I was born when I was five years old.
“Daddy, will you tell me a story?”
It was dark. I shivered under my blankets. My father sat in a beige rocking chair beside my bed, humming sadly to himself.
I couldn’t see his face.
Moonlight fell on trees outside the room, and I knew it was late—very late—but I couldn’t sleep.
My teeth chattered in the cold.
“Daddy, will you tell me a story?” I asked again, and this time he seemed to hear.
When he started speaking, he seemed very far away.
“A long time ago, there was a shadow. Nothing cast it, but it existed all the same. And in this shadow there were people, five of them, all living together. They couldn’t speak, because no one had taught them, so they just stood by each other, simply being.
“There was a light in the room. It was a dim yellow, and it warmed the people. It was at the very center of the darkness, and so there the people lived, moving through it, casting shadows on the blackened floor.”
He sounded tired.
“They would dance, sometimes, imagining that they were other things, in other places, and it was beautiful.
“Then, one day, one of the dancers became convinced that those other places—places beyond all the shadow—must exist, because if he could imagine them, how could they not be?
“So he set off into the darkness, looking for them.
“Then the heat of the fire was gone, and he wandered into the perspectiveless void of a freezing night.
“Sometimes he couldn’t tell if he was even moving, walking out there. Shape and form and function were all dead. Here was the same as there. The further from the fire he wandered, the dimmer its light grew, until he could only vaguely distinguish himself from the pitch-blackness around him.
“And then he couldn’t, and he felt like he was falling, yet also flying, hurled through the thrashing night, all reality passing him by like the mad dreams of some quiet god, and he began to suspect, maybe, that there was no ‘other place’ out there, that the darkness just stretched forever and forever, and that there had only been that light, and now he had lost it, and all he had left was an infinity of nothing.”
My father shook his head.
“And then, suddenly, out of that shadow he saw the distant glimmer of the light, and he walked back to it, because what the hell else was he supposed to do?
“The people asked, through their dances, what he had seen, but he didn’t know how to dance the nothingness.
“Instead he sank to his knees and cried.”
My father sniffled as he said it. Shadows gathered in the room.
“The others still danced, but he didn’t, not anymore. He just sat there, in the dark, waiting.
“Then there was a gun, cold and silvery, and the man pressed it to his head, because he wanted to know what he looked like on the inside.
“The others gathered around his body, staring at the crimson trickling from his face—at the soft, pink brains littered around the corpse—and they waited for him to get back up, because they didn’t know what death was.”
I shuddered. It was very cold in the room.
“And you know the funniest thing?” asked my father, laughing a little as he said it, “There was no wind in that darkness. The people there never knew it, never knew how it felt to have it rush through their hair, and they never would. It just didn’t exist down there.”
His head drooped.
“Think about that.”
That was my first memory. That was the first thing I remembered. The first time I was really alive.
Then, as five-year-old me lay shivering in bed, my father stood up and walked out of the room, and I never saw him again.
My mother said there was a car accident, metal shearing in the freezing night, but I knew that wasn’t really true.
He’d just wanted to see what he looked like on the inside.
They never found a body.
That was my first memory.
I was born when I was five years old.
#
“Did you feel anything?” I asked Harley.
We sat on a little bench in a little park just outside the city. It had rained recently, and the ground was damp and muddy. Tiny insects buzzed in the trees around us, living and dying without us ever noticing.
Twenty two years had passed since that night.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
The wind blew, and little water droplets slipped off dying leaves, landing on us.
“Yesterday, in the storm, you walked over that bridge on your way home. Did you feel anything?”
“It was kind of cold,” she said.
I sighed. There were so many things I couldn’t explain.
“I passed you, on that bridge. I saw you. You were wearing a green raincoat, but it wasn’t raining yet. I waved to you, but you didn’t notice. It’s strange, after seven years together, I sort of expected that somehow, someway, you’d feel me pass. Maybe feel a little warmer, even.”
“I didn’t,” she said.
I shook my head, and for a moment we just sat there in silence, letting yesterday’s rain fall on us.
I inhaled, feeling the damp air on my breath. It was nice.
Then she kissed me, warm lips against mine, and I shivered because everything else was so cold.
When she withdrew, she asked me a single question.
“Did you feel anything?”
“Cold,” I said, instinctively. “I felt cold.”
