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
This site and all its contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one Adam Wasserman.