At least once a month John would travel to an isolated rocky beach, to sit, to stand, to observe the world as one alone just as he imagined other humans to have done from the beginning of their times.
Over the years he never saw another person there. It wasn’t the friendliest sort of beach—no place to wade, no comfortable sand to lay a beach towel on. It was a place of sharp edges and hard surfaces, a reminder of the smallness of our bodies, the delicacy of our flesh. But for him there was a comfort in knowing he could have been anyone in time here, standing alone on the rocks, the massive presence of the world ready to tilt and crush him at any moment. Here he grieved endings, thankful that at least for the moment he could breathe the ocean air, feel the chill breeze against his too-exposed skin, and stand.
But in every deck there is at least one Joker, the card that’s the spoiler or the treat, depending on the game. Someone calls with a job offer or a profession of love, someone else delivers the news that what you care for most is gone and irretrievable. You try to keep this moment at the bottom of the deck, as far from you as possible, but still it shows up when you least expect it. Then again, what if it’s good news, and only your fear prevents you from holding it? There is no easy answer. There is only the anxiety, which could just as easily turn into elation or devastation.
Thoughts like these had kept John out of the game for years. But eventually there had to come a time when the winning and the losing mattered very little anymore. He just had to play the game. He just had to play.
There comes a time when there are more years behind you than ahead of you. There comes a time when it’s the last day on the job, the final European vacation, the last woman you’ll have in your bed. There comes a time when the caregiver becomes the one cared for. There comes a time when a twenty-year guarantee on the house’s new roof has no more meaning. There comes a time when the math seems irrelevant. There comes a time when you wonder if you have, in fact, reached that time, or if you’re just feeling old, like your father, and his father before him.
TWELVE MINUTES OF DARKNESS
1.
Since only darkness inspired him, he was always waiting for the light to burn out. Although he might switch the light off by hand (and most evenings this is what he did), there was something special about spontaneous, accidental darkness, and to encourage its visitations he would shake the lamp for a few minutes each day so as to weaken its filament. Once enveloped in such darkness, however it might have been achieved, he would scrawl across the pages his stories of lost children, maddened fathers, and vengeful women, ignoring lines and sometimes even the edge of the page, so that after a few years the outer stretches of his desk were tangled and layered with the missing phrases and ends of lines and stories he had written long into his middle age, then long into his old age. So many such bits and pieces had been irretrievably lost that he never had enough for a complete submission to whatever pulp journal might be popular at the time, but that did not matter to him. What mattered was the very act of writing through the dark, and in this, his last minute of living, he thought about the journey of it, mounting a carriage in the middle of the night, an umbrella poised above his head to keep off the inky drops, the driver quiet and sullen, the smoky horse blind and swollen, the great narrow carriage wheels turning toward the end of his story.
2.
Every night in her dreams the moon fell. Some nights it descended slow as a kiss, but on others it plummeted rapid as failure. She could not decide which was the worse nightmare. She could not bear the absence of even this vague light, and once when her soon to be ex-husband refused to pay the utilities she spent a night huddled before the fireplace like some earlier sort of human, pondering the required ritual to insure the sun’s eventual emergence from the black cave of night. Tonight she woke from the dream screaming, for in this new variation her father had swallowed the moon whole, then turned and looked at her with that old smile of complete control. She counted one by one the minutes of darkness, waiting for the moon to appear from behind the clouds. Finally the minute arrived when she realized the moon had left her forever, had fallen into the ocean or into the midst of men who had torn it to pieces, each desiring the whole of it, so she painted her face silver then, and sat in an upstairs window, and turned her head gradually as her dreams went through phases.
3.
Insomniacs both hate and love the night, he thought, waiting for that minute when the darkness would begin to fray, the torn edges of it scraping across the brightly colored roofs of the town, the smoke of its passage turning into bright morning fog, the great breadth and bulk of it dwindling into black, rotted threads as it made its frantic escape back into the caves and sleeping heads from whence it came. Finally the minute did come, and he could almost hear the raw edges of the grass and trees screaming from the abrupt departure of darkness, and his eyes began to water from the stench of the corpses rising from their beds all over town, brushing their teeth, grabbing that last cup of coffee before climbing into their cars for work.
4.
For just a minute the coming night had taken on the dark purple of a bruise, and she wondered what it would be like if all darkness were to remain this color, the color of her cheeks the minute before she left him, the color, that first minute, of the baby she had borne without him. Each day after he beat her she would go out and try to find some member of his family, some mutual friend she could show this darkness to. They would nod, and smile, and offer her tea, gazing at her as if admiring some remarkable sunset.
5.
During that minute when he misjudged the curve of the road, just before he slammed into the damp wall of night, he recalled as a child how he had set out open jars on the lawn in order to capture the darkness. He’d supposed the dark was so heavy that he would have plenty of time to screw the lids on before it could slither out and escape. Each morning before dawn he would slide out of bed and run downstairs only to be disappointed by the bright transparency of the cool glass containers. He considered lining the insides of the jars with double-sided tape or glue to at least give the darkness pause, but such measures felt somehow unnatural to him. Finally one morning something dark and viscous and frighteningly opaque had settled into one of his traps and did not stir when he twisted on the lid. He kept it upstairs under his bed for years, through fire and floods, his parents’ deaths and his first bouts with a black depression. Now as his car exploded from the force of dark he wondered whatever had happened to it.
6.
The dark we begin with ends, but the ending dark goes on forever. As the baby fought its way out of her that’s the lesson she would have wanted to teach it, if she hadn’t been in so much pain, if there hadn’t been just this one initial minute of its birth, and there were suddenly so many things she wanted to tell it. We all think life is going to be different from the way it turns out, she would have said, if the meanings of things hadn’t become so blurred for her. How would she explain both the pleasure and the terror in the anticipation of each new day? Household chores will become almost a religion. There will be days when the fact that one thing follows another will comfort you. When the baby was free and held up to her, at first she could only see the initial night reflected in its eyes, the black shadow cast by the duty she owed this helpless creature. Sometimes the time becomes a sooty blur, all the inefficient hours and wasted days accumulating so that you start wondering what happened to it all. Sometimes even the minutes seem sad and filled with a dark anxiety. And yet still, the baby smiled at her. Just try to keep busy, sweetheart.