The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (37 page)

As if on cue, her dream house suddenly echoed with the laughter of her neighbors. Wanting the sunlight and solace, she rushed in a panic to the front door, only to see that it was locked with a double-keyed deadbolt, and that the key was missing. She began to cry out, beating at the door, but then she heard something that riveted her.

A phone ringing.

A phone in another room.

She ran through the house, looking frantically from right to left. In the center of the master bedroom floor she found an ancient black rotary phone.
 
She knew who was calling even before she knelt and lifted the heavy receiver.
 
Knew indeed she was dreaming, too, because of what the phone was missing.

A
cord.

“Hello? David?”

A barely perceptible sound, like a breeze rustling leaves. Then a slow and rhythmic inhalation and exhalation of breath. With unbearable patience, her gentleman caller was definitely breathing. But could he speak?

“David?”
she repeated, her question less uncertain, and directed at his hesitation.

Still the caller waited, as her expectations fell and then rose again when suddenly she realized that David never waited, except to teach her some lesson or trick she hadn't yet been able to mimic.
   

“David,” she said, needing to break this silence, and to test the truth, “I feel like my life doesn't matter anymore. Not even to me.”

“But it could,” replied a distant yet familiar voice at last, calm as a whisper.
 
“Do you want to know how?”

“David!
 
Is it really you? You know that I do. Tell me, please!”

A pause, and then, “Are you listening now?”

"Yes, David, I'm listening."

As she waited, the line went dead. She looked down at the phone in disbelief. Found herself listening to utter silence. Listening for the children next door, but hearing nothing. She rushed to the window, to see that the lawn next door was empty, like they were never there. Listening to the voice in her head, wanting it to tell her what to do, she watched as the house faded.

And then the phone rang again.

She placed it quickly to her ear once more.
 
"Tell me," she said.
 
"Tell me the secret."

"There is no secret," David replied, slowly. "This is the secret that is hidden when you resist. When you don't pay attention."

"Attention to what?"

"To the only thing that matters."

She shook her head doubtfully. "But. . . I don't know what that is."

"Because you still believe that time is real. You believe that you own it. While, if anything, it owns you.”

“But how can it own me if it's not real?” she asked, reflexively.

“Look around you, and consider how a conception or obsession can possess your mind, when it's not real, either.”

Not real.
She knew that much was true, at least. No, it was not real at all.
 
None of it. She was dreaming. David was dead. Not here. Not really. Nor was she!

Impulsively, she knelt, and hung up the phone.
 

She stared down at it, then, waiting for it to disappear. Willing herself to awaken. But it rang once more, all the same, and she had to answer because she had another question.

“Who are you,” she demanded, "really?"

She closed her eyes against the vision of the empty dream house that surrounded her, created by her own desire and fear, and listened for the answer from a presence she could not explain.

“I am you,” David's voice replied, “and you are me. Yet you act as if we're disconnected and alone. You must act otherwise to know the truth.”

“I must act,” she said, “as though this is not all a mystery to me?”

“It is no mystery who you are. Nor I. We are not what we do, for we could do anything. Or nothing at all. You could even sit and stare at the wall, waiting to nightfall, or for work, or for nothing at all. But is that who you are?”

“I've done that already,” she confessed. “It's called depression.”

“Name it what you will,” whispered the voice, “it is still a resistance to see, to live, to be. Not a choice, but a habit. An enslavement.”

“Enslavement?”

“You do not choose pain instead of love. Instead, you believe that pain is real. That it is what you deserve. That it is who you are. And this has the same effect as choosing. But it is not you that is wrong in this misconception. It is your master. Your mind.”

“My mind,” she affirmed.

“You are not alone in this. Many cling to their illusions, with only hope as reward. Never insight. They trust ambition, follow fashion, crave luck. Yet they never believe that life is fair to them, and so they never really see or enjoy the one thing that they do possess.”

“And what is that,” she wondered aloud, “if not time and space?”
 

“Space is not real, either. You know this, too. Just look around you. Or imagine what a wise man once said, to imagine two points in outer space, with nothing but a vast vacuum between them. Imagine that you are one of these points, and I am the other. What is it, now, that determines the distance between you and I?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“But you do. It is your mind that does not know. That won't let you know. Your scientific mind, a tool that is inadequate for the job. Because when you move toward me in empty space, or away from me, through what are you moving?”

“Nothing,” she replied, quickly.

“Nothing?” repeated David's voice. “But if there is absolutely nothing between us, how can we be so far apart? And is there a limit to how far apart we can be? If there is no limit, then what you call space must be infinite, and you do not even know what it is.
 
But it is obviously something, because without it nothing could exist. So nothing does exist. Do you see?
Nothing
matters.”

“Nothing. . . matters.” She repeated the words with a strange elation.
 
“What matters is
nothing.”

“Is it not comforting to know this?”

“It is,” she admitted.
 
“Although I'm not sure why.”

“Have you not felt the space inside you? The place where you live, and never age? The infinite space, just like that space out there?”

“I'm not sure. Where is it?”

