Straight On Till Morning
The following is a short story I wrote, probably ten years or there abouts. I am posting it without rereading it for fear that I would want to rewrite it. I rewrote this a dozen times, still never got it the way I wanted it. Please excuse any missing puctuation or sloppy spelling.
1.
The Texas sun bore down on Jacob with fierce intensity. A ramshackle
house, a rusty dead windmill plastered against a lifeless sky was supposed to
mean something to him. What? He had forgotten or maybe it was a dream he had
had. Was it the scene it self or the heat of the sun, and why was it Texas? He
had never been to Texas, nor could he remember ever wanting to go, but here he
was. There was a car, the make he did not know, it was old, from the twenty's or
thirties. Was this significant? Sometimes theses things where just random, he
could change it, but there was a certain peacefulness about it, if it wasn't so
hot. He inhaled the scents; the summer grasses high and dry baking in the heat
of an early afternoon. He picked a stalk and put it in his mouth. He put his
hand on the hot metal of the car; he felt the heat radiating into his hand then
climbed into the back seat, pulling his hat down over his eyes and propping his
feet up on the front seat. He could feel the breeze then, slight, gentle and
soft. Carrying with it the whole aroma of the high Texas plain. He could feel
the drowsy comfort of sleep starting up, and thought that later he might walk
out to the horizon, just to see what popped up.
He started to slip into a light dream. The voice of a woman was gently
calling him from far away, across space and time. It was the voice of his
mother, calling him home for dinner; then his wife calling from the bedroom;
then his daughter, laughing from under a tent of blankets in their living room.
He reached for her, them: then stumbled. He woke suddenly, catching himself on
the warm, springy seat of the car. He was still there, alone. The sun was a
little less intense, the breeze more prominent, but still carrying a voice with
it.
The voice spoke to him. He could not tell where it came from. He always
imaged it above him, but that wasn't really true. Around him, through him, in
him? Always it was female. Always calming.
"Your daughter is dying, would you like to have more information?"Always
direct.
"Yes." And he was back on the ship.
Ever since he had come to the ship it remained little more than a way
station; a place to be, briefly,
before sliding back to a virtual world he preferred. The ship was a maze.
There were miles of corridors linked together at random, like a kid had gone mad
with tinker toys. But there wasn’t anything there, or anything to see. There
were rooms but they were just empty rooms. There was gravity, so the ship must
be moving fast enough to produce a G’s worth of pull. Whenever he tried picture
the ship in space he could only come up with images he had seen in comic books
or science fiction books or TV, and he got the impression that that was for from
the truth. The voice never said; only "we are moving" never where we are going,
or why. Never why he was there. If he asked, he got silence, then almost
maternally, "Why do you care? What difference does it make to you? Would you
rather not be here?" He didn’t care. He spent most of his time plugged in.
He could be anywhere then, anyone, anytime he chose. Just blink and he
was in Yankee stadium on a hot august day in nineteen twenty-seven. Blink again
and he stands in the middle of mud and music at Woodstock Just blink and the
world was his. He could watch the sun rise and set from a million different
perspectives. Share countless different lives in countless ways. Yet, for all
the choices he had most of the time he stayed in the eighties. He had married,
became a father, started to feel like he was beginning to understand life;
beginning to love life. He had died in the eighties, so now he lived them over
and over. Trying to get them right. Trying to really feel the way they felt to
other people. He understood, now after years of being on the ship, that nobody
understood being alive. Nobody could see where they were. Every ones
perspective had been blindsided by the constant rush of time moving past them.
Nobody could turn around and see what they had just lived through. You had to
rely on memory, and memory is biased. He had had no idea what the five or six
years of the nineteen eighties he had lived in had been about. He didn’t
understand his life at all, or anyone else's, until the day he died.
2.
"Your daughter is dying." The ship had said. " She is in her
seventy-fifth year of life and is suffering from a blood disorder not uncommon
to your species."
Seventy-five? Has it been that long already? He wondered where it had
gone. "Is it leukemia?"
"Perhaps."
"You don’t know? Can‘t they cure that yet?"
"Not in her case."
"I don’t understand why you don’t know." He was speaking to an empty
room.
"We know she is dying of a blood disease. We’ve decided she could be
brought in if she wishes. Would this be acceptable to you?" How was he supposed
to answer that? He hadn't seen her since she was six. Did she even have memories
of him, and if she did what were they?
"Is she considered old?" He asked.
"She is seventy-five."
