Then, after the end, four words he did not write.
we will meet again
He read it once, four times, ten times. He read it until the words no longer were semantic signifiers but only sounds drowned in his mouth clattering against the teeth loosening in his jaws and reaching the eyes that dissolved like sugar in water before the letters, all fifteen of them glaring up at his face. Mouth open to speak but no words came or went, only the inaudible movements of a newborn, his mouth dry but spit dribbling from his cracked lips.
A finger to the letters. Not in cursive but printed, the hand all different, lefthanded, even, the way the letters slanted opposite. The letters were cold and the page was cold and the room cooled and the hairs rose on his arms, his neck. Clutching his heart, he closed his eyes and breathed through his nose until the world stabilised, no longer expanding, contracting, shifting without him, leaving him sealegged and lost.
Is it you?
He backed away from the paper, standing, watching, waiting. He stood there for four minutes, not breathing, not blinking. He turned to the plant, his face full of pleas and begs, long, the skin looser, the eyes deeper. He took the pen in his hand again but did not sit.
If it's you tell me you have to tell me Is it you Is it you Is it you
The pen clattered on the table, he picked it up, poised, dropped it again, pushed the notebook into the wall, his mouth agape.
***
He did not sleep that night but watched the fire burn without and the petals shine within. The pale purple fluoresce of fauna. He peered from the blanket wrapped around his body, turbaned round his head, his eyes wide, catching the ardor particled by the plant, exchanged for the dust. Reaching a hand out, warmth. Both hands, incandesced, drawing from his hands, from his veins, from his heart, brighter, hallowed, harrowed, his eyes luminous, two pale lanterns trading life for light.
***
The sun rose and dimmed the plant's blush. He rose, his body light, and he walked with ease to the otherside of his apartment. Opening the refrigerator, nothing. Closed, he yawned and stretched, the arthritic joints pliable, uncreaked, uncracked.
The notebook remained on the desk and he walked slowly to it. With each step, his gait aged until he shuffled, bentbacked, pawing for stability in the air. Clutching the chair, then the table, then his heart, he put on his glasses and pulled the notebook close.
every word brings me more
write me back to life
and so shall i
Breath shallow, heart racing, he took the pen in hand, shaking, vision blurred, a vibration starting in his center, above his stomach and bellow his heart, a vibration increasing until every molecule took up, spreading from his center to his organs to his limbs and head. He turned to the plant, bigger than before, than moments ago, brighter. He put the pen to paper beginning, not beginning, his hand faltered, the pen dropped, picked up, wiped brow, frowned, lower over upper, eyes narrowed, steady, began again, stopped, and so it was for seventeen minutes, the sunlight lengthening the shadows and touching the corners of his apartment.
It's you really you. I've prayed a name and repeated it within my breath over and over when the world begins to slur from me and I lose myself I say your name Alec Alec Alec to steady the world to bring it back into focus and I can walk and live again living off only your name I pray it's true for all these nights I can't not think of you.
A gasp and he stopped as if pulled back from the land of graves and memories. He looked around the room, watched the sunlight travel and fill space.
You're here. I smell you even now. Watching me. I feel your hands on my shoulder, your lips on my neck, and this could all be seventy years ago, couldn't it? I took a train that lasted all my life only to be brought back to you. That's how it feels, like my whole life without you has passed in flashes and instants only to find you, still so young, ageless. Where have you been and where did you come from? If writing brings you back then I will write until my hands bleed, until my eyes rot, and my tongue turns to ash from this millennial pyre. Do you remember? I remember all of it. The cigarettes you smoked, Red Puffins, always alight in your hand. I sometimes thought halfasleep that you were a demon breathing smoke and not the man I lay beside, that some deranged spirit possessed you, but then you looked at me with those small dark eyes, your pale Dublin skin, your hairless body, so unirish I called you an Israelite. Do you remember Munich? Salzburg? I loved you first at Neuschwanstein, you posing so that it looked like you ate the castle for my camera. Your whispered kisses deep in the Alps, not caring. I envied you for that, carelessness I never could have. Even still, you'd laugh at me and my worries. Age has changed many things but not the worries, the anxieties. I have a child. She does not speak to me and I do not know where she is or if she still lives. The fires are everywhere, I think. I cannot watch the news and the television stopped making sense decades ago. You've missed nothing since your death except Sebastian's re-emergence, just as unwelcome as his initial plunge. People wanted to talk to me about the things we did but not anymore. I threw out the phone before I left for Cannes. I think the millennial fires keep the world busy now. I don't think it was us but it could have been. Our film brought ruin. The world would do better to have never had it return. Sometimes the dead should
He stopped, pressed his thumb and index finger to the bridge of his nose. The plant waved as if pushed and pulled by a breeze. The old man stared at its dance and felt the vibration again, his body warming then turning cold, exhaling long, until all air was gone, clutching his heart. Inhaling through his nose brought him back to full height, straightbacked in his chair.
