The Irreversible Reckoning

  ***

  Normally, when James laid behind me, with one arm under my head, and the other draped over my side, I slept like the dead, as they say. Nothing even remotely unpleasant ever passed through my unconscious mind, at least not while we were there on the Lapsarian. I would feel the gentle rocking of the ship beneath us, and my mind would drift off to the images of us asleep in a small canoe on a lazy river, or drifting further and further away from our gray, floating prison on a lifeboat. In the heavy limbo between wakefulness and sleep, I would see the ship getting further and further away, standing eerily against an almost black sky, as we drifted further and further towards the warmth and sunlight. As we drifted backwards, away from the place that had held us in its grip for two and a half decades, I would stand, and in that strange bizarreness that can only be experienced in the hynogogic state, I would wave, my hand moving slowly, as I watched that steel monstrosity disappear into the clouds and gloom. Even as I drifted towards freedom and the world I had known, I felt a gentle tugging in my heart. For what, I always wondered? I had been held there against my will, sentenced to a lifetime of fighting to survive, of killing to live another day. And yet, there it was, that ever-present nostalgia. That pain of something lost. Penny, Adam, James, Janna, Illa, Tony, Rael, and Grace were there onboard with me, and we were escaping with no resistance, and yet I was looking back to the place from where we had come, and though I did not want to return, I did feel something close to longing, something one only feels when saying goodbye. It was not unpleasant, at least not totally so, because is nostalgia ever completely unpleasant? As always, it was equal parts pain and joy, equal parts sadness and fondness.

  I had seen that floating image in my mind so many times that I began to convince myself it was a premonition. I knew, the way I always just knew, that someday, we would all leave there, but I did not know when that would be. It was that image in my mind, floating like a sad old ghost, even when I was fully awake, that spurred my need to escape. But at the thought of leaving, I felt the strangest sense of foreboding. I would leave and find Purissimus totally different than how I had last seen it, I knew. And from that fear of being gone and returning to a world so changed, one wonders how it could possibly be the same world. From that fear of falling asleep and waking up one hundred years in the future, my mind could turn that dreamy scene of floating away into a different, but not totally unrelated, nightmare.

  In it, I was at home on Earth, and yet Adam was there, or at least, his presence was there. In my mind, I knew that I had left the Earth, I knew that I had lived and loved and thrived and suffered on Purissimus. Being back on Earth, in that old world that reeked of decayed flowers and decomposing, burned, or drowned bodies, of blood, and yet of the old home, as well, made me that irrationally potent sad that one can only be in dreams. It is that sadness in which one can sob until the end of time, and still, the tears never dry, until one’s entire being is pained to a place in the core so deep, one is petrified at the depth he or she never knew they had. In the dream, I was always walking down the street towards my mother and father’s house, and the grey fog had rolled in so thickly, tinted with the smell of ash and ocean water from the burned or drowned cities. There were never any bodies on the street, though I could feel the presence of one million eyes watching me, and I knew that the eyes belonged to the dead. Out of reflex, my head would turn so that I could look for the source of that prickling feeling of being watched, but I saw nothing except the old houses and cars, decayed, covered in soot and burns, and yet still standing. In this dream, it is a model town through which I am walking, made from little odds and ends, put on display for me to see, gathering dust as though stored in its maker’s attic. My house stands on the hill, behind the gate that I find open and unlocked, and with, yet again, that heavy nostalgia, I slip inside.

  It is while I am ascending the steep driveway that I begin looking around for Adam and James, because it is right then that I realize that this scene is not right. I left this place. I departed this dying world. It was outside of the pull of this orb that I established a life that was all my own, that I lived almost completely free from the traumas of my past, that I fell in love with James, that I met and fell in love with Adam, and to be back there negated that life. In the dream, I believe that it was all a dream, a fantasy, a paracosm I built so I could escape the harsh reality of my parents’ resentment, of their hate, of my being so different, of how being different made me feel so isolated… In the dream, I fear all of this, and with each step, my heart grows heavier, because I know that it was all real, and yet what if it was not?

  The door is cracked just like the gate. I step into the foyer, where I had stood with James all those many years ago, and though I want to call out to someone, I am afraid to break the silence. As I stand there, I wonder why I have come there in the first place. Putting aside that everyone is dead or long gone from there, I wonder who it is that I am looking for in this old, empty house. Except it is not empty. In the living room, a dark figure sits in the high-backed, antique chair. In my youth, that chair was all perfectly preserved fabric, ornate embroidery, and polished wood, and in this dream, it still is; it is, quite strangely, the one artifact of my old life that has been left undamaged, and I have toiled endlessly in my mind over why that must be, that this chair is the only preserved relic in the room, and to this day, I have no other reason than that there is no reason. My mother is sitting in that chair, her head turned sideways, her icy blue eyes that matched my own looking out at the grey world, her gaze full of sadness, certainly, but not with tears. She is alone because I left her, because my father made the trip, and she did not.

  “Mom?” I ask, and it has been so many years since I called her “Mom” that the word tastes bitter on my tongue and sounds foreign to my ears.

  I see the next part from the side. I walk towards her slowly, cautiously, more guarded against what she will say than I ever was in life, because it is a dream, and in dreams, we feel what we cannot feel while we are awake. I feel my deep fear of her insults, of her resentment, of her blame. With that grey light streaming through the windows beside us, I watch myself approach her, and I watch as she finally turns her head once I stop, and I always stop with at least two arm’s lengths between us.

  Now, if this were a book or a movie, this would be the part where she imparts some wisdom, or where she crushes me with some utterly world-shattering final insult. This would be the part where something happens to make this dream so resoundingly sad, so memorable, and so important, obviously, because I have had it countless times over the years, and I am taking the time to transcribe it in detail. This would be the part where she utters some Knowing, where she tells me all that is to come.

  But that does not happen. It is a dream, and unless the dream is meant to show me something, then dreams do not flow logically or linearly. Instead, they flow like water over rocks, diverging over the crags and crevices, converging when they find a flat surface. In the dream, she looks at me, her eyes fill with tears until there are so many that they spill over to flow down her cheeks, and for a long time, I hold her gaze, and she holds mine, and then, almost as though she hears something or someone outside, she looks back out the window, and the scene seems to reset itself, except I am still standing there, unnerved and shaken to a point so deep, I never knew it was there. And as I ascend back into wakefulness, she does not look, and I tell myself that I will remember her face while simultaneously praying that I will wake up beside James or Adam or Penny or Janna, and my whole life on Pangaea will not have been some long, intricate, and beautiful dream.

  That morning, I awoke beside James, trembling so terribly that I woke him, too.

  “Hey,” He said, his eyes already alert and focused, full to the brim with concern for me. “It’s alright, baby. You’re alright.”

  He sat up, grasped my shaking hand that had shot out to touch him, to feel the warmth of his skin beneath my touch. My fingers linked with his, and my other hand re
ached out to rest on his chest, right on that ridiculous bespectacled owl tattoo, and my fingers rattled ever so slightly as the vibrations from his beating heart thrust out to rattle them.

  I had had the dream so many times by then that he knew it was from my old house in the old, grey world from which I had just returned. As always, I touched him first to ensure that he was real, and then, I leaned into him slowly, nestled my head under his, breathed in his scent that I knew so well, felt that warmth that was completely synonymous with him by then fill me up, and then, I allowed the tears to fall silently only when his arms were locked around me and my face was hidden in his neck.

  Over the years, he had learned that there was but one thing he had to say to bring me fully out of that dream world. It was so simple, and yet it was all I needed to hear.

  “I’m right here, baby.” He told me, “I’m right here.”