"Yes, but when I was there seventy-five would have been old. What would
her average life expectancy be now?"
"Humans routinely live well into there hundreds. Dose this matter? If
she chooses to come in she will be any age she wishes the same choice you had.
Do you wish this?"
"Is it my decision?"
"It is your decision if she is asked. You must ask her. It is her
decision to come in. Do you wish this?"
He didn’t know what he felt. After all, she was a grown woman. What
would her reaction be to her dead father suddenly appearing before her? What
right did he have to even ask her? He had always avoided anything that would
remind him of his family. He refused to relive that life, or to imagine it had
never ended. He never wanted to know; he couldn't bear it. It had been hard
enough to leave; going back seemed wrong, even sacrilegious. He felt guilty
about being alive when he thought of them. Like being alive was an act of
betrayal.
Only once, in the beginning, did he allow himself to go back while
plugged in. Vanity had led him to want to see what it was like the night after
they had buried him. He stood outside the house, it was dark, and the air was
cold. The curtains were open; light poured out onto the street. He didn’t see
his wife or his daughter, but he saw other relatives and friends, his parents,
his brother, Jane's parents and the rest of his in-laws. He had wanted to move
through the house like a ghost listening in on the talk, hear the way these
people remembered him; or to just move through the house again. Feeling the
walls he had painted the banister he had fixed, to hear every creaking
floorboard, smell the kitchen smells, to touch the every day detail life hides
from you. But he knew he would turn a corner and there would be Jane, standing
stoically smiling, holding things together. He was afraid that if he saw her or
Anne Marie he would get lost there not wanting to ever leave. He was afraid of
plugging into it and living it out, the way it might have really been; he knew
that too would end someday. He also knew it wouldn’t be true. So instead he
stared into the window and watched as his death played on the faces of the
people he had cared most about. People who could never guess the truth, nor
believe it. He walked around the neighborhood for hours, staring into other
people’s houses, trying to make peace with his choice. He would have died
anyway, died and never seen this. Died and never had the chance to offer
immortality to his daughter.
Plugging in was easy. Plugging out required an act of will. Plugging in
was a mere thought, a suggestion, an idea that would occur to him for no real
reason. A desire or a hunger he needed to fill. Plugging out was harder it was
leaving something real. Love, happiness, warmth, lust, excitement, even pain was
hard to let go of. Pain and sorrow, and regret were life. And life was hard to
give up, even if it was made up. He had slipped back again, back to the street
he lived on with all the smells and sounds, all the goose bumps of life. The
voice was calling him back.
"Do you wish this?"
3
There was no transition from being on the ship to not being there. No
‘beaming down.’ No shuttle. sweeping him down to earth from a high orbit. He said yes, and he was there.
This had bothered him sense that first day. The crushing pain in his chest, the confusion and fear, then
the voice. "You are dying. We can take you with us and prevent this, if you wish it. Do you wish it?" He
thought he was going mad. "Yes." He said. Then he was there. No explanation. They had handed him eternity.
It had occurred to him, once or twice, while plugged in that maybe he
was still lying on the sofa exhaling his last breath. Maybe this is what death was. An infinity of
experience flooding into the last few seconds of life, stretching it out in all directions, giving him, or anyone, an
infinite number of realities to experience. Maybe this is what it was like to be caught in the mind of God. He
usually dismissed this idea as being too metaphysical for the real universe, to much William Blake. It was
easier to believe in Neverland.
Earth had only changed in small ways. People still wore recognizable
cloth. There were still suits and dresses, jeans and t-shirts; but there was a
used quality to everything he saw. Most people had what looked like implants in
there the ears, like phones. There were cars, but fewer of them, smaller and
electric. You could still look out from the Berkley hills and know you
werelooking at San Francisco. The bridge still stretched across the cottony fog.
There were some new buildings, shimmering and glittery things to the south, but
many of the old ones were still stamped on the cityscape. It was still a post
card.
He took a fast, sleek train south along the hills then down into
Oakland. He walked down Broadway towards Jack London Square. People still crowed
the streets. A great mix of faces and hues. The sound of different voices,
laughing, shouting, crying, singing. The great tread and beat of a city
embracing the mid point of a century he knew nothing about. "This is real,
right?" The voice told him it was. But how could he really know? He had tried to
feel the ship around him but couldn’t. Only smells in the air, sounds and sights
convincing him this was real. Just like being plugged in.
He found the address the voice had directed him to, a complex of lofts
converted from warehouses some fifty years before, still looking like new. She
had lived here for forty-eight years, alone, never married or taken a partner.