She shrugged and stood up, and we walked through the park for a little while, listening to the far off pattering of animal feet over wet leaves.
Then she left, and I was alone, looking out at the thin trees, and a breeze blew through them, and I wondered how the men in my father’s old story could have lived without it.
I wondered what things I would die without seeing.
#
I had dreams about the men in the darkness. They danced and danced beneath their shallow yellow light, failing to get the corpse’s attention.
It was silent.
#
I sat in my office and tried to feel like I was doing something. There were papers strewn across my desk, all covered in equations and notes and results until the handwriting grew so small it was almost illegible.
Protein folding, a mixture of chemistry, biology, and physics. In college, they’d said it would save lives, that it would help us understand the universe better. Harley had been so excited.
I tapped my pencil against the paper. I hadn’t written anything for an hour. I just stared out the window at the gray sky, sunless, entirely engulfed by clouds, and thought.
The sky had been the same at my father’s funeral, all of us—fifty people in total, brothers and sisters and cousins and friends and family members who did their best to look mournful—standing out in the cold in black suits as a priest read about a salvation my father had never believed in.
I’d tried to feel sad, looking at it all, seeing the pictures of him with mom, both of them smiling in restaurants I’d never visited, laughing together during long forgotten Christmases, exploring that cave he’d discovered, but I felt nothing.
People told stories about him, laughing and crying, and they told me that they were so sorry and I was so brave, all because I’d lost a man who felt forever distant to me.
I wished I could remember more about him, some lovely story to tell, but I only had the one he’d given to me.
Dead men in the darkness.
Then they’d lowered the empty coffin into the ground, and I blinked my eyes repeatedly, hoping to cry, but no tears came.
After it was all over, my mother pulled me aside, bent down, and told me,
“This is awful—it really, truly is—but we’re not going to let it define us. I’m not going to let it define you. We’ll be okay.”
And I nodded, because I didn’t know what she meant.
I tried to read the bible when I was ten, and was so disappointed to find it nothing but a collection of old words.
My mom talked about my father sometimes, and I listened, sitting on the stained, off-white couch, comforting her as she cried, always saying that I remembered, even if I never did.
She never remarried. She never dated. She never even sold any of his things.
I tapped my pencil again. Protein folding. I tried to work but I couldn’t.
It just didn’t matter to me.
Not anymore.
#
In the darkness, surrounded by all those shadows, in a world without wind, the corpse stood up, battered bones cracking under the pressure, and all of the dancers dropped to their knees.
It stood there for an instant, bathed in the spotlight, its flaking flesh highlighted in yellow, and then it outstretched its ruined arms and sang, and it was so, so beautiful.
The sound echoed out of the blackness and through the burning wreck of my father’s car, through the charred Cercis tree he’d collided with, through the thin layers of memory and reality, and found itself in my dreaming mind.
Then, I was awake.
#
Thunder rumbled above the gray streets and drab buildings as I walked to work.
In all my dreams of that dark place, the corpse had never sung before. Maybe that meant something.
I didn’t know.
I thought about Harley, the two of us in college together, taking the same biochemistry class, and how I’d always watched for when her hand went up, eager to hear what she’d say, because always—always—it was something worth saying. Each of her words had a purpose, and I appreciated that.
And then, randomly, she invited me over to her dorm to help her with a class project, and I was so nervous, teeth chattering, standing outside her door, because I couldn’t fathom why she’d want to talk to me. Then she invited me in, and we were sitting in her perfectly neat white kitchen discussing why it was so impossible to predict the ways proteins would fold, and by the end of the discussion we were both smiling, and then we folded up against each other on her couch, and she kissed me, and it felt so wonderful being so close to something.
Later, I was back in my room flipping through piles of tattered notes, trying and failing to craft my own little thesis, my mind too focused on her.
But now, looking across the bridge at the shallow river and dim city lights, I just sighed, and walked away, knowing that all those lovely little folds would never change the city.
And as I walked I remembered my mother sitting beside me as I cried about nothing in particular, trying to comfort me, saying, “Don’t let his death change you. You’re so different now, but you don’t need to be. It’s okay to just be the same as before.” Lying in bed that night, I’d tried and tried to remember what I was like before everything, but I couldn’t, and it scared me that I might be changing, becoming someone—something—else without even knowing it.
#
There was a voice, and it sung in the darkness—words and rhymes and sounds trying so desperately to imitate a cold metal gun and the mind leaking leaking out of the body—and here is what it said:
“Daddy, will you tell me a story?”
