In Nightmares We're Alone (33 page)

No, I won’t go outside for fresh air with her. I don’t know what will happen if I head for that door while she’s here with me. But one way or the other I can feel lifetimes of anger surrounding me, ready to pull me down first chance they get.

“You’re so lucky,” I say. “You’ll never have to experience this kind of emptiness. This darkness. You did the right thing never marrying.”

She gives a sort of empathetic sigh. “I know it feels that way now. But it didn’t feel like it for the last twenty-five years.”

“Didn’t it? You’re a doctor. You’re a university professor. You have the life you were always dreaming of. I got so caught up in relationships and making other people happy I forgot about myself.”

“Hey,” she says, trying to cheer me up. “You’re a doctor too. We did everything the same. And you met somebody special and you had a lot of good times together. I spent years jealous of that.”

You bitch. How dare you envy me? My life is over and all I have to show for it is regret. I wasted it. I accomplished nothing of value.

“I’m a grade school teacher. I set my sights too low. I always did. I never learned how to go after what I wanted like you did. You were meant for your life. I wasn’t.”

There is a pause before she puts a hand on my back and says, “You’re upset. You have every right to be upset. But what you’re saying isn’t true. You have a lifetime of happy memories, and I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but you’ll make more.”

“No…”

No more happy memories. I’m never even leaving this damned house again. I can feel them. Even with Ellen here next to me, I can feel them all around. They’re staring at me with disappointed eyes. They’re saying, “You poor, silly girl.” They’re saying, “You were given the gift of life. This incredible wonder, this force of the universe that expresses itself in people who can paint like Rembrandt and compose like Mozart and string words together like Shakespeare, and how did you put it to use? You spent it all shying away from opportunity out of fear of disappointment and never made an attempt at contributing something so you wouldn’t risk embarrassing yourself. But you have embarrassed yourself, haven’t you? You’ve embarrassed life as a whole, because with infinite opportunity laid at your feet, you became nothing. And you will be relegated to nothing, stripped of your body and your memories and your relationships, and forgotten in the evolution of your species.”

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

Horace Man. Education reformist. When we talked about him in college and I read that sentence I remembered it from watching
The Twilight Zone
with Dad. That episode about the sad old teacher whose dead students come back to tell him how the knowledge he imparted on them bettered their lives.

Well Horace, I am ashamed. I made no impact as a teacher. The last two conversations with students ended in one looking at me like a crazy person and the other calling me a bitch. That’s the mark I left on my pupils. I am the villain of their stories, or at best an annoyance. And what’s worse, I never strove to be more.

What they didn’t teach me in college, what I’m not sure anybody can teach anyone, is how to go about winning a victory for mankind. For most of us, all we can do is grow old and look back and wish we had it to do over again so we could try harder. So we could think twice before tearing up that half-written manuscript the day we resigned ourselves to college educations. So we could at least know we tried, at least know we gave it everything we had and failed by our lack of abilities and not by our lack of drive.

I should have tried to spot a piece of That Thing We Don’t Quite See. I should have given the world one more picture to build into its mosaic. Not just served as a control for the interesting, experimental stories going on around me every day.

Yes, Horace, all I have is shame.

“No,” I say to Ellen. “I don’t have a lifetime of happy memories. I have a lifetime of regrets. And if I make any more memories they’ll only be more memories I regret because that’s the person I let myself become. You and I never should have been friends. I’ve spent my whole life living vicariously through you because you took all the things you wanted out of life and I took nothing. I devoted myself to other people and did everything they ever asked of me at the expense of my own happiness and now they’re all dead and it’s all I can do to look at you and not hate you for the way you somehow made it all work out.

