The Grey
Life, Chapter XXIII
14
January 2053 - Angst wandered into my room this morning looking much
like he did twelve years ago. There was that same bewildered look in
his eye, that same bitter confusion pulling his facial muscles in
unnatural directions. The look there was so compellingly needful that
it struck me almost as surrender - something I am quite familiar
with. But Angst did not know surrender. Perhaps if he had he would
have been a little happier. When I opened the front door last decade
and saw him standing there like that, I knew somewhere inside that he
would not be leaving again. I was happy to have him, as you know,
even more so because I did not enjoy the two years I had been living
alone. The house seemed cold and eerie, and it's strange to wake up
with no one to greet you. A man needs his company, and I was glad to
have Angst.
He
stood outside the door unblinking for several seconds and stared at
me. The right side of his face was bruised and cut, I noticed, but
the wounds seemed already a couple of days old. For a man of almost
seventy years he seemed in pretty rough shape. "Jesus Christ,
Angst, what happened to you?" I asked him after a few moments of
silence passed, stepping aside so he might enter.
Slowly,
almost painfully, he wobbled into the house. He stopped by the mirror
just inside the doorway to look at himself. I noticed as I closed the
door behind him that the look in his eyes had suddenly dimmed to
something like absence. And seeing that made me so terribly sad,
because he had once been so desperately alive. I thought for a brief
moment that he might be dying, but Angst possesses a strong
constitution and has always been full of rough vigor. As it turns
out, the son of a bitch is going to outlive me.
"I
got in a little trouble with a trucker from Utah," he explained,
touching a tentative hand to the week old or so growth on his face.
"What
kind of trouble, Angst?" I asked, trying to be firm, but I
couldn't help but laugh. "At your age?"
But
Angst didn't respond. He just kept staring into the mirror as if he
had never seen his own face before. As if he believed he were staring
at someone else, or he didn't know who he was.
"I
guess you quit your job at the diner," I said, walking past him
into the kitchen. "You want anything to drink?"
"Bourbon,"
Angst answered quickly.
I
brought out a glass but he didn't take it, so I set it on the table
in front of the mirror. "I haven't seen you in a while, Angst,"
I told him after a moment, but he was so encapsulated by his own face
that he hardly heard me. Coughing uncomfortably, dropping my eyes, I
added, "I'm living alone now."
But
Angst already knew that. He had seen Drusus in Pennsylvania before
starting the trek across country to find me. Of course, he didn't say
anything about it at the time. He just kept breathing into the mirror
and staring at himself.
"Is
there something wrong?" I asked carefully. "I mean, well -
how did you get marked up like that?"
"I
got in a little trouble with a trucker from Utah," he said. His
hand dropped to his side and he looked at me dreamily. "I got in
a little trouble with a trucker from Utah," he repeated. "From
Utah."
I
sighed heavily. The words could have been a line from a song he had
heard a few days ago, or from a television show he happened to catch.
I knew then that Angst's brain was cloudy, that finally for him the
inner world had gained dominance over the outer one. So carefully, I
took him by the arm and led him upstairs to Sarah's old bedroom. On
the way he managed to mumble a few more times about the trucker from
Utah, but as soon as he was prone on the bed he was asleep.
Later
on I phoned Drusus. He told me that Angst had been fired from his job
in Illinois at the diner, something about throwing food. The slow
descent into senility had come upon him quite suddenly. Out of
respect for the man they had grown to love over the years, his
co-workers and customers had tried to overlook his condition, but as
his fits became worse and began to border on violent they had to let
him go. The only person they knew to whom they could entrust him was
Drusus. But Angst didn't like living in Pennsylvania. He wanted to go
to Boston, where his brothers lived. And then one morning, Drusus
told me, he woke up and Angst was gone. That was about a month ago.
What could he have been doing all this time, I wondered? How had he
fed himself? Where did he sleep?
"Why
didn't you tell me he disappeared?" I hissed into the phone,
suddenly very angry. "You knew his condition. Did you call the
police?"
"Of
course I called the police!" Drusus snapped back at me. "What
else could I do? I looked around, but he could have been anywhere."
"Why
didn't you tell me?" I insisted. "He could have been dead,
or injured!"
