read:

Death is a sleep in which individuality is forgotten; everything else wakes again, or rather, never slept.

As far as I was concerned, that was the last straw. I glared back at him and told him to just spit out whatever he came to say. If he couldn’t do that--if all he had to offer was useless, cryptic paradoxes like everyone else, I invited him to get the hell out.

His teeth, beige and cracked, looked like old ivory piano keys. He ground them together while baring them at me. The dry, screeching of his molars begging for mercy was the only sound that escaped his mouth. His pale eyes, mad as a buzzard’s, danced with writhing, cold fire.

He was screaming at me, I knew. Not with his voice but with his whole being. The word hit me suddenly: Remember.

He pulled his arm back and threw something toward my face. I caught it just in time to avoid getting hit between the eyes. It was the coin-shaped jewel my mother left behind in that earlier dream. For the first time, I noticed the rivulets inside the clear gray fanning out from the black hole in the center.  

I twisted it slowly between my thumb and forefinger. Green began creeping through the grey. Once color completely surrounded the black center, a bright fleck of gold flashed from inside it. Sparking like fire, it bloomed into a memory all around me. Your death washed over me in an excruciating, sublime wave.

From the beginning, you said you’d never die in a hospital. You wanted to live the end of your life, not have it fed to zombie-like machines mindlessly regurgitating it back into you through a series of tubes. Zombies only beget zombies. Any halfwit knows that, you’d said.

You were right, of course. I wouldn’t take any of it back. Not even having to endure the infinite space that sometimes stretched between your last breaths.

On your very last breath, you’d looked straight into my eyes, and said in the most heartbreakingly soft voice, “I’m scared.” You squeezed my arm and your eyes turned desperate. “Don’t miss the place where the end becomes the beginning. Promise me...”

Your eyes flashed, then went dark. Empty. I kissed your cool, damp forehead and brushed a stray strand of your long, dark curls away from your face.

“Of course I promise,” I’d whispered, gently lowering my hand over your lashes to close your eyes. Inside that moment, I felt nothing but warm, glowing peace. I understood you perfectly. All I had to do was keep my promise.

While you were dying, your dad had been in the kitchen, heating up hot pockets. He tortures himself to this day about missing your last moments over the most depressing food man has ever concocted. He’d been heating them up for me but that doesn’t seem to help. I found them in the microwave, weeks later, cold and stiff.

It wasn’t until I repeated your words to your dad that I realized they didn’t make any sense. And I remembered that your hair, lashes, and your ability to speak were all long gone.

Your dad held me for a long time, telling me not to worry. It probably wasn’t a sign my illness was coming back, he’d said. Anyone could hallucinate after going years without a decent night's sleep. Especially while losing their child…

As the memory receded back into the jewel, I again became aware of the old man. He was staring intently at me, brows raised expectantly. As he took in my expression, his aged, weathered face became a gorgeous web of interconnected creases, all pulling together to spread a huge grin across his face. He clapped his hands, his mad blue eyes bright with tears, and wrapped me up in a tight, bony hug just painful enough to wake me.

What does it mean when your truest, most real experience is only in your head? I’d always known my hallucinations were meaningless but maybe I had it completely wrong--maybe they’re pure meaning.

The problem is, even if that’s true, even if I accept that you still exist and I really do need to find some place where the end becomes the beginning, where does that get me? Is belief, alone, enough? Because I have no idea what any of it even means, much less what I’m supposed to do.

I’ve realized that I’ve been stalling the inevitable. I need to talk to your dad. And about more than just a word on the calendar he doesn’t remember writing. I can’t tell him everything, of course. The dreams are obviously off the table. But I can’t escape the feeling that all this revolves around him.

The thing is, Evy, I’ve been able to find every single one of those strange lines from my dreams inside the books in our house. But none of the books are mine--they’re all your dad’s.

Besides you, he's the only person I know who's actually read them. As much as I hate to admit it, he’s probably my only shot at making sense of all this.

Chapter 6