This caused an almost crushing sadness in him. One of the things he had been
afraid of was finding her lonely or broken. He almost turned around, but he saw
that the door to her loft was painted with bright flowers; small children played
in distant sun drenched fields, birds flew. The painting moved. It changed its
perspective; it folded into itself. "This is real, right?"
The voice told him to open the door and go inside. The room was big and
comfortable, airy and clean. There were painted canvases stacked against the
walls or hanging on them. One caught his eye on the far wall. It showed the
figure of an indistinct man holding the hand of a little girl a brilliant
landscape before them. Everything about the picture was starkly realistic except
the man, who was little more than a shape, as if the artist had needed a model
to complete it.
She sat in a chair asleep. She was worn looking but she didn’t look like
a woman in her seventies. She had a round face without wrinkles. Her hair was
short and brown flecked evenly with gray. There was a half-empty class of
whiskey or something like it, on a table next to her. There was a book lying
open on her lap. He remembered reading to her. He read her The Little Prince and
Peter Pan. What was she reading? He couldn’t tell. He stared at her for several
moments measuring the shape of her face against the memory he carried with him
of her; of her mother, her grandmothers, and great grandmothers. He was looking
for himself too. Looking for the old man he never was.
She opened her eyes and gasp as she saw him. "Who the hell are you? I’ve
called the police. How did you get in here?"
"No. I’m sorry," he stammered. "I...you called the police? How?" She
stared at him.
"Who are you?"
"I’m sorry, the door was opened, I knocked." She was reaching for
something in the table drawer then she stopped and looked at him hard. For a
moment he thought she recognized him.
"The door was not open, and you didn‘t knock. Are you the man who called
about the paintings?" She asked, still looking hard at him.
"Sure," he said. She closed the drawer, and got up.
"You should have rung the bell. You could have been zapped. There are a
lot of weirdoes in this neighborhood." She moved towards some of the paintings.
"Look around, if you don’t see anything you like I have more up stairs. I have
to sell all I can, so they’re going for cheap. What I don’t sell will be donated
to the school."
"The school?" He asked. "Are you famous?"
"Sure I’m a famous high school teacher." She said not trying to hide the
sarcasm. She was looking
suspicious again.
"Do you teach art?"
"History. Didn’t we talk about this yesterday?" She was looking more
suspicious. " Who are you really?" She started walking back toward the table.
"Um, these are really good," he said.
"Don’t change the subject. I’ll zap you. Don’t think I won’t. The police
can be here in seconds, this loft is monitored."
"No. I‘m not here to rob you. I’m afraid you won’t believe me, in fact I
know you won’t." She pointed a small gun at him, it looked like a toy, he knew
it wasn’t.
"Look young man, I’m not in the mood for games; talk."
How could he say it? What would she believe? Just say it.
"I’m your father." He knew how wrong it sounded as he said it. This is
not real. Let me start over.
"What? Is this a joke?" She started to laugh. "Did one of my students
put you up to this? I would have thought that they had more imagination." She
put the gun away. "I’ll have to remember to flunk them all. "If your going to
impersonate someone you should do a little research don’t you think. You don’t
look anything like my father. You know there's a shop on seventh that makes
really great holo masks. They should have sprung for one. OK joke played, you
can leave now. And tell who ever sent you that this was in really bad taste."
She went to the door to show him out. "Come on. Please leave."
" I know how it must look. I’m younger looking than you probably
remember. This is how I looked in my twenties, before you were born, before I
knew your mother. Her name was Jane Elizabeth. Murray was her maiden name. " She
stopped and stared at him intently, then glanced at a shelf with old photos on
the other side of the room. "I know your dying." He said. "I Know you have
leukemia, or something like it anyway; that all the attempts to treat it have
failed. I know that you were born at eight thirty-one in the morning, on a
Saturday on March the twenty-fourth. I know you stuck a cheerios in your ear
when you were four and had to be taken to emergency, you thought the whole thing
was very funny. I know you have a scare on the inside of your left thigh, way
up. You jumped through a rose bush at your grandmother’s house. You called her
‘gammy Easy, her name was Louise. You never knew your other grand mother, my
mother. You called my father Papaw." You used to like to sit on the dock at his
place on Clear Lake and watch him fish. I hope you still did that after I was
gone? I know..."
