“I want to show you something.”
The text glared at him from the screen of the phone, inscrutable words from an unknown sender. His mind reeled, scrambling for an explanation he could not have right now.
The phone let out another bloop-poink!, the silly noise he had chosen for incoming texts.
“Look out your front window.”
“Who is this??” he typed furiously in reply. Then, bloop-poink.
“Look out your front window.”
He moved to get up from the sofa, then stopped himself. Considering for a moment, he decided to go into one of the bedrooms instead: it was dark in there, and the shades were drawn, and its window faced the front just as well. He parted the edge of the roll-down window shade from the frame ever so slightly, and peered through the slit.
In the shadow between streetlamps across the pavement, a dark figure, hooded and featureless, waved – towards the bedroom window. Then it beckoned him outside. He jumped back into the darkness of the room, heart slamming.
Bloop-poink.
“It's important.”
It was impossible, it had no explanation...and he found himself completely drawn in. Wary, but too curious to ignore it.
“Why?” he typed. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Bloop-poink. “Trust me. Okay?”
“I have no idea why I'm doing this,” he typed, “but...okay.”
He slid into his heavy coat (the cool October day had turned into a preview of late December somehow) and made his way to the back door. He wasn't quite trusting enough to go out the front, and the back provided at least a few seconds of cover. As he reached the front corner of his house, the doubt and fear took over entirely.
Bloop-poink. “Seriously. just come across the street. Stop hiding.”
It took him several moments to unglue his gaping eyes from the screen, and another moment after that to readjust to the relative darkness. “Damn,” he muttered to nobody at all, his breath a grey plume caught by the amber streetlamp glow. He stepped out of the shadow of his house and started towards the shadow figure across the street.
As he approached the curb, the figure turned and began to walk away, up the street. He was confused until he saw the beckoning hand rise over the figure's head, waving him onward. The road rose for several blocks, where the houses then began to grow sparse, the streetlamps ended, and finally after a small intersection, the last of the street itself dithered away into gravel and then a field.
By now, almost two miles later, his legs were tiring and his curiosity was wide awake. The two continued across the field to the far end, where the figure stopped at the cliff that was its border. He stopped as well, afraid to approach.
“I don't...I don't know what comes next,” he managed to say through his trepidation and cold-numbed lips. He was perhaps ten feet from it – him? her? IT – when again the beckoning hand rose. It was facing the cliff; he was facing its back. “No,” he said with some small authority. “No, I'm here, that's enough, tell me what this is all about.”
Bloop-poink. “I want to show you something. But you have to come over here.”
“I've lost it completely,” he muttered to himself. Then, with every nerve a live wire and every instinct howling in confusion, he stepped to the figure. “I'm here. What –”
THIS, he heard, a voice clear and clean and warm and sweet, a voice like falling into water that is such a perfect temperature that you can't even feel it, a voice that painted the frozen Autumn night in the bright hues of Spring. As the sound washed over him in its single syllable, the figure turned to him, lowering the dark hood which had obscured any identity, and for just a fraction of a part of a moment he saw –
A blinding light pulled him from the ground, not fighting gravity, but into a state devoid of any notion of it, and as he expanded into this new impossibility of light, he began to see: not with his eyes, but in images far clearer than human eyes could ever see. He witnessed days of his life gone by, moments of joy, of confusion, of sorrow, seemingly random, all coming to him in a great symphony of singularity, as if his life were compressed into a length of time which had no length at all, a durationless forever entirely comprehensible and impossible to explain. At once, the visions of moments shifted and he saw all that was his life now, the vast weave and tangle of existence, relationships, jobs, home, every single aspect of what would never again occur to him as simple existence. Again the visions – the light – shifted, and now in another non-instant he saw all that could have been but never was, all the Other choices, all the doors left unopened, all the paths untraversed, all the words left unsaid, and he felt a sense of joyous doom, as though he were his own eulogy at a funeral for a life that had never existed.
The light vanished. He stood at the cliff, alone.
After a few seconds, he realized he was not only quite cold, but also that he was not at all light-blind. Every facet of the dark field stood out in clear relief against its slight shadow on this moonless night.
Bloop-poink.
The sound startled him so that he flinched, dropping the phone. He sighed deeply, then picked it up and read the message.
“Close your eyes.”
“No,” he said to the weeds and the stars, in a tone that was both defeated and defiant. “No, tell me – tell me what's going on. Who are you?”
Utter silence. A slight breeze animated a few spent maple leaves.
“Okay, okay,” he relented. He took a deep breath and shut his eyes, tight.
The light again exploded into existence all about him, only this time it wasn't visions that came: it was feelings, sensations. The heavy atmosphere of a Summer storm, the electric confused bliss of a first kiss, the deep infinite swelling rumbled murmur of the ocean, the ethereal connection of holding a firstborn child, a thousand other instances that are the synapses where perception and emotion, mind and heart, meet.
He tried to speak and had forgotten how; but his thoughts resonated in the light, clearer than speech ever could be.
“What is this? Am I dying? Am I dead? Do I get another chance? Why am I seeing all this? Who ARE you?!”
Nothing. No ethereal voice. No text messages. Just light.
“Please!!” his mind screamed. “Why is this happening?!?”
The Voice came then, its sound a gentle hurricane, full and invisible and vast and immediate.
BECAUSE OF THIS.
Long before the mile-deep reverberation died away in his mind's ear, he realized he was again on his sofa, in his living room, warm, alone.
Bloop-poink.
His gut tightened at the thought of another inscrutable message from an unknown sender.
But this one was from his daughter.
“Daddy, are you OK?”
His eyes shifted from the phone to the gun and back again, welling with great hot tears of understanding and shame and relief and love.
*
©2016 B. W. Flatley
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