Why couldn’t he have calmed her? Led her from doubt? Why couldn’t he have given her what she needed? Thomas couldn’t accept his fate, either, to have lost her. He wasn’t her knight in shining armor.
It’s not your fault, a voice whispered.
Thomas shifted around, and a form lay on the forest floor, like a woman’s, a shadow, or a ghost, then of a man, a child, a woman again, but there, absolutely, it was. It appeared to be wearing a hat, with a feather, as when an Indian stood in his doorway when he was a child, and, though Thomas awoke, the Indian stayed there for several minutes, he wore an elaborate feather headdress, his bare chest smooth and brown, luminous in the dark of the bedroom.
Now she, he, or it sat up.
The indecipherable shadow muttered: Thomas, Thomas, don’t be silly.
That’s what it sounded like, he thought, he heard that, but do ghosts or sibyls call you silly? He was hearing things, of course, hearing what he wanted. Thomas believed the ghostlike shape was created by a weave of branches and leaves, the winds causing it to shift its shape. It was a shadow created by nature, the play of elements, and maybe of his desire, with an illusion of physicality, but even when he shut his eyes, then quickly opened them, it was there. He accepted his own explanations or interpretations and waited for more.
Someone will love you, the voice said in a deeper register.
Thomas scoffed, then he snorted, and the birds stopped singing, as if they recognized his sounds as derisive and objected with their silence. He stood up, brushed off his pants, boldly walked toward the form, and stuck his arm through the air above it. The shadow disappeared and his own shape hovered, instead. Selective hearing, selective memory, selective living. Maybe he was going mad, this was it, but he didn’t feel mad. Would he ever be happy? He couldn’t imagine it. A dream is a disguise, his college therapist explained, while his Spanish teacher taught Calderón’s La vida es sueño, and if a dream is a disguise, and life is a dream, then life is a disguise, too. The tautology satisfied him since it demonstrated he was able to think, so he wasn’t crazy yet, but if life were a disguise, what did it disguise. Was there a design? No, not a design, there was too much randomness, but then what does life disguise?
Thomas sat on the log again, thoroughly engaged in the question, listening to his thoughts, to the birds who sang again or argued or cried, until he fell asleep. He must have fallen asleep, because time passed and kept passing, and reality didn’t feel real, he was looking at himself looking at himself. The big striped tent was back, he saw himself go through the opening, he saw her walk down the aisle, everything repeated itself, he saw himself, he saw his twin, Tony, she was a man and a woman, and she didn’t hate him, his parents smiled, then looked sadly upon him. He saw life rushing by, was he dead? Life is a dream, life is a dream. Now everyone was in disguise, everyone, and he fled the tent again, horrified, because if everyone’s in disguise, and a disguise is also disguise, then where does it end. IN DEATH. In death, in death. He was dead. He wasn’t asleep, he was dead. Life disguises death. We only think we’re alive. That was the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and, realizing that, he breathed. He wasn’t dead, he was only reading a book. Nothing made sense. A dream is life, life is death, death is life, and all of it is a disguise. Everything. Lies, lies upon lies, only lies on lies only. He finished running away and again he was where he was, by the pond, and the birds were singing, and a mourning dove flew to him and alighted on his chest, so, startled, he rubbed his eyes to better see the beautiful grey bird.
The mourning dove chirped: The biggest lies are the ones you tell yourself.
OK, that’s good, Thomas said to the talking bird.
It was as if I’d seen a ghost, but I was the ghost, he explained to his friends later. He told his twin, Tony, that he knew she was a man and a woman, and he thought, in his dream, he was also. Tony liked him better then, maybe forever after. Thomas did forget Grace, he forgot Billy Webster, and one day he forgot falling asleep and dreaming at the pond, because that’s what he’d told himself. It was all a dream, life is a dream, a dream is life, life disguises death, and only I can lie to myself.
Lunacies
The first astronaut to reach the Moon proclaimed: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong, his head entombed in a white bubble, his eyes obliterated by Moon-resilient plastic, gravityless in a bloated space suit, planted the U.S. flag right where he stood.
Later, Armstrong realized his mistake. He was supposed to have said: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
“As you read this, the Moon is moving away from the Earth. Each year the Moon steals some of Earth’s rotational energy and uses it to propel itself about 3.8 centimeters higher in its orbit.”
He had never encountered a parasite he didn’t, in some way, envy for a kind of perverse talent.
“The tidal forces of the Moon — and the Sun — don’t act only on the oceans, they act on the land too. Stand on the equator, and the land beneath you will rise and fall as much as twenty-one inches over the course of twenty-four hours.”
Vertigo restrained her from standing near expansive plate-glass windows on the upper floors of top-heavy skyscrapers. She teetered on high heels, the foundation undulating beneath her feet, or maybe she was moonstruck again.
“The Moon is about the same age as Earth. When the Moon was created, it was much closer to Earth and appeared ten times larger in the sky.”
In Sunday school, he asked his teacher, “Why did God make the Moon without people?” His father told him the moon was too cold for people, it was the dark side of God’s work; then his mother broke in, “Your father’s being funny. Look at the TV. Michael Jackson, honey, he’s moon-walking.”
“The Moon is full when the Earth is between the Sun and Moon, it is a New Moon when the Moon is between the Sun and the Earth.”
Nocturnal creatures, cats nightly play and prance, hunting mice, hearing their faint movements behind plaster walls, while their owners beseech moon gods for love and power.
“The Moon is not a planet, but a satellite of the Earth.”
Being an identical twin was way cooler than being a virtual one — adopted at the same time, same age, but studies showed virtuals were very different people. He and his brother were unique, even if they looked the same, and he didn’t moon about his lost individuality, the way his twin did.
“An afterglow — also called post-luminescence — is a wide arc of glowing light that can sometimes be seen high in the western sky at twilight; it is caused by fine particles of dust scattering light in the upper atmosphere.”