The World of the End (51 page)

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Stunned, Ben lay by his prattling wife’s side for two more hours, scared of the moment when she would decide to get out of bed, turn on the light, and see the fruit of her imagination that, under the cover of darkness, grew flesh and blood, both believing and disbelieving what his ears reported. When she hushed, he thought he’d seize the moment and slip out, but she didn’t give him enough time to act. She moved through the dark with precision and Ben, paralyzed, heard the familiar sound of the switch being raised. The sickly light that spread over the room, a foul mixture of pale beige and rotten mustard, forced him to blink twice before his eyes rested on his wife. To his amazement, she didn’t notice him at first, as her eyes were racing among the tapes scattered on the floor, and only when she got down on hands and knees to retrieve a tape she’d inadvertently kicked under the bed, did she look up, see him, and smile.

Ben’s smile congealed on his lips. Her smile was not the smile of mutual understanding, the sarcastic smile, the offended smile, the seductive smile, the flattering smile, the dry humor smile, the dirty joke smile, the praised intellect smile, the deliberating smile, the derisive smile, the orgasmic smile, the confused smile, the perfunctory smile, the doubtful smile, the white lie smile, the idiotic smile, the frightened smile, the capricious smile, the sly smile, the morning smile, the generous smile, the wild smile, or the wonderment smile.

It was the smile of a complete stranger.

39

In the Realm of Dreams

Some twenty-seven months after Marian lost her life under bizarre aeronautical circumstances, she woke up in the dead of night to the sound of suspicious movements near the door, crawled over to the switch, and flipped on the light. She exhaled in relief when she saw that the room did not contain the mysterious intruder who had fueled her fears, but then her eyes fell on the TV screen. A rectangular white envelope was taped to it, bearing her name, in script she recognized from a different world. She pulled the envelope away from its unusual spot, sat on the bed, removed a sheath of papers, written in the same familiar scrawl, and strained to still the tremble in her hands. Her eyes focused on the jaunty lines of words and she forced her lips to speak them aloud, afraid that if she read in silence, the tremor would sift entire lines from her field of vision.

Dearest Marian,

This is no dream. The pages you are holding in your hand contain words written by your loving husband, and this letter is the first and last one you will receive. That’s in order to ensure that you don’t destroy it in a moment of rage or think that it is one more detail in the wild fantasy your mind has concocted. I don’t know if these words are able to touch you at all and reach into the depths of your fortressed soul, I have no idea whether you’ll read this letter and be able to see beyond your four walls. This endeavor may be utterly ridiculous. You may not understand what I want, you may toss this whole thing into the trash. But remember, there won’t be another letter. Not today, not tomorrow, not in another hundred years. I have no doubt you’ll recognize the handwriting just as you will the hand that produced it. The same hand that squeezed the trigger and brought me to you.

Yes. I, like you, found no point in soldiering on once you were cruelly uprooted from my life. I also shut the blinds, locked the doors, and enclosed myself behind the wall of the end. I wanted to believe that I would find the fortitude to overcome the loss and I craved that noble moment when I’d scale the wall and cross over to the other side, and when I started going to the health club in order to finally work on the body you’d yearned for, I lied to myself, hoping that by returning to the company of humans I would soon have my life back, rather than the lowly and remote version that felt like a bland memory from a happy childhood. Soon enough I understood the essence of the lie—a dead person cannot socialize with living, breathing beings. I felt like an unskilled spy, a mole that had lost his sanity, a double agent betraying both worlds at once. I was disgusted by the helplessness. If you are so pained, there’s a great way to put yourself out of your misery, I told myself. But make no mistake about my intentions, Marian—I wanted to break down the wall; at times I sought to forget you, to wipe the memory of you from my life, to master the immense power you had over me, but I never managed to stop laughing. I swear to you I was laughing. In jest. In rebuke. In the knowledge that it was all in vain. I asked myself, why were others able to handle their bereavement and I remained such a miserable failure? What the hell made my loss different, unique, special?

