This one is a long one. About 8 pages if you print it out. - RWhen I was a kid I made telescopes. A paper towel tube, a couple of rubber bands and some plastic wrap, doled out in small, unsuffocateable pieces. They were the finest telescopes in the world. From our backyard at midday I could count the rings around Saturn, follow meteors and comets, even read you the serial numbers off the solar panels on the spy satellites.
Didn’t have a paper towel tube? Two toilet paper tubes and I had myself a pair of binoculars that could track lions in Africa, polar bears in the Arctic. Nothing was beyond my sight. I could see kids playing soccer in China. I could see the Statue of Liberty from my swing set.
But tonight…
Tonight I lie next to you, counting the rotations of the ceiling fan and listening to you breathe. Tonight I wonder what I could see with one of my telescopes. Could I track your thoughts? Could I stalk them through your dreams like a nature photographer tracking some rare, endangered animal, lens at the ready for that all important shot that answers some critical question? Your breathing is slow and regular, not at all the jagged nightmare panting of the last few weeks. I am grateful for this, despite what I think it will cost.
I risk a glance at the clock and confirm my suspicion. Too close to dawn to risk medicating, too far from it to simply trance it out. There’s a book on the nightstand but I don’t want to risk waking you with the light. I don’t feel much like reading anyway. You stir slightly as I get out of bed but don’t wake up. I close the bedroom door behind me and make my way in darkness to the kitchen. I root around in the drawers for a while before I find a notepad. Even as I write I have no idea whether I will tell you about this, or if I’ll forget all about it and leave it for you to find days or months from now when, I suspect, I will be long gone. If you do find it then, will you read it? Will you recognize my handwriting and consign it to the trash? I don’t suppose it matters much. What matters now is that this document exists and that it is true and can be found.
I guess I should start with a confession. I have no memory of the day we met, which is to say I don’t know where we were or what you wore, or what day it was. I have two fleeting images left in my head from that day. Both are of you. One is of a smile, wide and slightly crooked, so bright it seems like it could spawn an angel. The other is of a scowl that could kill one. I have no idea what brought those two expressions about that day. I do know that I have been on the receiving end of both more times than I can count in the time since. I also know that every smile was worth enduring a thousand scowls. What I no longer know is whether any of this matters, whether it’s enough. I could ask, but the question is really its own answer, so what would be the point?
I’ve wondered, over the last few weeks of overlong silences and limply mirrored embraces, what might have been had the phone not rung.
This is of course a useless hypothetical. I can no more alter that moment than you can undream the nightmares you’ve had since. You deny them every morning as you stifle the yawns and put on just a little more makeup than normal. You deny them as I pretend not to notice. You deny them as though you’ve forgotten that you share a bed with an insomniac. I know the rhythm of your dreaming. I’ve used it so many times to put myself to sleep that I sometimes think I know what you dream, even without one of my special telescopes.
I’ve come to understand that this is little more than a useful fiction, a comforting lie I tell myself to make it seem easier. I’ve never needed to do that before and it scares me that I can’t keep from doing it now. Since that day you’ve thrown up a wall and neglected to leave so much as an arrow slit.
I don’t know what your sister said to you after I handed you the phone. Hence, we have this. There’s you, having nightmares and burying yourself in business to keep from slowing down. There’s me, awake while you dream and writing empty stories at the kitchen table as the sky lightens toward dawn.
An empty story. A good description, I think. As the tale opens, Boy has Girl. The curtain rises on a clean, modern, though kitschy, apartment. The two leads, Boy and Girl, move about easily, aimlessly. They’re relaxed. The TV, or maybe the stereo, provides background noise that’s just relevant enough to the period to ground the setting.
And then the phone rings. Boy answers, passes it to Girl. Cue lighting change, maybe a new song on the stereo. Something has happened. There’s no voice over.