"But
he wasn't, was he?"
"That's
no answer!"
"I
didn't want to upset you. His body didn't turn up anywhere -"
"Drusus,
do you really think if he died out in the wilderness somewhere they'd
have found his body?"
He
didn't answer me. I hung up the phone. But at least he was safe, even
if he was senile. Later on that night, after Drusus had phoned me
back, I was smoking a joint when Angst walked into my room. I had
just finished fixing up his face and checking his body for other
injuries. He seemed wide awake and attentive. "Can I come in?"
he asked, eyes fastened to the stick in my hand.
"Sure,
man," I said, taking another drag. He bounded like a little
child to my bed and sat down. I passed him the joint in silence and
watched him take a deep drag, hold in the smoke with something like
reverence and then exhale, satisfied. A calm look passed over his
face. He closed his eyes comfortably before he said, "Things
seem to clear up a little with this stuff, you know?"
"Yes,
Angst, I know. Now take another drag before the thing burns down to
the filter." And so he did.
But
he had that same look on his face this morning when he burst into my
room. Surprised and bewildered all over again, as if the world were
falling down around him. But the both of us had already witnessed the
world falling down around us. There was nothing all that surprising
about it. "David," he gasped, clutching violently at the
air in front of him and stumbling for my bed. The light from the
hallway spilled into the room behind him, directed his path towards
the bed, so that he seemed to be pushing himself through a thin slice
of illumination in a sea of precarious darkness. "David."
He seemed to be moaning now. "Oh, my God, David."
I
sat up groggily, trying to shake the sleep and a familiar dream from
my eyes and at the same time get my bearings. I didn't know where I
was. "It's time to go," I muttered instinctually. The light
from the hallway was stabbing at my eyes. I could make out a
turbulent shadow making its way toward me. "Sarah?" I asked
awkwardly. For some reason, squinting at the stumbling figure
moaning, a tattered phrase of Shanai's came to mind. "I can feel
death hovering between the shadows somewhere close." But had she
really said that? Had it really been written in all those notebooks
of absurd, badly written poetry I somehow found in my possession
after her death? But then I was able to place Angst's pleading voice
through all the confusion and the present hit me like a soggy brick.
Of course, Sarah had not slept in this bed with me in fourteen years.
And the horribly sounding death phrase had been my own. But there was
no time to think about such things, for here was one of my oldest
living friends and he was all shaken up. For the life of me, as I
breathed a string of soothing words to him, I couldn't think of one
single reason that he should appear to me at this time of night so
disturbed. This, what was to be his last night with me. "What
time is it?" I muttered half to myself once Angst had ceased his
groaning and sat himself on the bed next to me, quietly rocking
himself back to peace. But these days Angst is more like a child than
anything else, and such trivial things as the time have little
meaning for him.
Angst
had a dream. In this dream, he, Drusus, Lee and I were sitting around
a table eating mussels. We were eating in a vast, open, dimly lit
room, much like an old style banquet hall. All around as far as he
could see there were the tables, all perfectly set and with plates of
mussels steaming before each place, but there was no one else present
except for the four of us. On each table was a pink candle, what
seemed to be the only source of light. There was no ceiling, nor was
there a floor, only the tables and ourselves and those steaming
plates of mussels. Angst said that he felt uncomfortable sitting with
us, especially because he was the only one who was his proper age.
The rest of us appeared as we had in college. Drusus, Lee, and I were
speaking animatedly while we ate, very rapidly, and he said that the
soft speed of our language was such that he couldn't make out
anything that we were saying. He knew that it was something that
concerned him, but try as he might he couldn't understand a word and
he couldn't bring himself to interrupt. And he hated mussels. Just
watching the three of us shoveling them down our throats while we
spoke made him feel sick, and after a while we were eating and
talking so quickly that half the food we put in our mouths we spat
out again. Chewed bits of mussel clung to our cheeks and lips, hung
from the lapels of our dinner jackets and ties, but we didn't seem to
care and ordered more.