He turned to the notebook, his back ached, fingers creaked, body hung, aged. He took the pen in his hand.
I want you back. To return. Life without you is no life. The many years have slipped from me and my regrets have worn caverns in my face as deep as a fist, the wrinkles like canyons. I age without you and I regret not going with, not following you. The Thisbe to your Pyramus, your Juliet. One thing I discovered without you is that imitation does not work. I could never bring you back that way and now after all this time you have found me and not I you.
He stopped and wrote no more.
Turning on the shower, the steam filling space, a fog he disappeared in, his limbs and body no longer visible. He reached out his hand as if cupping a face but found nothing. And then hands on him, stretched from behind, they ran over his stomach, the sagging skin, the bulbous weight. He tried to move them away but found only the mist of condensation. A hand led him to the water, grazing his hand on all sides as if holding it, pulling him towards the fount. The water burned and his skin reddened and scorched, ripping away the flesh of age to birth a newness, a youth buried deep beneath his years, beneath mountains of time to be mined through for the man that once inhabited the old man's body. Hands all over him, evanescent hands of nonexistent touches, like a million wings of butterflies brushing, caressing every inch of his skin. The hands took his neck and a whisper told him to close his eyes but he did not and so watched the impressions of a vague visage form in the haze and approach. He took the face in his hands, the flesh of meat and the flesh of memories, he spoke a name, only two syllables, and lips met lips for an instant and the room collapsed, emptied of steam, and he stared at his hands, at the vacant room where he stood beneath the boiling water, alone.
***
The sulphuric air stung his eyes and nostrils but he shuffled along carrying a petal from his plant. It burned like an ember in his hand but he carried it, his skin charring and smoldering. The crowds no longer were but the fires continued from their unquenchable source. The hills all around burned and a haze spread over the air, ash like first snows, the sun distorted by the holocaust, a pinkish oval far away over the sea turned white. He brushed the soot and ash from his hair and face but then stopped and let it pile on him. Other figures appeared through the blizzard but they did not see him or did not look. Everyone he saw shrouded in t
he dense haze of particles in flux, not falling or rising but drifting along, careless and ignorant of gravity. Each shuffled step brought more to the air and every foot he progressed stuck more of it to him. His mouth covered by his handkerchief, the petal on fire in his other palm, he wandered like the blind through the dismal landscape of millennial California.
Shouts and screams and the unmistakable noxious stench of flesh burning mixed in the air and mystified the encompassing cloud breathing smoke and spitting ash. The fires turned to stars galaxies away and nothing was seen but the edge of his nose and the flame in his hand turning his skin to cinder and ash.