“Do you know I always wished you’d graduated ahead of me? I couldn’t ask you, not in any way you’d understand, not without sounding awful, but I didn’t want you to stay back so we could graduate together. I wanted to do it myself so at least maybe I could enjoy it. So I wouldn’t have to stand there accepting that stupid degree that meant I’d resigned myself to a career I never wanted, given up on being the person who I wanted to be, only to spend the whole day standing next to somebody who’d done the opposite. Do you know how hard it’s been? All these years, my closest friend doing what she’s always wanted to do while I tagged along and regretted everything in order to try to support the people who’d pushed me away from everything I wanted in life in the first place?

“I loved them. I did. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. But do you know how jealous I’ve been of you since… shit, since we first met? If I could have just traded ambitions with you, if I could have gotten the thrill you got out of education, it would have been paradise. I would’ve… I would’ve
done
something. But I had the wrong mind for it and now… now this. Now I’m alone and there’s nothing left to show for it.”

Ambrose Bierce said,
“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

They taught me those words in college. They taught me to memorize a lot of words. I guess they tried to teach me that words had meaning, but sometimes I feel like I never absorbed any.

Ellen stares at me with a stern look for a while. I don’t know if she’s angry or ready to break down or if she’s just disappointed in me or what. I can read her well, but I’ve never seen this look.

“Okay,” she says. “I guess… maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

She stands up from the couch and heads for the front door. Already I can feel
them
closing in, ready to take me as soon as she goes or as soon as I try to go after her.

“No,” I say. “Please. I’m sorry. Don’t go. I can’t do this alone.” I’m the victim. I never should have begged her to come last night. I should have let myself die in this living room, not shaking and hyperventilating, being the leech in the story of the one person left for whom I perhaps played a positive part. The one person for whom I wasn’t “villain” or “annoyance” or “sad old woman.” The one person for whom I was “best friend.”

“I’m not good for you right now,” says Ellen. She opens the door and is about to walk through it when she turns to me.

“You know, you’re not the only one who regrets,” she says. “I have regrets too. I’ve been jealous of you too. I’ve been happy for you, always, but I’ve been jealous. Do you think I wanted never to fall in love, never to live with somebody? Do you think I never wanted parents who cared about… about my future and my well being? So fine, I’m pretty fulfilled in my career, that’s great. But you’ve had a life to be proud of, Edna. You’ve had people who meant something to you. I never had that. All I… All I had was you. That’s it. That’s why I wanted you to have that moment with me at graduation. Because I didn’t think anybody else cared. And I still don’t. So if you want to hate that you didn’t have my life, don’t. I would’ve traded you if I could have.”

I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry. To think she’s been jealous. To think that’s who I’ve been in Ellen’s story, the fortunate friend with everything figured out who made life work for her. To think we’ve played the same role in each other’s stories.

She takes a step forward through the door frame.

“Ellen, please,” I say.

She starts to turn to me, looking like she’s ready to say something, but before she can get the words out, the door slams shut in her face. The same way the wind blew the door shut when I left Arthur standing in the living room. The same way the door was pushed shut the night Mom died in her sleep. And I can’t remember for sure anymore, but I bet Dad died alone behind a closed door too.

Oh Ellen. If only we could have really talked. If only we could have made each other understand. If only we could have traded. If only we could have seen from behind each other’s eyes.

If I end up at that dinner party when I die, mingling with all the great writers with whom I don’t belong and to whom I have nothing to say, wishing with all of me that I could have just one more day with Mom and Dad and Arthur and Ellen, just to appreciate it like I never did in the moment; then Ellen will have a husband and a family, and she will drive herself mad because she has no time to stand in front of a classroom and inspire young minds, when it was all she ever wanted to do and she somehow forgot.

And what of Mom and Dad? Are they dancing again, gazing in each other’s eyes, ready for eternity, or are there old velleities they told themselves they’d missed and now Dad’s flying jet aircrafts and Mom’s in the Peace Corps and they both wish they had each other again? Is Arthur’s MS cured? Is he a gymnast now who spends his time sitting in a locker room and wishing he had someone to tell him she loved him?

What if the anger I feel pulling me into oblivion is the anger of every dead person who ever realized she missed what was right in front of her? What if that’s how every story ends?

