Was Galway Kinnell one of my favorites? Yes, he was. You could even say he was my favorite. Was it neat-o that it was read right before mine, my poem rubbing elbows with his? You bet.
Given the tenor of this particular tale I’m telling you was the whole thing kissed by kismet in that now the aspect of this new world that makes my balls recede inside my body cavity is its silence and that Kinnell’s poem, coming right after mine, had that as its subject matter, indeed, bore the very title? Uh-huh. Yep. You’re catching on, dear reader.
Coincidences? Patterns? Early-onset schizophrenia? Psychosis? Grandma Lucille, what say you?
I know, I know.
So, anyway, you’re sitting at the edge of your desk, Mr. E, staring me down like I’d done something wrong, holding my story, touching the pad of your index finger to it saying, ‘there’s something here.’ You ‘couldn’t put your finger on’ what it was, yet you kept putting your actual finger on it. Kept making little circles on it with your index finger like a conjurer. My eyes flicked to your desk’s nameplate: Todd English, PhD (with such an education, why were you teaching high-school, Mr. E?), then to the framed black-and-white photograph of you and that smoking-hot wife of yours—Inga? Inger?—sitting on a boulder atop Mount Bonnell. My eyes stayed there. I hadn’t noticed the picture before. I started to lift my hand to point at it when you said, “Yeah. That’s new. We got engaged at that spot.”
I kept staring at it, looking at the transect of lake way down below you, and the strip of lawn where the bald man had stood waving up at me with that sickening smile.
I looked at your wife’s face. Intimidatingly beautiful with her square jaw, all blond Swedish model-looking. Real breasts, clearly. I couldn’t help thinking of her swanning around your house in one of your T-shirts post-coitus sipping on a bottle of water imported from her native Nordic country. I knew you didn’t have any kids. Fetching couple that you still were, I knew you’d probably be too old to conceive. You were the type who wanted kids. I knew it by the way you were, Mr. E. I thought maybe the pain and frustration I sensed in you wasn’t because of the shelved novel but the baby who wouldn’t come.
“Kevin? About this story. You said you’d had a dream?” you’d asked.
My eyes shifted from the photograph to your face. “Yes.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what was the dream about? I’m not trying to analyze you or anything. I’m fascinated.” Your finger still on the paper.
“Well, you were in it,” I told you.
You sat up straight and cleared your throat. “Okay.” You sat back on the edge of your desk and crossed one leg over the other, furrowed your brow and nodded.
“Not until the end though, and your appearance didn’t connect to the rest. It was basically… what you and I are doing now. You, sitting on the edge of your desk looking as you do now, and me sitting here with my backpack in my lap.”
You said, “hummm,” and raised your index finger from the paper to your pursed lips.
“I don’t remember many words passing between us. I remember you there and me here, and right now even I’m feeling…”
“Déjà vu?” you asked.
I nodded. “Still feeling it. See, I knew you were going to ask that.”
The room. It was very still. Time slushed through my ears. Ticks of it rode molecules of my heart-beaten blood.
In the hall, lockers clacked shut, voices burst out into laughter. You looked startled by the world outside that door. You cleared your throat again. “That’s really something, Kevin. I’m having the same feeling. And I had a dream, too, with you in it. Sitting there with your backpack in your lap.” You nodded to me. “Just like that.”
“Did you have a dream about the end of the world like in my story?”
You shook your head. “No. But this, yes.” A beat of pause. “And now it’s gone, that feeling.”
“Yes,” I’d said, relieved. The room opened and cleared. Like an eclipsing shadow lifting away with a flick.
You chuckled and shook your head clear. You sat in your chair and said, “Okay. Enough of that. Tell me about your dream and how it fueled this story of yours.”
“It’s a long time ago now, so the details aren’t there, at least not many. But with dreams it’s the ones that remain that are important, I guess, huh?”
“Could be. Again, I’m just an interested English teacher. If this is in any way uncomfortable…”
“No, no it’s fine.” I moved my eyes around in my head to remember and put the backpack on the floor. “I don’t know what happened to the world. Just these few people like in the story. We’re standing at some sort of overlook. Me, this dark-haired girl, and this other guy.”
“Do you know them? Then, or still?”
“In real life? Yes, actually. This girl I work with at Dollar Tree and another student here.”
You nod, your chin muscle flexing and tightening with thought.
“Below us is a mass of people. All these young kids. Thousands of them in a tight grouping. They’re facing and cheering at something in front of them and we didn’t know what it was. We knew we had to get closer to see but we didn’t want the kids to see us. We were really frightened. I don’t know why that is, but we were.”
“So what happened? This isn’t in your story. Do the things in the story occur in your dream?”
“Not really. The dream’s residue gave me the feeling which led to the idea.”
“In the dream did you go down to see what they were cheering about?”
“No, we didn’t. We were too scared to move. Didn’t want them to see us.”
You formed a steeple with your fingers in front of your face. “How did you know it was the end of the world?”
“I just felt it was. We all did. It was just that scene. There wasn’t any more to it.”
“In the dream it happened in an arid place? You set the story in Phoenix.”
I shook my head. “No, in the dream it was here in Austin, though I don’t know where exactly. The location was ambiguous. Just this field. The story grew out of this feeling in the dream, a feeling of—” I struggled for the right word.
“I understand. You feel something powerful but nebulous and you write to bring it into some focus.”
I shook my head. “—doom. That’s what I felt. A horrible doom that made my heart race and my stomach sour.”
“An apocalyptic vision will do that, I suppose. I’m sure it didn’t feel good and I’m sorry you had such a, well, a nightmare. But it fed a story. Something good came out of it.”
“But is it good?”
“Yeah, I think you’ve written a fine story here,” you said, brushing it again. Very tactile with my story, Mr. E.
“No, I mean is that a good thing in general terms? To have a horrible dream and not being able to sleep and feeling forced to get something down on paper?”
“That’s a hard question to answer. It’s the essential art question, isn’t it? Is the suffering one does, the privation experienced, worth the art it produces?”
I glanced at the wink of shine off Inga/Inger’s aviator sunglasses and her geometric mandible making her look like an insect. “Must art be the result of suffering?”
“Not necessarily. But show me any work of art that isn’t in some way tinged with bittersweetness, pain, the unknowable, existential ennui, our lives’ ephemeral nature. I don’t think you’ll find one. Even humorous work is rooted in darkness, sometimes the most dark and fearful. My God, I mean listen to Richard Pryor or David Sedaris, Mel Brooks. Carlin, Bill Hicks. Robin Williams? I mean, gah—dark, despairing stuff under the ha-has.” You traced the outside of the pages of my story with your index finger. I thought you might slice your finger pad open and bleed on it. It was profane, transgressive, what you were doing. Like, who cares if I cut the shit out of my finger on this right now. The way you stared at your sliding finger, meat along a blade…