The cemetery gates appeared a foot before him, poking through, visible. The gates, rent and broken, he walked past. His steps carried him and seventy minutes of aimless ambling brought him before a small stone that read Alec Flynn. Tears streamed from his face but not from sorrow. The ash and sulphur and smoke wore through him and he collapsed only to place the petal on the stone. Freed from his hand, the plant swallowed the haze around it, shining more and more. It spread, tendrils sprouted and searched for earth, burrowing into the soil round the stone, swallowing the smoke and ash, the cloud less thick near the bright evenstar he carried so far in his hands. It grew more and more, blooming flowers that wilted and fell to the earth as quickly as they sprouted. After the fifth such birth, life, and death, he plucked the new flower from its base, hot like ice in his hands, he took it with him and walked back home, alone, but found, his steps lighter, his back straighter, his breath breathed.
i have searched for you
for so long
born dead in this haze
i searched
forever
for no time at all
time is different
it neither is nor isnt
the dead
i only realised now
recently
that we were all dead
that we were all lost
but i found you
you called me
without knowing and without thinking
my name on your lips
a pen in your hand
you brought me back
to feel your touch and hear your voice
i know not where or why or how long
until now i was naught but emotion
i remember now
i remember
i remember all of you
The tears flowed and he read it over and over.
I remember all of you. He breathed it over and over, let it pass his teeth, roll against his tongue, in order to make it true, to make it last.
I will learn. I will learn to speak the forgotten language of the dead. We will speak. You will hold me and you will be my shadow, your ghost arms clung to me, I will live with you here, forever by my side. I will sew my skin to your spirit so we needn't be alone again. I remember how the wind would blow with rain and you held me close through those frigid Irish winters, though they chattered so and kicked us out of rooms and threw rocks when you loved me near the beach, not caring, never caring. Those were our times and I want them back, to return to a century ago, to a beautiful millennium lost to the passage of time. This new century, this newly birthed millennium already burns down and collapses all around. It will not last. I will see that day when you bury me and I reach from the grave to lie with you for the eternal sleep I owe you. We shall rest then.
He stopped and breathed for the first time since sitting. Old, his body anguished and worn, the soot and ash in his lungs, he turned to the flower, so bright, then the window, an impenetrable barrier of white smoke, of black smoke, the ash snowing against the walls, the soot piling with it and clinging to window sills.
He coughed and coughed till the blackness sputtered from his mouth and into his hand. His steps feeble and unsure, he made his way to the plant and bathed in its glow, but coughed anyway. He took the burning cold flower he stole from his grave and swallowed it whole.
The coughing subsided and the icy fire swept through his bones and sinews, recalibrating and reconfiguring the atoms, gutting the age from him, the inside out. He fell to the ground, seismic waves took him and the vibration returned, his eyes rolled back, his tongue shuddered, teeth clattered, and his body convulsed.
***
Awake on the floor, a puddle of black vomit stuck to his cheek, his pants damp and reeking of urine. He wiped his face and looked around the room and stopped at the flower, now in full bloom, shining its light onto him. He sat up, the clock, 3:19, and all was dark, night or day did not matter, the deep cloud billowed against the windows. Pushing himself to his feet, no bones creaked and no pain brought him gasping. Removing his clothes, he stood nude, his body the same, aged, but he wiggled his arms, loose, rolled his neck, lifted his knees, and reached toward the ground. He did not reach his toes but his knees were well met. He smiled and laughed.
He showered but did not fill the room with steam nor did he take his time but rushed through and shaved, urinated and defecated. He cleaned the vomit and urine, dressed well, as if going to meet the day but paused before the balcony door. Turned to the plant, its light spotlighting his movements, hand on the handle, he removed it and walked to the flower. It smelt like the opposite of the ocean. Not a fount of the dead or a burial ground for memories, but flourishes of life, pungently fecund, but sweet, a promise of birth, not death. It smelt like eternal summer, the sweat of a lover. It smelt like him. Alec. His smile faded and he turned from the flower to the notebook and bound to it, his body growing weak with each step, bones creaking, back bending, neck stiffening.