“It is where consciousness resides, although science cannot explain, nor the mind grasp, a space where time is an illusion, and where your physical body is only a shell. A place where what you
can't
see--what people imagine to be
nothing
--matters most. The one true reality.”

“Which is what?” she said faintly, urgently. "Tell me."

“Do not resist it, and then you will see.”

She woke on a hospital bed, roused as from a fever dream, weak from sedative.
 
Her arms were restrained to the metal sides by wide leather straps. Her wrist had been bandaged, but it was her head that hurt most.
 

She tried to call out, toward the open door leading to the hospital hallway.
 
“Help,” she managed to whisper.

The word seemed oddly foreign to her, as though she wasn't certain of its meaning anymore. She blinked, and in an eerie sense of déjà vu, attempted to bring the room into focus. On the opposite wall hung a calendar showing a blue glacier below a dark ridge of land. Beyond it, a massive, ominous and distant mountain rose to catch the sunlight. A mirror image of the mountain was reflected on a smooth sheet of ice at the base of the dark ridge, all blue and cold silence in stark contrast. She stared at the peak with a sense of foreboding.
 

“Help!” she heard herself gasp in sudden panic. But this time her voice truly seemed detached from her. The frightened voice of a child locked in a closet.
Or a liquor cabinet.
Had she really called out at all?
 
Surely she had. She'd definitely heard it, although this peculiar voice had seemed familiar somehow, too. A different voice, certainly, yet strangely also hers. As though she was possessed by some demon that was now cornered inside her head, fearing to be found out. The entity that pretended to be her.
 

Do not resist it,
she remembered David's words,
and then you will see.

She looked back at the calendar, which showed the new month, heralding what portended to be the loneliest interval of her life. How could she not resist that? Not resist being without David's help to overcome fears that had long flowered inside her like a cancer? Even if she
could
surrender, and then feel free enough to let go, as he had, when might peace become something real to her? Next week? Next month?

Next
year?

She squeezed shut her eyes again, and imagined David telling her the answer. Willing herself to see his face, she imagined him with the strained force of a dream slipping away. But it was no use. She was awake now, although drugged. And still there was no happy ending to come, that she could imagine.
 
No secret to set her free, just as David had said.
 

She lay back in resignation, and tried to remember her former boyfriend, next. The one she also knew as David. What would he do? Tell her to dismiss the past week as just a melodramatic and neurotic episode, most likely. A phase over which she might pass, with his amorous help. Or with the aid of a cocktail or six. She could even imagine him making a joke about a homeless person at the park, or looking the other way in passing, as though expecting to be hit on for money. He was cheap, not deep. So there would be no worthwhile advice coming from his direction. Nor would he understand doing nothing, either. Just watching a sunset had seemed like wasted time to him, she recalled. Being the man he was, with little patience for anything off his balance sheet, or beyond his goals and plans, he'd decided she didn't fit such plans, in the end.
 

So why hadn't she seen this coming, either? What had she been thinking?
                                                                                                                                                                
                                                                   

Stop,
she heard David's simple advice from her dream.
 

“Just stop,” she told her resisting mind, aloud. “Enough, already.”

Still, other images crowded in, attempting to force their way past her defenses and into her consciousness. Faces of friends who'd once envied her, ironically, before moving on with their own lives. Colleagues whose water cooler banter had seemed trivial and unreal, like substitutions for conversations happening at other water coolers, she wasn't sure where. Anticipations, lies and delusions. . . all of these had only led to petty frustrations.
 

She closed her eyes, and took a deep, slow breath.

Relax, Valerie. Let them go.

Another breath. She focused on the rhythmic rise and fall, ignoring the memories that competed for mental space. Sure enough, then, she could soon hear distant sounds, instead. Like her moment at the mall. Faint
whirrings
, closing doors, the click of footsteps, air whispering through ventilation ducts. . .
 
She concentrated on each sound in turn, isolating it, and then letting the combination of sounds meld into one continuous background motif of barely audible resonance.
 
Like radio signals heard from the depths of space, she listened for whatever was next, until each snippet became strangely new, divorced from its source. Gradually, the bed on which she lay no longer seemed to be restraining her. Her body felt giddily light, as though she might float away if not anchored down. Drifting into semi-consciousness again, she had the sensation of gently rising and turning beyond the confines of her room, toward a more peaceful awareness, where thoughts were renounced intrusions.

Am I there yet?
she wondered, just before that thought too was dispatched.

And then quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, in the absence of thought, she really was there. Not as a pronoun or name or conception. Not as an
I,
or even as a
Valerie
. . . but as a presence. An ambient poised within some quantum reality more vast than she'd ever imagined possible.
 

The quiet realization awed her. She didn't feel dwarfed by it, though, as when she'd once seen misshapen galaxies forming at the edge of space and time.
 
Instead, she felt at home within a space that knew no limitations or horizons--no setting sun or rising moon. Because she
was
the space.
Was
the nothing that embraced everything. And here, at last, she finally knew that she had a choice, too. It was the gift of sight, just as David had said. An insight so clear that she was unafraid to let back in all the faces that she'd once excluded.