#
I tapped my pencil against the page one final time, and then gave up.
The song was too loud.
It started to rain.
I called Harley.
“Hello?”
“I have to go back to the end of the beginning,” I told her. “There are dreams and a song and a man in the darkness and I thought something I’d done might have changed things but it hasn’t and… I have to see the place where my father died.”
There was a long silence, interrupted only by the sound of rain against glass.
“Harley?”
“You’re wrong,” she said, simply. “You have changed things. You only call me when you’re sad now. Remember when we used to talk about happy things? When you’d call at three in the morning to tell me about the most random discoveries, and you were so, so excited?”
I looked out at the gray, rain-soaked city.
“It was a different world,” I said.
“You were a different person,” she said.
We were quiet again.
“Look,” said Harley, “I just can’t do this right now. I’ve got a lot to deal with as it is. I… I think we should spend a little bit of time apart. Go find whatever it is you’re looking for, do whatever you need to do, and then call me when it’s all finally over.”
“How will I know that?” I asked.
“When you have something happy to say.”
#
“Daddy, will you tell me a story?”
#
Water sprayed around the car as I drove, and thunder roared through the night.
I was going back to where my life had begun and ended, where they’d found my father’s car, shattered and empty, where he had died.
And I wondered what he had been thinking that cold night, why he had told that story, where it had come from, and what I would have said, if I was in his place, and if it would’ve been different at all.
Then suddenly I was there, and I stepped out of the car and into the rain.
It was barren out there, just fields of dead grass all around me, save for a single dark, twisting tree, the one that my father had hit, all those years ago.
I walked up to it as my shoes filled with water and the freezing rain drenched me, and I placed my hand on its rough bark, and I could still feel where the car had collided with it, where they had broken and burned together, and I knew that the tree would never really heal.
Did you feel anything? I imagined Harley asking.
“Cold,” I mumbled to myself. “It’s so cold out here.”
Behind the tree, there was a little black opening in the land, and I recognized it from the photos of my father. It was the cave, the cave he’d discovered.
And then, before even thinking about it, I was walking up to the entrance, crawling down through the mud and stone and dirt, and entering the darkness.
For once, I knew where I was going.
The stone floor leveled out, and I wandered through the pitch-blackness, and as I did I thought about the man from my father’s story, walking through his perspectiveless void, how he couldn’t tell if he was even moving, and how much I understood that.
And I wondered if he’d gotten lonely, walking through the soundless shadow, and how afraid he must have been that there was nothing out there, that he’d given up the only people he’d ever known in search of something that didn’t even exist.
And for no reason at all, I thought of Harley.
Then far off, in the very back of the cave, there was the slightest glimmer of light, and I ran towards it.
When I reached it, I knew I would find the corpse man, arms outstretched, dancers kneeling around him as he sang madly, voice roaring through all reality and becoming the thunder of the storm, and I knew he would cast the yellow light across the whole cave, and then there would be no more darkness, and then he would ask me a question, that same question, will you tell me a story, and I would tell him so very many things.
But it wasn’t him.
The light was just a little yellow lamp, suspended from a stalactite, and beneath it was the slumped over skeleton of my father. Beside his ivory hand lay a little metal gun.
For a while I just stood there, unable to be anything at all.
Then, eventually, I lay before his leaning body, in the cold darkness, just like that night, so many years ago, and I told my father a story.
“One day, far in the future, when we’re both dust, all of the earth and stone above us will erode, falling far away, and when that happens, then finally the wind will blow down here.”
And I didn’t know whether that made things better or worse.
#
I rang Harley’s doorbell, and waited out on the stone steps for her to open her door.
When she did, she looked at me, as if confused.
“Do you have something happy…” she began, but I cut her off.
“No. Not happy. Not sad. Just kind of a thing.”
“Okay?”
“You were right. I’m not the same person you fell in love with. I’m not the same person who called you early in the morning in college. I’m not the same person you promised to spend the rest of your life with. But I’m also not the same person you wanted to take time away from. I’m just, kind of, me. Does that make sense?”
“Maybe?” she said. “Honestly I’m not really sure.”
“Can I come in?” I asked.
For a moment she just looked at me, and then she nodded, and we went inside and folded up against each other on her gray couch, keeping us warm in the cold city.