"And
another order for our quiet friend here," Lee said to the
mysterious waiter who had suddenly materialized, at the same time
indicating Angst. A great chunk of food fell from his nose and
somehow landed on Angst's hand. Grunting disgustedly, he tried to bat
it away, but it stuck there stubbornly. By the time he managed to
wipe it off with a napkin the waiter was gone and the three of us
were talking and eating again. After a time there was a layer of
chewed mussels everywhere, and the pile of uneaten mussels on Angst's
plate kept growing higher and higher because we just kept ordering
him more. Soon the pile of mussels was so high that he could no
longer see us, but the beige gob of chewed seafood somehow kept
squeezing through the spaces and landing in his lap.
Suddenly,
feeling as though he were about to vomit, Angst stood up and tried to
dig through the heap of mussels for the rest of us, but the pile had
grown so large that now it was a mountain and there was no way he
could find us. Our voices were dim and seemed far away, he said,
echoing as though from a distance, or through a cave. "Okay,
Angst, are you ready?" Drusus' voice floated distantly to him.
"Yes, yes, are you ready?" Lee and I echoed, but more
softly, as if we were receding.
"No!"
Angst cried out, horrified. The tables were gone and he was shoulder
deep in a vast sea of mussels that stretched as far as his eye could
see, a thundering wave of shells to his right that threatened to
squash him. "Are you ready?" Our voices reached him
faintly. He didn't know what he was supposed to be ready for, but
whatever it was he knew that he certainly wasn't. "No!" he
cried again as loud as he could, frantic, looking over the hard,
black sea and hoping that we had heard him, but he knew somehow that
he was alone.
And
then the mussels started moving. They were alive. Angst screamed into
the vastness around him as he felt little slimy animals latching onto
his body from below, and then swiftly, suddenly, they yanked him
down. He tried to grab onto something but there were just shells and
these slipped easily from his grasp. There was darkness then, and it
took him some time to realize that the darkness was no longer the
depths of a great sea of hungry sea creatures, eating away at his
flesh, but that of Sarah's old bedroom, and what he felt against his
legs were the sheets as he thrashed.
When
he stopped speaking we sat together in silence, listening to the
sounds of the early morning in the city. I was thinking about how to
tell him that Drusus and I were going to die tomorrow afternoon. But
before I could say anything, Angst surprised me and spoke first. "You
know," he said to me softly, "the way I live is like
dreaming all the time. It's like I'm walking in a constant dream and
only rarely does anything from the outside ever get through. But that
dream last night was so suffocating - David, what if my waking dreams
turn like that? Because you can't wake up from the waking dreams,
David. You just can't."
We
sat together again in a short moment of silence. I think he was
waiting for me to answer. Eventually, I did. "I don't think they
will, Angst. I don't think they ever do for people like you."
There is a sense of certainty that has filled me these last couple of
days and refuses to be banished. Somehow, sitting there with Angst
frightened next to me, I understood that he understood - that I would
be going somewhere today and not ever be coming back. Deep down
inside I don't think Angst is at all frightened to be alone. I think,
in fact, that he'll quite like it, if just for a short time. And the
fear that comes from dreams: I am familiar with it. After time you
come to realize that dreams are, after all, only dreams.
But
I had a dream of my own last night. For me, the dream has always been
the same. Always that damned room with the clocks and the colorful
shadows. And the thundering sounds of time, except nothing fits
together. The terrible seconds are all disjointed. All the clocks
read something quite different. All the clocks are quite useless.
The
dream used to scare me when it first came to me, not long after
graduation, when Sarah was still everywhere I went and furious with
me. For nights in a row that undulating room with no exit and so many
damned clocks kept me awake and miserable. Of course, it was not
merely the shadows that sifted between the moments like sand, but
rather the keen sense of urgency that filled me to know exactly what
time it was. As if I had somewhere to go, somewhere important, and
was on the verge of missing it. It was a feeling of such desperation,
of such acute need, like the one that accompanies the moment before
we sneeze. I never know why I must know the time. The why has never
seemed all that important. There is just that unexplained sense of
urgency rendered all the more urgent by its vagueness.