"Stop." She put her head in her hand and rubbed her temples, shaking her
head, then looking at the glass on the table. She walked over to the shelf and
took a photo in a small wood frame down and held it to her. She walked back to
her chair, sat down heavily, took the class and drank, draining it, then looked
back at him, then the picture. "I’m asleep right? I shouldn’t have taken those
pills with the whiskey. It’s always been one of my weaknesses." She looked at
the picture again, gently moving her hands along the wood frame. "I rarely ever
look at this. I have a whole album of pictures of him somewhere. He died when I
was six. My biological father. What's his name?"
"Jacob. Jacob Thomas."
"Not many people know that. My real fathers’ name was Paul. Paul raised
me, loved me, fed me, clothed me; was there when I got sick, when I graduated
from high school and college. I called him Daddy. My mother, who is still
living, by the way, wouldn’t let him adopt me out of respect for Jacobs’s
memory, and Papaw's." She looked at the picture a little harshly now, then let
out a deep sigh. "I read in a book once that before you die all your dead
friends and relatives pass by your deathbed in a conga line. Your a little early
I think (I hope). So, the ghost of my father has come back to haunt me. Why?
Because I’m dying, and I forgot him; well I suppose I have to face all my
demons. Ok demon convince me."
He only half heard her. Jane had remarried. Well why not? She would
have moved on, embraced life. She wasn't the type to hold on to the past. And
she was still alive. That was good to know, or was it? He wanted to know more
but he was afraid at the same time. He was afraid of knowing too much. Still it
hurt, knowing someone else had stepped into his spot, that his existence had
been so easily erased; and his daughters only memory of a father was not of him.
He wished now he hadn’t come. How could he tell her? The voice was silent. "I
didn’t die. I had a heart attack. I would have died that day anyway, or soon
after."
"This is to weird," she said. "Wake up Anne Marie."
"I know," he said, almost starting to laugh. "I know it sounds strange,
just listen. I was contacted by these beings," she started to laugh, "it was a
voice really. They said they could save me. They brought me up to their ship and
left a clone in my place."
"A clone?" she said mockingly.
"Yes." When he said it out loud it sounded like a farce. A clone? Was he
speaking or was it the voice? "Yes, a clone. Exactly like me only dead. Well,
it was never really alive. They took me up to their ship and rejuvenated me and
they keep me young. And I’m here to offer the same to you. They said I could ask
you. They don’t really understand a lot of things about people. So they study
us." What was he saying? Had they told him that? He couldn’t remember. Why
didn’t they ask her, like they asked him?
She was looking at him dumbly; disbelieving. "So why me? Why not Mom?"
Why not her mother? "Is she dying?"
"No." She said, a little sadly, he thought.
"They didn’t offer your mom. They offered you."
"So you’re not alone up there? There are others?"
"Well, yes... I mean no." He stammered "yes I’m alone. I’ve never seen
anyone else but I’m sure
there are others."
"How are you sure? What do they look like? These beings."
"I don’t know." He said. "I’ve never seen them. I only hear a voice. The
voice told me about you and said I could ask you if I wanted too."
"Great! Schizophrenia's in space. Wake up wake up."
He was lost in his thoughts now, why hadn’t they offered his wife? Would
Jane not have wanted to spend eternity with him? Why would she? He was the man
who died after knowing her for only seven or eight years, not the man she grew
old with. ‘Enough, enough you shouldn’t have come’ he thought. "Are you
interested?"
She looked at him in disbelief, confusion and sadness. "No," she said,
choking now on a sob trying to break out of her throat. "That’s why you’re here?
To give me forever, with you? Mom was right, your Peter Pan Dad. You never grew
up. The dead never do I guess."
"I’m sorry I came. This was a bad idea." He started for the door. She
was reminding him of how
Jane felt. She had mentioned divorce, said they were growing apart, called him
a dreamer. He couldn’t
make it to the door fast enough.
"That's it?" She almost shouted it at him. He looked a little puzzled.
"Do you know the one thing I remember about you?" He stopped and turned toward
her hopefully, like he was waiting for redemption. "The only memory I have of
you? Is that you died. You were there, and then you weren’t. I try to remember
things; I was six I should have some memories of you. All I have is the blank
space you were standing in." She was right, even then he used to slip off plug
into his head and drift. He looked at the painting he had seen when he came in.
He walked over to it; she got up and followed him.
"Is that what this is about?" He asked. "Am I the empty space?"
