The Dark Room (working title)

And I find it kind of funny

I find it kind of sad

The dreams in which I’m dying

Are the best I’ve ever had.[1]

The room is full of winter dark, but his mind is full of the feeling of summer. It’s a longing, a kind of love of the way it stays warm all night, so that he can sleep with the fan on; love of that moment when he parks the car in the shade and wants nothing so much as to lay across the seats and sleep in the close air through the afternoon. What does it take, he wonders, to hold on to moments like that? How is it possible for a man to fend off the winter that’s always seeded, sleeping, in his heart?

He has a ritual for finding sleep. At midnight, he goes out on the balcony, no matter the weather, and stands there cross-armed. He looks down at the dull glow of the city, the inky void where the river runs, and the outline of the hills in the distance. Those he can see like the edge of a saw if the moon is out. He thinks of nothing but how terrible the day was; long and stinging like a biting fly. Frequently painful but vital, like the lancing and drainage of some torn, infected thing. His life is resistant to
medication.

What am I doing out here, in the world, with its hard smells and bad water? Oil and water do not mix. I should be in bed. It’s late, isn’t it? It feels like it must be midnight; I’m getting that ache between my shoulder blades and my eyes are tired. I should rest, pull the covers over my head and breathe slowly in the dark.

Back inside, he goes around to check the locks and put out the lights, and takes a long pull on the bottle of whatever juice is chilling in the fridge.

As a child, he would lie awake a while, on his back, and pull the covers over his head. He would die there just a little, in the darkness of his room, arms across his chest. He could hear his parents’ television droning down the hall, and then their laughter. Imagine his pure little face incorrupt in a beautiful casket of rosewood, where he could see himself mourned by classmates and teachers awakened, finally, to the obvious truth of his greatness. They had missed his special gifts, and now they paid the price in pure loss. No hope, no remedy, but now at least they were sorry, and sprinkled his corpse with their tears.

Now at 45, these vestiges of that waking dream persist: He lays on his side and pulls up the sheet, over his head, smelling the essential nearly dead scent of self. He drifts off disillusioned, having seen life stop but then go on, too many times. No lessons learned, no abject repentance; just a few days of cold cuts and hot dish, packaged napkins, and finally the lawn to mow. Someone has to pay the bills, divide the loot. There must be a thousand snapshots in those boxes there, and why would he keep all these receipts?

Sometimes sleep won’t come at first, so he reaches out and feels for the phone beside the bed, keeping his eyes closed, and listens to the dial tone. He lets it moan into his ear, getting louder and louder in the abject silence of his room. This is what he needs to hear, the perfect voice of everyone on Earth. The humming even of the dead.

So when the voices come, through the blanket, from the bland wallpaper or the clock that hangs there, they come as just a breath. The voice of his mother sometimes, gathered like the echo of wind in a shell. Or someone else; he never knows. But there is always a voice in his head as he waits for sleep, and he considers it a kind of art. As if he set up a canvas by the muddy river, and watched as the river painted itself.

[1] Tears For Fears, “Mad World.”