He stood at the table breathing hard, vision faded, the hair on edge. Loosening his tie, undoing the buttons, he sat and closed his eyes and breathed three times deep through his nose.
youre dying i fear
and youll be gone from here
lost
it does not work as you say
to die is to lose
to be lost
you will ride the wind
follow scents of memories that are not yours
feel emotions
not your own
feel them so deep
it hurts to not be alive
you may grow jealous
become a tormentor
rabid
guilty
hateful
despising the living for their life
i remember
with each word you write
i remember
the me that was me
with you
sebastian
i remember
tell me of you
who are you now
what have you been
you almost died
i watched from here
watched the life seep out of you
youre losing you
but it tied you down
with a promise
to forget
tell me
He read it again and again, mouth held by his hand, heart in the other. He took the pen in his hand but did not write. Beside the window he searched through the fog of smoke. The silence weighed heavy. The walls no longer breathed, the pipes no longer spoke. The shouts from without disappeared. Alone. The fires invisible, the millennium encased by phantoms. No sunlight. No moonlight. No light but the evenstar brilliant in his own room and its daughter digesting within him.
Each step to the flower brought youth and each step to the notebook dug his grave. He stood between, where boundary met boundary, the draw of the past and the promise of future. For twenty three minutes he stood, inert, the tug of war coursing through him, weaving into the fiber of his life, each one, the past, the future, sewn to his heart, to that place at the center of him that houses all that he is, where a name sits with a promise.
He sat and began.
I have been many things since you left. I have been a suicide, a vagabond, a wretch, a wraith, a father, a husband, I have tried to be you, to be Sebastian, living in mimicry a
s a way to bring you back. I thought that if I got it right, that if I pretended hard enough and perfect enough, I would become you and we would be whole. A decade after you died I came back to life and met a woman. Her name does not matter but I married her. I loved her. She came to me as if from the dream I held onto since childhood that I have never spoken of, even to you. I only told her and it was how I proposed. I told her that I had seen a girl every night in my dreams since I was five years old. The girl began with no face and no discernible features, only the phantom of a human form. I knew she was beautiful. Perfect. Her hair was blacker than night, her eyes bright and uncanny, her frame slight. I loved her first. She was always my love and the reason for all the others. As years went by, her face formed and the features burrowed into my brain and I tried to map them onto every girl I knew, searching for her, wanting her, needing her. I found her nowhere, and so I wrote her into existence. I never let you read those novels I carried with me but they were her life and my life, all the tragedy and love of a man chasing the dream. I never stopped loving her but she disappeared from me months before I met you. And with you there was nothing else. We shimmered in silence. I remember every moment. But, after you died, ten years passed, I met her. She was beautiful and young, fifteen years my junior. I fell in love so fully with her, as lovesick as I had been with the dream of her, and so I wrote for her now that she lived. I believed I wrote her into existence, or at least dreamt her to life. That all those dreams I spent the life of my youth dreaming created her in the womb of another through the fertilisation of my imagination. Even more, the words I wrote brought her to womanhood and bound our lives together, though it would take so long before creator met creation, and love was there from the very start. I saw her and knew, knew who she was. Those were my first words to her, I know you. You know what she said? She said, I know. She had had a dream, not like mine, but of a man who would find her one day and see her. See her, not as a body or a human, but her as an entity unquantifiable. And I did. She bore my daughter. We were married for six years and then she died. She died like you died, with my hand in hers, pulling her back from death and trying to kiss the life back into her. It didn't work with you but it might with her because I created her, she was mine to give life to and take life from, but the dream collapsed and I was left with a tiny human I never understood. A daughter with the same ravenhair. Do you remember the film we made with Sebastian? Songs of the Dead. My daughter was that girl but also the perfect image of her mother. Ravenhair and violet eyes, the same woman I had dreamt for a lifetime was born again as my daughter. She does not love me. She hates me. Reviles me. I have a daughter but I do not know her. So unlike me and her mother, she was not a part of my dream. She is not a part of my life. Sometimes I think that she was not mine, that she was created by the dream of another, and her daughter will be the same, and unbroken forever. A line of woman who birth the dreams of men, who all look the same, but are not. In this way I forgot you for many years, though your name still burnt inside me. After she died, she was gone completely. I have not thought of her. I have not known her. I have not looked for her. My search for you began anew the moment she lied underground. That's why my daughter hates me so. She does not understand the love I had for her, nor will she ever know or understand how she was my first love but not my last or my true love. I longed for you so long. Have I found you?