Sometimes,
it was so bad that when I awoke I would cry. Sarah grew accustomed to
those times and without even speaking - when she was sleeping next to
me - would hold me until I stopped. She never asked me about those
dreams, perhaps never even guessed that they were the same. Sarah
always had a keen and well deserved sense of privacy. But to this day
I don't understand why! Why did they affect me as they did? The dread
like a bad taste in my mouth as I stared at the cold digits of the
clock on the nightstand next to me was always the same. It was
slippery against my skin like cold, raw meat. I never had the dream
at Drusus and Nancy's, although really I never spent much time there
so it could just be a coincidence. And after Sarah and I started
living together their frequency diminished to merely several times
per year. But after Emmanuel was shot, the dream changed somewhat.
Or, rather, it appended itself.
I
was still standing trapped in that damned room looking about in a
frenzy at all those clocks, thinking about how I needed to know what
time it was and trying to guess if there was any way to tell which
clock was the right one, when suddenly my eyes fell across somone's
back. Momentarily, I was startled, because I knew far back in my mind
that there had never been anyone else in the dream before. Not that I
realized I was stuck in a dream, or that I had had it before, but
somehow I knew that the man whose back that was had never been. I
know, it doesn't make sense, but such is the nature of our dreams.
The
old man was crouched in an especially shadowy part of the room by the
wall. He seemed to be hiding something - probably a fire, because the
reflections of flame danced darkly over his grey, pasty skin and what
I could see of his grey, pasty beard. Not that the fire offered any
light. Spidery darkness and the rich light of the flames shared the
same space with unnaturally mutual grace, a break from the rules that
our dreams like to present to us in the realm of impossibility.
Somehow
I was imparted with that particular dream knowledge to understand
that he had always been there and that he was somehow the master of
this place. So, still consumed with the ever desire to know the time,
I found myself shouting over to him, "What time is it?" My
voice echoed strangely back from the walls, sounded in my ears much
too ancient and exhausted than it should have. But the man hunched
over his fire did not even more, never mind answer, so I asked again,
this time a bit louder. "What time is it?" I tried to
approach him, but of course my feet wouldn't move, so when he
continued to ignore me I sent after him a volley of thundering
questions, and - of course - each one was met with successive
silence. It was only after the last of the echoes had died down and I
was standing half in a rage and half about to scream from the pain
that he lifted an arm and gestured vaguely toward the clocks covering
the walls, floor, and ceiling. He did it in such a way that he could
have all the clocks or just one.
So
for the last fourteen years I have been wrestling wills with ths old
man leaning over his fire, and each time I have lost. Each time I
send after him thunderous demands for the time, and each time he
responds with a vague gesture towards the clocks on the wall. And
then I'd wake up sweating and clutching the digital clock by the bed.
That
is, each time until last night. Last night the dream came to me with
renewed force, so that I was filled with such an encompassing need to
know the time that before I saw the old man I tried to tear the
clocks from the very walls, if only I could have moved. But then I
did see him, saw him hunched obdurately over his grim fire with his
hard back glaring maddeningly back at me, and I felt deep inside the
rage starting to rise, the unbounded hostility of passion. I found my
lips opening, ready to bombard him with my unceasing queries for his
knowledge, when without warning something quite firm came over me.
My
lips froze in the frame of that familiar question and then slowly
closed. Peace came to me like a gift from all the statues that have
taken the place of those terrible angels, and in a sudden moment of
intuition I realized that I was wearing a watch. I had been all this
time. I stood for a moment with all those clocks, ticking away their
useless moments, looking at the wristband. At any moment, I could
simply lift the thing to my face and see, but before I did the sudden
absurdity of the whole situation overcame me. Before I knew it, I was
laughing. Huge, booming peals of laughter suddenly filled the room,
and as if on cue, the sounds of time ceased and everything was still
except for my chest.
And
then the old man actually moved! Slowly, as if fighting his stony
joints for one last ounce of flexibility, he turned his head toward
me. The light form the fire danced there, too, but I could see that
this man had no face - no eyes, no nose, no eyebrows. Only a mouth,
and it was severely drawn. My laughter dimmed to a chuckling, for now
it was the faceless old man who seemed perturbed. On a sudden impulse
I raised my left hand and flicked him the bird. "Fuck you,"
I told him, really meaning it. But he actually had an answer for me.
"It's time to go," he said without any hint of expression,
and then the next thing I knew Angst was in the room with me, and it
really was time to go.
21
December 1991, Cranston - 21 October 1993 Oedelem
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