Alas, I never found an answer. It’s simplistic to say that we had something no other couples had. That’s obvious. And what other couples had was not ours. And still, I rejected every rational explanation in favor of survival in a world devoid of my beloved. The days passed in intoxicating stillness, and the only consolation was to be had in the strange worship of the body. In death you left me an unfulfilled aspiration, a small wish that served as a temporary lifesaver. Every night I looked into the mirror through your eyes, wondering if my body had swelled to the dimensions that would delight your tickled desires, and stitch by stitch the plan started to come together. I admit that I never realized that this is how the Other World would look, but as opposed to many others, I believed in its existence. I knew that if you left, you had surely gone somewhere. Even if that place was no-where, I preferred to wind up there and be with you rather than spend my time in a no-where where every breath of mine was staged, every opening of my eyes, a fraud. I thought that all other pain would be dwarfed by the pain I experienced there, in our house, which turned, in an instant, into my house, singular, a meaningless ownership, hell.

I was wrong.

No, I don’t have the slightest twinge of regret. Well, maybe about the wretched waiting. Maybe had I come earlier, we could have bridged the gap. The time gap. Who’s the idiot who said time heals? If anything, it debilitates. The fact is, you’re there and I’m here. And we’re both in the same world. How ironic. When I was in the previous world and you were here, we were, mentally, in parallel universes, if you’ll excuse the worn phrase. And then here, of all places, we were forced apart. And that’s where I dropped the ball, because even in my wildest dreams and worst nightmares I did not foresee the odd possibility that while I march, determined, toward my future with you, you stagnate and retreat toward the past, which ended with your death. You see, I feared that by the time I reached you, I’d realize that you had continued on without me to an unknown future. Like any efficient epilogist, I wanted the past over and done with, even though it spurred me into action and dictated my steps. I don’t fault you for the far-reaching changes you’ve undergone from the day you died to the chimerical present, even though I must admit I was surprised.

The first time we met, you asked that I not turn on the light, and we made love like in the good old days. Naïvely, I thought all our woes had been salved and that we would pick up again from where we had left off. The head of the department and all of his ominous forecasts could go to hell. I refused to accept the dictates which he handed down with such certainty, and I detested his chilly demeanor, as though he knew you better than me. I scorned him and his outrageous diagnoses and, above all else, I despised his assertion that in death you had become a different woman. And then you turned on the light. And smiled at me in a way I had never seen. Like you were surprised to see the man who just a second before had made love to you, like you were shocked by his very presence in your room, like someone amused and abashed by the sight of her lover who dared slip out of her dreams.

Marian, there’s nothing more frightening than a new and foreign expression on a loved one’s face, it’s like listening to a piece of comforting music you know well only to find that it’s been tweaked with discordant notes. We looked at each other for over an hour, I tried to convince you that I had come back to you from the world of the living, I shook you with all my might, yelled in your ear, even tried to slap that obtuse expression off your face, that same frozen expression that followed me for the next six months each time you turned on the light after our daily act of love. I thought that if I fulfilled my lover’s murky whim, then, with time, the woman with whom I had fallen in love would return to my arms, and every night, when walking out through the gates of the building, I felt satisfaction and disgust course through me as one, aware that for as long as I continued to visit you, your belief in the awful lie would grow, the same exasperating lie that had turned me into a ghost. For six months, the ghost’s body served your desire in the hot darkness of your room, and the steel bonds that tied our souls together rusted and cracked, leaving not so much as a single strand to hold on to, nothing. Six months, and we didn’t manage a single meaningful word to one another. I’m not willing to continue to make do with our tenebrific intercourse, Marian. Not anymore. More than anything else I desire your mind, which you’ve cordoned off with coils of barbed wire. Even from yourself. I have no place in your world. How could I possibly join you, when I know how wondrous you are in your being and how hurtful you are in your cessation.

It’s not you I fell in love with, but who you were. When you were.

It’s not me I detest, but the man you ask me to be, the fraud who comes in the dark, fulfills your dusky desires, and leaves with nightfall.

Marian, do you remember the difference between past and present?

Can you discern between the two?

