It’s night. I’m standing on a porch, looking through a dull-lit window at somebody I used to know. (“Who?”) I don’t know, because I don’t know him anymore.
“You’re talking to yourself again,” my wife says.
I shudder, fearing the November wind will penetrate the glass and blow apart this American home of ours.
But that was earlier.
Now:
The psychologist scribbles something in his notebook. “Now tell me the significance of the man on the other side of the window,” I say.
“He has no significance.”
“It’s just a dream,” my wife says, hugging me, wiping beads of cold sweat from my face. My heart is racing. “You’re safe with me.”
Sometimes I pretend to sleep. In the morning, I wake up and I pretend I live. Pretend to work, pretend to care.
I rip the notebook from the psychologist’s arthritic hands and read, “In the late hours of—
I awoke in a cold sweat, fearing the November wind, and, shivering, quietly rose from bed to walk from bedroom to bathroom; slinking across the downstairs living room, in dullest light, I froze, for through the window I saw a figure standing immobile on the backyard porch.
My heart—
Leaps, pumping blood and perspiration out my pores.
No, not a figure, a column.
A black column of sin-frosted vapour, infinitely deep yet manifestly on my porch, burning with an unbearable and hypnotic coldness,” I tell the psychologist.
He is pleased.
“We’re making progress. And?”
I have never been so afraid in my life as I was then, a rational heretofore person in the presence of a demon, truly. A recognition made not by one’s mind but by one’s soul. And I knew that I must turn away from it, forget it, because its very existence is a kind of knowledge that warps one—
(“You’re safe with me.”)
—’s moral spacetime. This immensity of evil, this nihilist gravity, dismembering the synapses; tearing at my innerness so that the self scintillates like a dying star, I am: looking out the window at the column on the porch looking through the window at the man of no significance, I am: heart-drumming, darkness ascending, sweat cascading, tubular and limitless; I am trying to look away, I swear to God, I swear to God, I love her still.
“The glass is porous.”
“What’s that?” she asks, half asleep.
“The wind, it has gotten in,” I say to her: to my psychologist, I say, “The wind has gotten in.”
And I am blown apart.
No longer dull, the living room light approaches zero.
And I am blasted across the universe, each particle reborn a star around which dead planets revolve with senseless predictability.
The clock ticks.
The deed has finally been done.
I slide open the bedroom window and breathe in the solid ice.
The psychologist closes his notebook and motions for the guard, who’s terrified of me despite that every day I smile at him.
“Do you miss her?” he asked me once.
(“Who?”)