Death, Sleep & the Traveler (17 page)

The sleep of reason produces demons, as Ursula once said. But I love my demons.

Ursula and Peter were in the nude. Ursula and Peter were facing in opposite directions, she kneeling head down on the orange rug, he straddling her slender yet slightly aged waist and playing her buttocks, slapping and beating on her buttocks like a lean African pounding his drums. Ursula and Peter were both laughing without restraint. I also began to laugh.

The lights fell on the black water as from a sinking ship. I was leaning forward, looking down, watching as the
lights, which ran the entire length of the ship, began to disintegrate and sink. I heard a splash.

“Peter,” I said, risking an idea I had long considered, “how is it you never married? Even now the sirens must call to you in chorus wherever you turn. Is it not so?”

He removed the pipe from between his teeth. He held the small hot meerschaum bowl in three fingers. He looked at me. And then he turned his head toward Ursula and raised his eyebrows, aimed the pipe stem in her direction, parted his lips. Then he turned again to me.

“But the question,” he said softly, “is why you married. You of all people.”

“No offense, Peter. I was only asking.”

Again he looked at Ursula, and suddenly replaced the bit of the amber pipe stem between his teeth. Thanks to the smoke from Peter’s pipe, the room smelled like a rose garden in fuming decay.

“There exists somewhere a man who wishes to amuse me, Allert, for the rest of his life. I ask only for amusement. And when I find my amusing man, I shall follow him to the ends of the earth. But we’ll never marry. Never.”

In my dream I am standing alone in an open second-story window on a warm day. There is not a person in sight, the trees are still, I am troubled by the fact that in
all the surrounding trees and heavy foliage there exists not a single bird. But I am alone in the window and basking in the atmosphere of the tender midday sun and the slant of an exterior brown beam and an expanse of powdery tiled roof that juts into my sight above a structure that is either a carriage house or a barn. Though empty, still, even desolate, it is a peaceful scene. For a while longer I resist the temptation to look down and instead concentrate on every other portion of the warmly lighted courtyard where I find no life. Apparently the courtyard belongs to a farm complete and real except for the total absence of animals and human beings. Ahead of me stands a fragment of mustard-colored wall, the trees are green, there are motes in the sunlit air. Behind me the empty room in which I stand is dark with shadows. I am wearing a gold watch chain across my vest, I am standing in full view of anyone who might suddenly walk into the cobbled area below or who might already be watching me from some concealed doorway or crevice in the yellow wall.

Then I look down. I lean forward to rest my spread hands on the broad sill and, thrusting myself partway out the window, stare down at the tableau intended for no one else’s sight but mine. I am perfectly aware that what I am looking at I must never forget, so that if my scrutiny is unemotional it is nonetheless slow and intense. I am also aware that I am making no sound, though I am momentarily moving my lips as if for speech, and that I am comfortable but quite unable to feel the slightest sensation of my own breathing.

What stands directly below my window is a large
box-like wooden wagon that rides on two high wheels with wooden spokes and iron rims and is equipped not with the usual shafts for horse or donkey but with a wooden crossbar clearly intended for human use. The splintered and high-sided old vehicle remains horizontal below my window. I observe the gray wood, the heavy wooden hubs of the wheels, a wisp of dry hay caught in a joint. And what I see, what fills my mind, is the sharp-seamed and extremely narrow tin coffin which the cart contains and which is angular and unadorned except for a long single strip of fading white flowers—carnations, perhaps, or roses—stretched as on a piece of cord from the head of the tin coffin to its angled foot. The wood that absorbs the light, the cheap bright metal that reflects it, the string of near-dead collapsing flowers that divides the lid of the coffin from head to foot, instead of lying conventionally in a rich full bunch above the breast of the dead person concealed within—these are the details that make me realize that eventually the coffin must be carted away and that death is the true poverty.

But there is something still more unusual about the sight below. Feeling my brow tightening in a single crease, it is then that I see that the poor tin coffin rests not on the bottom of the old cart but rather floats in perhaps a foot of dark water. Yes, I see now that the cart is partially filled with water in which the coffin is gently rocking. And then I understand. I stare at the shining tin coffin and at the standing water and listen to my own breath and understand the reason for the water in the old wooden cart: originally the coffin was packed in ice, a great quantity of ice, which has melted.

Am I the person to pull the slow cart out of the courtyard and, lodging my stomach against the wooden bar and hearing the coffin bumping like a small boat against the wood at my back, drag this inexplicably grief-ridden assemblage to whatever resting place awaits it?

I do not know. I stand in the window. I hear the buzzing of a single fly.

When I finished reporting this dream to Ursula, who had listened with more than her usual lassitude, she made two quite toneless comments while rising, as she did so, to leave the room. She said that obviously the coffin contained the body not of a man but a woman, and that this was the telltale dream of the only son.

I sat alone for an hour, two hours, hearing the fly and contemplating Ursula’s remarks.

I stood in the twilight of our smoothly plastered white hallway, alert yet immobilized on my way from parlor to den or den to living room, where I had lighted a fire in the fireplace some minutes before. And in this stationary moment, caught in one of the trivial paths of domesticity in the light of late afternoon, suddenly I understood completely the nature of the atmosphere in which I was so keenly suspended. What else could it be if not the air of private catastrophe? The silence was gathering into a secret voice. The light inside the house was soft and clear with the muted quality of the frozen snow outside.

So, I told myself, our separation was no longer impending but now was upon me or even ahead of me, like a road that changes direction until suddenly it doubles back
upon itself. Yes, our separation was now a fact. It was all in the silence and muted light. And just as I had expected I felt nothing, I anticipated no approaching pain, but was aware only of the perception of the event rather than of the event itself. I was aware of the silence. I was aware of the faded light.

It was possible that she had departed without farewells. Perhaps she had decided to spare me a final admonition, a final smile. Perhaps she had not wanted me watching as she tied the sash of her fur coat and drew on her driving gloves. Perhaps I had slumped into the folds of my newspaper, slipping away, dreaming of the goose that long ago had struck repeatedly at my bare childish calf, and so dozed through Ursula’s disappearance from the long life of our marriage. Or perhaps she was even now taking her place in the front seat of her car alone or beside a new companion, and even now was preparing to play out all my speculations, all the texture of this fading day, in the unmistakable sound of a car engine.

I turned, I saw Peter’s meerschaum pipe in an ash tray where Ursula had decided to leave it. In passing I thought the pipe was covered with a skin of dust, as if it were lying in Peter’s empty house instead of ours, and in that moment and even as I was walking down the hallway toward the kitchen, I remembered what had occurred to me at the time of his death: that grief is only another form of derangement and that my innocent childhood had been filled with it.

I saw the two cold Dutch ovens, I heard my footsteps on the tiles, I saw the snow beyond the kitchen window, I
saw the bright knives in their rack. Carefully, with eyebrows raised, with hands steady, I poured the schnapps into the little glass and held it up to the light. I felt that my face was expressionless, I knew that my actions were deliberate. I poured and then drank the schnapps. I leaned my cheek against the white tiles, each of which bore its glazed blue abstraction of an ancient Norse ship on a sea that might have been drawn by a child. I drank and waited for the sight and perhaps sound of Ursula’s car. But there was nothing. The tiles grew warm beneath my cheek.

I put down my glass. I saw the glass sitting alone on the flat expanse of thick white tiles, I saw how the light revealed the invisible film of liquor that still coated the inside of the glass and that smelled so beautifully like yellow kerosene.