George Bernard Shaw wrote,
“There are two great tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart
’
s desire. The other is to gain it.”

Go to college or don’t. You’ll learn it either way.

The rattling of Ellen struggling with the doorknob is distant, faded. It’s like I’m falling and I can hear her pounding away a hundred feet above me, working on getting the door open. Then five hundred feet. Then a thousand.

I know it’s happened already. And if it hasn’t, then it’s happening now. When Ellen opens that door, thirty seconds after it shut, she’ll find me curled up dead on the floor. Even after the paramedics come take my body out of there, whether they give me CPR, whether they try to defibrillate me in the ambulance, and no matter where they bury me, this new world I’ve just slipped into is where I’ll be.

And the gramophone begins to play.

Barney Google. With the goo-goo-googely eyes.

Death or insanity? When Ellen busts down that door is it a trip to a nuthouse or a morgue that’s in store?

“I became insane, with long periods of horrible sanity.”

That was Poe. Young people quote it and laugh and say, “So true. Being insane is so much more fun.” I wonder if they’d say the same thing if they knew the context. If they knew Poe was referring to a mourning period after the death of a woman he loved, if they knew how he meant reality was destroying him and the only place he could live was in an alcoholic stupor.

Really though, who cares?

“Hello, Mrs. Harris,” comes a child’s voice from behind me. “It’s time to catch the bus.”

I turn around to find Martin standing in my living room in his school clothes. He smiles at me and reaches out to give me his hand. There is nowhere else to go, so I take it and walk with him.

Martin leads me out the front door, but by this time, Ellen isn’t there. We’re not in the world anymore. We’re not in life. We’re not in a place or a time.

We follow a long, winding trail from my house and up to a cliffside where a school bus is parked. The moon hits it through the clouds like a spotlight and Martin holds his hand out to the doors, inviting me to take the stage. I climb the steps to the bus. There is no driver, but we drive nonetheless.

Inside I find Macie’s sister Heather and their mother Elaine. Heather has her arm around a boy I think I may have taught a decade back, but can’t remember. Elaine is crying, looking down at a crudely-made bracelet of beads she’s holding in her hands. I walk down the aisle and take a seat next to a handsome young man it takes me a moment to recognize as Casey Hart, his decaying flesh restored and his face quite handsome.

He clamps his hands together and makes an arch over his nose with his index fingers, pinching the skin between his eyes and shutting them tight, lost in a tortured thought.

“I tried so hard,” he says. “I tried to give the tree what it wanted. I don’t know what it wants.”

He’s off in his own story. We sit next to each other and stare ahead, trapped in our own respective tortures in our own respective minds.

As we wind down the path off this mountain in the dark, Casey’s body goes stone and he looks up with the most intense expression of awe I’ve seen on a person’s face. I follow his gaze through the windshield and I see what he sees. What fills my field of vision, stretching out across the sky in the valley below us, is what I thought would remain in the dark forever.

I finally get my first look.

I finally lay my eyes on That Thing We Don’t Quite See.

Like a flame at the end of a dark cave it stretches up from the rocky ground and lights the night. A tree. A tree so thick and tall and beautiful we can only comprehend it here, from countless miles away. It towers above everything, stretching miles and miles into space, almost infinite. Its branches reach across cities, across galaxies, they touch the stars and they blossom with flowers and leaves that glow, that shine. Deep blue flowers and bright green leaves. Like blue and green eyes that stare into our souls, deeper than any eyes in life can penetrate.

And the bus goes silent, and each of us stares in our own private awe, each of us connects in some way, sees some hidden truth, some elusive mystery that feels answered without being answered. We each come to understand that we’ve always understood, but when we finally see it from a distance, it doesn’t feel so hard to bear anymore.

As we race down the mountainside into the valley, the tree gets no closer. Like a mountain at the end of a highway, the more we drive, the further the distance looks. That infinite tree in the horizon just stands there at the end of our field of vision as we drive, and drive, and drive.