The last time we met, exactly five months and one week ago, I came to part with you, without telling you. I thought something might change that day, that maybe the fact that I had already decided on leaving would somehow alert you to what was going on. Long ago, in simpler times, you would just look me in the eyes and understand. But that day you outdid yourself and the moment we finished our lustful act you turned back to the screen and asked me to move out of the way. “You’re blocking me,” you snorted, waving me aside. I looked at the screen and I saw us making love. The real Ben interfered with your viewing of the taped Ben. The reality that was half fantasy stepped aside for memory. And still I tried my luck. I scooped a handful of tapes off the floor and made to leave. The smile faded. You looked at me like a dangerous animal protecting its young and before I was able to open the door you pounced on me and attacked me with a ferocity I didn’t know you possessed. When you pummeled me and pried the tapes free, I realized that if I didn’t remove myself from view, I would worsen your situation immeasurably. Do you remember what happened after I threatened to rob you of your past and the subsequent outburst of violence? Do you remember how you hugged the tapes to your chest lovingly and continued smiling your foreign smile as you sat back down in front of the TV as though nothing had happened?

Recognition came to me late. Nothing happened. The conclusive evidence of my existence didn’t so much as scratch your skin. You wouldn’t let anyone, not even me, crawl into your carefully framed world and ruin it. You didn’t want anyone “blocking” you. You were always stubborn, but in death you’ve become downright indomitable.

And again I want to be clear that I do not have any regrets about finding you. I would have lost my mind had you remained in the realm of dreams. Today, I can safely say that having met you turned you into a dream alright. My own personal nightmare. A Marian who does not recognize me outside the borderlines of her private fantasy, a Marian who refuses to talk reasonably with me, a Marian who loses all interest in me a moment after she mouths my name in passion. On the other hand, I still dream about you as though I had not found you between the walls of the ancient building. About the Marian I knew. About the Marian you see every day on your screen. My mask-free love. My naked love.

I thought I would break down again when I came to the decision not to return to the room. I thought the anguish over my betrayal by abandonment would rip me to pieces. I thought and I thought. Too much. Sometimes you just need to let thoughts race around till they get tired and subside on their own. Sometimes you need to go to sleep and wake up and find that it was all a dream: The thought that you’d be waiting for me with open arms and that we’d pick up from where we left off. The natural continuation of our harmonic relationship without any difficulties. The charmed eternity of lovebirds.

I admit, this wasn’t the end I’d hoped for. Its lack of clarity is so strange. And again it entails waiting. Less anxiously, more bindingly. Along with that, though, I’ve discovered a freedom I’d already managed to forget. There’s not a day when I don’t see you in my mind’s eye, there’s not a night when I don’t envision your form, there’s not a morning when I don’t wake up and seek you out with my fingers. Force of habit. But I’m free of the depression that had seized me early on. The bitter sadness that had seeped into my bones was blotted out as though it had never existed. And when the sadness lifted the cool fresh breeze of a new beginning began to blow. I started to understand that our existence side by side is not a dictate of reality. To understand that if memory is your way of loving me, I must respect and remember you in my own manner. To cherish your memory. I needed every step of this journey in order to let go of you. I needed this whole journey to lose you and find you again inside of me. Funny, eh? I committed suicide in order to come to terms with your death. People less prone to the extreme could have traveled this rocky path from their living room couches, and yet your husband needed all the drama. What won’t a righter do in order to find the period at the end of the story …

And still, it is over but not done with. Almost. You know why. Or perhaps not. Maybe you had the chance to forget about the meaning of time when you buried the present. Allow me to remind you. Today, forty-one years ago, you came into the previous world. Today, one year ago, I left that same world. And today, just a few hours ago, we finished celebrating the birthday of the woman who bears your exact likeness and name. Everyone came to the park in 2001. Everyone, Marian, even some people I didn’t know. Mom, Dad, Catherine, Henri, Uncle David and his new boyfriend, Uncle Gad, Yossef and Miriam, Grandpa Moses and Grandma Rosie, Sandrine and her partner, and even “the Norwegian hussy,” as Mom calls Dad’s girlfriend. And Samuel, my good friend, who helped me with my search. In the end, your charming sister managed to get over her embarrassment and thank the family that had adopted her, said she knew who she owed the really big thanks to, and looked teary-eyed straight at the empty chair at the head of the table, raised a glass of wine, and drank to your recuperation. We all stood up and offered birthday wishes to both Marians, the present and the absent, and we expressed the hope that next year perhaps you’d be willing to join us. You’ll be happy to hear that the idea of the empty chair was Henri’s.