Chapter 14 #2
In turn, I became a mystery for Phil. Outside Phil’s comprehension, all the secrets I held were a form of divinity over him, the source of his confusion, his daily bewilderment.
As he held a mystery for me, so I held a mystery for him, and in this way, we became each other’s Gods.
This was possibly why we were bonded in this time.
It was our mutual ignorance, our double unknowing, that kept us in orbit.
The less we understood, the closer we came to God, and to each other. We were two collapsing stars, circling.
Thankfully, Phil didn’t know anything about the afternoon Sarah and I had shared on the floor of his library, those wanton moments in the very room where I now slept.
I was glad Phil was spared that vision. But I had it in my memory, and at night, I replayed it over and over, stroking myself, bringing myself to climax.
I saw us there on the carpet, making love, as Phil lay in his bed upstairs, basting in his own fading memories, probably coupling with Sarah in his own imagination.
At night, in the library, lying on the hide-a-bed, I felt Sarah’s body next to mine.
I summoned her completely, catching hints of her scent, the curve of her thigh, the bend of her leg.
I could taste her tongue, with its vanishing sulfur flavor.
I could feel the weight of her breast in my palm.
She was still vivid to me, but I knew she wouldn’t be for long.
She’d disappear sense by sense, stripped away, until only occasional ghost impressions came through, sparked by a song, an angle of light.
In the end, I’d be left only with these wads of toilet paper, these crusted tube socks.
Sometimes during the day when Phil was gone I’d go into Sarah’s closet and try to retrieve traces of her.
The closet was filled with dresses and sweaters and a lifetime of shoes.
It would all go to the Salvation Army eventually but so far Phil didn’t have the will to part with it, and so the closet became my chapel.
I stood under the naked bulb and touched the cashmere, the denim, the silken pleats of a forgotten skirt.
I held a pair of canvas sailor pants she never wore.
I pulled her jogging jacket off the hanger.
It was so generic, this gray fabric with white piping.
It seemed like a weathered, shed skin. The smell of her was almost in the weave but not exactly.
I always exited the closet well before Phil came home, careful to leave everything exactly as it was.
“I don’t know what to cook anymore,” he said one night, staring into the refrigerator. “Everything I eat is something she made.”
“What did you like to make before you knew her?” I said.
“Nothing worth eating,” he said.
“We can order something,” I said.
“I don’t know what to order, either,” he said. “She never wanted to order food.”
And he heavily climbed the stairs back to his room, leaving me alone in the living room, surrounded by photographs of Sarah.
There were doilies she’d made, too, and books she’d read.
The objects belonged to Phil, but in time, they would have become mine.
And so Phil and I sat in our separate rooms, like two sentries, guarding the doorways to the past and the future, neither of which existed.
Work on my book stalled entirely. I was barely able to keep track of the grammar anymore.
I could hold on to one sentence at a time and no more.
A whole paragraph was beyond my reach. I was going days without a single minute of sleep1, and my head was becoming like a block of wood.
At night, lava boiled in my nerves, overflowing my chest. In the day, I lived in a darkened cave, peering out of a stone portal.
My teeth started to hurt. My joints were like hardened gum. I was turning into marble.
Everyone had advice for me. They suggested melatonin, magnesium, and Chinese herbs, all of which I tried and none of which helped.
I tried acupuncture, which was fine, but also didn’t help.
I enjoyed lying on the acupuncturist’s bed in the quiet room, seeing the hairline needles sprouting out of my hands, my feet, but I never fell asleep like other people did.
I could hear them snoring all around and I envied them.
I found an old woman online who taught me chi gong.
She had a wonderful way about her, shifting mellowly from pose to pose, so happy, so free.
She opened new channels in my body. But none of it helped me sleep.
Some nights I felt like I had a succubus on my back, living off my essence.
It was like a giant bug, sucking on my spinal column.
I tried prying it off in my mind, digging under the lip of the shell and yanking, but there was no shell to rip away.
There was no monster at all. Nothing was stuck to me.
I was simply afraid to sleep because some part of me believed that sleep meant death, and my whole life had become a form of vigilance against going under.
Increasingly, I came to think my insomnia foretold something even worse.
“Hell is training,” Suzuki said, in which case the hellish insomnia I was experiencing was practice for more hell, a worse hell.
It was my body understanding that whatever had touched my life that day on the mountain was still waiting for me out there.
It was a giant wheel turning, a giant clock waiting to strike.
My punishment was lurking on the horizon, and as sure as the sun would rise, it would find me.
At night I lay in bed, turning over every minute or two, mashing my pillow into different shapes.
Every sound gave me a fright. Every change of perception seemed like a trapdoor into a void.
Even a creaking branch or a passing car caused a little splash of adrenaline.
I was afraid every second might spin out and explode.
I never went to church or temple, but tried in my own way to invite the creator back into my life.
I wasn’t sure how to address the spirit, or even how to imagine it, but I tried gently asking it questions, politely making it new offers.
But the line never opened. The jewel of pure intention never formed.
And thus, the divine hand never came back down to take it. I’d been cast out.
One day, to avoid my desk, I drove to the crash site.
It was a three-hour drive, through beautiful, rugged terrain, exactly the kind of dull pilgrimage I needed.
The landscape unfolded in slow chapters, morphing gradually from savannah to foothills to evergreen forest, the trees gathering snow as they climbed to the pass, and losing the snow as the road descended into the brown, arid countryside of the high plains.
The mountains receded and I kept going, farther east.
I finally came to the spot, a blind curve in a wooded flatland.
Burnt flares were still scattered on the road and the crumpled guardrail was still unrepaired.
I continued on to a turnoff a half-mile up the highway and parked and walked the shoulder back to the bend, the occasional car or truck whooshing by, shaking the air.
At the turn, I could follow the skid marks to the broken guardrail and track the mangled path down to the water.
I climbed down the embankment of shale and stood on the rocky shore.
All evidence of the crash was gone. The river had cleansed itself of debris, the fast winter waters sweeping everything away.
The only litter on the shore were a few beer cans, an abandoned fishing fly.
I walked to the river’s edge and dipped my fingers into the icy flow.
The rocky bed rippled and tore under the current.
How incredibly stupid, I thought, to survive a fire only to drown in a river. Who’d authored that story, anyway?
The story could have gone so many other ways.
The author could have led me to obey His command.
It would’ve been hard to explain my reasoning to Sarah, but I could have done it.
She might have gone on and lived a long, satisfying life somewhere.
I might have met another woman. Over time, our love might have receded into memory, and one day we might have bumped into each other in a bookstore in some European city.
We might have shown each other pictures of our kids.
Or maybe the story would’ve been even better than that.
Maybe, if only I’d had enough patience, God would have released us from the covenant.
He would have returned us to each other’s sides, whole, without doubt, and blessed us with healthy babies.
They would have grown up and had children of their own, on a planet that somehow survived.
We might have gone on and lived long lives in a ranch house in Northern California, still friendly with Phil, who might have found new love himself, and prospered.
There were a million ways it could have unfolded, every version better than the draft we’d been given.
The more I thought about the alternate fates, however, the more I realized the whole question was becoming too abstract.
It was becoming a mere intellectual premise, without any emotion attached.
I was healing, in other words, or maybe moving on.
And what did that make me? A person who’d sacrificed my lover for nothing.
I got home after dark, and Phil was in the kitchen. He called out as soon as I walked in the door.
“I was getting worried!” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, putting away my keys and wallet. “I should’ve called, I guess.”
“I wasn’t that worried,” he said. “I could have called you, too.”