Arc d'X

34

TWO WEEKS AFTER HE died, I had a dream.

I’d been expecting it. I hadn’t really mourned my father; I’m not sure I have even now, years later. It may be that I mourned some passing of him before he died, or it may be that the loss still hasn’t sunk in, or it may be that on some deeper level I already understood that everything is loss, that our lives are a race against the clock of loss, a race to lose the vessel of our lives before we lose everything that vessel contains. Surely when my mother goes, should she go before me, the aloneness that’s almost become a psychological vanity for me, the aloneness I like to think I understand so damned well, will take on dimensions I never imagined; because then the loss of the only two things that all the moments of my life have had in common will leave me utterly alone either to know who I am — as I’ve always flattered myself I do — or to the desolation of a deluded life. In that case I’ll be at the mercy of either God or his antithesis, not the Devil, since I don’t believe in the Devil, but Chaos, against which the only weapon God has ever given us is memory.

In this dream about my father I was walking through the corridors of a rest home. It was a very pleasant rest home. The windows were open and the wind that came through was balmy and a pale lovely blue and beyond the windows I could see the trees swaying. As I walked the corridors I saw to the sides large rooms with rows of clean crisp beds, all of which were empty, until I came to the room where my father was. He was sitting up in one of the beds. He looked fine. There was color in his face and he appeared tranquil and happy, perhaps more than I’d ever seen him before. He greeted me. But I distinctly remembered, I completely understood that he was dead; in this dream my sense of time was grounded and I understood he’d died just two weeks before. “Oh,” I said to him, “this is a dream.”

This is not a dream, he answered.

For some time we discussed this, my father gently pressing the point that this was real. And nothing had ever seemed more real. I could feel the wind through the windows and see the trees swaying outside, and my father was as vivid as he’d ever been. On his lap he held a small plate. On the plate was a small pastry. He gave me the pastry and said, Here, taste this; and I did. He said, You can taste it, can’t you? and I could. He said, You can taste it because it isn’t a dream; and it was true that it didn’t taste like any dream, it was true that I couldn’t remember ever having been able to taste something in a dream before, taste being the one sense that’s beyond my imagination. But I still wouldn’t believe him. What my mind had come to believe in as the reality of his death was too strong for my heart, which was confronted with the reality of his talking to me now, and offering me a pastry.

And then I woke, at the beckoning of my mind, which feared that it would lose this argument with my heart. Except I didn’t wake to reality but rather into another dream, which I later forgot as immediately as I forget all my dreams, moments beyond the thin silver horizon of waking, beyond the edge of the blade of consciousness. Another dream that wasn’t in the least important except for the fact that it was there waiting beyond the archway of my last meeting with my father, a place for a coward to hurry when he wasn’t brave enough for his visions.

Everyone I’ve ever told about this has said the same thing. Every one of them has said my father was right.