"No," she snapped. "I was going to paint my father, my real father into
it; I just couldn’t put him on canvas. Its one of those holographic canvases,"
she said, forgetting that he didn’t know. "It moves when it’s activated. I just
couldn’t reanimate him so soon after his death, so I left it like that." So even
this is not for him. He stared at the picture, and felt his heart break. He
looked around at the other paintings, noticing for the first time that they were
moving like the painting on the door. She walked back to her chair and sat.
"I don’t blame you for dying. Paul was a wonderful father; he stepped into the
spot you left easily. I blame you for coming back. If I were going to have a
dream about a dead relative I’d prefer it be of him. We left a lot of things
unsaid. I suppose you left a lot unsaid too. Not just to me either. Anyway, I
don’t believe in Neverland any more and I don’t believe in this conversation.
Even if I did I wouldn’t want to go. I’m tired. I’ve lived my life, and it was
good enough. Full and rich, I guess. I did some good here. I regret nothing."
She was speaking to room around her, not him. "I‘ve had great friends, and great
lovers; I‘ve been my own women. I can look back on my life, short as it may be,
and say ok, this was good, this was worth it, and I wouldn’t change anything."
She stopped and thought, "well, maybe one thing." She didn’t explain. "Can you
say the same? Look at you, your still little more than a child. You haven’t
cheated death; you’ve cheated your self out of life." She looked at him now,
waiting for him to come back with something, anything. She’d always been a
fighter, always lived for the debate.
"You’ve been happy?" He said.
"Very." She said disappointed.
"You know you wouldn’t be tired up there. You would want to live
forever."
"Nothing last forever. The universe will end, in a whimper or bang."
She watched him looking at the paintings, moving and shifting, colors changing,
then fading back to where they started. She smiled as if remembering something
pleasant. "Mom always talked about you as a dreamer. I guess some of that rubbed
off on me. But I don’t want to live forever. I except the inevitability of
oblivion; I welcome it."
"Why?" He asked her. Why? He asked himself. Why would anybody want to
end the sensation of living? Why not feel and breathe and think or dream forever
if you could.
"Nothing is born if nothing dies," she said, weary of the dream she was
sure she was having. " I would like to wake up now, so I’m going to close my
eyes, count to hundred and wake up. I promise to think of you now and then. All
right; if you promise not to come back and haunt me. Deal?"
"Deal." He said, quietly.
She shivered. That voice, that word, thrown like ice water on her chest.
She heard it again calling up to her from the past. "If you put all your toys
away, we’ll read. Deal?"
"Deal."
He heard it like a whisper at first, then louder as a question. He
turned to look but her eyes were closed, and she was silently counting.
No transition. He was lying in a corridor on the ship. Just like he had
unplugged. Just like waking from a dream. He had a sudden desire to blink
himself somewhere, anywhere. Back to the sofa. He tried to feel the living room
around him. Tried to force the reality of that space into the one he was caught in;
tried to feel the pain in his chest swell up and engulf him’ swallow him down
into darkness. He found himself sitting in a living room on a sofa, but not his
living room, his sofa. Maybe he couldn’t go back, weather he wanted to or not.
He sat there and watched the sun move shadows across the room into dusk, then
fell asleep.
4.
The service was over. The people who had come were getting into their
cars, driving the slow winding road out past the gates, back to their lives. He
turned and looked to the west. The sun was gleaming and low. He could see the
Golden Gate Bridge just visible in the haze, sailboats catching the last of the
afternoon’s wind before sliding back to their berths. He knew the evening fog
was coming, that before the sun set half the bay would be wrapped in its soft
moist blanket.
The little girl took his hand and gently tugged. He looked down at her
startled at first but then he recognized her. She was as he remembered her, the
last time he had seen her. The deep questioning eyes looking at him, waiting for
the answer she knew he would give. Patient for a child her age. Had it been
that long ago?
They started walking down the gentle slope of the lawn without looking
back at the grave. "Where are we going now?" She asked. He stopped, looked
around at the cypress trees, felt the late summer coolness of the east bay
afternoon. He held his breath for a moment then released it and inhaled. He
could smell the millions of people, hear the murmuring of their voices on the
wind. The life of them, the unending being and beat of it all.
"Never land." He answered; "do you remember how to get there?"
"Yes, I think so. It’s been a along time. Why are we going there?"
Always the questions. Why?
"Because that’s where I live."
They walked a few more steps then, hand in hand rose into the air high
above the trees and the houses. They headed south following the great spill of
the bay past the bridges to the concrete and shinning glass towers of the south
cities, the home of his youth, he had left so long ago. Finely they headed east
toward the mountains and the Great Plains beyond, away from the setting sun,
towards the distant morning.