Whose story are we watching anyway? Is it Girl’s story, where we watch her work through the debris of whatever remains after the phone call? Do we ultimately get to know what happened, or do we only experience its aftermath? Is it Boy’s story, as he watches Girl retreat and tries to understand what, precisely, has happened, and whether the retreat will be followed by a return? Is it a shared story about the strength of love, or maybe about its breaking point, its dissolution? Maybe now you see my problem here. What to say? How to begin?
Outside, the view is eclipsed by fog, but the color of the sky is changing. We’re moving ever closer to another day and I have no idea what it will bring. I know now that I won’t be sleeping tonight. I wonder, are you still dreaming peacefully, or have you slipped back into the nightmares? Although I’m curious, I’m not going to check. I’d rather hold onto the last image I have of you. It may be the last one of you at peace I’ll get, and it makes me feel normal.
My lack of focus is annoying me, but I have an idea.
I looked all over, but I couldn’t find any rubber bands. No matter, I did find some electrical tape. I wonder what you’ll say when you see the pile of paper towels on the counter next to the holder. I spent a good ten minutes scanning the foggy city and the lightening sky, but you really can’t see shit through plastic wrap. Everything looks fuzzed out and scratchy. Maybe I need some sort of adapter that will connect my adult eyes to my eight year old’s imagination. Maybe I should have made binoculars. Now there’s an idea. I can see the huge piles of unspooled two-ply in the bathroom now. Would that get a smile, or a scowl?
I thought I knew most of your secrets. I really did. I’m fairly certain you know all of mine. All those nights and days of telling old stories and confessing old sins, how could you not? How could I not know what’s happening now? Did I miss something? I don’t think so. I’m not even sure I figure into this story. I’ll just ask the question, as I imagine you reading this. What was it? What was so bad, buried so deep, that you couldn’t tell me about it in all this time?
I’ve just thought of something. Do you remember the camping trip we took to the desert? I spent almost the whole first night just lying on my sleeping pad in the dirt staring at the sky. I refused to sleep in the tent and you got so mad at me. I was just staring at the stars and you wanted to know what was so special. Sure, you said, they’re pretty, but what was I looking at? That was probably the first time I looked at you and felt like I didn’t know, not you, but how to read you, to connect you to the part of me that saw what I saw. I remember thinking that I needed to come up with some poetic explanation to show you what I saw in the sky. I couldn’t come up with anything but some lame line about God’s Christmas lights. You were pissed. Maybe I should have made you a telescope.
I’ll try to tell you now, and maybe it’ll help. Forget the whole God’s Christmas lights thing. That was just snarky crap, not to mention a lame ass joke. What I should have said is that the stars are what ground us as people. They’re a link to the universe, if you want to go that route, but more importantly, they are a link to our past. I used to be able to name all the constellations I could see on our camping trips when I was a kid. The dippers, Orion, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, and so on. I even knew most of the legends behind the names. I’ve forgotten most of that now, but I still get the same feeling when I look up and trace the patterns in the sky. I know that no matter where I am or which constellation I’m looking at, someone else is staring at it too, now and a thousand years ago. The stars are the storage facility for our legends and our dreams. They help us find our way in the dark.
For the record, my favorite constellation was and is Orion. The hunter, I know. I always thought it was cool that there was a guy up there with a bow a couple of light years tall. Imagine the arrows. I don’t remember his legend, but whenever I go outside at night, I look for him. If I’m in a part of the world where I can’t see him, I don’t feel right. Something’s missing. So there you have it, that night I was looking up at the stars and remembering that I am in fact a human being, connected to all those that have come before and that are here now, even if I don’t know how.
It’s almost light outside, and you’ll be awake soon, looking in the mirror and figuring out how to hide the bags under your eyes, though tonight’s decent sleep should have helped a little.
You were still sleeping peacefully when I slipped in to get my running clothes. Since you seem to prefer it lately, I’ll make sure I’m gone while you get ready for the day. Maybe I’ll go all the way to the waterfront today. I’ll leave the telescope somewhere where you’ll see it and maybe tonight, as you wonder whether to call me or not, or maybe as you sit with a glass of wine and think about whatever it is that’s on your mind, you’ll look through it and see something that helps.
